by Geoff Small
Judith barged to the head of the crowd, but as she stumbled out from the throng, her way was barred by several shirt-sleeved police officers. Beyond them, two crews fought the fire, half a dozen hoses blasting the growling building in vain. Staring into the flames, she found it difficult to comprehend that Danny and his mother might be trapped in that diabolical heat. Just then, a warm breath tickled the back of her ear.
“How’s that for a leaving party then?”
Judith turned round — it was Danny! In spite of the hot sunshine, he was wearing a baggy black suit, which would have been fashionable sometime in the mid-eighties.
“Danny! Thank God you’re safe. Where’s your mother? Is she Ok?”
“There’s nothing that can harm her now. She died on Friday night while I was out at Bob and Ingrid’s party…We’ve just come back from the cremation…wanted it over and done with as soon as possible, as was the old girl’s wish.”
“I’m so sorry…what happened to the apartment?” Judith asked, a little excitedly.
“Well, it was left empty today for the first time in eight years and, coincidentally, it just happened to go up in smoke, along with all the booze and pieces for the wake,” Danny snorted sardonically. “The bastards got me out in the end eh!”
Judith, who attributed this statement to Danny’s paranoia, was more inclined to point the finger at kids bored on their summer holidays from school than at some capitalist conspiracy. During her week driving around the city, she’d seen quite a few burnt out apartments, usually in derelict tenements on the outlying schemes, but sometimes in semi occupied blocks as well. Unfortunately, not only was Glasgow the murder capital of Western Europe, but the house fire and arson capital of Britain too.
Judith had intended to get off as soon as possible, but she felt duty bound to make sure Danny was going to be ok first and so ended up at the relocated wake. It was held at The Brothers Bar on Saracen Street — a whitewashed, single floored, apartment roofed, windowless place, welded onto the end of a red-stone tenement. After a while, Danny started to tire of people’s sympathy and asked Judith to accompany him outside, where they sat on the roadside of an adjacent service lane, in the cool shadow of the pub. Her job, she knew, was to listen.
“Do you know how much I resent that woman, my mother? I hate her for the rigid morality she’s inflicted upon me.” He put his head between his knees for a moment before looking up again and continuing. “No wonder my sisters got as far away from her as possible, before they were drained of all joy as I have been. I can even sympathize with Fin’s drug addiction, poor wee bugger. It must have been his only escape from the evil world she portrayed to us, even as kids, when all we wanted to do was play and be normal.” He turned to Judith. “I went looking for him yesterday you know, but he’s been evicted from his apartment and now it’s got an iron shutter over the front door. The guy across the landing told me the former occupants had received Anti-Social Behaviour Orders for drug dealing. I looked everywhere for him, but it was no good.” He put his head back between his legs and spoke into the hole, so that his voice was slightly muffled. “Even as bloody kids we’d been conditioned to view fun as a sin — something that couldn’t be justified on such an ‘inequitable’ planet. We sneered at the ignorance of the other children, yet were so jealous of their unaffected happiness that we’d start fights with them.” Danny seemed ashamed at this recollection, burying his head further between his legs and not speaking for at least another minute. When he did eventually re-emerge and start talking again he didn’t stop, and furnished Judith with a profile of his mother that he’d obviously been rehearsing for years, until this moment, when he could finally spew out the ambivalence he felt towards her.
The eldest of six children, Annie Gilchrist had been brought up through the 1930s and 40s. Between her mother’s strict religious beliefs and father’s Communism there’d certainly been no room for light heartedness, and she’d spent most of her childhood helping old grandmother Gilchrist with work before getting a job in a laundry. With this background it was small wonder Danny ended up inhibited by an unlikely fusion of Christianity and Marxism. However, he was starting to suspect that his mother had only been a lip-syncer, for her actions hadn’t necessarily complimented her virtuous ideals. It may simply have been a case of opposites attracting, but her choice of husband seemed to be, at the very least, a subliminal rejection of her upbringing.
Danny’s father, Dougie was an atheist whose only ideology was football. He was a drunken, gambling, fornicating, bar room brawler and bloody good laugh. There was certainly no romanticising of the working man with him. As far as Dougie was concerned, if you worked then you were a mug and any money that did filter into the White household came from illicit sales of cigarettes and booze in the city’s pubs. In truth, he was a counterforce to Annie’s parents, a living proof that she was looking for something other than the sober outlook she’d inherited. But, ultimately, she’d been unable to shed such a deeply ingrained sense of guilt at having fun and so her kicks were experienced vicariously, through the legendry antics of her husband.
Judith had assumed Danny’s father was dead. In fact, nobody knew either way. During the summer of 1978 he’d flown to Argentina to watch Scotland in the World Cup Finals and never returned, along with many other fellow countrymen.
Although Danny resented Annie for passing on her hang-ups, he appreciated that she’d tried to break out of her oppressive mould by marrying Dougie, which ensured his upbringing was at least only half as grim as her own.
“I swear to you Judith, one way or another I’ve got to emancipate myself from her ideals, otherwise what’s left of my life is gonna pass by without a single drop of pleasure.”
They returned to The Brothers Bar and both sipped orange juice, the bereaved being a paragon of temperance, just like his mother. Sober, Judith found the drunken wake physically draining, but didn’t leave until she was sure Danny would be in safe hands. Thankfully, Katy volunteered to put him up with her parents and, as regards the inconvenience caused by the fire, it had only been a matter of time before the authorities had had him removed from the apartment anyway. Of course, priceless objects such as family photographs had been lost but, Judith thought, most of the fixtures and fittings probably belonged on a fire anyway. With her mind at rest, she eventually left just before seven, without having mentioned Herman’s prostitute beating, which she’d deemed an inappropriate topic under the circumstances.
PART TWO
CHAPTER: 5
That October, Judith started her sabbatical from work and moved to Glasgow, where she rented a one bed-roomed, West End apartment. Situated on the top floor of a blonde-stone tenement, her bow windowed living room was in the building’s conical roofed corner turret, which reminded her of a French Chateau. These tenements where broadly known as either blonde-stones or red-stones, but they were far more varied than that, with six different types of ‘blonde’ and four types of ‘red’ across the city.
Judith’s apartment was only a couple of blocks from the university: a neo-gothic palace in blonde sandstone, which had a soaring bell tower with a sooty, skeletal steeple resembling a shuttlecock. It was here, after the first of her tutorials, that she ran into Angie beneath the vaulted cloisters that bisected the grass quadrangle. Wearing a grey woollen roll neck with jeans, and cloaked to the waist in red coiled hair, the youngster had just begun the final year of an English degree. Spotting Judith, her sea green eyes conveyed genuine delight and the pair of them walked together, emerging from the cloisters onto a hilltop overlooking Kelvingrove Park, which was now approaching its full autumn splendour. As Judith focused on the twin red-stone campaniles of the Kelvingrove art gallery, towering above the golden trees down below, Angie updated her on the Herman saga, which had taken a sensational twist. Apparently, he’d admitted picking the prostitute up, but reckoned somebody else had assaulted her. That somebody was Bob Fitzgerald.
“The trial’s going on as we speak. I gav
e evidence last week and somehow managed to get through it without any aspersions being cast against my character, either by the barristers or the press — thank God.” Angie looked up at the pale blue sky momentarily, holding both hands together as if praying. “When they asked why it had taken me so long to go to the police, I said I probably never would have had it not been for you.” She winced in an expression of regret. “I’m sorry, but I mentioned your name in court…it just sort of happened before I realized.”
Judith rubbed Angie’s shoulder. “That’s ok, don’t worry about it.”
The young student puffed her cheeks out, trying to repress a smile of relief before continuing.
“The prosecution reckoned that Herman was an obsessive Squeaky Kirk fan who stalked the band. Bob exploited this by using him to procure prostitutes, so as not to run the risk of being seen soliciting himself and ending up on the front page of the Daily Record. On the occasion in question, Herman’s picked up this girl – Carina Curran – and driven her to Bob’s secret shag-pad apartment over in Govan.” To indicate where she meant, Angie nodded towards some dinosaurian looking, black shipyard cranes, beyond the tenement rooftops on the opposite, south side of the River Clyde. “Anyway, Herman’s been waiting in the kitchen there, ready to transport her back to Calton, post coitus, when he hears a loud argument in the bedroom. Carina — a classically trained cellist by the way — was taunting Bob, saying that she knew who he was and that his music was crap. Herman reckons she was going on and on and then, suddenly, she just stopped mid-sentence and there was complete silence. The next thing, Bob emerged and asked him to come to the room, where Carina’s lying in a pool of blood with a bronze paper weight on the floor by her head. Bob was convinced she was dead and begged Herman to dispose of the body, but he refused and left her at the side of Paisley Road instead, after ringing an ambulance.” Judith was shaking her head, lower lip hanging. “Of course, afterwards, Bob’s had no choice but to let Herman hang around with him full time, fearing he’d spill the beans otherwise.”
“What’s Bob had to say?”
Angie screwed her face up in disappointment, “nothing. He said zilch in the police station and, as yet, zilch in court. He’s being represented by a guy called Fergus Baxter, who looks after all the gangsters…but even he couldn’t prevent him being remanded in Barlinnie Prison.”
“So what happened to Herman then?”
“He got remanded in Barlinnie too, but after a week they transferred him to a mental hospital.” Judith closed her eyes and exhaled, as if a safety valve had been activated in her body, releasing some of the pressure induced by such hideous news. “Apparently, he’s an obsessive. Once he gets his mind on something it completely overwhelms his life, until the strain becomes too much and he has to be detained in hospital. Giving evidence, his psychiatrist said he suffers from something akin to Asperger’s syndrome…reckons that Bob and the Squeaky Kirk we’re most probably the only thing in his brain these last few years, outside of normal day to day activities.”
There was a brief silence and Angie looked suddenly distressed, as if the possibility of a miscarriage of justice had finally struck her.
“What did this girl who got beaten look like? Was she pretty?” Judith enquired, hungrily.
Angie shook her head. “She was fat — especially for a junkie. According to Herman’s evidence that’s how Bob likes them. She had massive tits, long, shaggy dark hair, thigh length leather boots and a short black skirt to show her big butt off.”
“She’s the opposite of Ingrid in other words.”
“Ingrid’s a trophy, to be exhibited alongside his flash car and designer clothes. It’s not what she does for him sexually or emotionally that matters, so much as the impression she makes upon his audience. Perhaps Carina’s indicative of the real Bob, trapped somewhere beneath all that received snobbery…a Bob who secretly loves baked beans, even though he’ll only eat caviar in public.”
Judith exhaled again. “How’s Ingrid coping with all of this?”
“According to gossip, she was spending a lot of time with her ex-boyfriend, that taxi driver fellow who turned up at the party.”
“Really?”
“But then the apartment got repossessed. She went back to England and the taxi driver had a breakdown, apparently. Last I heard he was living over in the East End, where he’s being looked after by a brother who’s trying to get off herione.”
Knowing how liberal people could be with the term ‘breakdown’, Judith was anxious to see for herself just how Danny was bearing up.
CHAPTER: 6
The next day, after a busy afternoon of research for her course, Judith found Finley White’s address on the Internet. In the process she happened across a local newspaper’s website, its front page exclaiming:
JUDGE ORDERS RETRIAL – ROCK STAR RELEASED
According to the article, Bob Fitzgerald’s defence had demanded a retrial, not least because the only evidence against him had been from his co-defendant Herman Knapp — a certified madman. The newspaper also suggested that the retrial was just a formality, because, in the absence of compelling new evidence, Bob would almost certainly be acquitted. In the meantime he was free to go, unlike Herman, who remained incarcerated under the Mental Health Act.
That evening, Judith drove across to Alexander Parade, a thoroughfare of fine sandstone tenements, just east of the city centre. Here and there in the darkness, the white light of a booze store or take away broke up the wall of corrugated shutters on the ground floors, but apart from that it was a murky place. She turned into a side street where a dozen teenagers were hanging about on the corner, wearing tracksuits and baseball caps and throwing lighted fireworks at one another. As she passed, one of them doubled up to stare inside the car, trying to ascertain whether its cargo was friend or foe.
The White brothers lived in a quadrangle of three floored, brown brick apartments, huddled between an enclave of industrial units and the M8 motorway, which emitted an incessant hum. As Judith waited for a response from the intercom, she kept glancing anxiously over each shoulder, fearing that the street corner gang may have followed her. She pressed the buzzer five times without any response and was just turning to go when the speaker crackled into life and a husky, unfamiliar male voice asked her identity. Surprisingly, the communal door clicked open without her having to explain anything more than her name, as if the person on the other end were already aware of her existence.
Judith was half-way up the brightly lit stairs when a thin character in a white Lacoste shell suit came to meet her, introducing himself as Finley White. About thirty-five years old, he had medium length greasy hair, a gaunt face and naïve looking, watery eyes. After taking her coat, he led her into the dank apartment, where she sat on a cigarette burned, burgundy coloured couch, next to a copy of that night’s local newspaper.
“So you’re Judith,” he said, as if having finally solved some lifelong puzzle.
“Oh, your brother’s mentioned me then?”
“Oh yes — he’s mentioned nothing else. When I took him in, he just kept muttering, like one of those dying cowboys in the movies: ‘Must say sorry to Judith…Must say sorry to Judith.’ Does that make any sense to you?”
“No. He’s certainly owes me no apologies that I know of.”
“Well, he’s not uttered a single word since…I think it’s his pride.”
“Pride?”
“Yes.” Fin sat down next to Judith, his voice dropping to a gravely whisper. “I think he feels ashamed that he kicked me out the house, especially now he’s relying on me to look after him. It’s like he’s sent himself to Coventry. But it’s me who should feel ashamed and I do. I did nothing to help my ma, just compounded her problems with my antics. Looking after Danny now is my way of making amends. He was there for her and now I’m here for him. Perhaps you might be able to explain this to the bloody fool.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s in his bed as always. I think it’
s best if we wait for him to appear of his own accord, when he comes out for the bathroom or something…to avoid any adverse pressure.”
They talked for several hours and Judith found Fin to be the complete opposite of his older brother. Where Danny affected omniscience, incessantly lecturing, Fin seemed more intent on listening and learning. In fact he was so attentive, she soon found herself divulging quite intimate details about her life. He seemed genuinely absorbed throughout, as if even the tiniest thing had the power to astound him. Judith suspected it was this willingness to learn that had made him vulnerable to drugs. She imagined Fin was someone who couldn’t pass judgement on a subject until he’d investigated every detail and experienced it himself, unlike Danny, who would self-righteously denounce anything that contradicted his inherited ideology.
When Judith mentioned Bob and Herman’s court case, Fin took control of the conversation, having been in Barlinnie Prison at the same time as the disgraced rock star. Apparently, Bob had been like a fish out of water inside, practically grovelling for his company. On spotting Danny’s younger brother in the prison canteen, he’d rushed over, ecstatically relieved to see a familiar face at last, even if it did belong to someone twenty leagues beneath his imagined echelon. This had been particularly cringe inducing for Fin, because Bob had always treated him with contempt in the past, snubbing his every salutation. On top of this, he despised the guy for running off with his brother’s girlfriend and detested him for the alleged assault on Carina Curran, whom he knew personally from the drugs scene. But his upbringing had prevented him from shunning Bob, and he’d even used what influence he had among other inmates to make sure no harm befell the man.