Needing a piss again. It’s such a drag. Everyone will think you’re on drugs, the way you go traipsing back and forwards. On your way you catch sight of yourself, looking a state. Your newly grown hair is plastered to your forehead, your T-shirt is stuck to you. And that leg of yours is pounding something chronic; you’ve been dancing on it again. You remember your infant-school head-mistress, a terrifying woman like the prison governor on Within These Walls. She had a steel-blue perm that seemed huge over her body, which was petite apart from legs the width of tractor tyres. Your bad leg is almost as bad as that.
Why does the pain extend and lace up your thigh muscles? Separate out the tense strands and maliciously pull on them as you move? All your joints are churlish and stiff. Your balls ache like someone’s grabbed them and your lower stomach is wound inside out. Occasionally it makes you want to throw up. Heading to the gents’ now, you realise that you are going to throw up. You promise yourself that when you have, you’ll go home. But that’s happened once before and you couldn’t manage the walk right away. Can’t get a taxi from the rank. Money’s running short. That time you sat on a scabby plush sofa upstairs and couldn’t move, couldn’t move. You imagined what would happen to you. Would they turn out all the lights and lock up after you? If you got locked in, by accident or otherwise, where would you crawl away to sleep? You couldn’t sleep on the scabby plush sofa upstairs, because there you are in full view of the street, through the wide windows. Once when you were here, a brick came through one of those windows. So you’d crawl yourself over behind the bar and sleep there, out of sight of Leith Walk and the traffic and late passers-by, no matter how sticky and foul the floor.
You crash into the toilets and of course it’s busy. There’s a queue at the long communal urinal. They queue to use it one at a time. Sometimes the punters here refuse to piss side by side. It’s funny what they’ll choose now and then to be coy about. You need the cubicle, the single cubicle and you thump against the door and slide a little down it. You get glared at by a bloke standing nearby. You must look really out of it. Just hope that the cubicle isn’t busy with a fucking couple. You need to be in now. If you could bend without increasing the pain you’d look under the door’s gap, see how many legs are inside.
Then you slump to the tiles, yelling out.
Someone kicked.
I came to on the floor of the toilets in CC’s. Piss everywhere. I still had the same pain, all up my bloated leg. I was half out of the cubicle and the queue had gathered round me. I had never fainted before in my life.
“He’s fuckin’ out of it,” someone decided, and the crowd started to disperse. The drumming at the urinal started up again and the traffic to and from the gents’ resumed.
“No, he’s ill,” said someone else. “He needs help or summat.”
And here was Cameron bending down and kneeling in front of me. “Andy,” he said, staring into my eyes. His eyes are Wedgwood blue. I’d forgotten how I’d missed seeing them. How grown-up he looked! As if he’d matured in the few weeks since we’d seen each other. His pale hair was fluffy with sweat.
“Hey,” I said.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked, frowning. “What are you on?” He dragged me into the cubicle properly, for some privacy, and shut the door. By now the pain was building up again into another grand, crashing wave. I slipped into his arms and I was going to go again.
“It’s my leg,” I sobbed, falling against him, and I wanted him to cut it off. I knew he always carried a penknife. For self-protection, Cameron had told me. You always have to protect yourself.
“Your bad leg?” he asked, and manoeuvred me to sit on the toilet seat.
Cameron could make me laugh when I didn’t want to, or when I didn’t expect it. Once we sat on the settee and he said, “Look, we can kiss…but I’ve got responsibilities.”
I moved back. “What?”
He shrugged and inhaled sharply. “I’ve got a mug of tea and a fag on the go.” Then he tipped his tea all over himself, down his T-shirt and jeans, grinning, just so he’d have to pull them off.
Whenever we were together he stroked me and touched me all the time. He just held on, saying, “Is that all right? It’s allowed, isn’t it? Hey?”
He was doing this again the night in the toilets, with me fading in and out of consciousness. I threw up, missing the steel toilet bowl. He splashed water on my face and shouted to someone to call an ambulance. I told him not to. I didn’t want an ambulance. I wouldn’t go to hospital.
“What can I do? What can I do?” he shouted at me, gripping me by both shoulders, shaking me as I slid to the floor. “Tell me!” He slapped me hard to bring me round.
It was like I was going to burst apart. “Cut me, cut my jeans.”
He took out that sharp little knife and, asking no more questions, slit the seams of the left leg of my jeans. The calf muscle beneath was shiny and purple like a sausage in the pan.
He looked me in the face. “What’s happening to you?”
Sweat was running down his face too. Was I generating heat that fierce? The pain reached up to twist my guts. It came in wave after wave and I wished I could pass out and just stay there. “You’ll have to cut me open,” I said, and thought about asking whether the blade of his knife was clean. He stuck it
