Filth

– It wis a relationship, I tell him considerately. – A full and loving relationship between man and beast.

George focuses on me in bemused shock. – It wisnae like . . . we wirnae like . . .

– No no no . . . I didn’t mean . . . I tell him, – I mean . . . suppose that aliens landed. Aliens fae outer space, I endeavour to explain. – They would only see two species of Earthling . . . I mean they wouldnae see like . . . Homo sapiens and canine. Aw they would see was two Earthlings . . . it’s the relationship . . . I raise my near-empty glass in the hope that this sad cunt will see through his selfish grief and hit the bar, – To Earthlings! I toast.

He raises his glass slightly and mumbles some distracted rubbish which I don’t catch.

I stand up and think about getting them in. I decide against it and leave the wretched old fool. I flag down a taxi and I’m just about to say Colinton, but I feel Toal’s drawer key with the change in my pocket and I get a surge of excitement and decide to take it to Stockbridge. It’s a short hop, so I get out and walk through the dark streets up towards our headquarters.

There are still a few lights on, but the place is almost deserted. The cleaners are in, but they’re on our floor. They have keys which fit all the office doors, which I obtained copies of some years ago. I used to fuck a clerical bird across the desk after hours. Maureen. She got married and left. No a bad ride, pretty game.

I take the back staircase, emerging on the records floor corridor. I go inside, open the drawer and take Toal’s hard copy manuscript and stick it in my document wallet. Then I go into the hard disk and erase the file: ‘DARK/wks’ from the C-drive, making sure it’s the correct one. I find the A-drive disks and have to search through them in order to make sure I’m erasing the right ones. He’s done two and called them different names from the C-drive ones, ‘BOB/wks’ and ‘CITY/wks’. They get the same treatment.

I leave the spare key inside the drawer and head off. I hear the hoovers of the cleaner and as I pass downstairs I look through the glass of the office door, shuddering to see lnglis and Drummond. Those cunts, putting in a nightshift. They’re obviously going through the clerical procedures involved in tracing the hammer. They’ll never find where it came from, the sad bastards. I think I can hear Gillman’s voice as well.

Then my heart skips a beat. I hear somebody coming up the back staircase.

I get down on my hands and knees and start to crawl under the glass section of the partition. I’d love to eavesdrop on what this motley crew are talking about and as I creep along under the windowspace I’m sure I hear someone say ‘Robertson’ but if I don’t move whoever’s coming up the back stair will find me squatting here in the corridor. I’m trembling with excitement and I’m almost three sheets and the thing is to get out undetected.

The windowspace becomes the wall, and I stand up and strut down the corridor.

Fuck!

I can hear voices coming towards me, and a cleaner with a mop and pail comes on to the first floor behind me. I jump into the shadows and turn towards the front staircase. I descend stealthily, then I duck into one of the toilets on the landing at the bend of the stairs to compose myself. After trembling in the cubicle for a few minutes, I venture outside. The coast is clear. I’m out the door. Thank God we’ve no security here.

I can’t believe my luck as the building recedes and I skip down to Stockbridge and up into the city, my feet light over the hard, compacted snow. I fall once and laugh, lying on my arse as it starts coming down again, the beautiful, perfect white flakes. I get up and walk for a while, singing in the snow. . . . though we sometimes go down we kin ey go back up . . .

The numbing wind is kicking up and after a while I can’t compete so I flag down a taxi back to Colinton. I can’t stop laughing in the cab. The driver turns around and says, – You’ve had a good night mate!

– Certainly have, I agree.

We blether away about fitba and Hearts and how Stronach should hang up his boots. I’m almost tempted to give him a tip, but think better of it, drinking in the stoical disappointment on his face as I count out the exact fare.

Ladies Night

Sunday morning and I get the News Of The Screws and have a quick scan at the Saturday night telly I video’d, after I get the fire lit. At least I managed to keep the coal deliveries going. This is one thing I ken how tae dae in my hoose: tae make a real fire. Carole could never dae that, she always left it tae me. I’ve tried to handwash one pair of flannels in the sink using washing-up liquid and I’ve hanged them on a collapsible clothes-horse in front of the fire to dry.

The telly is fuckin pish as usual, but I’ve always preferred working at night. That dog’s on the box with three rides who need fucked. One of them bears such a strong resemblance to that wee Annalise bird I fucked at the lay-by before we went on holiday that I almost expect her to have a Scottish accent. Turns out she’s Lesley from London. The fuckin questions get on my tits. I know what I would use for the Blind Date questions: No. 1:   If I were to ask you for a gam, would you gie it to me? No. 2:   Do you take it up the arsehole? No. 3:   Have you ever eaten the worm-ridden faeces of a non-uniformed police officer while he’s working you with a vibrator?

That’s the real questions the nation wants to fuckin well hear.

It’s so tedious that I take a look at Total’s script.

EXT. STREET. NEW YORK CITY. THURSDAY NIGHT, 3AM. A solitary man is nervously walking down a darkened, cold, deserted street. He gives the odd furtive glance backwards as if he is concerned that he is being followed. He heads down towards the waterfront with the lights of Brooklyn Bridge visible ahead of him. Someone shouts and he turns around. As this happens, we see, in slow-motion, a youth with a crowbar running towards the

Fuck off Total! What a load of shite! The cunt’s just ripping off whatever current bastard case we’re supposed to be solving and setting it in New York. That’s no fuckin screenwritin!

I rip off the title page and the first two and stick them in the fire I’ve built. The last copy of Toal’s masterwork and here it fuckin well goes! I decide to get down to some real writing and try the News Of The Screws crossword.

This crossword’s getting harder every fuckin day. The rings of Saturn . . . the rings of Uranus . . .

The ring of that fuckin phone.

And I left the machine off.

It’s always a mistake to answer the phone at hame. It’s a weakness, a polisman’s weakness: nosiness. I needed to find out who it is and it’s fuckin Toal. This means that I’ll have to watch what I put on the OTA 1–7. He’s giving us grief. He’s not impressed with two and a half pages of a progress report, I mean, how could a prodigious writer like Toal be? So he’s blabbering on about the topped coon, this Efan Wurie (he’s a Effen Worry tae me awright), how the Sambo-boy’s auld man’s sent a letter to the Home Secretary who’s nipped the Chief Constable’s heid who’s nipped Niddrie’s heid, who’s nipped Toal’s and now he’s nipping mine. This is why he’s taken Drummond off the case as lead officer: too many big guns firing off in all directions for a lightweight. I feel like asking him, But what about D.S. Amanda Drummond, what about her pivotal role in this investigation? Surely she proved a capable enough team leader for the Home Secretary to directly address such concerns to her? Ha!

But I can’t speak up. Toal. He’s giving me grief, but only because he has grief . . .

All I can think about is that boy’s skull, bashed in, the way his head was caved in and how it wasn’t like a heid at all, just like a broken silly puppet face, about how when you destroy something, when you brutalise it, it always looks warped and disfigured and slightly unreal and unhuman and that’s what makes it easier for you to go on brutalising it, go on fucking it and hurting it and mashing until you’ve destroyed it completely, proving that destruction is natural in the human spirit, that nature has devices to enable us to destroy, to make it easier for us; a way of making righteous people who want to act do things without the fear of consequence, a way of making us less than human, as we break the laws . . .