by Irvine Welsh
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 w
as 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!
— Caroline, he wheezed in acknowledgement.
Caroline Kibby caught the whiff of drink from her brother. Scrutinised his cheeks: rougher, drier and ruddier than usual. — You okay?
— Aye . . . it’s good to see you, Kibby sniffled, at first contritely, before a tickle of the alcohol in his brain produced a speculative half-smirk. — How’s the course going? he said in sombre exaggeration, attempting to root himself.
The room is sort of spinning but it’s no really bad, it’s like . . . who cares?
— It’s a bit of a drag, Caroline shrugged, instantly reassured that her brother’s old concerns were intact. Now vague and distracted, she sat down in the big armchair, curling into it, picking up the remote and clicking on the TV. The mute control was on and a newscaster mouthed in silent sincerity followed by footage of Middle Eastern women and children crying in a pile of rubble. The next picture showed an American soldier, armed to the teeth. Then it cut to a disengaged, constipated-looking George Bush and finally to a simpering Tony Blair, surrounded by suits, at some sort of function.
Kibby felt something rising inside him, through his watery, bloated flesh, across the yards of dulled space that seemed to exist between each cell, each neuron.
They get other people to do it for them. They have the money, the power and they exist to indulge themselves and their vanities. But it’s no them, it’s no their sons or daughters who have to go and fight and murder or be hurt or killed to indulge those conceits. It’s the people who have nothing, those who cannae fight back, who are made meek . . . and you can watch a thousand Harry Potters or Steven Spielbergs or Mary-Kate and Ashleys and Britneys and Big Brothers and Bridget Joneses and you can ignore it by wanting to be the next Principal Officer at the council . . . ignore that you’re not empowered, you’re not enfranchised, you’re a slave, a slave to those egotistical, pious, sanctimonious murdering bastards and the world they’ve created, a world as selfish and cowardly and vain as they are . . . like Skinner . . . they get other people to deal with the shit they make through their own twisted vanity . . .
Then the distance suddenly closed and a force fused and crackled between the gaps as Kibby’s head rattled.
There’s Caroline, my sister, part of this lazy, complacent decadence, wasting opportunity while my dad sweated his working life away and deprived himself to ensure that she had those chances . . .
— You always liked your course . . . he whined.
Caroline shook her head rapidly, her mop of blonde hair tumbling and swishing and falling back into place like nylon static, only a couple of strands displaced from its original position. — I do like it, it just gets on my nerves at times. It’s just work, work, work, she shrugged, letting her face take on first a speculative, then a wicked aspect. — I just feel as if I need a bit of pampering sometimes, she smiled.
— And that’s where he comes in, is it?
Caroline gazed at her brother, in a way she never had before, curling her lip, and Brian Kibby instantly saw himself through her eyes. What he saw was a freak; a corpulent, mournful, possessive failure whose wreckage of a life trailed behind him like the slime of a snail.
They thought I was a dirty child molester, outside by the park.
On cue, Kibby felt his treacherous pores chuck more icy, toxic sweat over him.
Not Caroline, though. No Caz. Wee sis.
How close they had been in a quietly undemonstrative and understated way. Then, on occasion, sickening sentiment would crush them into making the odd gesture that mortified them both: how Scottishly close they had once been.
Caroline. Wee sis.
From Brian Kibby’s point of view, all he could do was stare at his sister as she turned away and assiduously focused on the television. The American troops were preparing for a surge on Falluja in the run-up to the US elections as they had disclosed that over one hundred thousand Iraqi civilians had died as a result of coalition activities. He wanted to talk to her about this; he never usually talked politics with her because he always felt it was a distraction and that people should be happy with their lot instead of complaining or trying to change things all the time. He was wrong, though; he wanted to tell her that he was wrong and she was right.
But he was realising that he couldn’t build a bridge, couldn’t make a connection, because his hatred of Skinner had a life of its own, beyond intellect, beyond reason. It forged every grimace, framed each sentence, in fact, it determined all possible responses. It was an entity he was powerless to fight. And before he gained cognisance of it, this force was speaking for him, talking through him. — He’s evil . . . he’s . . . he whimpered breathlessly.
Caroline turned back to her scrutiny of Brian, then shook her head slowly.
He’s finally lost it.
We’ve been through so much together as a family and now it’s taken its toll. I’m so glad to be out of this madhouse, this crucible of fear and loss; to have finally cut loose and let go. God, what does Danny think of them, what does he think of me? It’s as well that he’s so understanding, so a
ble to empathise with our losses.
— You’re sick, Brian, Caroline concluded in deliberate detachment. — All Danny’s ever done is tried to help you, tried to be a friend to you. It was Danny that kept you in a job all that time, just because he knew you needed it. We needed it, she said, warming to her theme. — Because that’s the kind of person he is!
— You dinnae ken! You dinnae ken the kind ay person he is, Brian Kibby squealed in rage and terror.
Caroline’s face twisted into a demonic parody of itself. Kibby had seen her bad moods, from toddler pouts to teenage tantrums, but he could never have imagined that his pretty and serene sister could possibly have ever looked so grotesque. — I can’t stand it, Brian, I can’t stand your puerile jealousy of Danny!
— But he’s no what you think! Kibby wailed, looking ceilingwards towards heaven as if for confirmation.
But none was forthcoming as Caroline picked at some of the dry skin around her fingernail. Corrected herself. She’d have to stop that. — I know Danny, Brian. Aye, he likes to go out and have a good time. And he’s popular. So people get jealous, start making up nonsense.
Brian Kibby’s heartbeat rose and his sweat ducts gushed again. He winced as he got a whiff of that horrible stale scent rising from him. Skinner was doing it again, attacking him, weakening him somehow. — He’s using you, Caz, he’s just using you . . .
Caroline glared fiercely at her brother. — I’ve had a couple of proper relationships, Brian. I know a bit about that side of life. Don’t presume to tell me about it, she snapped at him in undisguised distaste. She didn’t need to say anything about Kibby’s own distinct lack of familiarity with emotional or carnal issues; this was as implicit as could be. — And don’t make a scene today, she warned, lowering her voice and glowering at him. — If you can’t show any decency to Danny or to me, then at least think of Mum.
— It’s him that’s no goat any de–
— Shut up! Caroline hissed, nodding to the door as their mother’s key turned in the lock.