Free Crime by Irvine Welsh Page B

need much encouragement. He needs another drink.
    He wanders in, Trudi reluctantly following him. They find a table and two stools and Lennox orders a couple of Sea Breezes.
    — I don’t want to sit around drinking all the time, Ray, I –
    — You don’t come to a place like this for culture.
    — You don’t come anywhere for
anything
, other than drinking. You could have stayed in the BMC club!
    Lennox’s excited head fills with the notion that our bodies and souls desire the poison, crave the superhuman promise and temporary madness it offers; the chance to throw off all the shackles of decency, surely the prerequisite to real intelligence and love. — At least I’m trying to enjoy myself.
    — Is that what you call it?
    And it hits him, in her look and tone, just how desperate he really is. He wants to say, ‘I’m dying, help me, please,’ but it comes out in a monotone shrug as, — I’m just doing what I want to do on holiday. If you don’t like it, fuck off.
    She looks at him in wide-eyed horror. As he watches her features shrink in tight malevolence, he wishes he could suck the words back into him. — Naw,
you
fuck off, ya prick! She springs up and, grabbing her bag, charges away.
    Lennox sits stuck to his chair, his limbs heavy, watching her incensed departure. He looks at the table, noticing that she’s left her notepad and
Perfect Bride
behind. A gentle gust of wind flips its pages over in a measured manner, one at a time; it’s as if her spirit remains at the table. But he thinks:
she’s not fucking about
. One puny consolation pulses in his brain:
at least I didn’t criticise her job at Scottish Power. She hates it when I do that
.
    The embarrassed waitress, who’s observed the scene, arrives with the drinks, sets them down, and hastily departs. Picking up the cocktail designated for Trudi, Lennox quickly kills it. Then he slowly sips at his own. Contemplating its azure, murky beauty, he almost doesn’t want to touch it. A couple at an adjacent table briefly gape at him before turning away.
I’m the nutter everybody wants to avoid
, he thinks in desperate cheer. Then he summons the waitress and pays the bill. Lennox feels his shoulders shake in a nervous, mirthful laughter, but when he gets up from the table the tears – terrible, thick, salty tears – are running down his face from under the shades, drying on his cheeks in the heat, stinging him.
    Scarcely realising he is carrying the magazine and the notepad, he walks down the street. All he can think of is the drink he needs. Not just the drink, the
place
to drink it. The sun has fallen behind the skyscrapers that line the Biscayne Bay, and murky particles of darkness accumulate in the warm air around him.
    He walks on, without any real sense of what he’s doing or where he’s going. It feels good to walk. Look at things. People. Buildings. Cars. Billboards. Shops. Apartment blocks. He walks until he realises that fatigue is setting in with the heat, his leg muscles becoming knotted and cramped. It’s still a holiday and beach area, but he’s passed the colonial low-rise hotels of the art deco district, moved into a zone of uglier, more mainstream tourist accommodation. Big high-rise hotels and apartment blocks have sprouted up around golf clubs and beach complexes.
    Lennox wonders how long it would take to walk to Ginger’s place up in Fort Lauderdale. A long time, if, indeed, it was even possible to do so. The whole place seems to be built around the car. Then it twigs that the numerous green-and-white posts he’s walked past are actually bus stops. Most people sitting on the bench by this particular one look non-white and non-rich; different to the occupants of the convertibles that stream by. They seem to regard him uneasily. It doesn’t bother him. A bus comes and he gets on, imitating the stick-thin black man in front of him by putting what he thinks is a dollar bill into a rolling slot.
    — That’s a five, buddy … it’s