White Goods (31 page)

I was still nervous of a
reprisal, despite the fact Adrian Tankard appeared to have sorted
Roy and his cronies out.

‘What did he
do?’
I’d asked Ian several times, but a
real answer hadn’t been forthcoming.

‘Had a word
with them,’
was the best I ever got, but
you could imagine that would be enough. This was big, scary, hairy
Adrian Tankard after all.

Once we got home, it was
clear Ian wasn’t staying there with me.

‘Where you off to?’ I
asked him, as he checked himself for his house key and
wallet.

‘Out,’ he’d replied, not
looking at me, his mind distracted.

‘Can I come
with you?’ I requested, wondering just how safe I’d be in the
house, by myself. See, as well as not venturing outside on my own,
I hadn’t been
in
on my own, either. Not since.

‘No, you
can’t.’

There was something in his
voice, in the look he finally gave me, too; an instant shot of
impatience and fear that quickly dissipated.

‘
Just going
out on my own. You’re to stay here, okay? You’ll be fine. You will
be. Okay? Okay?’

The repetition made me
realise he was waiting for an answer. Waiting for
reassurance.

Yes,
I nodded.

‘
Good. You
just stay here. Safe. No following me, yeah?’

The last
sentence was an unnecessary addition; it also confirmed something I
was already certain of - Ian was definitely
up-to-something.

You-kids-up-to-something?
A
favourite accusation of Mum’s; one that left my face guilty-pink,
even when completely innocent. Ian wasn’t innocent, though; I’d
overheard proof of his guilt just the night before.

Ian and Dad were in the
front room, checking through the last of the Basils, counting the
remainders, stacking them up ready for Beery-Dave to
collect.

‘
Put the ones
you damaged at the bottom,’ Dad instructed Ian. ‘Dave’ll only check
the top few before he loads them into his van.’

I was passing the door, on
my way up to bed. The door was ajar about a thumb’s thickness: I
could see in, but I doubt they could see me.

‘
I’ve seen
her,’ Ian said, changing the direction of their conversation from
business to personal. ‘At the hospital, Dad. Shirley.’

‘
Shirley?’ It
stopped Dad in his tracks; was enough to take his mind from Dontask
and put home first.
Oh, you do remember
you have a wife and kids, Anthony Buckley?
Mum. ‘Shirley White?’

‘
Yes.’

Moving several white boxes
onto the stack they had created, Dad cleared a space on the
bottle-green velvet sofa and sat down.

‘
What
does
she
want?’
It was a rhetorical question, I realised, afterwards. He was
thinking aloud. But Ian answered him.

‘
I don’t know.
I haven’t asked her yet.’

Dad’s response was abrupt;
a sudden fist that immediately bruised their easy way with each
other.

‘
And you’re
not going to, either! Jesus, Ian!’ Dad instantly rose to his feet,
an instinctive, defensive reaction that added to the drama. ‘You
understand me? You are to stay away from her! You are not to go
near her, you understand, boy?’

‘
Yes,’ Ian had
replied, a conceding mumble, as if he only half meant
it.

If Dad wasn’t convinced of
Ian’s compliance, he didn’t let it show, and they spent the rest of
their time together in awkward silence, sorting through the last of
the returns for Beery-Dave.

But the
following day, putting the previous night’s conversation and Ian’s
insistence I stay at home together –
No
following me, yeah?
– I was convinced of
his defiance. He was going out to see Shirley; I was certain of
this. It was one of the few things I
was
certain of regarding the whole
Shirley White mystery. I didn’t really know who she was, or why she
was connected to us. I definitely didn’t understand the fear that
surrounded her: the look that shadowed Ian’s face when he’d seen
her; Dad’s aggressive response. But there was definitely a link
with Ian – there was no doubting that – and the road to the truth
lay with him.

So, when he left on his
secret, solo trip out, I had to follow. In defiance of his
insistence that I stay behind, and in spite of my own fear of
venturing out alone.

I gave him a small head
start: long enough that he could look back a few times to check I
wasn’t tailing. Short enough that I could keep him in sight; short
enough that I could still cry out and get his attention if I
attracted unwanted attention.

Of course, no
one will notice you in
that
great disguise, will they?
Della: absented through love, but still talking opposite mode
in my head. She would have been right; the roomy navy parka wasn’t
great for incognito missions, but venturing out without its
protection was unthinkable to me.

‘
I’ll be as
safe as houses,’ I told myself, zipping it up, although that phrase
always made me think: it depended on the circumstances, didn’t it?
What if you were only as-safe-as-houses in an earthquake? That
wouldn’t be very safe at all. Or safe-as-houses in World War II,
during the Blitz.

Putting the thought from
my head, reminding myself that Adrian had sorted out my foes and
that Ian would be within shouting distance, I went through the
front room, out into the porch, then out into the street. Ian was
by then an exclamation mark at the top of our road, but I knew it
was him.

He did exactly as I
suspected: broke his word to Dad and went to see Shirley White. He
made his way to where she lived with such confidence that it
suggested he already knew the route. He’d been there
before.

He took the route we had
taken the time we had followed Della: left at the top of St James
Road, down the alleyway just before Beverley Courts, across a main
road, through another alley and then into the centre of the
Sheffield Road Estate. I followed Ian along alleyways and round
corners, until he stepped into Hay Road. Then I stopped. Hay Road
was a big square road, with a huge green right in the middle and
there was a great risk my clandestine operation would be exposed.
If Ian decided it was time to check over his shoulder or scan his
surroundings, that would be it. Apart from crouching behind cars
and vans, I had nowhere to hide. I simply had to follow him in the
open.

I had been to
Hay Road before. I didn’t have any friends who lived there, but I’d
been there with Dad before: sat in the car, whilst he went into
someone’s house
to-do-business.
I’d watched a group of boys playing football.
They’d noticed and eventually stopped kicking about and watched me
instead. One of the boys had begun to stride towards the car, his
lips moving at the same time:
what you
staring at?
That’s what he had said, but
then he’d turned around and he and his mates had scarpered off. Dad
had returned: I guess they’d seen him approach the car.

On the
morning I followed Ian, there were kids out playing, but none
particularly bothered me. Someone shouted
aren’t-you-hot-in-that-coat
, but I
just ignored them and kept going. I couldn’t afford to stop and I
was too frightened, in any case. For all I knew, this was Fallick
territory.

Ian was ahead enough not
to hear the jibes and too focussed on his end goal to look back.
Had he checked his tail, he’d have seen me for sure. Having
completed two sides of the Hay Road playing green, he turned off
into an alleyway, taking me back into the safer territory of small
roads and alleyways, where hiding was an altogether easier task.
Five minutes later, I had followed Ian across a key border in the
Sheffield Road Estate geography: from the old houses to the new
builds.

The new houses were a
recent extension to the Sheffield Road Estate. Between the original
estate and the crematorium grounds, there had been a wide stretch
of grassland, with just a road running through it. That was until
about three years back when a new development went up on part of
it. You could tell the new houses from the old: the old were made
from red bricks and had decent sized gardens; the new were made of
beige stone, and were smaller and squashed together, with small
square yards at their rear.

To get to the new
buildings, we had to go right through the middle of the estate,
past the line of shops that Russell and his mum lived above, past
the roughest area that was at the core of the estate – Pound Farm
Road, Charles Avenue, Davis Court – past a post-office and
newsagent and then through an adventure playground, which was
littered with empty cans and takeaway papers. The latter served as
a link between the old and new parts of the estate.

Ian’s
destination turned out to be
Chelsea
Gardens,
a block of flats in the new part
of the estate. By the time Ian reached it, I’d been following him
for over half an hour.

Opposite the
main entrance
was a bus stop. I waited
there, obscured by a glass-fronted shelter that had been sprayed
with graffiti, and watched Ian going inside, working out which flat
he entered. They were stacked in three storeys, and the building
had six windows on each floor, three either side of the entrance.
From my view, I could see a staircase climbing up through the
middle. Ian didn’t appear on the stairs, suggesting he had picked
one of the ground floor apartments.

Cautiously, I ventured
across the road, wondering if I could see anything from the rear.
With Ian out of sight, I was finally on my own, with only my navy
nylon shield and the omnipresent terror of Adrian Tankard to
protect me.

At the back of the flats,
there was a fenced-off communal garden. There was a gate to one
side. I pushed this gently and it gave instantly; the latch was
missing or broken. The garden area was just patchy grass, no
plants, with a rotary washing line as its central and only feature.
There a was door leading into the building, a bright blue
skateboard with red wheels and an empty plant pot at its step.
Either side of the door was a large window affording a clear view
inside both ground-floor flats.

Even as I
stood in the frame of the gateway, I could see Ian in the flat to
the right. He was sitting in an armchair, at an angle, with his
back to me. I inched in a little nearer, wanting a close-up glimpse
of what he had come for. As I slowly zoomed in, I saw a friendly
tableau. A young man, Ian, seated in the armchair by the window;
mug of coffee in his hand, nodding his head occasionally in
recognition of something, someone. A woman, Shirley White, was
perched on the edge of a low couch, chatting away, nervously
ringing her hands, her face serious, a little worried-looking. Then
there was the child: a boy, approximately four years old. He was on
the floor, playing with an array of toys. As I watched, he came to
his feet and wandered over to Ian, handed him something: a small
red toy car. Ian took it and I could see the corner of his mouth
curl with pleasure. My brain took in the scene again - a man, a
woman and a boy – and it reassessed what I was looking at. I was
looking at a small family, it told me.
You
are to stay away from her,
Dad had angrily
instructed. Was this why? Before I could consider their connections
further, the boy’s mouth moved and he pointed, and Ian’s head
turned round to see what he was pointing at: me.

‘What the fuck do you
think you’re playing at?’ Ian spat at me, catching up with me at
the front of the flats.

My instinct had been to
run, but coming back out onto the road, the speed and veracity of
my brother’s anger stopped me. He grabbed my right arm and, even
through the nylon padding, I could feel the squeeze of his wrath
leave its mark.

‘I told you to stay at
home, so why the hell did you follow me? Can’t you do what you’re
told for once? Can’t you stay out of other people’s business?
Eh?’

His glare was feral with
rage, his mouth foaming with spit and fury, and I felt sick with
fear. Something tightened around my neck. If Ian sensed this, he
ignored it, intent on punishing me.

‘No wonder you’re always
getting into trouble! Just can’t keep your nose out!’

As Ian
dragged me home, questions whirled inside my worried head. Who was
this Shirley White? Why did I remember her? I knew her name from
the back of an old photograph, torn in two, and I recalled her that
day at Jubilee Park, sitting next to Mum on the bench. But none of
that made her important, significant to us. But Ian’s visit, his
reaction,
Dad’s
reaction, that made her a little more important. And the boy;
the boy felt like he made a difference. He felt
significant.

As we turned into the
Victoria Avenue, just minutes from our front door, I finally found
my voice and the courage to put a question to Ian.

‘Who was that boy?’ I
asked and his instantaneous, blazing reaction was confirmation in
itself: the boy was important to us, to Ian.