The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (25 page)

At De Fretais’s instigation, they relaxed on to the cushions, where Graeme began carefully measuring some clear, slightly bluish-tinted liquid from a bottle into Skinner’s champagne. — As you haven’t been here before, I’d suggest a little something to relax you, he smiled, but Skinner still felt the glacier in his stare.

Hesitating only for a second, he recommenced sipping the champagne. There was no discoloration, altered odour or taste arising from the addition of the liquid, and the bubbles continued to sparkle.

Thank fuck for Kibby.

And it did relax him. Feeling his muscles growing heavy, Skinner was happy to be helped out of his jacket, by Graeme and Roger. A mild nausea followed by a fleeting sensation of hunger hit him, before he seemed to lose all connection between reality and thought and he felt himself falling, tumbling off the cushions on to the floor, only partially aware that he had been pulled to it by Roger.

This sensation in my chest is oppressive, like my respiratory system is freezing up. I remember somebody once told me that their grandad was on an iron lung. I feel like my lungs are iron. I should be scared, panicky, but there’s something tranquil about it all, my head telling
me that fear would simply be pointless: what will be will be . . . I’m thinking that it would be a good way to die, to pass over . . .

He didn’t resist, although at times he had the illusion that he could, as his belt was unbuckled and his trousers and underpants were slid down to his ankles then yanked from him. He felt his legs being pulled apart like slabs of dead meat. The thick, shag-pile carpet was in his face, making it even harder to breathe.

From a blurred view along the floor he saw shafts of light sweep in from under the door. Then he felt a heavy weight on him, followed by some movement and a stabbing sensation in his anus. Someone was on him, in him even. He fancied it was Graeme, but it might just as easily have been Roger. He could hear the man’s teeth grinding together in his ear; it was as if the man was in pain from being entered himself, maybe he was for all Skinner knew. Then he felt the man really breaching him, even through the drug, with an eye-watering force that seemed ready to split him in two. He heard curses that ought to have been sickening, —You dirty fucking North Brit whore, I’m fucking your stinking English-loving hole, you demented little ignoramus rent boy . . . but through the drug they were somehow rendered as tender as a mother’s lullaby.

After he was finished, another man took his place. He could vaguely discern that Anwar was giving another of the group the same treatment, was it Roger or Graeme or had somebody else come into the room? De Fretais had raised the woman Clarissa’s skirts and the back of his head was going up and down between her legs as she regarded Skinner in an intense, but contemptuous way. Two of the girls he assumed were prostitutes were caressing each other, egged on by male voices that seemed to tune in and out of his consciousness like radio stations on a long car journey.

Then he was asleep, and when he came to he found himself alone in the room. He pulled up his pants and trousers, slipped on his shoes and crept out the door. Every step was agony as
a searing, scorching pain burned up his arsehole into his guts. Skinner cried in rage and tears of agony as he hobbled home, and when he got there and put his finger to his anus, it returned bloodied.

He felt foolish, violated and used, until he thought about that strange sleep. What could it do to heal him? He lay in bed, shaking in woeful, twitching paroxysms until it eventually came for him and took him away.

When he woke up he was refreshed. He touched his anus with his finger. There was no sign of any blood, wet or dried. It was like it had never happened.

It was like it had happened to somebody else.

Her own health had never been particularly good. A nervous woman, with a tendency towards viral infections, her almost translucent skin often had a greenish hue to it. She was prone to gagging at certain smells, and public toilets made her particularly squeamish. Indeed, such was her fatalistic demeanour, it was as if Joyce Kibby developed such illnesses as a show of solidarity, first with her husband, then her son. No matter how often she washed her hair it only seemed to alternate between scrawny and oily, or dry and brittle.

She knew that Keith had been a drinker before he met her. Through the AA he’d found the church and, through the church, her. When his illness became rampant Joyce had assumed that it had been his previous heavy drinking that had weakened his internal organs, but with what was now going on with Brian, it made her reassess her husband’s decline.

Joyce loved her children fiercely, but was aware that in Keith’s absence they would not so patiently indulge her tendency to fuss. She knew that she was often guilty of putting her fears into them and fought hard against her own natural instinct to do this. Joyce saw her late husband Keith’s strength in Caroline in particular, and she was reluctant to sap it or to sour the girl through her own weakness. Yet Caroline had come in tired,
bleary and smelling of drink on a few occasions lately and while Joyce had noticed this she could not quite understand it. She had made a mental note to address the issue, but like so many of her cerebral self-postings, it got lost in a fog of despair.

Fear had defined her life. Brought up in Lewis in the Free Church of Scotland, she was taught to be God-fearing in the real sense of the term. Her Maker was essentially wrathful by nature, and if bad fate befell you, you spent your time trying to work out what you had done to displease him. As there was nobody else to blame for Brian’s condition, Joyce took the burden of guilt upon herself. She worried that she had spoiled him, that her mollycoddling was somehow responsible for lowering his immune system. Apart from this self-reproach, her only other strategies were to listen to the advice of the medical specialists, and pray.

The doctors, though still no wiser as to the causes and possible cure for Brian Kibby’s ailment, nonetheless found some unanimity through the observation of his condition. Bluntly, it seemed that Brian was rotting away from the inside. Brain, throat, chest, lungs, heart, kidneys, liver, pancreas, bladder and bowels were all corroding, under a sustained and ferocious attack, but what exactly from remained so phantom and abstruse.

Her relationship with Elder Allen and Elder Clinton (it seemed so strange referring to young men in that way) had cooled slightly, and they didn’t visit quite so often, in spite of the formidable meals she prepared for them, which they greatly appreciated. They became disconcerted when she tried to foist Free Church literature on them, which claimed that the Book of the Modern Testament was evil heresy, propagated by false prophets. Her zeal was disconcerting to the young missionaries, who reasoned that they had come to convert, not be reconditioned themselves.

Upstairs in his bedroom, Brian Kibby was trying to follow the advice of the pamphlet on masturbation. But while
attempting to engineer distraction from thoughts of Lucy by playing
Harvest Moon
, he met Muffy in the village and his mouth went dry.

She’s only an icon . . . she’s only a graphic . . . it’s just a game . . .

Joyce had been unable to sleep and so had gone down into the kitchen to prepare food. As she ruminated on matters spiritual while making her Scotch broth, upstairs Brian had a searing attack. Sleeplessly sitting at his computer, he had resisted Muffy’s charms and was halfway through a game, repairing rain-damaged fences and reaping wheat, when a weird, dopey sensation came over him. Then suddenly, his insides seemed to buckle and twist and he fell off the chair and hit the floor, screaming helplessly in the face of a burning ache in his very core.

IT WAS A
bright, warm morning, although the wind coming off the North Sea was fresh and brisk. Skinner skipped up Leith Walk, nodding jovially if he made eye contact with anyone, whether acquaintances or strangers. His euphoria amplified when he got to the office and saw Kibby standing against the wall, looking in some distress.

His chorus and verse is totally Donald Ducked!

—
Brian, Skinner smiled, — we should go through these inspection reports of yours, he said breezily, pulling up two hard plastic chairs which lay by the side of Kibby’s desk. — Take a pew.

Kibby shuffled towards him, but didn’t sit. Skinner nodded to the seat. — What’s up? Duke of Argyll’s playing up?

— Naw, I . . . look . . .

— Have you been practising bum banditry or something?

— Get lost, Kibby hissed at Skinner, lurching to the toilet.

Skinner rolled his eyes and picked up a file. Thoughtfully turning to Shannon, he asked, — Do you think Brian Kibby’s queer?

— No, he’s just a wee bit shy. Stop being so horrible to him, Danny, Shannon said. More than Skinner, she was feeling the ennui of a relationship that was going nowhere. He just seemed to want sex these days, and from what she’d heard, not just with her either.

— I think being a virgin at twenty-one in Edinburgh is about the most pathetic thing I can envisage. People lose their virginity quicker here than any city in the Western world . . . except San Francisco.

Shannon looked doubtfully at him. — Is that borne out with statistics?

— Everything’s borne out with statistics, Skinner observed and he scraped his nail down between two of his teeth to dislodge some trapped food. He senses her need, knows that they’ll probably fuck tonight. Shannon knows this as well and looks at him, again despairing about the futility of it all. The friends-who-fuck relationship was losing its appeal.

The way he’s looking at me . . .
Shannon flinched, then stared hard at him.
There’s something different about him lately
. Maybe it was the promotion, but he seemed intoxicated by power. And, she had to concede, in spite of its ugliness, it held a fascination for her. But for all the allure, there was something about his proximity that was warping.

— What? Skinner said, and shrugged as Shannon got up and left the office.

Lassies can be so weird.

While immersed in his power over Kibby, Skinner felt that his current life was somehow not sustainable. Perversely, so much of it now seemed to depend on his nemesis. This strange hex, it was holding him back, preventing him from realising what he was coming to see as his destiny.

He wondered about living in San Francisco, where it never gets that cold, where everything is temperate, between fifty-five and seventy-five degrees most of the time. De Fretais’s words in the text of
The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs
burned in his ears; Greg Tomlin, overpaid, oversexed, over here. And Tomlin lived in San Francisco. Could the American chef be his father? Skinner thought about the affinity he’d always felt with the USA. The land of the free; where your accent didn’t matter. But he supposed everybody related to it; movies, TV, fast-food outlets, you grew up with up it. Cultural imperialism. Yet no wonder everybody increasingly hated it: it was stupid, self-serving and so in-your-face that it was setting itself up to be despised. Greg Tomlin, what was he like? Was he the tall, slim, suntanned
man with the new young family, who would take his long-lost son to his bosom?

Would I despise him? Would we get on like a house on fire?

Danny Skinner danced breezily into the toilet and urinated. As he washed his hands, he cheerfully hummed the lyrics to an R. Kelly song:

He knew who was inside the locked toilet trap. Brian Kibby sat in terrorised silence on the jacks, his arse-cheeks spread on the seat, grimacing from the pain that razored deep in the core of him. He had been trying to think of ways he could stop touching his penis, when Skinner came along and inadvertantly helped him, his singing snuffing out all sexual thought. But it only heightened his pain, misery and degradation.

Help me God, please make me strong . . .

Skinner smiled at the closed door. He heard a sudden shower of rain drum against the frosted-glass window outside and wished that he was in San Francisco.

God, I wish I was in Scotland! These pictures just bring it all back. Edinburgh, what a town! Had the sort of weather where you didn’t mind being stuck in a kitchen, or a bar. Not like this freaky shit; the Santa Ana winds have brought havoc and the temperature has soared upwards of one hundred degrees. They’re having it worse down in southern California. I wonder what the right-wing born-again types are thinking as their homes burn. It might be Judgement Day and they’re being punished for voting in Arnie. With so many Christians and so few Lions, I guess that’s what fires are for.

But it isn’t kitchen weather, no, not at all. I’d rather be on
a beach than at work. All day, every day. As soon as I turn my back I’ve a renegade diva cook who wants to put his own stamp on my seafood risotto. Now I got to be in the freakin place early cause the plumber’s coming to unblock one of the sinks.

I have a glance through them again, that set of old photographs I found the other day – or rather Paul found when he was looking through his stuff – from back in Scotland. It must have been around ’79, or ’80 maybe. Her hair, ridiculous that it seemed so crazy back then, that goofy smile. Him in those silly janitor’s overalls. And Alan, I swear you can see the fat gene ready to explode, even back then. He’s doing very nicely for himself now, a clear case of scum rising to the top. I wonder how the others are getting on.

Different times. Old pictures just fill me full of melancholy. I put them back in the envelope and stick it on the small table by the front door. I head outside and go down our front steps, on to the street, looking up Castro. I decide I’ll walk into work.

So I stride up Castro, through this curious ghetto, where all the farm boys settled when they were demobbed from the navy after World War II. Once they’d got used to ass, there was no way they were going back home to marry some bovine breeder and live out the rest of their days on a Midwest farm in sexual frustration. No, this point of disembarkation and demobilisation was really our point of embarkation and mobilisation. This was the first real Boystown.