Free The Blade Artist by Irvine Welsh Page A

fantasise a future for us together when I’d barely spoken a word to her. I thought of us being together in America, in a big convertible, driving to Big Sur and the Joshua Tree. I could find no weakness in her warm, missionary light, couldn’t even determine its source; political, religious, philosophical, or just rebelliousness against her own privileged class? I didn’t care. I read as much as I could, fighting through mydyslexia, now I had motivation, till my brain hurt. I was listening to audiobooks, and finally learning to decode all that jumbled nonsense. She was a powerful catalyst, yes, but this change wasn’t just about her.
    I grew bored with the staple True Crime books I had used to develop my reading skills; most were shabby affairs of self-serving bullshit, ghostwritten by grubby journos to impress kids, and wankers whose balls would never drop. I read more challenging stuff. Philosophy and art history. The biographies of the great painters. To learn, yes, but also to impress her.
    But who was she? She was good and strong and I was bad and weak. That’s what hit me most of all from being around her. That I was weak. The notion was ridiculous; it went against everything I’d come to believe about my persona and image, against the way I’d consciously forged myself over the years. Yet who else but a weak man would spend half his life letting others lock him up like an animal?
    I was one of the weakest people on the planet. I had zero control over my darker impulses. Therefore I was constant jail fodder. Some mouthy cunt got wide; they had to be decimated on the spot, and I was back in prison. Thus such nonentities were in total command of my destiny. That was my first major epiphany: I was weak because I wasn’t in control of myself. Melanie was in control of herself. In order to be with somebody like her, to live a free life, not in a tenement or scheme on the breadline, or even a suburb and crippled with a lifetime of debt, I needed a free mind. I had to get control of myself.
    I told her this.

14
     
THE MENTOR
     
    Franco had returned to Elspeth’s quite early the previous evening, and called Melanie on the American phone. The battery finally died in mid-conversation. This frustrated him, as he sensed that she was ramping herself up to say something important. The Tesco device seemed to belong to an era from about three prison sentences back. It sat in the palm of his hand like the last of an endangered species. He plugged in the charger and pumped electricity into this corpse, seeing if it might reanimate. He’d put ten pounds on the account, at the sales clerk’s advice. — Twenty’s too much, she’d told him earnestly. He’d shaken his head in disbelief. Now he saw what she was on about, the thing seemed designed to fall apart as soon as he exited the supermarket. Now he had to remember to get an adaptor for the US charger. Then, suddenly, the jet lag he thought he’d mastered hit him like a sledgehammer, and he retired early, sleeping deeply and restoratively.
    Rising into a dull morning, Franco makes his usual breakfast, with provisions he’d picked up in Waitrose, substituting feta for Swiss cheese, and this time is able to tempt his sister into joining them. As they sit around the kitchen table, withthe exception of Greg, who has gone to work early, Elspeth asks, — So how is June?
    — Same. But fatter, he adds.
    George and Thomas smirk, then stop under Elspeth’s reprimanding stare.
    — Did she tell you about the funeral arrangements?
    — Aye, but there’s nothing much, other than what we already know: it’s on Friday, two o’clock at Warriston, and I’m footing the bill.
    — Well, it is your son, Elspeth glared, — and you can afford it and she can’t.
    — I didn’t say I was complaining.
    Elspeth looks doubtfully at him, but sees the boys taking an interest, so pulls back. — Greg says he’s taking the afternoon off.
    — I told him that there’s no need.
    —