The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (32 page)

Brian Kibby stayed in his room, almost constantly on his laptop; either at his games or online. The attacks had stopped, but they’d left him ill, depleted and depressed. He lay on his bed, propped up on a bank of pillows, his iBook by his side. He was in no shape to go out or to see anyone, and had banned all visits. Fat Gerald was undeterred by this and constantly called him on his mobile phone, gleefully disclosing Lucy’s supposed romantic adventures. These got so disturbing that Kibby stopped taking the calls, but then the texts started, and he couldn’t resist reading them. Through red eyes, which burned like hot coals in his skull, he read the latest gloating note:

Aviemore diff class lucy not seeing angus now but ken got off with her. Sly old fox! Shes turned into right slag giving it to anybody snogged her at disco didnt go further – wld catch something! Ken and i finished hyp hykers guide to grampians, will send u copy.

Kibby shuffled in discomfort against the pillows that held him up, and deleted the message.

That guide was my idea! Ken and me were supposed to be doing that together . . . and Lucy . . . he’s old enough to be her father! The dirty, filthy wee whore!

Kibby hastily went back online and scoured pornographic websites until he found a girl who resembled Lucy, with the gold-rimmed spectacles. Her name was Helga, or so she said in a Scandinavian accent, which sang tinnily from the laptop speakers. Guiltily lowering the sound, Kibby then masturbated with all the ferocity that his sick body would permit.

Should have had that fucking wee ride . . . she wanted it . . . everybody else was there . . . you dirty wee slut . . . urgh . . .

Following his climax, more of his meagre life force seemed to leave him. He looked up to the ceiling as a dark, hollow sensation rose inside him and lisped, — Sorry . . .

More black marks . . . I was doing so well . . . how could I have been so weak . . .

He picked up the tie again and, hesitating only for a few seconds, bound his right hand tightly to the bedpost.

But that night, somebody really was punishing him for his sins. He awoke sweating, in the most howling, tortuous pain he’d ever known in his life.

Joyce Kibby, on waking to the terrible cries, rose and threw on her dressing gown as her heart thrashed in her chest. Running to her son’s bedroom she screamed, — Brian, clicking on his light switch, only for the bulb to pop dead in one brief, insipid flare. — Brian! Joyce cried again.

There was no reply through the darkness, not even a faint sound. When she bounded across and clicked on his bedside lamp she found her son yellow and barely breathing. For some reason one of his hands was tied to the bedpost. –What happened, son, your hand . . .?

Realising he was in no state to respond, Joyce ran downstairs and called the ambulance, then bolted back up to the bedroom. — Hold on, they’re coming, she pleaded, as Brian lay groaning in soft whispers, sweat oozing out of every pore in his body. She untied his hand, then held it, feeling his weak pulse. She had no way of telling how long she sat like that with him before the ambulance came and took his perspiring bulk down on a stretcher, across the small front garden to the van. The air seemed to revive Brian Kibby slightly and he wailed, — Ah jist feel that ah’ve let everybody doon . . .

Joyce clutched her son’s stout body in her thin arms. — There, there . . . don’t be silly, son, we love you. We’ll always love you . . . you’re still my bairn, she cried. His skin was so yellow, and he complained of terrible pains in his back, like he was being hacked open.

FOY’S STEAK KNIFE
slid through the sautéed liver. Raising a forkful to his mouth, he let the succulent meat partly dissolve on his palate. The taste and consistency evoked the sweetness of honey. Foy cupped the goblet of a satisfactorily robust Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon in his hand and let its aroma rise in his nostrils. Times like these were what the Council Principal Officer lived for, the engagement of the senses purely for the art of
living in the moment
. They were totally priceless to him. But try as he might, Robert Foy could not ignore the bombshell dropped by his friend opposite him.

— I mean it, Bob, Skinner said, glancing down at his briefcase on the floor.

Lowering the glass back to the table, Foy sighed and let his mask of contentment slip. Gravity moved ruthlessly into the vacuum, forcing his heavy features south. — Danny . . . I feel the same every other day. Sleep on it, at least.

It was as if he had never spoken, as Skinner fished into his briefcase and pulled out an envelope. — It’s all here.

Foy arched his brows, curled out his lower lip and picked up the beige envelope Skinner had thrust before him, opened it, read the enclosed letter. — God, you’re serious, he finally conceded.— You really
are
resigning. You’ve already sent Cooper a copy, I take it?

— This morning, Skinner replied impassively.

— But why? Foy was incredulous. — You’ve no long been made up to Principal Officer.

What can I say to him? Perhaps something like ‘There are billions
of people on this planet and I’m getting a little fed up running into the same two or three dozen arseholes’. He might take it personally.

—
To travel. See a bit of the world, Skinner responded matter-of-factly before elaborating: — I want to go to America. Always have.

Foy sucked in his bottom lip and frowned in concentration. — Well, you’re a young man, and you’ve been here a while now. It’s only natural that you want to get away. Spread the wings, he said chewing on another piece of liver, while sipping at his glass of Cabernet Sauvignon. As if to confirm to himself what he was experiencing, he read the label once more, reassuring himself it was really from the Joseph Phelps vineyard, in his book one of the Napa Valley’s finest.—This is excellent wine, he contended, picking up the now half-empty bottle. — I can’t tempt you?

— No, I’m trying to get in shape, Skinner said, putting one hand over the wine glass and raising the bubbling San Pellegrino mineral water to his lips with the other. — Packed in the fags as well.

— Well, it
is
a special occasion. Come on now, Foy urged, — it’ll no do ye any harm! Look at young Mr Kibby, a teetotaller, now he’s in need of a new liver. It just goes to show that all this health stuff is garbage. It’s all in the genes. If it’s got your name on it it’s got your name on it, he said, taking another forkful of that sautéed liver.

Skinner looked grimly at Foy, recalling some verse, which he was moved to recite to his friend: —
Wine rots the liver, fever swells the spleen, meat clogs the belly, dust inflames the eye
.

— What’s that shite?

— Aleister Crowley. And he’s not wrong.

— You only get one life, Foy said, raising his glass again. — But of course youse papes think that you’re going somewhere better afterwards!

— It’s called California. Skinner toasted him with mineral water, thinking about how he had to get away from here, from all these drinking opportunities. They were all around,
everywhere; those expectations that whenever you stepped outside your front door you’d partake of alcoholic beverage. It was as natural as breathing.

And he’s over there, across the city at Little France in that hospital bed, where I put him: fighting for his life. Now I have to fight by his side. I have to be with him. That’s the cruellest curse of all, what they never tell you about having such a nemesis, how inextricably bound up with them you become. How you eventually have to take on responsibility for them. A real enemy becomes like a wife, a child or an elderly parent. They determine your whole fucking life and you are never free of the cunts.

All these possibilities for intoxication: they were killing Kibby. But this was Edinburgh, Scotland. A cold city on Europe’s periphery where it gets dark early, rains a lot and is dull for much of the year, he considered bleakly. Nominally a capital, but the major decisions for the lives of its citizens are still made miles away. All in all, perfect conditions for bouts of self-destructive heavy drinking, Skinner thought. Yes, he had to get away from here.

When he got home he sat down at his kitchen table. Choking with emotion, he wrote his mother a letter.

Dear Mum,

I’m sorry I was drunk when I was asking about my father. When I came round the last time, I wanted to apologise but Busby was there, and I think you’d been drinking yourself and it wasn’t the appropriate time. Things have got a bit strange between us, but I want you to know that I love you dearly.

I’ve decided that I’m not going to ask you about my father again. I respect that you feel the need to keep this inform-ation to yourself, for reasons which I’ll probably never understand. But I also need you to know, and accept, that I need to find out. I’ve just reconciled myself to the fact that it’s going to be without your help.

I don’t know everything yet but I’m closing in. I’ve
talked to De Fretais, Old Sandy, tried to check out some of the old punks. Now I’m going to America to track down Greg Tomlin.

If you do feel the need to say anything to me, please get in touch by next Thursday, because I go away to the States then.

I want you to know that you did more for me than any two-parent family and that my desire to find my dad isn’t intended to disrespect you or what you’ve done for me. I also want you to know that whatever the circumstances of your relationship with my father, nothing could undermine the love I have for you.

Always your boy,

Danny.

He stuck it in an envelope and went to put it through her door, but didn’t want to run the risk of meeting her on the stair. Instead he went to Bev’s Hairdressing Salon, and stuck it through the letter box, where she’d find it the next morning with the bills and flyers from the local takeaways.

He walked down to Bernard Street, to the squawking and scrabbling of the birds: the restaurants had left piles of garbage from lunchtime outside and the bin men were late. Close to the nervous, belligerent seagulls, an oily blue-black crow had commandeered a large piece of liver, which it pecked at.

Coming across a new café-bar, he went inside, sitting in the corner with a soda water and lime, trying to read the
Evening News
, but lost in his own dramas. His arcane considerations turned to San Francisco, where there was sunlight, outdoor life, body consciousness and health. One could surely do good things over there, things that didn’t involve alcohol. How could Edinburgh compare? And in San Francisco there was Greg Tomlin, the Master Chef whom Danny Skinner was growing to believe might just be his father.

I hate the hospital: the nurses, the doctors, and the cheery porters with their banter. I loathe them all. They could do no good, none of them. My dad wasted away here, in this new state-of-the-art facility, this place that was fucked up before it even opened, like our Parliament, or our Hogmanay street party that never was. It seems that nobody does failure as consistently or as spectacularly as we do. It’s the one thing we excel at.

Now my brother is in here and they’re still doing no good. All their knowledge and their care, it just adds up to nothing. Because let’s be honest about all this, our Brian is in a terrible state and they tell us that they’re looking for a liver for him. Are they trying hard enough? Looking far enough afield? If we had the money would they try harder? Look harder? They might not find one and the transplant might not be successful even if they do. And might this disease not attack the new liver in the same way that it attacked his last one?

My big brother is going to die. I look at him and see his bloated, yellowing face, hear the wispy strains of his weak voice, with his eyelids shutting as he seems to drift in and out of this life. Most of all I smell that pungent scent; it’s the rank stench that I associate with death. I recall its dusky ming oozing from the pores in my father’s skin. I know it, I can feel it. And my mother, my poor mother, is going through everything she went through with my dad. Her world is falling apart around her.

All she does is pray. At least those creepy American boys seem to have stopped coming round. But she still stops by that small stone church on the grassy knoll every day. That place that bored the shit out of me every Sunday of my childhood, when I’d wake up with a skull-crushing dread of us going round there. Now she’s even started going to that Presbyterian Free Church in town, the crowd she went to as a girl back in Lewis.

Sometimes I try to remind her about the odds that the doctors gave us against Brian surviving. I don’t know why; it’s like I’m bracing myself for the impact and I need her to know
that she’s in the speeding car with me. I just can’t do blind faith any more. Probably never could. But she doesn’t want to know, because that’s all she wants, all she needs, and probably all she’s got. She seems to believe that Brian’s intrinsic goodness and virtue will protect him.

So I leave her in prayer and him in his disturbing slumber and exit the ward, heading for the coffee bar. They don’t notice my departure, or maybe they do.

What was she doing here, in this place of worship, talking to this stranger, this man who had never known relations with a woman, at least officially, and telling him everything? And when she’d blurted out the story in its entirety and she asked him what to do, she knew that three Hail Marys would be enough for her, would make her strong enough to keep the secret.

She left St Mary’s Star of the Sea, a place where she’d reluctantly been taken as a child, but always humbly sneaked back to in times of stress. Heading down Constitution Street and Bernard Street towards the Shore, sitting and watching the magnificent white swans cruising the black waters, Beverly Skinner asked herself what kind of Catholic she was, and what kind of mother.

But she’d said her piece to the priest. Tonight Trina was coming round and they’d drink Carlsberg Special and vodka and smoke dope and play the Pistols, Clash, Stranglers and the Jam, until poor old Mrs Carruthers thumped on what was her ceiling and Bev’s floor with the broom, and all would be well again.