I’m shivering. It was cold out there.
A double whisky keeps the chill at bay. I change to voddy after that though; cunts can’t whiff it on your breath in the same way. I knock back of few of those. I’m thinking about the guy. Pushing the life into him, all the time pushing against a greater force. Trying to fill the plugless bath but it’s no use, it all just goes.
I leave the bar and find the motor. I swirl some mouthwash around my gob and spit it out on to the frozen snow, watching the clean blue solution indent the white. I rev up the motor and the end slides all over the place as I turn the corner. One spastic beeps me but I’m too pished to bother.
Work however has lost its appeal, not that it ever had any in the first place. I leave the car in the car park for appearances’ sake and I knock off early, trudging homewards through the snow before flagging a taxi. Back at the ranch, I watch the scores on the teletext, noting that Hearts have lost three– nil at Rugby Park. I make an effort to clean up, and I manage to throw out some old plates of food and tin foil cartons of curry and chinky. Chrissie arrives early, which annoys me, as the place is still a shithouse. I’m chuffed though, to see that cock-stirring mix of need and devotion in the hoor’s eyes. Chrissie’s about five-four. I doubt she’s above the six-stone mark. She’s not so much heroin chic as hospice chic, and looks somewhat less than resplendent in a gaudy yellow blouse and an above-the-knee black skirt which looks like it’s made from the same material as my flannels.
She expects me to say something. Wrong! It doesnae work that wey. Silence is golden and sometimes you have to struggle to control it. Any schemie convict’ll tell you the same.
– Bruce . . . did you really mean what you said to me earlier, about how you could fall in love with me? she asks.
I’m looking closely at her, at the burst blood vessels around her nose. Fuckin Wurzel Gummidge here. I’m thinking: No chance. – Of course I could, and you know it as well as I do. Don’t play the innocent with me. Sit down.
She takes off her coat, sits down on the couch and lights up a cigarette. She’s just like one of them, the ghouls that stood by and watched as I tried to bring that boy back. The sickening, passive, idle, grateful ghouls. How does it feel?
– I’m so confused Bruce. It’s not been an easy time, she says. I move on to the couch beside her. She’s going to see how it feels to have her breath taken away.
– Listen, there’s something you should know about me, about how I am . . . I open a button on the hoor’s blouse and stick my hand down it. She’s like a Belsen horror, all skin and bone. Her eyes have huge, black shadows under them. I look into the pupils and watch them widen in concert with the twinge in my troosers. I take the cigarette from her hand and stub it out in the ashtray. She twitches nervously and looks at me with a strange smile.
– Bruce . . . she says, looking at the smouldering fag.
– Ye ken the thing aboot fags? I ask, pointing to the ashtray with my free hand, sliding my other mitt under her bra and harshly tweaking her nipple. I watch her shut her eyes and gasp a wee bit. – What ye get from fags is an asphyxiation hit. It shuts oaf the oxygen tae the brain. That’s the high, I say, tapping her head. Pushing the life in, squeezing the life out. I take my hand out and start undoing her blouse, button by button, and then I take the top button from her skirt and unzip it and I stand up hauling her to her feet with me and the skirt slides off her to the floor, like a piece of doner kebab lamb from the greasy hunk of meat on the skewer. I pull her towards me and stick my hand inside her pants, cupping her arse cheeks, pulling her up against me. I push my mouth to her ear, getting a scent of cat’s-pish perfume. – Tell ye something, it’s as wild as fuck when ye make love, that oxygen starvation thing. You and Bob ever dae that?
– I don’t know . . . we never . . .
– Yis ever turn oaf the gas for each other? Sssssssssss, I say softly, in her ear.
– We . . . no . . . we never . . .
– You want tae play at turning oaf the gas? You daein it for me and me daein it for you?
I’m looking at the black roots at the bottom of her sick yellow hair, which looks like greased straw, the condition totally fucked by cheap dyes. A coffee, fags and vallies tart. There’s a factory somewhere that churns them out. Turn left on the outskirts of the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
– I don’t know what it involves . . . she whinges. She’s looking at a precipice which she can’t really see over, blinded as she is by her despair and her medication.
– It’s a wee adventure. In all adventures to different places you need an experienced guide. Let me be yir guide. Put yirself in ma hands. I’d never hurt you, I tell her, and I’m taking down her pants, exposing that dirty big black bush which contrasts starkly with that sick blonde hair. My skin tingles wondrously and the colours of the walls and furnishings seem heightened as I ease her back on to the couch. I loosen my flannels, ignoring a fairly noxious waft and let them fall to my knees. I’m losing weight alright.
I’ve got the two belts ready, which I retrieve from under the settee. One goes round her neck, the other round mine. I’m idly finger-fucking her and she’s getting juiced up. She’s a randy hoor awright: her clit’s soon as prominent as Ray Lennox’s cock. I spread her thighs with my hands and push my cock into her. No sense in wearing a condom because she tells me that she’s only been with Hurley for years which is as good as being a virgin. My knob’s not feeling too raw. As it inches home I tighten the belt round her scrawny neck. I find my stroke and start giving her it good-style. She’s bucking away, getting right into it.
– Ma fuckin belt, I shout, increasing my pace, – turn oaf ma fuckin gas!
She tightens it a bit but her face is going red and twisting into a strange pout as I throttle her and she starts trying to scream: – You’re . . . cack . . . cack . . . cack choking . . . cack . . . me . . . cack . . . cack . . . cack . . . It sounds like an old banger trying to start up, which, I suppose, is exactly what it is.
How far do you have to go to be like that guy at the South Side? Is there a time during the struggle, the struggle for life and breath, when you finally consciously realise that it’s all fucked and that you’re going for good? How does it feel?
– YOU FUCKIN CHOKE ME THEN! I scream, choking and poking at it, and in the end I have to grab my ain belt and turn off my ain gas soas that I get there, but she does too and I’m so close to just keeping going, increasing the pressure and she sees it in my eyes for a second and I see the panic in hers and I come hard with an accompanying series of muffled heaves.
I let go and she’s pulling the belt from round her neck, I can see the mark it’s left and the blood vessels on her eyelids have haemorrhaged. She’s trying to fill her dry, stiff lungs with air, but she’s crying and laughing and she loves every fuckin minute of it the cow. She was never that far out, not as far out as the boy. He was way out of range. I couldn’t bring him back, I did all I could.
How did it make you feel?
We sleep for a bit, as our breathing comes back to normal in unison. When I wake up I’m consumed by an overwhelming urge to be cruel, which I know that if I don’t satisfy verbally will end up with me brekking the sow’s jaw and as she’s polisman’s meat, rather than a common-or-garden Roger Moore, that could get a little bit messy administratively and legally speaking. – You’re a cow, I state coldly as I sit up on the couch and light up one of her fags, – because I’ve been fucking you, we’ve been turning oaf the fuckin gas fir each other and you’re my mate’s wife. Ken what that makes you in my book? A cow. C. O. W.
I spell it out for the slag.
She looks at me like a wounded deer pleading with me no tae let it have baith fuckin barrels. – Don’t say that . . . why are you being like this . . . why . . .
Why? Cause it’s games time. – Ken how you’re a cow? Ken how? Cause you let ays in here, I point at her minge, – but you’ll no let ays in here, I point to her head, – or in here, I point to her chest, – cause that’s love. That the now, that was nothing. That was just sad case games, and tae me that is what I’d call a cow, I shake my head. – That was a wee test, and you failed miserably. Failed wi faded colours . . . I take a bunch of her greasy straw hair between my forefinger and thumb to illustrate my point.