GUILT TRIPPER
Authors: Geoff Small
Digital edition published
in
2012
by
The Electronic Book Company
www.theelectronicbookcompany.com
www.facebook.com/quality.ebooks
Cover photograph by Jef
Seghers
Cover design by The
Electronic Book Company
Copyright 2012 by
Geoff Small
CONTENTS:
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
Language: UK
English Spellings
This
ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be
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hard work of this author. This ebook contains detailed research material,
combined with the author's own subjective opinions, which are open to debate.
Any offence caused to persons either living or dead is purely unintentional.
Factual references may include or present the author's own interpretation,
based on research and study. All characters appearing in this work are
fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely
coincidental.
Copyright 2012 by
Geoff Small
All rights reserved
Set in
Scotland, Guilt Tripper is the fast-moving story of Glasgow man, Danny White,
an unemployed artist whose beautiful girlfriend has left him for his successful
and wealthy best friend, Bob Fitzgerald. Convinced his socialist beliefs have
made him soft, Danny decides things should change. So when he discovers
Fitzgerald has a perverted violent side, he extorts money from him which he
then uses to set up an art school in the Scottish Highlands for underprivileged
teenagers.
Everything
is perfect until a bedraggled Fitzgerald turns up at the school one night and tells
Danny the sinister truth about the money funding his project. Horrified and
conscience-stricken, Danny attempts to put things right - but is it all too
late?
Please note:
This book was written, produced and
self-edited
in the UK
where some of the spellings and word usage vary slightly from U.S. English.
PART ONE
In the midsummer
dusk, Judith hailed a taxi outside her hotel and asked to be taken to a
cultured bar. On route the driver received a phone call. Whatever was said must
have been pretty serious because he swung his black cab into oncoming traffic
and sped off in the opposite direction. They headed north, entering a very
different Glasgow, its rundown buildings alternating with overgrown wasteland. Turning
off the main drag, the cab rattled along a potholed road, bisecting a field of
flattened earth where a whole neighbourhood had recently been demolished. Judith
was starting to worry that she’d been kidnapped, until they reached the other
side, screeching up behind a police car and an ambulance, parked by some
derelict, reconstituted stone tenements. Here, the driver shot out and ran into
a ground floor apartment — the only one in the street which didn’t have iron
sheets over the windows — while she watched powerlessly from the back seat.
Thirty-year-old
Judith Child was an attractive woman with bobbed ash brown hair, a cheeky heart-shaped
face and sparkling, friendly blue eyes. She worked as assistant curator at Worcester
City Art Gallery, but desperately wanted to become chief somewhere in her own
right. For this though, she needed an Art History Masters degree, which was why
she’d come to Glasgow, for an interview up at the university. Either side of
this appointment she’d be touring the city all week, so as to become better
acquainted with her prospective home before driving back the following Tuesday.
Once the emergency
services had left empty handed, Judith went in search of her taxi driver, whom
she found in the tenement close, comforting a tracksuited teenage girl. With a
nod he gestured for his fare to go on into
the apartment where
she took a seat in the dimly lit lounge and balked at the whiff of stale urine
and the sight of the antiquated decor.
The saddle brown, ‘leather
look’ suite was torn, exposing the yellow foam within, while the gold metallic wallpaper
from the early nineteen eighties reminded her of chocolate coins. Near the
mantelpiece, surrounded by catheter bag boxes, a large portrait painting on an
easel caught her attention. It depicted a woman in her thirties wearing a black
dress, with long raven hair, soul penetrating chestnut coloured eyes and a
determined but dignified, chiselled face.
“I’m sorry to have
inconvenienced you, only my ma’s had one of her fits,” the taxi driver
apologized as he entered the room, switching an orange shaded light on. “Poor
wee Katy back there was minding her when it happened.”
“Will your mother be
ok?”
He shook his head. “She’s
been bed-ridden for over eight years now…we’re just waiting for the
inevitable.”
The taxi driver
stared sombrely into the middle distance, giving Judith an opportunity to study
him for the first time.
At five foot eleven, he was an intense
looking, lean fellow approaching middle age, with sharp sculpted features and
unkempt brown hair. He wore an unstylish, black crew neck T-shirt dappled with
coloured oil paint, faded jeans and red, threadbare baseball pumps — the whole
outfit probably costing no more than twenty pounds.
“I see somebody in
the house is a painter,” she said, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “Who’s
the portrait of?”
The taxi driver
turned to face the painting. “That’s my mother back in the seventies: strong
and indomitable, the way I like to remember her.” He went over to the easel,
removed the picture and handed it to Judith. “You know, she’s sacrificed all
joy and comfort for her beliefs. When I was a kid my dad wangled the eight of
us a four bed-roomed house from the council — but she refused to move. She said:
‘when everyone else gets four bedrooms we’ll go. Until that day we’re staying
put, in solidarity with our brothers and sisters.’ And where did all Annie
White’s principles get her, eh? Paralysed at fifty nine by a stroke, that’s
where.” He let out a long sigh. “Not long after, the love of my life left me. If
I’m honest, I spent more time worrying about that than thinking about ma — something
I’ll always regret. I’d even considered abandoning her so I could follow this
girl to Italy.”
Suddenly looking
ashamed, he retrieved the picture off Judith, who got up and followed him back
to the mantelpiece, so she could examine an old family photo on the gold
papered wall above, featuring the taxi driver as a child and what looked like
four elder sisters and a younger brother in a pushchair.
“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.”