Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh [104]
— Presumably the whole two million won’t move into Caledonian Place. I mean, conditions are cramped enough in the Dairy ghetto as it is.
— Laugh if ye like. Whit aboot joabs? Two million on the dole already. Hooses? Aw they perr buggers livin in cardboard city. God, was he nipping my heid. Thankfully, the mighty Ma, guardian of the soap box, intervened.
— Shut up, will yis! Ah’m tryin tae watch the telly!
Sorry mater. I know that it’s a trifle self-indulgent of me, your HIV offspring, to crave your attention when Mike Baldwin is making an important choice which will determine his future. Which grotesque auld hing-oot will the shrivelled post-menopausal slag want tae shaft? Stay tuned.
I decide not to mention my HIV. My parents don’t have very progressive views on such things. Or maybe they do. Who knows? At any rate, it just did not feel right. Tom always tells us to keep in tune with our feelings. My feelings were that my parents married at eighteen and had produced four screaming brats by the time they were my age. They think I’m ‘queer’ already. Bringing AIDS into the picture will only serve to confirm this suspicion.
Instead I drank a can of Export and quietly talked fitba with the auld man. He hasn’t been to a game since 1970. Colour television had gone for his legs. Twenty years later, satellite came along and fucked them up completely. Nonetheless, he still regarded himself as an expert on the game. The opinions of others were worthless. In any event, it was a waste of time attempting to venture them. As with politics, he’d eventually come around to the opposite viewpoint from the one he’d previously advocated and express it just as stridently. All you needed to do was put up no hard front for him to argue against and he’d gradually talk himself around to your way of thinking.
I sat for a while, nodding intently. Then I made some banal excuse and left.
I returned home and checked my toolbox. A former chippie’s collection of various sharp implements. On Saturday, I took it round to Frances’s flat in Wester Hailes. I had a few odd jobs to do. One of them she knew nothing about.
Fran had been looking forward to the meal out with her pals. She talked incessantly as she got ready. I tried to respond beyond a series of low groans which sounded like ‘aye’ and ‘right’, but my mind was spinning with thoughts of what I had to do. I sat hunched and tense on the bed, frequently rising to the window to peer out, as she put her ‘face’ on.
After what seemed like a lifetime, I heard the sound of a motor rolling into the deserted, shabby car park. I sprang to the window, cheerfully announcing: — Taxi’s here!
Frances left me in custody of her sleeping child.
The whole operation went smoothly enough. Afterwards I felt terrible. Was I any better than Venters? Wee Kevin. We had some good times together. I’d taken him to the shows at the Meadows festival, to Kirkcaldy for a League Cup tie, and to the Museum of Childhood. While it doesn’t seem a great deal, it’s a sight more than his auld boy ever did for the poor wee bastard. Frances said as much to me.
Bad as I felt then, it was only a foretaste of the horror that hit me when I developed the photographs. As the prints formed into clarity, I shook with fear and remorse. I put them on the dryer and made myself a coffee, which I used to wash down two valium. Then I took the prints and went to the hospice to visit Venters.
Physically, there was not a great deal left of him. I feared the worst when I looked into his glazed eyes. Some people with AIDS had been developing pre-senile dementia. The disease could have his body. If it had also taken his mind, it would deprive me of my revenge.
Thankfully, Venters soon registered my presence, his initial lack of response probably a side-effect of the medication he was on. His eyes soon fixed me in their gaze, acquiring the sneaky, furtive look I associated with him. I could feel his contempt for me oozing through his sickly smile. He thought he’d found a sappy cunt to indulge him until the end. I sat