Текст книги "Guilt Tripper"

Автор книги: Geoff Small

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Digital edition published in 2012

by The Electronic Book Company

www.theelectronicbookcompany.com

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Cover photograph by Jef Seghers

Cover design by The Electronic Book Company

Copyright 2012 by Geoff Small

CONTENTS:

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

PART TWO

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

PART THREE

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

PART FOUR

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

 

 

Language: UK English Spellings

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this ebook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This ebook contains detailed research material, combined with the author's own subjective opinions, which are open to debate. Any offence caused to persons either living or dead is purely unintentional. Factual references may include or present the author's own interpretation, based on research and study. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

Copyright 2012 by Geoff Small

All rights reserved

INTRODUCTION

Set in Scotland, Guilt Tripper is the fast-moving story of Glasgow man, Danny White, an unemployed artist whose beautiful girlfriend has left him for his successful and wealthy best friend, Bob Fitzgerald. Convinced his socialist beliefs have made him soft, Danny decides things should change. So when he discovers Fitzgerald has a perverted violent side, he extorts money from him which he then uses to set up an art school in the Scottish Highlands for underprivileged teenagers.

Everything is perfect until a bedraggled Fitzgerald turns up at the school one night and tells Danny the sinister truth about the money funding his project. Horrified and conscience-stricken, Danny attempts to put things right – but is it all too late?

Please note:  This book was written, produced and self-edited in the UK where some of the spellings and word usage vary slightly from U.S. English.

 

 

PART ONE

 CHAPTER: 1

In the midsummer dusk, Judith hailed a taxi outside her hotel and asked to be taken to a cultured bar. On route the driver received a phone call. Whatever was said must have been pretty serious because he swung his black cab into oncoming traffic and sped off in the opposite direction. They headed north, entering a very different Glasgow, its rundown buildings alternating with overgrown wasteland. Turning off the main drag, the cab rattled along a potholed road, bisecting a field of flattened earth where a whole neighbourhood had recently been demolished. Judith was starting to worry that she’d been kidnapped, until they reached the other side, screeching up behind a police car and an ambulance, parked by some derelict, reconstituted stone tenements. Here, the driver shot out and ran into a ground floor apartment – the only one in the street which didn’t have iron sheets over the windows – while she watched powerlessly from the back seat.

 Thirty-year-old Judith Child was an attractive woman with bobbed ash brown hair, a cheeky heart-shaped face and sparkling, friendly blue eyes. She worked as assistant curator at Worcester City Art Gallery, but desperately wanted to become chief somewhere in her own right. For this though, she needed an Art History Masters degree, which was why she’d come to Glasgow, for an interview up at the university. Either side of this appointment she’d be touring the city all week, so as to become better acquainted with her prospective home before driving back the following Tuesday.

 Once the emergency services had left empty handed, Judith went in search of her taxi driver, whom she found in the tenement close, comforting a tracksuited teenage girl. With a nod he gestured for his fare to go on into the apartment where she took a seat in the dimly lit lounge and balked at the whiff of stale urine and the sight of the antiquated decor. The saddle brown, ‘leather look’ suite was torn, exposing the yellow foam within, while the gold metallic wallpaper from the early nineteen eighties reminded her of chocolate coins. Near the mantelpiece, surrounded by catheter bag boxes, a large portrait painting on an easel caught her attention. It depicted a woman in her thirties wearing a black dress, with long raven hair, soul penetrating chestnut coloured eyes and a determined but dignified, chiselled face.

 “I’m sorry to have inconvenienced you, only my ma’s had one of her fits,” the taxi driver apologized as he entered the room, switching an orange shaded light on. “Poor wee Katy back there was minding her when it happened.”

 “Will your mother be ok?”

 He shook his head. “She’s been bed-ridden for over eight years now…we’re just waiting for the inevitable.”

 The taxi driver stared sombrely into the middle distance, giving Judith an opportunity to study him for the first time. At five foot eleven, he was an intense looking, lean fellow approaching middle age, with sharp sculpted features and unkempt brown hair. He wore an unstylish, black crew neck T-shirt dappled with coloured oil paint, faded jeans and red, threadbare baseball pumps – the whole outfit probably costing no more than twenty pounds.

 “I see somebody in the house is a painter,” she said, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “Who’s the portrait of?”

 The taxi driver turned to face the painting. “That’s my mother back in the seventies: strong and indomitable, the way I like to remember her.” He went over to the easel, removed the picture and handed it to Judith. “You know, she’s sacrificed all joy and comfort for her beliefs. When I was a kid my dad wangled the eight of us a four bed-roomed house from the council – but she refused to move. She said: ‘when everyone else gets four bedrooms we’ll go. Until that day we’re staying put, in solidarity with our brothers and sisters.’ And where did all Annie White’s principles get her, eh? Paralysed at fifty nine by a stroke, that’s where.” He let out a long sigh. “Not long after, the love of my life left me. If I’m honest, I spent more time worrying about that than thinking about ma – something I’ll always regret. I’d even considered abandoning her so I could follow this girl to Italy.”

 Suddenly looking ashamed, he retrieved the picture off Judith, who got up and followed him back to the mantelpiece, so she could examine an old family photo on the gold papered wall above, featuring the taxi driver as a child and what looked like four elder sisters and a younger brother in a pushchair.

 “So where are your siblings now?” she asked.

 “I haven’t seen any of them in twenty-five years, except for Finley. He lives just across town in the Gallowgate…but we don’t speak anymore and he’s banned from the house.”

 “I’m sorry to hear that. Is there no hope of reconciliation?”

 “Not until he stops pumping crap into his veins, no.”

 “Oh,” Judith looked down at the tattered carpet, embarrassed by her own prying.

 At this point Katy – the young tracksuited brunette who’d once lived in the building across the road until the council pulled it down – reappeared to look after the taxi driver’s mother while he got his fare to her intended destination.

 Although it had gone dark outside, the June night sky was still a luminous milky blue, making haunting silhouettes of the derelict tenements and their chimney stacks. As they drove through this desolate landscape, the taxi driver explained how the housing association were waiting to demolish his building but couldn’t so long as his mother was living there. They’d offered him a brand new house half a mile away, but he’d refused to co-operate with an “illegitimate organisation”. He claimed they had no mandate to push him around because just two fifths of the eighty-three thousand former council tenants had voted to transfer into their control. Caught between rent increases should they vote YES and no new homes or repairs if they voted NO, for many, abstention had been their only real choice.

 As the cab passed some newly built beige brick, two-up two-downs, the taxi driver began tutting. “Look what the bastards are doing…they’re anglicizing us…splitting us up into isolated units.” He looked in his rear view at Judith. “Why are you English so petrified of community?”

 “I don’t know, I’ve never really thought about it. Are we?”

 “Well, in most European countries people live close together in tenement blocks, but in England everybody wants their own little detached house with a private back garden so they can talk to the rose bushes. I don’t know whether it’s because they live this way that they don’t like other people, or because they don’t like other people that they choose to live this way.”

 “That’s ironic coming from the murder capital of Western Europe,” Judith exclaimed, indignantly. But he was too busy ranting to hear a word she said.

 “Don’t get me wrong, those tenements we live in back there are shit holes. But what angers me is, shit holes or not, they’ve evolved into communities over the years. And that’s what they do: every time a place enters its third generation it has to be demolished, because the people there are so familiar with one another that they start to think as one…and people who act and think as one – that scares the bastards. I’m convinced they’ve deliberately infested the place with heroin to drive a wedge between us…that and wilfully neglected our homes so that they can legitimise demolition and replace them with nice little private houses.”

 Judith pointed out that many former council tenants had consciously rejected the tenement life he was extolling. Indeed, those who’d bothered to participate in consultations with the Housing Association had asked for private back gardens – their own little sanctuary from drug addicts and alcoholics. They didn’t want to have to walk through piss in the communal hallways any more, or try getting upstairs in a wheelchair.

 Stopping for some traffic lights, the taxi driver took a breather. At first Judith thought he was ruminating over what she’d said, but then he resumed his tirade without even recognising her contribution. Although he was very intelligent, she’d noticed that all his knowledge had been channelled into a depressingly negative outlook on the world – something which began to annoy her. As he started another whine about the demolition of his community and how he wasn’t going to leave without a fight, she could hold her tongue no longer.

 “How can you live in that godforsaken place?”

 “Because it’s my family’s homeland and nobody’s gonna move me just to suit their bourgeois plans! Let the bastards force me out! That way I’ve still got my pride and everyone can see what they’re all about!”

 “That’s just romantic stubbornness,” Judith shrieked in exasperation. “Everyone would be better off if you moved.”

 The taxi driver turned to face her through the Plexiglas, so angrily that she was beginning to regret her outburst.

 “Listen, my mother gave birth to five of her six children in there, and was herself born in the next street down. It’s a spiritual thing. She’s gonna die in her homeland, just like I know she wants.”

 When the lights changed there was an excruciating silence all the way to Oran Mor – a trendy bar in a converted sandstone church at the corner of Great Western and Byre’s Road, opposite the botanical gardens. On arrival, Judith tried paying the fare, but the taxi driver, who actually seemed frightened by the ten pound note in her hand, waved the offer away.

“Tonight’s on the house,” he said nobly, then handed her a card. “In future, ring this number and I’ll sort you for half price.”

 

CHAPTER: 2

 At Oran Mor, Judith got befriended by a pair of local celebrities. Bob Fitzgerald was singer-songwriter with a band called The Squeaky Kirk, his fiancée, Ingrid, a model in TV commercials for a furniture chain. Not only did they buy her champagne, but invited her to their engagement party the following Friday as well.

 During the week in between, everything went well, not least because Judith had won a place on her course. Most evenings she utilized her half price taxi driver, who always seemed strangely put out if she went anywhere other than Oran Mor. Indeed, he seemed positively obsessed with the place, constantly quizzing her about it whenever he picked her up outside. In fact, the only time he didn’t look disappointed not to be going there was the night of the party, which he seemed more excited about than she did.

 Bob and Ingrid lived in a trendy red-stone tenement near the university, off a blacked out landing on the second floor. Here, Judith struggled through the packed apartment searching for a familiar face, until Ingrid grabbed her by the hand and led her away, zigzagging through the crowd to a big brick walled kitchen, where she poured the pair of them a flute of champagne. With Swedish blonde, elbow length hair, high cheekbones and striking cornflower blue eyes, Judith thought this tall, svelte English woman was possibly the most beautiful female she’d ever met. Wearing a lemon coloured silk cocktail dress, she could only have been about twenty-six, making her fourteen years younger than Bob, who was an athletic six foot-two with a tanned, horsey face and expensively styled, spiky brown coiffeur. A conceited man, he wore a white designer suit and a pink silk shirt, making him unmistakable as he moved about the party alone, watching people enjoy his champagne like a proud chef watches happy diners.

 Ingrid and Judith were soon joined by others and a conversation ensued about art. With everyone name dropping the contemporary painters they knew personally, Judith thought it apt to mention her taxi driver and produced his card, printed with the name DANNY WHITE. Ingrid’s smile disappeared. She excused herself from the other guests and shepherded Judith to the twin Belfast sinks in the far corner, which were filled with bottles of Moet and ice.

 “You say this Danny White is a taxi driver? Only, the Danny White I know is supposed to be looking after his ill mother full time.”

 “Yes – that’s the one!”

 Ingrid took another long look at the card then disappeared, leaving her guest to go among the designer clad crowd. They proved a genial bunch, though Judith was a little upset by their treatment of a bespectacled, lanky Englishman called Dickens. Not only had they laughed on mass when he’d introduced himself to her as a writer, but they’d also ridiculed his ragged brown suit and jibed about him being a scrounger. This proved the final straw, prompting her to drain her third flute of champagne and leave. As the apartment door boomed shut behind her, though, she stopped suddenly in the darkness, hearing voices coming from the landing above. One of them was definitely Ingrid’s and the other, a broad Scot’s, was familiar too.

 “How do you think I felt, having to choose between my mother and my girlfriend?”

 “Oh don’t be ridiculous!”

 “It’s the truth! You weren’t prepared to stick around coz you didn’t want to be held back. You knew that my looking after mum would prevent you from having all the goodies you were after. I can understand that, she’s not your mother. But how could you choose materialism over love?”

 Now Judith knew it was her taxi driver, Danny, no mistake.

 “Love?” Ingrid laughed mockingly. “Life’s short Danny and us girls haven’t got time to mope about like you…we’ve got nests to build…babies to contemplate. That’s when romantic love ends and we have to start being practical and sensible. Sometimes you can’t buy the prettiest coat. You have to buy the one that’s going to keep you warm.”

 “So you don’t love Bob then?”

 “No. The very notion of being in love with somebody else negates what you were convinced was love in the first place. It’s a catch-22. If you’ve only ever had one love then how do you know it’s the most you can be in love? Likewise, if you’ve had several or more then you no longer know how to value it. In other words, there’s no such thing! Love and Communism Danny, they’re just ideals, and you’re just a hopeless romantic. I mean, how many girlfriends have you had since me?” There was a silence. “How many Danny? Over the last eight years, how many?”

 “None.”

 “See. Rather than accept that love is just a hallucination experienced by the young, you cling onto the idea, like a religion. To have another relationship – not love, but a grown up relationship – would mean betraying the saintly image you have of yourself. You’d rather martyr yourself to loneliness than be accused of being fickle, just like you martyr yourself to poverty to avoid being implicated with ‘capitalism’. Grow up!”

 “Just because you’re devoid of honour, don’t ridicule mine.”

 “God, you’re so sanctimonious!”

 “Ingrid, you walked out on me coz you couldn’t handle my responsibility for my mother…Yes, that’s right, the very sort of practical, sensible responsibility you said you had to renounce our love for. Then you ran off to Italy with my best friend, coz he didn’t have any baggage, and, more importantly, he’d just released his second album and could buy you the middle-class existence you wanted.”

 “No Danny! That’s the version you choose to believe because you’re frightened of confronting yourself…Do you want to know the truth? Do you, really?”

 “Come on then, tell me!”

 “I’d been plucking up the courage to finish the relationship months before your mother fell ill. Then I postponed my actions because of the stroke. I stuck with you for another six, hard months…and they were hard because I was forcing myself, trying to convince myself it was right so as to avoid hurting you any further. So don’t you dare call me selfish! You’re not the only person who makes sacrifices you know!”

 “So it was all a lie then?”

 “No! But I couldn’t put up with your ugliness any more.”

 “Oh thanks.”

 “Not physical ugliness, ugly personality traits…traits that were destroying me.”

 “Go on,” Danny’s voice was quavering now with emotion.

 “Your stubborn inflexibility on love is reflected in your politics, your morals, even in your art for God’s sake. Your all or nothing crusade…well, it’s not natural…it’s suffocating! At first it was really attractive. I was a young drama student and your views helped me to view the world differently – something essential to my acting that I’m forever indebted to you for. But as your opinions kept going round on a loop, while the rest of the world was changing all about us, you started becoming a parody of yourself. You had all this anger at the human race and it was caught up in a non-productive, vicious cycle. Put bluntly, you were a miserable bastard and you were making me miserable too. I mean this in all honesty Danny: it disappoints me that you haven’t changed.”

 There was a long silence. Judith tensed up, mindful not to make any noise which might betray her eavesdropping.

 “So why did you go with Bob then?”

 “Some of what you say is true, of course. But again, only you could portray positive things in such a negative way. Yes, Bob’s ambition and success are important to me. We’ve been together for eight years, not because of ‘love’ but because we’re compatible. We share needs and aspirations. We can travel together. See, Bob’s not an absolutist like you. He doesn’t shout at me because I state an opinion he doesn’t believe in. We have dialectical conversations. We work together...You know, Danny, you’re a very intelligent man, but there’s no beauty in being right all the time. I mean, why is it that all your wisdom is so negative? Most of us ignorant people go hunting for goodness among the horror, but you already know there’s no goodness and so you search for horror to bolster your case.”

There was an intense silence before Ingrid spoke again, trying to mitigate any upset she’d caused. “Will you come inside for a lemonade or something?”

 “No, it’s best I get off.”

 “You’ve got to move forward…start being positive… come on, eh?”

 Judith removed her heels and tip-toed downstairs, wincing at the crackling sound made by grains of chipped stone beneath her feet. Outside, she went to get a well-earned cigarette from her handbag, only to discover that she’d left it in the party. When she returned, she found Danny encircled by old friends in the kitchen, where he cut a startling contrast in his market clothes. However, everyone seemed genuinely delighted to see him, but refrained from being too demonstrative, due the presence of Bob. The latter stared down at the floor, which was understandable considering the circumstances. Being forced to stand with his former best friend, whose girlfriend he’d stolen, must have been excruciating.

 Judith weaved her way to the far corner of the kitchen and reclaimed her handbag from near the ice filled sinks. On turning round again she jolted. A dark haired, brooding character called Herman was leering at her from the periphery of the circle surrounding Danny, oblivious that he was himself under surveillance. Among the babbling crowd over his shoulder, a small, skinny girl with long, red curly locks stared at him in a sort of obsessive trance, until the sound of exploding glass brought the whole party to an abrupt halt. Seething with jealousy at the attention being lavished on his rival, Bob Fitzgerald had hurled a champagne flute at the architrave of the door, showering those in its vicinity with small pieces of glass, before barging out. Of course, Ingrid ran after him and neither would be seen again that night. They’d booked into a plush hotel in town until the Monday anyway, so as to recover from their hangovers while the cleaners tidied the apartment.