~𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝘄𝗲'𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘀𝗵, 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗲, 𝘄𝗲'𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗲𝗲𝘇𝗲, 𝘄𝗲'𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗲𝘁𝘀, 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘀𝗵, 𝗺𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘆𝗼𝘂, 𝗶𝘁'𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗲 𝗱𝗼~
Renton wasn't a particularly pretty boy. Especially when he was using. His eyes were red and raw most hours of the day, his skin was pasty and ashy until she reached his fingertips; pale blue like the bruises she was adorned with. He was a skimpy lad - her sister would have been able to snap him simply by lifting her hand.
But when she was high, he was the most beautiful thing in the universe. Her and Renton would shoot up together in the flat and lay there for hours. Part of her knew it was purely because he yearned to be comforted and just to hold something, but she liked to imagine that there was a purpose behind the warmth in him holding the side of her face. Even early on, he would hold her to his chest, spine pressed straight against the floor, and they would sink together. She melted through him, into him, until she was a puddle of love witnessing the world pass by. His heartbeat pounded softly through her head with a sound infinitely more comforting than her mother singing her to sleep as if she were an infant swaddled in cotton.
She lit a cigarette with what little strength remained in her arms and blew smoke upwards, remarking in a slur, 'What were you saying about an orgasm?'
Mark scoffed. 'This. Don't you think it's better than your most mind-shitting orgasm ten thousand times over?'
'Wouldn't know.'
'Never had a good one? Sick Boy never kept up after his own?'
Her head moved further into his fusty t-shirt as she grinned and breathed him in. Her hand moved to his mouth, allowing a few puffs of the Russian imported cigarettes from Mother Superior, more importantly allowing him to taste the traces of where her lips had been. Ordinarily, he'd be sharing five cigarettes a day with her or Sick Boy or Begbie, but again, it was different when they were using. The filter was the most delightful, divine thing that had ever touched his lips. So heavenly, in fact, that it made him want to eliminate the middle man altogether. He gazed down the contours of his own nose to see hers pointing to the rotting ceiling, and below that were her lips. He might have done it if he could have brought himself to even sit upright.
'Listen-' his hand obliviously drew shapes on her stomach where her top had ridden up- 'we'll make that right one night, eh? You can hold me to it.'
'I fuckin will, Rent.' She took a few longer, more exaggerated drags from what her sister liked to call a "coffin nail". 'Sick Boy won't be happy with you, though.'
'Why won't I be happy? What could you possibly have done to make my life worse?' a rather grating, loud voice clamored. The bleach blonde crouched in front of them.
'Sick Boy!' she cheered and forced herself into a sitting position. It was the happiest he'd ever seen her. She leaned forward and cupped his cheeks, cigarette placed between her index and middle finger, and kissed him rather lovingly.
He grimaced, but he also kissed her back for the few moments before she pulled away. 'What the fuck do you think you're doing, girl?'
'Why is it,' she licked her lips, 'that in all that time me and you were together, I never had a good orgasm without using my own fucking fingers?'
Renton burst out into hysterics. It took an embarrassingly short time for her to choke on the smoke in her lungs and blow it into Sick Boy's face, collapsing back onto the floor with Mark - trembling with disembodied laughter - breaking her fall.
He had trouble recollecting when, exactly, Lana and Sick Boy started messing around with each other professionally, but he remembered seeing them kiss for the first time. He'd been waiting at the bathroom door for hours, knocking every ten minutes and receiving only a groan in response. Simon Williamson had pranced by, inquired what was going on, and instantly assumed a concerned look. Mark might have taken it all a little more seriously, too, if he hadn't been off his face.
Sick Boy pounded down the door, convinced that she'd overdosed, only to be met with the girl contently staring at the ceiling, nodding out, still on the toilet.
'Lana?' he'd asked cautiously.
'Sick Boy,' she'd greeted him delightfully.
Mark watched from the door as relief flooded through his best friend with such power that he felt compelled to stride over, forcefully grab her face, and kiss her quite harshly. From then on, they would fight and make up every other week for a few years, ultimately ending after he took it upon himself to sleep with Allison out of revenge. After all, it wasn't just the illness of addiction that gained Sick Boy his name. Lana had ended it quite loudly once she found them in bed together, coincidentally the night baby Dawn was conceived, and ran out into the street with intensions of another hit and copious amounts of alcohol.
Against his better judgement, Mark had followed her out, administered her hit with a clean needle, and took her out to the club to take her mind off things. Though there were occasional comments and digs at both Lana and Sick Boy for ever dating each other in the first place, the group largely pretended it didn't happen. Or they didn't remember - it was hard to tell sometimes.
Gradually, she nodded out on the floor of what had become a squat as she stared at the side of Renton's face. She used to think they were falling asleep after the hit but once she tried it for herself, Lana understood that a distinct sensation would overtake the victim and give them no choice but to relax into a state of complete comfort. Lana was laying in the middle of a field wrapped in cool sheets, the sun absorbing her pain through her skin. Everyone she knew was waiting for her beyond the forest in the distance.
'Rent, it's so...' She reached for him and suddenly, laying in the grass beside her, he was there.
'What?' he inquired, his voice clearer than the world surrounding her.
'It's so lovely. You're so lovely,' she very nearly moaned.
'How much did you hit, girl?'
'Mm... maybe a little more. But it's okay. It's all... better.'
____________________
The pub. The place where all jollities and hopes came to die. It was early afternoon by the time Lana had regained mental stability and was beginning to feel a little less hazy and wishful, therefore she sought to adopt a slightly more conventional stimulant to replace the sinking that would become apparent when the comfort died away.
Luckily for her, most of her friends were addicts in their own private ways, and the more societally acceptable of the group simply could not stop themselves gorging on substance. There would be uproar if as many junkies roamed the streets as drunks did. But while Lana was banished from her household before she could finish growing, her best childhood friend - Myra Rodgers - was free to sit in corners of clubs with cigarettes and to be held by her mother and offered yet another glass of wine when she was rather unceremoniously dumped by her fiancé.
She liked to pretend she was one of them. There was an incredible freedom in acting as if she wasn't tied down with the drawbacks of heroin. She would put on makeup and a top that would stray up her waist and lie to people who asked how she was doing.
But not today. Lana saw no reason for performance for a group of furious twenty-somethings, only one snide remark away from slashing each other with busted bottles to relieve their constant ache for entertainment. An inescapable desire for sex, drugs, booze. All three at once, if they were lucky.
Thus, she sat at the table with her hand pressed into the side of her face, strands of once lustrous hair hanging limp like a curtain to mask the shame. Ordinarily, Lana wasn't a necessarily bad-looking girl. She dressed the same way anyone her age did and the bone structure of her face was reasonably desirable, though these could be looked past quite easily when one observed the expression fused to her face, carved into her features. For each location Renton had ever taken her to, she increasingly resembled a child who didn't want to be there.
'You look like a bairn in a courthouse.'
Drearily, her eyes followed the shape of his body to reach his face. Grimacing at the foul taste in her mouth, she croaked, 'Are you wearing my shirt?'
Under Begbie's unwavering gaze, he instantly barked, 'No!'
Despite vividly remembering her Aunt Linda giving her the top for her seventeenth birthday, Lana nodded and looked down with inquiries of what she was wearing herself. The shoes on her feet were not her own, if she thought hard enough she could remember changing her underpants a few days ago. She'd been dragged from the flat with such desperation for a drink that she didn't look at what she was doing.
Opening her mouth to ask if they belonged to him, she focused on Renton once more only to meet his mellowed eyes with shocking immediacy. While Sick Boy ranted on about his warped aspirations and solutions to life's problems, Lana continued to watch the young man with a shaven head under a cloud of cigarette smoke and the mental sensation of wanting to crawl under his skin glimpsed across her thoughts.
The idea irked her with such intensity that she physically shifted, not noticing Mark break his gaze with a smirk, and asked loudly, 'Anyone?'
Seven hands were raised, eliciting a groan as she dragged herself to her feet.
'Same again?'
Seven sets of nods. Lana spun with her stranger's shoes against the filthy pub carpet and headed to the bar to empty her pockets. She carried three glasses in each hand and rested them in front of every one of her friends at the table, remarking as she returned to place her own on a stained beer mat, 'I'm off for a piss. If I find out you put your cock in my drink again, I'll cut it off in your sleep.' Her eyes shot daggers at Sick Boy.
'I wouldn't,' he said defensively. 'You know how it tastes already, don't you?'
Begbie clapped a hand on his shoulder, roaring out a hoarse laugh, and cheered, 'Good on ya, boy. That reminds me of this lass last week-'
Lana moped to the toilets before she could hear another word from him, for she feared a further sentence from that man's throat might tempt her to pour the liquid from his drink and shatter the glass in a sharp dash to the front of her own skull. There was an urgency in her hands locking the stall door behind her, much more so in her unbuttoning her trousers and pulling them down as she realised just how badly she needed it. Her brows furrowed over the state of her underwear - when she got back to her place that evening, she would turn them inside out having discovered there were none left.
All mundane tasks were interlaced by a persistent hunger deep in her stomach - occasionally graduating into a black hole that destroyed everything around her on the worse days - but most commonly an itchy void that, once finally scratched, would weep and bleed into life's crevices. Yet each time she scratched the itch, the insatiable demand for stimulation, the leakage caused further damage to the foundations, became increasingly harder to clean. The result was that of a faulty human being; one that remained sat on pub toilets far beyond what was considered a normal measure of time simply because what lay beyond that confined space was too painful to navigate without scratching.
'Lana? Do you need a tampon?' Lizzie called out into the toilets.
'No!' she almost screamed. 'I need another fucking hit!' She kicked the rickety stall door and toilet roll dispenser in succession.
'God, I wouldn't dream of injecting myself with that cancerous shit.' Her voice warped in a way that only indicated she was applying lipstick in the dusty mirror.
'Lizzie?'
'What?'
'Have you got a tampon?' Lana asked as she dug through her jeans pockets, which remained situated in bunches around her ankles.
'Yeah.'
'Applicator too?'
'What are you? Fourteen?'
'No! I use pads, don't I?' she said rhetorically.
The required equipment was passed beneath the stall door.
'I'll be back in a minute or so, Lizzie!' Lana announced and, so as not to arouse suspicion, added, 'You know how it is - I stopped using tampons a while back. The size was reminding me of Sick Boy.'
Lizzie cackled and returned to the table to continue nattering with everyone else as her friend very nearly folded over sat on the toilet, the applicator shoved halfway up her nose as she followed the lines on her thigh.
With the front of her face completely numb, Lana emerged into the pub, nostrils flared and eyes wide. Renton stood at the bar by himself and, though she told herself to return to her initial seat, she found her body getting closer to his. Her feet led her to him. It was pure luck on her part that her hands didn't reach out to him. Rent Boy - the tranquility and warmth barely remaining as a flickering lamp in the sea that drowned her.
'You alright?'
Fuck. He was speaking.
'I'm fuckin brilliant,' she replied stoically.
'You look cracked out.'
'I wish.'
He nodded. There was a long silence as she leaned against the varnished wood and played with the beer mats. Lana yearned to speak now, to talk about nothing in particular for twenty minutes, but Renton's decided pause held her tongue as she tapped her feet and fingertips across anything she could reach. She was rewarded for her begrudging cooperation when Mark - after countless minutes and countless drags - finally looked at her more directly and said, 'I'm gonna get clean.'
'Why are you telling me?'
'Because I think you should, too.'
Rather amusedly, she sat down on one of the uneven bar stools and scoffed, 'Why?'
Renton mirrored her. 'Because. Where does it end otherwise? In a fucking casket for us, Lana. That's where it ends.'
'What happened to you between us sat on the floor and me exiting that shitter? You sound like adverts.' Lana impatiently fumbled for a cigarette in her jumper pockets. She wasn't in the mood for sharing. 'Don't get me wrong, go ahead with yourself. Ensure that I bury you of old age and not a fuckin overdose. But it's got as much to do with me as the wank stain on the wall back at the flat.'
'Look, I wouldn't be askin this if I didn't mean it, like.'
'You'd be better off talking to Spud. The poor bastard's more likely to sober up over you telling him what to do, never mind his own bloody moral compass.'
Mark was sure his own had been shattered years ago. Though she gazed upon him with unmistakable adoration, her undivided attention earning him the greatest possible amount of self-confidence, he also recognised the wildness causing her pupils to pulsate. He watched Lana twitch and still, she refused to acknowledge the rush as long as he required her to be present.
Quietly, he said, 'I'm not talking to Spud. I'm talking to you and - without any disrespect, Lana - I'm telling you now because of what we said earlier. I wouldn't shag you on heroin.'
Lana paused, half-tempted to smack him. 'What the fuck did we say earlier?'
Mark threw back his head in agitation, although the sudden movement proved extremely painful and thus, he found himself having to play it off (with little success) by rubbing the back of his neck and buzzed head. 'I said we'd put your finishing problems to rest, didn't I?' he explained a little too loudly for comfort.
Her face practically lit up. 'You meant that?'
'Yeah, I fuckin meant it. Brief though the comment may have been, it wasn't a lie.'
Lana tilted her head. 'How sober are you?'
'Dreadfully.' He grimaced. 'I would throttle a man for some Valium.'
'You dumb fuck!' She stood up instantly. Lana had experienced the withdrawals of heroin once. It had been so horrifying that she gave in after a few hours and hadn't once looked back. 'Rent, you've got to come out easy. If you don't, you'll regret it forever.'
'And why the fuck would I consult you on this, eh? Miss Gardyns - hardly finished chasing those lines she depends on as she walks out the rank pub bogs.'
She rolled her eyes so hard it made her brain burn. 'What do I have to say to get you to go on methadone instead?'
Mark craned his neck to get one last good look at her face. 'Say you'll get clean too. Sick Boy's already started just to take the piss.' He gulped through the torturous headache. 'Come on, Lana. Don't make me say it.'
Instantly, she began vigorously shaking her head. 'Don't fucking dare, Rent.' She would have rather been a sober civilian who had never discovered drugs than hear those words again. Something about the combination of the phrase haunted her, tempted her to drop to her knees when she heard it. It was something of a dissonant harmony that deepened the wounds in her soul. It restored the terrible itch in her stomach. 'I'll do it, just don't say that shit.'