The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (49 page)
Read The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs Online
Authors: Irvine Welsh
Joyce was having a good time, and was drinking quickly, unaccustomed to the wine that Skinner kept pouring into her glass.
— Do you ever go to church, Danny? she asked him earnestly.
— Religiously, said Skinner, drawing a laugh from Caroline and a guilty grin from Joyce. Kibby remained stone-faced. — No, I have to admit that I don’t, Joyce, he continued, dispensing with the levity, — but I hear that you’re a regular attender.
— Oh yes. It was a great comfort to me when my Keith . . . She stifled an emotional tear and looked over at her son. — . . . and of course, when His Nibs there was really sick.
Kibby, in response to his mother’s condescension, felt his inner thirteen-year-old kick in. He downed the mineral water and poured a glass of the white burgundy. — Just one won’t hurt, he said to Joyce as she pouted, then he turned sardonically to Skinner and added, — A little of what you fancy, right, Danny?
Skinner looked from him to the disapproving Joyce and raised his hands in the air in the gesture of mock surrender. — I’m staying out of this one!
But there was a lot more than just one, as another bottle found its way to the table.
Kibby was becoming emboldened by the drink. He looked across at Skinner. — People criticise the police, until it’s them that get burgled or beaten up, eh, Danny?
Skinner shrugged, wondering where Kibby was heading with this.
— No, I was just thinking of the time that you got beaten
up at the football. You would have been glad of their intervention then.
— It would have been a relief . . . for somebody anyhow, Skinner smirked.
— Police? Joyce asked in concerned anxiety. — What about the police?
— ‘Walking on the Moon’? Skinner winked, and Joyce grinned without knowing what he was talking about.
After a few more bottles of wine had been downed, it became apparent that Joyce Kibby was having a
very
good time. — I have tae confess . . . I feel a wee bit dizzy, she giggled, relaxed as she noted that Brian and Danny seemed to be getting on a bit better. Then the room started spinning and Joyce began to gag and redden. — Oh dear . . .
— Mum, are you okay? Caroline enquired, this bizarre but welcome circumstance of her mother’s intoxication and her boyfriend and brother’s civility, albeit forced, not being lost on her. Although her spirits were raised, a sense of duty called. — I’m going to take Mum home, she said, rising.
— Aye, let’s call it a day, Skinner agreed, signalling for the bill.
Kibby threw back his double brandy digestif, and ordered another. — The night is but young, he smiled, vaguely sinister, his hooded eyes in shadow from Skinner’s vantage, but gleaming under the candlelight nonetheless. — What’s wrong, Danny pal, kin ye no stand the pace?
Only Danny Skinner saw something dark and ethereal in that aside, something which went beyond the semi-drunk banter of two old workmates.
The day it is passing in laughter and song . . .
—
You two stay for a drink if youse want, Caroline said, trying to get her shaking and bemused mother to her feet.
As Skinner gently chided Joyce for being drunk, Brian Kibby turned to Caroline and yanked on her arm. She braced herself for another of his attacks on her beau, but he just looked sadly at her and whined lowly, — I broke it, sis. The railway. Smashed
it all up. Dad’s railway. I was depressed, I just went crazy, and I feel so bad . . .
Caroline saw the terrible pain in his eyes. — Oh Brian, you might be able to repair it . . .
— Some things cannae be fixed. They just stay broken, Kibby groaned miserably, turning to take in the other diners in the room and focusing on Skinner, who had caught the comment and returned his stare.
As the waitress came with their coats Caroline felt the tension rise like a rocket, and said a reluctant goodbye. But Skinner only saw her lips move, because that gesture and supposedly inoffensive remark confirmed his realisation that Kibby somehow knew about the curse.
He knows. And now he’s going to kill us both with his drinking
.
Panic seized him for a second or two, but Danny Skinner accepted the offer to drink on, feeling that he now had little option
.
He was tossed around in a maelstrom of sensations, but one thought dominated: they were destroying each other, and Brian Kibby had to be made to see that.
So the two strangest drinking partners bade the women farewell and retired to the adjoining pub. Skinner looked at Kibby. It seemed he was preparing for more than just a drinking bout; he sat up on a bar stool with the intensity of a gladiator.
Skinner’s mind flipped and tossed as he looked across at his opponent. — Bri . . . this is daft. This kind ay drinking isnae good for either ay us. Trust me, I know.
— You do what the fuck you like, Skinner, I’m on the piss and I don’t give a toss, Kibby said, gesturing to the barmaid.
— Look, Bri . . . Skinner began, but Kibby already had a pint and a double whisky by his side, so self-preservation compelled him to follow suit.
Kibby can’t have that much left; another mega-session will make him so ill he’ll be bedridden and unable to get near any pubs or offies, and therefore unable to damage me. Then I’ll be able to convince him it’s a mug’s game.
—
You won’t be able to keep up with me, Brian, Skinner said, raising his glass, then added chillingly, — There’s no way you can win.
— I’ll have a fuckin good try though, Skinner, Brian Kibby spat in retaliation. — And you don’t need to be all smarmy now that my mum and sister are away!
And he raised a glass of absinthe, which Skinner hadn’t even noticed him ordering, to his cracked lips.
C’mon then, Skinner. Let’s do this. Let’s just fucking well do it. Absinthe, whisky, beer, voddy, gin, fucking meths, anything you want. Bring it on. Bring it on, you evil, smarmy, mutant bastard spawn of Satan!
Help me God.
Help me.
Skinner looked Kibby up and down. It didn’t even sound like him any more. But fuck him anyway, he thought, seeing a phantom sweep of the old Kibby, the professional victim he’d extended the hand of friendship to, but who, frightened of life, had scuttled back into his wimpy shell. — Suits me fine, he said. — Oh, and incidentally, whatever you think I’ve done to you, it’s no been anywhere near enough, he sneered as he slugged at the drink.
The thing was, even as he hissed out this abuse, he realised in paradox that he no longer actually disliked Kibby.
Now Kibby isnae the keen, sooky, irritating little arselick of old. He’s caustic and bitter and vindictive and obsessed and just li– . . . no . . . no . . .
No . . .
Fuck you, Kibby, I’ve got a plane tae catch.
The Diary
WHEN WE GET
out the taxi and back to the house, I leave Mum sitting drunk and giddy in front of the television. I’ve never seen her like that before. She’s rabbiting on about my father, telling me what a good man he was, and going on about Danny, saying that he’s a good boy and that it’s great that he and Brian are now friends.
I’m very doubtful about that, and I was reluctant to leave them together because there was something going on there, but they insisted and I really needed to get her home.
She’s on about my dad again: going on about how much she loved him. Then she turns to me and looks almost angry as her voice drops and she says, — Of course, you were always his favourite. They always say fathers and daughters, mothers and sons. She coughs, and her eyes go wide in a fanatical zeal. — But I love you, Caroline, I love you so much. You know that, don’t you!
— Mum, of course I do . . .
She rises and stumbles over and hugs me. Her grip is surprisingly strong, and she’s clinging to me desperately, not letting go. — My wee lassie, my bonnie wee lassie, she says through her choking tears. Her convulsions are rocking me. I’m stroking the dyed curls of her hair, watching the grey coming out at the temples of her scalp in a morose fascination.
But I’m getting uncomfortable and I whisper in her ear, — Mum, I’m just going upstairs for a bit. There’s something I said I would check. She looks at me agog for a second, so I add, — For Brian, which seems to placate her and she loosens her grip.
— Brian . . . she repeats softly, then starts murmuring something, a prayer or the recital of a passage of Scripture, as I leave the room.
I get upstairs and yank down on the hooked stick, opening the trapdoor and freeing the aluminium steps. I pull them down and start to climb. The bolt that attaches them has become worn and they rattle dangerously under my weight. I’m relieved when I scale to the top and step on to the attic floor.
I click on the lights and I can see that Brian has really wrecked the place. It’s like the model town has been bombed. I don’t know if it can be restored; I would think that anything that can be built can be restored, but it’s going to be a big job. I doubt Brian’s up to it now. Part of me thinks I should offer to help him, then I consider just how ridiculous that is. I wouldn’t know where to start.
I sift through the mess, looking at the broken hills that Dad made with all that papier mâché. I remember helping him make it up in this big orange basin we used to keep under the sink. So I did contribute to all this, more than I realised. When I think about it now, we all did it together. I was just a wee girl but I remember that I was excited to help. Where did I edit out all that good stuff in our lives? When did all those lovely memories of togetherness and fun start to become uncool and embarrassing for me?
I try to pull two parts of one split hill back together. Something inside falls out and hits the ground with a thud. I think it’s a wooden support from part of the frame or something, but I see what looks like a thick desk diary on the ground. It’s not a diary though, it’s a lined John Menzies notebook and the handwriting inside it is all Dad’s. Inside the front cover there’s a note attached.
One day this notebook will be found. My wife and children will know the truth that I’ve lived with for so many years. Joyce, Caroline, Brian, please believe two things.
Firstly, that the person I was then before you all came into my life was very different to the person that I am now. Secondly, wherever I am now, I love you all more than ever.
God bless you all.
I start to read from the book. It’s trembling in my hand so much that I have to put it on the floor. My blood runs cold at one passage.
I can’t believe that he said nothing. An accident at work, they called it. We both knew better, and I suppose that she did as well.
I couldn’t help it; I was demented with anger and the drink. It’s important for me to write this down.
My name is Keith Kibby and I’m an alcoholic. I don’t know when this started. I always drank. My friends always drank. My family always drank. My dad was a merchant seaman and he was away from home a lot. Now I can see what a great life being at sea was for an alcoholic. You can dry out at sea, the only place you don’t have encouragement to buy drink. No pubs, no adverts, no booze. But nobody drinks like a sailor and when he came home he drank and drank. I find memories of him sober very few and fleeting.
I was mainly brought up by my mother. I had a younger brother but he died as a baby. One day I came home from school to find my mother crying with my Aunt Gillian, and the crib empty. Cot death, they said. People also said that my mother and father were never the same after that. They said that Dad drank more than ever.
Growing up, I started to hang around with some local boys. We got rowdy as we got into our teens, as boys do when they’re in a gang. Some of us were tough, others just pretended to be. We called ourselves the Tolcross
Rebels. We were proud of who we were. We fought other gangs and we drank a lot. I drank more than most.
I left Darroch School at sixteen. When I went to my careers officer he sat me down and gave me a card, which I took along to the railways. I trained as a chef on the railways, with British Rail. They sent me to Telford College on day release where I did the City and Guilds of London Institute’s chef course.
I never, ever liked being a chef. I had no flair for it and resented being cooped up, sweating in a hot kitchen. I worked on the Edinburgh to London trains, in the restaurant cars. I wanted to be up front driving the train, not penned into a narrow kitchen, heating up pre-cooked food for businessmen. Like so many kids at my school, I got poor career advice.
The Tories had come to power under Thatcher and they were shutting everything down. I got involved in the union, and became politically aware, or ‘politically conscious’ as we liked to refer to it back then. I went to meetings, took part in marches and demonstrations, stood on picket lines. I read a lot of history; a lot about socialism and how it offered working people the chance of a better life.
But I could see that so much of it was pie in the sky. The system would always win, would always be able to throw enough scraps from the rich man’s table to keep ordinary people stampeding over each other to get to them. I grew disenchanted that the world would never be like I wanted it to, a fair and just place for all. So I drank more. At least that was the way I saw it at the time. It was probably just an excuse.
I needed excuses, as I didn’t want to be like my father. He was abusive in drink. I stood up to him as a young man when he hit my mother. We fought, physically fought, in drink. My father was a brutal man, and I suppose that
I learned to be too, in order to stand up to him. Once we both ended up in casualty after a battle. My mum would sometimes leave him but she would always go back.
There wasn’t much love in my life back then, but I had music. Outside of politics, that was my big passion, specifically punk rock; when it came along I was in my element, as it sort of combined the both. It was stuff that was being made by ordinary young guys from the same sort of places as us, rather than remote, rich pampered superstars in Surrey mansions. There were some great local bands in Edinburgh at the time: the Valves, Rezillos, Scars, Skids, the Old Boys and Matt Vinyl and the Decorators.
It was strange that punk was portrayed in the media as violent, but it was going to punk gigs that got me away from the street violence of the Edinburgh gang scene at the time. Through punk I fell in love with this girl, I met her a Clash gig. Her name was Beverly; she was a true punk rocker. She had green hair and she often wore a safety pin through her nose. A really wild lassie, though she had her softer side as well. She stood out just by being a girl as, to be honest, there weren’t many who were lookers that were into punk. Compared to her I suppose I was just pretending: I was a punk on Friday and then got togged up in disco gear to go to Busters or Annabel’s on Saturday, in order to meet girls.
But I never met a girl like her at those places.
Beverly hated that; she was always calling me a plastic. She worked as a waitress in the Archangel Tavern, where she became famous for her green hair. They said it was a bohemian crowd that hung around there. I didn’t like them though; they were too posh for the likes of me.
Not that I cared about them. For the first time in my life, I was in love.
Beverly was friendly with some of the chefs there. They were restaurant chefs and they looked down on a railway
skivvy like me. That De Fretais boy was one of them, only he wasn’t called De Fretais back then. He was in my class at Telford.
There was always a problem with my drinking. Put that together with Beverly’s temper and we were a volatile mix. She did her own thing and was seeing this other guy at the same time as me. He was a chef as well, in the Northern Hotel. I didn’t know him but I knew of him. Hotel and restaurant workers tended to socialise together because of the working hours.
Beverly fell pregnant right after we got together, wouldn’t say whether it was mine or the other guy’s. He was a drummer as well; he played with the Old Boys. I didn’t know this guy but I hated him. Why not? He was a chef in a better place than me, a real punk who played in a band, and Bev, whom I was crazy about, she loved him more than she did me. I couldn’t accept that.
One night, things just came to a head. I was drunk and I was really angry about the situation, and I did the most stupid thing I’ve ever done in my life. I went to see the other boy to try and sort things out. It was horrible. I went to where he was working and argued with the guy in his kitchen. Nobody else was around at the time. He didn’t take me seriously, gave me the brush-off. As I went away, shouting at him, he flicked the V-sign at me and said, ‘Fuck off, arsehole.’ He said it so dismissively. Now when I think about it, fair play to the boy; a drunkard comes into his work shouting the odds, how else would he react? But in drink and crippled with jealousy, I was totally enraged and lost my head.
The boy had turned away from me and I ran back towards him, grabbed the back of his head and pushed it into what I thought through my alcohol haze was this pot of soup. It wasn’t. It turned out that it was deep-fried fat. He screamed: I’ve never heard anything like that scream,
but I suppose I screamed too, as it burned my hands. The pot cowped over and I ran out the kitchen without looking back. A porter saw me and I pushed past him and mumbled something about there having been an accident. I never even knew the boy’s proper name at the time. Since then I found out it was Donnie Alexander. I went home and when I woke up it seemed like a dream. But my scorched hands told me that it wasn’t. The boy had such terrible burns to his face, and was badly disfigured. For some reason he never shopped me, said it was an accident. I couldn’t go to the doctor’s with my hands. I was in pain for weeks; God knows what it was like for poor Donnie.
He didn’t say anything, but Bev knew that I had done it. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out. She wouldn’t see me, even when the baby was due. Threatened to tell the police what I’d done if I went anywhere near her. She wasn’t joking either. Beverly was a very headstrong lassie. I loved her but she really did love Donnie. Who could blame her? I was a drunk and the thing about drunks is that you always tire of them at some point. She was with him before me; it was just that they’d had a bad fallout. Sometimes I think she was just using me to get at him. I would have done anything for her.
Then the kid came along. A boy. I know that he was my son, I just do.
The worst thing, though, was when I heard about Donnie Alexander’s death. I had disfigured him. He went away to work down in Newcastle, in a small hotel. Then I heard that he was dead. He’d committed suicide in his bedsit. It was all my fault; I as good as murdered the man.
It’s important for me to write this down as honestly as I can.
I went to AA and straightened myself out and from there I got into going to church. I had never been religious, in fact I was anything but and to be honest I’m
still sceptical, but it gave me the strength to continue life sober. I let go of politics, although I remained a union man. I stopped seeing all my old pals. I retrained with British Rail, first as a signalman, then as a driver. I loved the job, the solitude, and particularly the beauty of the West Highland line.
Through the church I met my Joyce and built a new life with her. We had two great kids. I only ever touched alcohol on a few occasions after that. In those relapses I could see the old me: bitter, sarcastic, aggressive and violent. I was a psychopath in drink.
I felt terrible about Bev’s boy but I reasoned that he was better off without me. She had started a hairdressing business, which seemed to be successful. I went to see her at her shop once, a few years later. I wanted to see if I could do right by the kid. But Bev told me that she wanted nothing to do with me and that I was never to go anywhere near the boy; Daniel, she called him.
I had to respect her wishes. I did watch him play football sometimes, making sure that she didn’t see me. It used to break my heart, watching the other fathers making a fuss of their laddies. Maybe I was just projecting my own hurt, but he often seemed such a lost, lonely wee guy. I mind of him scoring a goal in a game once, when she wasn’t there, and I went up to him afterwards and said, ‘Good game there, son.’ A big lump stuck in my throat when his eyes met mine, I was choking back my tears. I had to turn and leave. It was the only words I ever spoke to him, although I’ve said thousands of them in my own head. But in the end I had to let go as I had my Brian and Caroline to consider, and, of course, Joyce. I had to try and look after them as best I could.
I told Joyce everything. I think that it was a mistake. They say that the truth sets you free, but now I know that it’s just self-indulgent nonsense. It may set
you
free,
but it can decimate those around you. It hurt Joyce so much that she had a nervous breakdown and I don’t think she’s ever been quite the same since.
Now, I suppose, I’m doing the same thing. Spouting self-indulgent truths to make myself feel better, when I know that it might hurt those I love the most. I feel that you should be strong enough to suck it up, keep it in. But when I do, I feel the burn in me, the need to go out and drink. I can’t do that, and only writing it down helps. I only hope that when you all see this, it’ll be at a time in your lives when you can understand it. The only thing I can say is that there are some kinds of mistakes you make that you never stop paying for, nor do those closest to you.
Now, Brian, Caroline, the chances are that you’re reading this. Danny, you might even be too. If so, I missed having you around, believe me. There hasn’t been a day that’s passed in my life when I haven’t thought about you. I sincerely hope that not having me around made absolutely no difference to you.
Joyce, I love you and could never apologise in a million years for all the hurt I’ve caused. I love you all and hope that you can find it within yourselves to forgive my stupidity and weakness.
God bless you all.