Authors: Irvine Welsh
We went back to my place. My lonely flat, even lonelier with two people in it. I sat on the couch, Gary sat in the chair opposite. I put the radio on. Despite the fact that she'd taken her stuff and gone months ago, mere was still traces of her here; a glove, a scarf, a poster she'd bought stuck up on the wall, these Russian dolls we'd got from Covent Garden. The presence of such articles always loomed large in times of stress. Now they were overpowering. Gary and I sat drinking neat vodka and waiting for the bulletins.
After a bit Gary got up to take a piss. When he returned, he came back with the gun. He then sat back down in the chair opposite me. He ran his fingers along the narrow barrel. When he spoke his voice seemed strange; far away and disembodied.
— Did ya see his face, Jock?
— It wisnae fuckin funny, Gal, ya fuckin stupid cunt! I hissed, anger finally spilling through my sick fear.
— Yeah, but his face, Jock. That ticking smarmy nonce face. It's true, Jock, people change when you pull a gun on them.
He's looking right at me. Now he's pointing the shooter at me.
— Gal. .. dinnae fuck about man . . . dinnae . . .
I can't breathe, I feel my bones shaking; from the soles of my feet upwards, shaking my whole body in a jarring, sickening rhythm.
— Yeah, he says, — people change when you pull a gun on them.
The weapon is still pointed at me. He reloaded it when he took that slash. I know it.
— I heard that you were seeing quite a bit of my missus when I was inside, mate, he says softly, caressingly.
I try to say something, try to reason, try to plead, but my voice is dry in my throat as his finger tenses on the trigger.
I was anti-everything and everyone. I didn't want people around me. This aversion was not some big crippling anxiety; merely a mature recognition of my own psychological vulnerability and my lack of suitability as a companion. Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain as I struggled to give them some order which might serve to motivate my listless life.
For others Amsterdam was a place of magic. A bright summer; young people enjoying the attractions of a city that epitomised personal freedom. For me it was but a dull, blurred series of shadows. I was repelled by the harsh sunlight, seldom venturing out until it got dark. During the day I watched English and Dutch language programmes on the television and smoked a lot of marijuana. Rab was a less than enthusiastic host. Without any sense of his own ridiculousness he informed me that here in Amsterdam he was known as 'Robbie'.
Rab/Robbie's revulsion for me seemed to blaze behind his face, sucking the oxygen from the air in the small front room on which I had made up a couch-bed. I'd note his cheek muscles twitch in repressed anger as he'd come in, dirty, grimy and tired from a hard, physical job, to find me mellow in front of the box, the ubiquitous spliff in my hand.
I was a burden. I had been here for only a fortnight and clean for three weeks. My physical symptoms had abated. If you can stay clean for a month you've got a chance. However, I felt it was time I looked for a place of my own. My friendship with Rab (now, of course, re-invented as Robbie) could not survive the one-sided, exploitative basis I had re-modelled it on. The worse thing was: I didn't really care.
One evening, about a fortnight into my stay, it seemed he'd had enough. — When ye gaunny start lookin for a job, man? he asked, with obviously forced nonchalance.
— I am, mate. I hud a wee shuftie aroond yesterday, trying tae check a few things out, y'know? The lie of the land, I said with contrived sincerity. We went on like this; forced civility, with a subtext of mutual antagonism.
I took tram number 17 from Rab/Robbie's depressing little scheme in the western sector into the city centre. Nothing happens in places like the one we stayed in, Slotter Vaart they call it; breeze-block and concrete everywhere; one bar, one supermarket, one Chinese restaurant. It could've been anywhere. You need a city centre to give you a sense of place. I could've been back in Wester Hailes, or on Kingsmead, back in one of those places I came here to get away from. Only I hadn't got away. One dustbin for the poor outside of
action strasser
is much the same as any other, regardless of the city it serves.
In my frame of mind, I hated being approached by people. Amsterdam is the wrong place to be in such circumstances. No sooner had I alighted in The Damrak than I was hassled. I'd made the mistake of looking around to get my bearings. — French? American? English? an Arabic-looking guy asked.
— Fuck off, I hissed.
Even as I walked away from him into the English bookshop I could hear his voice reeling of a list of drugs. — Hashish, heroin, cocaine, ecstasy . ..
During what was meant to be a relaxing browse, I found myself staging an internal debate as to whether or not I would shoplift a book; deciding against it, I left before the urge became unbearable. Feeling pleased with myself, I crossed over Dam Square into the red-light district. A cool twilight had descended on the city. I strolled, enjoying the fall of darkness. On a side-street off a canal, near where the whores sit in the windows, a man approached me at a threatening pace. I decided quickly that I would put my hands around his neck and choke him to death if he attempted to make any contact with me at all. I focused on his Adam's apple with murderous intent, my face twisting into a sneer as his cold, insect eyes slowly filled with apprehension. — Time ... do you have the time? he asked fearfully.
I curtly nodded negative, striding satisfyingly past him as he arched his body to avoid being brushed onto the pavement. In Warmoesstraat it was not so easy. A group of youths were fighting a series of running battles; Ajax and Salzburg fans. The UEFA Cup. Yes. I could not handle the movement and the screaming. It was the noise and motion I was averse to more than the threat of violence. I took the line of least resistance, and slipped down a side-street into a brown bar.
It was a quiet, tranquil haven. Apart from a dark-skinned man with yellow teeth (I had never seen teeth so yellow), who was wired up to the pinball machine, the only other occupants of the place were the barman and a woman who sat on a stool at the bar. They were sharing a bottle of tequila and their laughter and intimate behaviour indicated that their relationship went beyond that of publican-customer.
The barman was setting the woman up with tequila shots. They were a little drunk, displaying a saccharine flirtatiousness. It took the man a while to register my presence at the bar. Indeed, the woman had to draw his attention to me. His response was to give her an embarrassed shrug, though it was obvious that he couldn't care less about me. Indeed, I sensed that I was an inconvenience.
In certain states of mind I would have been offended by this negligence and would definitely have spoken up. In other states of mind I would have done a lot more. At this point in time, however, I was happy to be ignored; it confirmed that I was as effectively invisible as I intended to be. I didn't care.
I ordered a Heineken. The woman seemed intent on drawing me into their conversation. I was just as intent on avoiding contact. I had nothing to say to these people.
— So where do you come from with an accent like that? she laughed, her X-ray gaze sweeping over me. When her eyes met mine I saw a type of person who, despite their apparent camaraderie, has an instinctive drive towards manipulative schemes. Perhaps I was looking at my reflection. I smiled. — Scotland.
— Yeah? Where about? Glasgow? Edinburgh?
— All over really, I replied, bland and blasé. Did it really matter which indistinct shite-arsed towns and schemes I was dragged through, growing up in that dull and dire little country?
She laughed, however, and looked thoughtful, as if I'd said something really profound. — All over, she mused. -Just like me. All over. She introduced herself as Chrissie. Her boyfriend, or he who, given his indulgence of her, intended to be her boyfriend, was called Richard.
From behind the bar, Richard stole injured glances at me, before I turned to face him, having clocked this in a bar mirror. He responded with a ducking motion of his head, followed by a 'Hi' in a dislocated hiss, and a furtive grope of a ratty beard which grew out of a pock-marked face but merely seemed to accentuate rather than conceal the lunar landscape it sprang from.
Chrissie talked in a rambling, expansive way, making observations about the world and citing mundane examples from her own experience to back them up.
It's a habit of mine to look at people's bare arms. Chrissie's were covered in healed track marks; the kind where ugly scar tissues is always left. Even more evident were the slash marks; judging by depth and position, the self-hating, response-to-frustration type rather than the serious suicide-bid variety. Her face was open and animated but her eyes had that watery, diminished aspect common to the traumatised. I read her as a grubby map of all the places you didn't want to go to: addiction, mental breakdown, drug psychosis, sexual exploitation. In Chrissie I saw someone who'd felt bad about herself and the world and had tried to shoot and fuck herself into better times without realising that she was only compounding the problem. I was no stranger to at least some of the places Chrissie had been. She looked as if she was very ill-equipped for these visits, however, and that she tended to stick around a bit too long.
At the moment her problems seemed to be drink and Richard. My first thought was that she was welcome to both. I found Chrissie pretty repulsive. Her body was layered with hard fat around her gut, thighs and hips. I saw a beaten woman whose only resistance to the attentions of middle-age was to wear clothes too youthful, tight and revealing for her meaty figure.
Her doughy face twisted flirtatiously at me. I was vaguely nauseated at this woman; gone to seed, yet unselfconsciously attempting to display a sexual magnetism she no longer possessed, and seemingly unaware of the grotesque vaudevillian caricature which had supplanted it.
It was then, paradoxically, that a horrible impulse struck me, which appeared to have its origins in an unspecific area behind my genitals: this person who repulsed me, this woman, would become my lover.
Why should this be? Perhaps it was my natural perversity; perhaps Chrissie was that strange arena where repulsion and attraction meet. Maybe I admired her stubborn refusal to acknowledge the remorseless shrinking of her possibilities. She acted as if new, exciting, enriching experiences were just around the corner, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. I felt a gratuitous urge, as I often do with such people, to shake her and scream the truth in her face:
You're a useless, ugly piece of meat. Your life has been desperate and abominable so far, and it's only going to get worse. Stop fucking kidding yourself.
A conflicting mass of emotions, I was actively despising someone while simultaneously planning their seduction. It was only later that I acknowledged, with some horror and shame, that these feelings didn't really conflict at all. At that stage, though, I was unsure as to whether Chrissie was flirting with me or merely trying to tease the seedy Richard. Perhaps she wasn't sure herself.
— We're going to the beach tomorrow. You must come, she said.
— That would be great, I smiled lavishly, as the colour drained from Richard's face.
— I may have to work ... he stammered nervously.
— Well, if you won't drive us, we'll just go alone! she simpered in a little-girl manner, a tactic commonly used by whores, which she almost certainly once was, when she still had the looks to make it pay.
I was definitely pushing at an open door.
We drank and talked until the increasingly nervous Richard shut the bar and then we went to a cafe for some blow. The date was formalised; tomorrow I was forsaking my nocturnal life for a day of seaside frolics with Chrissie and Richard.
Richard was very uptight the following day when he drove us down to the beach. I derived pleasure from watching his knuckles go white on the steering wheel as Chrissie, arched around from the front passenger sat, indulged in some frivolous and mildly flirtatious banter with me. Every bad joke or dull anecdote which spilled lazily from my lips was greeted with frenetic peals of laughter from Chrissie, as Richard suffered in tense silence. I could feel his hatred for me growing in increments, constricting him, impairing his breathing, muddying his thought processes. I felt like a nasty child jacking up the volume on the handset of the television control for the purpose of annoying an adult.
He inadvertently gained some measure of revenge, sticking on a Carpenters tape. I writhed in discomfort as he and Chrissie sung along. — Such a terrible loss, Karen Carpenter, she said solemnly. Richard nodded in sombre agreement. — Sad, isn't it, Euan? Chrissie asked, wanting to include me in their strange little festival of grief for this dead pop star.
I smiled in a good-natured, carefree way. — I couldn't give a toss. There's people all over the world who haven't got enough to eat. Why should I give a fuck about some over-privileged fucked-up Yank who's too screwed up to lift a forkful of scran into her gub?
There was a stunned silence. Eventually Chrissie wailed, — You've a very nasty, cynical mind, Euan! Richard wholeheartedly agreed, unable to conceal his glee that I'd upset her. He even started singing along to 'Top of the World'. After this, he and Chrissie began conversing in Dutch and laughing.
I was unperturbed at this temporary exclusion. In fact I was enjoying their reaction. Richard simply did not understand the type of person Chrissie was. I sensed that she was attracted to ugliness and cynicism because she saw herself as an agent of change. I was a challenge to her. Richard's servile indulgence would amuse her from time to time; it was, however, just a holiday retreat, not a permanent home, ultimately bland and boring. In trying to be what he thought she wanted, he had given her nothing to change; denied her the satisfaction of making a real impact in their relationship. In the meantime, she would string this fool along, as he indulged her boundless vanity.
We lay on the beach. We threw a ball at each other. It was like a caricature of what people should do at the seaside. I grew uncomfortable with the scene and the heat and lay down in the shade. Richard ran around in his cut-offs; tanned and athletic, despite a slightly distended stomach. Chrissie looked embarrassingly flabby.
When she went to get ice-cream, leaving Richard and I alone for the first time, I felt a little bit nervous.
— She's great, isn't she, he enthused. I reluctantly smiled.
— Chrissie has come through a lot.
— Yes, I acknowledged. That I had already deduced.
— I feel differently about her than I've done about anyone else. I've known her a long time. Sometimes I think she needs to be protected from herself.
— That's a wee bit too conceptual for me, Richard.
— You know what I mean. You keep your arms covered up.
I felt my bottom lip curl in knee-jerk petulance. It was the childlike, dishonest response of someone who isn't really hurt but is pretending to be so in order to justify future aggression towards, or elicit retraction from, the other party. It was second nature to me. I was pleased that he felt he had my measure; with a delusion of power over me he'd get cocky and therefore careless. I'd pick my moment and tear out his heart. It was hardly a difficult target, lying right there on the sleeve of his blouse. This whole thing was as much about me and Richard as it was about me and Chrissie; in a sense she was only the battleground on which our duel was being fought. Our natural antipathy on first meeting had incubated in the hothouse of our continuing contact. In an astonishingly short time it had blossomed into fully-fledged hatred.