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  The big, bad shock ah wis oan aboot came yesterday when ah wis lookin aroond the gaff for her purse n some dosh, n ah found a diary by mistake. Well, ah jist couldnae help masel, man, hud tae huv a wee nose. Ah mean, ah ken it wis wrong n that, dead wrong, but cause wi hudnae been speakin ah jist hud tae git intae her state ay mind. Big mistake but, man, ignorance wis pure bliss. What sort ay goat ays wis what she wrote: it wis like she was talkin tae wee Andy.

  I don’t know where he is, your daddy. He’s let us down again, pal, and I’m the one again who’s got to be strong. Your dad can mess up, but I can’t. Just because somebody has to be strong and I’m just a wee bit better at it than your weak, stupid daddy. I wish he was a real bastard, because that would make it easier. It makes it hard that he’s the nicest man you’ll ever meet, and don’t let anybody tell you different. But I can’t be his ma and your ma as well. I can’t cause I’m not strong enough. If I was strong enough I would, even though I know he’d be taking me for a mug. I’d still do it though, if I was strong enough. But I’m not and I have to put you first. Just because you’re that wee.

  It hit ays hard, man. Read it once, twice, and it must be said, found masel sheddin one or two tears, no just for me, but for the catgirl authoress. Aw that love goin tae the wrong place. Ah mind when ah wis younger ah wis just crazy, crazy, crazy aboot that lassie, but ah thought, this is a wee bit oot ay yir reach, man. A top-six SPL chick isnae gaunnae hook up wi an East of Scotland League journeyman. But the Junk Cup kin be a great leveller and there’s the luck ay the draw tae consider. Aye, one time we were walkin hame thegither eftir a session, totally fucked, when it jist sortay happened. Ah think aboot what eight years wi me has done tae her. Naw, ah’ve got tae let her go, and leave the gig, and gie her a good pey-oaf.

  It’s got tae be done, man.

  So it’s after the counsellin do, ah’m shamblin up the Walk, tryin tae get intae a stride pattern before the old cramps and sweats commence and ah start spazin oot. Ah’m trying tae cheer maself up by thinkin aboot blondes and books and ah’m contemplatin that intelligent blonde lassie, the one wi the deep voice that’s meant tae be the thinkin man’s chug. Ye’d be able tae talk Russian novels awright wi her, too right. Oan that very subject, thir’s a wee bookshop opened up and ah cross ower tae huv a quick look inside. Problem is thit the timin’s a wee bit oaf n this nippy motor nearly hits ays, horn blarin as it tears past me doon the street. Ah git a jolt ay fear like yir skeleton jumps oot ay yir body n does a wee jig before hoppin back in.

  Ah’m safe, safe, safe but. The shoap’s got that fusty auld smell thit auld bookshoaps’ve goat, bit thir’s new stuff here n aw. Thir’s an auld fat boy wi silver hair n glesses n eh’s pure keepin ehs mincers oan the boy Murphy here. Ah’m huvin a wee browse but, n ah spys yin oan Leith’s history. It’s aw auld stuff but, though mind you, ah suppose that’s what history’s meant tae be aboot! Ah look at its last section oan contemporary Leith, n it’s aw Royal Yacht Britannias n aw that stuff, nowt aboot the YLT even. Some cat should write the real history ay the famous auld port, talk tae the punters that were aroond; like the auld cats that worked the docks, yards n bonds, drank in the boozers, hung oot wi the Teds, the YLT, the CCS, right through tae the present, aw the wee gadges wi the sovies oan thir fingers, they hip-hop rappy kids like ma wee mate Curtis wi the stammer.

  Ah pits the books back, n ah heads back oot intae the street n continues up taewards fair Edina. Then, acroass the road, at the cashpoint oan the corner, ah see a boy who looks familiar, and it’s Cousin Dode, a Glesgey felly likes. Ah’m straight ower, this time watchin fir traffic.

  — Dode . . .

  — Awright there, Spud, eh sais, ehs eyes flickerin in a sort ay disapproval, then suddenly lightin up. — S’pose yir wahntin a bung?

  Jist like that, the Weedgie boy said it, man, n ah couldnae believe it! Withoot ays askin, jist like that! God bless those Glasgow Hun cats. Great boy, Dode. Sortay stocky wee boy wi greyish hair whae goes oan aboot how great Glesgey is, but well, obviously, the boy lives through here but, man. — Eh, ah dunno when ah’ll be able tae square ye up, catboy . . .

  — Hi! This is me yir talkin tae! Dode points tae ehsel, and we’re over the road intae the Old Salt.

  — Just been in n chenged ma pin number. They let ye dae that in ma bank, Dode explains, — personal like, so thit yi’ll remember it easier. Bet your bank disnae let you dae that, eh sais, aw superior.

  Ah’m sortay thinkin aboot this. — Eh, ah never really bother wi banks, man. Once when they sent ays oan this scheme, daein the slabbyin, likes, they made ays git an account. Ah goes, no, catboy, ah’m no a bank sortay gadge really, jist gie me cash, but they jist goes tae ays: sorry, man, pure modern gig, likes, ken?

  Dode nods n goes tae speak, but ah press on cause ye cannae let Weedgies start, man, cause as cool as those cats are, once they git intae this ‘awright, big man, how’s it gaun, by the way’ stuff, well, those cats could spraff for Scotland. If ye selected a talk team tae represent the country it’s an absolute cert at least eight or nine fae the eleven would be Weedgies. So ah goes oan: — Well, they let me get intae the bank for a bit. But they kicked ays oot whin the green gages stoaped. The East Fife’s goat an account, well, she’s really the Lemon Curd but ah call her the East cause it’s sortay likes ay common law, man, ken?

  — Yir some boey, Spud, Cousin Dode smiles, putting a hand oan ma shoodir. — Interdum stultus bene loquitur, eh, mate.

  Dode’s quite a bright cunt for a soapdodger, likes, kens loads ay Latin n that. — Too true, Cousin Dode . . . eh, what does it mean, but?

  — It means that ye, eh, talk a lot ay sense, Spud, eh sais.

  Well, that’s eywis nice tae hear, sortay welcome words soothin tae the auld ego n that, so that’s me well chuffed. Also, that twenty bar the good Cuz slipped intae ma mit is appreciated n aw, it maist certainly is.

  13

  Whores of Amsterdam Pt 1

  The DJ’s good; you can tell by the number of trainspotters jostling around the box to watch him, and how relaxed he is in the face of the almost pensive-looking audience who’re just waiting for something to happen, little knowing, most of them, that it already is.

  Sure enough, he slips in that tune and they explode, shocked at the ferocity of their reaction, suddenly realising that he’s been toying with them, tweaking them for a good half-hour. As the cheer goes up he gives a canny, sly smile which sparks across the dance floor.

  Across the floor of my club, here on the Herengracht, ‘the gentleman’s canal’ in old Amsterdam. I sip my vodka and Coke from my vantage point in the shadows at the back of the house, aware that I should be looking after this guy, extending the hand of friendship and hospitality like I do to all my guest DJs, even the ones who I think are arseholes. But Martin can look after this boy, I’m keeping out the road as he’s from my home town and known to me. I’ve nothing against people from my home town, I just don’t like running into them over here.

  I see Katrin, her back to me, wearing that short, dark-blue dress, tight to her thin body which tapers up to her neck, the shock of razor-cut blonde hair sprouting from her head: she’s standing with Miz and some shaggable porno teen he’s picked up. I can’t tell what kind of mood Katrin’s in, I hope she’s taken a pill. I put my arm around her waist but my spirits dip as I feel her tense at my contact. Nonetheless, I make the effort. — Good night, eh? I shout in her ear.

  She turns her head to me and says in a gloomy German voice: — I want to go home . . .

  Miz catches my eye and flashes me a look of understanding.

  I move away from them, over to the office, and see Martin in there with Sian and this Brummie lassie who’s started hanging around with them. They’re doing lines of coke, which are chopped up, spread across the pine desk. He holds up a rolled fifty-guilder note to me as I contemplate the urging, eager saucer eyes of the girls. — Nah, ah’m alright, I tell him.

  Martin, nodding at the lassies, throws a wrap on the desk,
and pulls me into the small ante-room where we keep the photocopier and the clandestine conversations. — You okay?

  — Aye . . . It’s just Katrin . . . you know how things are.

  Martin’s face crinkles under his greying brown hair, and his big teeth flash in wired alert. — You know my advice, mate . . .

  — Aye . . .

  — Sorry, Mark, but she’s a miserable cow and she’s making you the same way, he tells me yet again, then he points to the door of the office. — You should be having the time of your life. Drinks, chicks, drugs. I mean, look at Miz out there, he shakes his head. — He’s older than either of us. You only get one life, mate.

  Martin and I are partners in the club, the same in so many ways, but the difference is that I can never be as flighty as him. When I get together with somebody, I believe in sticking it out. Even when there’s nothing left to stick out. But he means well, and I let him bend my ear for a bit, before heading back to the floor.

  And I find myself looking for Katrin, straying down to the front of the house. For some reason I glance up, and the DJ, the Edinburgh guy, catches my eye for a brief second and we give each other a thin-lipped smile of acknowledgement, and something uneasy rises in my chest. Then I turn away and catch sight of Katrin by the bar.

  14

  Scam # 18,737

  All those people who have no place in the new Leith are here on my first day at the helm. A load of dirty auld mingers and these wee tartan techno and hip-hop cunts wi the sovies on every fuckin finger. One of the cheeky little bastards even calls me Sick Boy! Well, the only drugs that’ll be dealt here will carry the Simon Williamson seal of approval, you insolent wee fuckers. Especially as yesterday I had the good fortune to run into an auld associate called Seeker, and now my pockets are fairly bulging with pills and wraps of ching.

  And auld Morag will have to go; a fat wifie with retro National Health frames is too old-skool Leith for the type of regime the Williamson boy plans to institute. Too seventies, Mo. Style police: nee naw nee naw nee naw . . . She’s serving one of the wee cunts now, or trying too. — F-f-f-four p-p-p-pints ay l-l-l . . . the boy says tae the sniggers of his mates, his face twisting in impersonation of a stroke victim as Morag stands in open-mouthed embarrassment.

  Changes may have to be made. Alex McLeish?

  Well, I think that’s right, Simon. When I arrived here the club was in a shambles. Straight away I saw the potential, but we had to clear away some of the dead wood before we were ripe for investment.

  That’s the process, Alex.

  Morag specialises in the catering side of the enterprise. We do meals here, three-course fuckers for something like ninety-nine pence a head for the pensioners. It irks me at what this is not doing to the profit margins: if I’d wanted to serve socialised food I’d have gone into meals on wheels. Aye, those bar lunches are fucking scandalously cheap: I’m subbing those auld parasites to stay alive.

  One auld bear shuffles up tae me, somewhat menacing blue eyes set in yellow and red crystalline skin, so jaunty for such an ancient bastard. The cunt smells so badly of pish you’d think he’d been in a golden showers video. Maybe those auld fuckers are into the water sports at that centre they go to. — Fish or shepherd’s pie, fish or shepherd’s pie . . . he rasps, — did ye batter yir fish the day?

  — Naw, ah jist gie’d it a slap and telt it tae behave itself, I quip with a smile and a wink.

  My attempts at playing jocular mine host are obviously doomed to failure in this fucking sad arcade of rancid old losers. He looks at me, his auld wee Scots terrier face aw screwed up in belligerence. — Is that breadcrumbs or batter?

  — Batter, I inform the vexatious auld fuck in tired resignation.

  — Ah like it best done wi breadcrumbs, he goes, that mumpy face twisted into a circusy girn as he looks over intae the corner. — N Tam n Alec n Mabel n Ginty’ll tell ye same, right? Eh shouts across, soliciting some enthusiastic nods from similar human remains.

  — I humbly apologise, I say, biting my tongue, trying to retain a mood of superficial bonhomie.

  — The batter, is it crispy? Ah mean, it’s no that mushy wey, is it?

  I am making a supreme fucking effort here, the wide auld cunt. — As crisp as a new twenty-pound note, I tell him.

  — Huh, it’s been a long time since ah hud a new twenty-pound note, the old ratbag moans. — The peas, ur they mushy or gairden?

  — Nae peas if thir no gairdin peas! this famine-victim wifie called Mabel shouts over.

  The captain’s wife was Mabel, by Christ, and she was able . . . tae gie the crew, their daily screw . . . upon the kitchen table.

  Mushy or gairdin. Now there’s a consideration for a man of enterprise. If Matt Colville could see me now, for him to witness this humiliation would be worth about five fucks at his wife. The burning issues of the day, right enough. Mushy or gairdin. I don’t know. I don’t care. I feel like shouting back: the only stale pees in here are in your fuckin scabby auld knickers, hen.

  I turn to Morag the Toerag and let her sort it all out. A queue of sorts is building at the bar. Oh fuck. There’s one recognisable figure standing there, shaking and shivering, and I’m resolutely cleaning the glasses, trying to avoid his big, lamplight eyes, but those searchlights of need are trained relentlessly on me. I know how lassies feel when they say ‘he was undressing me with his eyes’ because in this case I can say ‘he was debiting my bank account with his eyes’.

  Eventually, I can’t not look. — Spud, I smile. — Long time no see. How goes it? It’s been a few year.

  — Fine, eh . . . awright, he stammers. Mr Murphy is a more wizened, depleted version of how I remember him, if that’s possible. In fact, he looks like a recently deceased scrawny tomcat which has been dug up from its back-garden resting place by an urban fox. His eyes have that doolally mix of a man who’s done too many uppers and downers for the different constituent parts of his brain to ever agree again as to what time of the day it is. He’s a fucking ragged, rancid shell of a human being, propelled by drugs from one scabby flat or grotty pub to a subsequent similar den of corruption in search of his next toxic ingestion.

  — Excellent. And how’s Ali? I ask, wondering if she’s still shacked up with him. I occasionally think about her. In a strange way I felt that we’d somehow end up together, once we’d got all our fucking-up out the way. She was always my woman, but I suppose I feel like that about all of them. But her and him being together; it isn’t right, not right at all.

  If she’s any sense she’ll have kicked him into touch years ago, not that I’m to be granted the courtesy of an answer. It’s not even ‘So what are you doing up here working behind a bar in Leith, Simon?’ His crooked, selfish frame can’t even impart that rudimentary level of curiosity, far less a genuine fucking greeting. — Look, ye ken what ah’m gaunnae ask ye, catboy, he coughs out.

  — Not until you do, I smile, as patronisingly and frostily as I can manage, which I think, particularly in this case, is quite a fucking bit.

  Murphy has the cheek to shoot me back an expression of hurt betrayal: a so-this-is-how-it’s-gaunnae-be look. Then he inhales deeply, a strange, slow sound as the air struggles to push out his puny, scrawny lungs rendered so inefficient by what? bronchitis, pneumonia, tuberculosis, cigarettes, crack cocaine, Aids? — Ah widnae ask ye but ah’m really sick. Ah’m sick like nowt oan earth.

  I look him over, and decide that he’s not wrong. Then I hold the cleaned glass up to the light. I curtly inform him, while checking it for stains: — Half a mile up the road there. On the other side of the street.

  — What? he goes, open-mouthed, fairground-goldfish style, framed as he is in the yellow lights of the pub.

  — Edinburgh Council Department of Social Work, I inform him. — This, on the other hand, is a public house. I think you may have come to the wrong place. Here we’re only licensed to sell intoxicating liquor. I convey him this information with all due officiousness, picking up another glass.
r />   I almost regretted my words as Spud looked incredulously at me for a second, let the hurt sink in and then skulked out in a broken silence. Fortunately, the rush of shame was instantly replaced by a surge of pride and relief as yet another lame duck hobbled out of my life.

  Aye, we went back a long way, but those were different times.

  A wee crowd come in, then to my horror I see some Scottish Office suits poke their heads round the door and wrinkle their noses before beating a hasty retreat. Potential newcomers with wallets driven out by dogged old scumbags with pennies and young cunts who seem to be consuming every drug to great excess – except, that is, the alcohol I try to make my living from by selling in this bar. It’s going to be a long first shift. I get on with it in mounting despondency, thinking of old Paula’s warm fools’ paradise.

  At long last, I spy a friendly face coming into the pub, under a rash of curly hair cut shorter than I’m used to, and belonging on a much slimmer model than I could have believed. The last time I saw this man, I was convinced that he was heading for Fat Hell. It’s like he saw the signs and found the slip road for the bypass in time, and is now back on the Svelte Heaven motorway. It’s none other than the best-known former aerated waters’ salesman this fine city has ever produced, ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson, from Saughton’s Chosen Few. Terry’s a bit off his manor down here, but he’s a welcome face nonetheless. He greets me heartily and I note that his clothes have also changed for the better; expensive-looking leather jacket, Queen’s Park FC-style black-and-white hooped Lacoste top, although the effect is somewhat spoiled by what looks like Calvin Klein jeans and Timberland shoes. I make a mental note to have a word. I buy him a drink and we chat about days gone by. Terry’s telling me what he’s been up to and I have to say it sounds interesting . . . — as game as fuck, the lassies. Ye widnae believe it; viddy the scenes n pit oan a show. We’ve started tae shift some through mail order in the grotmags. At first they wir rough, but wir gittin better, takin it forward like, cause a mate’s aw pally wi this community group in Niddrie that huv goat this proper editin suite for digital vid. That’s jist the start; one ay the boys wants tae design a website, then get the credit-card details and let the cunts download what they want ontae it. Fuck aw that business shite, it’s porn that made the Internet.