Free Doors Open by Ian Rankin Page A

in twenty-first century philistine Britain? The space for Westie’s showcase had already been allocated - deep in the bowels of the college building on Lauriston Place, next to a sculptor who worked with straw and a ‘video installationist’ whose main claim to fame was a looped stop-motion animation of a slowly lactating breast.

    ‘I know my place,’ was all Westie had said.

    Influenced (retrospectively) by Banksy, and spurred on by his experience with the Warholesque Irn-Bru bottle, Westie’s stock in trade was pastiche. He would copy in minute detail a Constable landscape, say, but then add just the tiniest idiosyncrasy - a crushed beer can or a used condom (almost his signature, according to the other students) or a scrap of wind-tossed rubbish such as a Tesco bag or crisp packet. A Stubbs portrait of a proud stallion might feature a jet fighter in the distant sky. In Westie’s version of Raeburn’s The Reverend Walker Skating , the only perceptible difference was that the man of the cloth now found himself sporting a black eye and stitches to a cut on his left cheek. One of his tutors had gone on at length about ‘anachronism in art’, seeming to think it a good thing, but others had accused him of simple copying - ‘which is by no means the same as art, merely capable draughtsmanship’.

    All Westie knew was that he had a marketable-sounding nickname and only a few more weeks to go before the end of term. Which meant he should either be applying for postgraduate places or else looking for gainful employment. But he’d been up half the night working on a graffiti project: stencils of the muffled face of the artist Banksy with the words ‘Money In The Banksy’ and some dollar bills painted above and below. The stencils were anonymous. He was hoping the local media would pick up on the story and make ‘the Scottish Banksy’ a fixture in the public imagination. It hadn’t happened yet. His girlfriend Alice wanted him to become a ‘graphic artist’, meaning comic books. She worked front-of-house at an artsy cinema on Lothian Road and reckoned the way for Westie to become a top Hollywood director was for him to start drawing cartoons. He would then move into promo videos for indie rock bands and from there to the movies. The only problem with this - as he’d pointed out to her several times - was that he had no interest whatsoever in film directing . . . she was the one who wanted it.

    ‘But you’re the one with the talent,’ she’d responded, stamping a foot. That gesture said quite a lot about Alice - an only child raised by doting middle-class parents who had praised her in everything she’d ever attempted. Piano lessons were going to turn her into the Vanessa Mae of the keyboard; her songwriting would see her sharing a stage with Joni Mitchell or at the very least K.T. Tunstall. She’d thought herself a prodigy as a painter, until her teacher at the fee-paying high school put her right. Having dropped out of university (Film and Media Studies with Creative Writing), she was pinning her scant hopes on Westie. The flat was hers - no way he could have afforded the rent. It was owned by her parents, who dropped by sometimes and never failed to be unimpressed by their daughter’s choice of live-in boyfriend. He’d overheard them one time asking her a heartfelt question - ‘Are you quite sure, dear?’ - knowing they were talking about him , their golden child’s bit of rough. He’d wanted to barge in, trumpet his working-class credentials - the Fife coalfields; Kirkcaldy High. Nothing given to him on a plate. But he’d known how it would sound to their ears . . .

    Cretins.

    Another time, he’d told Alice about a screen academy that was setting up in the city - she could do it part-time, learning all about film-making. Her excitement had lasted until a trawl of the internet had revealed the potential financial outlay.

    ‘Mummy and Daddy will be happy to pay,’ Westie had suggested, and