“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 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.”