The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (38 page)

I wish the two of you all the best.

Love

Dan X

Dessie stole my fuckin bird! Cunt! Wonder how much that rates in his insurance man’s mind? A grand? Two grand? Does it even make us square? He’d probably say something like, ‘Naw, youse were really just only fuck buddies so it’s only assessed at five hundred quid, plus incidental celibacy damage, but I understand that you rifled the fat tart behind the bar shortly after this, which negates that particular clause.’

Ah well, at least he’ll be better for her than I was. I was a bit of cunt to Shannon, but she wasn’t exactly Ms Sweetness and Light either. But I’ll be better to Dorothy, cause here I’m free from Kibby’s curse, his curse on me, which pre-dates mine on him. Here there’s none of that irrational, all-embracing
hatred, distorting my life, fucking everyone I come into contact with. Here I can do good things and we can both be at peace.

But first I have things to sort out. I have to know about Kibby and this shit that’s going on with us. And I have to find my old man, and he sure as fuck isn’t out here. Tomlin is off the list, gone the way of old Sandy. I have to bite the real bullet and confront De Fretais, and beat it out of that slimy fat fucker if necessary.

I have to go home before I can do anything else.

EDINBURGH IN AUTUMN
seemed to him a city stripped of its pretensions, cut back and pared down to its essence. The festival tourists had long gone, and it had little appeal for anybody passing through. As it grew cold, wet and dark, its citizens shuffled around its streets like frightened novices in a boxing ring, anticipating punches from every quarter but unable to do much about it.

Yet he felt that the city was more at ease with itself at this time than at any other. Freed from external definitions dubbing it the ‘arts capital of the world’ (festival) or the ‘party capital of Europe’ (Hogmanay), its populace were simply allowed to get on with the prosaic but remarkable business of everyday life in a North European city.

And Danny Skinner had flown back into town feeling more disorientated than ever. For the entire flight he was thinking about Dorothy, the traumatic tearfulness of their departure at San Francisco airport shocking them both in its intensity. His mind danced with the wonderful possibilities and cruel improbabilities of a long-term, long-distance romance. But his quest was incomplete. Greg Tomlin had been removed from the list, but he knew that his mother had been in some kind of serious relationship. While it warmed his heart to think that he might have been the product of a real, if fleeting, love, rather than a cider-and-speed fuck, he couldn’t bring himself to confront her again, at least for the time being. De Fretais was the one he wanted.

When he got back to his cold flat in Leith, he switched on
the central heating, then took some sleeping pills and knocked himself out. The next day he called Bob Foy, finding out that De Fretais was currently filming in Germany. The next person he phoned was Joyce Kibby and he was still jet-lagged when he met her for a coffee in the St John’s café in Corstorphine.

Skinner learned that Brian Kibby was healing nicely, with the new liver doing its job. And while he listened to Joyce prattling on, he wanted to tell her,
It’s all because of me that he’s fucked, but I’ve sorted him, I’ve not been drinking
, but of course he couldn’t do that. All he could do was think: Why can’t I like Joyce Kibby more? But as she sang, — We’re getting him home, Mr Skinner, Brian’s coming home next week! he felt himself sharing her joy.

Giving her hand a spirited squeeze, Skinner trumpeted, — This is great news! And please, for last time, it’s Danny.

And Joyce Kibby blushed like a schoolgirl because in ways she couldn’t quite understand she really liked young Mr Sk-, Danny.

I head on the number 12 bus from Corstophine back to Leith finding myself glowing in elation at the improvement in Brian Kibby’s health. It gets so intense that I opt to alight at the West End, to pick up a copy of the Gillian McKeith book,
You Are What You Eat
. I intend to use it as the basis to make up a sensible proxy diet plan for him. I also pick up more milk thistle from Boots. Later, at the Internet café at the foot of the Walk, I send Dorothy an email detailing some fairly advanced sexual propositions. Hopefully they’ll float her boat and at least I’ll have it in writing if she backs off later.

I idly trawl the Net for news of some of the local punk bands I know my mother was into, reasoning that ageing punks might even have better recall than ancient chefs. I find a piece on
the Old Boys, which interests me:

THE OLD BOYS’ REUNION GIG

The Old Boys were an Edinburgh punk quartet who gigged on the local circuit from 1977 to 1982. Most punk bands belted out rabble-rousing anthems of teen rebellion, urging hedonistic escape from a corrupt state and nihilistic acts of depravity and self-abuse in order to combat the boredom of modern life. The Old Boys, though, led by charismatic singer Wes Pilton (Kenneth Grant), took a very different tack.

They sang highly reactionary songs about social decline; lamenting permissiveness, drug-taking, single parenthood and the irresponsibility of youth. They extolled the virtues of wartime Britain: heroic boldness in face of the enemy,
esprit de corps
and an empire on which the sun never set. All this was cause for concern, particularly as the band played every number with deadpan conviction, making them outcasts on the punk scene, an anathema to its self-professed radicalism. However, some mavericks saw them as the true spirit of punk: bold enough to take the piss out of themselves and antagonistic enough to wind up their own audience. They played at being every old bore you had ever met in the pub, criticising your fashion sense. They would dress as their grandads, the sort of proud old man who would wear his best suit to go down the local on a Saturday. Wes Pilton sported a dodgy tash and wore a flat cap and a mackintosh, with a Remembrance Day poppy in its lapel all year round. In between songs he would talk incessantly about his pigeons.

Their first album,
The Old Boys
, brought them some recognition beyond their home town, although opinion was divided on the band and their motives. Were they simply mocking and undermining the generations before them in the cruellest possible manner, or were they a reactionary Trojan Horse within the castle of punk?

The Old Boys themselves never gave the game away, though several critics were pushed too far by the inflammatory and racist single ‘Compulsory Repatriation’. In
response to a near riot at Nicky Tam’s Tavern which, it was claimed, was instigated byAnti-Nazi League members, Wes Pilton came out with the classic quote: ‘Has nae cunt in this fuckin doss ever heard ay irony?’

This summed up the Old Boys. They were a band ahead of their time: postmodern piss-takers in a more deadpan, serious, political era. Perhaps due to the frustration that nobody really got them, they started to parody themselves, with attendant declining returns.

It seemed as if this sordid chapter signalled the beginning of the end for the band. They staggered on until the inevitable split came in 1982 when Pilton was briefly sectioned under the Mental Health Act and committed to the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in Morningside. Mike Gibson, the band’s guitarist, left to study accountancy at the city’s Napier College. Steve Fotheringham, on bass, was the one Old Boy who stayed in the music business. He now works as a DJ and producer. Pilton returned with a solo album entitled
Craighouse
, a concept offering based on his experiences in the mental institution.

The band had the sort of luck with drummers that sounds like the inspiration for
Spinal Tap
, both of their skins men tragically having taken their own lives. Donnie Alexander, the original drummer, left the band in April 1980, following a horrific workplace accident which left him badly disfigured. He was found dead in a gas-stinking bedsit in Newcastle upon Tyne some eighteen months later. His replacement in the band, the unfortunately named Martin Smelt, committed suicide by throwing himself from the Dean Bridge in the summer of 1986. A keen Hearts supporter, he was said to have suffered from a deep depression following the footballing events of that year.

Over twenty years later, the Old Boys are playing a comeback gig, Smelt being replaced on skins by Chrissie Fotheringham, the American spouse of Steve, so at least
there’ll be no excuse for the rhythm section not being in time.

It says that gig is next week at the Music Box in Victoria Street. I’ll definitely check that out and also pick up the
Best of . . .
CD that’s recently been issued.

I head outside and I’m finding it bitingly cold here after California, and it’s getting dark so quickly. Nonetheless, I’m still feeling quite chuffed until I get round to Duke Street and see that slimy little ratbag, shuffling jauntily down the road.

Busby. What’s his profile? What does that ruddy-faced nonce drink?

Export. Whisky. You decide.

I duck into a shop doorway and watch him going into one of the old gadges’ howfs that are struggling to stay open in the face of being undercut by the big Wetherspoon’s toilet on the corner, with its happy-hour pitchers of cocktails for thirty-eight pence or something like that. Yet as soon as the old gaffs shut down the prices will rise okay, make no mistake.

Busby.

I’m looking in on him through the long windows of the pub; greasy where fish-supper-eating squinty-eyed drunks have pawed at it with their grubby mitts, trying to balance themselves as they attempt to see if there’s any cunt inside that they can tap off ay.

Wee Busby, sitting there under the lights of some old Leith fleapit of a pub with his half of heavy and wee gold yin. The thin layer of sweat – or is it grease? – on his face. His strawberry nose. His busy, mocking, sneering little eyes, so at odds with that clamshell smile.

The insurance man.

What is the insurance man offering? He’s offering insurance against being ourselves. Which is no insurance at all.

I’m looking in, watching Busby sit there with Sammy. The big fella: chunky and bemused as his life has slid slowly into
alcoholic debauchery. He’s scarcely noticed the departing years, wife, kids, girlfriends but now he’s feeling their absence and all he has left is that most loyal yet treacherous of bitches: who else but Dame Peeve?

Even worse for him, Busby, the skinny-framed sweetie wife, now has the measure of this hulk, a man he probably avoided for a large part of his young life. Things change though, sometimes so gradually that you don’t even notice, especially for auld cunts like them. Somebody as sly as Busby will always become the master of someone as slow as Sammy if he’s patient and takes care to insinuate himself enough.

And why not? Busby’s no threat, he’s got nothing Sammy wants, save the stolen nights with bored or lonely single women like my mother. Then as Sammy’s alcoholism and confusion grew, he’d find in Busby a strange companion. Deferential at first:
Aye, you’ll soon be back on your feet, Sammy, they cannae keep a good man doon and you’ve ey been one ay the best, Sammy . . .

Now, though, the contempt is showing. It shows in the sneering glances that Sammy is too languorous and alcohol-fuddled to notice. Or the odd barbed aside that cuts through his muffled layers of consciousness because suddenly Busby’s approval has become so important for Sammy as it’s now the only quasi-affirmative show in town.

And I see in Busby and Sammy how fucked up things are when you take responsibility for somebody else, how much you can come to rely on them. For Busby and Sammy, read Skinner and Kibby. Or every cunt and any cunt in every grotty bar in every town and city in this country. Everybody who has missed the boat and has nothing left but each other and their own sad dramas full of loathing and dread to fall back on. You can enjoy a mocking dance with somebody, but it’s such an albatross around your neck. Especially when the music stops and you find yourselves so deep in each other’s desperate embrace that you can’t untangle.

Not yet twenty-four years old and I can see that it’s all fucked
already. My twin curses, Kibby and alcoholism, have taught me that. Is alcoholism the product of bastardism, or is it just another fucking excuse? Discuss, discuss, discuss.

But I so want to go in there and buy a drink for auld Busby and Sammy. Take the old boys on a trip down memory lane. Listen keenly, yes keenly, as Sammy slobbers and even gets coy as sneaky auld Busby’s rubber mooth becomes even slacker with drink as the secrets get coughed out.

‘Aye, you could be ma laddie right enough. Aboot then that ah cowped yir ma. Wee punk rocker she wis at the time n aw. Mind ay her, Sammy! Nice pair ay tits oan it! Wir you no thair n aw? You wir eywis a Slade man but, eh no, Sammy? Noddy Holder.“Cum On Feel The Noize”? Mind ay that yin, Sammy? “Skwueeze Me Pleeze Me”!’

Just to give me permission to stand up and smash my fist into that face, that twisted rubber mouth which has talked its way out of a thousand such punches, to watch as the dentures or the last remaining teeth hurtle across the bar like bullets. But no. Because I’d need to take a drink myself for that yin and one is never enough and a thousand is too much.

I’m saving Brian. Denying myself to save Brian, and not just through fear of reciprocity, which is real enough. It’s more than self-interest or self-preservation. I simply don’t want him to die, I never did. Because he doesn’t deserve to die. All he was wis an annoying sooky wee cunt. All I ever wanted to do was boot him up the arse.

But the pull, oh my God the fucking pull, aye, much stronger in dingy auld Edina than in sunny Cal-i-for-nigh-ay. One can of lager. Just one fucking cool pint of Michael Philip. I’m heading up the Walk, passing the Lorne Bar now. The Alhambra, with its door wedged open. Duncan Stewart’s perched on the bar stool; I see the back of his shaved head. Every bar I pass containing a face: a memory, a story, and the fabric of a life. More than the alcohol I’m addicted to that way of life, that culture, those social relationships. I can’t go in there, though,
and just drink water or lemonade. I can’t go in there. I can’t stay here, the invisible hand of expectation guiding, cajoling, pushing and thrusting me in the same direction, or directions. I’ve backtracked and I’m heading the way I came, back doon the street. I’m at the crossroads but all the roads lead to the same place. Cause it’s everywhere. Where do you go from the foot of the Walk? Up the Walk to the Central, Spey, et cetera, et cetera, or along Junction Street to Mac’s, the Tam O’Shanter, Wilkies, et cetera, et cetera? Or perhaps Duke Street to the big Wetherspoon’s or the Marksman, et cetera, et cetera? Or maybe Constitution Street to Yogi’s although it’s no his any mair, or Homes or Nobles et cetera, et cetera?