Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh [120]
Franco Begbie felt angry and confused. Any injury to a friend he took as a personal insult. He prided himself on looking after his mates. The death of one of them confronted him with his own impotence. Franco resolved this problem by turning his anger on Matty. He remembered the time that Matty shat it off Gypo and Mikey Forrester in Lothian Road, and he had to have both the cunts on his puff. Not that it presented him with any difficulty. It was the principle of the thing though. You had to back up your mates. He’d made Matty pay for his cowardice: physically, with beatings, and socially, with heaps of humiliating slaggings. Now he realised, he’d not made the cunt pay enough.
Mrs Connell was thinking about Matty as a wee laddie. All boys were dirty, but Matty had been particularly bad. Hard on shoes, reducing clothes to threadbare status in no time at all. She was therefore not concerned when he grew into punk as he grew into adolescence. It seemed merely to be making a virtue out of necessity. Matty had always been a punk. One particular incident came to her mind. As a child, he had accompanied her to get her false teeth fitted. She felt self-conscious on the bus home. Matty insisted upon telling everyone on the bus that his Ma had false teeth put in. He was a particularly loving child. You lose them, she thought. After they get to seven, they’re no longer yours. Then, just when you adjust, it happens again at fourteen. Something happens. Then when you put heroin into it, they’re no longer their own. Less Matty, more heroin.
She sobbed softly and rhythmically, the valium measuring out her grief in sickening little breezes, attempting to dissipate the raging hurricane of raw angst and misery within her, which it simultaneously struggled to keep under wraps.
Anthony, Matty’s younger brother, was thinking about revenge. Revenge on all the scumbags who’d brought his brother down. He knew them, some of them had the fucking gall to be here today. Murphy, Renton and Williamson. These pathetic arseholes, who breezed around like they shat ice-cream cones, like they knew something nobody else did, when all they were was junky trash. Them, and the more sinister figures behind them. His brother, his fucking weak, stupid brother, had got in tow with that scum.
Anthony’s mind cast back to the occasion that Derek Sutherland had beaten him up badly at the disused railway yard. Matty found out, and went to have Deek Sutherland, who was the same age as Anthony, and two years younger than himself. Anthony remembered his eager anticipation of Deek Sutherland’s complete humiliation at the hands of his brother. In the event, it was Anthony who was again humiliated, this time by proxy. It was almost as intense as the one he’d received from Deek Sutherland himself, as he watched his old adversary almost casually overwhelm and kick the shite out of his brother. Matty had let him down there. He had let everybody down since.
Wee Lisa Connell felt sad that her Daddy was in that box, but he would have wings like an angel and go up to heaven. Her Nana had cried when Lisa had suggested that might happen. It was like he was sleeping in that box. Her Nana said that the box went away, to heaven. Lisa thought that angels grew wings and flew to heaven. It mildly concerned her that he would not be able to fly, unless they let him out of the box. Still, they probably knew what they were doing. Heaven sounded good. She would go there some day, and see her dad. When he had come to see her in Wester Hailes he usually wasn’t well so she wasn’t allowed to talk to him. It would be good to go to heaven, to play with him, like they used to when she was really wee. He’d be well again in heaven. Heaven would be different from Wester Hailes.
Shirley held her daughter