Caroline’s mouth seemed to turn up a little at the corner; it probably wasn’t what she wanted to hear, he considered.
But Danny Skinner was feeling like he hadn’t felt with a girl since he was about fifteen. He was awkward and nervous. They kissed, and it was okay, and then they went into a strange, long sleep in each other’s arms, so beautiful and peaceful it was like they’d been drugged by something more prolific than the hash they’d enjoyed.
It was Skinner who woke first in the morning light. Immediately he marvelled at Caroline’s slumbering pulchritude but was soon once again beset by a terrible unease, feeling compelled to get up and leave the bed. He went to the kitchen and started to fix breakfast, laying out some cereal, yogurt, orange juice and green tea. Skinner felt strangely relieved through his disappointment when she emerged wearing all her own clothes, rather than one of his T-shirts.
Yet through their breakfast they chatted in a relaxed manner, and it was only when Caroline was ready to depart that the awkwardness set in once again. For some reason Skinner could only give her a chaste peck on the cheek. — Can I see you again? he asked.
— I’d like that, she smiled, wondering why this was all so clumsy.
Was it because of Brian and his strange dislike of this guy?
Skinner was tempted to say tomorrow, but he needed some time to think things through. His head was in a mess. — What about Thursday?
Caroline Kibby was as anxious to have a moratorium as Danny Skinner was. — Thursday’s fine.
She set off on her way back to her new home on the South Side. A while after she’d gone, Skinner remembered that he was going to see the Old Boys on Thursday. He didn’t want to start messing Caroline around at this stage, so he thought that they could go together. He noticed that she’d left some hash behind on the coffee table. He skinned up another joint and felt his head bubble. It was strong gear.
Fucking sabotaging Edinburgh soapbar! It’s as good as any California grass I had with Dorothy. Probably some home-grown hydroponic shite or whatever dopeheads call it.
He rolled up another joint and sucked on it.
36
The Old Boys
IT’S GETTING COLD, but it looks more like a summer’s day. The sky is almost blonde. A starling, twig in its beak, flutters from the corner of the roof extension next door, across to the willow tree at the bottom of the back garden. It’ll have to watch for the likes of Tarquin, the cat who lives next door. He’s caught a few of them.
I’m getting stronger. I’ve started going for wee walks now. I climbed to the top of Drum Brae yesterday. Today I put on a T-shirt, a fleece, trainers and tracksuit bottoms and head outside, going down the Glasgow Road. I call into the PC World computer superstore wondering whether or not to upgrade my Harvest Moon to the newer edition. I decide against it, I don’t feel comfortable spending money on luxuries now that I’m no working.
One of these lassies with the clipboards is outside. She wears a waterproof with oxfam on it. She gives me a big smile. — Can you spare a minute for Oxfam?
— No.
— No problem, she smiles.
— Correct. It is no problem. It’s part of the solution, I tell her.
She raises her eyebrows and gies a closed-up grin. I can feel my neck burn as I depart, but I feel satisfied to have resisted. They always want something. Always. I’ve stopped the other direct debits as well!
I cut through by the church on to the Gyle playing fields. Aye, I’m getting stronger but I’ll never be the same again. The disease has stolen so much from me. I miss my job, and the people in the office. Except Skinner, only I hear that he isn’t there any more. Supposed to be taking time off to travel. Why doesn’t he just do that then?
I fucking well told Mum not to bring him into our house! If he comes again, I won’t be in. What is he playing at, hanging around me and my mother? He’s nothing to do with me. He never was!
What does he want?
There’s a football match on at the Gyle Park, two teams running around kicking a ball about. How I’d love to join them, even though I never liked the game. It was always too rough and fast and aggressive for me. They shouted at me because I was slow and couldnae trap the ball. I was just a bit nervous and awkward. Now, though, I’d just get right into it. Get stuck right in like my dad used to tell me to. I wouldn’t care about hurting myself or anybody else. Because I know now that doing things doesn’t hurt you; you get hurt by avoiding them.
Whatever comes my way in life now, I know that I’m done with hiding.
By the time I get home it’s getting dark. Mum’s got a basket of dirty washing as she heads into the kitchen, looking at me as if she’s going to say something, then thinking better of it.
— What?
— Nothing . . . Did you enjoy your walk?
— Aye . . . I head up to my room and fire up Harvest Moon. It’s New Year’s Eve and I’m straight round Muffy’s, no messing about to check fucking chickens or cattle or crops, I’m courting her, bringing her cake and flowers . . . but what do I get back, baby? What do I get from you?
Take off your dress.
Slip off your little white panties . . . I know you’re wearing them . . . that’s it . . .
Bend over that fence . . .
. . . that’s it . . .
I’ve got a big cock; a big, dirty cock that I think is made for tight Jap pussy . . .
. . . that’s it, you fucking Jap bitch . . . take this, baby, take it . . . fucking bitches with your big doll lips and your tight pussies . . . your big eyes, every one of you bitches has such big fucking doe eyes . . . ohhh . . . ohhh . . . ohhhh . . . YA FUCKER . . .
Oh.
My spunk is all over my thighs . . . wasted spunk, spunk that should have gone to make beautiful white Christian babies? Like fuck, spunk that should have been swallowed by fucking sluts like that fucking Lucy Moore whore and that filthy Shannon bitch who went with Skinner . . .
THAT’S THE FUCKIN WASTE.
I’m gasping and my head is spinning but I’m going to fuck every bitch on this fuckin farm. Then tomorrow I’m going back to PC World to buy Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. There’s a reason why Game Informer gave it ten out of ten.
From behind the pane, cracked and mottled with dirt, a judging sky hung threateningly in bruised layers over the city. Skinner considered that he needed to get those windows clean. He could just about make out a row of broken chimney pots on the tenement roofs opposite, holding each other up like a group of partying drunks heading to the next bar. Better take the raincoat, he thought, as he prepared to go outside.
The top of Waverley steps, Skinner pursed sourly, then laughed at his own stupidity.
What fuckin tube arranges to meet a bird at the top ay Waverley steps? She’ll probably have blown across to Fife by the time I get up to that fucking wind trap. You dipstick, Skinner!
As he bustled up the Walk, negotiating the grand thoroughfare in even strides, he tried to recall Caroline, to see if, when he conjured up this image of perfection of her, it would chime with the one that greeted him in the flesh at the top of the steps. Or had his mind been playing tricks on him?
When he saw her standing there, approaching her profile, he realised right away, almost with a sense of disappointment, that it hadn’t. He was confronted with someone who was approaching the zenith of their beauty without spoiling it by coming anywhere near that awareness.
Her hair is white blonde and looks like silk. Her neck is a slender white stem where the hair tapers out into soft down. Two small silver earrings with tiny ruby-coloured inserts sparkle in her plump lobes.
Skinner wanted to graze on them idly, remembering he thought about doing just that when they were alone in bed the other night, but somehow couldn’t. He looked at her fingernails, which were so long that he fancied she could pick locks with them. He was aware that his gaze was all over her and he checked himself, making eye contact as she turned and registered his approach.
C
aroline smiled at him and Skinner saw himself like De Fretais’s pan-seared tuna steak, burned on the outside, mildly tenderised internally.
He took her to a cocktail bar, a proper American-style one, not a trashy British office workers’ haunt, as he derisively described one she mentioned. Sensing a growing harshness in his soul, Skinner tried to check himself. Why was he behaving like this? Was it a way of trying to marshal his inner self in front of a girl who excited strange, indefinable passions in him? To hell with Brian Kibby and Gillian McKeith for a short time: he ordered a vodka martini made with vermouth and crushed ice. Skinner couldn’t work out why he was unable to just make love to this beautiful girl he cared about. How hard could it be? He had one drink, then another. Then one more, Caroline matching him all the way for consumption and mood. He went to the machine, inserted his coins and wrestled out a packet of cigarettes.
They tried to negotiate the maelstrom of emotion swirling about them. Role-playing around it, they alternately acted harsh, blasé and aggressively flirty. The drink was their prop in this terrible theatre.
The fourth martini arrived; two green olives, skewered by a cocktail stick, straddled the glass. He picked up the cocktail stick and popped one olive into his mouth. Her eyes met his and a charge surged through him, hopelessly emboldening him and he pulled Caroline to him and transfered the olive into her mouth, almost spitting it in. She pulled away for a bit, because it felt not like it should, like she would expect, but intrusive, even creepy. Something was far from right here.
I’ve got such strong feelings for Danny, but . . .
Skinner cursed himself internally at the inappropriateness of the gesture, felt a terrible void growing between them.
Screw the nut, Skinner, you fucking tube . . . you fuckin . . . stay cool. C’mon, it was a bad move, but not a disaster.
He contented himself with looking at her again as they sat by each other on bar stools. They seemed to settle into a relaxed intimacy, but one that they sensed would send them scampering away like rodents with hair-trigger nerves, whenever it crossed a sexual line. It had to be real slow, he reasoned, and he got her to touch palms with him. — Almost as big as mine, he said, marvelling at the fluidity and luminosity of her eyes.
I wonder what they would be like when we make love, whether or not they would roll up behind their lids at her key moment, that deathly ethereal, yet arousing effect some women, and for all I know, men, display when they climax.
Danny Skinner was still a young enough man not to realise that his vanity could, on occasion, easily outstrip his sophistication. He’d also been sober long enough to forget that with alcohol it could happen so readily. And although Caroline Kibby was a younger woman, she was still a woman and moreover an inherently mature one whom circumstance had forced to grow up quickly. And as they headed down towards Victoria Street, she sensed that something was deeply wrong between the two of them.
It was Skinner’s idea to go along and see the Old Boys. They staggered into the venue, very drunk, but anxious to lose their embarrassment in yet more alcohol and the music. He couldn’t believe the crowd, loads of old punks, most of them contemporaries of his mother. Some still dressed like they did twenty-five years ago, while others were quite smart and straight-looking.
The space was spartan, and Skinner and Caroline tucked themselves by a pillar at the back of the house, close to the bar, as the band came on to rapturous applause.
It’s the audience who look so old. Even the stick-thin guys who’d kept their stupid hair didn’t realise that they looked ancient and ridiculous in their punk threads, the way old cunts never manage to dig. The Old Girl said they used to laugh at old Teds as well, but it was age they were laughing at as much as style, the fucking hypocritical non-sexist, non-racist, non-ageist old fuckers!
The good thing about the band, though, is that they haven’t visibly aged. They looked like old fuckers then; they are old fuckers now. Chrissie Fotheringham cuts a cool demeanour on the drums, with her headsquare, overcoat, woollen mittens and NHS glasses, but she’s a good decade younger than the others. The singer, Wes Pilton, he’s the star of the show and he gets the crowd going with ‘The War Years’:
Days of glory, days of hope
Days without porn and dope
Of discipline by birch and rope
Those were the war years.
Days when we lived without fear
No rampaging yobs on beer
The beat bobby would clip your ear
Back in the war years.
Pilton marched, stiffed-backed, to the front of the stage and bent down as he crooned the chorus:
Britain stood alone
Fought against the foe
People shed their tears
For those killed in those years.
He leapt up, quite energetically, Skinner thought, before going back into scathing, snarling punk mode with the verse:
Now our country’s breaking down
Lawless thugs in every town
National service would straighten those clowns
Just like the war years.
Taking the bows, Pilton gave a straight military salute to the crowd. — My pigeons have died, he announced to the audience cheers and laughter, — but we’re still here, well, most of us. This is for those departed, our old drummers Donnie and Martin. He winked as they launched into ‘A Penny From the Poor Box’.
Skinner drifted over to the bar to get some more drinks, where he witnessed Sandy Cunningham-Blyth, swaying around, stupefied with alcohol. Even the hardest-line veteran punks were giving him a wide berth, he noticed. The seasoned chef was the oldest person present and Skinner met his gaze, but Cunningham-Blyth didn’t recognise him.
When he returned with some rum and Cokes in plastic beakers, he found Caroline sweating, her eyeliner smudging. She was distressed by the tunelessness of the band. — This doesnae seem your thing, Danny, she shouted in his ear.
— Naw, I’m just looking for my old man.
— Your dad? Where is he?
— Fuck knows. Probably up on that stage, Skinner said, and that was what Caroline thought he said, although it couldn’t have been that, she considered. Perhaps she’d misheard him over the racket and through those muffled layers of alcohol.
37
First Drink
IT WAS BACK. The disease.
It had its own stamp, a particular way of making him feel: like he was shabby and dirty inside. It also seemed to pollute the rest of the world, which became a vile place, full of the cold, callous and uncaring. Bolts of fear rose in him, battering his body in high-impact waves. But this time he decided that he couldn’t stay here in his room and lie down to it.
And so Brian Kibby pulled his lumbering, shivering bulk into the Centurion Bar in Corstorphine’s St John’s Road. On his entry he was hit by a smoky fug even more pervasive and impenetrable than the frozen fog he’d emerged from. This, and the loud, raucous banter, almost made Kibby turn on his heels, but the nervous young man stood his ground as the tired, appraising eyes of the seasoned drinkers took him in, cursorily classifying him as one of their own.
Thinking about his reduced circumstances, Kibby moved uneasily to the bar. All his young life he had work or school or college to go to; now he had nothing, just this.
It has all been taken away, even Mum and now . . . Caroline. They’re all under his spell!
On reaching the bar he hesitated for only a second or two before requesting, — A pint of lager and a double whisky please.
The barman didn’t know him, but recognised a drinker’s build and bearing, dispatching the order with economy.
Sipping the whisky, he wanted to retch as he felt its queasy, nauseating burn all the way from mouth to stomach, but he swallowed hard, washing it down with some gassy beer, which was scarcely more palatable to him. But the second whisky was much better and the third was like nectar, and then Brian Kibby was flying. His head buzzed and his hand tightened around the glass, the knuckles g
rowing white. The pains were still there, he could feel them, but they didn’t hurt him, their sting cushioned by the alcohol. Almost to his shock, he found himself in the grip of a vicious anger. In the past this even-tempered young man had occasionally felt these uglier emotions teasing at him, but he had never allowed himself to succumb to them. But now, in his warped spite, Kibby felt a delicious liberation.
Caroline. Seeing him.
His sister was seeing Skinner. This horrible picture wouldn’t shift. For so long his lonely illness had dominated his thoughts, but now they were consumed by this new terror. It made Brian Kibby reflect malignantly, yet again, on his rivalry with Danny Skinner.
Skinner. They’re under his spell. His curse . . .
And by the sheer, consecrating intensity of his violent thoughts, something, some deep, bizarre truth seemed to settle into the core of his psyche.
Skinner’s done it!
He’s done this to me!
It was irrational, but strangely all the more powerful, profound and important for that. Yes, he eagerly ratified to his own hungry consciousness, it was Skinner.
SKINNER . . .
And perhaps, at some level, Brian Kibby had always believed this. In some unspecific way, purely on an emotional, intuitive level, he had always suspected that Danny Skinner had something to do with his terrible penance. He’d seen Skinner looking at him, studying him in that disconcerting way with his smug face appearing like it understood everything. At one stage he believed that Skinner might be poisoning him. There was a time when he would eat or drink nothing that Skinner could have been around or might have tampered with. But it had proven impossible: this hadn’t stopped his decline. Yet, somehow, part of him had remained convinced that Skinner was responsible.
It was Skinner!
And now Caroline’s going out with him, and my mother is so pleased. She’s so delighted that she can’t stop talking about it, like a silly wee lassie! Now Skinner’s coming for a meal at my house next Wednesday! He’s taking over, trying to become part of the family!