by Irvine Welsh
Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Irvine Welsh
Dedication
Title Page
Prelude: She Came to Dance, 20 January 1980
1. Recipes
1. Bedroom Secrets, 16 December 2003
2. Kitchen Secrets
3. The Outdoor Life
4. Skegness
5. Compensation
6. Little France
7. This Christmas
8. Festivities
9. New Year
10. Sex and Death
11. Funerals
12. The Archangel Tavern
13. Spring
14. Presentation
2. Cooking
15. Mystery Virus
16. Star Trekkin
17. Interview
18. Rick’s Bar
19. Dukes of Hazzard
20. Black Marks
21. Muffy
22. Brummie Balearics
23. High Concept
24. Private Festivities
25. Meat City
3. Exit
26. Surgeon
27. Going Under
28. AA
29. Van Ness
30. Fags
31. Gymnasium Days
32. Pulled Up
4. The Dinner
33. Autumn
34. Shock and Awe
35. The Leaning Tower
36. The Old Boys
37. First Drink
38. Muso
39. Alaska
40. Persevere
41. Train Wreck
42. The Diary
43. Leith Calling
44. Stranger on the Shore
45. An email from America
46. Flame-Grilled
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
At Edinburgh’s Department of Environmental Health, hard-drinking, womanising officer Danny Skinner wants to uncover secrets: ‘the bedroom secrets of the master chefs’, secrets he believes might just help him understand his self-destructive impulses. But the arrival of the virginal, model-railway enthusiast Brian Kibby at the department provokes an uncharacteristic response in Skinner, and threatens to throw his mission off course. Consumed by loathing for his nemesis, Skinner enacts a curse, and when Kibby contracts a horrific and debilitating mystery virus, Skinner understands that their destinies are supernaturally bound, and he is faced with a terrible dilemma ...
About the Author
Irvine Welsh is the author of eight previous novels and four books of shorter fiction. He currently lives in Chicago.
ALSO BY IRVINE WELSH
Fiction
Trainspotting
The Acid House
Marabou Stork Nightmares
Ecstasy
Filth
Glue
Porno
If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work
Crime
Reheated Cabbage
Skagboys
Drama
You’ll Have Had Your Hole
Babylon Heights (with Dean Cavanagh)
Screenplay
The Acid House
For Elizabeth
The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs
Irvine Welsh
Prelude
She Came to Dance, 20 January 1980
— THIS IS THE fuckin Clash! The green-haired girl had screamed into the face of the flinty-eyed bouncer, who’d shoved her back into her seat. — And this is a fuckin cinema, he’d told her.
It was the Odeon cinema, and the security personnel seemed determined to stop any dancing. But after the local band, Joseph K, had finished their set, the main act had come out all guns blazing, blasting out ‘Clash City Rockers’, and the crowd immediately surged down to the front of the house. The girl with the green hair scanned around for the bouncer, who was preoccupied, then sprang back up. For a while the security staff tried to stem the tide, but finally capitulated about halfway through the set, between ‘I Fought the Law’ and ‘(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais’.
The crowd was lost in the thrashing noise; at the front of the house they bounced along in rapture, while those at the back climbed on to their seats to dance. The girl with green hair, now right at the front centre of the stage, seemed to be rising higher than the rest, or perhaps it was just her hair, and the way the strobes hit it, making it appear as if a spectacular emerald flame was bursting from her head. A few, only a few, were gobbing at the band and she was screaming at them to cut it out as he – her hero – had only just recovered from hepatitis.
She’d been to the Odeon only a few times before, most recently to see Apocalypse Now, but it wasn’t like this and she could bet that it had never been. Her friend Trina was a few feet from her, the only other girl so near the front that she could almost smell the band.
Taking a last gulp from the plastic Irn Bru bottle she’d filled with snakebite, she killed it and let it fall to the sticky, carpeted floor. Her brain fizzed with the buzz of it working in tandem with the amphetamine sulphate she’d taken earlier. She roared the words of the songs as she leapt, working herself into a defiant frenzy, going to a place where she could almost forget what he had told her earlier that afternoon. Just after they’d made love when he’d gone so quiet and distant, his thin, wiry frame shivering on the mattress.
— What’s up, Donnie? What is it? she’d asked him.
— It’s all fucked, he’d said blankly.
She told him not to be daft, everything was brilliant and the Clash gig was happening tonight, they’d been waiting for this for ages. Then he turned round and his eyes were moist and he looked like a child. It was then that her first and only lover had told her that he’d been fucking someone else earlier; right there on the mattress they shared every night, the place where they’d just made love.
It had meant nothing; it was a mistake, he immediately claimed, panic rising in him as the extent of his transgression became apparent in her reaction. He was young and learning about boundaries as he saw his emotional vocabulary extending out in front of him, just a little too slowly. He had just wanted to tell her: to be straight with her.
She saw his lips move but heard little of the detail of his qualification as she’d got out of their mattress bed and pulled on her clothes. Then she’d taken his ticket for the gig from her pocket and ripped it into pieces right there in front of him. And after that she’d gone to the Southern Bar to meet the others, as arranged, then on to the Odeon to see the show because the greatest rock’n’ roll band of all time were playing in her city and she would see it and he would miss it and at least some sort of justice would be done.
A tallish guy with short dark hair dressed in a leather jacket, jeans and a mohair jumper, who had been pogoing next to her, was suddenly screaming something in her ear as the band went into ‘Complete Control’. She couldn’t make it out and it didn’t matter as in an instant she was eating his face off, and his arms felt good around her.
The second encore began with the comparatively rare ‘Revolution Rock’ and ended with an incandescent version of ‘London’s Burning’ repositioned as ‘Edinburgh’s Burning’. And she was too, melting with the speed in her brain, which pulsed in the frozen air as they got outside the cinema. The boy was going to a party in the Canongate and he asked her to come along. She agreed; she didn’t want to go home. More than that, she wanted him. And wanted to show someone else that two could play at that game.
As they walked in the cold night he talked effusively, seeming fascinated by her green mane, and told her that this part
of town used to be known as Little Ireland. He explained that the Irish immigrants settled here, and it was in these streets that Burke and Hare murdered the poor and destitute in order to provide bodies for the medical school. She looked up at his face; there was a hard set to it but his eyes were sensitive, even womanly. He pointed over to St Mary’s Church, and told her that many years before Celtic in Glasgow, the Edinburgh Irishmen had formed the Hibernian Football Club in these very halls. He grew animated when he pointed up the street, and told her that Hibernian’s most famous supporter, James Connolly, was born up that road and had went on to lead the Easter Risings in Dublin, which culminated in Ireland’s freedom from British imperialism.
It seemed important to him that she knew that Connolly was a socialist, not an Irish nationalist. — In this city we know nothing about our real identity, he said passionately, — it’s all imposed on us.
But she had other things on her mind than history and he would be her second lover that evening, though by the end of the night she would have had three.
1
Recipes
1
Bedroom Secrets, 16 December 2003
DANNY SKINNER ROSE first, restless, having failed to get off to sleep. This concerned him as he usually fell into a heavy slumber after they’d made love. Made love, he thought, smiled, and then considered again. Had sex. He looked at Kay Ballantyne as she dozed blissfully, that long, glossy black hair splayed over the pillow, her lips still carrying the remnants of the satisfaction he’d given her. A swell of tenderness bloomed from deep within him. — Made love, he said softly, kissing her forehead diligently, so as to prevent the bristles of his long, pointed chin from scratching her.
Wrapping a green tartan dressing gown around himself, he fingered its gold-stitched crest on the breast pocket. It was a Harp emblem, with an inscription, ‘1875’. Kay had bought Skinner it for his Christmas, last year. They hadn’t been going out long then, and as a gift it seemed to say so much. But what had he given her? He couldn’t recall: perhaps a leotard.
Skinner went through to his kitchen, and from the fridge procured a can of Stella Artois. Cracking it open, he headed to the lounge where he rescued the television’s remote from the guts of the large sofa, and found the programme, The Secrets of the Master Chefs. This popular show was now in its second series. It was hosted by a famous chef, who toured Britain, asking local cooks to demonstrate their secret recipes for a party of celebrity diners and food critics, who would then pass judgement.
But the ultimate verdict rested with the eminent chef, Alan De Fretais. This celebrated cook had recently courted controversy by publishing a book entitled The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs. On the pages of this aphrodisiac cookbook, several internationally renowned culinary experts had each produced a recipe, writing about how they managed to use it to advance a seduction or to complement a lovemaking session. It quickly became a publishing sensation, spending several weeks heading the best-sellers list.
Today De Fretais and his camera crew were at a large hotel in Royal Deeside. The television chef was a giant, with a bombastic, bullying manner, and the local cook, an earnest young man, was obviously feeling intimidated in his own kitchen.
Sipping his can of lager, Danny Skinner watched the nervous, flickering eyes and defensive posture of the rookie chef, thinking with pride how he himself had the measure of this browbeating tyrant; standing his ground on the couple of occasions they’d had dealings. Now he just had to wait and see what they did with his report.
— A kitchen has to be spotless, spotless, spotless, De Fretais scolded, punctuating this with play-rapping cuffs around the back of the young chef’s head.
Skinner watched the junior cook hopelessly defer, fearful of the occasion, the cameras and the bulk of the gross chef who harassed him, relegating him to the role of hapless stooge. He wouldn’t try that shit on with me, he thought, raising the can of Stella to his lips. It was empty, but there was more in the fridge.
2
Kitchen Secrets
— DE FRETAIS’S KITCHEN is a fucking midden; that’s what it is. The white-faced young man stood his ground. His attire, a tastefully blended mix of quality designer clothing, did not so much hint as scream at ideas beyond station and salary. At just over six foot two Danny Skinner often seemed larger: his presence augmented by penetrating dark brown eyes and the black cater-pillar brows that sat thickly above them. His wavy raven hair was combed in a side parting which gave him a raffish, almost arrogant bearing; this enhanced by his angular face and a twist to his thin-lipped mouth suggesting levity, even when he was at his most sombre.
The stocky-framed man facing him was in his late forties. He had a ruddy, squarish liver-spotted face topped by a mane of amber-coloured creamed-back hair that was whitening at the temples. Bob Foy was not used to being to being challenged in this manner. One of his eyebrows was raised incredulously; yet in that motion and the expression his slack features had settled into, there was just a smidgen of enquiry, even of mild fascination, which permitted Danny Skinner to continue. — I’m only doing my job. The man’s kitchen is a disgrace, he contended.
Danny Skinner had been an Environmental Health Officer at Edinburgh City Council for three years, moving there from a management trainee post within the authority. This was a very short time in Foy’s book. —This is Alan De Fretais we’re talking about here, son, his boss snorted.
The discussion was taking place in a barn of an open-plan office, partitioned by small screens dividing it into workstations. Light spilled in through the big windows on one side and although it had been double-glazed you could still hear the noise from the traffic outside on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. The solid walls were lined with a few antiquated tin filing cabinets, hand-me-downs from different departments throughout the local authority, and a photocopier that kept the maintenance men in more regular employment than the office staff. A perennially dirty sink was positioned in one corner, beside a fridge and a table with a peeling veneer, on which sat a kettle, teapot and coffee urn. At the back there was a staircase that led to the departmental conference room and the accommodation of another section, but before that a mezzanine floor with two smaller self-contained offices was unobtrusively tucked away.
Danny Skinner glanced at the doleful faces around him as Foy let the report he’d just meticulously prepared fall heavily on to the desk, which separated the two men. He could see the others in the room, Oswald Aitken and Colin McGhee, looking everywhere but at him and Foy. McGhee, a short, squat Glaswegian with brown hair and a grey suit that was just a little too snug, was pretending to search for something in the mountain of paperwork that lay heaped on his desk. Aitken, a tall, consumptive-looking man, with thinning sandy hair and a lined, almost pained face, briefly gazed at Skinner in distaste. He saw a cocky youth whose disturbingly busy eyes hinted that the soul behind them was perpetually wrestling with something or other. Such young men were always trouble and Aitken, counting the days till his retirement, wanted none of it.
Realising that support would not be forthcoming, Skinner considered that it was perhaps time to lighten things up. — I’m no saying that his kitchen was damp, but not only did I find a salmon in the mousetrap, the poor bastard had asthma. I was on my way to phoning the RSPCA!
Aitken pouted as if someone had farted under his nose in the Kirk he served in as an elder. McGhee stifled a chuckle but Foy remained inscrutable. Then he let his eye leave Skinner and settle on the lapel of his own checked jacket, from which he brushed some dandruff, worrying slightly that his shoulders might be covered with the stuff. He’d have to remember to tell Amelia to change that shampoo.
Then Foy looked Skinner squarely in the eye again. It was a searching glance Skinner knew well, and not only from his boss. That gaze of somebody who is trying to see beyond what you presented to them, trying to read the insides of you. Skinner held his own stare firm as Foy broke the glance to nod to Aitken and McGhee, who gratefully took his cue and departed. T
hen he resumed his eye contact with a vengeance. — Have you been on the fucking pish or what?
Skinner bristled, instinctively feeling attack to be the best form of defence. A flash of anger came into his eyes. — What the fuck are you on about? he snapped.
Foy, used to deference in his staff, was slightly taken aback. — Sorry, I, eh, didn’t mean to imply, he began before assuming a complicit tone, — Have you had a drink at lunchtime? I mean, it’s Friday afternoon!
As the Principal Officer, Foy was usually drinking himself on Friday afternoons, in fact he was generally posted missing from about midday, this being one of the odd Fridays when he ostentatiously walked around ensuring superiors and subordinates got a full view of him busy and sober. Skinner therefore felt relaxed enough to divulge, — Two pints of lager with my bar lunch, that’s all.
With a ragged clearing of his throat, Foy advanced his proposition. — I hope you didnae inspect De Fretais’s place with a bevvy on your breath, no matter how light. He’s used to detecting it in his own staff. So are his chefs.
— I did the inspection Tuesday morning, Bob, Skinner said, then stressed, — You know that I would never go on to any site with a drink in me. I just had paperwork to catch up with this affie so I indulged myself with two pints of lager, Skinner yawned, — and I have to admit that the second one was a mistake. Still, a cup of instant coffee will sort that right out.
Picking up the thin file that contained Skinner’s report, Foy said, — Well, you know De Fretais, he’s our local celeb and Le Petit Jardin is his flagship restaurant. Two Michelin stars, son. How many other restaurants in Britain can boast that?
Skinner tried briefly to think about this, then decided that he didn’t know and couldn’t care less. I’m a health inspector, not a groupie for some fucking cook.
As he bit his tongue, Foy moved around the desk, placing his arm around Skinner’s back. Although shorter than his younger subordinate, he was a powerful bull of a man whose frame was only slowly and reluctantly going to seed, and Skinner felt the force on his shoulders. — I’ll drop by and have a quiet wee word with him, let him know about cleaning up his act a wee bitty.