Trainspotting Characters

Lizzy is Tommy’s strong-willed girlfriend. They break up after he chooses to go to an Iggy Pop concert instead of a movie with her, setting off Tommy’s descent into heroin addiction.

June is Begbie’s on-again, off-again girlfriend who gets pregnant with their child. After Begbie refuses to get involved as a father, June must raise the child largely on her own, showing how conservative gender roles influence life in Leith.

Nina is a young woman who dresses like a goth. On two separate occasions, one of her male cousins flirts with her at a funeral (Geoff and Rent Boy).

Uncle Andy is Nina’s uncle who dies of a heart problem. Nina thinks for a moment he’s still alive, but it turns out to just be an electric blanket warming his corpse.

Auntie Alice is Uncle Andy’s wife and Nina’s aunt. Nina has good memories at their house, but it takes Nina a while to acknowledge that, as she tries to repress her grief over Uncle Andy’s sudden death.

Granty is a member of a poker club with Billy, Lenny, Jackie, and others. While Granty is holding the group’s money, he dies, and his girlfriend, Fiona, seemingly runs off with the money, causing conflict between his surviving friends.

Stella is a friend of Stevie’s. After he confesses his love to her, she calls him back on New Year’s Eve to say she loves him too. At the end of the story, the two of them live together in London.

Gail is briefly Davie Mitchell’s girlfriend. Her whole family gets a nasty surprise when Davie comes down to dinner with sheets full of his own vomit from the previous night and accidentally spills it all over Sunday breakfast.

Na Na is Spud’s grandmother. She has several children with different men, with Dode being the youngest.

Lenny is a friend of Billy’s who is part of his poker club. After the club loses all its money, they look for a scapegoat and beat up fellow member Jackie.

Jackie is a friend of Billy’s who is part of his poker club. He gets accused of being part of a scheme to steal the group’s money, so all his friends beat him up on a stairwell.

Dode is Spud’s uncle. He is half West Indian, which earns him unwanted attention from Nazis on one occasion, but Dode seems to have built up his resilience to these threats.

Fiona is the girlfriend of Granty who, after his death, seemingly finds and steals the money he’s holding for his poker group and uses it to take a vacation.

Gav is a minor friend of Rent Boy, Spud, and the others. He works at the unemployment office.

Frances is the ex-girlfriend of Venters who has a son, Kevin, with him. She becomes a key figure in Davie Mitchell’s revenge plot against Venters, although Davie never actually hurts her.

Planet of the Apes is a pub patron who looks like an extra from the movie Planet of the Apes. He becomes an early customer in Sick Boy’s scheme to sell sexual favors from women he knows.

Dr. Forbes is Rent Boy’s psychiatrist for a short time and diagnoses that Rent Boy’s heroin addiction is connected to his relationship with his dead brother Davie Renton. While there seems to be truth to Dr. Forbes’s words, Rent Boy isn’t ready to acknowledge it.

Andreas is a hotel owner who used to commit petty crimes with Sick Boy. Though he tried to distance himself from Sick Boy after becoming successful, he agrees to do one last big heroin deal with Sick Boy, and this motivates all the events in the novels’ final chapter.

Peter Gilbert is a drug-dealing middleman that Andreas connects with Sick Boy and the others from Leith. His professionalism and detached attitude contrast with the more haphazard actions of the novel’s major characters.

Molly is an HIV-positive sex worker who likes Sick Boy. Sick Boy seems to like her in return, but he ends their conversation by asking to borrow money from her, showing how he continues to treat many of his relationships with women as transactional.

Raymie is a minor friend of Rent Boy’s who is almost never seen in the same place as Spud, causing Sick Boy to jokingly theorize that they’re the same person.

Mel is Rent Boy’s friend in London that he is headed to see when he meets Gi.

Geoff is a cousin of Nina’s who flirts with her at Uncle Andy’s funeral.