White Goods (16 page)

‘Oi, don’t ignore us!’
Roy shouted, getting closer. ‘What you got in that bag? Oi! What’s
in the bag, wanker!?’

The bag he was
referring to was a big
Army and
Navy
carrier bag I had with me and I
didn’t want them getting their hands on what was inside. So I
walked faster and faster. Without realising it, I was almost
running when I got to the zebra crossing. But I made the mistake of
looking back. That’s when they started running; just Roy and the
older boy, Clint. Justin kept back.

‘
Gonna get you
Buckley!’ Roy cried out, laughing, catching up on me. When he did,
I was just outside Beverly Courts. ‘Fucking little shit!’ he
uttered and I felt something hit me hard across my back. Not his
fists this time; he’d used the branch he’d been carrying. As well
as cracking against my spine, its knobbly bark scraped my
skin.

‘You
bastard!’ I cried and he went to hit me again, but the caretaker
came out of the front entrance of the sheltered flats, waving at
Roy and Clint to
bugger off!

They hung
around laughing at first, taking the mickey as Geoff Warren – the
caretaker and my only salvation at that moment in time – hobbled
towards them, his right fist his weapon, his somewhat gammy left
leg his hindrance. When he got closer to them, they finally
scarpered; maybe it was his guts scaring them, as they didn’t have
any themselves and didn’t know what power guts might have given the
55 year-old war veteran. It didn’t stop them calling him
cripple
and
spazzer
as they sped
off, leaving their branch behind. Justin seemed to follow on, still
at a distance. I tried not to think about him.

I knew all
about Geoff – not just his age, but his wife, kids and grandkids,
his part in the Second World War, what he did on his days off
(fishing if the weather was right,
getting-under-her-feet
when it
wasn’t), how often his injury played him up. Some of it I knew
through him, as he was chatty whenever you came to Beverly Courts;
some of it through Nan, because he was her
knight-in-shining-armour.

That man’s a
saint.

He’d do
anything you ask him.

No job’s a
bother.

He’d give you
the shirt off his back.

I turned my nose up at the
latter; I’d seen his shirts and they were a bit grubby and holey.
Red Nanny said it was just a work shirt, giving me a puzzled look
as she said it, and you couldn’t expect Sunday best when he was
doing handyman jobs.

‘You alright there?’
Geoff said to me that Sunday, as I straightened my back. I winced.
‘You visiting today?’ he added, hobbling along beside me, opening
the front door for me and walking me right up to her door and even
waiting until she answered her door, like I was one of his old
people.

Nan Buckley always took
about half an hour to answer the door.

We had lots of theories
about that.

Takes her a
while to get out of her coffin –
Ian.

She has to put
in her teeth and pull on her wig –
Della.

She has to
get Geoff out of her bed and out the window –
Ian and Della.

Take her that
long to shave off her beard –
me, only Dad
overheard that time and threatened that I wouldn’t sit down for a
week if he
heard-the-like-again.

When she eventually
answered the door, her face dropped a bit – it’s just one of you,
her face said, and it was definitely not Ian. Ian was her
favourite, after Geoff the caretaker, of course. Ian could do no
wrong and Ian’s favourite biscuits were always in the tin at Red
Nanny’s.

‘Hello
There,’ she said, forgetting my name again. I’d been
There
since as long as I
could remember. Her face lit up a bit, as she saw the war hero
hovering over my shoulder. ‘Hello Geoff,’ she flirted, waving a
hand at him, her perfectly painted red nails flickering.

And then I was
in.

‘Scot,’ she announced
abruptly, smiling. She’d remembered. ‘Kettle,’ she added and then
scuttled off to her little kitchen, which was really just a big
cupboard in the corner of her room.

Old. She was
suddenly old. The shuffle in her slippers and the single word
sentences. She did this sometimes. One minute she’d be the chatty,
snobby Nan Buckley we’d all come to – my mind pauses, thinking
–
appreciate
.
Next thing she’d be a bit lost, looking for things in her mind she
couldn’t find. And what she eventually found was just little bits,
single words. It was as if she was a completely different person,
but I liked this version.

Whilst she was making a
pot of tea, I sat in her little flat and looked about,
waiting.

Nan Buckley’s
flat was
a glorified bed-sit,
according to Mum, but only when Dad was out of
earshot, because you always had to
watch-what-you-said-about-her-Majesty.
I wasn’t sure what a
normal
bed-sit was like, so I had no comparison - or
what it had to do with speaking in front of the Queen - but Nan
Buckley’s flat wasn’t very big. It was mainly one room, where she
had a couple of armchairs, a TV and her old record player that
played 78’s. Her bed was tucked away in one corner. She also had a
foldaway table for playing cards on. She had to eat her
meals-on-wheels from a tray, which she’d tell you with a twitch in
her nose, as if this wasn’t quite good enough. She had a bathroom
as well, with funny toilet paper that was like tracing paper and
not very good for wiping your bum at all. She had the
cupboard-sized kitchen too, with just a small hob, fridge, sink,
toaster, kettle and a couple of cupboards on the wall for her food
and plates.

‘It’s just a
stop gap, whilst I sort myself,’ is what she told people if they
asked how she was getting on
in
that place.
But Nan
Buckley had lived at Beverley Courts for as long as I could
remember.

On top of her TV I
noticed something different: the gilded, ornate picture frame that
sat on top of it didn’t have a photograph in it anymore. It was
empty. It used to house Mum and Dad on their wedding day. Dad had
big sideburns, a moustache the size of a sausage under his nose and
wore a blue pinstriped suit. Mum was dressed in a beige skirt-suit,
something else that Red Nanny turned her nose up at, even though
she had had it on display as long as I had been visiting
her.

‘I do wish
you’d worn white, Theresa,’
she’d said to
Mum once.

‘Oh, Doris,
you said people like me weren’t supposed to,’
Mum had replied and Nan had done her
tight-lipped-look-to-her-lap thing.

We had all
been squashed in there on that occasion, apart from Dad who
was
seeing-a-man-about-a-dog
-
again.

But now it was just
me.

‘I’ve brought you a
present,’ I told her.

‘Have you?’ Nan Buckley
was suddenly asking, back in the room, bringing in a small blue
plate with four biscuits on it. (Ian was allowed to choose from the
whole tin.) ‘Pop back in the kitchen, will you, and bring those
teas in.’

When I came
back from her cupboard-kitchen with two teas in proper cups and
with saucers, she had a
waiting
look on her face.

‘What is it?’ she
repeated.

The last time I had come
to see her, Red Nanny had mentioned the empty photo
frame.

‘I need a new picture for
that frame,’ she’d instructed me from her chair, red blanket over
her knees, nails and lips to match as usual, in multi-word sentence
mode. ‘Something nice and pretty to distract me when the Nine
O’clock News gets a bit depressing.’ (Nan Buckley only watched the
BBC and only specific programmes.) ‘I don’t like those sad
stories,’ she’d added, picking up a biscuit and making a small
squeal of delight, like she’d discovered something. ‘Look Sean,
your favourites.’ Then she’d seen the look on my face and then my
face in general, realising her mistake. ‘Scot,’ she’d said and we
were back to One-Word-Nanny again.

The present
I’d referred to was a little something for her empty frame. I found
it in a drawer in the cupboard-under-the-stairs in our back room.
We had lots of photographs in there: some in books, small ones in
tins without lids and some loose. The one I chose was a big black
and white one of Mum when she was eighteen. It was just her face
and her hair, which was really large;
backcombed and lacquered,
was how
Mum described it. Her eyes were really on you, though, watching,
reading inside your head, I reckoned.

‘Oh,’ One-Word-Nanny said
when I pulled it from the bag, a little bit of alarm in her
features, as if it wasn’t quite what she was expecting.

I guessed the eyes were
reading her instantly, knowing all the things she had thought about
Mum over the years. Knowing her secrets, too, maybe.

‘Shall I put it in the
frame?’

Red Nanny paused, still
looking doubtful.

‘Who is this again?’ she
asked and I reluctantly explained. ‘Oh, yes,’ she continued,
regressing to a two-syllable sentence.

I took the gold-coloured
frame from the top of the TV and carefully took the back off,
making sure I didn’t touch the glass, and slid the monochrome
photograph of Mum in place. When I put it back, we both stared at
it, sipping our tea, held captive by the ghostly gaze of my absent
but very much present mother. Eventually, I spoke.

‘Auntie Stella’s got
engaged,’ I said and Nan Buckley came back to life again – back to
Red Nanny this time.

‘Oh, did she?’ she
uttered, voice a little haughty. ‘How many times is that
now?’

I couldn’t help it – I
had to smile. And Nan Buckley gave me a wink. There was a real
naughty twinkle in that eye.

‘So, tell me all about
it.’

The engagement party had
been just the week before.

It turned out
that
Uncle
Gary
wasn’t asking Auntie Stella to marry him after all – just to move
in. But, she’d jumped in too soon. When he finally got round to
explaining this to her, they had a huge row. Worse, she threatened
to leave him and move back in with her family
where-she-was-loved-and-wanted
. She
did for a bit: moved back for a whole hour-and-a-half, and sat in
the front room we never used,
with-her-bags-and-her-pride
(Della)
waiting for
him
to do something
.
Him
being
Uncle
Gary. And he did – turned up
after 90 minutes and got down on one knee, saying it had just never
occurred to him, but now it had, it was all he wanted, couldn’t
imagine life without her. (‘Grovelling,’ Della called it.) Then we
had the squealing and the shrieking all over again and Dad
reluctantly opened another bottle of Asti.

Their party
was at
Uncle
Gary’s place on the estate.
Juniper
Court
was his address, number 12. I was
almost expecting it to be like Red Nanny’s place, with a name like
that. But it wasn’t; it wasn’t what we expected at all.

Neither was
the estate. For all Mum’s comments about it –
council
(spoken with a shudder as if
she’d just licked a dog shit),
rough,
dangerous
– I was expecting it to be a bit
run-down, full of houses like the derelict one me and Justin
secretly hung out in at the dump. Druggies on the corner. Smashed
up telephone boxes smelling of wee. Crisp, fag and chip wrappers
everywhere, mixed up with white dog turds. Fridges and mattresses
dumped in the street.

‘That’s at
the other end,’
Uncle
Gary explained, when I mentioned it to him.

The end of
the estate where he lived was
privately
owned
, which sounded even posher than
our
privately rented
property. The streets were clean. The houses and flats new,
in beige bricks, with driveways, garages and tidy little front
lawns.

Gary’s home
was a flat.
First floor flat,
he explained, somehow elevating it in status. You
had to climb a staircase to get to his door, but it was all his; it
wasn’t
a shared entrance.
Inside, we met the unexpected again.

I knew it would be clean
– his car was always immaculate – but he always had a few tacky
things in it. Furry dice dangling from the rear-view mirror;
traffic-light air freshener; small fluffy cushions on the back
seat. The flat was different; the flat was...

‘Modern,’ Dad
said, undecided on whether he liked it. I realised instantly that
Dad hadn’t been inside before either. ‘And pricey,’ he added, and
you could tell he was wondering how
Uncle
Gary could afford it all,
working like he did with him and Adrian.