Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh [102]
— I said, it’s a shame we had to meet under such circumstances.
He groaned contentedly and fell into a sleep. I extracted his scrawny fingers from my hand.
Unpleasant dreams, cunt.
The nurse came in to check on my man. — Most anti-social. Hardly the way to treat a guest, I smiled, looking down on the slumbering near-corpse that was Venters. She forced a nervous laugh, probably thinking it’s the black humour of the homosexual or the junky, or the haemophiliac or whatever she imagines me to be. I don’t give a toss about her perception of me. I see myself as the avenging angel.
Killing this shitebag would only do him a big favour. That was the problem, but one which I managed to resolve. How do you hurt a man who’s going to die soon, knows it, and doesnae give a toss? Talking, but more crucially, listening to Venters, I found out how. You hurt them through the living, through the people they care for.
The song says that ‘everybody loves somebody sometime’, but Venters seemed to defy that generalisation. The man just did not like people, and they more than reciprocated. With other men Venters saw himself in an adversarial role. Past acquaintances were described with bitterness: ‘a rip-off merchant’, or derision: ‘a fuckin sap’. The description employed depended on who had abused, exploited or manipulated whom, on the particular occasion in question.
Women fell into two indistinct categories. They either had ‘a fanny like a fish supper’, or ‘a fanny like a burst couch’. Venters evidently saw little in a woman beyond ‘the furry hole’, as he called it. Even some disparaging remarks about their tits or arses would have represented a considerable broadening of vision. I got despondent. How could this bastard ever love anybody? I gave it time, however, and patience reaped its reward.
Despicable shite though he was, Venters did care for one person. There was no mistaking the change in his conversational tone when he employed the phrase: ‘the wee felly’. I discreetly pumped him for information about the five-year-old son he had by this woman in Wester Hailes, a ‘cow’ who would not let him see the child, named Kevin. Part of me loved this woman already.
The child showed me how Venters could be hurt. In contrast to his normal bearing, he was stricken with pain and incoherent with sentiment when he talked about how he’d never see his son grow up, about how much he loved ‘the wee felly’. That was why Venters did not fear death. He actually believed that he would live on, in some sense or other, through his son.
It hadn’t been difficult to insinuate myself into the life of Frances, Venters’s ex-girlfriend. She hated Venters with a vitriol which endeared her to me even though I wasn’t attracted to her in any other way.
After checking her out, I cruised her accidentally-on-purpose at a trashy disco, where I played the role of charming and attentive suitor. Of course, money was no object. She was soon well into it, obviously having never been treated decently by a man in her life, and she wasn’t used to cash, living on the breadline with a kid to bring up.
The worst part was when it came to sex. I insisted, of course, on wearing a condom. She had, prior to us getting to that stage, told me about Venters. I nobly said that I trusted her and would be prepared to make love without a condom, but I wanted to remove the element of uncertainty from her mind, and I had to be honest, I had been with a few different people. Given her past experience with Venters, such doubts were bound to be present. When she started to cry, I thought I had blown it. Her tears were due to gratitude however.
— You’re a really nice person, Davie, dae ye ken that? she said. If she knew what I was going to do, she wouldn’t have held such a lofty opinion. It made me feel bad, but whenever I thought of Venters, the feeling evaporated. I would go through with it alright.
I timed my courtship of Frances to coincide with Venter’s decline into serious