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The artist picks up on the mood of his subjects and the shifting atmospherics of the room, but can’t determine its source. — What’s up, boys?

— They look great mate, Renton says uneasily. — Very authentic. I’m just blown away by how real they seem, even withoot the mince pies.

— Nice one, Frank Begbie smiles. — Now as a token of my appreciation, I’ve booked us a table at the Café Royal. A slap-up nosh on me. He looks at Sick Boy. — You still in a hurry to get off?

— It might be nice to catch up properly, Simon Williamson concedes. — On condition Renton puts his fucking phone away for ten minutes. I thought I was bad, but you have to retain some fucking social skills in the digital age.

— Business, Renton says defensively. — It never stops.

— Vicky business, I’m betting, Frank Begbie teases.

Sick Boy’s guileful grin slides over Franco and Renton, deft as a pickpocket’s fingers. — So he has a proper girlfriend, which he’s kept silent about! He still reverts to his seventeen-year-old self on such occasions!

— Aye, right, Renton says, his hand wet with sweat on the device in his pocket.

— And on the subject of business, if you gentlemen are ever in London and looking for escort services, and he hands them all an embossed Colleagues business card. — Now, he smiles at Franco, — let us feast!

9

SICK BOY – EXPANDING/CONTRACTING

Carlotta is constantly on the phone, even though I’m back in London where I can do little to find her missing Thai-hooring husband. She’s fucking relentless, so I pick up, as I trek from King’s Cross Underground to my office. I can’t leave Colleagues for too long. There’s only so much you can do online without being at the holeface. The girls form their own bonds with the clients, then conspire to undercut you by making their own deals. There is zero you can do about it. Then they’ll rip off, or fall out with the customers, who return like nothing has happened, to use my service again. So you are continually firing and recruiting. And for a pittance. They make the real money.

But Carlotta does not give a fuck about my business affairs, as her sobs heave down the line. — It’s killin me, Si-mihn… it’s fuckin killin me, as I jink past open-mouthed stunned plebs waiting for the lights to change, hopping over York Way to the Caley Road. This time my sis really is beside herself and making no sense. I’m looking around the tarted-up street, barely able to comprehend what’s become of the bookies and the Scottish Stores pub, those once-redoubtable centres of hooring and drug activity that constituted my personal power base. Grim days. Carra can barely speak; thankfully Louisa takes over. — She’s in pieces. Still husnae heard a single word fae Euan since he went tae Thailand.

The dirty bastard. Lumpy-bawed Presbyterian hoor’s erse-ramming cunt… — Has anybody been able to work out how long he’s going to be away?

Louisa is trying to sound outraged, but she can’t help a salacious Schadenfreude seep into her tones. Nobody could have female siblings like mine and believe in the concept of the sisterhood as anything other than a movable feast. — Only that he bought a round-the-world ticket after sorting out a career break with his employer. Of course his first port of call is Bangkok!

— What the fuck, I hiss, crossing past the old snooker hall, now a shit club venue, copping a lungful of exhaust fumes. A solitary jakey extends a styrofoam and croaks hopefully. His face contorts in a bitter sneer as he sees it’s only coppers and a 5p I’ve deposited. — He must have said when he’s planning on returning?

— He told her all this in one email, Lou says breathlessly, — then cancelled his account and shut down his Facebook page. He’s even pit off his phone, Simon. She’s goat no way ay getting in touch wi him!

The office is located in a backstreet behind Pentonville Road, on the side that has escaped redevelopment. It’s a shabby old building above a minicab office and kebab shop, its days numbered with the sweeping post-Eurostar gentrification of the area. I let myself in and feel my feet stick to the carpet as I mount a stair so narrow it could be in Renton’s stomping ground of Amsterdam.

In the meantime, Lousia has managed to get Carlotta back on the blower. Of course, her and Ross, to say nothing of Euan’s auld mammy back in Wee Free cattle-cowpin land, are worried sick. The audacity of those self-indulgent pansy bourgeois drama queens on their menopausal breakdowns in saying that I don’t know how to treat women!

A wave of heat hits me as I open the office door. I left the fucking radiator on, and the power bill will be extravagant. Some privatised utility-shareholding one per cent public-school Nazi fuck will be getting wanked blind by a Third World child on a luxury yacht right now. Thank heavens for Renton’s money. I tell Carlotta to calm down and assure her I’ll be up next week. I ask her if there’s anybody else Euan would be in touch with, but she’s tried all his workmates and he’s just cut them off too. The cunt really has gone native. I never thought he’d have the balls.

Getting her off the phone feels like the psychic version of doing a pish you’ve long been bursting for. I open the window to let the cold air seep in, then move to my raised standing desk to check my emails and the website. A few lassies have left notices and shots. I’m enjoying their portfolios, and phoning to make appointments, when VICTOR SYME flashes up on caller ID, providing not so much a sinking feeling, as a bitter, rancorous surge of nausea, convincing you that the world is fucking finished.

The snide-couponed sex offender is talking about his urgent desire to meet ‘this surgeon felly’. Of course, I have to spill the disturbing news. Inevitably, he’s far from chuffed. — Call me as soon as he’s back! Ah dinnae like surprises, he whinges.

That’s a cliché all arseholes use: Ah dinnae like surprises. Fucking soulless control freaks. And gangsters are just the politicians of the schemes. Now the psychotic fishwife Syme thinks that I’m some kind of PA for this vanishing podiatrist! Fuck me, that cunt’s feet must be in bad shape! — He’s fled the country, Vic, on a hooring expedition, I’m wagering.

— Well, you’d better git um fuckin well back!

When you’re as much of a cunt as Syme, you don’t need to be logical, far less reasonable. — Well, Vic, if I knew where the fucker was I’d be right over there, dragging him back myself. But he’s gone off the radar.

— As soon as ye hear fae him, ah want tae ken aboot it!

— You’ll be the second to know, after my sis, his wife.

— Ah dinnae dae second, Syme says, and I can feel the spiteful malice down the line. Fuck sake, this is one creepy imbecile!

— Did I say second? I meant my sister will be second, I say, examining the profile of Candy from Bexleyheath, 20, student at Middlesex University, tweaking the head of my cherry through black brushed denim and boxers. — You, of course, will be numero uno.

— Count oan it, he snaps. — And dinnae think you’re oot ay ma range doon there in London, he says, in that queasy, smug voice that chills me. — Be seein ye.

I cough a goodbye into a dead line.

10

RENTON – BONNYRIGGED

I cannae ignore it any longer; that itching and the watery, milky discharge fae my cock every time I take a single fish. That tenderness around the hee-haws, and now augmented by those sharp abdominal pains. A present from Edinburgh. One that Marianne probably got fae fucking Sick Boy!