Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh [103]
My opportunity came, in the event, at exactly the right time; in the end it was probably fifty-fifty luck and planning. Venters was struggling, no more than a wrinkled parcel of skin and bone. The doctor had said: any day now.
I had got Frances to trust me with the babysitting. I encouraged her to get out with her friends. She was planning to go out for a curry on the Saturday night, leaving me alone in her flat with the kid. I would take the opportunity presented to me. On the Wednesday before the big day, I decided to visit my parents. I had thought about telling them of my medical condition, and knew it would probably be my last visit.
My parents’ home was a flat in Oxgangs. The place had always seemed so modem to me when I was a kid. Now it looked strange, a shantytown relic of a bygone era. The auld girl answered the door. For a second she looked tentative. Then she realised it was me and not my younger brother, and therefore the purse could be kept in mothballs. She welcomed me, her enthusiasm generated by relief. — Hu-low stranger, she sang, ushering me in with haste.
I noted the reason for the hurry, Coronation Street was on. Mike Baldwin had apparently reached a point where he had to confront live-in-lover Alma Sedgewick and tell her that he was really into rich widow Jackie Ingram. Mike couldn’t help it. He was a prisoner of love, a force external to him, which compelled him to behave the way he did. I could, as Tom would have put it, empathise. I was a prisoner of hate, a force which was an equally demanding taskmaster. I sat down on the couch.
— Hello stranger, ma old man repeated, not looking at me from behind his Evening News. — What have you been up tae then? he asked wearily.
— Nuthin’ much.
Nothing really pater. Oh, did I mention I’m antibody positive? It’s very fashionable now, you know. One simply must have a damaged immune system these days.
— Two million Chinkies. Two million ay the buggers. That’s whit we’re gaunnae huv ower here whin Hong Kong goes back tae China. He let out a long exhalation of breath. — Two million Wee Willie Winkies, he mused.
I said nothing, refusing to rise to the bait. Ever since I’d gone to university, jacking in what my parents habitually described as ‘a good trade’, the auld man had cast himself as hard-nosed reactionary to my student revolutionary. At first it had been a joke, but with the passing years I grew out of my role as he began to embrace his more firmly.
— You’re a fascist. It’s all to do with inadequate penis size, I told him cheerfully. Coronation Street’s vice-like grip on my Ma’s psyche was broken briefly as she turned to us with a knowing smirk.
— Dinnae talk bloody nonsense. Ah’ve proved ma manhood son, he belligerently replied, digging at the fact I’d managed to reach the age of twenty-five without obtaining a wife or producing children. For a second I even thought that he was going to pull out his cock to try and prove me wrong. Instead he shrugged off my remark and returned to his chosen theme. — How’d you like two million Chinkies in your street? I thought of the term ‘Chinky’ and visualised loads of aluminium cartons of half-eaten food lying in my road. It was an easy image to call to mind, as it was a scene I observed every Sunday morning.
— It sometimes seems like I already huv, I thought out loud.
— There ye are then, he said, as if I’d conceded a point. — Another two million ur