WHAT JAIL IS LIKE‘John Lapsley Parlabane. That you stand before this court today will, I am sure, have come as a surprise to many, not least your erstwhile smug and, as it turns out, disastrously complacent self. However, to those with a more rounded experience of your methods and morality, both the beneficiaries and the victims of your self-righteous and self-appointed crusading, it will remain a source of bed-wetting astonishment that it has taken so long for the forces of the law to bring themselves to bear upon your arrogant and devious person.
‘You are, in the well-chosen words of our Prime Minister in describing your ilk, an unreconstructed wanker. To that one might add that you have infinitely more to say for yourself than your knowledge or experience could possibly justify, and that I have seldom found myself passing sentence on someone so evidently lacking the benefits of a damn good kicking.
‘You have thrust upon us your ill-informed, half-baked, out-dated and, frankly, paranoid theories for a tiresome number of years now, and the wonder of it is that anyone continued to listen long enough for you to persist with the behaviour that has ultimately led to your downfall. I would remind you, Mr Parlabane, that paranoia is often merely the flipside of egotism: both deludedly imagine the world to revolve around oneself.
‘While your journalistic exploits have occasionally enjoyed vindication in the past, it should be evident to anyone remotely cognisant with the facts that your roles in certain notorious events have been grossly exaggerated by both posterity - which is often inexplicably kind to the self-aggrandising - and by your own indulgently biased accounts. No doubt you like to depict yourself as a thorn in the flesh of the establishment, but closer to the truth would be to say that you are merely an irritant, and that the subsequent rashes are far more the result of your unwanted presence than of any defect on the part of those you choose to infect.
‘In the case of someone so self-absorbed, it is perhaps plausible that certain developments in the wider world may have escaped your notice; to wit, the inexorable passing of the years and the irrefutable testimony of the calendar, which states, if you would take note, that this is not the 1990s any more. Once upon a time, you found and to your credit exposed corruption and conspiracy among those of whom we expected better. Your problem, it strikes me, was that you did not know what to be about next. You have continued to seek out such nefariousness, but where you have not found it you have instead imagined it - and more insidiously, implied it. If I were you, I might wish to consider whether a man who finds corruption in every place he looks might perhaps be seeing the reflection of what lies within himself.
‘In the instance that has brought you before me, you arrogantly pitted yourself against an organisation far more august and enduring than the windmills at which you had tilted before; and though you were but a mosquito attacking an elephant, it cannot be ignored that this mosquito wished the elephant harm, and its bite may have done so had it not been swatted.
‘In short, Mr Parlabane, there is no place for you here in the future. This is a new Scotland, a new country, with new standards and a new morality. I must not allow it or its institutions - nascent and ancient alike - to be disparaged and prejudiced by the diseased mind of a wee shite like you. For this reason, I order that you be taken from this court, henceforth to a place of confinement, there to dwell in perpetual fear of being chibbed and humped by rabid schemies.
‘Take him down.’
Okay, so those weren’t the sheriff’s precise words, but the import was much the same, and Parlabane wasn’t arguing. No grand conspiracy had ensnared him, just his own stubbornness and complacency, in combination with a nihilistic recklessness that was unmistakably borne of wilful self-destruction. He was in the huff with the whole wide world, and indulged the negligent abandon of a wounded fool, heedless of danger because he’s convinced nothing can hurt him anymore than he’s been hurt already.
The slamming of the cell door shook him out of it and loudly begged to differ. The sheriff’s pronouncement of sentence had failed to deliver such a jolt, Parlabane meekly absorbing it with a masochistic resignation. Go on, do your worst. See if I care. You think I’m scared of pain and misery? Let me tell you about pain and misery, pal. Let me tell you what jail is really like. Loneliness? Isolation? Humiliation? Ostracisation? Tick, tick, tick, tick.
The van, the guards, the handcuffs, the prison building, none of them penetrated the cocoon of symbiotic self-pity and self-loathing. They were all part of a journey, and on journeys it’s always easy, if you wish, to blot out all thoughts of what awaits at your destination. Parlabane remembered the supreme acts of will it once took to get him to leave even a diesel-reeking railway carriage at Glasgow Central when only lectures and tutorials lay ahead. Elaborate sexual imaginings and scything ripostes to Old-Firm-biased football pundits were hardly the stuff of profound immersion, but nonetheless most mornings he was willing the train to slow. Whether it be by van, train, car or womb, coping with reality could be suspended until you reached your destination - but only until then.
In truth, it wasn’t really the slamming and locking of the reception cell that woke Parlabane from his weeks of absorption, but what happened in the immediate moments following: viz, nothing at all. The jangle of some keys, the muted echoes of shouts from somewhere else in the hall, the departing foot-steps of the warder, and after that, only the sound of his own breath.
A few seconds of that and all the things it had seemed so bloody important to be right about suddenly lost their hypnotic allure, finally revealing themselves to be as tarnished and worthless as anyone else could have told him. Or rather, as one particular person had been trying to tell him, if only he’d taken his head out of his arse long enough to hear her.
Sarah. Oh shit.
Yep, he’d really shown her, hadn’t he? She’d certainly learn her lesson now. No more stepping out of line for that one, no sirree.
Christ.
Unreconstructed wanker? Total fucking arsehole.
He sat down on the edge of the lower bunk, staring at the door, head sinking to palms, elbows in anticipatory support on his thighs.
Remind me again, he asked himself, why you thought it a constructive course of action to go breaking into the headquarters of the Scottish Catholic Church. Stumped? Too tough? All right, how about an easier one. Run by me one more time why you decided your own pride would keep you company once it had successfully alienated your wife. Maybe you’d like some more time to think about it. No prob-lem. How about six months, minus remission?
‘Awwww, fuck.’
He closed his eyes, waiting for tears, but no such comfort came. He was still too numb to feel anything but stupid.
‘Haaa! You’re gaunny greet, ya fuckin’ waaank!’
Fright ripped through Parlabane like an electro-magnetic pulse, as the voice intruded on his confinement from about a foot behind his ear. In his startlement he tried to stand up and smacked his head off the top bunk, consequently collapsing to the floor as his legs buckled beneath him.
‘Ah-hahahahahaha - fuckin’ waaank!’
He was facing away from the bed, barely able to focus, breathing rapidly through gritted teeth. He clutched both hands to the top of his head, pressing down so hard that if he had been a Striker football figurine, his right foot would have booted the ball off the table and all the way under the fridge, whence never to return. Tears, it did not escape his notice, were no problem now.
Sarah had once explained to him why applying pressure to an injury helps dull the pain: it sends supplementary information along the nerves, effectively taking up some of the brain’s sensory-processing capacity that would otherwise be more exclusively applied to acknowledging the fact that you’d just, for example, rattled your head off a metal bedframe. On this occasion, however, Parlabane felt it was more a matter of holding his skull together.
‘Ah-hahahahahaha! Fuckin’ lyin’ burlin’. Ah-hahahaha! Daft cunt.’
He blinked a few times, widened his eyes, shut them, then widened them again, strenuously beseeching the room to behave. In time, the batteries ran out on the stroboscope, and the giant who was shaking the cell like an unopened Christmas parcel finally got bored and put it down on the floor again. Parlabane tentatively lifted his fingers from his scalp, and grimaced at the sensation of stickiness. There couldn’t be many parts of the human body which didn’t make him queasy upon the secretion of moisture to the touch. Indeed, off-hand the only one he could think of wasn’t even on his body, but it would be wise to put that from his mind for a while. A long while.
Parlabane examined his fingers. There was blood, but little more than a smear. It would probably be pushing it to ask the warder whether a CT scan might be called for.
He turned his head delicately to look at the bunks. On the bottom, pressed back against the wall and leaning up on one elbow, there lay this wraith of a creature, sneering like an anorexic gargoyle. Parlabane hadn’t noticed anyone else in the cell when he was brought in, and though he would admit his own dedicated obliviousness could account for certain observational deficiencies, it nonetheless failed to explain entirely how he could miss the fact that the bed he’d sat down on was already occupied. But then, that was because he was used to people existing in three dimensions. This sliver barely put a ripple in the blanket.
‘Fuckin’ never saw me there, did ye? Fuckin’ daft cunt. Hahahahaha.’
It was initially difficult to make out a face atop what the sliver was attempting to pass off as a body - at least until you knew what you were looking for. The bloke’s skin was a bluey-grey colour that would have had any competent physician diving for the intubation kit, and which, by what Parlabane sincerely hoped was coincidence, matched the walls of the cell to within a pantone. When he laughed - which had so far been about sixty percent of the time - he wore an expression that suggested he was simultaneously attempting to pass an agricultural implement, with the subsidiary effect of stretching his skin so tight across his face that there seemed a tangible danger of his cheekbones bursting through the pallid membrane. Fortunately, he didn’t appear to have any cheekbones. Evolution, Parlabane reflected, could be awful clever that way.
He patted tenderly at his scalp again. It was still seeping, the reverberations continuing to shudder through his head in time with his pulse. He had a look at the ascent required to reach the top bunk and opted to stay crumpled on the floor for a few more minutes’ convalescence.
‘Fooaltiyeman, that looked fuckin’ sair. Hahahahahaha. Fuckin’ daft cunt.’
The sliver adjusted his reclining posture, shuffling forwards from the wall, presumably to afford himself a better view of the ongoing daft-cuntery.
‘Serve ye fuckin’ right, sittin’ there when it’s ma fuckin’ bed.’
With his sleeve having fallen away from it a couple of inches, Parlabane could now more clearly see the grey twiglet of arm that was implausibly supporting Sliver’s head. It looked as though all it would take to snap the thing would be for a fly to alight on his nose, but Parlabane knew better than to assume his appearance was any reflection on his ability to look after himself. He certainly wasn’t about to put it to the test by telling him to shut the fuck up. Nonetheless, Parlabane felt sure, if Sliver had been in Belsen, his nickname would have been ‘Slim’.
‘Sorry,’ he managed quietly. ‘I’ll take the top one, shall I?’
‘Fuckin’ right ye will. Go up there an’ greet.’
‘In a minute.’
‘Fuckin’ first time, innit, eh? Fuckin’ never been in the jile afore, huv ye? Ahhh, fuckin’ shitin’ it I bet, fuckinnn. Ahh-haa. Fuckin’ - Fooaltiyeman, I don’t fuckin’ like the look o’ your fuckin’ chances man, ne’er I don’t. Fuckin’ sideyways for you, pal, mark my fuckin’ words. Fuckin’ daft cunt. Fooaltiye, I’ve been inside a few times, man, fuckin’ seen it aw afore, man, fuckin’ awyit, an’ fuckin’ - fuckin’ cunts like you, naw, man, hahaha, don’t fuckin’ fancy ye, altiye. Haha. Fuckin’ sideyways. Fuckin’ twirly sheets job, man, altiye. Ahh-haaaah. Fuckin’ waaank.’
Parlabane, even in his embattled, embittered and em, just-hit-his-head-off-an-iron-bedframe state, retained sufficient presence of mind to appreciate the significance of the moment. As a man who scornfully disapproved of inappropriate superlatives, he could honestly say he was now in the presence of the least charming person he had ever met. Given that he worked in the journalism trade, and that through his wife he had unavoidably met a number of surgeons, this was saying something.
‘Fooaltiyeman, I’ve seen your type afore, many a time. Many. A. Fu. Kin. Time. Fooaltiye, fuckin’ easy meat, man, that’s you, fuckinnnn ah-haa.’
Parlabane felt an enormous temptation to point at him, narrow his eyes and say: ‘Gordonstoun? No, no, no, that’s right. Fettes, Fettes.’ Resisting was assisted by the thought that he had precipitated the previous torrents merely by being in the same cell. Actually upsetting the cadaverous bastard was, as Sarah might put it, contraindicated.
He winced at the phrase, the remembered sound of her voice in his head. It was like pouring Tabasco sauce on to his injured scalp. Daft cunt right enough. Fuckin’ wank. Ahh-haaa. Fuckinnnn.
Without warning or apparent explanation, something evidently occurred to Sliver (or ‘Fooaltiye’, as Parlabane was beginning to think of him). He softened his expression and leaned that bit further forward. The effect on his face was to make it look like merely a death-mask, as opposed to an atrophied skull, but the intention was clearly solicitous.
‘Nah mate, just kiddin ye oan like n’at, know? Just a fuckin’ wee joke, man, fuckinnn. I mean, ye aw-right like? Ye awright? Banged your heid? Fooaltiye, looked fuckin’ sair, man, so it did. Ye awright?’
What, Parlabane wondered, could possibly have caused this impromptu volte-face (or volte-skull if he was being pedantic)? What pacific thought could have tamed the rage in this tormented and misunderstood young man’s heart?
‘Ye any fags?’
That would be it, then.
‘Sorry, I don’t smoke.’
‘Fuck’s sake. Aye right. Naw, ne’er ye dae. Fuckinnn. Altiyeman, it’s amazin’. Nae cunt smokes in this place, no when ye fuckin’ tap them anyway. Fuckinn. Come oan, ya cunt. Just gie’s a fag. Just wan. Fuck’s sake.’
Parlabane felt an amplified throb in his head as Fooaltiye raised his voice. Despite the distraction of pain, his detective skills had successfully decoded the human skelf’s eponymous, punctuatory ejaculation. He had achieved this through the cryptographic technique of comparing its constituent variants: Fooaltiyeman, Fooaltiye, Altiyeman and just plain Altiye. Translated from the primitive and obscure ‘Prick’ dialect, it meant ‘Phew, I’ll tell you, man -’ and heralded an observation of deepest wisdom.
‘I don’t smoke,’ Parlabane repeated, slowly, quietly, every word’s resonation giving his napper another twinge.
‘Awww, fuck’s sake, man. Fuckinnn, come on, man. If I had some I’d gie you wan, ’mon tae fuck. Just fuckin’ cough, man, just wan, ’mon.’
Parlabane cradled his head again as the throbbing threatened to resume its previous intensity.
‘I don’t smoke. I never have.’
‘Right.’
There was a flurry of dark and light greys as the bottom bunk’s blanket billowed angrily and Fooaltiye emerged from beneath it. He hopped down to the floor and squatted in front of Parlabane, scrawny, pale and sweatily greasy: Smeagol with a habit.
‘Fuckin’ stop an’ search time, ya cunt. An’ altiye, if I fuckin’ fin’ any fags, you’re gettin’ a fuckin’ skelp, man. Alfuckintiye.’
Fooaltiye was in his face, his emaciated and pock-marked limbs seeming to enclose Parlabane. Hands patted him down, a bony knee pressed into his ribs, and from his dental write-off of a mouth there wafted vapours internationally outlawed since the First World War.
Parlabane just sat there, motionless, unresisting, head-bowed, feeling the utter humiliation of his vulnerability. This was what he had brought himself to: being menaced by some junky scrote practically half his age, and being too fucking scared to do anything about it but close his eyes and wait for it to be over.
What the hell could he do? On the outside he’d once been a man of boundless (and, when necessary, lawless) resources, all of which could be put to use in compensating for the fact that when it came to physical brutality, he wouldn’t last three rounds with Tweety-Pie. He’d always been slight, but with it had come the benefits of a low centre of gravity and a blessed gift in the middle-ear department. Balance and aim came easily, which in his schooldays had made him a fairly nippy winger in the classic Scottish ‘irritating wee bastard’ mould. In later life they had afforded an unusual (but frequently utilised) facility for negotiating the exteriors of otherwise inaccessible premises; and an even more dubious subsidiary bonus was that they also made him a natural shot. These abilities, together with a connoisseur’s eye for subterfuge, had allowed him to evade the malice and vengeance of billionaires, politicians, conspirators, crooks, thugs and professional assassins on two continents.
None of them, however, were any use one-on-one in a Saughton jail-cell, with his brain still reverberating and his sense of self at a record low. Fooaltiye was hardly likely to be the worst of it, either.
The patting-down ceased with a loud tut and a ‘fuck’s sake’. Fooaltiye got up and returned to his lair on the bottom bunk. Parlabane remained staring at the floor, fearing that if he stood up, he’d find himself less than an inch tall.
‘Fuckin’ waank. Fuckin’ nae use tae nae cunt, fuck’s sake.’
Parlabane harboured fleeting thoughts of the Beretta once secreted in his flat in East London Street. Childish. He glanced up at Fooaltiye, his revenge fantasy mutating absurdly. The scrawny bawhair became the Emperor Palpatine, the Beretta sitting on the arm of his chair. ‘You want...this... don’t you?’
Get over it. Get used to it.
‘Fuck’s sake, man. Nae fuckin’ fags. Aww, fuck, man. I’m fuckin’ dyin’ man, altiye. Fuckin’ nuhin since this mornin’ man, fuckin’ chronic, man. Altiye, s’gaunny be ’oors afore we get sorted oot here - an’ that means fuckin’ ’oors afore I can get sorted oot, if ye ken whit I mean. Fuckinnn... take their time, so they will, the fuckin’ screws. You might as well get comfy, ya cunt, ’cause we’re gaun nae-where. Aww, s’gaunny be murder, man, fuuuck. Fuckin’ need somethin’ man. Just a fuckin’ fag would dae me the noo.’
This was the closest thing to helpful advice he was likely to get. It would indeed be a while - maybe even overnight, given the hour already - before the powers-that-be decided more specifically what they were going to do with him. He eyed the upper bunk. The brain-rattling exertions of the ascent would be rewarded with the convalescent opportunities of a lie-down, and maybe with a little luck the whole fucking thing might collapse and crush Kate Moss down there to death.
Unfortunately, the solidity suggested by the frame’s earlier impact on Parlabane’s head was borne out when he stretched himself upon the mattress, itself possibly the only thing in the building skinnier than his cell-mate. Rest was to be found only in the strict, physically immobile sense, as Fooaltiye’s garrulousness was not impeded by Parlabane’s retreat to bed anymore than it had been by his serial refusal to in any way engage him. Fooaltiye, he gathered, was just a trifle anxious about a certain chemical imbalance which he wished to remedy at the earliest possible juncture, and his forced abstention from even so much as a skinny roll-up was somewhat limiting the scope of his conversational motifs.
‘Aww, fuck, man, altiye, I’m fuckin’ sufferin’ here, man, so I am. Fuckinnn.’
Good, Parlabane thought, before calculating the greater ramifications, principally those affecting the likelihood of the bugger shutting up about it. He wasn’t worried about anything more dramatic, having benefited from the dual perspectives on overnight smackhead behaviour offered by Sarah, as an anaesthetist, and their friend Jenny Dalziel, as a cop. In hospital, incapacitated and cut off from their supply, Sarah said they invariably went totally candyfloss, trying to convince the heartless bastard staff that the very demons of hell had been unleashed upon them by their excruciating withdrawal. The goal of these scenery-chewing performances was to elicit any pharmaceuticals the docs might be willing to part with for the sake of a quiet night.
Down at the cells, however, Jenny insisted it was a very different story. They knew they were in for the night, knew there was absolutely no chance of getting anything more exhilarating than a good kick in the balls for their troubles, so they were good as gold, co-operating in any way that would more quickly expedite getting back on the street. French Connection 2 reconstructions were very few and far between. They just sat tight, sniffed and sweated, waited for their statutory roll and sausage in the morning, then fucked off as soon as the polis let them.
Fooaltiye wouldn’t go nuts, Parlabane knew, but more worryingly, he had a literally captive audience, and very little sensitivity to how his material was going down. He tried holding the pillow to his ears, but it was too flimsy to do more than slightly muffle the interminable soliloquy, and given that Fooaltiye’s vocabulary was barely into three figures, nor was there any danger of losing the import through missing some subtle nuance.
The defining aspect of this latterday epic - The Sweariad, as Parlabane had begun thinking of it after the first hour or so - was not Fooaltiye’s anally detailed odyssey through the Fabled Realms of Skag; nor even his evocative descriptions of tonight’s anguished deprivation; but his exemplary employment of Junkie Logic. This was a phenomenon of which he had often heard both Sarah and Jenny talk, in terms of awe and wonder. (The awe was as in ‘awe fuck, here he goes again’; the wonder as in ‘I wonder if this arsehole really thinks anybody is so fucking stupid as to believe that?’)
Junkie logic was tortuously complicated, fashioning elaborately structured equations that required exhausting powers of imagination to construct, and complementarily vast faculties of comprehension to follow. Hawking, it was rumoured, had considered a book on the subject, but shat it when he decided he wasn’t sure he could pull it off. However, if like him you found it all too intimidatingly complex, there was always a simple primer, which is that it all ultimately adds up to an exercise in demonstrating how everything that has ever gone wrong in the life of the said junkie was entirely the fault and responsibility of someone else.
‘Thae Tamazepams, man,’ said Fooaltiye, for instance, ‘fuckin’ doctors shouldnae be allowed tae gie them oot. Altiyeman, fuckin’ mate o’ mine lost a fuckin’ leg ’cause o’ thae fuckin’ things, man. Fuckin’ lost a leg. Fuckin’ injectin’ thae jellies, fuckin’ clogged up his veins, man. An’ fuckin’ doctors are giein them oot? Fuckin’ disgrace, altiye. Shoulda been fuckin’ banned yonks ago, man, if you cannae fuckin’ inject the fuckin’ things withoot them gummin’ up your fuckin’ veins. What fuckin’ good are they then, man? I mean, whit stupit cunt thought that up - puttin’ the stuff in fuckin’ jellies? Know fuckin’ nothin’ these doctor cunts, altiye.’
Parlabane stifled an anguished moan. He remembered the old joke about a new arrival in hell. The bloke gets shown a door and told, ‘You’re in there,’ by his accompanying imp. When he gets inside, he finds a bunch of men sitting up to their necks in shit, drinking cups of tea. ‘This isn’t so bad,’ he tells himself. ‘Get used to the smell and it might even seem quite civilised.’ At which point another imp sticks his head round the door and says: ‘Right lads, tea-break’s over. Back on your heids.’
The difference in Parlabane’s case was that right then he’d prefer to be on his head. Just as long as the keech completely insulated his ears.
‘Aw here, wait a minute. Wait. A. Wee. Minute. Here. Yessss!’
He couldn’t help looking over the side to investigate the creature’s sudden discovery, his curiosity engaged by the sheer unlikelihood of anything in any way consumable lying unused and undiscovered in a tiny prison cell. The concept of a stray fag lying unclaimed under the table was about as plausible as a stray tuppence lying unclaimed in Aberdeen.
Fooaltiye, however, was a creature of either deeper faith or greater vision. He hopped from the bed and scuttled a couple of feet across the floor, reinforcing Parlabane’s Smeagol comparison.
‘Fuckin’ beauty, man.’
Fooaltiye placed his prize on the tabletop. Parlabane was, he would admit, a comparative ingenu in the world of serious drug usage, but he felt confident enough in his limited knowledge to be able to identify this treasured object as a teabag. In fact, a retired teabag might be more like it, the shrivelled and dried-out little thing having been pensioned off to a dusty corner of the cell after an arduous and over-long working life. Fooaltiye, to Parlabane’s growing incredulity, placed a Rizla next to the teabag before picking the perforated paper open and dumping its contents on to the skin. Or rather, half its contents, as it would clearly be a shocking extravagance to waste the lot on just one roll-up.
Implausibly, the improvised cigarettes did in fact have the desired effect; or at least the effect desired by Parlabane, which was to stop Fooaltiye talking for a while. What they did for wraith-boy he couldn’t care less. The smell, predictably, was revolting; Parlabane found it hard to think of descriptive comparisons, but was still sure that if Jilly Goolden got a whiff, she’d be applying it to a new cabernet-blanc varietal within the month.
The reason for Fooaltiye’s silence was less the placebo effect of his faux-fags than their stubborn lack of combustibility. The sound of matches being struck and fizzing into light soon established a near-rhythmic regularity, interspersed in syncopation with fevered bouts of sucking and disappointed ‘fuck’s sake’s. The bugger was probably inhaling more sulphur dioxide than whatever insipid fumes could be drawn from the exhausted herbs, and it entertained Parlabane to imagine it turning into oleum somewhere around Fooaltiye’s tonsils, then burning through his vocal chords with a smoky hiss.
The sounds of doors slamming and locks turning echoed from beyond the cell, resonantly audible now that Fooaltiye’s mouth was otherwise engaged. At first, Parlabane expected each thump and clatter to herald the arrival of the warder who would advise him of his security category and escort him to his more permanent quarters. No-one came, though. The sounds continued, merely the noises of a prison systematically getting on with its business, of which he was now a small and not particularly significant part.
Fear and humiliation had given way to banality and tedium, and it was the latter two that truly brought home what he was now stuck with. Not the vulnerability, the indignity or the danger of his situation, but the inexorable onset of its mundanity. He sighed, deeply, doing so before it occurred to him that it might attract Fooaltiye’s interest. Fortunately, the sliver wasn’t equipped for multi-tasking, so couldn’t listen and concentrate on keeping his fag lit at the same time.
It was a good time to ask himself what the hell had gone wrong. Not as good, admittedly, as a few weeks back, when technically it was still in his gift not to fuck up, but that was by the by. What mattered was the question of what had led him to the course of actions that had in turn led him to this cell; what had caused him to lose his rationality, his perspective and ultimately his freedom; and what had changed him from Jack Parlabane, investigative hack, to Parlabane, John, 46967.
Tricky.
In his guilt-ridden state, it was not a struggle to lay the responsibility on his own pride and his own stupidity. Certainly, if he needed a reminder of the level of self-knowledge attained by blaming society at large for your own shortcomings, he only had to breathe in the whiff of burnt, stale tea permeating the cell. However, despite the curious comforts of self-flagellation, he was wise enough to understand that it was equally useless to divorce what he had done from the circumstances in which he had done it. The whole country, let’s face it, had gone a little nuts, and while it wasn’t an excuse, it was still part of the equation.
So had he been punished for being the one sane man fighting the cause of reason in a world gone crazy? Or had he been himself infected by the moralistic madness, and lost his sense of judgement as a consequence? The truth, he suspected, lay somewhere in between.
The political climate had altered suddenly and violently, something which, in Parlabane’s experience, political climates seldom did. New eras in politics were not precipitous. They didn’t dawn, no matter how many fanfares were sounded. They took shape slowly and subtly, and you didn’t realise you were in the midst of change until that change was irreversibly underway.
In the natural world, radical climatic change could be precipitated by nothing less than a disaster, such as a meteor strike or a volcanic eruption. The political world was little different, except that its disasters were invariably of the victims’ own making. In the case of both, power fell to those already equipped to cope with the new conditions, and to those others who were quickest to adapt. Parlabane hadn’t adapted. This was due to a combination of disbelief and wilful intransigence.
He had been ready for a lot of things about post-devolution Scottish politics. The much-bemoaned sense of anti-climax was, to his mind, inevitable; he didn’t remember any party’s manifesto promising a Socialist Utopia (Creation of) bill, least of all New Labour’s.
The teething troubles, the jostlings, the stumblings and the embarrassments were also inevitable. The new parliament was an infant with much growing to do; it wasn’t supposed to spring fully formed from the loins of Zeus.
That Labour LiteTM should continue to fortify its centre-right comfort zone, while cloaking it in nauseatingly touchy-feely rhetoric, was no great surprise. That the SNP should respond with leftist posturing, and that the impression should be less convincing than Alex Salmond in a silk négligé, was no great surprise. That the Tories should continue to exert as much influence as a pissed conscience over a stiff prick, no matter how much tartanry they affected, was also no great surprise. In fact, that this new, allegedly consensual and co-operative era of Scottish politics should very quickly begin to resemble all the old, back-stabbing, eye-gouging eras was pretty much what Parlabane expected.
Cynical as he knew this sounded, he nonetheless did expect that progress would ultimately be made. Change, though, would be incremental, not dramatic. Donald Dewar’s first-term agenda was rightly decried as a hyper-cautious and anodyne snooze-fest, but there was also an argument for getting used to the new vehicle with a few slow laps before you tried flooring the accelerator.
And for a while progress was being made, though maybe not so much by politics than in politics, which was arguably even more important. With the excuse of blaming the English now inadmissible (or at least, in the SNP’s case, mutated into blaming ‘London-controlled Labour’), a clearer sense of political self-identity was beginning to emerge. The agenda was, if not dictated, at least and at last influenced by the issues the Scottish electorate were vocally concerned about, rather than by what effect a Daily Mail front page might have on the swithering classes down south.
With comparing themselves and their behaviour to England no longer relevant (if it ever was), the Scots were forced to take a more honest look at who they really were. Racism, for instance, had been their grubby little secret for the best part of a century, from the Church of Scotland’s infamous pamphlet on The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality, to the revelation that the instance of assault on ethnic minorities was three times the UK average. ‘Wha’s like us?’ myths of a warm-hearted and liberal nation had long been reinforced by head-shaking (but secretly delighted) disapproval as English football thugs laid waste another foreign city. Bereft of such distractions, and perhaps now in possession of sufficient confidence, Scotland was beginning to acknowledge what it didn’t like about itself as well as re-evaluating the often suspect worth of what it did. Whether this led to any of it actually getting sorted out was, of course, another matter, but it was undeniably, like a hundred dead spin-doctors, a start.
The whole thing was a start. It was the kind of opportunity history seldom afforded: to begin again and do it differently next time. To create something new, and in so doing, purge whatever had corrupted version 1.1. Hence the widespread anxiety that whatever we had created should work, and that it should not repeat the mistakes that necessitated its creation in the first place.
This led to disproportionate public censure of early outbreaks of confrontational, point-scoring exchanges (thereafter referred to with gleeful scorn as ‘Westminster-style’ politics). Equally disproportionate were the appalled reactions of seasoned commentators to the rather rough-and-ready contributions of certain MSPs not schooled in the starchier formalities of public speaking. But all of this was perfectly natural: the creation was in infancy, and to the concerned parent, every minor blemish can look like a potential deformity; every anomaly the onset of fatal disease. In time, though, the wee bugger usually thrives.
The definition of ‘thriving’ was, of course, entirely subjective. It was said that if you had low expectations, you couldn’t be disappointed, but in Parlabane’s experience of politicians, no matter how low you set the threshold, they could still contrive to come up short. That they hadn’t might still say as much about his standards as about their achievements, but nonetheless his impression of post-devolution Scotland had been that it was no better than he’d hoped for and no worse than he’d feared.
There had even been the odd glimpse of something that might, in a certain light, be taken for maturity. The Peter Logan thing, for example. Some regarded the fact that he hung on to his post after that as the ultimate dubious testimony to Labour Lite’s spin capabilities. However, Parlabane knew they’d never have managed it - never attempted it - if they didn’t think people’s priorities and perspectives had changed. Cabinet careers, it seemed, were no longer going to be in the gift of the tabloids, and if the Churches wanted to talk about morality, they would maybe have to start looking beyond the crotch for a fucking change.
It was a pity the cause célèbre had to be that self-satisfied knob-end, but it would have been churlish not to see the bigger picture. Joe Punter certainly had, and that, Parlabane thought, constituted serious grounds for optimism.
But that was months ago. September. Before the meteor-strike. Before the disaster and its relentlessly corrosive fall-out.