Free The Blade Artist by Irvine Welsh

was just wrong.
    — Christ, it’s a bit late tae apologise now!
    — Who’s apologising? It was wrong, he accepts, — but I’m not sorry I hurt you . I’m just indifferent. Always was. I had no emotional connection to you whatsoever. So how can I be sorry?
    — Ah’m the mother ay oor . . . you . . . June stammers, then explodes, — you’ve nae emotional connection tae anybody !
    — Anger is an emotion, Franco says, opening the door and exiting.
    He goes downstairs and out into the street, heading to the bus stop. Thinks of the nights in bed with June. She’d had a flush of desirable youth, her body had been lithe and firm, as arousing as the insolent whip of her fringe, and there was that slutty chewing of her gum that excited and irritated him in equal measures. Yet he can’t ever remember caressing her. Only fucking her hard.
    In his pocket, two phones, the Tesco one, so cold and rough and dead. He pushes it aside and gently squeezes the sleek American iPhone. He thinks of Melanie, spooning with her in the night, the fragrance of her, as her blonde hair tickles his nostrils. The sickle-shaped birthmark on her wrist. The love flowing through the skin on their bodies like blood. How she was his tender underbelly. How if they wanted to plunge him with a knife they would go straight through her into him. Into that part rendered soft by loving.

13
     
THE DANCE PARTNER 2
     
    I got to see the blonde American lassie they had all been talking about. The news of her had spread through the prison system like a virus. People flocked to take her art classes; looking for a smile, a whiff of perfume. All about the accumulation of wanking material. The violent sexuality of imaginative space, where you went when you were on lock-up in that box. The last freedom.
    I just thought, why? Why was she doing this? She came from money. Why work with the scum of the earth? But she surprised me. As well as being a good person, she was strong and righteous. There was nothing wishy-washy about her. Yes, she’d had all the advantages, but she’d chosen to try and make a difference in the lives of some of the most broken, lost men.
    I recall in that first class she wore a tight green sweater and black leggings, with a green band in her hair. Afterwards, I thought I’d be pulling the fuckin end off it all night thinking about her. But I didn’t wank for a second. I just lay there, remembering her words, her voice, constructing romantic fantasies about her. They made me feel pathetic and weak. But I imagined talking to her, alone. Without the giggles and comments of all the arseholes in the group. How could I talk to her? I didn’t try. I worked.
    There was the portrait I started, Dance Partner, of Craig Liddel. Seeker. He was the guy I’d got the big sentence for killing, my second manslaughter conviction, reduced from murder, as the court (correctly) deemed it was self-defence. It was our third confrontation, the first being in jail, when he came off best, the second at an old mill house in Northumberland, where I had the advantage. The decider bout in the car park was conclusive. In the picture Liddel’s face, not set in a sneer, or crumpled with cold contempt or murderous rage, as it was when we met, but open and smiling. Around it, a series of ghosts of men, women and children. Then, Melanie Francis, approaching me, intrigued. Asking me about my work. The way she called it that; not my painting, but my work.
    I told her it was the man I’d killed. The people whose lives around him I had changed. His family and friends. There were others; the women he’d never know, the children he’d never have, and the places, the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, he’d never see.
    — Do you aspire to see those places? she asked me.
    I looked into her deep blue eyes and realised for the first time, to my shock and horror, that I did. — Yes, I told her.
    I was falling for her from day one. It seemed ludicrous. I was daring to dream, to