by Geoff Small
Danny stood up and raised his glass of water in a toast: “Everybody! To Ryan! And may all the students in this college be as worthy as him!”
“To Ryan!” the others concurred, chinking their tumblers together.
Ryan looked like he was on the verge of tears and left before betraying any more emotion.
CHAPTER: 12
Except for occasional fallouts, the college was getting along fine. Thanks to passionate teaching and a co-operative ethos — which saw the more able students obliged to coach those lagging behind — astounding advances were made during that first term. Consequently, meal time conversations evolved from idle gossip to full-on intellectual debates, which rarely saw anyone leave the table until midnight. There’d also been something of a revolution in the preparation of the meals themselves, with every resident student and teacher being partnered off to do their stint at the range. Despite a few burnt meals early on, by winter everyone had become a competent chef, except for Danny. In fact, his meals were so abysmal, he got banned from all kitchen duties except washing-up, and even then he left a lot to be desired.
That December, the students went home for a month, leaving Danny, Judith, Angie, Fin and Ryan, who’d been invited to stay in Hamish’s room rather than be all alone. While enjoying Christmas dinner together, they were interrupted by someone knocking at the door. It was just after three o’clock. The Highland dusk had already fallen, so that when Judith answered she could only make out a man’s silhouette. Being the season of goodwill to all men though, she brought the stranger into the candlelit kitchen where it took a moment before she recognized Dickens without his glasses. Still wearing his old brown suit, he’d been walking all day from Kinlochewe.
Judith did the utmost to make Dickens welcome, but he threw it back in her face. Taciturn and sullen, he inhibited what had been a merry gathering, rudely smoking his roll ups while everyone was still eating. It was obvious he wanted her exclusive attention, so she took him up to her room where they sat together on the bed.
Just out of prison, Dickens had hitched-hiked from Glasgow to Kinlochewe on Christmas Eve, having acquired the college address from a cell-mate whose daughter was a student. It turned out that he’d been arrested for fare dodging on a London bound train the day after Judith had last spoken to him at Herman’s house. Typing Dickens’s name into their computer, Motherwell Police had discovered he was already on the run, having jumped bail for two assaults, one in Edinburgh and another in Dundee. Not only that, but Bob Fitzgerald had made an allegation against him the previous day, when Dickens had been round to his apartment and dispensed a farewell head-butt. All three assaults had been inflicted upon former acquaintances who Dickens had felt let down by. One was beaten up for asking him to leave their family home, after he’d been sleeping on the couch for two months, another for not inviting him to their wedding. As for Bob Fitzgerald, well, Dickens had elevated the singer to hero status and he’d repaid him with ridicule.
Judith was perturbed to learn that Dickens had been harbouring a dream of him and her being a couple. Indeed, to him it was destiny. He kept banging on about “us” and “we” as if their future together was ineluctable and it had only been prison bars keeping them apart. She was paying the price now for her affectionate farewell eighteen months earlier, when she’d said she loved him, in that way women do with men whom they have no physical attraction to whatsoever. She tried subtly to disabuse him of this fantasy, all the time fearing that she might become another victim of his violence.
“Dickens, I don’t want a relationship with anybody, Ok.
Dickens sprang up from the bed and banged his palm violently against the wardrobe.
“Dickens, please, calm down,” Judith implored.
“I am calm!”
“You’ve got to stop demanding so much of people.”
He spun round to face her again. “Demanding so much of people? Demanding so much of people! I’ve never had anything!” Then he turned and, this time, punched the wardrobe with all his might.
Judith stood up and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Until you stop seeing every little thing that doesn’t go your way as a personal slight, you’re not going to develop one jot — and I know you don’t want that.”
But there was no assuaging him at this time and he stormed out of the room. She followed, but by the time she’d got downstairs he’d gone. Temperatures of around minus five had been forecast, so Judith took the minibus and searched the only available road, stopping every hundred yards to holler Dickens’s name across the pitch black moorland. After a fruitless twenty minutes, though, she drove back, relieved not to have found him if she were honest.
Three days later Hamish came back and Ryan returned to the student quarters, where he encountered absolute carnage. All the computer monitors had been smashed, wash basins and pipes torn from walls — flooding the wash rooms — while every book in the recreation loft had had its pages torn out and strewn across the pool table, its blue felt in shreds. A discarded Old Holborn tobacco packet betrayed Dickens as the culprit and explained why Judith hadn’t found him on Christmas night.
Everyone wanted to report Dickens to the police, except Ryan and Danny. The youngster — viscerally opposed to the authorities — wanted to hunt him down and dispense his own justice, while Danny pleaded for some understanding on behalf of the homeless orphan, whose vandalism he perceived as the honest expression of a powerless man.
“Can anyone of us here begin to imagine the sense of rejection and exclusion that poor man must be suffering? I can see no practical purpose in sending him back to prison. The man needs a family. Perhaps we should be that family? Perhaps we should take him in and forgive him, like a mother or a brother forgives when a close one goes berserk — as so often happens — smashing household objects out of hurt.”
This was a step too far for the others, so a compromise was reached and Dickens went unreported.
Danny postponed the students return until February, by which time the byre had been restored to its former glory. Unfortunately, one of the lads — Mucky Tea from Castlemilk — got embroiled in a gang fight during the interim period and ended up on remand at a youth offenders centre. A month later he received a six month jail sentence — something for which even Danny struggled to forgive Dickens. Mucky Tea’s place in the byre was soon filled though, by one of the local students who had trouble at home with his father.
CHAPTER 13
By summer, Gairloch College was back on track. The art students were exhibiting their work at the village hall and Ryan was due to sign a publishing deal, thanks to Angie, who’d sent sample chapters of his work to her mother to distribute among the London literati. It had been the first time she’d contacted her family in over four years and Judith admired the way she’d swallowed her pride to help others.
An even more miraculous event occurred after Ryan’s celebratory meal, when he ended up snogging Belinda. This wasn’t the sudden phenomenon it might have seemed. The morning after their spat at the dinner table, Ryan had taken advice from Danny and sent her some flowers as an apology, bringing them onto speaking terms for the first time. Thereafter, his teaching sessions helped develop the situation from one of polite diplomacy to mutual respect, before literary success finally wooed her.
Judith was delighted to see Ryan and Belinda’s relationship flourish, but Danny expressed reservations about the whole thing. Remembering how he’d been distracted from painting by Ingrid, he worried that Ryan’s contentment might have a harmful effect on his writing. He claimed that, in his experience, love narrowed perceptions, shrinking the universe from a chaos of infinite stimuli and possibilities until it became just one person. Single track minds, he argued, rarely produced interesting art.
In what seemed like no time at all, Gairloch College was enjoying its first anniversary dinner, where freshly shot grouse was being washed down with Chateau Haut-Brion at one-hundred and twenty pounds a bottle. This wasn’t as profligate as it might seem.
Before a single cork had been popped, Danny had treated his students to a wine appreciation course and legitimised the expense as part of their education. He reckoned that if the kids knew what decent booze tasted like then they would aspire to better things in life than Buckfast and Special Brew, when they eventually returned home.
It was a bright, muggy evening so the front door had been left open. What with the party atmosphere, no one noticed a woman walking into the kitchen, carrying a small child in her arms. Judith was only alerted when, one by one, students suddenly stopped talking and stared towards the door. She looked up to find Ingrid, suntanned and beautiful, staring across at Danny, sitting halfway along the table, beneath his mother’s portrait on the back wall. Wearing those perennial blue overalls, he was too busy tucking into a grouse and slurping on red wine, to realize that the love of his life had just entered the room. It wasn’t until complete silence reigned that he eventually looked up, by which time Francesca — Ingrid’s less attractive sister — had arrived too. As his eyes darted from Ingrid’s to the child in her arms, his face grew pale. He sprang up and rushed round the table towards her.
“Ingrid? What’s going on?”
“We need to talk,” she asserted arrogantly.
Danny gestured towards the lounge then followed the hip swaying actress in her white, diaphanous trousers and matching silk, strapped summer top. Meanwhile, Hamish gave his seat up to Francesca — who was now holding the child — while Judith took advantage of the distraction. She slipped out into the sticky evening, ostensibly to have a cigarette, but mainly to eavesdrop at an open, front window. Blowing smoke, she stood with her back to the rugged, grey-stone wall, while Ingrid’s spoilt voice filtered through the net curtain.
“It makes no odds whether I informed you at the time or in the next century, your Lawrence’s father — end of.”
“How do you know he’s not Bob’s?”
“Because we hadn’t had sex in years…we were never really a physical couple.”
There was a contemplative pause before Danny’s next question.
“Why have you only seen fit to tell me about Lawrence now?”
“I was a psychological mess…coming down off years of coke and booze. My meagre energies would have been denuded even more if I’d had to deal with you as well as Lawrence, and that would have benefited no one. I thought it more practical to concentrate on getting myself fit.”
“There’s that ‘practical’ word again…your euphemism for being a selfish bitch!”
“Like your use of ‘sacrifice’ you mean, whenever you shirked responsibility. I mean, where’s your sense of sacrifice now?”
“What?”
“Can’t you see that missing my pregnancy and avoiding Lawrence’s first sixteen months was a sacrifice worth making, so that he wasn’t damaged for life. We’d have been arguing, just like now, and that can really screw newly born babies up — forever.” There was a brief pause. “I needed time to get my head straight, ok?” At this point, the actress’s voice quavered a touch too emphatically for Judith’s liking. “Part of the reason I never told you was because I was on the verge of having an abortion… then I nearly gave him up for adoption. If I hadn’t had the space to resolve my psychological problems, we wouldn’t have even made it through the pregnancy together. It’s from this point now that you have to start being Lawrence’s father…now’s the time for you to start applying your morality to practical purposes, like raising our son.”
“Do you mean within a family unit?”
Ingrid hesitated before answering, “yes.”
There were another thirty seconds before Danny spoke again, making an attempt at levity which Judith interpreted as an articulation of his delight.
“Come to think of it, we really need a drama teacher.”
But there was no laugh from Ingrid, polite or otherwise. “Well, you’ll have to throw your little toys away now you’ve got responsibilities.”
“What toys?” Danny laughed in bewilderment.
“This place I mean. We’ve got to move full steam ahead, for Lawrence’s sake. There’s no way we’re going to achieve anything stranded out here in the back of beyond. If we move to London, I can get back into acting and you can realize your full potential in the art world, instead of hiding away from life up here.”
“But…I…I can’t desert these kids.”
“Your responsibility is to me and Lawrence now, not a bunch of scrounging schemies. I noticed that was good wine they were quaffing out there at my child’s expense…Haut-Brion!...Chateau Haut-Brion! Oh, you’ve got to toughen up Danny! Time to join the real world I’m afraid.”
“I need to think.”
“You shouldn’t have to think about it…you love me right?”
“I’ve got to get some air.”
Totally preoccupied, Danny didn’t even notice Judith as he bounded out the front door, heading towards the beach. By the time he returned, after dark, the party had broken up and the students were lying outside the byre on their mattresses, unable to sleep because of the heat. When he entered the kitchen, Judith was washing dishes with Francesca, while Ingrid sat drinking wine at the table.
“Where the hell did you get to?” she moaned.
Judith and Francesca left them alone, the latter going upstairs to check on little Lawrence, the former going outside to listen in at the kitchen window.
“So?” Ingrid demanded.
“This isn’t easy for me.”
“Life isn’t easy Danny.”
“The way I see things, I’ve not made any bond or promises to our son. In fact, until the last few hours he may as well not have existed. But these kids, these ‘scrounging schemies’ I have bonded with and I have made promises to. I’ve already seen enough to know I’ll never have anything in common with you or our child…not like I have things in common with these people. I mean, you’ve already got him dolled up in designer clothes for God’s sake! No. Under your terms, fulfilling the obligation to my biological child would mean betraying twenty-two others…my spiritual children if you like. Surely, being as ‘practical’ as you are, you’ll acknowledge that it’s more efficient to bring twenty-two kids up well, rather than just one, who, in fact, isn’t going to be brought up well at all, but encouraged to be an obnoxious, selfish, greedy, grabbing brat like his mother.”
“Typical friggin’ socialist! Worry about everyone else’s kids while avoiding responsibility for their own! What sort of a man abandons his family?”
“I don’t know. This is my family…you’re quite welcome to join us.”
“You’re a lunatic! You’ll never rise out of the gutter because you love it there you freak! Francesca!” Ingrid wailed up the stairs. “Bring Lawrence! We’re leaving!”
Judith hid herself round the side of the cottage, where she waited until Ingrid’s silver Range Rover had tore off, spraying gravel in its wake. When she re-entered the kitchen, Danny was removing a bottle of malt and a glass tumbler from an overhead cupboard. On turning round he spotted her and went back for another glass, while she sat down at the end of the table in silence. He came and sat on the corner next to her, half filling the tumblers before handing her one. Though she was happy to see the back of Ingrid, Judith’s conscience compelled her to play devil’s advocate. There was, after all, a child involved.
“Danny, I overheard you and Ingrid.” Danny took his first ever sip of whisky and screwed his face up in displeasure at the taste. “Are you absolutely sure you’re making the right decision?”
“I’ve never felt so sure about anything in my whole life Judith. This past year or so has been the best time I’ve ever had. I didn’t realize my happiness until Ingrid appeared and reminded me how miserable our relationship actually became. Within minutes of being here she was dragging me down a dark well and making me claustrophobic.” He turned his head to look out the window. “Down at the beach, listening to the waves and the piping Oystercatchers, I thought ‘God, I’m free’. Not only tha
t, but free within a community. Why the hell would I want to imprison myself in some overpriced, terraced house in a soulless city, where I know nobody except my grasping, dictatorial missus and a kid who, shaped in her mould, I’d only end up hating anyway.”
“But Danny, he’s your son. Surely that means something?”
“Of course it does, and that’s why I’m doing what’s best for him. It’s no good him being torn between us all the time. Much better that he has a set path to follow, and that’s either hers or mine. I’m wise enough to know that it’s going to be hers. And as for any emotional attachment, well, that doesn’t even exist yet, so it’s not like I’m going to be pining after him.”
“But you are going to see him from time to time?”
“That’ll be up to her.”
“But if you do see him that’s when you’ll become attached. By then it will be too late to become a family, though, because of your decision tonight. I mean what if Ingrid gets someone else in…someone who neglects Lawrence because he’s not their flesh and blood?”
“What if that ‘someone else’ can be a better father than I ever could, simply because he doesn’t suffer the egotism that comes with being a biological parent? Perhaps he’ll see Lawrence as an individual rather than his personal ambassador.” Judith puckered her lips while thinking about what he said. “That’s possibly why I get along so well with these kids, because they’re not my own. You know those stories we hear about new born babies being mixed up in hospital wards and going home with the wrong parents? Perhaps that should be done as a matter of course. That way we’d eradicate that emotional involvement which only ever ends in arguments, and kids would get the rational, objective guidance they need.”
