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.