— Yes, mate, I’ll sort it out. Can you put her on?
Some grumbling and then the voice changes. — Well then?
— Em… alright, babe?
— Don’t fucking babe me, Mark! There was no pickup!
Fuck… — So sorry. That car firm, I’m no using these wankers again. I’ll get right onto them now. Fucking outrageous. Doesnae help you, ah know, but let’s get you billeted then we’ll get some lunch, I coo, managing to pacify her and end the call. Fuck, forgot to email Muchteld in the office. Again. Like in Berlin wi Carl’s decks. The coke is blasting more holes in a brain already like a Swiss cheese. But Hibs won the Cup, for fuck sake, so fuck everything!
Carl looks at me in quizzical evaluation. — You rode her? Young Emily? The Night Rider, he laughs.
— Of course not, she’s a client. It would be unprofessional, I say pompously. — And she’s too young for me. I feel the roar ay the coke, thinking ay Edinburgh. A terrible error ay judgement fae us both. Especially me. But fuck it; it was great n aw. And it was just sex. And there were condoms. Nobody was hurt in that particular shag. — I’m no like you, Ewart.
— What’s that meant tae mean?
— Ye cannae bang every young lassie that looks like Helena, thinking that’s gaunny bring back that romance, I say, tipping some ching into my pina colada.
— What the fuck –
— Accept that we fuck up in relationships. It’s what human beings do. Then we hopefully learn that our selfish, narcissistic behaviour bugs the fuck oot ay the other party. So we stop it. I stir the drink with the plastic straw and sip.
He looks at me, a fucking milk bottle with eyes. — So this is you stopping it then, gadge?
— Well, I’m trying to… trying to provide… I burst oot laughing and he does n aw, — a professional management service tae ma exciting client base… we’re sniggering and then laughing so much that we can hardly breathe, —… but you fuck it up and enable ma bad behaviour, ya Jambo cunt…
— Some fucking management…
— I’ve made you three hundred fucking grand this year! After you bombing out your film scores and no DJing for eight years, just sittin oan a fuckin couch smoking dope! Three hundred grand, for playing fucking records in nightclubs.
— It’s no enough, Carl says, and he’s deadly serious.
— What? What the fuck is enough?
— I’ll tell you when you bring it to me, he smiles, and he isnae joking. — Fancy daein some DMT?
— What?
— You’ve never done DMT?
I’m embarrassed, as it’s the only drug I huvnae done. It never appealed. Hallucinogenics are a young cunt’s drug. — Naw… Is it a good high…?
— DMT isnae a social drug, Mark, he contends. — It’s an education.
— I’m a bit long in the tooth for drug experiments, Carl. So are you, mate.
Thirty-eight minutes later, we’re in his hotel room and a punctured plastic litre bottle is filling wi smoke fae the drug he’s burning on aluminium foil on the nozzle, displacing the water that leaks fae the boatil intae a basin. When it’s done, Carl takes the burning foil off its neck, and ma mouth is round it. The acrid shit razes my lungs worse than crack. — As Terence McKenna says, you have tae take the third toke, he urges, but I feel fucking overwhelmed already. There’s an almighty rush in my heid and the sense that I’m physically leaving the room, even though I’m still here. What keeps me persisting, though, is the utter lack ay danger and loss ay control you normally feel when ye dae a new drug, especially one that takes hud ay ye tae this extent. I keep forcing it back intae ma lungs.
I slide back in the chair, resting my heid, wi my eyes shut. Brightly coloured geometric shapes appear, and dance in front ay me.
I open my eyes and Carl looks at me in an intense awe. Everything in the world, from him to the mundane objects in the room, is heightened. — You have the 4-D vision, he says to me. — Don’t worry, it’ll adjust to normal after about fifteen to twenty minutes.
— Can I no just keep it? I’ve never had such fucking depth perception, I grin at him, then start to haver. — I was happy just tae be, man. That strange contentment, the bizarre sense that it was familiar, that I’d seen it before. It stopped ays fae freaking oot at the weird things I saw.
— It is mental. Did you see the wee Lego dwarfs? Like sort of acid-house garden techno gnomes?
— Aye, they wee people; they seemed tae alternate between a physical presence, clear and real, almost digital, and a spectral form. They were genuinely happy tae see ays, without being all frivolous and fussy about it.
— Were you happy tae see them?
— Aye, those wee cunts are brand new. And you ken the strangest thing? Nae comedown. I feel in my body and mind like I’ve never taken anything. I could go for a run or to the gym right now. How long was I under for? It must have been at least twenty minutes, maybe forty?
— Less than two, Carl smiles.
So we sit for hours, engaging in discussion. Most of all, the conclusion is that visiting that place answers everything about the great dilemmas we ask ourselves, about human society, the individual and the collective. It tells ye that it’s both that are sovereign, and that our politics of trying to resolve the two are utterly futile. That we are aw connected to a greater force, yet retain our unique singularity. Ye can be as much or as little ay one or the other as ye like. They are so integrated that even the question, which has haunted philosophy, politics and religion for all time ceases tae exist. Yet at the same time, I never cease being aware that I am Mark Renton, a breathing, human organism, sitting oan a couch in a hotel suite in Ibiza town, and my friend Carl is in the room, and I just need tae open ma eyes to join him.
I want every cunt in the world tae be right in on this. Then Carl hands me a wrap of cocaine. — I’m not wanting fucking ching, Carl. No after this.
— It isnae ching, it’s K. I have tae play later and I don’t want tae start hitting this, so you take it.
— Fuck sake, you no got any willpower?
— Nup, he says.
I pocket the wrap.
25
SICK BOY – BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME
I don’t want this staggering trip to end. It has changed life as we know it. — It’s time to put everything you think you were sure about in this whole wide world to one side, sis, I tell Carlotta, as the Hibernian team bus approaches so slowly, inching through the hysterical, dancing and shell-shocked but appreciative crowds that bellow out ‘Super John McGinn’ and ‘Stokesy’s On Fire’. — You need to be with him, I implore, looking over at Euan, who stands a few feet away on the corner of the side street, by the cherry-popped Ross and his spazzy wee mate whom he is doubtlessly now lording it over.
The favour I’ve done that whingy little cunt cannot be overstated. Early on in life, I sussed out that this gig was all about impressing women. The hard man, the joker, the intellectual, the culture vulture, the moneymaker; all of them trying so hard, but ultimately just aspiring to be the shagger. So much easier tae simply be that guy from the off, and cut out all the other wearisome pish. I passed that knowledge on to a gormless little spunker, gratis. Now Ross and his dippit comrade are standing there with their fresh glory-hunter Hibs scarves on, chin spots rashing, eyes scanning the lassies in the crowd.
But poor Crackpot Carlotta, la mia sorellina, has tears in her eyes. — He did me wrong, she sobs, sounding straight outta Nashville, but she’s now at last permitting the wound, rather than talking from inside a fuddled suit of antidepressant armour.