Filth

More Carole?

I’ve had a lot, in fact maybe too much, but it’s that time of year. It’s freezing and I’m glad I’ve put my big coat on. I’m carrying my nice new handbag, the one Bruce got me for last Christmas, well that should now be the Christmas before last, but I’ve not really used it yet. The Tron is sectioned off and the city is heaving. This used to be a traditional Scottish affair but now it’s just the Edinburgh Festival at New Year, another tourist thing. I’m sick of it. I head away from it all, down Leith Walk, passing crowds of jeering youths, couples and tourists who are all making their way up the town.

I turn off a sidestreet and see the glowing light of a bar. I’m heading towards it but I’m aware that there’s a car cruising alongside me, as if I was a hooker or something. One guy’s hanging out the window making signs. I ignore him. Then it stops a little bit in front of me and two young men get out. They approach me and one blocks my path. My grip tightens on my handbag.

– Happy New Year doll! he says.

– Ye comin fir a wee ride sweetheart? the other asks.

– No . . . I . . . I start, then stop. I don’t like talking. To strangers. Not when I’m out with

They start to laugh. I start to laugh. We start to laugh. Then one man gets out from the back of the car and pushes us into the back seat as another pair of hands grab hold of our wrists. We’re in the back seat of the car crushed between two men and the other two have got into the front and we’re speeding off. It’s strange, but we never thought of reacting: resisting or running off, although we had time to do both. This seems the right way.

– You’re a fuckin sick fairy. Ah’m gonny fuckin cripple you, one young man says, turning around in the front passenger seat. We know this albino-skinned boy to be Gorman. We know the record of this thug.

– Ye shag guys like that . . . darling? a guy next to us is laughing. He is big. His hands are like shovels. His head is as chunky as Darth Vader’s mask. This man we know to be Setterington.

They can’t talk to us like that. – Listen! we tell them, – Police! We’re working undercover!

They laugh. They just laugh at me. We pull off the wig we have been wearing. We still hold on to our handbag. Carole’s handbag. My present. Last Christmas I gave you my heart. The car seems to be moving so slowly, and there is a sickness in our stomach, a sickness which makes us feel as if we have eaten too much candyfloss at the fairground and gone on the waltzers. Stacey liked the waltzers. Us and her, her tucked in the middle. The nuclear family, spinning, twisting, disorientated, but still huddled together.

Still . . .

– Sexier oan but, eh, one guy’s laughing. He’s laughing at us. We do not recognise him.

Spinning, twisting out of control. The wig. It cost two hundred pounds from Turvey’s on the Glasgow Road. Made specially to look like Carole’s hair, long and black. I told the guy it was for my wife. Her hair fell out after chemotherapy. How terrible, he said. She smokes too many cigarettes, I told him.

– Any keks you wear may be taken doon and used in evidence, another one smiles; Liddell, this one is called.

– I’m Detec . . .

I’m

We’re a family . . . we knew a fam . . .

– Detective Se . . . we start to tell them, but Setterington has punched us hard on the nose with his anvil fist and the tears are filling our eyes and there is a sharp noise of pain spreading across our face and hitting the centre of our brain and an irregular pattern of breathing fits, a heaving in our chest, half a sob, half a puke. The only thing we can react to is the pain. We can see or feel nothing else.

How did it make you feel

We’re different to what they think

Where’s the fuckin back up team? We are fuckin polis! Police.

They put a plastic carrier bag over our head. We are now unable to see where we’re going. We’re remembering how this all started: that when Carole first left with the bairn we used to set the table for two and then we started wearing her clathes and it was like she was still with us but no really . . . Carole . . . Carole, why did you dae it, with that fuckin nigger, those whores they meant nothing tae me . . . you’re fuckin big-moothed hoor ay a sister . . . fanny like the fuckin Mersey tunnel . . . and the bairn . . . oh God . . . God . . . God . . . we want to live . . . all we’re asking for is some law and order . . . it’s the job . . .

we want tae make it up . . .

we’re not like the scum they put in the prisons . . .

we want tae make it right . . .

. . . we don’t know where we’re going. We don’t know at all. This is Edinburgh. It’s winter but it’s hot and sticky under this plastic bag and we can’t fuckin well breathe here.

We’ve lost the handbag.

And their voices.

– Need a bag ower that cunt’s heid before ah’d fuck it, Gorman’s voice.

– Get away! It’s a fuckin guy ya poofy cunt! another is telling him.

– Ah’m no gonnae fuck it wi ma cock, ah’m ah ya daft cunt, bit we’ll see what we can find tae stick up this queer erse, see how much the cunt can take.

– Barry.

We’re bundled out of the car and pushed up a set of stairs. Stairs. We can see the steps under our feet. Pushed. The coon. They make us move too quick and we go over in our heels, stumbling, but they’re stopping us from falling and they are shouting obscenities at us.

– Move yir queer erse ya fuckin buftie!

– C’moan ya fuckin daft twat!

This place is derelict, we can see the broken glass under our feet. It’s abandoned, no noise but our own. We reach the top of the stairs and they throw us into a room. Then there’s more voices. A girl’s voice. I recognise it.

– Ah kent ah had seen him fae somewhaire.

Estelle.

– Did eh huv a plastic bag ower ehs heid at the time?

– Wide cunt!

I feel a sharp pain in my testicles. I cover them with my hands. My fingers knead the material of the skirt.

– Nice one Ocky!

Ocky. I’ve been kicked by Ocky.

– The thing is boys . . . and girls, it’s Lexo’s voice, – we have tae go aw the wey wi this pig. Ye ken what that means.

– Ye cannae waste a pig man, the other guy, I think his name’s Liddell, is saying.

There’s a nervous laugh from Estelle. She thinks those cunts are joking. – Ah’m no wantin nowt tae dae wi this, she says.

– Dinnae be daft Lexo, Liddell’s saying. – Ye cannae waste a pig. End of. That’s it fucked eftir that.

Another voice cuts in, gasping, frightened. – It’s nae fuckin joke . . . c’moan boys . . . ye cannae kill the boy . . . no a polisman . . . My assailant Ocky.

– You shut yir fuckin grassin wee mooth, Ghostie says, and I can sense Ocky trembling from here. – We’ll see tae you later. We ken aw aboot you pal.

– Ah’m no a grass . . . Ocky pleads.

Poor Ocky. Always between a rock and a hard place.

– Lexo’s right, Ghostie says. – This cunt kens the score. We did the boy.

– We dae him n aw, Lexo’s mocking voice continues, – Deid cunts tell nae tales. We can torch this place wi the cunt in it. Or what’s left ay the cunt in it.

One of them whips off the bag. There is a sharp light in our face and we blink. We look at them. Yes, there’s the four of them, the same four, plus Estelle and Ocky. Liddell is holding an old anglepoise lamp in my face.

The handbag is on the shelf. Setterington is mincing around with it.

But we are starting to get in control now. They shouldn’t have taken off the bag. Our face is throbbing and sore, our eyes still water, but we’re thinking again. We see them. The lamp does not bother us. They look at our unflinching gaze.

We see them.

– Look at him, what a fuckin tube, Ghostie Gorman the evil-looking little albino twat spits. He then smiles, and produces a wrap of charlie and starts rubbing it on his gums. – High grade mate, high grade. Took it oot ay yir bag thaire. Nab it fae D.S. duty, aye?

I say nothing.

– Should’ve joined the polis masel! he laughs, and the others chorus him.

I’m looking at Ocky, then at Estelle. Her face is pinched and angry. She looks at me with a raw hate as if she’s blaming me for putting her in this position. Ghostie sees me staring at her. – Like the bird here, dae ye? Sexy eh? No as sexy as you bit, eh no mate?

He pulls Estelle to him and kisses her, pushing his tongue into her mouth. She’s awkward and stiff, resisting slightly then complying. He stops and turns to me. Estelle rubs her lips. – French kissin, Ghostie explains. – That’s me gittin intae practice for the World Cup. The nosh as well. Ah went tae this French restaurant last summer there. Ye like French grub?

– No bothered, I tell him.

– The posh one off the Royal Mile, he urges. – A real French job. Ah like the garlic, me. Garlic snails.

He puckers his lips and makes a slurping sound.

– You ever go tae that place mate, Le Petit Jardin? Ghostie pronounces the restaurant name with an affected French accent.

– Naw. I never went there, I tell him.

Me and Carole never went there. I never liked French food. I always preferred going out for a curry. The Raj doon at the Shore in Leith. Tommy Miah’s place. That was always my favourite. A windae table if we could get yin. The Anarklia in Dalry Road. Carole liked the vegetarian options there.

– It wis durin the Festival, Ghostie tells me, tarrying leisurely. This cunt’s worse than Toal. – Ah goes in, in a resturant in ma ain city. The waiter comes up and sais: Do you have reservations? Ah just looks aroond . . . he twists his head haughtily around the derelict room, – and ah goes: Aye, ah do. The decor, then he looks contemptuously at me like I was the waiter, – the service, and probably the food. But I’d still like a fuckin table.

The others smirk and smile sycophantically as he goes through the pantomine. Ocky and Estelle’s grins conceal death-masks of terror, and only Lexo is unmoved, looking out the window.

Ghostie shakes his head grimly. – But naw. Nae table. No room at the inn, he shrugs. – But Le Petit Jardin shut doon for a month eftir that. Within a few hours ay us gittin bombed oot, some wee mob had steamed the place and turned it ower. Terrorised the clientele. Now ah nivir huv any bother findin a table. Treat ays like royalty, so they dae. Even wi this Edinburgh’s Hogmanay, wi aw they tourists, ah could walk in any time and they’d sort ays oot straight away.

There will be no pleading for forgiveness. They are rubbish, they are criminal scum. They are different from us. There is now no fear in us. They are weak.

– You think that impresses me, we laugh, shaking our head, – that you can get a mob ay daft wee bairns tae dae a stupid frog restaurant over? It doesnae, we shake our head mockingly, glaring into his dark eyes.

– Shut yir fuck . . . Liddell starts, putting the lamp down and moving forward.

Ghostie raises his hand. – Shut up. Let the cunt speak.

I look around at them all, then back at Ghostie. – Ah ken you mate. You hide in the mob. You are one shiting cunt. Me and you then . . . I’m staring at his cold, cold eyes. – Ah’d take you. We look round at them. – Ah’d take any one ay yis in a square go! Fuckin shitin cunts! we snarl at them.

We can see this pushes the right buttons in their spastic psychology. They are shocked. Laughing, incredulous, but taken aback. They know that they are going to have to work for what they thought would just be sport. To have to put themselves on the line in some way. We’ve cracked their fuckin code and we are challenging them to prove to us that they are what they think themselves to be. One of them, Ghostie Gorman, goes, – Right, this cunt dies. Ah’m takin um.

– Lit’s jist fuckin dae the cunt now n stoap fuckin aboot, Lexo says.

– Naw. Ah want him. Gorman looks at me and laughs loudly. – You die, he says softly.

He signals for the others to depart, and they file out tentatively. He has an old key, which he uses to lock us in this room. – The key to the house of love, he smiles, putting it on the mantelpiece.

It’s just him and us, the fuckin donkey. Without announcing our intentions, we fly at him, but he catches us with a punch to our face and it hurts and he’s all over us and we feel weak and broken under his raining blows and it shouldn’t have been like this and he’s laughing at us and the fear is here now and our despondency rises as we realise we’ve got nothing to give, we are just static. His head crashes into us and our nose explodes much worse than in the car because it’s crunched into our face and we’re choking on our own blood and we can’t breathe and there are more digging blows and our arms feel so heavy, we can’t even fuckin well lift them to hit back or block him.

We’re on the ground. Only Bruce is taking the blows, the boots. He is protecting me, protecting Stevie, all the rest . . . no . . . no . . . Carole isnae here. Stevie isnae here. It’s just me. Bruce. Bruce and the Worm.

– Mind ay that auld disco song? Doctor Kiss-Kiss? That’s me, he says strutting around. He offers his hand. I take it.

He pulls me to my feet. His arm is around our shoulders. We can’t move.

– Ah’ve always fuckin hated cops, he explains. – No in the normal way everybody hates cops. Ah’ve eywis hated the cunts in a special wey. You’re different though sweethert. You kin be saved. Ah’m gonny make an honest woman ay you yet!

He yanks our head back and he’s looking at us in the eye. His long tongue licks his lips.

– Fuckin wide poof polis! He smiles. – Now it’s time for you to learn something . . . He sticks his tongue in our mouth, mingling his saliva with our blood.

He probes for a while, then withdraws and we hear his voice, – Sexy! Whoa hoah! You thought ye could take me, ya fuckin sick poof! Ye liked that, eh sexy, he pants softly. – Ye liked it, eh?

Yes. We know that we want him to do this again, this is our last wish. We want to say, Please, let us be together like that again, just one last time, but we can’t shout, only think, only hope that he can somehow sense this wish.

He does.

He pushes his tongue into our head again, but now we raise our weary arms to embrace him. Our hands lock together behind his back to celebrate our own joining, our own communion, our brotherhood. A grip nothing can break . . . it’s Carole . . .

Oh Carole

we embrace her and bite hard into her tongue and she’s squealing and trying to push us away like she did when we just wanted to hold her after we confronted her about the nigger, but no my darling, you cannae get away this time, no, cause we’re hugging her tight and as she tries to pull free we’re moving forward, no no my darling, we can’t let you go, not now . . . because we need to be together Carole, you know that . . . it’s just how it always has to be . . . our eyes have shut but through the membrane of our eyelids we can still see the light and we move towards it.

Move in tae the light Stevie . . . Carole . . . away from the filth, intae the light . . .

But this isn’t Carole. This is excrement. What is this thing doing here, doing here with us instead of Carole!

It has to go.

At the right time we release our grip and push and watch him falling backwards, crashing through the rotten window panes, still holding on, but unable to pull himself back in, and trying to grab the old, worn curtains but the material just tears in his hands and he looks at us with hate and incomprehension, his own blood spilling from the severed tongue in his mouth, as he slides out the window and crashes down on to the concrete court below. We look out and down and we can tell by the way he’s bent and broken that he’s gone, and then, as if to confirm our suspicion, a huge heart-shape of blood forms around his head.

The spastics are banging on the door screaming threats. Ha ha ha.

I go to shout at them but there’s something in my mouth. I put my fingers in and take it out. A piece of his tongue. I reach down and see Carole’s handbag and put it in her purse.

I’m screaming back at them through the door: – Who’s fuckin next spastics! We are the Edinburgh polis! We kill spastics! WE HATE NIGGERS! ESPECIALLY THE WHITE ONES THEY CALL SCHEMIES!

Then it stops.

It seems like an age.

Then we smell burning. They have set the building on fire. We go to the window and see them running out of the stairway. They scream a death threat up at me as they clock their spastic pal and we shout back: – Youse die! Youse git the same as that fuckin spastic! YOUSE DIE!

We get the key from the mantelpiece and open the door. There is a surge of heat and the flames are everywhere, tearing up from floor to ceiling along the old papered walls.

We are trapped. The thick, filthy smoke is filling our lungs.

Our only option is to go to the kitchen and climb out on to the back drainpipe. When we get outside the wind is flapping in our ears and we feel that we are so high. The sky above us is a lovely pale blue with a cloud formation the shape of a twisted beggar. The pipe is slippy, but we hold on. Then it wrenches from its brackets and we lose our grip and fall, and there is no time for us to brace for impact and we are crashing down into something which takes our weight as it cuts and rips all around us and we’re sinking into a filthy green brittle tomb, which is where we come to rest, in this fucking hedge and we are unable to move. The hedge grows over a spiked fence and one spike has missed our head by inches. We can’t move, all we can do is think of Carole and sob. We cry for ourselves, not for her. It is important to remember that we always cry for ourselves.

Oh Carole, I am but a fool

Carole is nothing you see, I am the fool. Poor me.

Then we hear voices. First we half-see the blurred figure of a uniformed spastic, asking us who we are.

Darling I love you, though you treat me cruel

You treat me cruel.

At some point one of the voices becomes familiar: – Well Robbo, you’ve really fucked it up this time.

We are torn to pieces in a woman’s dress, stuck in a hedge and we hear Toal talking to us, and in our present circumstances it has to be conceded that he may have a point.

You hurt me, and you make me cry

All we can say is, – You should see the other cunt.

– We’re still scraping that particular piece of shit off the pavement at the front.

But if you leave me, I will surely die.

– Boss . . . I . . . don’t leave me . . . stay with me . . . we whine in a voice that is not our own.

– Don’t try to talk Bruce, later. I’m here, Toal squeezes my hand. A good man Toal, I’ve always said it. He’s got a look in his eye, like my mother had when she was dying in that hospital bed. When we were trying to tell her that we were sorry for all the fuck-ups. Sorry that we were not somebody different. Sorry that we werenae like Stevie. A look like she understood. But she still pitied me.

Toal’s alright, but I can see the pity in his eyes, a pity I detest more than anything.

That is not true

That is not

true.