The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (47 page)

I’ve killed him. Killed my own father. He was a chef, a shagger; we even had the bond of hating Kibby. My ma didn’t like him, but then he wasn’t a likeable guy. I can see it now, she didn’t detest him because he hated her; she loathed him because he was so indifferent to
her, indifferent to me. She was just another silly wee tart who didn’t take precautions that he’d got up the duff, so it was her problem. He probably got into her the same way he did tae poor Kay . . .

He didnae react tae me like I was his long-lost son. There was no vibe, outside a bit of morbid fascination on his part, which he satisfied after he’d met me a couple of times. He knew who I was from the start, but there was no vibe because he was just a selfish cunt . . .

. . . but . . .

. . . but when I got the promotion and went to his restaurant, and he brought over the champagne, maybe he did that because he was proud of me . . .

He got an old notepad and pen and practised writing the name:

Danny Frazer

The paper reported that Kay, whose identity was not disclosed until later issues, was in a stable condition. As soon as she was named on Radio Forth, Skinner made telephone enquiries to the hospital, stating he was her fiancé. A sympathetic nurse told him she was okay.

There were tears in his eyes as he read the glowing testimonies to the achievements and character of his victim. Shaking free of his maudlin inertia, Skinner took a taxi to the Infirmary, convinced that enough time had passed to put him out of the frame of suspicion. There had been no reference to potential foul play in the paper but the police would know that bolts didn’t unscrew themselves. Or maybe they did, he didn’t know.

When he got on to the ward he almost walked past Kay’s bed. She was so battered-looking, like she’d been in a bad car accident. Her face and eyes were swollen and there was a bandage across the bridge of her nose.

De Fretais must have nutted her when the piano hit them.

Yet she seemed so pleased to see him, and he was just massively relieved to discover that she would be okay. He realised with
an almost sickening force that he still loved her, and possibly always would. It was a doomed love of course, but one that would never be the less for that. He wanted to tell her everything, but fortune had it that she spoke first.

— Danny . . . I’m so glad you’re here . . .

— I heard about it on Radio Forth. When they mentioned your name, I was so shocked, I had to come and make sure you were okay, Skinner gasped, now relieved that the moment for total candour had passed. — What happened?

— A piano fell on us . . . myself and Alan. He’s . . . I was so lucky . . . Tears welled up in her eyes. — I was so stupid, Danny . . . we were . . . we were having sex . . . She spluttered it out. — What was I thinking about?

— It’s okay, it’s okay . . . Skinner cooed breathlessly, almost rendered speechless with guilt. Her nose was broken and so were two of her ribs and he had done this. Done this to someone he loved.

It was the hate.

It was the alcohol . . . the chefs.

It’s not Kibby’s curse, it’s a curse to everybody, and it’s consuming me and every single person I come into contact with. I’ve got to sack it all, got to get back to Dorothy in San Francisco . . .

Skinner sat for a bit until Kay’s mother came in. She was an elegant woman, well groomed, who had obviously looked after herself. The type that aged well, he’d always thought. She seemed surprised to see him. It’s probably because I’m relatively sober, he considered with a poignant ache.

He excused himself but was in no shape to return to work. He found an Internet café and emailed Dorothy, and then checked online for cheap flight tickets to San Francisco.

Ah’m fucking oot ay here. The Kibbys, Brian Kibby
and
Caroline Kibby, it isnae right, it’s well fucked. Ah’m gaunnae kill them all if ah dinnae get the fuck away. It’s being here; it seems to lend itself to having strange, destructive obsessions with your neighbours, and you forget to get a life of your own.

Naw, I’m hurting nae cunt else.

He contemplated the curse, how it was infecting everything. He thought of the old cliché, ‘Be careful what you wish for’, and considered whether he could,
compos voti
, achieve satisfaction.

While looking through the
Evening News
earlier, Skinner had noticed a feature on a white witch, Mary McClintock. Although now retired, it was claimed that she was an authority on spells. It took him a long time to track her down to her Tranent home in the sheltered housing complex. He called her and, after finding out his age, she agreed to see him.

It was uncomfortably hot in Mary’s flat, but Skinner took a seat opposite the fat old woman. — Can you help me? he said earnestly.

— What’s your problem?

He told her that he believed that he had put a spell on somebody. He wanted to know if this was possible, how he could have done this, and how it could be reversed.

— Oh aye, it’s possible. Mary regarded him cannily. — I can help you, but I need payin first, son. Money’s nae use tae me at ma age. Her eyes wrinkled. — You’re a fine-lookin laddie, she said harshly. — A good cock, son, that’s the payment I need!

Skinner looked at her, and shook his head. Then he broke into a broad grin. — This
is
a joke, right?

— There’s the door. Mary raised her hand slowly and pointed behind him.

Skinner kept his gaze on her, his expression pained. He blew out some air through tight lips. Then he thought about Caroline, his terrible impotence around her. — Awright, he said.

Mary seemed slightly taken aback, then rose eagerly, letting her weight slump heavily on to her walking frame. Hobbling slowly through to the bedroom, she beckoned Skinner to follow. He hesitated for a second, and smiled crushingly to himself, before pursuing her.

The sparsely furnished bedroom, with an old brass bed
prominent, was dank and musty. — Take oaf yir clathes then, let me see the goods, Mary rasped in lecherous cheer.

As Skinner undressed, the old woman removed her coat and began to struggle out of a series of cardigans, pinafores and vests. Lying on the bed, she looked smaller but still monstrous, wrinkled rolls of flab spilling over the mattress. Foul aromas rose from the putrefying pools of sweat and dead skin trapped within the folds of her flesh. — Thoat ye’d be bigger, Mary pouted as Skinner removed his Calvin Klein briefs.

Fuckin cheeky auld clart . . .

—
Next time ah’ll bring a strap-on, he said bitterly.

Ignoring him, Mary lay back on the bed and pulled away at the sagging corrugations of her body until she was able to locate her sex. — Ah’ve nae cream tae lubricate this. Ye’ll huv tae use spit. Howk it up, she commanded.

Skinner moved across to the bed. Mary’s bony fingers held her folds up, and he saw it between those surprisingly spindly thighs, which were so thin and sharp it was as if the thigh bone would rip through the papery yellow and blue-blotched skin. Amazingly, the hair was still as raven black as the hair on the woman’s head probably hadn’t been for many, many decades. With the skin around her pubic region angry-red and swollen, probably from some kind of infection, her genitalia appeared to him like the deformed newly born offspring of a life form not yet conceived.

In a gripping fascination, Skinner wondered how many frustrating sexless years she’d endured, relentlessly nagged by a body clock that refused to run down. In confirmation, he glanced at her head sprawled on the pillow, and she caught his eye with a coy look, enabling him to briefly glimpse the young woman in her, which rendered her all the more grotesque in his eyes. His knees sank into the mattress, as the waft of the yellow urine and slimy golden-brown faecal matter that lay saturating the incontinence pads underneath her rose in the cold air.

The smell was bad, but he thanked the cocaine blockage of
his nostrils. He pulled phlegm up from his chest and sucked mucus down from his head, mixing them into a pungent cocktail before splattering it with violence on to her pubic area. — Work it in, Mary urged, as Skinner took his thick green slime and spread it like a chef might glaze some pastry, at the same time slowly breaching and exploring. A ludicrously distended clitoris popped out from nowhere like a jack-in-the-box, the size of a small boy’s penis, and disconcertingly strangulated groans coming from the bed told Skinner that he was hitting the spot. After a while she gasped, — Pit it in now . . . pit it in . . .

In his total preoccupation with the macabre pantomime he’d become involved in, Skinner hadn’t even begun to consider his penis, but it was rock hard, even after him having done half a gram of cocaine earlier. Without being conscious of it, he was framing yet another hypothesis to explain his alcoholism: he speculated that he possessed a libertine sexuality and attempting to swamp it with the bottle was a way of preventing situations like these continually arising. He rubbed some of the waste on to the tip, then the shaft of his cock and entered her with slow trepidation.

— Been that long it’s probably sealed up, she said heavily, reading his mind as he forced his way in.

She took a lot of fucking; her desire might have been intact but if there was a climax in her it seemed to be well buried.

Fuck sake, I should get the morn’s lottery numbers plus next week’s racing results for this!

There were times when she was close to the brink but it seemed to slip away, and Skinner felt like giving up as the foulness of the situation hit him. He watched the old alarm clock by the bedside going from seven twenty to seven forty. As he felt the slurping of her wet skin on his stomach, thighs and testicles become the rub of coarse sandpaper then the jag of brittle old bones, he was forced to recall the old Leith motto: Persevere.

When she came it was accompanied by a long, nocturnal, wolf-like howl, and her bony fingers sank like meat hooks into the tight flesh of his buttocks.

Without coming himself, Skinner withdrew, climbing off Mary and the bed. Gingerly picking up his clothes and holding them out from himself at arm’s length, he went to the toilet, knowing that if he looked at what he felt was splattered on his genitals, abdomen and thighs, he’d never be able to hold on to the contents of his stomach. There was a small shower at one end of the bath, with an alarm cord to call the warden in emergencies. There was no soap in the shower tray: it lay by the bath taps. Skinner suspected that Mary came from the generation where getting clean meant steeping in a tub of your own waste every Sunday. The water was tepid but he watched tendrils of mucus, faeces and other excretions weave a dance around the grill of the plughole before vanishing.

He dried off, dressed and returned to the front room. There was no sign of Mary, though he reasoned that she was just putting on all her layers; but then he feared that the old woman might be lying dead, so preoccupied was he with his destructive powers. Eventually, he heard her moving down the hallway and was relieved to see her appear. As she collapsed down into the chair, a huge smile changing her expression so radically it was like she’d had a facelift, she said, — Doon tae business. What’s the problem?

It took Skinner a while to get into his story, aware of its ridiculousness. However, he found to his surprise that what they’d just been through seemed to make it easier for him.

And Mary listened attentively, never once interrupting until he finished. After his tale, Skinner felt cleansed somewhat, unburdened by the act of disclosure.

Mary had no doubt as to what the problem was.— Intentions, son . . . call them wishes if ye want, they can be so powerful in some people that they do become curses, become spells. Yes, you’ve definitely put a spell on this young man.

Having lived with this strange arrangement for many months, Skinner accepted this as given rather than just a fanciful notion. — But why do
I
have that power, and why just with
Kibby
? I mean, I’ve wished for other things tae happen tae other people but nothing’s come of it, he explained, thinking about Busby, as he picked remorselessly at the skin around his nails.

Then Skinner felt a chill, the air seeming to cool, as Mary nodded slowly. For the first time he became aware of a certain power emanating from this old woman. — It’s either something tae dae with the nature of what ye wished for or tae dae with the person you wished it upon. What does the spell mean tae ye? What does this laddie mean tae ye?

He shook his head slowly, stood up and prepared to take his leave. — Thanks very much, but I
have
been thinking about those questions, he said, his tongue dripping sarcasm.

Mary twisted her head round and said, — The more things in your life that are unresolved, the more powerful yir anger is, the stronger the potential fir ye to do this sort of harm.

Skinner stopped. — Kibby was a . . . he began, then halted as he had an abominable but opaque awareness. It was stark but somehow not envisionable. He had a sense that somewhere inside of him he knew the answer, but would never be able to dredge it into the realm of conscious thought.

But . . . one time I mind of this guy who always used to watch us play football. Inverleith Park, the Links. He always kept his distance though. One day he said to me, ‘Good game there, son.’ He was . . .

—
I’m worried for you, she warned, — worried that you’ll come to harm. Then her hand reached out and grabbed Skinner’s wrist.

Skinner’s heart flew to his mouth, shocked as he was at the sudden movement and the speed of the old woman’s reflexes and the strength of her grip. Nonetheless, he composed himself and twisted his arm away, breaking her grasp. — Worry about the other boy, that’s the one you should be concerned for, he scoffed.

— I fear for ye, she told him.

Skinner again scorned her, but as he departed he could not conceal his apprehension. Maybe he would go for that drink he needed.

THE WHISKY HELPED
. It had given him the power and determination to embark on the arduous task of hauling his heavy, battered frame up the stepladder. The wasted muscles in his arms and legs burned like hot coals as the aluminium steps creaked, popped and groaned under his weight. A fuzzy rasp trawled through his lungs, which toiled to push in enough oxygen to feed his exertions as his pulse accelerated. At one stage he was so giddy he thought that he was going to slip off the ladder and crash to the floor. Then, with one last exhaustive heave, he stepped, trembling, into his old attic. It felt like breaking through a suffocating membrane into another world as his head spun with the drink and the effort of the climb. He gasped, struggling to regain his wind and senses as he tugged on the cord light switch. The neon strip lights flickered into action confronting him with the model railway and town.