Capital: Volume One. It was a bit slow to start with, certainly not a page-turner. I persevered but there was no discernible plot and there were too many formulae. This Marx guy was no John Grisham. Disillusioned, I put it back. What I needed was some perspective, a human angle; who was this guy? I returned to the catalogue and entered Marx as a title. This time it suggested Karl Marx: A Biography.
This was more like it. It turned out that Marx was a total chancer. Famous for theorising the emancipation of the working class, Marx spent all day drinking port at the expense of some Engels bloke who had inherited a factory. It seemed to me that Marx must have been sleeping with the Engels guy, because why else would Engels give him all that money? And get this: Marx had his bread buttered on both sides—he married Jenny von Westphalen, whose dad was a baron or something. One of the best bits in the book was when they could no longer afford their middleclass lifestyle and Marx sent his wife to scrounge off her parents. While she was away, he knocked up the servant.
At five o’clock, I explained all this to Lucy’s chest. Fortunately, Lucy didn’t notice that I spoke to her chest any more than she noticed that barmen always served her first, or that men walked backwards after they passed her in the street, or that women swore at their husbands and hissed “Marry her then!” as if she’d jump at the chance to bed down with their hairy-backed, baldheaded mates. “It’s quite a sad story,” I said. “All the children from his marriage died tragically.”
“Yeah, I heard that.”
“You wouldn’t believe it: Jennychen got cancer and died just before her dad. Laura Marx, she went and married this Paul Lafargue guy and they committed suicide together in 1911. The wee boy Edgar died of tuberculosis when he was just eight. Another two died as babies, a third before it could even be named, and get this: Eleanor Marx, she shacked up with this Edward Aveling guy—”
“Is this the suicide pact that wasn’t a suicide pact?”
“Aye,” I said, a bit pissed off to have my story spoiled. “I guess brains aren’t genetic. I mean, surely it’s the first rule of suicide pacts: if he hands you the prussic acid and insists you go first, don’t do it.”
Lucy laughed, lips red from the blackcurrant cordial in her snakebite. “Do you know about Marx’s bastard child? Not Lenin, I mean the one he had with the servant?” Lucy was originally from the North West and she spoke with a Gaelic lull that sort of lingered, so that my replies always seemed delayed, as if we were talking on a satellite link.
“Aye, I read that too.”
“How is the arm?” she asked, her expression changing as she watched me struggle to get a fag out with one hand.
“Alright. I’m supposed to get the stitches out tomorrow.”
She shook her head and touched my knee as three students cheered, The Simpsons tune jingled, lights fizzed and sparked, and coins rattled out of a fruit machine.
4
The stabbing? Okay.
A canal runs through Dundule. There’s no lighting—not many people would choose to walk there on a November night—but in 1998, I always went home that way. I liked its cavernous stone cul-de-sacs and the rusty rings on its overgrown mooring plinths. I used to think, what an effort, what labour, to have built all this only for it to be replaced by the railway. It runs for eight miles, and then it just stops.
Under the bridge, where the road passes overhead, I heard shouting and laughing and saw three boys—fourteen year olds? Fifteen year olds? They were arranged in order of height, swaggering to fill the track. One of them whispered, “That’s that cunt that jumps aboot wi that Jason radge.”
“Fuckin bawbag!”
I kept walking, pretending I couldn’t hear them.
“Here, cunto! Dickheid, we’re talkin tae you.” In the distance there were fireworks, shot up a mile or two away, bursting red, amber, and green. I turned, just as the middle-sized guy shoved me. Then I was stumbling backwards and he was following me, fists clenched, shouting “You mind Giorgio, eh? You mind Giorgio, eh? Ya fuckin radge cunt.” He was leaning into my face and shouting and I could feel his breath. And the world bleached white because when I lose my temper I get this—it’s not a red mist, it’s more like white dots that merge together until I can’t see, like a blizzard that gets faster and faster until—
The only thing I can tell you is that I would have expected more pain. At first I thought someone had punched me. Then my whole side was warm and I saw the blood running oily thick from my fist and the kids saw the blood and for a moment we all stood there and stared. Then they ran towards the road and I remember being on my haunches, jeans soaking up puddle water. Then I stood up, dizzy and sick, alone but conscious of how this looked—the blood, the fireworks, the whole composition of the scene. I wrapped my jumper around the wound and stumbled towards the street lights.
On the main road, the taxi drivers swerved towards me, saw the blood, and accelerated. I had to jump in front of a black cab, place my hands on the bonnet. “Please, I really need to get to hospital?”
At A&E, the receptionist took my details. A mop diluted my blood on the plastic floor. They slammed me on a trolley and crashed me through swinging doors. “Okay, he’s nineteen, lacerations on the upper arm.”
They wanted to know what had happened.
But how far back do you go? Should I start with the blowjob in the Railway Inn? With Deanne? With her butterfly tattoo, short skirts, and ripped stockings? Jerry the Fence’s daughter, Gordon’s cousin, and briefly, briefly, my girlfriend, Deanne was eighteen when eighteen was impossibly old. When I met her in the summer of ’96, Deanne was already old enough to work in a bar. She was old enough to know how to slam tequila with salt and lemon. She was old enough to have a stud in her tongue.
When Gordon introduced us, we were drinking illegally in his uncle’s pub. Joop perfume buzzed around Deanne like an entourage. She had big lips and acne and a brown face that shared a neat border with a white neck; she had big gold earrings, like coopers’ hoops, trussed in her platinum blonde hair.
When it was late and we were drunk, she followed me into the gents, shoved me into the cubicle, and grabbed the back of my head, crashing our teeth. She kissed a sloppy wet kiss with a slimy wet tongue—she kissed like a Labrador—and then she unbuckled my belt. Imagine it: I’ve spent the whole night trying to hide my erection, but just when I need it, my cock’s wrinkled and small. She takes it in her mouth (kneeling on the pissy wet tiles, heels pressed against the foot of the door), and pulls her skirt to her waist, but all I can think about is the hole in the door where a lock might have been, the toilet seat propped on the barred windowsill, the gang names carved into the ceiling, the charred bog roll holder, the bloody bogeys smeared on the partition. On the other side of the door, some guy’s piss is thundering into the tin urinal. He farts and exhales in satisfaction. I can’t do this!
She stops. “What’s wrong?” she whispers, holding my dick in her hand.
“Nothing.”
“Nothin?” She throws the flaccid penis at me in disgust.
“...”
“Are you queer or somethin?”
“No! Fuck no.”
“Do you no fancy me?”
“Oh aye, totally, you’re well tidy.”
“Can you no get stiffies?”
“Aye, course I can. It’s just…”
“What?”
“Well, I’m a wee bit nervous.”
“What