Between the Bridge and the River Read Online Free PDF Page B

course. She said, “Do you want a chocolate digestive with your tea?”
    Gus declined, as nonsexually as he could, and Deborah left slightly disappointed.
    Gus sighed and looked out the window to the great damp city of Glasgow. Most of the buildings had been sandblasted in the last twenty years, which Gus, along with most Glaswegians, secretly detested. This town used to be black and sooty and smelly and terrifying; now it looked like Disneyland in the rain, sad and wrong.
    It hadn’t just been sandblasted, it had been disinfected.
    Gus thought about a paper cover he had seen on a toilet seat on a business trip to America. It had written on it “Sanitized for your convenience” in pleasant and friendly writing, with a little drawing of a woman smiling and giving a thumbs-up.
    The drawing of the woman wasn’t very good. She looked like Paul McCartney.
    People were frightened to bare their arses in anything less than laboratory conditions. Glasgow had been sanitized for your convenience, but then again, so had Gus.
    He had started out his working life in one of the great shipyards of Glasgow (now riverside apartments). He became a left-wing union official, fighting for the rights of the workers. A charismatic young man, he was spotted by the BBC and asked on to political panel shows. From there he went on to investigative and front-line reporting, doing a lot of face time on camera during the rise of Solidarity and the collapseof the Soviet empire. That was when he grew the trademark mustache. Somehow it associated him with Lech Walesa. They were brothers in politics, heroism, and facial hair, although this was unknown to Mr. Walesa.
    From producing his own segments he went on to producing his own show and when Margaret Thatcher created conditions that were advantageous he started his own production company, making local news programs and documentaries exposing the evils of Margaret Thatcher and the like. His company became successful and wealthy, as he did himself.
    He eventually managed a takeover of the Scottish media giant he now controlled, and now he sat at the top of his own private modern republic. Havel of his private Czechoslovakia. He hadn’t deserted socialism, he just liked money and power.
    He saw himself as a great modern left-wing intellectual trapped in the body and job of a successful capitalist media giant.
    Of course, he was, in truth, a cunt.
    He didn’t like Fraser, though. He hated his jumpers and his bourgeois religious phony baloney show (although the advertising rates were great, viewing figures were great, fuck, business is business) and he hated the fact that something this twee was one of his signature programs.
    He’d get rid of Fraser given half a chance, although he couldn’t just fire a star, the shareholders would kill him. They loved Fraser’s homespun image, his family appeal, they’d go mad.
    He hated answering to those morons.
    Deborah beeped him. “Tracy Flood from the Sunday
Recorder
on line three.”
    “What can I do for you, Tracy? Don’t tell me one of my newsreaders is a crack whore.”
    “Better, Gus. Much better.”
    He stuck his hand into his waistband and leaned back in his chair.
    Oh fuck.
    * * *
    Margaret couldn’t help herself, she kind of enjoyed the fact that Fraser was panicking.
    “Shit, Margaret! Why didn’t you tell me before we went in?”
    “What good would it have done?”
    “He’ll fire me.”
    “No one is going to fire you. You’re a star.”
    “Oh, wake up, Margaret. I’m not a star, I’m a celebrity, and when Sunday comes I won’t even be that. I’ll be a punch line.”
    “Hey, it didn’t do Hugh Grant any harm. In fact, his career went from strength to strength.”
    “Margaret, Hugh Grant is upper class, which means everybody already knew he was sexually deviant. He also was not a religious broadcaster in a country of narrow-minded religious bigots.”
    “Oh, that’s right, blame Scotland, not your own penis.”
    “I have nothing