Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Irvine Welsh

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Epigraph

  Lorraine Goes To Livingston: A Rave and Regency Romance

  Dedication

  1. Rebecca’s Chocolates

  2. Yasmin Goes To Yeovil

  3. Freddy’s Bodies

  4. Admission

  5. Untitled – Work In Progress (Miss May Regency Romance No. 14.)

  6. Lorraine And Yvonne’s Discovery

  7. Perk’s Dilemma

  8. Freddie’s Indiscretion

  9. In The Jungle

  10. Rebecca’s Recovery

  11. Untitled – Work In Progress

  12. Rebecca’s Relapse

  13. Perks Sees The Script

  14. Untitled – Work In Progress

  15. Perks Is Upset

  16. A Bugger In The Scrum

  17. Lorraine And Love

  18. Untitled – Work In Progress

  19. The Pathologist’s Report

  20. Untitled – Work In Progress

  21. Lord Of The Rings

  22. Untitled – Work In Progress

  23. Perk’s End

  24. Pathologically Yours

  25. Lorraine Goes To Livingston

  Fortune’s Always Hiding: A Corporate Drug Romance

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Aggravation

  London, 1961

  Suburbia

  Wolverhampton, 1963

  A Slag’s Habit

  Toronto, 1967

  Decent Skirt

  London, 1979

  Mouthy Slags

  New York City, 1982

  Injustice

  Pembrokeshire, 1982

  Sacred Cows

  Orgreave, 1984

  London, 1990

  Fitted Up

  Sheffield Steel

  London, 1991

  You Want Some?

  The Yard

  The Undefeated: An Acid House Romance

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One: The Overwhelming Love Of Ecstasy

  1. Heather

  2. Lloyd

  3. Heather

  4. Lloyd

  5. Heather

  6. Lloyd

  7. Heather

  8. Lloyd

  9. Heather

  10. Lloyd

  11. Heather

  12. Lloyd

  Part Two: The Overwhelming Ecstasy Of Love

  13. Heather

  14. Lloyd

  15. Heather

  16. Lloyd

  17. Heather

  18. Lloyd

  19. Heather

  20. Lloyd

  21. Heather

  22. Lloyd

  23. Heather

  24. Lloyd

  25. Heather

  26. Lloyd

  27. Heather

  28. Lloyd

  29. Heather

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Rebecca Navarro, best-selling authoress of Regency romances, suffers a paralysing stroke. Assisted by her nurse, Rebecca plans her revenge on her unfaithful husband. But will Freddy Royle, hospital trustee, celebrity and necrophiliac, thwart those plans? Dave Thornton, soccer thug, has lost his heart to flawed beauty Samantha Worthington. Together they go in search of the man who marketed the drug that crippled her – in order to cripple him. Lloyd from Leith has a transfiguring passion for the unhappily married Heather. Together they explore the true nature of house music and chemical romance. Will their ardour fizzle and die in the grim backstreets of Edinburgh, or will it ignite and blaze like a thousand suns?

  About the Author

  Irvine Welsh is the author of eight novels and four books of shorter fiction. His most recent novel Skagboys is the prequel to the bestselling Trainspotting. He currently lives in Chicago. www.irvinewelsh.net

  Also by Irvine Welsh

  Fiction

  Trainspotting

  The Acid House

  Marabou Stork Nightmares

  Filth

  Glue

  Porno

  The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

  If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work …

  Crime

  Reheated Cabbage

  Skagboys

  Drama

  You’ll Have Had Your Hole

  Babylon Heights (with Dean Cavanagh)

  Screenplay

  The Acid House

  To Sandy MacNair

  Ecstatic love and more to Anne, my friends and family, and all the good people – you know who you are.

  Thanks to Robin at the publishers for his diligence and support.

  Thanks to Paolo for the Marv rarities, especially Piece of Clay; Toni for the eurotechno; Janet and Tracy for the happy house; and Dino and Frank for the gabber. Nice one to Antoinette for the stereo and Bernard for the gaff.

  Love to all the posses in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Amsterdam, London, Manchester, Newcastle, New York, San Francisco and Munich.

  Glory to the Hibees.

  Take care.

  They say that death kills you, but death doesn’t kill you. Boredom and indifference kill you.

  I Need More, Iggy Pop

  Lorraine Goes To Livingston

  A Rave and Regency Romance

  For Debbie Donovan and Gary Dunn

  1 Rebecca’s Chocolates

  Rebecca Navarro sat in her spacious conservatory and looked out across the bright, fresh garden. Perky was down at the bottom end by the old stone wall, pruning the rose-bushes. She could just about make out the suggestion of that familiar pre-occupied frown on his brow, her view distorted by the sun shining strongly into her face through the glass. She felt floaty, drowsy and dislocated in the heat. Succumbing to it, she allowed the heavy typescript to slip through her hands and fall onto the glass coffee table with a fat thump. The first page bore the heading:

  UNTITLED – WORK IN PROGRESS

  (Miss May Regency Romance No. 14.)

  A dark cloud hovered ominously in front of the sun, breaking its spell on Rebecca. She took the opportunity to steal a brief glance at her reflection in the now-darkened glass of the partition door. This triggered a brief spasm of self-loathing before she altered her position from profile to face-on and sucked in her cheeks. The new image obliterated the one of sagging-flesh-hanging-from-the-jawline to the extent that Rebecca felt justified in giving herself a little reward.

  Perky was engrossed in his gardening, or pretending to be. The Navarros employed a man to do the gardening and he undertook his duties thoroughly and professionally, but Perky would always find a pretext to go out and do some pottering. He claimed it helped him to think. Rebecca could never, for the life of her, imagine what her husband had to think about.

  Despite Perky’s preoccupation however, Rebecca was still swift and furtive as her hand reached across to the box. She pulled up the top layer and quickly removed two rum truffles from the bottom section. She crammed them into her mouth, the sickly sensation almost making her faint, and started to chew violently. The trick was to consume as quickly as possible; in doing it this way there was a sense that the body could be cheated, conned into processing the calories as a block lot, letting them go through as two little items.

  This self-delusion could not be sustained as the vile, sweet sickness hit her stomach. She could feel her body slowly and agonisingly breaking down those ugly poisons, conducting a meticulous inventory of calories and toxins present befor
e distributing them to the parts of the body where they would do the most damage.

  So at first Rebecca thought that she was experiencing one of her familiar anxiety attacks when it hit her: that slow, burning pain. It took a couple of seconds before the possibility, then the actuality, dawned on her, that it was more than that. She couldn’t breathe as her ears began to ring and the world around her started to spin. Rebecca fell heavily from her chair to the floor of the conservatory, gripping her throat, her face twisting to one side, chocolate and saliva spilling from her mouth.

  A few yards away, Perky chopped at the rose-bushes. Buggers want spraying, he thought, as he stood back to assess his work. Out of the corner of his eye he saw something twitching on the conservatory floor …

  2 Yasmin Goes To Yeovil

  Yvonne Croft picked up the copy of the book Yasmin Goes To Yeovil by Rebecca Navarro. She had scoffed at her mother’s addiction to this series of pulp romantic fiction known as the Miss May Regency Romances, but she just couldn’t leave this book alone. There seemed, times, she considered, when its hold on her reached fearsome levels. Yvonne sat up in the lotus position in her large wicker basket chair, one of the few items of furniture alongside the single bed, the wooden wardrobe, the chest of drawers and the miniature sink in her small rectangular room in the nurses’ home of St Hubbin’s Hospital in London.

  She was greedily devouring the last two pages of the book, the climax to this particular romance. Yvonne Croft knew what would happen. She knew that the wily match-maker Miss May (who turned up in every Rebecca Navarro novel in various incarnations) would expose Sir Rodney de Mourney as an unspeakable cad and that the sensuous, tempestuous and untameable Yasmin Delacourt would be united with her true love, the dashing Tom Resnick, just as in Rebecca Navarro’s previous work Lucy Goes To Liverpool, where the lovely heroine was saved from kidnap, the smuggler ship and a life of white slavery at the hands of the evil Milburn D’Arcy, by dashing East India Company official Quentin Hammond.

  Yvonne nonetheless read with enthusiasm, and was transported into a world of romance, a world free from the reality of eight-hour backshifts on geriatric wards, looking after decaying, incontinent people who had degenerated into sagging, wheezing, brittle, twisted parodies of themselves as they prepared to die.

  Page 224

  Tom Resnick rode like the wind. He knew that his steadfast mare was in great pain and that he risked Midnight’s lameness by pushing the loyal and noble beast with such savage determination. And for what? His heart heavy, Tom knew that he would never reach Brondy Hall before Yasmin was joined in marriage to the despicable Sir Rodney de Mourney, that trickster who, unbeknown to his beautiful angel, was preparing to swindle her out of her fortune and reduce that lovely creature to the role of imprisoned concubine.

  At the ball, Sir Rodney was relaxed and cheerful. Yasmin had never looked so beautiful. Her virtue would be his tonight, and how Sir Rodney would savour the final surrender of this headstrong filly. Lord Beaumont stood by his friend’s side. – Your bride-to-be is indeed a treasure. To be frank with you, Rodney, my dear friend, I thought that you would never win her heart, convinced as I was that she had seen us both as frippery fellows indeed.

  – Never underestimate a huntsman, my friend, Sir Rodney smiled. – I am far too experienced a sportsman to pursue my quarry too closely. I simply held back and waited for the ideal opportunity to arise before administering the coup de grâce.

  – Despatching the troublesome Resnick overseas, I’ll wager.

  Sir Rodney raised an eyebrow and lowered his voice. – Please be a little more discreet, my friend, he looked around shiftily and, convinced that nobody had heard them over the noise of the band that played the waltz, continued – yes, I arranged for Resnick’s unexpected commission with the Sussex Rangers and his posting to Belgium. Hopefully Boney’s marksmen have delivered the knave to hell even as we speak!

  – A good thing too, Beaumont smiled, – for the lady Yasmin had sadly not conducted herself in the manner appropriate to a delicately nurtured female. She seemed to know little discomfiture on that occasion when you and I visited her; finding her embroiled in the concerns of someone no more than an urchin – certainly far beneath the notice of any aspirant to social heights!

  – Yes, Beaumont, the wanton streak, though, has appeal in a filly, though that streak must be broken if the woman is to become a dutiful wife. It is this streak that I shall break tonight!

  Sir Rodney was unaware that a tall spinster was standing behind the velvet curtain. Miss May had heard everything. She moved off, into the body of the party, leaving him with his thoughts of Yasmin. Tonight would be

  Yvonne was distracted by a knock on the door. It was her friend Lorraine Gillespie. – Ye on a late, Yvonne? Lorraine smiled at her. It was an unusual smile, Yvonne thought, one which always seemed to be directed at something beyond its recipient. Sometimes when she looked at you like that, it was as if it wasn’t even Lorraine at all.

  – Yeah, worst bleedin luck. That fucking Sister Bruce; proper old bag she is.

  – Ye want tae see that Sister Patel … her fuckin patter, Lorraine winced. – You will go-ooh and change the bedclothes, and when you have done this, you will go-ooh and do the drug round, and when you have done this you will go-oh-oh and do the temperatures and then when you have done this go-oh-oh …

  – Yeah … Sister Patel. She’s damaged goods, that one.

  – Yvonne, is it cool for me tae make a brew, aye?

  – Yeah, sorry … you stick on the kettle, will ya, Lorraine? – I’m sorry to be such an anti-social cow, I just gotta finish this book.

  Lorraine went over to the sink behind Yvonne and filled the kettle and put it on. On her way past her friend she bent over her chair and filled her nostrils with the fragrance of Yvonne’s perfume and shampoo. She caught herself rubbing some of Yvonne’s shining blonde hair between her thumb and forefinger. – God, Yvonne, your hair’s gone really lovely. What shampoo is that you’ve been using?

  – It’s just that Schwartzkopf stuff, she said, – you like it?

  – Yeah, said Lorraine, feeling a funny dryness in her throat, – I do.

  She went back over to the sink and unplugged the kettle.

  – So you going clubbing tonight? Yvonne asked.

  – Aw aye, I’m always up for clubbing, Lorraine smiled.

  3 Freddy’s Bodies

  There was nothing like the sight of a stiff to give Freddy Royle a stiffie.

  – Bit bashed about this one, Glen, the path lab technician explained, as he wheeled the body into the hospital mortuary.

  Freddy was finding it hard to maintain steady breathing. He examined the corpse. – She’s bain a roight pretty un n arl, he rasped in his Somerset drawl, – caar accident oi presumes?

  – Yeah, poor cow. M25. Lost too much blood by the time they cut her out of the pile-up, Glen mumbled uncomfortably. He was feeling a bit sick. Usually a stiff was just a stiff to him, and he had seen them in all conditions. Sometimes though, when it was someone young, or someone whose beauty could still be evidenced from the three-dimensional photograph of flesh they had left behind, the sense of the waste and futility of it all just fazed him. This was such an occasion.

  One of the dead girl’s legs was lacerated to the bone. Freddy ran his hand up the perfect one. It felt smooth. – Still a bit wahrm n arl, he observed, – bit too waarm for moi tastes if the truth be told.

  – Eh, Freddy, Glen began.

  – Oh zorry, me ol moite, Freddy smiled, reaching into his wallet and peeling off some notes which he handed over to Glen.

  – Cheers, Glen said, pocketing the money and hastily exiting. Glen fingered the notes in his pocket as he walked briskly down the hospital corridor and took the lift to the canteen. This part of the ritual, the exchange of cash, left him elated and debased at the same time. He could never tell which emotion was the strongest. Why though, he reasoned, should he deny himself a cut if the rest of them were in on it? Tho
se arseholes who had more than he ever would: the hospital trustees.

  Yes, the trustees knew all about Freddy Royle, Glen reflected bitterly. They knew the real secrets of the chat-show host, the presenter of the lonely hearts television show, From Fred With Love, the author of several books, including Howzat! – Freddy Royle On Cricket, Freddy Royle’s Somerset, Somerset With a Z: The Wit Of The West Country, West Country Walks With Freddy Royle and Freddy Royle’s 101 Magic Party Tricks. Yes, those trustee bastards knew what this distinguished friend, this favourite caring, laconic uncle to the nation did with the stiffs they got in here. The thing was, Freddy brought millions of pounds into the place with his fund-raising activities. This brought kudos to the trustees, and made St Hubbin’s Hospital a flagship for the arm’s-length trusts from the NHS. All they had to do was keep shtumm and indulge Sir Freddy with the odd body.

  Glen thought about Sir Freddy, thrusting his way to a loveless paradise with a piece of dead meat. In the canteen, he joined the line and examined the food on display. Glen decided against a bacon roll and had processed cheese instead. He thought of Freddy and the old necrophiliac joke: someday some rotten cunt will split on him. It wouldn’t be Glen though: Freddy paid too well for that. Thinking of the cash and what it could buy, Glen’s thoughts turned to AWOL at the SW1 Club tonight. She would be there – she often was on a Saturday – or at Garage City in Shaftesbury Avenue. Ray Harrow, one of the theatre technicians, had told him. Ray was into jungle; he had the same modus operandi as Lorraine. Ray was okay, he had lent Glen tapes. Glen couldn’t get into jungle, but he’d try for Lorraine. Lorraine Gillespie. Beautiful Lorraine. Student Nurse Lorraine Gillespie. He knew she worked hard: conscientious, dedicated on the ward. He knew she raved hard: AWOL, The Gallery, Garage City. What he wanted to know was how she loved.

  When he came to the end of the line with his tray and paid the cashier, he saw the blonde nurse sitting at one of the tables. He didn’t know her name, all he knew of her was that she was Lorraine’s friend. By the look of things she was just starting her shift. Glen thought about sitting beside her, talking to her, perhaps even finding out about Lorraine through her. He moved over towards her, and then obeying a sudden nervous impulse, half-slipped and half-collapsed into a seat a couple of tables away. As he ate his roll he cursed his weakness. Lorraine. If he couldn’t work up the bottle to talk to her friend, how was he ever going to work up the bottle to talk to her?