GUILT TRIPPER (11 page)

 After being escorted
off McLeod’s property, Judith found the minibus gone, leaving her all alone in
Glasgow. She booked into a hotel for the night then returned to Gairloch by
public transport the following day. When she finally arrived, after an eight
hour bus journey, the kids told her there’d been no sign of Danny and that Hamish
had packed his bags and left with Angie, citing Ryan’s assault as the final
straw.

 All week, Judith
agonised over whether to stay, but, in the end, decided it was futile. She knew
Danny would never return, and Ryan worked for Rex McLeod now anyway. So, realizing
that Gairloch College was over, she left Fin with the students and drove back
to England, where she’d soon be working as an assistant curator again, only
this time at Birmingham’s City Art Gallery.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER:
16

 The following summer,
Judith took a well-deserved walking holiday in Iceland. To get there though,
she had to catch a plane from Glasgow, where she arrived by train the day
before her flight. While queuing for a taxi outside Central Station with her
luggage, she spotted a familiar face approaching, smoking a roll up, accompanied
by a shell-suited, teenage brunette, pushing a baby in a pram. It was Dickens. He
stopped to talk, telling her that he was living back at the Great Eastern
Hotel, but would soon be moving, with his girlfriend and nine-month-old child,
to a brand new housing association pad in Possil.

 “That’s were Danny
used to live,” Judith exclaimed, smiling genially towards the skinny young
mother, who was either nodding at everything Dickens said or laughing
nervously.

 “I know, he’s told
me all about the place,” Dickens declared proudly.

 Judith was taken
aback by this statement. “When did you see Danny then?”

 “Didn’t you know? We’re
next door neighbours over at the Great Eastern. I apologised to him for my
behaviour that Christmas night up in the Highlands…he was really good about
it.”

 “Yes, he’s like that.
He’s a good man,” Judith said, trying to maintain a veneer of normality, but
her veins were pulsating with shock at the news about Danny’s lowly accommodation.
That aside, she was delighted to see Dickens so happy, but, knowing how
sensitive and prone to violence he could be, worried about what might happen if
his young girlfriend ever decided to leave him.

 After dropping her
luggage at a bed and breakfast, Judith took a cab to the Great Eastern Hotel. Here,
Danny lived in one of twenty-four white, wooden cubicles which faced one
another along a narrow, chlorine smelling corridor. He was sitting on a bed
wearing his blue overalls when she arrived, after being shown up to the fourth
floor by a masculine looking female warden with tattooed forearms.

 “I’m surprised you
want to see me,” he said, forlornly.

 Embarrassed by
Danny’s self-deprecation, Judith’s eyes wandered from the single bed at the
centre of the cubicle to his mother’s portrait painting, now nailed to the
wooden wall behind. Looking down again, her attention was grabbed by a hardback
book on the pillow behind him. Staring up from its glossy flysheet, against a
backdrop of iron shuttered, concrete tenements was Ryan, head turned just
enough to flaunt his battle scar.

 “Why are you here
Danny?” She regained eye contact. “Is it because you feel guilty about being
happy that year up at Gairloch? Are you ashamed that your contentment was
funded by McLeod’s drug money?”

 “How do you know
about that?” Danny exclaimed, his eyes following Judith as she approached the
bed and picked Ryan’s book up.

 “I overheard your
conversation with Bob.”

 Danny looked
relieved not to have to explain everything. In the meantime Judith perused the
item in her hands. Published by another Rex McLeod front called Highly Educated
Delinquent, it went under the title ‘Toi’s Are Us’ — Toi being the name of the
‘team’ which Ryan had led around his housing scheme.

 “I stole it from
Waterstone’s,” Danny confessed. “Somehow, shoplifting seemed more moral than
subsidising a heroin dealer.” This elicited an exasperated sigh from Judith.

“Ryan really
disappointed me when he accepted McLeod’s proposition. My own corruption was
bad enough, but his fall was like the end of all hope. It was as if everything
me and him had discussed over that past twelve months meant nothing. After he
let me down like that, I didn’t want to be near human beings ever again.”

 “But you let him
down first Danny…can’t you even see that! By being all nice things to all men,
you allowed the bad to prosper at the expense of the good. You should have been
protecting Ryan and all those other kids from spiteful weirdos such as Bob
Fitzgerald, but instead you allowed him to sleep under the same roof…you even
invited him to stay permanently! You were too blinded by those damned
egalitarian beliefs to notice the danger you were putting everyone in. The fact
is Danny, there are people who are always going to be bad, no matter what, and
they don’t deserve our compassion. Those types have to be expelled from society
otherwise it just isn’t worth living in.”

 “I’m not saying you’re
wrong, but, because of my upbringing, it isn’t easy for me to think like that.”

 “What’s that toe-rag
up to these days anyway?”

 “Bob? He’s avoiding
Rex McLeod full-time, odd jobbing his way round the world and restricting
himself to remote places. The last I heard, he was supposed to be working at a
fish canning factory, somewhere north of the Arctic Circle in Norway. I just
hope to God he manages to evade that filth peddling bastard for ever more.”

 “Why?”

 “Why? Well, mainly,
because if anything terrible happens to Bob then it’ll be all my fault, for
making McLeod aware that he’d been sharing trade secrets with me.”

 “But if McLeod does
catch up with Bob, then you’ll at least have achieved some justice for that
poor girl Carina…what’s her name?”

 “Curran.”

 “Yes.”

 “Well, first of all,
I’ve learnt that there isn’t any justice and, secondly, if it was wrong of Bob
to have inflicted violence upon Carina, then it would be no less wrong for Rex
McLeod or anybody else to inflict violence upon Bob. An act of barbarism
shouldn’t suddenly become palatable simply because it’s supported by a moral
argument. I’m not having a pop at you Judith, but frankly, there’s nothing more
sinister than a sadist in search of legitimisation. As far as I’m concerned,
you either enjoy violence or you don’t.”

 Judith stood in
silence, wracking her brains for a counter argument. But at heart she felt
Danny was right.

 “So, apart from
festering in this hole, what else have you been up to these past ten months? What’s
happened to the college for God’s sake?”

 As Danny’s
explanation gained steam, Judith sat down on the bed, listening intently.

 It transpired that
he’d never returned north, being unable to set foot in a house financed by heroin.
However, he had spent his final fifty grand employing qualified teachers to get
the kids through their diplomas. But, according to Katy — who visited him
regularly at the hostel — it had been a miserable place thereon. The new
employees did only as much as they were paid for and eschewed the students when
outside the classroom. The big communal dinners became a thing of the past, and
the kids were discouraged from the house altogether. Instead, they were
expected to prepare their own individual meals back at the byre, in a tiny
kitchen which occupied the room vacated by Ryan.

 With all the joy
removed, only six of the original twelve Glaswegians had completed their second
year. Thanks to the foundations laid by Danny, Hamish, Judith and Angie,
though, they all achieved high grades that summer — most notably Belinda, who
passed English with distinction, despite being heartbroken over Ryan’s
departure.

 Once the place had
been deserted — around mid-May — Danny had put the house and byre on the market
for less than he’d paid for them derelict, so desperate was he to be cleansed
of any association with Rex McLeod’s money. It sold within days. The only
problem was, his charity owned Gairloch College and so he had to conduct the
absurd charade of selling a painting to it for one hundred and fifty thousand
pounds, in order to get his hands on the cash. At first he’d been more than
happy paying the Capital Gains Tax to the government, until he learnt that Rex
McLeod’s security firm had just won a large government contract. There seemed
to be no escape — he was either being paid by or paying for the drug dealer.

 Carrying the
remaining money in a holdall, Danny had walked through some of the city’s most
deprived areas, during the early hours, redistributing it as he went. First
off, he’d revisited North Glasgow, where Katy and her parent’s now lived in an
even worse and older building than their original tenement, which had been
demolished for private houses. Not only was it a far cry from the home with front
and back doors that the housing association had promised, but it too would soon
be torn down. Here, he’d posted ten thousand pounds through the letter box, as
thanks for the girl’s unstinting dedication to his ill mother, and to help
finance the creative writing degree she was embarking on that autumn, down in
East Anglia. Then he’d hit the daunting, thirty floor, Springburn high rises. Despite
the elevators not working, he dropped twenty grand at a fourteenth floor apartment,
home to a guy called Brucie Cruickshanks, who was dying from Mesothelioma after
years working with asbestos in the Govan shipyards. The poor bastard had been
denied compensation and Danny hoped his donation might lessen the stress, if
not for Brucie then maybe for Mrs. Cruickshanks. After this, he’d returned to
the East End, pushing a similar amount through the door of a football club for
recovering drug addicts, before crossing the M8 footbridge and walking several
miles to a new, semi-detached house in the redeveloped Blackhill area, where he
posted a manila envelope containing fifty thousand pounds. He hadn’t quite made
it back down the path though, when a squat, moustachioed fellow aged about
fifty came out, wanting to know what was going on. Danny could not have
imagined a worse situation. He’d been left with two choices: run or finally
confess his sins to the person he’d exploited most. In the name of decency, he’d
felt compelled to introduce himself.

 The man had invited
Danny inside, where a thin, dark haired woman lay on the couch watching TV — it
was Carina Curran. Having spent months semi-comatose, followed by years in a
deep, appetite suppressing depression, she’d shed much of her former weight. She’d
made a steady recovery in the three years since the attack, and even regained
her ability to walk, but only over short distances and then very slowly.

 Having taken the armchair
opposite Mr. Curran, Danny had wasted no time with his revelation, maniacally
spewing it up without commas or full stops. He’d been prepared for hysterics
from Carina and even physical violence from her dad, but instead they’d just
sat in silence, depriving him of any distraction from his shame. Confession
over, the eight foot walk to the front door had seemed like a mile.

 Three days later,
the Currans had turned up at the Great Eastern Hotel, returning Danny’s money. He’d
tried to convince Carina that, as a victim of both Bob Fitzgerald’s violence
and Rex McLeod’s drug dealing, she was entitled to some compensation. But she’d
said she abhorred the compensation culture and believed all money should be in
the hands of communities, not individuals.

 “Individuals waste
money on phone ringtones, cocaine and furry dice to hang from their rear view
mirrors,” she’d said. “Whereas communities, at their best, spend it on brain
surgeons and special needs education. As a beneficiary of both, how can I
legitimise taking any more money out of the pot? Without a Health Service,
fifty thousand pounds wouldn’t even have paid for my bed and breakfast in a
private hospital.”

 When Carina spoke,
her brain damage had made itself apparent. She’d had to pause every so often to
remember a simple word or regain a train of thought and occasionally she’d
slurred her words. Apart from this handicap she’d been remarkably eloquent —
especially for someone having to relearn how to read and write.

 Carina said that
closing a college for twenty kids in order to make one individual wealthy was
absurd. If he really wanted to make amends for what he’d done, she’d told
Danny, he could teach her how to paint.

 After the first
drawing lesson round at the house, Carina had taken a nap, leaving Danny and Mr.
Curran alone together. Mr. Curran had explained how the be all and end all of
his daughter’s life had been playing the cello, until Mrs. Curran died,
following a protracted illness. It was at this time that she’d become close
friends with a wealthy violin player from her orchestra, called Cordellia Henderson.
This elegant lady — the wife of a merchant banker — had been smoking heroin in
Carina’s company after shows for years without any apparent adverse effects. As
a consequence, the young girl had seen no harm accepting an invitation to a
toot one evening, as a distraction from her grief. The banker’s wife had
enjoyed having a partner in crime and Carina smoked heroin gratis on fourteen
consecutive nights before that particular run of shows ended. The following
week, she’d been ringing on the Henderson’s doorbell at their West End
townhouse, lusting after another toot. But the visit had been ill received,
with Carina being scolded for her indiscretion and warned never to visit the
house again, under any circumstances. If she hadn’t just inherited three thousand
pounds the teenager would have been blissfully broke, as always, and gone straight
home, perhaps never touching heroin again. Instead, she’d hit the East End, enquiring
for dealers among the street corner gangs, until someone directed her to a
Gallowgate apartment. Within a month all her money had been smoked away and her
life was spiralling out of control. Having been sacked from the orchestra for
falling asleep during a performance, she’d sold the cello her father had worked
double shifts for at the Tennents Brewery, before taking up prostitution and
the hypodermic needle. The rest, as they say, is history. Fortunately, Carina’s
injuries had erased all memory of heroin. Unfortunately, though, they’d also
stolen her musical talent.