Skagboys

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Irvine Welsh

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Tempted

  Prologue: Notes From Rehab Journal (Concerning Orgreave)

  I Did What I Did

  Blackpool

  Notes on an Epidemic 1

  Too Shy

  First Shot: Just Say ‘Aye’

  Family Planning

  Way of the Dragon

  Held Out

  Dutch Elm

  Falling

  InterRail

  Misery Loves Bedfellows

  Funeral Pyre

  Notes on an Epidemic 2

  Love Cats

  Freedom

  Notes on an Epidemic 3

  It Never Rains …

  Same Again

  Cold

  Union Street

  Baltic Street

  Heavenly Dancer

  Supply Side Economics

  A Mature Student

  House Guests

  The Hoochie Connection

  Skaggirl

  Notes on an Epidemic 4

  The Light Hurt His Eyes

  Thawing

  Seventh Floor

  Bad Circulation

  Northern Soul Classics

  Dirty Dicks

  Hogmanay

  Notes on an Epidemic 5

  The Art of Conversation

  Skin and Bone

  The Chute

  Waters of Leith

  Ocean

  Sea Dogs

  1. Customs and Excise

  2. Reasonable Duties

  3. Car Deck

  Nash Stoorie Bomb

  The High Seas

  Desertion

  Junk Dilemmas No. 1

  Towers of London

  Wound Botulism

  Drought

  Junk Dilemmas No. 2

  Notes on an Epidemic 6

  A Safe Port

  Junk Dilemmas No. 3

  St Monans (Peer Education)

  The Cusp

  The Rehab Diaries

  Avanti

  Chasing Brown

  In Business

  Junk Dilemmas No. 4

  Soft Cell

  Notes on an Epidemic 7

  Trainspotting at Gorgie Central

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Mark Renton has it all: he’s good-looking, young, with a pretty girlfriend and a place at university. But there’s no room for him in the 1980s. Thatcher’s government is destroying working-class communities across Britain, and the post-war certainties of full employment, educational opportunity and a welfare state are gone. When his family starts to fracture, Mark’s life swings out of control and he succumbs to the defeatism which has taken hold in Edinburgh’s grimmer areas. The way out is heroin.

  It’s no better for his friends. Spud Murphy is paid off from his job, Tommy Lawrence feels himself being sucked into a life of petty crime and violence - the worlds of the thieving Matty Connell and psychotic Franco Begbie. Only Sick Boy, the supreme manipulator of the opposite sex, seems to ride the current, scamming and hustling his way through it all.

  Skagboys charts their journey from likely lads to young men addicted to the heroin which has flooded their disintegrating community. This is the 1980s: a time of drugs, poverty, AIDS, violence, political strife and hatred - but a lot of laughs, and maybe just a little love; a decade which changed Britain for ever. The prequel to the world-renowned Trainspotting, this is an exhilarating and moving book, full of the scabrous humour, salty vernacular and appalling behaviour that has made Irvine Welsh a household name.

  About the Author

  Irvine Welsh is the author of seven previous novels and four books of shorter fiction. He currently lives in Chicago.

  www.irvinewelsh.net

  ALSO BY IRVINE WELSH

  FICTION

  Trainspotting

  The Acid House

  Marabou Stork Nightmares

  Ecstasy

  Filth

  Glue

  Porno

  The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

  If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work …

  Crime

  Reheated Cabbage

  DRAMA

  You’ll Have Had Your Hole

  Babylon Heights (with Dean Cavanagh)

  SCREENPLAY

  The Acid House

  In memory of Alan Gordon, ‘the leader of the team’,

  and Stuart Russell and Paul Reekie,

  the real leaders of the opposition in England and Scotland

  ‘There is no such thing as society.’

  Margaret Thatcher

  ‘That Calvinistic sense of innate depravity and original sin from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always wholly free.’

  Herman Melville

  Tempted

  Prologue: Notes from Rehab Journal

  Journal Entry: Concerning Orgreave

  Even the plank-stiffness of this old, unyielding settee can’t arrest my body’s slink into deliverance. It reminds me of the university residences in Aberdeen; lying in the dark, basking in exalted freedom from the fear that coalesced in my chest, like the thick phlegm did in his. Because whatever I hear outside, cars scrunching down the narrow, council-house streets, sometimes sweeping their headlights across this fusty old room, drunks challenging or serenading the world, or the rending shrieks of cats taking their torturous pleasures, I know I won’t hear that noise.

  No coughing.

  No screaming.

  No thumping sound: doof doof doof …

  None of those urgent, raised whispers which, by their panic levels, enable you to calibrate just how sleepless your night will be.

  Just the dozy, relatively silent darkness, and this settee.

  Nae. Fuckin. Coughing.

  Because it always starts with a cough. Just one. Then, as you will him to settle down, your quickening pulse tells you that you’ve subconsciously been waiting for that bark. Then the second one – the worse moment – when your anger shifts from the source of the cough onto those who would assist him.

  Just fuckin leave it, ya cunts.

  But, of course, you hear the disturbance from behind the paper-thin walls; a weary sigh, the sharp click of the light switch, the skittish footsteps. Then the voices, cooing and pleading, before the grim procedure starts: the postural drainage.

  Doof … doof … doof …

  … doof … doof … doof …

  The dread rhythm of my father’s big hands pounding on his thin, crooked back, insistent, even violent. Such a different sound and beat to my ma’s timorous taps. Their hushed and exasperated encouragement.

  I wish they would leave him in the hospital. Just keep him the fuck away. I’m not going back to that house until he’s gone forever. It’s so wonderful that from this haven you can forget all that and just let your mind and body dissolve into sleep.

  ‘C’mon, son! Up! Move it!’

  Awakening sore and stiff, to the gravelly voice of my father. He’s standing over me, his thick brow furrowed, naked from the waist up, his chest a forest of blond-grey fur, as he brandishes a white toothbrush. It takes me three full seconds, each measured in an eye blink, to remember that I’m on my gran’s couch in Cardonald. I only got to sleep a few hours ago and it would still be pitch black except for the small table lamp he’s clicked on, oozing a fatigued aquamarine glow across the room. But he’s right, we have to go: to make the bus at St Enoch’s Square.

  I know that once I get moving I’ll be fine, even though I’m a little untidy FUCKIN DAEIN IT AGAIN!!

&nb
sp; Ah ken that once ah git movin ah’ll be fine, even though ah’m a bit scruff order and ask tae borrow Gran’s iron; just tae get the worse creases oot ay the navy Fred Perry before ah pill it ower ma thin, white, goosebumped body. Dad’s huvin nane ay it but. ‘Forget it,’ he says, waving his toothbrush, marching tae the bathroom across the hall, clicking oan the overhead light as he goes. ‘It’s no a fashion show! C’moan!’

  Ah dinnae need that much encouragement; the adrenalin’s leaking intae me, buzzing us up. There’s no way ah’m missing this yin. Granny Renton’s up tae see us off; small, white-heided in her quilted dressing gown, but robust and ever-alert, peerin at us ower her glesses, duffel bag in her hand. She gapes at us for a second, makes some kind ay gesture, then she’s off fussing eftir ma dad in the hallway. Ah can hear her soft sing-song voice. ‘Whit time’s the bus go … where does it leave fae … whit time will ye get there …?’

  ‘Go back … tae yir … bed … Mother,’ ma dad garbles in between moothfaes ay toothbrush and spit, as ah take the opportunity tae quickly pull oan ma clathes; shirt, jeans, socks, trainers n jaykit. I’m looking at the framed pictures of my Granda Renton on the mantelpiece. Gran’s taken oot the four medals he got in the war, including the VC, which I think was fae Normandy. He wouldnae have liked them being on display like that; he kept them in an old baccy tin and always had tae be cajoled intae showin us them. Fair play tae him, he told us from the off, me n ma brother Billy, that it was aw bullshit. That some brave men got nae medals for their heroics, while wankers could get decorated for nowt. Ah recall, one time when we were aw oan holiday in the guest hoose doon in Blackpool, ah was pressing him, ‘But you were brave, eh, Granda, charging up that beach, ye must have been brave.’

  ‘I was scared, son,’ he’d telt me, his face sombre. ‘But most of all ah wis angry; angry at being there. Really angry. I wanted tae take it out on somebody, then go hame.’

  ‘But that man hud tae be stoaped though, Faither,’ my dad had implored, ‘ye said so yirsel!’

  ‘Ah know that. Ah wis angry that he wis allowed tae git started in the first place.’

  The two pictures ay Granda R offer subtle contrast. In one he’s a cocky young gadge in a uniform that lends him gravitas, aboot tae swagger off oan an adventure wi his mates. The second, more recently taken, shows him wi a deep smile, but different tae the other presumptuous grin. It’s no exactly false, but it looks set and hard-won.

  Ma gran returns, catching me at the pictures. Perhaps she sees something in us, in profile; a hint ay the past, because she sidles up tae me, puts her airm roond ma waist and whispers, ‘Gie the bastirts hell, son.’ Gran smells fragrant but old, like she has a soap naebody uses any mair. As my dad comes through and we prepare tae leave, she adds, ‘But watch yirsel and look eftir ma laddie,’ meaning him. It’s weird that she still thinks ay him that wey, wi him being ancient, no far offay fifty!

  ‘C’mon, pal, the cab’s here,’ he says, maybe a bit abashed at her fussing, as he looks through the curtains ootside tae the street, before turning and kissing my gran on her foreheid. Then she grabs my hand. ‘You’re the best ay them, son, the best ay them aw,’ she whispers in urgent confidence. She’s said this every time ah’ve seen her since ah wis a bairn. Used tae make us feel great, till ah found oot she said it tae aw her grandchildren, and her neighbour’s kids! Ah’m sure she means it at the time, but.

  The best ay them aw.

  She releases the grip and hands Dad the duffel bag. ‘Dinnae you be losin the Thermos flask in that bag, David Renton,’ she ticks.

  ‘Aye, Maw, ah telt ye ah’d keep an eye oan it,’ he says sheepishly, like he’s become a surly teenager again. He starts tae go, but she stops him. ‘You’re forgettin something,’ she says, and goes tae the sideboard and produces three small glesses, which she proceeds tae fill up wi whisky. Ma dad rolls his eyes. ‘Maw …’

  She isnae hearin him. She raises a gless, forcing us tae follow, although ah hate whisky n it’s the last thing ah want this early in the morning. ‘Here’s tae us, wha’s like us – damn few n thir aw deid!’ Gran croaks.

  Dad knocks his back in a oner. Gran’s has already gone, by some kind ay osmosis, as ah didnae even see her pit the gless tae her lips. It takes me two retching gulps to get it doon. ‘C’mon, son, yir a Renton,’ she chides.

  Then Dad nods tae me and we’re off. ‘She’s an awfay wumin,’ he says with affection, as we climb intae the big black taxi, ma stomach burning. Ah wave back at her small figure, standing in the doorway in the murky street, willing the daft auld bat tae git back inside, intae the warm.

  Glasgow. That was how we learned tae spell it at primary school: Granny Likes A Small Glass Of Whisky.

  It’s still pitch dark and Weedgieville is spooky at four o’clock on a Monday morning, as the cab creaks and rumbles intae toon. It’s minging in here; some dirty fucker’s puked fae last night and ye can still smell it. ‘Jesus Christ.’ The old boy waves his hand in front ay his neb. Ma dad’s a big, broad-shoodird sort ay gadge, whereas ah take mair eftir my mother in build: sticklike and rangy. His hair can genuinely be called blond (even though it’s now greying), as opposed tae mine which, however ah try n dress it up, is basically ginger. He’s wearin a broon cord jaykit, which ah have tae say is quite smart, though ruined by the Glasgow Rangers FC lapel badge, pinned next tae his Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers yin, and he fairly reeks ay Blue Stratos.

  The bus is waitin fir us in the empty square behind Argyle Street. Some pickets are being harassed by a change-scrounging jakey whae keeps staggerin oaf intae the night then returning, always reprising the same routine. Ah climb oan the bus tae get the fuck away fae the pest. This cunt disgusts me; he’s nae pride, nae politics. His deranged eyes roll and those rubber lips purse in that purple face. He’s been beaten tae a pulp by the system, and aw the parasite can dae is try tae scrounge offay people whae’ve goat the bottle tae fight back. ‘Wanker,’ ah hear masel snap.

  ‘Dinnae be sae quick tae judge, son.’ Dad’s accent is mair Glaswegian; stepping off the Edinburgh train at Queen Street does that. ‘Ye dunno that boey’s story.’

  Ah say nowt, but ah dinnae want tae ken that minger’s tale. Oan the bus, ah sit beside Dad and a couple ay his auld mates fae the Govan yards. It’s good, cause ah feel closer tae him than ah’ve done in a while. It seems ages since we’ve done something thegither, just the two ay us. He’s pretty quiet n thoughtful though, probably worried cause ay ma wee brother, oor Davie, being taken back intae the hoaspital.

  There’s plenty bevvy oan the bus but naebody’s allowed tae touch it till we head back, then we’ll celebrate stoapin they fuckin scab lorries! Stacks ay nosh but; Granny Renton has made loads and loads ay sannies on white, spongy Sunblest bread: cheese and tomatay and ham and tomatay, like it’s a funeral we’re gaun tae!

  Mind you, oan the bus it’s mair like a fitba match than either boneyerd procession or picket; it has a big Cup Final vibe tae it, wi aw they banners hingin in the windaes. Half ay the people on oor coach are striking miners, fae pits in Ayrshire, Lanarkshire, the Lothians and Fife; the other half trade unionists like the auld man, and assorted fellow travellers, like me. Ah was delighted when Dad telt us he’d got us a seat; the politicos at the uni would be as jealous as fuck that ah wis oan one ay the official National Union ay Mineworkers’ buses!

  The bus isnae that far out ay Glesgey before the night fades away intae a beautiful summer sky ay early-morning greeny-blue. Even though it’s early, a few cars are on the road, some ay them blaring their horns at us in support ay the strike.

  At least ah’m getting some conversation out ay Andy, whae’s ma dad’s best mate. He’s a wiry, salt-ay-the-earth Weedgie boy, an ex-welder and lifelong CP member. His bony face has this almost translucent, nicotine-yellay skin stretched ower it. ‘So, that’ll be you back at the uni in September, eh, Mark?’

  ‘Aye, but a few ay us are gaun oaf oan the InterRail acroas Europe next month, eh. Been back graftin at ma
auld job as a chippy, tryin tae get some shekels thegither.’

  ‘Aye, it’s a great life when yir young. Make the maist ay it, that’s ma advice. Ye got a girlfriend at that university?’

  Before ah can answer, Dad’s ears prick up. ‘Better no have, or that wee Hazel’ll be daein her nut. Lovely wee lassie,’ he says tae Andy, then turns tae me n goes, ‘Whit is it she does again, Mark?’

  ‘Windae displays. At Binns at the West End, the department store, likes,’ ah tells Andy.

  A big contented crocodile smile spreads across my dad’s pus. If the cunt knew what Hazel and me’s relationship wis like, he widnae be sae keen tae bang oan aboot her aw the time. A terrible But that’s another story. The auld boy’s just chuffed tae see us wi a bird, worrying fir years ah was a possible buftie boy due tae ma musical tastes. Ah hud an aggressively glam-rock puberty, and was a teenage punk. Then there wis the time that oor Billy caught me wank

  Another story.

  We’re makin good time, n it’s still aw cool when we git ower the border tae England, but as we get near Yorkshire and oantae the smaller roads, things git a wee bit weird. Thaire’s polis everywhere. But instead ay stoapin the bus every few yards for nae reason at aw, as we expect, they just wave us oan. They even gie us helpful directions as how tae git tae the village. ‘What the fuck’s aw this aboot?’ one boy shouts. ‘Whaire’s aw the usual roadblocks n harassment?’

  ‘Community policing,’ another gadge laughs.

  Ma dad looks oot at a row ay smiling coppers, one ay whom waves at us wi an ear-tae-ear grin. ‘Ah dinnae like this. This isnae right.’

  ‘As long as they dinnae stop us gettin they scabs sent back,’ ah goes.

  ‘You’ll keep the heid,’ he warns us in a low growl, then frowns. ‘Whae’s this mate that yir meetin up wi then?’

  ‘Just one ay the boys fi London ah used tae stey in the squat at Shepherd’s Bush wi. Nicksy. He’s awright.’

  ‘Another wan ay they dippit punk rockers, ah’ll bet!’

  ‘Ah dinnae ken what music he’s listenin tae now,’ ah tell him, a bit irritated. He can be a daft auld fucker sometimes.

  ‘Punk rock,’ he laughs tae his mates, ‘another fad he got bored wi. What’s the latest yin, this aw-night soul stuff? Gaun doon tae Bolton Casino n drinkin Cokes!’