The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (2 page)

The stocky-framed man facing him was in his late forties. He had a ruddy, squarish liver-spotted face topped by a mane of amber-coloured creamed-back hair that was whitening at the temples. Bob Foy was not used to being to being challenged in this manner. One of his eyebrows was raised incredulously; yet in that motion and the expression his slack features had settled into, there was just a smidgen of enquiry, even of mild fascination, which permitted Danny Skinner to continue. — I’m only doing my job. The man’s kitchen is a disgrace, he contended.

Danny Skinner had been an Environmental Health Officer at Edinburgh City Council for three years, moving there from a management trainee post within the authority. This was a very short time in Foy’s book. —This is Alan De Fretais we’re talking about here, son, his boss snorted.

The discussion was taking place in a barn of an open-plan
office, partitioned by small screens dividing it into workstations. Light spilled in through the big windows on one side and although it had been double-glazed you could still hear the noise from the traffic outside on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. The solid walls were lined with a few antiquated tin filing cabinets, hand-me-downs from different departments throughout the local authority, and a photocopier that kept the maintenance men in more regular employment than the office staff. A perennially dirty sink was positioned in one corner, beside a fridge and a table with a peeling veneer, on which sat a kettle, teapot and coffee urn. At the back there was a staircase that led to the departmental conference room and the accommodation of another section, but before that a mezzanine floor with two smaller self-contained offices was unobtrusively tucked away.

Danny Skinner glanced at the doleful faces around him as Foy let the report he’d just meticulously prepared fall heavily on to the desk, which separated the two men. He could see the others in the room, Oswald Aitken and Colin McGhee, looking everywhere but at him and Foy. McGhee, a short, squat Glaswegian with brown hair and a grey suit that was just a little too snug, was pretending to search for something in the mountain of paperwork that lay heaped on his desk. Aitken, a tall, consumptive-looking man, with thinning sandy hair and a lined, almost pained face, briefly gazed at Skinner in distaste. He saw a cocky youth whose disturbingly busy eyes hinted that the soul behind them was perpetually wrestling with something or other. Such young men were always trouble and Aitken, counting the days till his retirement, wanted none of it.

Realising that support would not be forthcoming, Skinner considered that it was perhaps time to lighten things up. — I’m no saying that his kitchen was damp, but not only did I find a salmon in the mousetrap, the poor bastard had asthma. I was on my way to phoning the RSPCA!

Aitken pouted as if someone had farted under his nose in the Kirk he served in as an elder. McGhee stifled a chuckle
but Foy remained inscrutable. Then he let his eye leave Skinner and settle on the lapel of his own checked jacket, from which he brushed some dandruff, worrying slightly that his shoulders might be covered with the stuff. He’d have to remember to tell Amelia to change that shampoo.

Then Foy looked Skinner squarely in the eye again. It was a searching glance Skinner knew well, and not only from his boss. That gaze of somebody who is trying to see beyond what you presented to them, trying to read the insides of you. Skinner held his own stare firm as Foy broke the glance to nod to Aitken and McGhee, who gratefully took his cue and departed. Then he resumed his eye contact with a vengeance. — Have you been on the fucking pish or what?

Skinner bristled, instinctively feeling attack to be the best form of defence. A flash of anger came into his eyes. — What the fuck are you on about? he snapped.

Foy, used to deference in his staff, was slightly taken aback. — Sorry, I, eh, didn’t mean to imply, he began before assuming a complicit tone, — Have you had a drink at lunchtime? I mean, it’s Friday afternoon!

As the Principal Officer, Foy was usually drinking himself on Friday afternoons, in fact he was generally posted missing from about midday, this being one of the odd Fridays when he ostentatiously walked around ensuring superiors and subordinates got a full view of him busy and sober. Skinner therefore felt relaxed enough to divulge, — Two pints of lager with my bar lunch, that’s all.

With a ragged clearing of his throat, Foy advanced his proposition. — I hope you didnae inspect De Fretais’s place with a bevvy on your breath, no matter how light. He’s used to detecting it in his own staff. So are his chefs.

— I did the inspection Tuesday morning, Bob, Skinner said, then stressed, — You know that I would never go on to any site with a drink in me. I just had paperwork to catch up with this affie so I indulged myself with two pints of lager, Skinner
yawned, — and I have to admit that the second one was a mistake. Still, a cup of instant coffee will sort that right out.

Picking up the thin file that contained Skinner’s report, Foy said, — Well, you know De Fretais, he’s our local celeb and Le Petit Jardin is his flagship restaurant. Two Michelin stars, son. How many other restaurants in Britain can boast that?

Skinner tried briefly to think about this, then decided that he didn’t know and couldn’t care less.
I’m a health inspector, not a groupie for some fucking cook.

As he bit his tongue, Foy moved around the desk, placing his arm around Skinner’s back. Although shorter than his younger subordinate, he was a powerful bull of a man whose frame was only slowly and reluctantly going to seed, and Skinner felt the force on his shoulders. — I’ll drop by and have a quiet wee word with him, let him know about cleaning up his act a wee bitty.

Danny Skinner felt his bottom lip curl outwards, the way it always seemed to when he was undermined and forlorn. He’d done his job. He’d told the truth. Skinner was no naive fool, he knew the realpolitik of the situation: some were always more equal than others. But it stuck in his craw that if a Bangladeshi immigrant with a last-orders curry house had a kitchen as minging as De Fretais’s then he’d probably never a boil an egg in the city again. — Right, he said miserably.

But maybe he had spiced it up a bit. He didn’t like De Fretais, even if he found the man strangely compelling. His copy of
The Bedroom Secrets of
the Master Chefs
was a guilty lunchtime purchase, and it lay concealed in his briefcase. He recalled the opening paragraphs of the foreword, which he’d read with such distaste:

He’s just a fucking cook, and so many of those cunts are too big for their boots.

And this fucking guide to sexy food! That fat cunt! The whole thing’s ridiculous, it’s been a good few years since that phantom’s seen his fucking prick without the help of a mirror! And those fucking anodyne, sexless yuppies would respond to that, they would actually buy it in their thousands and make a fat, rich, spoiled cunt fatter, richer and more spoiled still. And here I am with a fucking copy in my bag!

Watching Skinner’s complexion redden, Foy felt a slight unease and removed his arm. — Danny, we can’t be rocking boats at this time of the year, so no pub stories from the horse’s mouth about how bad our friend De Fretais’s kitchen is, okay?

— Goes without saying, Skinner replied, trying to conceal a mounting excitement that in the boozer tonight he’d blab to everyone who would listen.

— That’s the spirit, Danny. You’re a good inspector and we certainly need them. We’re down to five in the inspectorate,
Foy shook his head in disgust, and then quickly brightened up. — Mind you, our new laddie starts tomorrow, the one from Fife.

— Oh aye? Skinner raised his brows enquiringly in an unwitting impersonation of his boss.

— Aye . . . Brian Kibby. Seems a nice young chap.

— Fine . . . Skinner said distractedly, his thoughts drifting to the weekend. He’d have a few bevvies tonight; these four pints at dinner time had given him a fair old thirst. Then, barring the football on Saturday, he’d spend the rest of the weekend with Kay.

Everybody had his or her own idea of where Edinburgh ended and the port of Leith commenced. Officially, they said it was the old Boundary Bar at Pilrig, or where the EH6 postcode started. For Skinner though, coming down the Walk, he never truly felt back in Leith until he could feel the hill levelling out under his feet, which was a great sensation, like his body was a spacecraft, landing home after a long voyage to inhospitable lands. He generally marked this from the Balfour Bar onwards.

On his way back home, Skinner decided to stop off at his mother’s, who lived across the road from her hairdressing business, in a small cobblestoned alley off Junction Street. That was where he’d grown up, before moving out the previous summer. He’d always wanted his own place, but now that he had it, he missed home more than he could ever have imagined.

The Old Girl’s finished her shift and she fair stinks of thon perming lotion. I’d forgotten how much the whole gaff reeks of it, how it
permeates
. She’s still got that Indian-ink home-made BEV tattoo on her forearm, making zero attempt tae conceal it, even when she’s working directly with her customers in her service industry business. Admittedly, wir no talking fussy client base here: a million miles removed fae the sorts who would patronise, say, fat boy De Fretais’s restaurant.

I grew up hanging around that shop, where every old boiler
of a regular was a surrogate auntie or gran. I was smeared, like a luxury unguent, intae aw thon meaty bosoms. A wee boy without a daddy: to be pitied, spoiled, loved even. Good old sunny Leith: no place loves its bastards like a port.

The electric-bar fire with its fake coal display throws out some heat, but her big, blue fluffy Persian cat lies sprawled out on the rug in front of it, absorbing all the warmth like the selfish fucker it is. The art deco mantelpiece bordering it is usually the centrepiece of the room, but it now takes second place to an overwhelming, outsized Christmas tree in the corner. On the wall, above the fireplace, hangs a mounted copy of the Clash album
London Calling
. Scrawled on it by Magic Marker ink is:

To Bev, Edinburgh’s No.1 punk,

Luv Joe S xxx

20/1/80

The Old Girl’s great conceit is that she’s a student of human nature, having convinced herself that, in her line of work, she can read a person like a copy of
Hello!
. When they come in and tell her they’re thinking of having this or that done to their dry, cracking or lank, greasy locks, she looks them in the eye and goes: ‘Ye
sure
that’s what ye want?’ They’ll stare nervously back at her and throw out some hopeful possibilities till she nods approvingly and says, ‘That’s the one.’ Then she’ll cheerfully expedite this, cooing ‘It’s awfay nice’, or ‘It really suits ye, hen’. And they keep coming back. As the Old Girl often boasts, ‘Ah ken thum better thin they ken thirsels.’

Unwelcome, however, is the application of this attitude in her dealings with her solo bastard offspring. She sits in her chair as I slump on the couch, hitting the handset and switching on
Scotland Today
. — That compo money, she begins, narrowing her eyes under those big specs, — suppose that’s aw in the hands ay the publicans by now, eh?

The Old Girl’s expanding out the way. She’s always been a short-arse, but now her face is getting fleshier. As she’s always favoured black, she gets no slim-effect pay-off on her middle-age spread. — Grossly unfair, I say as the sports round-up comes on and another Riordan goal bursts the net, — there’s a number of bookies who’ve had their cut.

But she’s taking the pish here. She knows how much it cost to put a deposit on that flat. It was
fifteen
grand I got for that accident, no a hundred and fifteen!

— So it’s aw been squandered? she says, running her hand through her crimson hair.

I’m not getting into this with her. — To paraphrase a great footballer: ‘I spent most of it on drink, women and the horses. The rest I squandered.’

— Aye, right, the Old Girl snorts, rising and putting her hands on her hips, unwittingly mimicking the pose struck by Jean-Jacques Burnel in the Stranglers poster on the wall behind her. — Suppose yir steyin for yir tea?

This is seldom the gastronomic treat she imagines it to be. —What ye got?

— Sausages.

Hud me back. — Beef or pork?

The Old Girl whips her glasses from her face, leaving wine-coloured indentations on each side of her nose. She struggles to refocus, looking like she’s just woken up as she brushes the lenses on her blouse. — You wantin yir tea or no?

— Aye . . . awright.

— Dinnae dae ays any favours, Danny, she muses, breathing on her lenses and wiping them again. She puts them back on and heads across to the galley kitchen, where she opens up the fridge.

I get up and move across to the kitchen area, draping myself over the breakfast bar. — Maybe I ought to have invested my money in commodities. Something popular and durable, I stretch across, poking the tattoo on her arm, — like Indian ink.