The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (35 page)

. . . then the air around me seems to thicken into a gas, then moisture, then a liquid which becomes a syrupy substance, slowing my descent and I then think I’ve hit a glass floor but it starts to give and my velocity picks up again and whenever I try to shut my eyes I can’t, I just keep seeing objects and people, then faces, hurtling past me and I’m going to hit something and smash to pieces like a broken glass . . .

. . . and I’m bracing every fibre of myself for impact before I realise that I’m slowing down once more . . .

I feel a sickening sensation, all around me, inside me . . .

I’ve gone away. I know I have . . .

Somewhere so far away I’ll never get back.

Too far out. Too far gone.

I want to go home.

Then the voice comes. It seems to be from inside my head but it’s not my voice, it’s not my thoughts. I’m thinking that I
don’t want this, I don’t want to be here, I want my mum, my sister . . . my dad, I want things to be like they were before . . .

It sounds like my dad.

It doesn’t look like him because there’s nothing to look like, but it is him. He’s telling me to hold on and that I’ll be alright and that Caz and Ma need me.

I’ll hold on. I’ll keep on.

It was one of the three large municipal crematoriums in the city. Like the other two, it had a chapel, a garden of remembrance and a small graveyard. A strong sun had been blazing but now it had gone behind a dark cloud and Beverly Skinner was suddenly cold. She looked up, trying to trace the cloud’s trajectory, hoping that the sun would soon re-emerge.

She laid the bouquet of flowers down on his grave, on the simple headstone she’d visited on so many occasions, always in secret solitude. And even after all this time, the tears still flowed readily. It wasn’t natural, it wasn’t right; she’d only been a girl at the time. But he was such a great guy, and it was horrible it ended like it did. Could she have saved them all this pain if she had just forgiven him, there and then? If only she hadn’t gone with –

No.

It was too late now, she thought, looking down at the tombstone.

DONALD GEOFFREY ALEXANDER

12 JULY 1962 – 25 DECEMBER 1981

She looked back up at the clouds and thought about her son. Wherever he was, she prayed that he was safe, and that he would forgive her. The cloud around the sun now seemed to be breaking up and dispersing, but looking north she noted that darker, stormier ones were coming in from the horizon.

I look out towards Potrero Hill and see some dark clouds gathering. Chances are that it would rain heavily over there while we’ll be basking in the sunshine down here. Microclimate. I love the light here; it’s busy and it swarms, shimmers and pours, earning its keep as the main player in the city’s constantly unfolding dramas. Not that I get to participate in them; I never see enough light with the goddam shifts I work.

Paul always says that I put in far too many hours, and all I can do is remind him that I’m a chef. A chef works while others play. And now he’s going and I’ve got a book coming out.

A lover or a book; a life or a career.

You never think of life in terms of those choices. They seem possible to defer for a while but they always catch up with you. Then you realise that you’ve already made your choices without intending to.

Now I have to leave my kitchen in Luis’s care, not to go to Key West with Paul, but to go on the road to promote this book. Go forth and promote Greg Tomlin! But I wasn’t that interested in Greg Tomlin on television or Greg Tomlin in publishing, all I ever wanted to do was cook. But that’s what I do now: I present and I publish. Why is it not enough simply to cook food people want to come along to eat and enjoy, and run my own kitchen?

Because something happens to you when you’re in demand. You can’t stand the thought of not being in demand any more. So you do what they want you to do.

And my kitchen and my bedroom: how they disintegrate around me, as my smile gets bigger and my heart emptier.

I’m lying on a soft bed. A bed of my own bones, which seem to have melted and merged into the mattress. I feel naked except for something covering my groin. Kay is standing above me, wearing that grey-corded short skirt I always liked, and nothing else. She hikes the skirt up and her pubic hair is shaved . . . no, waxed, smooth, porn-star-style.
—
You never shaved . . . even when I asked, I croak, but she puts her finger to her mouth and says, — Shh . . . secrets . . . Then she bends over me with her long, black hair and her small firm breasts moving into my face like a sensual flood . . . she smells fresh and warm in the sun . . .

I hear noises and squint my eyes open and the golden light blinds me.

I’m on the pavement, where I’ve been slumbering like a booze-filled, kip-exhausted jakey. I manage to haul myself up. Maybe it was the jet lag, maybe the heat. More likely the pish withdrawal finally hitting home, or the lot at once. Perhaps over here I don’t have Kibby to take all the bad shit; maybe he’s out of range.

Despite the heat, I’m cold and shaking. I stagger on to the main drag where I pick up a cab and get back to Dorothy’s. I’m weak the rest of the day, lying on the couch, going through the
San Francisco Chronicle
, hopping around six hundred channels of shite where the best I can come up with is
Changing Rooms
on BBC America 163. Thankfully Dot comes back early but she heads straight to her little office at the rear of the apartment. — I gotta do some shit, honey, she says semi-apologetically, like I’m already the fixture in this gaff I most certainly aspire to becoming.

— Cool, babes, I wink cheesily, belying my nausea. Eventually I get up and out on to the porch to take in some air. Reasoning that my blood sugar might be low, I go back inside and pour myself an orange juice, make some coffee and toast a bagel, which I have with banana and peanut butter. I then scrape off some of the peanut butter as it has a very high fat content and that might not be good for our Mr Kibby right now. Suddenly thinking about the caffeine, I take the coffee through to Dorothy.

— That’s so sweet of you, honey, she says, — I run on this stuff, she informs me before turning back to her screen.

I take the hint and depart, returning to my food, thinking about Brian Kibby, how even here across the pond, I still have his fate in my hands. Or maybe not. Maybe the damaging power
of the hex really is weaker from across here, or maybe he’s completely out of my range. Out of sight, out of mind, away from damage. Maybe my future’s here in San Francisco with Dot Cominsky.

I’m sitting at the marble-topped table, browsing through the paper, hoping some life comes back into my listless body. When I get to the book review section, I see this arresting caricature and I can’t believe it! It’s a man in a chef’s hat, with a dark curl snaking out from under it across his forehead. He has two black eyebrows, a pointed chin and the Dick Dastardly pantomime villain moustache.

I could be
. . .

Fuck sakes.

I’m instantly energised. It’s Greg Tomlin, which I knew before I looked at the heading and sub-headings, which herald a full-page review of his new book. This cunt has to be my old boy! I know it! At the bottom of the article it says that he’s doing a book signing at this place in town tomorrow night. I’ll be there!

THE BOOKSHOP IS
a brightly lit L-shaped place in this small modern mall on Van Ness Avenue, a wide road full of snarling traffic that rips right through the city centre, the cold pin in the butterfly. I felt I had to level with Dorothy about my quest to find my father. She was excited and intrigued about my disclosures, and she told me that she’d once dined in Tomlin’s old restaurant. She was very keen to come with me, but I reasoned that my first meeting with Greg Tomlin should be between just the pair of us.

Before I left we made love. I went down on her, working her hole with my tongue, then her flaps, then her clit, holding back, teasing slightly until I felt her hips thrusting into my face and the pressure of her hand on the back of my neck increase exponentially. —You goddam fucking tease, she said and I think I said something like, — Mmmmmhhh, in reply, but I kept her on the boil for a bit before bringing her off repeatedly, taking a delight in her orgasms like they were exploding pearls on a string. Then I went up and started to fuck her until we hit a viscous, demented climax together, prolonging it till we were spent and lay prone on the sweat-drenched bed. She was blown away by it: I left her doolally, mumbling like a drunk in the semi-dark behind the closed Spanish colonial shutters. Being off the peeve makes you much better at shagging, no doubt about it. It’s not just to do with the energy levels being higher; as it’s the only form of enjoyment left you want to make it last, which means the lassie needs to have loads of orgasms before you blow your muck.

I’m still slightly dazed myself as I take my seat among a crowd of largely older dinner-party types, only about fifty or so of them. There are one or two bored yuppie housewives in the mix as well. I’m still flicking through the copy of Tomlin’s book that I got earlier: worried like fuck about the homosexual shit it’s peppered with.

My troubling speculations are broken as Tomlin comes out to polite applause and sits in a big leather chair, joined by another guy in an identical one opposite him. The guy introduces himself as the bookshop manager. As my eyes hungrily scrutinise Tomlin, I can’t help feeling more than a wee bit disappointed. Bad enough him being an obvious fag, but he also looks too short-arsed to be my old man. The author photo on the cover is obviously an ancient one, and it’s evident that the caricature in the newspaper is based on it. The black, curly hair of the Tomlin of this vintage is going grey, as well as thinning and receding. He has a florid coupon lit by burst blood vessels. He’s either the demented, stressed-out chef with high blood pressure, or no stranger to the good life. Whatever, he certainly isn’t my cool, tanned healthy Californian dad.

After a brown-nose intro from the store manager, Tomlin steps up to the lectern to read. He starts off jerky and not too confident, but he soon finds his stride, performing engagingly as the crowd warms to him. He goes on way too long for my likes but by the time the question-and-answer session comes along, Tomlin’s your archetypal, self-consciously witty queen who’s OD’d on Oscar Wilde.

There isn’t that much cooking in the book. It’s largely a memoir with a prominent highly personal sexual content; a buftie version of some UK tabloid Page Three slapper’s
Cocks I Have Known
, recounted in words of more than two syllables. I was obviously most interested in the Archangel stuff, particularly the lines:

I would expect that a certain green-haired punkette would have been one of them. The thing is, do the dates fit? Where was he and, more importantly, who was he fucking on Sunday 20 January 1980, nine months before Daniel Joseph Skinner popped into the world?

Despite the nature of the book, the audience questions are mundane, focusing on the token recipes and the best ways to cook this or that, with no one particularly interested in the biographical details. Tomlin seems a bit disappointed, but what the fuck does the cunt expect? He’s just a cook; these cunts get all up themselves but at the end of the day all we want from them is a decent fuckin scran. We’re after their kitchen secrets, not their bedroom ones, although I’m the one exception in this audience. Blissfully it doesn’t go on, as Tomlin has product to shift and at nearly forty bucks a throw it doesn’t come cheap.

I stall to the back of the line (as the Septics call a queue) and hold my copy up to him for signing. Tomlin looks even rougher, older and shorter from close up. Yet his eyes are lively enough as he regards me, taking the proffered book. He has a gold ring on his finger with G. W. T. inscribed on it. — Who shall I make this out to? he asks, and his accent is a gayer, posher version of the character Mayor Quimby in
The Simpsons.

— Just sign it for Danny, I tell him.

— Wow, he says, — that’s a Skarrish accent. Edinboro, right?

My accent snares the old fruitbat, and after putting up with his obligatory crap see-you-Jimmy impersonations, we decide to go for a drink. He asks me to excuse him for a second while he has a brief communication with the guy who was chairing
the event. I browse at some books for a bit, flicking through Jackie Chan’s autobiography. Then the buftie chef comes over and says, — Ready for that drink?

I nod and follow him towards the exit. The chair gadge waves at us, so does another of the bookshop staff who looks a mincing ferret of the highest order, pouting in a disgruntled manner at me like I’ve just nicked his bird. Tomlin smiles and gestures back in departure but says under his breath, — What an obsequious asshole that man is!

As we walk down Van Ness Avenue my head is spinning. I can’t see how this man can possibly be my father and I can’t see how he can not be, both at the same time.

For months now I’ve felt death around me, closing in on me. I fear that I’m becoming like Moira Ormond and all the other girls at our school whom I used to detest. The goth lassies who read too much Sylvia Plath and listened to too much Nick Cave and wore too much black clothing. They were my enemies and I wonder what their lives are like now. Was it just teen angst or had they known all this kind of stuff I’m learning about now, all this death and decay? Surely some kids must experience loss in their adolescence and it must affect them. I wish I’d taken the trouble to find out before being so dismissive.

Thinking about Moira, the strange beauty in her luminous eyes, her imperturbable determination to disregard the maltreatment we would dole out, a horrible anxiety comes over me, rising from the pit of my stomach, going through my spine and spreading up my back like a shivering rash. I have an urge to contact her and apologise and tell her that I understand now, but she’d probably just look blankly at me or laugh in my face. I’d deserve no less.