The long knives, p.1
The Long Knives, page 1
Irvine Welsh
* * *
THE LONG KNIVES
Contents
Introduction
Prologue
Day One: Tuesday Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Day Two: Wednesday Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Day Three: Thursday Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Day Four: Friday Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Day Five: Saturday Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Day Six: Sunday Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Day Seven: Monday Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Irvine Welsh is the author of twelve previous novels, including Trainspotting, and four books of shorter fiction. He currently lives in London.
https://www.facebook.com/irvinewelshauthor
https://twitter.com/IrvineWelsh
Also by Irvine Welsh
FICTION
Trainspotting
The Acid House
Marabou Stork Nightmares
Ecstasy
Filth
Glue
Porno
The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs
If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work …
Crime
Reheated Cabbage
Skagboys
The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins
A Decent Ride
The Blade Artist
Dead Men’s Trousers
DRAMA
You’ll Have Had Your Hole
Babylon Heights (with Dean Cavanagh)
SCREENPLAY
The Acid House
This book is dedicated to the vivid and immortal spirit of Bradley John Welsh.
Every day missed, every moment inspiring.
An adversary is someone you want to defeat. An enemy is someone you need to destroy. With adversaries, compromise is virtuous: after all, today’s adversary could be tomorrow’s ally. But with enemies, compromise is an unsatisfactory appeasement.
In our modern age, we are losing the distinction between the two.
Prologue
He’s stripped to his boxer shorts. Secured to the moulded plastic chair. Wrists and ankles strained white against the ties. Dimpled gooseflesh trembling. Apart from those candy-striped underpants, there’s just one other item he wears: the brown leather hood we pulled over his head. But he’s soundless now, as I watch him from the other end of the large, empty warehouse. I mirror his silence as I sit down in a similar chair, in order to study him from afar.
You’re always a student. In this game, as in life, there is no absolute knowledge. All you have are your own experiences, what you observe and infer through your senses, nourished, hopefully, with a little imagination. And, of course, that quality that his class of people is painfully deficient in: empathy. Most of the time this deficit seems to serve them well, in their limited way, as they blunder on chasing their bottom lines and profit margins, stunningly unaware that they are also part of the world they are systematically fucking up.
How do I put myself in the shoes of this shivering figure? Well, let me give it a try: I am in a completely terrifying environment, over which I have no control. I can see nothing through the suffocating hood covering my head and face except a sliver of my own body and the timber floor of the warehouse. (This cladding oddly makes this captive look sinister, as if he is the oppressor. But no, he’s totally in our power.)
I don’t know how I’m doing here, but it’s obvious he’s not in a good place. Frankly, it’s not even comfortable for me, as much as I’m glad to be in my circumstances, rather than his. A slight nausea is rising inside me. Will it worsen if I get closer? I stand up and walk towards him, almost tiptoeing across the floorboards to maintain silence. Speculating that every step closer might furnish me with more information as to his emotional state.
Yes … once again, he strains against the bounds. It’s futile. His wrists and ankles are as if welded to the hard chair. His arms are white and flabby through indolence and decadence. Now the sinews strain demonically in them, across his oddly sculpted shoulders, under his wobbling boy tits.
Beneath his moonless amice, I’m guessing that fireworks are going off. The thin leather buckles inwards as he inhales, his tongue maybe intermittently pushing it out, as he tastes the skin of dead animal. Maybe he screws his eyes down to that vague source of light underneath his chin, yes, a chink of it, spilling through the slash in the mask, cut there to let oxygen in. Now he’s obviously marshalling himself – this is exciting – as he tenses his body further, sucking in deeply, then bellowing, — WHAT THE FUCK …
Not the first shout-out since he woke, but once again he only hears his muffled voice ricochet coldly around the huge and cavernous space. He must be thinking of how he got here, what this dramatic disturbance to his existence constitutes. There’s his dutiful Samantha, how he disappointed her. But that bitch was made for disenchantment; trained, like so many women of her class, to absorb psychic hurt and cry softly into her pillow at night, or maybe in the arms of a lover, while presenting that stoical, loyal face to the world. Their darling children James and Matilda; maybe it’s been tougher on those kids. Well, it’s soon going to get a lot thornier. That college essay to discuss, the rugby game or school play sadly missed due to pressures of work; those are the least of his worries now. This is the shit that the prick ought to have thought through before he embarked on his life of making others miserable. His sister, Moira, the barrister; what is it with them? I suspect she will feel the loss of him the most. That dull, domestic life that he never really had – his solid work of corruption and the enrichment of the already wealthy ate up all his time – how he must now crave it. What disrupted this?
My call: urging him to come back. To return to a place he was done with, apart from the visits to his sister, in order to see the kids.
Now he’s still again. I retreat, maintaining my silence from the corner of the capacious space, sinking back into my chair. He must be so cold: his flesh is pulsing in the raw, dank air. I know from my own experience how you still notice those minor horrors, even as you splash around in a sea of abject terror. I’d like to discuss this with him, but I’m wary of slipping into the torturer’s indulgence of gloating torment. This is not the game we are playing. Above all, it would feed the lie that this was about him. He is not, and never will be, the narrator of this tale. This is not the final chapter. It’s just the last that this particular character will feature in.
Men like him usually tell the story.
In business.
Politics.
Media.
But not this time: I repeat, he is not writing this story. And this abdication is unwittingly at his own bequest!
And she is probably the very last person he would think about. Even less than me with my personal nemesis, whom we sadly only managed to incapacitate: as one gets older the atrocities of childhood grow more vivid than those in an adolescence and adulthood blunted by hormones. But to such men, we will just be obscure pieces of collateral damage, in a warehouse full of the souls they’ve ruined and impaired through the selfish meeting of their own immediate, base needs.
He is not writing this story.
She enters, looking magnificent in checked trousers, trainers and a short coat, which she slips off, revealing a ready-for-business tank top. Her arms are lean and gym-toned. Her hair pinned up, under her flat cap. In her hand, the tool bag that means this cannot end well for him. Oh, we’ve learned from the last time. The slurp of the plastic draught excluder on the door must have registered, even on the other side of that stifling hood.
She smiles, touches my shoulder. I rise from this old chair. We walk slowly across the floor towards him. A creak on one of the boards. His body tenses again, as he pushes back in his seat. Now he can hear the sound of footsteps: somebody creeping closer. Is he thinking: perhaps there’s more than one of them?
— Who’s there? Who is this? His voice is softer, more tentative now.
We walk slowly around him. So close he must feel our presence shimmer. It’s not the heat; it’s just the aura of other human beings in his proximity. He smells something, his sinuses whine softly under the mask, as he tries to ascertain what it is. Perhaps old books. Is he in a library? It’s her perfume. Unique and rare, it’s called Dead Writers. It is allegedly inspired by novelists like Hemingway and Poe. The black tea, vanilla and heliotrope notes actually do make it smell like an old drawing room stuffed full of antique books. N ot a lot of women would have the balls to wear such a fragrance.
But not a lot of women, or men, have her balls. If he ever did, that will very soon cease to be the case.
— What do you want? Look, I have money … His muffled voice trails off into a plea.
We respond with a silence so thick he must feel it clog his lungs. Drowning him.
He’s brought this on himself. Again.
Samantha.
The children.
All he ever did was set self-indulgent traps for them to get through. Testing their loyalty. And he had nearly repaired his last mess, almost convinced her to join him in London, to make a go of it again, on a bigger stage, where he was reascendant.
Oh yes, we know everything about him. Neither of us are gamblers by nature. The more research you do, the surer something is. Know their vanities and weaknesses. Help them to fall on their own swords. When all is said and done, that’s what they really crave, that drama of utter disgrace and humiliation. It’s the most compelling chapter of the narcissist’s biography. What they are always working towards, in the face of whatever nonsense they choose to delude themselves with.
How he must hate himself right now. Detest the weakness that led him here. This punishment, at the hands of a force he can’t understand; how much self-loathing must that induce?
He’ll soon be free of it all. It’s time.
Her head turns sharply to me, eyes suddenly set with a luminous ferocity. She moves at a feline speed, her arms at his boxer shorts in a sudden uncompromising tug, yanking them down. He squirms in helpless violation as his penis and balls flop helplessly between his legs. With the jerking convulsions of his body ebbing and flowing, and the nervous gurgling, I read him as scared but perhaps also hopeful. While this alludes to the darkest contravention, it also hints at a harmless if potentially humiliating rugby-club prank, one so beloved of the darker elements on the fringes of his circle.
I know this feeling.
Could this babbling yet erupt into a collusive chuckle? The Evans. The Alasdairs. The Murdos. The Roddys. Those bloody cards …
This he would take right now.
But something freezes him again. Maybe it’s her scent: it says something else.
— Stop, he pleads, his high voice breaking, possibly reminding him of his schooldays. Perhaps he’d be walking home, in his uniform, running into a group of council-estate boys – or council schemes as they call them here – from a nearby comprehensive. Would they take delight in punching his fat arms, dancing around him in a morbid revelry at the marks they caused, knowing they would bruise? I think so.
That was a long time ago. He had made himself into a different man. The gym and sports, to his satisfaction, had sabotaged the pudgy trajectory of his youth. The victimhood had been shed with the flab. Of course there was the sloth of a complacent middle age and his career; first-class travel, lavish expenses, late nights, and he reverted to the unappetising version of himself we see now. The burgeoning corpulence exemplified by the white ball of gut, the fleshy jowls capitulating to gravity, and those moobs an infant could suckle on. But it didn’t matter. Now he was a winner. He could buy beautiful women.
Yes, he’d stepped on a few toes … I wonder if he’s trying to think: which ones? That terrible problem with that Graham character; a dark urge he had to satisfy. It almost ruined him.
Now her.
Now me.
Surely not: she wouldn’t be on his radar after all this time.
Perhaps it was business.
And sure enough, he asks in sudden inspiration, — Is this about the Samuels contract? There’s no need to – NO!
He squeals out as her hands, covered in latex gloves, touch him: he can feel the thin gossamer rubber stickiness and his penile skin retracts under their graze. — NO!
And I play my part, simply by laying my own hand on his shoulder. He recoils, and I wager he has never felt such a cold touch.
The uncompromising pulse of terror surges so keenly through his body, sparking it into a tensile spasm, that I’m briefly concerned the ties will snap under the power it fuses through him.
But there’s no way: it just slashes them deeper into his wrists and ankles.
I lift my brandishing hand, leaving his body to the air that stings at his exposed floppy cock and balls. Her evaluating touch, strangely gentle, now also gone. Leaving a vacuum of even greater discomfort.
But not for long. We are not going to make the same mistake twice. Again, I touch him without touching him. Nobody has a frostier caress that me, inchoate, inhuman. His prick literally contracts a further inch under it.
She is warmer for sure, not that he will feel any benefit, as she starts wrapping the leather strap around his genitals. Applying the devastating tourniquet. Turns the wooden handle to pull it tautly.
— PLEASE!
He feels the noose tighten.
— No, please … he says softly this time, in response to the twisting pain. And yes, there’s a brief sense of arousal; he knows these games, and the infliction of sexual pain on others, even if he was always the one in control. But not now. Now he’s experiencing the air escaping from his lungs, as the sweat and tears roll down his cheeks, dripping onto his chest from under the hood as his penis engorges with the blood trapped in it … then …
… I open the case and she removes the six-inch knife.
… then the cut … a beautiful motion as the blood spurts out. She pulls at his cock and hacks, but it won’t come away! His loud, pig-like squeals … we never bargained for this, the knife was razor-sharp, but we are prepared. We dispense with the ceremonial blade, as I produce a serrated one from the bag and hand it to her. Through his splattering blood and cries I feel mildly deflated – Father’s knives have again proven deficient to my task of vengeance – but this does not last as under her frantic sawing, the muscles in her arms pumped, his genitals finally snap away in her hand. Eureka!
Is he, I wonder, experiencing a strange relief, a giddy lightness in brain and body, as something burdening is whipped from him … perhaps just before he senses it will never return?
Because she’s holding it aloft, that beautifully grotesque trophy, as he ascertains that this is not an encumbrance that has been removed from him, but something close to the very essence of who he is …
— AAAAGGHHHEEEEE …
… An animal squeal, like nothing I have heard before; it bellows out from under the mask … holds its pitch in a resonant drill, as he slumps forward, perhaps hoping that unconsciousness will deliver him from the pain. Maybe he’s praying for the blessed liberation of death; anything to take him into a different realm. And he surely must feel that this is happening, but only after many more screaming heartbeats in purgatory.
She holds the genitals at arm’s length, regarding them, then him, before dropping them into the plastic box.
Does he sense the whiff of perfume? If so, it’s soon overwhelmed, as he shouts out, through the burning inferno of pain that disintegrates his spirit, a familiar name: — LENNOX …
Day One
* * *
TUESDAY
1
Ray Lennox pulls in a long breath. This fans rather than extinguishes the burning embers in his chest and calves. Fighting past the pain, he forces himself into a steady rhythm. At first it’s galling, then lungs and legs start working together like seasoned lovers rather than first-time daters. The crisp air carries the fresh whip of ozone. In Edinburgh, autumn often seems the default setting, no more than a rogue isobar away. But the towering trees are yet to shed, and weak sunlight dances through a canopy of leaves above him, as he bombs on down the footpath along the river.
Trying to get into Holyrood Park through a warren of backstreets, he comes upon it: the entrance in the car park of an unremarkable housing development of flats. On seeing it, his ears ring, forcing him to stop. He can’t believe it.
