White Goods

White
goods

by

guy a
johnson

Ending.

On the day that I finally
understood the truth of things, I took the boy by the hand and made
him face it with me.

It’s strange the places
where you find it, the truth. People like to say that it’s staring
you in the face, or that it’s right under your nose. I’ve never
found it in either place, though. And on this day, it wasn’t
obvious – it wasn’t going to leap out at you, not unless you knew
where to look. Luckily, I had quite a good idea. I’m not sure if I
found it, or whether it found me. But we got there, the boy and
me.

All the way, he kept
asking me questions. Where were we going? What time would we be
back? Could we go back now? Wouldn’t people be worried? What was
this all about? Was this an adventure?

I liked the last question.
Made what we were doing sound fun, so I went along with
it.

‘
An adventure,
yes,’ I confirmed.

Our journey together
started at the crematorium, where we laid low for a bit. Waiting
for night to come, so we could move about undetected. All part of
this great adventure, I reassured him. Then, under the cover of a
navy summer’s night, we got on with our quest.

From the crematorium, we
crossed the road and headed towards the dump. From there, we went
past old Crinky Crunkle’s fat, short bungalow, along Church Lane,
across the green next to the Tankards’ place, past the Chequers
public house, turning right into the alleyway that led to the new
housing estate, through that and then onto my road – Victoria
Avenue – with its multi-coloured terraced rows. All the way, the
boy was at my side, keeping up with my hearty pace. He glanced back
a few times, as if looking for a way out, or keeping note of the
route we had taken, but I kept him on track with a few instructions
– ‘Keep up,’ ‘Left here,’ ‘Straight over.’ I said little else, but
it wasn’t needed. He had stopped asking questions and was just
doing as instructed.

It was only when we
finally reached my house that he stalled.

‘
We’re using
the back entrance,’ I instructed in a near-whisper, waiting for him
to move again. To get to our garden via the back, there was an
alleyway between two houses that you had to pass through. Then, you
turned right, went through our immediate neighbours’ garden, before
you reached a gate into ours. It was a weird set up and it always
felt like we were trespassing, even though we weren’t.

‘
Go on,’ I
pressed, giving his arm a gentle tug, but he was still
apprehensive. ‘Nothing to be afraid of,’ I reassured him; it made
little difference, so I changed tack. ‘After this, it’ll be over,
okay? All over.’

‘
Do you
promise?’ he asked, echoing my quiet tone.

‘
I promise,’ I
hushed.

With that, he nodded in
compliance and we finished the last steps of our excursion: through
the alleyway, across next-door’s garden and into ours. We headed
for the wooden shed at the very end; to the place where I was
certain the truth was hiding.

There was a key to the
shed I’d kept under a stone. I retrieved it, slid it into the
padlock on the door and we were in. I shut the door.

‘
In there,’ I
told him, pointing to the back. There, shrouded by a pile of old,
musty blankets was a huge, rusting chest freezer. I threw off the
blankets, opened its mighty, white mouth. The grey seal smacked
apart like a set of thick lips and released a big icy breath into
the air. I still had a hold of his hand, so I pulled him forward,
and pushed that hand into the icy well, where he felt the cold,
harsh reality that lurked inside.

‘
The truth,’ I
announced, not letting go, aware he was now trembling, the terror
eventually manifesting in a wet patch at the front of his
trousers.

I couldn’t tell you
exactly what decided my next move. I couldn’t tell you how I
managed it, either. Physically, or mentally. Hours later - once I’d
thought it through, thought about what I had done - it was too
late. It had happened.

‘
What you
doing?’ the boy managed, defenceless with shock, as I hauled his
little body up, shoving him sharp, tipping him over the edge of the
freezer.

Then the lid was down and
the lock on the handle clicked into place.

1.

There has always been a bit of dispute
over exactly who or what finished our mother off. Different
accounts and stories, with pins of doubt and ambiguity tacked on
along the way.

Ian and Della, my elder siblings, reckoned it was
inevitable. The way she had acted,
what
she did; all
that led up to what eventually happened.
Something-like-that-was-bound-to-happen-sooner-or-later,
was the gist of it.

Dad didn't say much himself, kept it
all hidden inside. Kept very silent on the matter, like it was a
secret.

Auntie Stella, Mum's sister, was more
vocal on the matter: she blamed Electrolux for the whole episode,
particularly when she'd been drinking. Mum wouldn't have liked
that; she didn't have time for drinkers.

'Nothing
worse than a bad drunk,' she used to warn us all, lighting up a
Superking and pointing the red glow of its end at Dad's silver tray
of spirit bottles on the front room sideboard, indicating him.
Which we found odd, because he was quite good at being
drunk.

Mum smoking; the smell of it filling
the lounge. That wasn’t something I thought I’d miss, but I
did.

Losing Mum changed everything. When she
left our lives, there was a gap. And gaps need filling, don’t they?
So, I started looking. Looking in between the gaps, looking for
what should have been there; and finding what was there too,
finding what was supposed to be long dead and deeply
buried.

But that was later and my story starts before then. It
starts with an ending: with
her
ending, on the
day white goods conspired to do-in our beloved mother in her own
house, with her horrified family watching. And a bit before that,
too; on our last holiday together as a family.

You see, I have two beginnings. Two
places where my story can start. And it's hard to know which one
should come first, so I'll have to tell them both at
once.

Our house was number 45, Victoria
Avenue. End of a terrace.

‘
Semi-detached,’ Mum optimistically corrected, should anyone
use that other, less well-to-do phrase.

Number 45. A small front porch led into
the hardly-ever-used front room, with an autumn-yellow carpet,
patterned with leaves. Our best three-piece-suite sat in this room:
bottle green velvet, with wooden arms – dark and glossy. A teak
sideboard squeezed into the right hand alcove. Dad’s stereo was in
here, with his speakers in each corner and his box of LPs from the
sixties. And white boxes – this was where Dad kept most of his
white boxes.

‘
They’ll be gone in a day or so,’ he’d promise Mum, whenever
she complained about them
taking-over-her-whole-house.
And, true to his word, they usually were – only to be
swiftly replaced by another shipment.

A door from
the front room led to a staircase that cut straight across the
house, with just a square of carpet separating you from the door to
the back room. We played for hours on the stairs as kids. We’d shut
the doors at the bottom and at the bedroom doors upstairs and
pretend it was a different place. We would set up a garage of cars
on the L-shaped landing and send the little vehicles flying down
the stairs. I sent my Action-Man tank down them once and it hit
Mum’s legs as she walked through.

‘
You can stop that
right
now! Little
buggers!’

The back room was the room we used the most. Originally,
this had been the kitchen space, before we had
the extension
– I’ll come to that in a bit. Later, it became our family
room: a squeezed-in place, with too much furniture and not enough
space.

‘
You wanna knock through,’
my Auntie Stella was fond of suggesting, like she knew about these
things. ‘Put a spiral staircase in the corner. Open it up. Oh, I’d
love one of them.’

But we never did. We never did anything to our house that
we didn’t really need to. It was privately rented; that was Dad’s
excuse. No point in putting in the effort when it wasn’t ours to
keep. It was a point of pride – the privately rented bit. It
wasn’t
council
was my Dad’s point. It set us apart:
we lived
privately.

In a space
ten feet square, my parents managed to cram a foldaway dining
table, a sofa, an armchair, a TV set and a grey and red leather
pouffe. There was also a door that led to the
cupboard-under-the-stairs; another favourite play-place. The
cupboard housed five foldaway orange-vinyl stools (used to
accompany our dining table), heaps of coats and usually a large
sack or two of potatoes. The floor of the back room was covered in
beige carpet tiles and these in turn had a kaleidoscopic, circular
rug over the top of it - a design of multi-coloured and
multi-patterned triangles, circumferenced in a fringe of red
tassels.

Beyond this was the
extension
– a phrase
that sat proudly alongside
privately-rented
and
semi-detached.
Here
was our kitchen: long, narrow, with limited space and unlimited
appliances. On the left, we had a tall larder, fridge, a gas
cooker, and two doors that hid the airing cupboard and emersion
heater; on the right were the washing machine, dishwasher, and the
sink, with a gas-heater above it that got you instant hot
water.

‘
You a got a dishwasher?’ said my mate Justin, amazed. I
just shrugged, playing it cool. ‘Where’d you get it?’

‘
Comes from Dontask,’ I
said. ‘Haven’t you got one too?’

I wasn’t
supposed to say where our stuff came from – that was one of Dad’s
golden rules. But it didn’t matter with Justin. Our dads worked
together, so it was likely Justin knew anyway.

‘
Where?’ he asked, as if
he’d never heard of it.

‘
You know -
Dontask
.’

Justin
had just
shrugged, like he didn’t really understand, so we changed the
subject.

At the end of the kitchen was the world’s coldest bathroom,
with another door leading off to the world’s coldest toilet. The
flooring throughout the extension was an ornate pattern of red and
black vinyl that
didn’t-show-the-dirt;
the walls differed – pale green in the kitchen, garish pink
in the bathroom, and toilet-flush-blue in the loo.

There was a lean-to just outside the back door, which led
to our garden and the big shed at the end. The lean-to – a roof of
corrugated plastic – was where Dad kept the rest of his white
boxes, the ones that wouldn’t fit in our front
room
.
White boxes full of thingy-me-bobs and
what-ya-ma-call-its. White boxes I wasn’t allowed to go poking in.
Things from Dontask.

Our house, then, where the five of us lived: Mum, Dad, Ian,
Della and me. Until
that
day. Then it was
just the four of us.

When it happened, Ian was upstairs doing
something-he-shouldn’t’ve,
according to Della. He was 16 to my
just-12, but I knew what she was talking about. I’d spied a strange
ritual occurring a few times at night, when it was lights-out
time.

We shared a room, much to his
discontent, and, through the shadows, I’d seen Ian bend his legs up
under the bedclothes, making a small tent. This was accompanied by
a low panting sound and some hand shuffling. It all started off
slow and quiet, but built up in pace and volume, eventually ending
with a sharp gasp – somewhere between joy and being winded –
followed by a slow, satisfied sigh. Then, he’d roll over and go to
sleep.

I’d witnessed this several times before asking Ian about
it. He simply went red in the face and mumbled something
about
finding-out-about-it-all-myself-one-day.
I didn’t ask him again, and the
nightly huff-puffing-shuffling seemed to stop.