by Irvine Welsh
Kibby shuffled towards him, but didn’t sit. Skinner nodded to the seat. — What’s up? Duke of Argyll’s playing up?
— Naw, I . . . look . . .
— Have you been practising bum banditry or something?
— Get lost, Kibby hissed at Skinner, lurching to the toilet.
Skinner rolled his eyes and picked up a file. Thoughtfully turning to Shannon, he asked, — Do you think Brian Kibby’s queer?
— No, he’s just a wee bit shy. Stop being so horrible to him, Danny, Shannon said. More than Skinner, she was feeling the ennui of a relationship that was going nowhere. He just seemed to want sex these days, and from what she’d heard, not just with her either.
— I think being a virgin at twenty-one in Edinburgh is about the most pathetic thing I can envisage. People lose their virginity quicker here than any city in the Western world . . . except San Francisco.
Shannon looked doubtfully at him. — Is that borne out with statistics?
— Everything’s borne out with statistics, Skinner observed and he scraped his nail down between two of his teeth to dislodge some trapped food. He senses her need, knows that they’ll probably fuck tonight. Shannon knows this as well and looks at him, again despairing about the futility of it all. The friends-who-fuck relationship was losing its appeal.
The way he’s looking at me . . . Shannon flinched, then stared hard at him. There’s something different about him lately. Maybe it was the promotion, but he seemed intoxicated by power. And, she had to concede, in spite of its ugliness, it held a fascination for her. But for all the allure, there was something about his proximity that was warping.
— What? Skinner said, and shrugged as Shannon got up and left the office.
Lassies can be so weird.
While immersed in his power over Kibby, Skinner felt that his current life was somehow not sustainable. Perversely, so much of it now seemed to depend on his nemesis. This strange hex, it was holding him back, preventing him from realising what he was coming to see as his destiny.
He wondered about living in San Francisco, where it never gets that cold, where everything is temperate, between fifty-five and seventy-five degrees most of the time. De Fretais’s words in the text of The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs burned in his ears; Greg Tomlin, overpaid, oversexed, over here. And Tomlin lived in San Francisco. Could the American chef be his father? Skinner thought about the affinity he’d always felt with the USA. The land of the free; where your accent didn’t matter. But he supposed everybody related to it; movies, TV, fast-food outlets, you grew up with up it. Cultural imperialism. Yet no wonder everybody increasingly hated it: it was stupid, self-serving and so in-your-face that it was setting itself up to be despised. Greg Tomlin, what was he like? Was he the tall, slim, suntanned man with the new young family, who would take his long-lost son to his bosom?
Would I despise him? Would we get on like a house on fire?
Danny Skinner danced breezily into the toilet and urinated. As he washed his hands, he cheerfully hummed the lyrics to an R. Kelly song:
It’s the freakin weekend baby,
I’m gonna have me some fun,
Gimmie some of that toot-toot
Gimmie some of that beep-beep
He knew who was inside the locked toilet trap. Brian Kibby sat in terrorised silence on the jacks, his arse-cheeks spread on the seat, grimacing from the pain that razored deep in the core of him. He had been trying to think of ways he could stop touching his penis, when Skinner came along and inadvertantly helped him, his singing snuffing out all sexual thought. But it only heightened his pain, misery and degradation.
Help me God, please make me strong . . .
Skinner smiled at the closed door. He heard a sudden shower of rain drum against the frosted-glass window outside and wished that he was in San Francisco.
God, I wish I was in Scotland! These pictures just bring it all back. Edinburgh, what a town! Had the sort of weather where you didn’t mind being stuck in a kitchen, or a bar. Not like this freaky shit; the Santa Ana winds have brought havoc and the temperature has soared upwards of one hundred degrees. They’re having it worse down in southern California. I wonder what the right-wing born-again types are thinking as their homes burn. It might be Judgement Day and they’re being punished for voting in Arnie. With so many Christians and so few Lions, I guess that’s what fires are for.
But it isn’t kitchen weather, no, not at all. I’d rather be on a beach than at work. All day, every day. As soon as I turn my back I’ve a renegade diva cook who wants to put his own stamp on my seafood risotto. Now I got to be in the freakin place early cause the plumber’s coming to unblock one of the sinks.
I have a glance through them again, that set of old photographs I found the other day – or rather Paul found when he was looking through his stuff – from back in Scotland. It must have been around ’79, or ’80 maybe. Her hair, ridiculous that it seemed so crazy back then, that goofy smile. Him in those silly janitor’s overalls. And Alan, I swear you can see the fat gene ready to explode, even back then. He’s doing very nicely for himself now, a clear case of scum rising to the top. I wonder how the others are getting on.
Different times. Old pictures just fill me full of melancholy. I put them back in the envelope and stick it on the small table by the front door. I head outside and go down our front steps, on to the street, looking up Castro. I decide I’ll walk into work.
So I stride up Castro, through this curious ghetto, where all the farm boys settled when they were demobbed from the navy after World War II. Once they’d got used to ass, there was no way they were going back home to marry some bovine breeder and live out the rest of their days on a Midwest farm in sexual frustration. No, this point of disembarkation and demobilisation was really our point of embarkation and mobilisation. This was the first real Boystown.
The old bar tempts me, but I pass it by, cutting through to Fillmore, then up on to Haight. I realise that, even after all those years, I’m still entranced by this grand old place, built on gold and sustained on microchips. It makes me wonder why I gave the bar a miss. Years ago, I’d always swing by for a quick drink, or even just to catch up on the gossip.
It’s probably because today’s Castro, with its gay plumbers, launderettes, butchers and carpentry services, all seems so superfluous to me: just another part of society’s obsession with sexualising everything. How we queens have changed the straight world for the worse. If only we’d realised that getting a sink fixed isn’t a gay or straight act, it’s non-sexual. Very non-sexual.
When I get to the restaurant, the young plumber illustrates this perfectly. His assumption of such a conventionally culturally gay persona is so all-embracing that he comes on like one of the androids from the film I, Robot.
— Just exactly what goes down this sink, Mr Tomlin, he lisps, covered in rotting food and stinking water.
— It’s a kitchen, I tell him. And it is. Not a beach, just a dirty, stinking, white-hot fucking kitchen.
Wobbling, sneezing, burping and farting around the pristine kitchen with his notepad, Brian Kibby pulled himself through the agony of his inspection. So complete was his immersion in his own misery that he was unaware of the impression he himself was making. Maurice Le Grand, Executive Chef at the Rue St Lazare Bistro was enraged as he observed this dishevelled, malodorous creature, who had come to inspect his restaurant. This was a joke. How dare they insult him in this manner?
Le Grand was straight on the phone to Bob Foy, who had asked Skinner to sit in on a counselling interview he was immediately conducting with Kibby on the matter.
Danny Skinner found himself savouring the moment Brian Kibby crept shamefully into the office. — Sit down, Foy gruffly commanded, then pushed a paper across the desk in front of him. It was a complaints note. It shook in Kibby’s hand as he read it.
— What is this, Brian?
— I . . . I . . . Kibby stammered.
— It’s a complaints form. Fro
m Le Grand. Calls you a mess. A disgrace, Foy said, lifting an eyebrow. — Should we be concerned, Brian? He scanned Kibby’s haggard appearance in contempt, before irrevocably answering his own question. — I think we should.
Kibby went to speak, but his brain seemed to fuse. For the first time he seemed to take cognisance of the stains on his shirt, and the trousers of his blue suit, which was far too tight for him.
What’s happening to me?
— Listen, Skinner said, dropping his voice, — is anything wrong?
— It’s just this illness . . . I . . .
— Nothing bothering you, like at home?
— No! I . . . I just haven’t been well . . . I . . . Kibby hesitated. Skinner and Foy had got rid of Winchester, Skinner’s old drinking buddy. They could make life hard for him. — I’m sorry . . .
— You’re going to have to shape up, Foy said in a quiet, restrained anger.—You’re making this section look pretty stupid, Brian, and we won’t have it.
— I . . . I . . .
— Do I make myself clear?
Somewhere, the sense of injustice at his lot seemed to enbolden Kibby, and he was able to look Foy in the eye and say, — Perfectly clear.
I’m letting people down. I’ve not been good at the job lately. I must be tidier. It’s just that I feel so sick . . .
— Good, Foy icily grinned.
Kibby looked towards Skinner, whom he’d noted had glanced in slight distaste at Foy. — Look, Brian, consider this an informal little chat, he said, — off the record, if you like.
Tears glistened in Brian Kibby’s eyes and, perversely, he experienced a wave of gratitude, which at once repelled him and also made him want to scream at Skinner, at Danny Skinner, for help. —Thanks, Kibby coughed out, before excusing himself and heading for his refuge that was the toilet.
What about Kibby today? Fuck sake, that boy is a born victim. You can never be guilty for giving victims what they crave most desperately in life: persecution and, even more generously, martyrdom. If you don’t do it the Fates will do it for you. The Fates are seldom wrong. You can count the exceptions on the fingers of a mutilated hand.
De Fretais and my mother, between the both of them I could get the real story. But I’m thinking that it’s Tomlin that the Fates have in mind for me. All my life I’ve known that my destiny was elsewhere, now I think it’s California.
What’s keeping me here? Things are getting weirder with Shannon. Last night was more like a square-go than a shag. We were kissing on my couch, but in an attacking, nasty manner and she got me, kind of ordered me, to strip off. Then she started sucking my cock, but raking at it with her teeth, biting it, and it was fucking painful and she knew it was. I grabbed a handful of hair: to pull her away from, rather than towards, my groin area. Her eyes were narrow and cruel and I tore her blouse off, snapping two buttons in the process. I reasoned that she wanted it rough so I started mangling her tits. She gasped and grimaced and bit my lower lip until we both got that metallic taste of blood in our mouths. I got her jeans and pants down and rammed my fingers roughly into her cunt. She grabbed my cock crudely, the sharp fingernails digging into it as she yanked the foreskin up and down with such power I could feel the strand tearing and stinging. Almost as a defensive manoeuvre, I grabbed her wrist and pinned it back on the couch, thrusting myself into her, my knob burning. She pulled on the back of my head, pushing her own forehead into my nose, rubbing it and grinding it severely, till my eyes watered and I was almost certain she was going to break it. I fucked her as hard and relentlessly as I could and clamped her nipple in a callous vice-like pinch between forefinger and thumb. Then she dragged her nails down my back and the side of my body and violently pushed me away as she twisted out from under me. She ordered me to roll over as she gets on top, shouting, — I’M ON TOP, I’M ON FUCKING TOP OF YOU, SKINNER, YOU CUNT, and she fucks me, but she’s really just fucking herself into a bitter orgasm. When she’s done, she tears away from me like we were two strips of Velcro, leaving me to jerk off so as to come; my spunk shoots all over the couch and some on to her thigh, which she brushes off with scorn, rubbing it on to the cushion. And the worst fucking thing about it is the way she just treats it as normal, coolly putting on her clothes and leaving. And then we see each other in that cunting office the next morning and it’s like nothing’s happened!
And I keep subtly looking at Kibby, for the marks, bites and scratches that I know I’ll find.
It’s fucking crazy with Shannon and me, but we’re no longer friends! I keep singing that Dandy Warhols song to myself whenever she walks into a room:
A long time ago we used to be friends
But I haven’t thought of you lately at all
If ever again a greeting I send to you
Short and sweet is all I intend
A-aah – a-aah – a-aah – a-aah . . .
Now she’s got the huff as we sit in the putrescent Leith superpub called the Grapes. Done out like an airport bar but for non-high-flyers; hardwood tables, plenty glass and chrome. The chairs and floor are already looking like they’ve taken a good beating and the air is thick and blue with smoke. The scabby Junction Street fashionwear attire of the clientele gives the game away almost as much as the prices, painted chalk-style on various blackboards, advertising cooking lager at £1.49 a pint and Stella at £1.90. I’m at the bar drinking Bulmers cider and Jack Daniel’s while Shannon’s on Bushmills. To cheer her up I put my name down for the karaoke. I see a familiar figure approaching the bar, and fuck me if it isn’t my old mate Dessie Kinghorn. I nod to the cunt and he cursorily returns the compliment with a measured shake of his head. — Dessie! I shout across at him. — How goes? And I’m steering Shannon towards him.
— No bad, he says, as he and Shannon uncomfortably register each other.
I turn to Shannon. — This is Dessie Kinghorn, an old buddy of mine. Shannon is . . . a colleague, I laugh and she looks sourly at me. — I suppose Dessie’s an old colleague of sorts too. Represents the clued-up, stylish wing of the movement, I say, looking him up and down, his tatty old jeans, and minging T-shirt which looks like it’s spent a good day too long on his back in a festering, sweltering Rio shanty town. A poor show threadwise.
— Fuck off, Skinner, he spits.
— Dinnae be like that, Desmondo, have a beer. I turn to the barmaid. — A pint of your best lager for my old buddy Dessie Kinghorn! Make it Stella or Carlsberg Export. Nothing but premium for Dessie boy! I turn back to my old buddy. — Still in insurance then, Des?
I never really noticed how evil those eyes were before but I do now as Kinghorn’s looking at me in downright abhorrence. His mouth hangs open in that glaikit stroke-victim impersonation nutters sometimes go into just before they start flinging punches. — Ah wis made redundant last year. But I don’t want a drink fae you. I dinnae want anything fae you!
— Funny, Des, I just got a big promotion at the council, didn’t I, Shannon? She looks as pointedly at me as Dessie does. — Big bucks. But you ken me, mate, every penny is needed. Expensive tastes. I finger the lapel of my new CP Company jaiket. — A curse, I suppose.
— Fuck off, I’m warning you. Dessie’s eyes narrow. — See, if you werenae wi yir bird . . .
I’m about to pull Dessie up about his rather sexist comment when the wee guy who’s running the karaoke holds up a card and shouts, — Danny Skinner!
— Must go, but hold on, I’ll be back, I smile, hopping up on to the small stage and taking the microphone from the boy. — I’m Danny Skinner, I shout, catching the attention of some old boys, young gadges and lassies in the nearby seats, — and this is a song I dedicate to my old mucker Dessie Kinghorn, who’s a bit down on his luck at the moment. I wink at Des who now seems on the verge of a fit as I launch into ‘Something Beautiful’.
— You can’t manufacture a miracle, the silence was pi-ra-ful that day . . . a love is getting too cynical . . . I turn to Shannon whose expression is now so acerbic that it takes me a split secon
d to register that it’s actually her, — . . . passion’s just physical these days . . . but get no sign, love ain’t kind, every night you admit defeat . . . and cry yourself blind . . . I look at Dessie and upturn my free palm as I belt out the chorus as camply soulful as I can, — If you can’t wake up in the morning, cause your bed lies vacant at night . . . if you’re lost, I point at Dessie, — hurt, and again, — tired and lonely can’t control it try as you might . . . may you find that love that won’t leave you, may you find at the end of the day, you won’t be lost, hurt, tired and lonely, somethin beautiful will come your way . . .
Dessie freaks and charges up on to the stage. I keep hold of the mike but raise my hands, boxer-style, defending my face. He gets a couple of good licks in, one on the side of the jaw, punching through my guard, like back in our boyhood spars at Leith Victoria, but I’m keeping my grip on that mike. — The DJ said on the ra . . . The speakers go dead as the boy who runs the karaoke switches off the machine. I drop the mike, and it falls to the floor. Stepping back I raise my hands to the air in innocent appeal as Dessie tries to stick in the boot, misses, feels like a cunt and shouts, — You’re fuckin scum, Skinner! And he turns and pushes past the karaoke boy, making a storming exit from the pub! What a diva!
I shrug apologetically at the stunned drinkers, picking up the mike and handing it back to the bemused-looking boy. Shannon comes up to me and says, — You’re being such a tedious bastard; I’m off hame, and true to her word departs from the boozer! Another drama queen! Well, fuck her. I go back to the bar and finish the drinks, starting on the pint I got up for Dessie Kinghorn, which he didn’t touch.
A long time ago we used to be friends
But I haven’t thought of you lately at all
If ever again a greeting I send to you
Short and sweet is all I intend
A-aah – a-aah – a-aah – a-aah . . .