Chapter 1: Racid

There are characters in this life, and in history too, who are, quite simply, bad. No matter how much love and sweet attention is given to them, they cannot resist being bad. Gerard Racid was one such character.

In the year 1935, to a pair of wonderful parents, young Racid was born. He was a weakling of a child, but his infirmity only made his parents dote upon him even more.

His mother would pinch his cheeks with love and try to make him chuckle, but little Racid never even raised a smile, let alone a chuckle. As time progressed, his parents worried whether something was wrong with their “little baby” and the lack of laughter within him.

They took him to a specialist; numerous tests were carried out, and the devastating news was returned that the boy was “retarded”—such was the brutal diagnosis of the time. However, it wasn’t that Racid was “retarded” which made him bad throughout his life; there was something within the child, in his heart or head, which manifested itself in quite extraordinary characteristics of selfishness.

At the tender age of five, Racid began to attend infant school. From his first day there, he was a loner, and as the years passed by, he became evermore withdrawn into himself. He had no friends, nor did he desire any.

There was, however, one thing young Racid was intensely interested in: possessions. He would grab with greedy hands anything offered to him. Racid’s bedroom was a veritable miser’s nest, full of all sorts of rubbish.

His parents loved to see the inordinate passion with which he grasped any new possession. They showered gifts upon him, but, strangely, he never once thanked them with that beautiful shine of light shown when a little boy looks at his parents after receiving presents. They didn’t mind, though, as they loved him without reserve.

The years passed on; Racid left infant school and carried the same character with him into high school. At the end of his school life, Racid left with no qualifications. In fact, the boy couldn’t even read, though every effort had been tried; the boy simply never once showed enthusiasm for any of his studies.

Although Racid wasn’t all that bright, he did know how to act in his own best interests; even if that meant bringing great misery to others, he didn’t care. On his final day of school, Racid returned to his family home and declared to his loving parents, “I’m off now. I don’t have to live here anymore, and besides, I can’t stand you both.”

Before Racid left home, he relieved both his parents of what spare cash they had in the house at that time.

Racid never sought communication with his parents again. When he happened to encounter them by chance, he would either cross the road or turn and walk the other way. His mother was devastated and inconsolable. Her health suffered, and in her 48th year, cancer took her from this world. Racid’s father, Albert, now hated his son.

With the money Racid had stolen from his parents, he secured himself a cheap bedsit. Since it was easy to find both cheap bedsit accommodation and employment in those days, Racid readily took a job cleaning up in a nearby factory.

For the next fourteen years, Gerard Racid worked in the same factory, never once striving for promotion—not that he’d get it if he did, since his employers couldn’t stand him—but he’d turn up on time and was never sick, which was all that mattered to the factory management.

Just as in school, Racid in the workplace was a loner. He never socialised with his work colleagues, never went for a sandwich, or drank with them. The only social communication he had was one of profit. Racid possessed a cheap van, and in his spare time, he would regularly roam the streets of Leeds, searching for any old scrap to sell on for a profit at the factory.

Racid was now 30 and had had only one brief liaison with the opposite sex, but nothing came of it. No decent girl would entertain him, deeming him “an oddball”.

He possessed a squat, fattish, and somewhat twisted frame for a man; he stood no taller than five feet, five inches. His hair had badly thinned during his twenties, so that only separated strands of weak, dark hair now existed, which he combed over the pinkish dome of his head. Since he loathed the notion of paying for Brylcreem to keep it in place, he used instead fat straight from the chip pan.

“Why waste money,” he would say to himself after finishing combing the strands of thinned hair over his head and wiping the surplus lard off the comb with his only towel.

Racid knew he was ugly and had little chance of winning over the heart of a fair woman; he was also aware of his limited intelligence and never once sought to improve his social status. He had come to accept the reality of who he was, and the only recreation and felicity he sought and had were giving full vent and expression to his grasping and miserly lifestyle. However, in his 30th year, Racid’s fortunes and life changed.