A Transit smashes through the iron gates of a cemetery and four women clad in
bridal white spill out with shovels. They drag a corpse from the wet earth,
then career through the streets of Edinburgh in search of other, living
victims. A trembling Welshman and a cocky joyrider are bundled into the back
at gunpoint, then the van arrives at a church and the foursome sweep through
the doors, a shiny silver Magnum carried before them like a cross. “This is
a house of God,” cries the priest. “God moved out the day you moved in,” one
replies, and he’s trussed in the Transit before you can say “Hail, Mary”.
One fast cut later and the men are kneeling, hands tied tight, at the edge of
a deserted Leith dockside. One by one, the women step forward and place a
bullet in the skull of the wretch before them. With steps so well
synchronised they could be a dance troupe, they kick forwards and the bodies
plunge into the dark waters below. The women pause for a moment, then turn
and make for the van, shoulders back and heads held high. Four Weddings and
a Funeral? Four Murders and a Drugs Binge maybe. This is Irvine Welsh, after
all.
And yet behind the obvious mayhem of his first full-length drama for TV,
there is a different version of Welsh emerging. Sure, there is bestiality,
incest, necrophilia, booze, violence and drugs, ranging from crack cocaine
to cheap amphetamines. The story of Wedding Belles, however, is one of four
women’s friendship and how it is tested as one of them approaches her
wedding day.
Amanda (Michelle Gomez) is getting married. She’s dated some scum, so she’s
happy to snare a pilot with no obvious vices. But although she can’t yet see
it, her three best friends are staggering towards her nuptials hiding
secrets as dark as that midnight water. Shaz (Kathleen McDermott) is selling
black-market Viagra to her nursing-home residents and dealing with the
attentions of a randy vicar. Kelly (Shirley Henderson) has covered her years
of abuse for too long and the horror is starting to escape. Rhona (Shauna
Macdonald) has become a junkie since her fiancé was murdered and has bought
a gun to top herself. The details are grotesque, but the way the women save
each other has an old-fashioned charm. There is even a point where Welsh
almost writes a happy ending — something that is out of character for the
man who closed Marabou Stork Nightmares with the narrator’s eyelids cut off,
watching his rape victim drive a knife home.
Somehow, the man has mellowed.
Perhaps it is the influence of his co-writer, Dean Cavanagh, who entered the
media maelstrom as editor of dope fanzine The Herb Garden. Or perhaps it is
because he has finally found love. In 2005, the 48-year-old married a
twentysome-thing American called Beth after teaching on her creative-writing
course in Chicago.
Last year, he gave an interview to the Daily Mail — an astonishing event in
itself — where he described his life in Dublin as “not so much middle-class
as upper-class. I’m very much a gentleman of leisure. I write. I sit and
look out of my window into the garden. I enjoy books. I love the density and
complexity of Jane Austen and George Eliot. I listen to music; I travel. I
can go off to a film festival whenever I like”.
Whatever the cause, Belles marks a return to his strongest topic — the
complexities of friendship. His 1993 debut, Trainspotting, worked because it
tested the fraying bonds between Rents, Sick Boy, Begbie and Spud. The drugs
were merely a backdrop, but — the 1990s being the 1990s — it was the
chemicals that received the attention. This even fooled “the poet laureate
of the chemical generation” himself, and for a while he turned out dreary
accounts of drug binges while critics scoured his work for the latest
shocking shtick — bent coppers and porno.
Belles, however, narrates the strains the women face and how — aw, bless them
— they rally round to pull through together. That is not to say Welsh has
gone entirely Barbara Cartland. When we chat, he is in London for the day to
film his Belles cameo as a transsexual hardcase raped by a gang of Somali
sailors. “I called it Wedding Belles because I noticed films with Wedding in
the title do quite well,” he deadpans. “Four Weddings and a Funeral, The
Wedding Singer, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
“But also, it’s a chance to write strong working-class women. I’ve always
liked the women characters I’ve written, but they have never had the
airtime, and yet some of the most interesting things I’ve done in life have
been with groups of girls. The same challenges apply as with men — loyalty
to the group, developing as an individual — but they’re more acute because
of the pressure to procreate. It’s about struggling to maintain camaraderie
against the forces of commerce and biology.”
He points out that the women, like Leith, are dealing with the lick of social
paint known as gentrification. “We’re in a postpolitical era where the
possibility of social change is off the agenda,” he shrugs. “Good drama is
about conflict, and 2.2 kids in sub-urbia just isn’t interesting. These
days, you opt in or opt out, and opting out means embracing a subculture.
That is why I find the fringes more interesting.”
You sense the trade winds that blow this money through Edinburgh’s former
slum alarm him. “I’ve moved away from Leith in the sense that it’s my muse,”
he explains. “This will be the last thing I set there. My next book will be
set in America or Spain. Although I’m ambivalent about the novel in a way.
The publishing industry is going backwards. I don’t think Trainspotting
would be published today. It’s all about formula. The gates were briefly
open, but they’ve shut again. If I was starting out as a writer, I don’t
know where I’d go. I guess I’d be attracted by television, although I found
the journey to screenplay writing far from smooth. Writing a book, you can
play God, the finished product is yours. A screenplay is like a cave
painting — broad brush strokes that actors and directors interpret. You have
to accept that. It’s the way it should be.”
Just as he starts to sound like the Serenity Prayer and I think we’ve lost
him for good, a wicked grin crosses his face and he turns that thought on
its head. “Although I have to say, you can find a shelf full of books on how
to write a screenplay, but almost none on writing a novel. I guess the novel
still has mystery, and the power to transcend the banal in a way that
screenplays never can.”
And he’s back to being the kind of trouble-maker whose debut TV film could
begin with a bride spraying a man’s brains across the desolate concrete of
an Edinburgh dock. Pure, unadulterated Irvine Welsh.
Wedding Belles, Channel 4, Thursday, at 10pm
