Brian Scott, 19, Edinburgh North, YTS Edinburgh Council Direct Labour Organisation, intravenous drug use.
Kenneth Stirling, 24, Edinburgh South, unemployed, intravenous drug use.
Michael Summer, 20, Edinburgh North, pipe-fitter, intravenous drug use.
George Thake, 22, Edinburgh South, University of Edinburgh accountancy student and Duke of Edinburgh Award recipient, intravenous drug use.
Eric Thewlis, 27, Edinburgh North, unemployed heating and ventilating engineer, intravenous drug use.
Angela Towers, 20, Edinburgh South, retail worker, British Home Stores, route of transmission undisclosed.
Andrew Tremenco, 21, Edinburgh North, BA business studies student at Heriot-Watt University, intravenous drug use.
Norman Vincente, 45, Edinburgh South, wine bar proprietor, father of three, unprotected sexual contact with intravenous drug user.
Susan Woodburn, 20, Edinburgh North, Whisky Bonds worker, mother of one, unprotected sexual contact with intravenous drug user.
Kylie Woodburn, 6 months, Edinburgh North, antibodies through birth.
Keith Yule, 22, Edinburgh North, unemployed bricklayer and amateur drummer, intravenous drug use.
Trainspotting at Gorgie Central
EVEN IN SLEEP’S domain, Renton sensed the onset of withdrawal, that point where his slumbering body gave notice of the critical imbalance in his junk-deprived cells. Through his fatigue he was experiencing his essence’s now unstoppable rise to the surface, from somewhere within the fabric of the mattress, or, deeper still, under the floorboards of the building, buried in the warm, soft earth, coming up, up up, into that wrecked, peeled body.
He’d been dreaming (or was it thinking?) about heroin. About being blissed out, staring at walls, his thoughts slowly ebbing all over the place, like golden syrup spilling from an upturned tin. The sudden realisation of how unconnected those ruminations were was followed by the appearance of that one detested itch: the solitary twinge in a previously relaxed body, graciously satiated by a tranquil night’s sleep. Yet to scratch this itch would merely bring more, then the torture would begin in earnest. Still desperately tired, he can’t get comfy. The prickle is displaced by a severe cramp; the legs first, then the back. When the shivers arrive he knows for sure that it’s not his imagination, the gear is leaving him.
He wakes up in the bed, trembling, next to another body. It’s Hazel. — What fuckin time …? he hears his hesitant, croaky voice plead.
His next thought: we huvnae shagged. No way. At least that was impossible. For three weeks he’s been battering into the gear, having lasted about eight hours since his discharge from St Monans. On two occasions they managed the usual tense, unsatisfying couplings. But that was over a fortnight ago. Since then it’s been the ‘tap me, fix me, ninety-six me’ scenario that he and Sick Boy had come up with in gallows response to the ‘wine me, dine me, sixty-nine me’ slutty T-shirt that was doing the rounds.
But she’s still here. Coming in from time to time, sometimes with food, occasionally more welcome paracetamol. In fleeting awe he looks at her asleep; beautiful, serene, temporarily removed from the source of her haunting.
He smells her hair. It merges into less worthy scents in the bed that he and Sick Boy or Spud often share, feet to head. Considers how Hazel in some ways prefers him as a desexualised junky, no threat to her. Recalling that terrible conversation when she came round the first night he was bombed after rehab; how she’d probably have said nothing if he wasn’t.
— Sex isnae good for me. It’s no you, or laddies … it’s just that my dad … he used to –
Him hearing, but not wanting to: the information coming from miles away through drug and psychic mufflers. Saying to her repeatedly, — It’s okay. I’m sorry …
— It’s no you. As long as you know that. I’ve tried tae like it but I cannae. I’m just sayin that cause ah ken you see other lassies.
— Right … well, no really, he said, grateful for the out. She made him sound like some sort of stud, like Sick Boy. But he did meet more girls than, say, somebody like poor Spud. At that point he thought of Charlene, her pinched features contrasting with the extravagant generosity of the locks that framed them. Fiona, with that oily patch on her forehead he’d loved, and how she got rid of it when she got rid of him. The way he’d been too scared to accept the love she’d offered him.
A coward and a waster.
— So what happened wi her in Aberdeen? Youse seemed really close.
— Oh, you know … drugs, he lied. A coward and a waster. — She wisnae intae it. He looked at Hazel’s sad, pale green eyes. You’d think they’d be brown, he always thought. Maybe it was her hair, she might have been born with a thick head of brown hair. That sudden thought made him almost physically sick: her mother presenting the baby to the smiling nonce father, who’d perhaps observed, ‘She’s got lovely brown hair. We should call her Hazel.’ Renton felt his throat constrict, and quickly asked her, — Why do you see me, ah mean, keep hangin aboot wi us?
Now he watches the shaft of light laser across her face from between those dark blue curtains that never quite pull together. Her eyes shut, her small, slightly protruding teeth glinting. — I really like ye, Mark, she told him.
— But how can you like me, he pressed, pained and confused.
— You’re a nice guy. Always were.
This had given Renton cause to contemplate that no matter how shite you felt about yourself, some people would never play the game. He said to her that night, — Sleep here wi me. Ah willnae touch ye.
She knew he meant it.
And they’d lain in bed together most nights since then, the junky and the incest victim, the voluntary and conscripted recruits to the army of the sexually dysfunctional, and helped themselves to sleep. They didn’t know if they were in some kind of love. They certainly knew they were gripped by a sort of need.
Renton fills his nostrils. Silvikrin, Vosene or Head & Shoulders? He recalls, in grim shame, how he once tried to encourage her to take heroin. He thought it would be something they could share. She point-blank refused and he was actually quite offended at the time. Not now though. Now he’d give nobody a single thing. There was nothing to give.
He gently strokes her hair, marvelling at how fine it feels. Remembering the first time Hazel approached him; she was in first year, he in second. She’d kept smiling at him in the corridors, playground and street. Then, through a friend in his registration class, she’d slipped him a note:
Mark,
Be my boyfriend.
Hazel xxx
After this, she and her mates would giggle in nervy conspiracy whenever he passed them. His own pals started laughing, and took the pish out of him. People began saying that they were boyfriend and girlfriend; that they were ‘going out’ together.
Mark n Hazel, up a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G …
This mortified him; they’d barely spoken. Hazel was a sweet, slight wee lassie with specs, who at thirteen looked aboot nine.
— Fuck the erse of it, he recalled Sick Boy threatening, — or I will.
But the infatuation passed. He didn’t see her much again till the end of her second year. She’d changed physically; tits, make-up, cooler specs, ones which set up the horn in him (the contact lenses would come later), had all been acquired, and her legs had achieved that definition at the calves that re-routed the flow of blood from brain to cock. But she’d lost something as well. Gone was the sass, and she didn’t seem to want a boyfriend any more. Instead, she wanted a friend. And that was what they’d become. They made tapes for each other, went to gigs, developed an emotional intimacy, while pretending to the outside world that they were conventional girlfriend and boyfriend; eighteenth-birthday parties, twenty-firsts, weddings, funerals, they attended together in a strange closeness and awkward resentment. That fucking animal had wrecked her, his own child. Renton was so glad he’d put that call into Begbie. That stoat would be feeling real pain now.