Reheated Cabbage is the first tome from the master of Scotsploitation that I’ve braved in quite a few years now. Unbeknownst to me when I purchased it, this anthology brings together not a collection of new stories and novellas, รก la If You Liked School…, but a medley of extraordinary ephemera. The result is an eclectic jamboree of old short stories that wouldn’t have been out of place in The Acid House and experimental efforts that bear many of the hallmarks of Welsh’s recent works.The volume opens with a fierce piece on marital apathy. “A Fault on the Line” sees football fanatic Malky, desperate to get home in time for the match, haul his family over a railway line where – of course – a train collides with his stout spouse, slicing her chubby little legs clean off. What follows is a magnificently revolting exploration of Malky’s warped ethics as he hurriedly forces his young children gather up his moribund wife’s stray limbs before trying his damnedest to escape the ambulance, and later the hospital, just so that he may make it home in time for the game. It’s vintage Welsh.
Similarly mordant is “Catholic Guilt (You Know You Love It)” – a perverted tale that sees a Scots queer-basher die while on the job with his best mate’s twin sister, only to wake up and find that St Peter has reserved the most pungent form of purgatory for him – buggering his way back through just about every male friend, acquaintance or even sexual abuser that he’s ever encountered. Now this would have been grotesquely mirthful in of itself, but Welsh has a last-minute twist in his tale that takes the hitherto-inferred moral of the story and shoves it straight up its wily protagonist’s amenable arse.
I also enjoyed “Victor Spoils”, in which two young men who move in the same circles each lay claim to the affections of a shared sexual partner, Sarah McWilliams, who’s far more concerned with getting her cripplingly-painful wisdom teeth removed by a libidinous on-call dentist than she is with either one of them. The fists-then-reason plot encapsulates the young buck ‘trophy’ mentality flawlessly, while at the same time making it painfully plain that what they each seek to seize isn’t capable of possession at all.
Best of all though is “The Rosewell Incident”, a wonderfully wacky novella that dares to cross science fiction with the author’s own imitable genre. A young soccer casual is abducted from Midlothian by a race of highly-advanced extra-terrestrials, a number of whom take especial interest in the ways of their cigarette-smoking, barbaric abductee. Having been afforded a life of luxury – which included regularly being provided with female abductees of the Hollywood actress / model variety to copulate with – the casual resolves to stay with his alien captors, whom he intends to teach a thing or two about sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. We pick up the tale many years later, as a splinter group of the aliens is on its way back to Earth, which they intend to silently conquer and put under the rule of this casual, whom they hope to marionette.
Initially, I thought that the author was just playing the incongruity of aliens loose in Leith for laughs – after all, the sheer mirth that’s vested in having an alien coming out with lines such as “Nae sa fuckin wide now, ya radge” to the President of the United States and the rest of the world leaders is mind-boggling - but as the plot unfurled I found that he’d actually put together a very clever and incisive indictment of our current world order, as well as that tested by the casuals here. Indeed, for me “The Rosewell Incident” was not only a highlight of Reheated Cabbage, but a highlight of Welsh’s works to date.
“I Am Miami”, by contrast, is incredibly refreshing. Purpose-penned for this collection, Welsh’s novella pits “Juice” Terry Lawson and his now rich and famous Glue counterpart, DJ Carl ‘N-Sign’ Ewart, against the Scots schoolmaster who made their youths a living hell, Albert Black. Like many of Welsh’s recent works, this escapade sees him blend his trademark first person Scots dialect with more traditional English prose, with the former largely being reserved for the Glue boys and the latter for Mr Black. It’s a joy to read about the now much slimmer Juice T still pursuing “the spice ay life” with such zest, particularly when it’s juxtaposed with Carl’s newfound maturity / monogamy. Where the piece really excels though is in lifting the veil on the old cruel Scottish schoolmaster archetype (if you’ve ever seen the Pink Floyd movie The Wall, you can readily picture this guy), Welsh exploring both the subtle and gross neuroses that sculpted the righteous-but-sadistic Mr Black with his habitual delicious deviance.
However, Reheated Cabbage does have its share of fillers. “Kissing and Making Up” stands out as being a particularly colourless piece, while “The State of the Party” – which was originally published in serialised form – seems to lack purpose and direction; unlike most short stories bearing Welsh’s name, it has no real sting.
Altogether, Reheated Cabbage is as sundry a collection as you’re likely to find by just a single author, and whilst I can see why one or two of its tales have never made mainstream appearances before, its others are right up there amongst Welsh’s most memorable. If, like me, you count the Scots scribe amongst your favourites, then I think you’ll take great pleasure in devouring this decades-spanning assortment, provided you remember that it isn’t supposed to be The Best of Irvine Welsh – it’s The Rest of Irvine Welsh; the granddaddy of all B-side compilations.
