The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs Read Online Free PDF Page B

flight from home had warmed him, but disembarking from the bus, the morning’s damp chill began to insinuate itself. As he felt the drizzle and haar slowly saturating his clothing, he reflected that sometimes going outdoors in Scotland could be like stepping into a cold sauna. To kill some time he walked down the Royal Mile a little. In the newsagent’s he bought this month’s copy of
Game Informer
, putting it into his bag. Then he cut down a side street, excitement fluttering in his stomach as he saw one of his favourite shops, with its quaint, painted sign:
    A. T. Wilson Hobbies and Pastimes
    Brian remembered how his dad enjoyed teasing him about his frequent purchases from this particular shop. ‘Still going tae the toyshop then, son? Ye no a wee bit auld for all that?’ Keith Kibby would laugh, but there was often a mocking, derisive edge to this humour and it shamed the son, making him more covert about his purchases.
    The showpiece model railway in the Kibby attic was impressive, though as Brian had few acquaintances, not many people had enjoyed the privilege of seeing it. As a train driver, Keith Kibby originally thought that his son was sharing in his locomotive fascination, and was disappointed to learn that this passion only ran to
model
trains. But in a misplaced attempt to encourage him in the activity, his father, an enthusiastic DIY man, had floored the attic and put in the aluminium stepladder and the lighting.
    Brian Kibby had inherited his father’s woodworking skills. Keith’s joinery workshop had been on the other side of the attic until he had become too ill to manage up the ladder so frequently and had used the garden shed instead. Therefore the whole floor became devoted to Brian’s railway and town complex, apart from a few old cupboards where some childhood toys and books were stored, and a lot of shelving containing his archived games review magazines.
    It was very rare for anyone else to go up there, and the attic became Brian’s refuge, a place of retreat when he was bullied at school or when he had things, or girls, to think about. Evenings of lonely, guilty masturbation sessions rolled by as his fevered mind conjured up naked or scantily clad images of the girls in his neighbourhood or at his school whom he was almost too shy to look at, let alone talk to.
    But his overwhelming passion was his model railway. This, too, he was ashamed of; it was so out of kilter with what the other kids enjoyed, or at least professed to enjoy, the pleasure it afforded was as culpably delicious as his bouts of masturbation. As a result, he became more circumspect and withdrawnamong his peers, only really feeling free when he was in his attic, the master of the environment he was creating.
    Keith’s family jokes about being ‘pushed out’ the attic concealed much greater anxieties, and not just relating to his own declining health. He worried that he had psychologically bricked his son into the roof space; through encouraging this hobby he’d presented this shy boy with a means of entombing himself.
    When Brian got to the age when Keith considered him too old to accompany them on family holidays, the father asked the son where he was planning to go.
    — Hamburg, Brian told him eagerly.
    Keith thought with concern about the touristy sex-sleaze of the Reeperbahn, but then realised, with some relief, that it was just a rite of passage his son was long overdue, as he cast his mind back to his own teenage adventures in Amsterdam’s red-light district. Something then jarred inside him when the boy added, — They’ve got the biggest model railway in the world there!
    But Keith knew that it had been him who had initiated the obsession. He had helped his son build the big papier mâché hills, which the trains ran around and tunnelled under, and had assisted him in making the detailed constructions. Brian’s pride was the station building and hotel, modelled on St Pancras in London. It had been part of a