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.

The Tales Of A Tapeworm

The hospital discharge procedures. The discharge in my pants. In my flannels. I wait for the taxi for Robertson in the A&E.

– Is there nobody who can take you home? a concerned nurse asks.

– No . . . I say.

She looks at me with a sick pity and then leaves to attend to her duties. She’s replaced by a jakey who sits sucking on a purple tin. He hands it to me. I take a swig, expecting to wince as the sickening, syrupy liquid hits my gullet, but I feel nothing.

– I’ve been comin here for ages, he tells me. – Got off the skag, but I was straight on this stuff.

Tennents never advertise the purple tin. It’s not a recreational drug; they know it’s as strong a drug as heroin or crack. They know that you don’t need to market hard drugs like those. The desperate will always find them. Scotland’s greatest export next to whisky. The white man cometh. He take your land. He give the whisky. Just when you think it safe to go back in water he give you old purple tin. The white Caledonian Ku Klux Klan are coming.

– Taxi for Robertson.

I’m going home.

The nurse is back. She has a nice smell. Not like the hospital. Not like the jakey. Not like me. – I wish there was someone you could stay with, she says, touching my wrist.

I’m never really alone, but the voices are silent. For now.

I smile and follow the cabbie. I wish there was someone I

The purple tin will destroy America once they import it over there . . . those Russian jakeys begging in the streets under capitalism, we’ll do those cunts as well.

Obliterate surplus labour!

Obliterate them with the old purple tin!

Don’t give em Ecstasy! We don’t want them dancing! Keep them dulled, staggering and incoherent as they die! Make it glamorous. Put it on celluloid, put it on hoardings. Just keep the real thing as far away from us as possible.

And the white race of Caledonia will stalk the Earth as juggernaut superbeings . . . like from that album by that shite heavy-metal band . . . who the fuck was it . . .

Carole, you standing there and me bending your fingers back, loaded up with cocaine and alcohol and you looking at me with your large eyes in a weird state way beyond fear and me trying to think of why I should stop and trying to feel something that will make me stop before that crack

that crack

and your scream changing now; more broken and desperate than ever before, me making you feel but me still feeling

nothing.

How did it make you feel?

But it wasn’t me that did it. We all have to take our share of the blame.

We can cope with this nothingness. We know it too well to be disabled by it. But it’s so cold. The central heating seems to have broken down. The pilot light has blown out. Carole knew how to fix it. We, I, we consider getting a fire together, but it all seems too much: the fetching of coals, the finding of firelighters (is there a new pack?), the kindling, the lighting.

No.

We have knocked on Tom Stronach’s door a couple of times, but there is no reply. We once heard the television, so we know that Julie is in. The New Year’s Day game. Stronach will be playing in that. But no, the papers said that he was dropped. I would think that he would attend though. Surely. We venture out to Safeway’s for food.

We cannot move our head as we walk.

We hear our breathing in the cold air: rhythmic, deep. It puts us into a kind of a trance. We are still alive. We are in the supermarket. Breathing.

The tins and packets on the shelves are just colours and shapes to us. We cannot recognise the products, cannot read the labels. If we take one of each then the chances are that we will have enough of the right things.

This one.

That one.

This one.

– Detective Ser . . . Mister Robertson . . . I hear a voice at my side.

I turn round to see her, a woman. She looks . . .

. . . she has a large smile on her face. Her hair is nice and her teeth are so white. She wears jeans and a beige polo-neck sweater under a brown lined leather jacket. There’s a sadness in her eyes.

Who is she? I’m befuddled and besotted by lack of sleep and all those voices in my head, clamouring for attention . . . for recognition . . .

All I can say is, – How have you been doing?

– Not bad . . . not good, her face screws up and she laughs bitterly. I really want to see her smile again. She looks so beautiful when she smiles. – I’m really missing him. Why is it only the good die young? she asks me, and she asks it in a real way, as a real question, looking at me as if she thinks that I might know the answer.

– Eh . . . I . . . eh . . .

Now she’s seeing me for the first time. She sees my surgical support collar from where I hurt my neck in the fall. She sees the six-pack of the old purple tin in my shopping basket. I hadn’t realised it was there. It was like they just jumped in of their own accord. She’s seeing me now. She’s seeing a jakey with a four-day growth, a manky overcoat, stained flannels and old trainers.

– Are you alright? she asks.

– Eh? Oh, this, I laugh, looking down at myself. – Undercover, I whisper conspiratorially.

– Isn’t it a bit extreme for shoplifting?

– Ha! This isnae shoplifting. This is huge-scale corporate fraud I’m investigating. I nod over to the staff offices at the back of the supermarket.

– I see, she says vaguely, as her son comes over to her side. – You remember Mister Robertson. The policeman. He tried to help your dad.

– Hiya, the wee guy smiles, but as he clocks me he takes a step back. I smell my flannels. Wafting up the inside of my coat under my nose.

– It’s okay Euan. Mister Robertson’s doing detective work. He’s dressed up as a tramp. It must be exciting being undercover, eh Euan?