“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 gave 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.”