Skagboys

This novel serves as a prequel to Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (1993). Set primarily in the mid-1980s in Leith, the port district of Edinburgh, Scotland, it traces how a group of young working-class men descend into heroin addiction against the backdrop of mass unemployment, industrial decline, and the social devastation wrought by the Thatcher government's economic policies.

The novel opens with a journal entry written from rehab by Mark Renton, a university student from Leith, recalling a trip with his father to join a miners' picket at a coking plant in Yorkshire during the 1984 miners' strike. Police in riot gear brutally attack the unarmed pickets. Renton is beaten, and his father's friend Andy suffers a severe head wound. On the bus home, sectarian singing erupts between Protestant Loyalist and Irish Republican factions, prompting Renton's father to erupt in fury. Disgusted, Renton jumps off the bus on the motorway and stands on an overpass, contemplating a bleak future.

Back in Leith, the novel introduces the core group. Simon "Sick Boy" Williamson, a vain and manipulative young man, celebrates his twenty-second birthday and the departure of his philandering father from the family home. He notices that Maria Anderson, the teenage daughter of his neighbor Coke, has become attractive and begins cultivating access to the family. Frank "Franco" Begbie, a heavyset and volatile figure, dominates his social circle through intimidation and casual violence. When a young woman named Samantha Frenchard confronts him in a pub about getting her pregnant, he humiliates her publicly. Danny "Spud" Murphy is a gentle young man who works in furniture delivery. Tommy Lawrence, athletic and decent, is Renton's closest friend. Keith "Keezbo" Yule, a good-natured, overweight Hearts supporter, plays drums in a band with Renton.

Renton works a summer job at a joinery workshop and takes a trip to a Northern Soul music all-nighter in Blackpool with Tommy, Keezbo, and Rab "Second Prize" McLaughlin, a former footballer sliding into alcoholism. The trip represents one of the last moments of uncomplicated fun before heroin enters their lives. Interspersed throughout the novel, seven factual "Notes on an Epidemic" sections trace the political and social conditions fueling the crisis: Scotland's denied devolution, soaring unemployment, the origins of Edinburgh's heroin supply at the Macfarlan Smith pharmaceutical plant in the Gorgie district, and the closure of a needle exchange that accelerated HIV transmission through shared syringes.

The decisive turn comes when Renton and Sick Boy visit Johnny Swan, a dealer at Tollcross, and try heroin for the first time. Renton experiences overwhelming euphoria, a sensation of everything being perfectly right. Sick Boy is equally captivated, and the first fix is presented as an irreversible threshold. Sick Boy soon begins using secretly on his own. Meanwhile, their neighbor Coke Anderson is beaten so severely by a pub landlord named Dickson, an ex-policeman, that Coke falls into a coma and dies. The court treats the death as an accident caused by Coke's intoxication, and Dickson receives only an assault conviction and a fine.

The Anderson family's destruction accelerates. Sick Boy sleeps with Coke's widow, Janey, then turns his attention to the vulnerable teenage Maria. After Janey is imprisoned for benefits fraud, Sick Boy introduces Maria to heroin and exploits her growing dependence, coercing her into sexual exploitation for drug money and even bringing Dickson, her father's killer, to abuse her. In a separate act of retribution, Renton's brother Billy organizes a beating of Dickson, knocking out his teeth, after learning that Dickson had insulted their father.

Renton travels across Europe on an InterRail trip with his university friend Paul "Bisto" Bisset, Fiona Conyers, an intelligent student from Newcastle he has fallen in love with, and Joanne Dunsmuir, Fiona's friend and a fellow Aberdeen student. In Paris, Renton and Fiona become inseparable. The journey through Berlin and Istanbul is suffused with romantic intensity. On returning home, Renton learns that his younger brother Wee Davie has died. Davie had cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, and extreme autism. Despite the death having been long anticipated, the family is shattered. At the funeral, Renton delivers a moving toast, briefly unifying the grieving household.

Back at Aberdeen University, Renton's heroin use escalates as he begins scoring from Don, a dealer in the dockside pubs. His relationship with Fiona deteriorates. In a moment of vulnerability, he confides that he used to relieve his brother Wee Davie's sexual frustration manually, a secret that caused lasting family shame when Billy caught him. Eventually, Renton tells Fiona he prefers heroin to her. She calls him a coward. He abandons his studies and returns to Edinburgh.

The epidemic spreads rapidly. Spud, now laid off from the furniture delivery firm, Matty Connell, a petty thief and childhood friend of Renton's from the Fort housing scheme, and Alison Lozinska, a former schoolmate of Renton's and a bright young woman grieving her mother's death from cancer, all sink into heavy use. Alison has an affair with her boss, Alexander Birch, whose brother Russell is secretly stealing morphine from the pharmaceutical plant and passing it to Seeker, the city's most dangerous drug dealer. Overwhelmed after her mother's death, Alison cuts her wrist and nearly bleeds to death before calling an ambulance. Begbie's violence intensifies: He stabs a man from Lochend and attacks the Frenchard family, the relatives of Samantha, whose pregnancy he denied, hospitalizing one of her brothers with an iron railing. He is sentenced to a year in prison.

Renton and Sick Boy move to London, staying with Nicksy, Renton's friend from an earlier squat in Shepherd's Bush, in a tower block in Hackney. They work briefly on the Sealink ferries to Holland but quit after an associate pressures them to smuggle heroin through customs. Nicksy, devastated after learning that a young woman he loves terminated a pregnancy, climbs onto a fourteenth-floor window ledge and is talked back inside by a police negotiator.

Spud collapses from wound botulism, a serious infection from injecting contaminated heroin, and is put on a ventilator. Renton and Matty are arrested for stealing a charity collection tin and offered a choice between prison and rehabilitation. Renton chooses rehab. At the St Monans Substance-Dependency Group in Fife, he finds Sick Boy, Spud, Keezbo, Johnny Swan, and others already enrolled. Over 45 days, Renton endures detox and group therapy while keeping a diary that documents the process, including his private acknowledgment of what he calls "The Big Lie" of rehab: None of them truly want to stop using; they want to clean up so they can use again at a manageable level. During rehab, Renton writes a journal entry confessing that he betrayed Fiona by sleeping with Joanne on Calton Hill on the day of Wee Davie's death. He discards the pages, but Sick Boy secretly retrieves them, gaining private leverage over Renton. Renton and Sick Boy also compose a fake council letter targeting their racist former neighbors, the Currans, which later causes Olly Curran to have a heart attack.

After discharge, Renton lasts roughly eight hours before using again. A severe heroin drought hits Edinburgh. In desperation, Renton and Sick Boy devise a plan to break into the Macfarlan Smith pharmaceutical plant using wooden planks as bridges from a railway embankment over the perimeter fence. They recruit Spud, Keezbo, and Matty. Sick and shivering with withdrawal, the group carries the planks along the railway tracks at night. They cross into the compound but trigger an alarm before reaching any drugs. In the frantic escape, the plank falls, stranding Keezbo on a rooftop. He sits down in resignation as the others flee.

Renton and Sick Boy walk through the empty city for hours, confessing regrets. They reach the flat exhausted, take their last Valium, and declare they are finished with heroin. Sick Boy tells Renton that whatever happens, they will always back each other up. As they unlock the door, the phone begins to ring. The novel ends on this suspended moment. The final "Notes on an Epidemic" sections list Edinburgh residents newly diagnosed as HIV-positive, including Matty and Keezbo, establishing the devastating consequences that lie ahead in the events of Trainspotting.