The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (42 page)

Thinking about his reduced circumstances, Kibby moved uneasily to the bar. All his young life he had work or school or college to go to; now he had nothing, just this.

It has all been taken away, even Mum and now . . . Caroline. They’re all under his spell!

On reaching the bar he hesitated for only a second or two before requesting, — A pint of lager and a double whisky please.

The barman didn’t know him, but recognised a drinker’s build and bearing, dispatching the order with economy.

Sipping the whisky, he wanted to retch as he felt its queasy, nauseating burn all the way from mouth to stomach, but he
swallowed hard, washing it down with some gassy beer, which was scarcely more palatable to him. But the second whisky was much better and the third was like nectar, and then Brian Kibby was flying. His head buzzed and his hand tightened around the glass, the knuckles growing white. The pains were still there, he could feel them, but they didn’t hurt him, their sting cushioned by the alcohol. Almost to his shock, he found himself in the grip of a vicious anger. In the past this even-tempered young man had occasionally felt these uglier emotions teasing at him, but he had never allowed himself to succumb to them. But now, in his warped spite, Kibby felt a delicious liberation.

Caroline. Seeing
him.

His sister was seeing Skinner. This horrible picture wouldn’t shift. For so long his lonely illness had dominated his thoughts, but now they were consumed by this new terror. It made Brian Kibby reflect malignantly, yet again, on his rivalry with Danny Skinner.

Skinner. They’re under his spell. His curse . . .

And by the sheer, consecrating intensity of his violent thoughts, something, some deep, bizarre truth seemed to settle into the core of his psyche.

Skinner’s done it!

He’s done this to me!

It was irrational, but strangely all the more powerful, profound and important for that. Yes, he eagerly ratified to his own hungry consciousness, it
was
Skinner.

SKINNER . . .

And perhaps, at some level, Brian Kibby had always believed this. In some unspecific way, purely on an emotional, intuitive level, he had always suspected that Danny Skinner had something to do with his terrible penance. He’d seen Skinner looking at him, studying him in that disconcerting way with his smug face appearing like it understood everything. At one stage he believed that Skinner might be poisoning him. There was a time when he would eat or drink nothing that Skinner could have
been around or might have tampered with. But it had proven impossible: this hadn’t stopped his decline. Yet, somehow, part of him had remained convinced that Skinner was responsible.

It
was
Skinner!

And now Caroline’s going out with him, and my mother is so pleased. She’s so delighted that she can’t stop talking about it, like a silly wee lassie! Now Skinner’s coming for a meal at my house next Wednesday! He’s taking over, trying to become part of the family!

Only the gesture for another round could break off Kibby’s rancorous meditations. — Same again, he told the barman in an offhand slur of anger.

He was oblivious to the raising of the man’s eyebrows, could only see his hand going to the optics. Inside his skull burned with whisky and thoughts of violence against Skinner.

I’d like to see that . . . that bastard . . . I’d like to see him get punched and kicked and stomped . . .

Then his train of thought smashed so suddenly into a set of psychic buffers that Kibby shook spasmodically with the force of the revelation. He realised that Skinner had been beaten up before, beaten badly, and it had been in the newspaper.

The football, and there wisnae a mark on him afterwards!

There were still some windows lit mawkit yellow in the adjoining tenements; lonely ragged teeth in a big, dark, cavernous mouth. As his heavy eyes blundered into slow focus through a repetitive throb in his skull, Skinner could just about make out the differing shades of the darkness he’d learned to navigate his life around. As his trembling hands ripped into the sooty douts in the McEwan’s Export ashtray by his bedside, crumbling and breaking shreds of unburned tobacco to roll into a single skin, he contemplated those long hours of blackness, seeming to stretch out into infinity.

Alcohol, he considered, as he raised his smoke to his lips, was the only mechanism by which he could avoid running into the all-engulfing darkness. On those early mornings, it was the
drunkenness of the previous night that caused him to sleep in and miss getting up for work and emerging into that cold, biting and dreary blackness. And the only occasions when he could escape from the workplace before the late afternoon’s night settled around him was when his need for a drink moved him to duck out early.

What else was there in this dreich, drookit place? he caustically considered, feeling the puny, stale tobacco push into his lungs. The weather levelled us all down into depressed jakeys, bent and scowling under a suffocating cloak of darkness. Where was the respite? Where else was the comradely, raucous laughter, and if you were lucky, the welcoming smile of a pretty girl? All under one sick, nicotine-stained and alcohol-sodden roof. The place where even the mocking sneer of the adversary at least let you know that you were alive: everything took place in the public house.

He’d not been to such a place for a long time. But now Danny Skinner had woken up feeling like he hadn’t felt for ages: sick, exhausted, shaky, tired and seedy. He could feel it in his body: its degenerative, corrupting influence. It must be a virus. But no, surely he had Brian Kibby for all that.

He pulled back the duvet and allowed the stench of his alcohol-corrupted body to waft upwards. A shudder started to vibrate in the small of his back as the image of a stricken Brian Kibby briefly flared in his mind. It was like the flashbulb of the police photo-grapher at the scene of a homicide in an old Hollywood movie.

Naw . . . surely tae fuck naw . . .

Could it mean that Brian Kibby was finally gone . . . dead as the morning outside; his heavy body and troubled psyche ultimately crumbling under the strain as his life ebbed from him . . .?

No . . . steady on . . . surely Caroline or Joyce would have phoned to tell me.

Through his sour gunge-filled mouth, Skinner, dabbing out
the cigarette, sucked in a thin, icy breath, which burned his raw throat and made his bubbling stomach heave. Then, as his pulse kicked up, turning on some tap, opening those glands that swamped him with perspiration, a searing realisation hit him.

Kibby. The dirty wee cunt is . . . fighting back.

Yes, Danny Skinner was hung-over. So did the powers not then have a reciprocal nature? He felt the muscles in his tired but still tight arm. They’d fairly sprouted up back in the day when Kibby was tanning it in the gym. He’d just laughed it off, put it down as a time-of-life development. But no, far from it being a futile exercise, Brian Kibby had been actively pumping Danny Skinner up! Now Kibby was on the piss, and he was suffering! It made the perverse sense that only this bizarre condition could, and Skinner found himself conceding that it said a lot for Kibby’s priggish sobriety; a lesser man would have hit the bevvy ages ago.

Shuddering up the Walk into town, Skinner sat at the Internet café on Rose Street, writing emails, battling to ignore those seedy demons that gnawed at his brain and body, occasionally trying, by his condition, to gauge the amount that Kibby had put away.

It was useless. He couldn’t write to Dorothy. Skinner found himself in the old position he was often in at work: skiving, avoiding tasks simply because his edgy, hung-over self didn’t possess the mental fortitude to concentrate and cope with even the most minor of social interactions. Asking for change for the coin machine when the Internet time expired was way too much hassle. And prior to this he was doing what he would have done at the council: having a day of vicious paper cuts and picking up burning coffee mugs and dancing to desks with them. Through his seediness, one emotion came to dominate:
if Kibby wants it, he’ll fucking well get it.

Fortified by the spirit of battle, Skinner left the café and strode up the North Bridge to hit the Royal Mile’s pubs. By the time he’d left the first of them it was already difficult to
distinguish the early-night sky from the medieval-looking stone tenements on the street.

Later that night, exiting from his last hostelry sodden with drink, he looked up, watching the weathervane on a church spire cut the moon into several pieces. Contemplating the luminous hollow sky, the tendrils of cloud providing so rich a Gothic background to the ridged steeple, Skinner fancied that all type and magnitude of diabolical forces could be concealed within its folds. Cold blue cobblestones clicked under the reinforced heels of his leather brogues as he meandered down the Royal Mile from the castle to the palace, his dragon breath freezing in jets in front of him. He’d pause occasionally at a close mouth to check the pulse of city life at closing time, strangely reassured if he spied a couple engaged in a knee-trembler, a vomiting drunkard or some youths meting out a senseless kicking to a stranger.

As he savoured his intoxication and thought of the bottle of Johnnie Walker that sat in his flat, Skinner’s grin expanded to the width of the street. He was back on home territory.

If Kibby wants tae row, then let’s just see what the fuckin wee fandan’s got!

He was looking forward to his forthcoming visit to the Kibbys’. How he’d enjoy that little showdown, he cackled as he danced in the shadow cast by the cold, luminous, silvery moon.

Brian Kibby needed a drink. He’d been at the computer upstairs in his bedroom. Through his sweating pain he’d managed to plug in his laptop. This time, though, he didn’t load up
Harvest Moon
or any of the other video games. He went online to
www.thescotsman.co.uk
and signed in and found the
Evening News
section and searched for Skinner. And eventually he found what he was looking for: the occasion some months ago when Daniel Skinner was taken to hospital after the Hibs–Aberdeen game. He was involved in a brawl, they said, and had ‘serious
injuries’. But Skinner had not a scratch on him that Monday morning, the morning Brian Kibby had woken up in Newcastle, after the convention, looking and feeling like he’d been hit by a truck.

Kibby shivered as he looked through the article.

It cannae be . . . it’s impossible . . . but somehow it is Skinner. Skinner somehow kens aw aboot this! He’s fucking well cursed me!

He left his house, making his way up to the Centurion Bar. All those years and he had never set foot in this place. Now it already felt as much of a refuge as his attic ever did.

— Hair of the dog, eh, Raymond Galt, the barman, grinned as he dispensed Brian Kibby another double Scotch.

— Aye, Kibby replied in a gruff mumble that sounded like someone else, his mind absorbed for the first time with the drinker’s dilemma. It helped, took away the pain, albeit only for a while. But when life was all pain, any pocket of respite, however brief, needed his embrace. And this time he
really
needed a drink; Skinner was coming to his house, coming for tea.

He was with Caroline. Had she slept . . .?

NO!

Kibby threw down the nip and then a few more, before lurching out of the bar where he almost collided with a woman and a toddler in a pushchair. His subsequent apology came out as a weird slur, as the woman’s angry, contemptuous gaze scorched him briefly. But soon he was back in the exclusive domain of his own self-loathing as made his way home in the weak light, stopping off at the off-licence, to get more whisky.

Surely Caroline wasn’t sleeping with Skinner . . .

Kibby felt the effects of the whisky in his head, heard Skinner’s sneers in mocking flashback, telling all in that college refectory about the ‘birds’ he’d shagged . . .

. . . that Kay, she was lovely and he treated her like shit . . . Shannon . . . what are they to him, just spunkbags, disposable . . . I’ll bet he gives them marks out of ten . . .

Embittered, Brian Kibby alternately staggered and lurched
purposefully down the hill, into his housing scheme. A short distance from his home he got out of breath and had to stop for a rest. He was adjacent to a swing park where several kids were playing, supervised by some adults. Kibby was standing there, panting heavily, staring off into space. One of the adults, the sole man, a wiry guy in his early thirties took a couple of steps towards him. — You! he shouted at Kibby, before thumbing down the road. — Keep movin!

— What? Kibby said, at first bemused, then almost fretful as the injustice of the situation hit home.

And Kibby felt fear, and fought through his lack of breath and headed down the road. It wasn’t the man he was scared of – his own wrath was now too great – but he feared being branded a pervert, disgracing his mother and sister in their neighbourhood.

Maybe I am a pervert . . . wanking like that, like an animal, a creep . . . how long will it be before I start touching up kids . . .? no . . .

When Kibby got home the place was empty. It was likely that his mother would be out shopping. He hauled himself upstairs and stashed his whisky under his bed. Going back downstairs, he half slumped, half laid his expansive body out on the couch. After a while he heard a scrabbling, followed by the groaning twist of a key in the door. The sound never used to bother him, but now it was a major source of misery. He would have to oil that lock.

Dad would have . . .

Kibby sat sweating on the couch, breathing hard and low, wishing he’d had just
one
more whisky, and was tempted to go upstairs and get one, but in his guilt he worried that Joyce would instantly smell it on his breath. Yet he could not stop a defiant, belligerent twist moulding his mouth as the door opened.

However, it wasn’t Joyce, it was Caroline. He remembered she had said that she’d give their mum a hand with the meal before Skinner came by. Brian Kibby’s spirits rose. This was the
first time he’d been alone with her in ages. Now he’d be able to tell his sister what Skinner was really like, before he destroyed her, just as he had surely done to him!