“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.