Filth

Now I’m ready and I hear the key. I jump and I’m falling, then I feel myself rising, I hear a crash, but there’s no pain and there’s a figure at the frosted glass of the door but it’s not her it’s too wee it’s Stacey no Stacey for fuck sake don’t open the door . . . don’t . . . and I care . . .
. . . I want more than anything for Stacey not to be there and see this and I’m trying to shout No go away and I hear her screaming Daddy and I want to live and make it up to her and Carole, I can hear her now too, screaming BRUCE because I care and I’ve won and beaten the bastards but what price victory
STACYE PLEASE GOD BE SOMETHING ELSE SOMEONE ELSE . . .

The feelings must be followed. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an ideologue or a sensualist, you follow the stimuli thinking that they’re your signposts to the promised land. But they are nothing of the kind. What they are is rocks to navigate past, each one you brush against, ripping you a little more open and there are always more on the horizon. But you can’t face up to that, so you force yourself to believe the bullshit of those that you instinctively know to be liars and you repeat those lies to yourself and to others, hoping that by repeating them often enough and fervently enough you’ll attain the godlike status we accord to those who tell the lies most frequently and most passionately.
But you never do, and even if you could, you wouldn’t value it, you’d realise that nobody believes in heroes any more. We know that they only want to sell us something we don’t really want and keep from us what we really do need.

I’ve made the t-shirt we are wearing. It has YOU CAUSED THIS on it in big, black letters. The noose feels tight around our neck. We look up at it, strung on the rafters of the attic and we’re now just waiting, ready to drop out of the hatch as soon as she turns the key in the lock and pushes the door open. We’ll land right in front of her in the hallway, so she’ll have that on her conscience for the rest of her fucking life the fuckin whore and liar.

Her voice is not the voice of the Carole we know. There is now no room for the words that she had waited for for so long, the words we were not capable of speaking, the ones that might have made a difference. In the absence of the words she became meat, a repository for my come. To be fucked, to be wanked over. To be made to do things she would not otherwise have done. In the sex clubs we joined. Bent by the will of my . . . need? It’s not her voice. I almost like this woman. She sounds like Carole before
Enough.
Now that we’ve told her to come, all we can do is sit and wait. And prepare. Prepare to do the cow.
For good.

She said she loved him. That was all I knew about him: he was black and she said she loved him. We couldn’t help it, finishing that cunt off. It was when we were with her, dressed in her clothes. In that club wearing her clathes with the specialist large shoes we ordered from the shop in Newcastle. These yobs had set upon the cunt, kicked him unconscious. We just had to finish him, we didn’t know whether or not it was the guy Carole was with. We did him with the claw hammer we used for our protection on the streets. We bought it in Chelmsford, on the way back from Tony and Diana’s. Drummond could search all over Scotland. We needed to have it; there were people who would try to hassle us. We needed to have it, Carole and I.

I had Carole, but I fucked every other woman I could get my hands on. Didn’t matter what they were like; prostitutes, relatives, birds on a night out who were up for it, workmates. If I’m being honest, I liked quite a few of them, although it was always easier never to admit that. I did it all the time, at any opportunity.
Carole only did it once.

The screw stopped me. Hauled me off. The Beast still rots away in the psychiatric prison. He is used to being assaulted by prison staff, but I hoped that he remembered that one as a little bit special. But probably not.

I don’t have any photographs. Only memories. I can still vividly recall the time I went in to see him.
My own father. The one who never abused me, never forced me to eat coal, never called me the spawn of the devil. But he was still the one I hated most.

It’s light and we are cold; our teeth chatter together. A jakey coughs an insult at us, or it could be a request for money. We look in our pockets and there is a twenty-pound note and some change.
We take out the twenty-pound note and hand it to the jakey who sees the pain in our eyes and his own eyes focus in a grateful then fearful sobriety as he takes the note and mumbles

We are walking again, through the Dell, through the long passage, which is like an old railway tunnel. There is one point in this tunnel, the point we have now reached, where it bends and you cannot see the light ahead, nor can you see it if you look back. A couple of steps forward and the light shines, a couple of steps backward and a glance over your shoulder and it’s the same story. But here, just at this point: this is limbo. There is the sense that if you stay at this point for too long, stop at this point of oblivion for a certain amount of time, you will just cease to exist.
And we cannot move.