Текст книги "Guilt Tripper"

Автор книги: Geoff Small

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 8 страниц)

 “I did, yes. But how can you trust a man who, it’s just turned out, has been lying to himself for forty years. You do know you’re renouncing everything you professed to believe in?” There was another brief pause before Bob started talking into his phone. “Fergus?...Bob Fitzgerald…Fitzgerald! Fergus, I need a face to face…I know that but…I wouldn’t be bothering you unless it was an emergency…Half an hour…I really, really appreciate thi…hello?”

 Light filled the hallway. Judith just about managed to conceal herself in the darkened bathroom before Bob marched out of Danny’s bedroom towards the front door, talking manically.

 “It’ll be worth it to see you finally coveting cash and stripped of your self-righteousness. We’ll be morally indistinguishable and I won’t have moved an inch either way. You know what this means don’t you?” He turned to face Danny, who was now wearing an old white dressing gown, with pink streaks where it had been washed with coloured clothes. “It means I’ve won. I was right and you were wrong. We are all instinctively loners…self-interested individuals.” He rubbed his hands in glee. “Do thank the old lady downstairs for letting me past her as she came through the main entrance door.”

 

CHAPTER: 8

 Danny turned from shutting the door to find a deeply hurt Judith standing in front of him.

 “You used me,” she complained plaintively.

 Ashamed, Danny looked down at the floor. “Yes, I did…and I’m truly, truly sorry.” Then he walked away, unable to look at her. As he entered the lounge, he passed Fin on his way out, but neither so much as acknowledged the other’s presence. The latter told Judith he was going to give her and Danny some time alone together, before retiring to his own bedroom.

 Having taken time to recompose herself, Judith went into the lounge, where Danny was stood on the balcony in his dressing gown, looking up at the stars. She slumped down on the couch and stared at the faded area on the knees of her jeans, arms crossed, kneading her pink, lamb’s wool V-neck jumper with her fingers. After a couple of minutes, Danny started talking, but remained with his back to her.

 “The only reason I drove a cab was to keep Bob and Ingrid under surveillance…the bloody thing wasn’t even mine. I just borrowed it from a pal when he wasn’t working. I only took fares if, like you, they furthered my ends, and so I was usually out of pocket by the time I’d paid for fuel. But I didn’t have any other vices and watching Ingrid was my passion. It was more of an escape than anything – just a few of hours away from the apartment and mum. I was supposed to be her full time carer, but I don’t know if I’d have coped without that time to myself each day.” When Judith looked up, Danny was still out on the balcony, but facing her now. “Please, try not to consider me a freak. It’s just really hard giving up on somebody you love. Not a minute’s gone by without my regretting having used you. I might have had a hidden agenda to begin with, but I grew to enjoy your company immensely and felt we could probably be very good pals. So please, please try and forgive me Judith. Be my friend, then at least something precious will have come out of this ridiculous obsession of mine.”

 The puzzle of “Must say sorry to Judith” had been solved. Danny had obviously been genuinely contrite about using her and, as such, she found it easier to consider forgiveness. But a much darker issue still needed addressing.

 “I can bring myself to understand you spying on Ingrid, even your reasons for not telling her about what Bob did, if I try hard enough. But blackmail? How can you justify something as calculated as that?”

 “Homelessness.”

 “What?”

 “While that arrogant bully’s swaggering round the city with several million in the bank, Finley and I are being evicted, so the landlord can get more lucrative tenants. We’re being deprived of the fundamental human right to a home, while unproductive people like Bob, with their three houses, are hogging all the money.” He stabbed out with his forefinger to stress the point. “All I’ll be doing is taking our rightful share of the cake.”

 “Profiting from violence against society’s most vulnerable though? Surely that’s against everything you stand for?”

 “Even Castro’s had to make moral compromises…and, anyway, like I told you at the wake, since my ma’ died I don’t have any ideology. Ideology’s what’s been paralysing me all these years.”

 “But what if he does it again, only next time he kills somebody?”

 “There’s nothing we can do to prevent that short of becoming murderers ourselves. Remember, I never actually saw Bob do anything, and, it’s so long after the event, my evidence would be dismissed as sour grapes over Ingrid. The only thing we’ve got on him is an informal confession. So, if we play it by the book he remains free and unpunished. If we take his cash though, he’ll at least be paying for what he did in some way…we can transubstantiate it through good acts, just like the government claims to do when they confiscate the proceeds of criminality.”

 Every so often, exploding fireworks could be heard in the distance, on the outlying housing schemes, beyond the motorway.

 “So how have you reached a figure of seven hundred and sixty grand then?” Judith asked, intrigued.

 Danny’s eyes suddenly blazed with excitement; something she’d never expected to see in this dour man.

 “I can only speculate, but, according to one of Fin’s newspapers a couple of weeks back, sales of The Squeaky Kirk’s back catalogue have gone through the roof since Bob’s arrest.” He rummaged in his dressing gown pockets. “I’ve got some figures somewhere.” Producing a crumpled paper cutting, he came back inside and handed it to Judith. On it was a list of the band’s seven albums and the corresponding worldwide sales tallies from July to the beginning of October that year, totalling six hundred and thirty eight thousand copies. “If each CD sold for a tenner, there’s been a turnover exceeding six million quid, twelve and a half per-cent of which goes to Bob as the composer. That means roughly seven hundred and sixty grand for our charity.”

 “Oh! That’s not so bad then – have you decided which one?”

 “Too bloody right I have.”

 “Yea?” Judith was starting to warm to Danny again.

 “It’s a place up in the Highlands. Kids from underprivileged parts of Glasgow go there to learn about art and literature. Then they go on to complete their education at universities away from their hometown, so that they escape the hopeless environments that would otherwise stunt them. Hopefully, though, they’ll return some day to pass their learning on. It’s a beautiful wild place where they can fish, hike and sort their heads out in peace.”

 “Arr, that sounds really nice Danny. Where is it exactly?”

 “I’ll tell you when I’ve found a suitable location. We should be able to get somewhere big enough with more than seven hundred grand, shouldn’t we?”

 “What? You’re going to run your own private school?” Judith exclaimed. “You’re going to select who can and can’t attend?”

 “Like I say, I’ve learnt to execute my principles within the context of the world in which I actually live. Rather than just moan about the poor provision of services, I’m actually going to provide alternative one’s and hopefully, become a model – a beacon for others. It’s not the way I want it, but the fact is, the poor are going to have to learn to educate themselves, because it’s more than apparent that the middle classes aren’t going to do it for them. Just as the Rochdale Pioneers had to open their own schools in the Nineteenth Century, we, the ‘underclass’, are going to have to do the same now. After all, if you’re not prepared to look after your own, you can hardly expect strangers to.” Just then, Fin walked tentatively into the lounge. “Fin, nip out and get a meal for five from the Chinese,” Danny shouted. “You can take it out of my disability money!” Fin looked delighted. Not only was his brother talking to him, but it seemed he might actually be about to eat something too. “And get yourself some beers and a bottle of wine for Judith – we’re celebrating.”

 

CHAPTER: 9

After a jovial meal around the coffee table, Judith nodded off on the White’s couch. Next morning, she was woken at around eight by a whistling, clean shaven Danny, whose baggy black suit looked ridiculous on his thin body. Taking pity, she frogmarched him into the kitchen, sat him on a stool and set about his curly mane with a pair of scissors. She was just brushing his brown locks from the linoleum when the buzzer went on the intercom. Danny told his visitors to come up then inspected his haircut in the hall mirror before opening the door. Bob, still in white, marched straight past him to the lounge, shadowed by a dumpy, gnome-like lawyer with a pointed ginger goatee beard, wearing a green and brown tartan suit. Danny and Judith tagged along.

 Fergus Baxter slammed a briefcase on the glass coffee table moodily, sitting at the very edge of the couch to open it. The others, all nervous, remained on their feet. He produced a cheque and held it up in the air for Danny to take.

 “A hundred and fifty thousand pounds?” Danny turned imploringly to Bob. “We agreed on all your royalties since July. What’s going on?”

 “You’re much better off this way – believe me,” Baxter interrupted.

 Danny rustled in his suit pocket then handed the paper cutting to the lawyer, who read the text and sniggered.

 “I was under the impression you were more intelligent than to believe the newspapers.” Noting the anger in Danny’s eyes, though, he held a pacifying, vertical palm out. “Royalties come in dribs and drabs Mr. White, whereas with a lump sum – invested properly – the interest alone will be more than a match.” Baxter pinched his ginger goatee between two fingers several times. “It’s also less suspicious.”

 “I don’t see how me receiving his royalties is any more conspicuous than the transfer of a hundred and fifty grand from his account to mine.”

 Baxter smiled, cynically. “My client tells me you’re a painter, Mr. White – and a very good one too. So good in fact, that nobody would be shocked to discover somebody paying a hundred and fifty grand for some of your collection.”

 “No!” Danny turned to Bob again. “Don’t you dare use him to flatter and bamboozle me. You instruct him to do as we agreed!”

 “If we could all just calm down a second,” Baxter appealed, so reasonably it was eerie. “Once news gets around that your paintings are valued in six figure sums you’ll literally be printing your own cash, for a year at the least.”

 “And I suppose it’ll be tax deductible for you, won’t it?”

 Baxter shrugged his shoulders.

 Danny looked down at the holes in the threadbare carpet, slowly shaking his head in anger before looking up again. “I’ll have to confer with my friend.” He flicked his head for Judith to join him back in the kitchen. “So what do you think?” he whispered to her.

 “I thought we were supposed to be punishing him for what he’s done to that poor girl?” she exclaimed indignantly, while straining to keep her voice down. “To me it seems he can’t lose. He’ll be able to claim tax back if he’s bought your paintings, and by artificially creating such a lucrative art market, he may even go on to sell them at a profit. Which means you get less than you originally asked and he ends up even richer. How’s that making amends? I mean, who’s blackmailing who here? On top of that, he’s dragging you into the mire with him. Your name will be synonymous with his forever.”

 Danny put his hands to his head, before dragging them down his face, stretching his eyes and alabaster skin with his fingers. He sighed.

 “You’re right, he mustn’t get everything his own way. But me and Fin need that cash or we’re screwed. I’ll compromise and meet them half way: three hundred and sixty grand.”

 “It’s seven hundred and sixty grand or nothing Danny. You’re the blackmailer for God’s sake, not the other way round.”

 They marched purposefully back into the lounge, interrupting Bob and Baxter’s whispering huddle on the couch.

 “Err,” Danny went to speak but Judith raised her voice over his.

 “It’s like this, fellas: Danny’s been more than reasonable already. Anyone else would have bled you dry. So it’s seven hundred and sixty grand or he’s going straight to the police.”

 Baxter looked to Bob, before plucking another already written cheque from his case. Along with this he arranged some paperwork out on the coffee table to be signed: receipts for the purchase of paintings at seven-hundred and sixty thousand pounds – a figure which, it was now obvious, they’d been willing to pay all along. Once Danny had signed everything, Bob clapped his hands together.

 “Ok! Let’s have a gander at some of your paintings then Daniel.”

 Swept along by these events, Judith found herself following the men downstairs and climbing into the back of Baxter’s beige Jaguar with Danny, who gave directions for the Southside. After a few miles, Danny said, here, and they pulled up next to some garages, behind a concrete high-rise apartment block, as wide as a football pitch is long. Everybody climbed out and huddled in the drizzle, while Danny lifted one of the rusty metal doors, revealing at least a hundred paintings, leaning against one another like unwanted deck chairs. Bob immediately strode across to a six-foot high, seven foot wide canvas propped up against the back wall. Painted in a classical style, it was a study of Ingrid, lying asleep in a white silk nightgown, on top of a bed.

 “You’re welcome to everything except the sleeping scene,” Danny shouted, urgently.

 “No, that’s the best one. I’m having it in honour of our deal,” Bob countered, triumphantly.

 “Oh no…I’m not letting you steal everything from me!”

 Bob affected a perplexed look. “How’s seven hundred and sixty thousand pounds theft?”

 “I shouldn’t be giving you anything…I’m already sparing your liberty!”

 “Can’t you see I’m giving you an opportunity to get out of all this with your dignity intact? Danny, you’re a good man, and I don’t want to see that destroyed. If people like you turn out bad, what hope is there for the rest of us? You’re not a blackmailer, you’re a painter. Now sell me some friggin’ paintings!” Bob smiled slyly.

 “Take it...take anything you want.”

 Danny handed Bob the garage key and marched off. Judith thought it best to leave him be and pottered about for a couple of minutes, until the others were distracted enough for her to slip away unnoticed – she certainly had no intention of getting into a car alone with them.

 

CHAPTER: 10

 When Judith arrived back at the apartment, Fin had just returned from the clinic, where he’d provided his fourth consecutive, opiate negative urine sample. But there was no Danny as yet. It wasn’t until well past six that he eventually came home, carrying a large pile of property agent’s print-outs. Among these he found the location for his college – a semi-derelict, granite-stone crofter’s house, up on the west coast, near Gairloch. Situated in the shadow of a mountain, the dwelling was of modest size, but there were ten acres of land on which to place mobile classrooms, and, a spacious byre (cowshed) that could easily be renovated to shelter students. More importantly, it was going for just one-hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds, leaving plenty of cash to make the overall project viable.

 By December, Danny had regained weight and looked a lot healthier, so the White’s rented a trailer home up at Gairloch, where, together with some of their unemployed friends, they renovated the cottage and transformed the byre into comfortable accommodation for twelve people. At weekends they returned to Glasgow. Here, Judith joined them, distributing leaflets to tracksuited gangs on concrete housing schemes, which were in the process of being demolished and replaced with a mixture of privately owned and socially rented beige brick houses, similar to those popping up in Danny’s old neighbourhood. They were usually subjected to drunken sarcastic remarks for their trouble, often downright abuse and, just once, outright aggression. The most intimidating experience, though, was the night a black Range Rover with tinted windows kept appearing, cruising slowly behind them. It turned out that the occupants were foot soldiers of Rex McLeod, the most feared man in the city. They’d obviously had reports of three strangers approaching youths on housing schemes and so naturally assumed they were either drug dealers, trying to establish new patches, or undercover police officers. Fortunately, Danny knew their boss – having painted portraits for him – and so managed to reassure these bull necked, shaven headed characters that they were neither.

 Danny reckoned that Rex McLeod was a “paternalistic, communitarian gangster”. Known as The Big Man, he’d made his money robbing banks in the Sixties and Seventies, but nowadays relied mainly on other people doing truck heists for him – truck heists which provided cheap goods for folk who couldn’t afford them otherwise. If Danny, Fin and Judith had been dealers, they’d have been punished not because they were competitors, but because Rex detested drugs and lamented the damage they’d done to his city. Truth be told, when he wasn’t raising money for drugs charities, he’d be either informing on pushers or having their legs broken.

 The following May – the same day Bob and Herman were finally officially acquitted of Carina Curran’s attempted murder – Danny delivered a presentation to a dozen teenagers, on the top floor of an old textiles mill which had been converted into artist’s studios. While herding them in off the stairs, where they’d been hanging about diffidently, he’d been shocked to discover a particularly nasty character among their number. Wearing a white Lacoste tracksuit and checked Burberry baseball cap, he had a gaunt, embittered face with a thick, purple line of scar tissue beginning below his right ear and running just above his jaw line to the corner of his mouth. One night, during a recruitment walkabout on the schemes, his gang had heckled Danny and co so venomously that they’d deemed it wise to leave.

 After a drink and nibble from the Mediterranean buffet, which degenerated into a full on olive and feta-cheese fight, Danny sat everybody round him in a semi-circle of orange, plastic chairs. While trying to explain his vision he was constantly interrupted by ‘Scar Face’ much to the amusement of the girls present. However, a raven haired beauty called Belinda became embroiled in an argument with Scar Face, causing Danny to have to intervene and ask the lad what he hoped to derive from the course, should he embark upon it.

 “What’s it to you?” He stared through Danny as if challenging him to a fight.

 “Well, I’m here to help you.”

 “Oh is that right big man? What do you want me to do, kiss your butt or something?” His audience roared with laughter.

 “No, I…”

 “Aye you do. This isn’t about helping us. It’s all about your middle class ego. We shouldn’t be in a position where we’re beholden to ‘charitable’ individuals like you.”

 “I quite agree,” Danny concurred. “But we’re here to facilitate and develop whatever interests you may have in art?”

 “Listen, I couldn’t paint ma shoes and I never want to.”

 “Ah, so you want to learn about writers?”

 “Learn? Listen pal, there’s nothing you and your ilk can teach me about ‘literature’. Shakespeare, Cervantes, Hardy, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Kafka, Carver, Kundera, they’re the only existence I’ve ever been able to afford. I don’t need to be taught how to read, I need to be enabled to write.”

 Danny’s eyes dwelled on the lad a moment, as if identifying something there that nobody else could.

 “How can we enable you to write then?”

 “By getting me out of that hell hole I live in and allowing me some peace. They reckoned that J.K Rowling wrote in crowded cafes. Well, I’d like to see her even write a note to the milkman at our place, with my sister’s kids running about the apartment and my dad watching the TV at full blast, night and day.”

 “Tell me about it. I had to share with a brother and four sisters”

 “Yeah, in a nice big house I bet?”

 “No. Possil.”

 “You’re from Possil? Get away.”

 “What made you think I came from a big house?”

 “I don’t know, the way you talk – all bourgeois like.”

 Judith sniggered at the irony.

 Once Danny and this particular lad had established some mutual respect, the rest of the meeting continued in an orderly fashion, ending with the handing out of application forms to be returned at enrolment the following week. Unfortunately, only three people were to turn up, including Scar Face and Belinda, who completely ignored one another.

 Poor student numbers were to be the least of Danny’s worries. After six months deliberation, Gairloch Community Council seemed set on denying permission for the college, fearing that drug addicts and razor gangs would invade their idyll. He was about to abort the project when, one cloudy afternoon in June, a Daily Herald journalist and photographer came knocking at the trailer home door. They wanted to know Mr. White’s feelings about his recent exhibition in London. Of course, Danny thought they had the wrong person, but they hadn’t. An anonymous dealer had organised the event, which resulted in a collector, who owned a string of kebab restaurants, paying one million pounds for the whole lot.

 Just as Judith had predicted, Bob Fitzgerald was now two hundred and forty thousand pounds richer for having been blackmailed. Thankfully, though, the journalists knew nothing about his involvement, otherwise Danny’s dream would have been sunk forever. As it was, the Daily Herald interview spawned a tissue of positive publicity, prompting Gairloch Council to change their minds. However, there were conditions. Places would have to be provided for local youth and the situation would be subject to quarterly reviews.

 Now Danny had discovered public relations, Judith went into Glasgow and selected him a wardrobe of clothes that the kids on the schemes would connect with. Undoubtedly, his hotchpotch of rags had repelled them up to now, so she purchased a pair of Nike trainers, Rockport boots, two pairs of Armani jeans, some check Lacoste shirts and a navy blue Stone-Island bomber jacket. At first he went berserk at the cost – a grand in total – until Judith argued it amounted to less than two pounds a week over the decade he’d gone without any new garments whatsoever. Once he’d calmed down about the cash, he went into one of his moral diatribes. He claimed it was principles and beliefs, not clothes, which made a person, and that a true socialist prophet would never set himself above those he professed to help, in any way. But Judith reckoned that people would only follow if they saw their own aspirations reflected in their leader. Just because he valued an ascetic existence, she said, he shouldn’t expect everybody else to. Eventually he wore the clothes, though not before having removed all the logos, including the swoosh from his trainers. This infuriated Judith, because she knew that without them Danny remained a nothing in their target group’s eyes.

 As the street kids got used to them being about, recruitment drives became less hassle and, by the middle of August, they had at last secured a full complement to take up north. The only thing they needed now was an English teacher.

 Rather than having to pay obscene salaries, Danny reckoned he knew unoccupied guys from his neighbourhood who were capable of teaching; their love of literature far outweighing any lack of formal qualifications. In fact, he argued that he’d sooner have self-taught guys with passion than some kid who’d been through the sausage machine of university, merely to attain an “easy” twenty grand a year in the classroom. But he was to be disappointed. The people he’d been banking on were too set in their beer, cigarettes and gambling ways to relocate to the wilderness, making him so angry that he vented his spleen on several, telling Judith that he’d be glad to get out of “this amorphous dump.”

 It was beginning to look like they’d never find a teacher, until Judith’s graduation day up at the university, where the White brothers were her guests. Here, she introduced them to Angie and Angie’s boyfriend Hamish, the couple having just collected first class English Literature degrees. On learning this, Danny wasted no time inviting them to teach with him up at Gairloch, in return for free board and lodging and a hundred pounds a week pocket money. Hamish – who had his sights on a career in journalism – declined the offer outright, until Angie agreed to go along for free. This caused an argument between them, but by lunchtime the next day both had committed themselves to the project. Just as things were looking up for Danny, events had most definitely taken a turn for the worse for Judith. The morning after her graduation, she awoke with a hangover to a letter giving notice of redundancy, from her employers at Worcester City Council, who were cutting staff in non-essential services due to a budget shortfall.