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	Chapter ten
	Thursday 5:35pm The snow comes in great billowing gusts. Whirling clouds of frozen cotton wool, stained orange by the factory security lights. I struggle across the car park, hands clamped firmly under my armpits, my bag, dislodged by the wind, hanging awkwardly from the crook of an elbow. I scrabble my key into the driver’s side door lock, feeling icy teeth sink into the exposed flesh of my hands. I sling my bag into the back seat and try to dislodge some of the snow from my trainers by dint of repeatedly kicking the doorframe. I get in and turn the key in the ignition. It makes that horrible gritty fuck you I’m not going to start noise, but eventually the engine sputters into life. I leave it running while I hunt for the can of antifreeze. I get my hat and gloves out of the glove compartment, and armed with a can of Ice-A-Way, clamber out to brave the storm. I spray the stuff all over the back window, noting in the process that it smells remarkably similar to this cocktail they used to serve in the Wanchor. I do the side windows and then hose the windscreen, taking care to get the wipers. I look out across the road and over the fields, jigging up and down in a vein attempt to keep warm. A dark expanse of grey nothing. Fields with fence posts sticking out of the snow like rotted teeth, blanked out by the blizzard. Snow comes rolling out of the darkness like a tide. Fairytale of New York is playing on the radio. I let the hot air blowers do their work. I wait until the fog melts away from the windscreen before I drive off. It is the day before Christmas Eve and we have the next three days off. Not that the company is doing this to be nice to us you understand. The turkey orders we did today will arrive in the shops tomorrow. If we were to spend Christmas Eve packing turkeys, they would all arrive in the shops the next day; Christmas Day. Who the fuck buys their turkey on Christmas Day? Nobody, or at least not enough people to justify a full day’s work. The outcome however is the same, whatever the reasoning behind it. A whole three days off. I pull away from the car park, wipers on. I have to dip my lights straight away. Even with the lights on dip the snow is like an endless hypnotic tunnel. It’s like being deep underwater. Swimming the depths of a frozen ocean with luminous plankton rushing past your head. I’m glad when the lights of the factory disappear as I mount the crest of the hill. Out of sight, out of mind. That place has really been doing my head in lately. For a start, it must be at least a month since I last properly saw daylight. I arrive at seven and leave at roughly half-five-six. Dawn until dusk. At the weekends I am either asleep all day or sitting in a darkened room drinking with Mike and Stevie, or whoever else I’ve landed up with, until it’s time for the pubs to open. The only daylight I see is filtered through curtains and cigarette smoke. I feel terrible, listless and devoid of spirit. I have had a cold for well over a month now. The work itself is terrible too. Always at this time of year I find myself longing to have the burgers back. The turkeys are brought up from the game department where they have been plucked, gutted, and prepared, and spend a night in the freezer, ready for the next day. That is what we have been faced with every morning for the last month and a half, an entire freezer full of turkeys, and the knowledge that we aren’t allowed to go home until every single one of them has been bagged, tagged and put through to the packing department. It works like this. A crate of frozen turkeys is brought up from the freezer by forklift and placed at the end of a broad conveyer belt. Two people heave them onto the belt. Standing by the side of the belt there are two groups of workers with two distinct jobs. The first group (which I am a part of) grab the turkeys as they pass and slide them into big plastic bags. The second group seal the necks of the bags with a clip/pipe cleaner sort of thing and slap on a sticker with the Benzies logo and a space for the weight to be stamped on. Two more people grab them at the end of the line and load them back into a crate which is fork-lifted through to the packing department. For roughly ten hours a day my life consists of stuffing dead birds into plastic bags. At break times I take myself over to the canteen for something to eat. There is ratty green tinsel strung along the tops of the windows and paper snowmen blu-tacked to the wall. When I am finished, I pull on my hat jacket and gloves, and go out to the smoking hut to huddle miserably with a fag clutched in one shivering hand. I do not count the moments it takes to walk from the factory to the canteen, and from the canteen to the smoking hut, as seeing daylight. Yesterday lunchtime Heart Attack Paddy came into the canteen and banged on one of the tables with a metal spoon until he had everyone’s attention. People paused, forkfuls of macaroni and shepherds pie halfway to their lips. “May I have your attention for one moment please.” The old women goggled and nudged each other. “Oh bloody hell, what now?” I heard Fat Andy mutter to himself. The room quietened down. “We know that you have all been working very hard recently. So Mr Benzies, out of his own pocket, has provided you with a little Christmas bonus.” This simply does not compute. In all the time I have been here we have never been given a Christmas, or any other kind of bonus. To my distress I find warm feelings surfacing for Jack Benzies where no warm feelings have ever surfaced before. “So,” says Paddy, reaching behind him and producing a Tupperware box. “Take as many as you want, there’s enough for everyone!” The two canteen ladies make their way among the assembled workers, similar Tupperware boxes in their outstretched hands. Mince pies. Yes, well, that would be about right wouldn’t it. I take one and bite into it. Correction. Stale mince pies. Fuck sake. Malky is back at work. Malky, another reason the factory is doing my head in, another source of my gloom. Fuck it, I don’t even want to think about it. It will be a blissful three days before I have to think about anything at all. I have to pick Stevie up on the way home. I signal left to turn off my usual route onto the back road to Stevie’s. As I turn I feel the car begin to tail out in the snow. The back end begins to swing but I turn into the skid and correct it. I allow myself a grin. I know how to drive in the snow. Ever since I first passed my test, at the first sign of a snowfall, I have been out pulling hand-breakers. Some people are shit scared of driving in snow. The words, severe weather warning, or necessary journeys only, seem to translate in our minds into the words hand-brake heaven. In fact, I pull one now, round a sharp right hand corner. I feel the wheels slide on the hard packed snow which has never known plough or gritter. I release it at just the right moment (well, if I’m honest, a little too close to the verge for comfort) and straighten up. I grin again, starting to feel a little bit human. It’ll be lonely this Christmas by Mud is playing on the radio. I pull into Stevie’s drive, carving two rents in the unspoiled blanket of snow, and honk the horn. The living room curtain twitches and a moment later Stevie appears at the door a bag slung over his shoulder. He comes quickly down the steps leaving a trail of footprints. A sudden oblong of light throws itself across the snow like the negative of a shadow. Stevie’s mum knocks on the glass of the living room window and blows him a kiss, which he catches and puts in his pocket. She gives me a wave and a smile and I return it. The light is extinguished as she draws the curtains. “Get it?” I ask, as he opens the door and chucks his bag into the back seat. “Aye,” he says blowing the hair out of his eyes. He reaches inside his jacket and hands me a wrap. “Gram a piece,” he says. “Nice one,” I reply. Stevie was meeting some boy in his lunch hour who was supposed to be getting coke. Me and Mike both gave him money but I was trying not to get my hopes up. It all sounded too vague and unlikely. In such circumstances, where you have to meet some boy somewhere who might be getting such and such, things all too often go tits up. Still, no point getting excited yet. This coke is more than likely complete shite. By the time coke gets to the nearest big city it has probably been cut a dozen times. By the time it gets all the way out here it’s probably more like fifteen. Still, we can only live in hope. The plan for the next few days is this. We’re staying at mine tonight. Out tonight, quite likely all day tomorrow too, out to Starski’s tomorrow night, then a taxi back to Stevie’s late on Christmas Eve. Christmas Day, turkey and all the trimmings at Stevie’s, then back to mine and out again, probably out all night, then back to work the next day. A good plan looking at it from this end but perhaps not from the other. But like I’ve said before, the me on the receiving end of my plan is not the me who made it. The unfortunate wretch who will have to drag their half dead carcass into work on Monday morning is a person who doesn’t exist yet. The whole situation is someone else’s problem, not mine. Fuck them if they can’t take a joke. It’s good of Stevie’s mum to invite me for Christmas like this. One evening in late November I sat down and made two phone calls. One to my Mother and one to my Father, both saying roughly similar things. I’m sorry but I won’t be coming for Christmas. It would be unfair of me to choose either. My father told me to go and stay with my mother, and my mother told me that my dad wouldn’t mind me coming to stay with her. No, I said, I wouldn’t feel right doing that. Am I sure, will I be ok, won’t I reconsider? I am, I will and I won’t, I replied. Then I said my goodbyes and hung up. That was only half the reason though. It wouldn’t feel right. It would be awkward, painfully awkward. There was nothing there for me anymore. We would be walking on eggshells around each other, whichever option I chose. We would all come away feeling bad and none of us would know why. I didn’t think I could cope with that. My reasons for staying away were selfish as much as anything else. I fully intended to spend Christmas Day on my own in the flat. Dan is going back to Inverness to stay with his parents over Christmas and Hogmanay, the leisure centre being closed for two weeks. I wasn’t looking forward to it, I’ll admit that much. Being alone on Christmas Day must be one of the worst things in the world. It was, however, better than the alternative. When Stevie found out he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He insisted that I came to his. I was so grateful to him I could have cried. I didn’t though. All I said was, Cheers mate, appreciate it, but he understood. He looked sideways at me and smiled in his quiet way. No problem, that was all he said, but he understood. Stevie sticks my Stones tape into the deck to escape from the hideous Christmas drivel on the radio. We get the last three seconds of Sister Morphine and then Dead Flowers, which is ok by me. Stevie sparks up a joint and I ask how his day’s been. He scowls and tells me he’s spent all day outside in the snow digging a new bunker on the 17th hole, while the head green-keeper spent all day in a warm bothy wanking himself silly. At least that’s the way Stevie puts it. This is, hopefully, not actually the case. We haven’t been in the flat more than five minutes when the doorbell goes. It’s Mike wearing a Santa hat and carrying a crate of McEwans Export. “Ho-fucking-ho,” he says as I open the door. We fuck around the flat for a while, drinking and listening to music. Then we decide to get stuck into the coke. It turns out to be quite good. About eight we have one last line for the road and head for the Wanchor. It is fucking freezing as we walk down the road. I pull my red and white scarf tighter around my neck, glad I brought it. It has stopped snowing, but there’s more on the way, you can feel it. The pavements are slippy. An ice rink of snow compacted by many feet. No one will be out to clear them until tomorrow morning. Here and there pink grit and rock salt have burned holes through to the pavement. Someone’s going to end up in hospital with a broken leg before tonight is over. The Wanchor is warm and stuffy after the snow sharp night air. The tiled floor is slippy with a coating of melted slush. Andy and Wild Thing are at a back table. I give them a thumbs up as I go to the bar to get a pint in. Andy has long since forgiven me for The Incident We Do Not Speak About. I pay for the drinks and hand them back to Stevie and Mike, who gets his fags out and offers them round. We go through the back and sit with Andy and Wild Thing. “Merry Christmas!” Wild Thing says, taking a break from checking out two birds on the pool table. “It’s not for two days yet,” Mike says. “It’s the thought that counts,” Wild Thing says, resuming his ogling. I follow his gaze which is glued to the seat of a tight pair of jeans. Nice arse, I think. With a sudden unpleasant flash I realise that it belongs to the girl Sarah, the one who stuck her nails into my arm. I avert my gaze quickly. The paranoia demon works itself up from a trot to a gallop. If she saw that she’s going to come over here and break that pool cue over your head. Fuck, she might just do that anyway. These are Cally’s mates. If they’re here then there’s every chance she’ll be here too. I haven’t seen her since the night I tried to kiss her. I am split in two by this thought. Half of me wants to see her so badly it’s like a burning box of matches under my heart. And do what? Talk to her? Explain? Try to put things right? Or would just seeing her face be enough? Fuck knows. The other half of me however, can’t think of anything worse. Just wants to get the fuck out of here. Maybe get a bottle of rum from the bar, disappear back to the flat and have a little discussion with the rest of that coke. I turn my face back to the table, looking for something to distract my attention. The dunt from that last line of coke is starting to fade, so I go to the toilet and snort a line off the cistern. I sit on the toilet smoking a fag with red eyes, letting the coke drip down the back of my throat. When I come out of the toilet I find that I don’t care anymore, I simply don’t give a fuck about the whole situation. Colombian anaesthetic. I give Sarah a little wave on my way back to the table. She scowls. The Discopistol turns up a little while later. He sits demurely, straight-backed, sipping his first vodka and coke of the night. Amy Shaw, another one of Cally’s ‘it girl’ friends arrives. Mike sighs, chin propped on one hand. “What I wouldn’t give to shag that,” he says. Wild Thing hoots derisively. “Well keep dreaming Mike ‘cause you’ve got fucking no chance!” Wild Thing can be a right prick sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, I like the guy, but he’s got the ‘one up’ disease really bad. He’s one of those people who’s always trying to score points over his mates. Particularly when it comes to girls. Sometimes he can pass it off as banter, but sometimes he oversteps the mark. What he has just said to Mike for instance. His actual words aren’t that offensive. But what he said falls short of what he actually means. What he is really saying is, keep dreaming, ‘cause I’m the only one here she’d even give the time of day to. And it’s not just aimed at Mike, it’s aimed at all his mates. The fact that this is probably true is beside the point. Mike however, does us all proud. “Is that right dog-boy?” Everybody at the table creases up laughing. Apart from Wild Thing that is. For a second you can see the anger on his face. He looks as if he’s about to smack Mike. He quickly gets it under control though, and gives Mike the finger and what is clearly intended to be a patronising smile. “It is actually,” he says, but his words are drowned out by helpless laughter. It’s Combat Mike – 1 Wild Thing – 0, and he fucking knows it. This may take a little explaining, so please bear with me. In a small town like this everyone knows everyone else, and everyone remembers everything. Consequently something you did at secondary or even primary school can haunt your life for years to come. This explains people with names like Rory Shitty-breeks and Ball-biter, not to mention The Boy Who Got Caught Wanking in the English Cupboard (this has been his how people refer to him for so long that nobody actually knows his name anymore). As long as you live here you will never escape your past. What happened to Wild Thing in primary six has not replaced his name in the same way that Rory Adamson’s shitting outside the canteen in primary four did, or Kevin Ferguson’s biting someone’s balls so hard in a fight that they had to go to hospital. And certainly not in the same way that the red faced boy whose name nobody now remembers lost his identity on the day he was dragged through the English department by a bellowing Mrs Inglis. What happened to Wild Thing has not been forgotten though. It lives in the minds of his friends and surfaces whenever he needs taken down a peg or two. The story begins with a fence. A simple brown fence of inadequate height. If the fence had been two feet higher the story would never have taken place. Unfortunately for Wild Thing it was not. The fence in question separated the playing field of our primary school from the row of terraced houses it bordered. Behind this inadequately tall fence were square paving slabbed yards containing broken down old clotheslines of the whirly variety and the occasional broken down old shed. In one of these back yards lived Rouick. For seven years Rouick was the terror of our young lives. He was our version of the bogeyman, the lurking fear that haunted the playground. Rouick was an enormous golden Labrador, fat, filthy and terrible. When the mood took him he would leap over the woefully inadequate fence, into the playground, and tear across the grass towards the nearest child. You had to be vigilant because if Rouick caught you, he would mount you. And once he had mounted you, brought his seven stone of panting doghood to bear, he could not be dissuaded until he was entirely satisfied. Our behaviour was akin to a beach full of swimmers when someone screams shark. Only it wasn’t, shark, that would cause the heads of a whole generation of school children to whip round, faces blanched with fear. There is no more awful experience in a young person’s life than, when engaged in some innocent childhood activity, they hear the terrible cry, ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUIIIICK, and realise that they have strayed too far out across the playing fields. Realise that the school steps and safety look like a distant beach looks to a drowning swimmer. To realise that the situation which haunted a thousand prepubescent nightmares had come true, when you threw a glance back over your shoulder to see the great grinning beast bearing down on you, tongue lolling, claws tearing divots from the grass. There was nothing you could do but run, and prey. Luckily, this never happened to me. It happened to Wild Thing though. I remember it like it was yesterday. A frosty November playtime. There was a game of twenty-five a-side football in progress. Never being any good at football, and due to general schoolboy prejudice, I had been shunted into goals. I was between the goalposts (or rolled up jackets to be more accurate) nearest the school. Not being that fast a runner, if I had been at the other end of the pitch, the inadequate fence end, things might have gone badly for me. Wild Thing’s mother used to insist that on rainy days he wore one of those all over body cagoules, you know the sort of thing, like a bright blue nylon wetsuit. Looking the length of the pitch past the other players with their muddy knees and plumes of breath, I could see a small blue figure jogging behind the goals to retrieve the football (a shoot 5, or fifty pee fly away as it was more commonly known, due to its propensity to go up and never come back down again), which had been blasted past my counterpart in the other goal (a young boy with coke bottle N.H.S glasses who went by the name of Eric Gerard) for the seventh time that morning. I was standing, arms folded, glad that the ball was not, for once, hurtling towards me requiring me to hurl my myself into it’s path, collecting a stinging slap to some part of my anatomy, followed by a jarring blow from the frozen ground. I was watching proceedings at the other end of the pitch with a pleasant lazy apathy, when suddenly I saw something which made my still beating heart leap a good foot skywards and lodge somewhere between my ears. Over the inadequately short fence a huge tawny apparition had appeared like a randy jack in the box. Rouick landed with all four clawed feet at once and shook himself, saliva flying from his jaws in great shoestrings. My mouth worked soundlessly. Everyone apart from Eric and I had their backs to him. Eric took one look at him and began to run, legs pumping industriously, in the other direction. My mouth flapped like a drowning fish a few more times, then I finally found my voice. “Roooooooooooooooooooooooooiiiiiiiiiiii­iiiiiiiiiiiiick!” I bellowed. There was sudden and terrible panic as everyone bolted for the safety of the square of tarmac which made up the part of the playground nearest the school. I was lucky, I was close enough to bolt it to the school steps. From the fourth step up I had a grandstand view of this desperate race. Most of the outfield players had been in our half, waiting for the ball to be kicked out to them, and as such didn’t have very far to run. As they began to arrive, scared and panting, it became clear that there were two figures lagging behind the fleeing pack. One, the one in the lead, was clad in blue plastic. The other, despite his head start, was Eric. Wild Thing was normally a fast runner but his waterproofs, coupled with the fact that he was closest to the fence when the balloon went up, meant that he was making slow progress. It seemed, though, that he’d done enough. He was ahead of poor Eric, who couldn’t run for shit, by a good three meters. We were cheering, shouting encouragement like a crowd at a football match. To Rouick, to Wild Thing, to Eric, to all three. We were howling at the tops of our voices as Eric looked back over his shoulder and let out a despairing shriek as he saw the beige juggernaut closing in on him like a freight train, unsheathed dog-penis red and awful, and bigger than the world. It was at that moment that Wild Thing slipped. Eric overtook him and ran onto the tarmac to rapturous applause, like an Olympic runner taking the tape in the four hundred meters. Wild Thing was just getting to his feet when Rouick hit him amid ships and bowled him over again. We cheered wildly above Wild Thing’s girl-like cries of fear and a series of loud slapping sounds, as of something large and meaty repeatedly striking plastic. It was a good five minutes before Mr Lewis the school janitor arrived on the scene waving a brush and chased the now satisfied Rouick away. “Why didn’t you boys help him?” he bellowed. But we were too deep in the tar pit of helpless laughter to answer. It was several years before I realised what it was that was dripping off Wild Thing’s blue suit in long steaming runners. Eventually the laughter subsides. Despite trying to play it light you can tell by Wild Thing’s face that he’s pissed off. Mike is going to have to watch himself. Wild Thing will spend the rest of the night trying to get him back at any opportunity. We drink for a while more, occasionally disappearing into the toilet to do another line of coke. I notice with dismay that a good quarter of mine is gone already. When I spot Maggie coming in I sidle my way across the bar and have a word. He nods curtly and says he’ll be over in a minute. I ask who wants pills. Surprise surprise, everybody does. Maggie comes over and sits with us and does a really unsubtle job of the crafty one-handed notes-for-pills exchange. He might as well be waving a flag. Before he goes he gives Stevie his new mobile number written on a green piece of paper. We take our leave of the Wanchor headed for the flat, collars turned up against the driving snow. The clock on the dashboard says three. We watch the snow fall, fat flakes stick to the windscreen and are brushed away by the wind. Our faces are lit by the faint glow of the dash lights, green and strange. The engine is running, a gentle vibration felt rather than heard. You can’t always get what you want, plays quietly on the stereo. The cunt is already fifteen minutes late. This is typical. Drug dealers are never ever on time. It seems to be something buried deep in the psychology of the average small time pill punter, some deep underlying need to fuck you around at any given opportunity. “Fuck sake!” Stevie says. We wait, watching the snow. The tape finishes. Stevie rummages in the glove box and eventually comes out with a Massive Attack tape. He waves it at me raising his eyebrows. I shrug. “Not fussed,” I say. I know why they do it. Want me to tell you? Well I’m going to anyway. They do it because they can. Because we need them more than they need us. At this hour supply never exceeds demand. They are doing us the favour and as such have the license to fuck us around as much as they like. To make us wait for hours in frozen carparks or pre-dawn playparks, to force us to try to find houses in streets we have never even heard of with the worst directions imaginable, knowing all the while that in the end we will be grateful. Forward motion is a hell of a thing. We wait a while longer. “D’you reckon we should phone him again?” Stevie asks. As one we look out of the window at the nearest phone box, half way down the street and half buried in a snowdrift. Never has our anti-mobile pact seemed a worse idea. I shift in my seat, my guts uncomfortable inside me. I’m starting to come down. We only got two pills each off Maggie. He said phone him if we wanted more. So we did, about an hour ago, at which point he said he would meet us here in five minutes. Which is how we come to be sitting, feeling stupid and pissed off, in this car park. Needless to say neither Stevie, who from the look of him is beginning to feel as fragile as I am, nor myself, fancy the walk to the phone box. I wish we had even half a pill each, just to tide us over. But we don’t, Maggie’s crap pills are all gone. So is the coke. A gram of coke doesn’t last long, especially when you start dishing out lines to people and… fuck! Hold on though! My coke isn’t all gone! I sit bolt upright. “Fuck!” I say. “What?” Stevie says looking around wildly. I reach into my pocket and pull out my Kinder Egg, popping it open with my finger and thumb and pulling out the wrap. I snap on the interior light and carefully unfold the paper. There’s about enough left for two small lines. “Tell you what Stevie,” I say. “I’ll give you half of this if you go to the phone box.” “That’s fucking blackmail!” “Yes it is,” I say with a grin. He throws up his hands in exasperation. “Got anything to snort it off?” he asks. “There’s a road map in the glove box,” I say. Five minutes later Stevie is half mummified in hat scarf and gloves. “I’m still not happy about this you cunt,” he says with his gloved hand on the door handle. “Get on with it,” I say lighting a cigarette. Still grumbling he wrenches open the door, letting in a snatch of icy wind and several snowflakes, and staggers out into the frozen wilderness beyond. I watch his progress with barely suppressed mirth. The coke is beginning to work. The only effect it is having is to stop me coming down, under the circumstances though, that’s fine by me. Half way to the phone box Stevie falls over. I can hear his cursing from here. When he eventually gets back to the car he resembles the abominable snowman. “Mind the seats,” I chortle as he clambers in. “Fuck your seats,” he says. “Give me a fag.” I hold my packet out. “What did Maggie say?” I ask. “He says he’ll be here in five minutes.” The cunt eventually turns up half an hour later. “About fucking time,” Stevie says as he jogs round the corner. Stevie gets out and lets him clamber into the back. “Sorry I’m a bit late,” he says, mashed off his tits. A bit late! The cunt! We are forced to accept this with grumpy good nature. He’s here now, to start getting pissed off with him will do no good. Zero. In fact the only thing it will accomplish will be to make him inclined not to sell us any pills. Sorry boys all gone, just sold the last ones, have to be quicker next time. In which case all this waiting will have been for nothing. Stevie starts to get the money out. “Got the pills then?” “Nah,” Maggie says. “We’ve got to go up to my mate’s house to get them.” More fucking about. “Got any fags?” Stevie wearily produces his packet and I bite my tongue and reverse out of the car park. After a good five minutes of Maggie’s crap directions, left here, no right, no I mean left, We park outside one of those old semi-detached council houses which have been converted into four flats: two on the left, two on the right, with a central stairwell. Maggie pushes the buzzer and we wait, shivering, on the doorstep. After a long time there is a whisper of static and a voice, suspicious and unfriendly. “Aye?” I don’t like the sound of the voice. It sets the bad shit warning bells jangling in my head. Maggie leans into the little speaker. “Open up, it’s Maggie,” he says in a kind of jokey, mock exasperated way. Something tells me that this is exactly the wrong tone to adopt with that voice. There is another, long pause, before whoever is at the other end of the line buzzes us in. The stairwell is in total darkness. We curse and feel our night-blind way up the stairs. When we get to the top Maggie knocks on the door on the left. Someone opens it a crack and looks out with one eye before opening the door wider to admit us. “C’mon in,” Maggie grins at us. I shrug at Stevie, who, from his face, is also feeling the bad vibes radiating from this situation. As we follow him in I catch a glance of a retreating back disappearing through a door at the end of the hall. Obviously whoever let us in. Through the door is a small grotty living room. The TV is on but the sound has been turned down. Shitty trance is playing on the stereo. Maggie motions us to sit. We sit nervously on a threadbare brown sofa next to the boy who let us in. A pale unhealthy looking fucker with a stringy blonde beard and blackheads straddling his nose. His eyes are heavy lidded under his baseball cap. He offers no greeting, doesn’t even look at us, all his attention on the silent TV. He’s clearly fucked but he doesn’t look mashed. As if reading my mind he reaches down beside the sofa and produces a folded square of tinfoil and a rolled up tube of paper. He holds the tinfoil in his left hand, the tube of paper between his lips, and gently, slowly, runs the flame from a plastic lighter along the crease. “Sit down boys, make yourselves at home,” Maggie says, a little belatedly. A door behind the sofa, which I hadn’t noticed before, opens throwing a door shaped block of light across the shadowy living room. “Alright Chuckie my man, how you doing?” Maggie yells, hopping up from the arm of the sofa and bounding over to shake the hand of the man standing in the doorway. His age is difficult to gauge, he could be twenty-five, he could be forty. A short scrawny guy, with close-cropped hair to conceal a receding hairline, and half an inch of ginger stubble on his hollow cheeks. I know this cunt, or at least know of him. I’ve seen him in the Wanchor a couple of times, sitting at the end of the bar with a pint and a couple of seriously crazy looking mates, once with that fucker Martin Frazer whose speed we stole. He has that invisible psycho field around him which means that even in a crowded pub no one will come within three feet of him. He’s nicknamed Chuckie because he resembles, both physically and in temperament, the doll from the child’s-play films. Chuckie is what people like Dinnet aspire to be. Who knows, maybe what Dinnet will be, a couple years and another jail sentence down the line, if all his fondest nutter fantasies come true. I’d always wondered who Maggie’s dealer was. Now I know. If he’s mixed up with bastards like this he’s stupider than I thought. Maggie gestures to us. “These are the people I told you about.” Chuckie grins and winks but his eyes aren’t smiling. “Alright folks, how’s it going?” “Aye, not bad,” I reply, trying to sound nonchalant. He looks at Maggie. “Wee word in the kitchen,” he says, jerking a thumb towards the door. They go through and Chuckie pulls the door closed behind them. I look at the boy on the other end of the sofa. He blinks his heavy eyelids at me and looks away, transferring his attention back to the noiseless telly. The sound of a raised voice, Chuckie’s, floats through the closed kitchen door. I strain trying to make out words but can only make out a single snippet. “……bring those fuckin cunts up here for? Are you fu……” Then there is the unmistakable sound of a blow and the crash of overturned furniture. Then silence. My heart begins to hammer in my chest, picking up speed like a steam train rolling away from the station. I look at Stevie and see the anxiety I feel mirrored on his face. The kitchen door opens. “Alright folks, sorry ‘bout that. You wantin a wee line of coke?” Without waiting for an answer Chuckie sits down in a vacant armchair and retrieves a tea tray from underneath it. He picks up a Stanley-knife blade and scoops some coke out of what looks like a quarter ounce bag onto a cracked hand mirror which is also on the tray. He taps out three lines, chopping them with the blade to make sure they’re well powdered. “See if you get a ball of blu-tac and stick it between two of these blades?” He says conversationally, not looking up. He hands the mirror and a rolled up piece of paper to me. There are two smallish lines and one huge one. I snort the smallest line and pass it to Stevie. He is playing games with us. “You can slash somebody’s face wide fuckin open. Makes two cuts see. The fuckin doctors can’t sew it up again. Makes a right fuckin mess, leaves you with a cunt of a scar.” He snorts the big line, which Stevie has left. “Now, what was it youse were wanting?” “Eh, just ten pills,” I say nervously, taking the money out of my pocket. He shoots a look at Maggie, who I now notice is standing in the kitchen doorway, right eye swelling rapidly closed, which says you brought these fuckers up here for ten pills? Maggie looks very close to tears. Chuckie produces the pills from the kitchen and we pay him and get the fuck out of there as fast as we can. We slink away down the darkened stairwell and into the streetlit night. “Fuck sake,” mutters Stevie. “That was fucking well dodgy.” However, by the time we have paused to neck a pill each, washing them down with handfuls of snow, we are both agreeing that dodgy as it was, it was well worth it. I spend most of the next day in bed, not exactly sleeping but not exactly awake either. A horrible day-long muddled dream. When I get up at four Stevie is on the sofa wrapped in a duvet, watching a crap film and smoking a joint. I make a pan of scrambled eggs and throw it away in disgust. We both agree to lay off the drugs tonight, stick to booze instead. I feel like a scraped out shadow. Everything feels unreal. I feel like I am disconnected from the world, unable to touch or affect anything properly. We drink a couple cans of McEwans export, leftover, undrunk on account of its vileness, from Mike’s carryout last night. I phone the cunt. He sounds awful, tired and put upon. I can hear tense voices in the background. Sounds like his family are having a go at him. Probably because he came home wrecked at eight in the morning. He say’s he’ll be round about seven then hangs up. I stand at the window, looking out and down into the street. The snow has stopped, a few flakes blown from the rooftops chase themselves in circles through the air. It is almost dark, the streetlights on, fairy lights strung between them. From the streetlight nearest the window hangs a large, ugly, plastic star, which glows green. “The shops’ll probably be shutting soon,” Stevie says. “Coming for a carryout?” “Aye,” I say. Stevie emerges from his nest on the couch and chucks me my coat. The air outside is freezing but it makes me feel a little better, clears my head like a sudden hard slap. I light a fag and cough so hard that I double over and little blue points of light dance before my eyes. Stevie slaps my back until the coughing fit evaporates. I wipe my streaming eyes with the back of a gloved hand. There is a rattle and wheeze to my breathing which I don’t like at all. “Bad fish!” I gasp. We walk to Alldays, shadowed by streamers of breath. We pass the Christmas tree in the middle of the square by the war memorial, points of colour suspended among its branches, blue, green, red, yellow and orange. We instinctively step out of the way of a couple of snowballs thrown by little cunts on the other side of the square. We barely acknowledge the projectiles, just another part of the winter landscape. We buy a crate of Miller from Alldays and, reasoning that we should probably eat something, each buy a fish supper from the chipper. When we get back I feel better for having been out of the flat. We sit on the sofa, drinking beer and watching Christmas Eve telly. To my utter astonishment I find that I am not only able to eat, but actually enjoy, my fish and chips. I am on about my fourth can when I decide I should phone my parents before I get too pissed. Dad sounds drunk but happy to hear from me all the same. He says he will come up to stay with me sometime soon and asks if I got the card. I did, a card with a picture of Santa on the front and fifty quid inside. I got the same from my mum, except her card had a picture of a robin on it. I ask him if he got my present and he says he did. I sent him a bottle of aftershave and a tie because I couldn’t think of anything else. I sent Mum a lavender bathset, containing soap shampoo and some of those little balls you put in the bathwater. Our Christmas gifts to each other speak volumes about our relationship. Money, ties and toiletries are the kinds of things you give to someone you have a commitment to but do not know well enough to buy them something they’d actually like. I wish Dad a merry Christmas and he seems on the edge of saying something but instead he just says merry Christmas, and I ring off. The phone call to Mum isn’t so easy. After about a minute she launches into this big lecture about how she’s not happy about me spending Christmas by myself and that she wishes I would come down to see her more, especially as it’s just a couple of hours on the bus, and even quicker on the train, and public transport is so easy these days. This is a bit fucking rich considering I am not the one who left, and also considering the fact that, since she fucked off to live with that old rat-bag auntie Gladys, she hasn’t been back to see me once. I grit my teeth and take it though. After about seven hours of this she seems to have gotten it out of her system. She wishes me a happy Christmas and says she loves me. “You too,” I reply, mindful of the fact that Stevie is in the room. I feel guilty when she is gone. Like a bad person. Mum has a special talent for making me feel this way. Mike arrives at six thirty, half an hour early. He doesn’t say anything but I can tell he’s pissed off. I don’t ask but I get the impression that he needed to get out of his house. He asks what the plan is. “Starski’s?” I ask. “Woo-hoo!” he says grumpily. Starski’s is fucking packed with wankers. I stand by the bar with Stevie and Mike. You can’t get moved in this shithole and I can’t get properly pissed. Not through lack of trying either. I lean with the small of my back against the bar, tired and self conscious, paranoid that people are staring at me. Every few seconds I am jostled by shitheads trying to get to the bar. I want a pill. I really want a pill. Something to help me achieve escape velocity and get the fuck out of here. Out of my head and away from these fat aggressive men, hair full of gel, and these hostile girls, with their short skirts and cold reptile eyes. And to cap it all Cally is here. I shrank back against the bar when I saw her come in with her it-girl friends. In the event I find that seeing her makes me feel almost physically sick. I have to fight the urge to crawl under a table and spend the evening rocking back and forth curled up in a ball so she won’t see me. Thankfully she disappeared in the crowd, towards the other end of the bar, or I would be unable to prevent myself stealing glances at her, one of which she would surely catch and think I am staring at her, which of course I am. I keep catching myself scanning the room for mashed people, anyone pulling facials is a possible source of pills. I think of our anti-drug pact. It would be nice to be able to eat Christmas dinner for the first time in years, but forward motion wins every time. I grin in spite of myself when I notice Stevie doing exactly the same thing. “You thinking what I’m thinking?” He sighs. “Probably.” Mike and Stevie depart in search of pills, or whatever else they can get their hands on. I order three double vodkas and a can of red bull and wonder where it all went wrong. We never used to drink when we were necking. When we first started necking I mean. Right at the beginning when we were fifteen or so. But gradually, like a black hole, the drink is expanding, blotting out everything else, making it a side-show. Maybe it was because the pills were better then, good MDMA doves rather than piss poor Mitsubishi’s full of fuck knows what. Maybe it wasn’t the pills that got old and jaded. Maybe it was us. Maybe we squeezed the last of the serotonin out of our brains. Are we like a dried up old sponges? Fuck knows. All I know is that at some point, and I can’t say when it happened, the pills stopped being enough. We needed more, and more, and more. Forward fucking motion. I finish the vodka and order a pint. Stevie appears back and reports that Mike is speaking to some boy who reckons he can get when his mate arrives. Same old bullshit, I think. Stevie gets another drink. Mike still has not appeared by the time he’s draining the dregs so he ducks off to check on his progress. The moron DJ is playing Christmas tunes one after another. God save us, I think. I endure Slade, followed closely by Wizard, then Fairy Tale of New York by the Pogues, the second time I’ve heard it this weekend. I check my watch; 12:04. Happy Christmas, I mutter. When I look up I make eye contact with Cally on the other side of the room. Fuck, I hadn’t even noticed she was there. She smiles shyly and gives me a little wave. I return it tentatively. She begins to weave her way across the bar to talk to me. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck! I try desperately to shove some chuddy into my mouth but my nervous fingers can’t fish it out of my pocket. Oh God, my breath must smell like a pack of dead dogs! It’s trapped under my fags and my keys. I almost get it but it skitters away from me like a bar of soap in a bath. C’mon you cunt of a thing, c’mon you stupid fucking bast… “Hi, how’re you?” Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuc­kfuckfuckfuckfuck. “I’m okay, how’re you?” I say, quickly wrenching my hand out of my pocket before she gets the impression I’m playing with myself. “Oh you know,” she says, blowing a strand of hair out of her face and giving a tiny nervous laugh. “You’re not staying with Dan’s folks for Christmas then?” I ask out of desperation, born of the fact that I can’t think of a single other intelligible thing to say. She gives me a strange look. “Didn’t he tell you?” I blink, a sudden swell of paranoia in my chest. “No,” I say. “Tell me what?” “I finished with Dan three weeks ago.” “Oh,” I say, relief flooding in. “No he didn’t tell me. I’m sorry to hear that.” By some minor act of God I actually keep a straight face while I am saying this. Dan didn’t tell me, but then again that’s hardly a surprise, Dan only grudgingly spares me a good morning grunt. I try to think whether he has been in a worse mood lately. I honestly haven’t noticed. Says something doesn’t it when a person can be such a consistently grumpy wanker that being dumped by their girlfriend doesn’t even raise a blip on the shit head scale. “Why did you split up?” I ask. She sighs. “Lots of things really. We hadn’t been getting on for a while. I’d been going out with him for ages, we’d, you know, grown apart and all that.” “Nothing to do with him being a bit of a tosser then?” In spite of herself she smiles, then has to cover a laugh with her hand. She looks up at me smiling that smile which makes her nose wrinkle. “Maybe,” she says. “A little bit.” “C’mon Cally, our taxi’ll be waiting!” says the guy who I notice for the first time is standing behind us, hands in his pockets, petulantly kicking at the edge of the bar. I stiffen a little. “look, I’ve got to go,” she says grabbing my sleeve. “But it was really nice to see you again.” “Yeah you too,” I say. “Will you be up here at New Year?” she asks. “Probably,” I say, thinking at the same time that I am pretty unlikely to be anywhere else. “Well I’ll maybe see you then okay?” “Yeah,” I say. She takes a step towards the guy, whose name is Chris Fisher, and he puts an arm round her and propels her towards the door. She looks round and gives me a sad smile. “Happy Christmas,” she says. “Happy Christmas Cally,” I reply, but she doesn’t hear me because she has been swallowed up by the crowd and all I can see is the top of Chris fucking Fisher’s blonde gelled head making its way towards the door. Chris fucking Fisher. Chris fucking Fisher was in my year at school. Blonde, rich, good looking, cocky, wanker. Played centre mid for the school football team, now plays centre mid for the crappy local team, does think it’s perfectly acceptable to wear his club blazer and tie to come to Starski’s. I know this because I have seen him do it on several occasions. The archetypal town celebrity. Wanker. “Oh well,” I say to myself. “The world has gone back to normal again.” What, my brain sneers at me above The Fairy Tale of New York, did you get a little thrill when she told you she’d broken up with Dan? Think you had a chance? Think that maybe she was about to say she’d dumped Dan for you, hmmm… “Shut up brain,” I say, and ask the barmaid for three double vodkas and a can of red bull. I am pretty rubbered by the time we leave. We never got pills. The boy Mike was talking to turned out, as I’d suspected, to be full of shit. We have, in fact, managed to lose Mike. Me and Stevie hold on to each other as we stagger outside. It has stopped snowing but there was still a thick covering on the ground. I hope our taxi will be able to make it to Stevie’s house. Our taxi! Oh fuck! We didn’t remember to book one! Stevie puts his head in his hands and lets out a groan, which may or may not, be exaggerated. “Oh noooooooooooooo!” He says. “How the fuck are we going to get home now?” “It’s ok, we’ll just steal some other cunt’s taxi,” I say patting him on the back. We attempt this, but a series of progressively grumpier (and uglier), taxi drivers deny us, until we are forced to walk down to the square in the hope that there will be one floating about there. Halfway down the road Stevie picks up a traffic cone and wings it across the street in frustration. It bounces off the roof of a Ford Escort and clatters onto the pavement beyond. That was when the riot van we didn’t see sitting just up the street turns on its lights and three big coppers come piling out. We try to run but I slip in the snow and Stevie stops and looks back hesitating, and they’ve got us. The pig that grabs me has got my arm twisted up behind me and is trying to jamb the thumb of his free hand into the crook of my elbow, looking for the pressure point. They bundle us into the back and slam the doors. “Oh,” Stevie says. “I was just thinking things couldn’t get any worse.” “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” screams one of the pigs through the little grill at the front of the van. We sit stationary for about fifteen minutes then gears are engaged, handbrake released, and we are moving, going I presume, to the police station. We are driving for about twenty minutes before we come slowly to a halt. One of the front doors clunks open and I hear footsteps coming round the side of the van. The back doors are flung open and a voice orders us to get out. We are on an empty stretch of country road. There has been a plough along it recently. We climb down faces lit red by the vans taillights. The exhaust purrs softly, a gentle stream of vapour escaping from it. The van’s breath condensing in the winter air, just as ours is. The copper slams the back doors and walks away. “Merry Christmas,” he calls as he opens the door, releasing a swirl of nasty laughter from inside. The van pulls away leaving us alone. I look round in desperation, they’ve dumped us in the middle of fucking nowhere. They’ve dumped us in the middle of nowhere, the fucking bastards! How the fuck are we supposed to get home now? We don’t even know where we are! How the fuck… Suddenly I notice that Stevie is laughing. “What the fuck is so funny?” I shout, exasperated. He takes my shoulder and turns me around, pointing to the lights of a house about half a mile distant. “See those lights? That’s my house.” “Fuck off,” I say. “Are you sure?” He nods creasing up with silent laughter. I wave both my arms above my head and shout at the retreating taillights of the riot van. That backfired didn’t it you fuckers! “Cheers boys! And a merry Christmas to you too!” Christmas Morning is not too shabby. Stevie and I took preventative measures when we got in last night. Two pints of water and three ibuprofen apiece before we crashed out. Stevie’s Mum calls us at eleven. I have a bit of a hangover but not bad. It is my turn first for the shower. I take toothbrush and towel from the bag I left here on Tuesday and make my ablutions. Then I dress, thanking God that I had the foresight to leave my stuff here well in advance. The clean underwear, T-shirt, and combats feel good against my freshly washed skin. I go through to the kitchen and take over tattie peeling duties while Stevie has a shower. We eat about one. I produce two presents from my bag and give one each to Stevie and Mrs D, a thank you for rescuing me from a lonely Christmas and a microwave turkey dinner. I give Stevie the new Air album, and Mrs D gets a lavender bath set. Stevie grins. When she opens his present it turns out to be a bath basket complete with ‘novelty’ duck bath sponge. Then they hand me a package wrapped in snowman wrapping paper. I wasn’t expecting this. I thank them and open it. It’s a blue Diesel top. “Oh wow, thank you!” “No problem,” Stevie says and winks. We pull our crackers and read out our stupid jokes. We eat our turkey wearing our paper hats. At two, as we make a start on the trifle, Stevie’s mum turns over to the Queen’s speech. The Queen talks to me from the television set as if she knows me. How can an old woman who lives in a palace a thousand miles away possibly think what she has to say can have any relevance to my life? I am so happy though that I decide to let her off, just this once. After Christmas dinner Stevie and I sit on the sofa, stuffed, eating Quality Street and drinking beer, watching Jurassic Park. Mike phones at four and says he’ll be up to collect us about six. Stevie and I are pleasantly drunk by the time he arrives. We throw our shit onto the back seat, and armed with a couple of beers for the road, say our goodbyes. Mike grins as we get into the car and hands us a pill each. He floors it along the road, L.A. Woman on the stereo. We are really moving despite the fact that, although the roads have been ploughed and gritted, they are slippy as fuck. He keeps his foot flat on the accelerator and we barrel into the scary corner. I actually feel the tyres give a little on the surface of the road. The thought that we are all about to die has time to form in my head before Mike jerks the wheel slightly to the right, straightening us up, and we are belting along open road once more. We are in Wild Thing’s kitchen and it has just gone one. Stevie is crushing a pill between two soupspoons. I tear a square from the roll of tinfoil on the worktop and place it on the kitchen table. I take my jumper and polish the foil, trying to get all the creases out. I’m not sure why this should help but am doing it anyway. The microwave pings. Mike takes out a glass of orange liquid, Lucozade with a pill in it. Microwave the fucker for one minute. Mike’s route to a quick dunt when all else fails. I envy him. Chasing pills is even more foul than snorting them, but, having chosen our weapon we must use it. No turning back now. You live by the sword, you die by the sword. I fold the square of tinfoil along a diagonal and hand it to Stevie. With delicate taps he tips the crushed pill onto the crease, in a thin white line. I rip a bit of paper in half and roll it up, making sure one end is thin and one end is nice and wide to funnel in as much smoke as possible. I put it in my mouth and Stevie holds the tinfoil and a lighter ready. “Okay?” Stevie asks. I take a deep breath. “Bon appetite,” shouts Mike and downs his Lucozade. Stevie thumbs the lighter flint and I start to inhale. Immediately the smoke gets in my eyes and up my nose. Burning toxic overflow from a chemical plant. The worst smell, the worst taste, you can imagine. I can feel it burning my throat and lungs but I can’t stop sucking because Stevie still has the lighter going. Then it snaps out and I have to breathe in for a second more to get the last from the line of blackened powder. I cough, but with instinct born of experience, turn away so I will not blow crushed pill all over the kitchen. I gag but control it and wipe my streaming eyes. Convulsive shudders wrack my body and even when they have subsided my hands still shake. My teeth are beginning, very slightly, to chatter. “Good shit,” I say through my clamped up jaw. It occurs to me with sudden and horrible clarity that I have to be at work in six hours. “Again?” Stevie asks. I put the roll of paper in my mouth, and bend over the tinfoil.
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