White Goods (32 page)

‘You mention none of this
when we get home, okay? You don’t mention a word of it to Dad,
okay?’ He had me by both arms, gripping tight, his hold like
wound-round elastic bands, restricting my circulation. ‘You
understand me? Not one fucking mention, Scot, or I’ll-.’

He stopped
himself at the last minute, but his intention wasn’t lost on
me.
Not one fucking mention or
I’ll-.
Or you’ll what, I wanted to ask.
Hit me? Teach me a lesson I’ll never forget?
Can’t promise we won’t hurt you, little boy.
It remained there – his unfinished threat – just
in the air. It was enough to calm Ian, though, and he released my
arms from his harsh grasp.

‘Let’s get back,’ he said
simply, giving me no further instructions.

Why are you
so angry?
I wanted to ask, to understand.
It wasn’t just that day, either. It wasn’t just me he seemed to be
angry with. Della and Russell - they were also in receipt of his
ire. But I was too shocked and frightened to ask any further
questions.

Instead, we walked the
last few yards home in prickly silence.

The rest of
the day was uneventful. Ian went out with Dad in the afternoon and
I spent a bit of time on my own. I kept wishing that Justin would
call by, that everything could go back to how it was before the
incident at the Jubilee Park toilets. But he never did; inside, I
was certain that our friendship had ended for good. There was a
knock at our door around 4pm, and from the blurred wiry outline
through the glass, I could see it was only
Uncle
Gary. He had a delivery for
Dontask, which he stacked next to the goods Beery-Dave would be
collecting later. As he kept bringing the boxes in, I wondered if
he’d take the opportunity to ask me about the letter I’d stolen
from him, seeing as I was on my own. But in the end he didn’t get
the chance: Della’s arrival – accompanied by Russell – was hot on
the heels of his.

‘Alright
Scot?’ Russell asked, cheerily, as
Uncle
Gary skulked away.

‘Yeah,’ I said,
suppressing a grin. I liked Russell; apart from Ian, everybody
liked Russell. He was solid; he had that strong, protective,
brotherly feel about him. That thought made me sad. That was Ian’s
role – that’s how he’d been at Nan Buckley’s funeral: protective,
brotherly; full of words of wisdom. Now, he’d become
secretive.

‘And angry,’
I mused, on my own again, as Della had dragged Russell up to her
room to
listen-to-some-music-on-our-own.

They stayed
up there until Dad’s white work van
brummed
out the front around
six-ish; within seconds they were back downstairs with me again,
acting as if they’d been keeping me company the whole
time.

‘You been dancing?’ I
asked, noticing a few pips of sweat on Russell’s
forehead.

He didn’t
answer.

It was much later – a
while after everyone’s bedtime – that the next instalment of Ian’s
drama played itself out.

I woke from just a few
hours’ sleep, my mind thick, filled with imaginary wool; my eyelids
heavy. I pulled the covers close to me, hoping to snuggle straight
back to sleep, but muffled voices downstairs caught my attention. I
looked over to Ian’s side of the room – even through the midnight
shadows, I could see his bed was empty. I strained to hear the
voices better; it was just two of them – Dad and Ian.

Slowly and as quietly as
possible, I turned out of bed and took tiny steps out to the
landing and down the stairs as far as I could, hoping I wouldn’t be
detected. They were in the backroom. Reaching the eighth stair, I
sat down and listened.

‘
What the hell
were you playing at?’ Dad. ‘What the hell made you go there? After
everything that happened…’

‘I wanted to see her.
Wanted to confront her.’

‘Ian, we agreed, didn’t
we? I made it clear, didn’t I?’

A pause – but I had the
sense he was shrugging. Shrugging and thinking through his
answer.

‘How come you knew where
she lived?’ Dad.

‘I’ve been
following her,’ Ian confessed. ‘Ever since Scot and me saw her at
Mum’s
place,’
–
he said that last word with slow, deliberate disgust – ‘I’ve been
following her. I wanted to know where she was staying. I went back
to see Mum a few times on my own and a couple of times she was
there too. She didn’t see me. I wasn’t sure she was gonna recognise
me. Last week, when I was leaving, she was just ahead of me. So, I
followed her back to that address.’

‘Was today the first time
you went in, Ian?’

Ian’s reply was small,
hardly audible. ‘No.’

A deep long sigh from Dad
stalled their conversation a few seconds.

‘You have to stay away,
Ian. After what happened, after what Jackie did.’ Dad stopped, his
words lost for a moment. ‘You have to put that past behind you. Now
more than ever. You understand, boy?’

There was another pause.
I guess they were looking at each other, sharing looks of
understanding and acceptance. Or maybe they had run out of words.
Eventually, Dad asked a question.

‘What did you tell
him?’

They meant me; I knew it
instinctively. They were talking about me.

‘What does Scot know?’
Dad added, restricting his question, confirming my assumption was
correct beyond doubt.

‘Nothing.’

‘Good, keep it that way,
okay? Last thing we need is him getting dragged into this.’ Another
conversation-stifling sigh ensued. ‘Anything else, Ian?’

There was a
pause: still, silent, like someone had pressed pause on the
Betamax.

‘Ian?’

Ian
eventually got the tape going again, shocking the scene back
onto
play
with a
single, forbidden utterance.

‘Jackie,’ he
said.

‘Sorry?’

‘The boy,’ Ian expanded.
‘That’s his name - Jackie.’

Another gap; its
soundtrack a deep exhalation from Dad.

‘Jackie, eh? Well I
never. Ian?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Stay away from her, ok?
No going back. Not to visit her or the boy. You
understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean it. We know she’s
bad news, and this only makes the situation worse. And not another
word to Scot, either. Not a word. He asks you about her, you don’t
know anything. Make something up, I don’t care. Anything but the
truth, okay?’

I had made my
way back to bed by the time Ian sneaked in himself. I wasn’t asleep
however. My mind was buzzing with a hive of confusion and
questions, and I was unable to relax it. I still didn’t know who
Shirley was, and now
Jackie
had turned up as a little boy, the same little
boy who had been in the family tableau I had spied earlier that
day. But whatever was going on, whatever the truth, Ian was now on
instruction to keep it all from me:
anything but the truth,
Dad had told
him. Why; why couldn’t I know the truth?

‘
What’s going
on?’ I eventually asked through the darkness.

Ian said nothing. I knew
he wasn’t asleep. He was lying on his back and I could tell his
eyes were open.

‘
Ian, please,
tell me.’

But he wasn’t answering
any of my questions and a stubborn muteness ensued.

I lay on my back, too,
eyes wide open and staring up at the ceiling, simultaneously trying
to work it all out and put it from my mind. In my chest, like a
second heart, a fist of anxiety was clenching and pulsing,
supplying my whole body with a perpetual rush of
anguish.

Who was this
Shirley White?

Who was this
woman who I seemed to know, who seemed to know me, too, but was
also a complete stranger?

Just who
exactly was she?

And why was
Dad so determined on my not finding out?

Eventually, my exhausted
brain took control, cutting my supply of angst, and I fell into a
coma of restless, broken sleep.

16.

My suspicions that there
would be a price to pay for Adrian Tankard’s help in getting Rory
and his gang off our backs weren’t entirely misplaced. A fortnight
after I followed Ian to Shirley White’s flat, a little request came
our way.

One Sunday morning,
Adrian turned up at our house to deliver some white boxes to Dad.
Once they were stacked in the front room, Dad took a few minutes to
inspect the stock, and Adrian took this opportunity to pull Ian to
one side.

‘I’ve got a job for you
lot,’ he said.

It wasn’t quite the dodgy
favour I was expecting.

‘It’s bad enough,
though,’ Ian cursed, when he shared Adrian’s request with the rest
of us. We were sitting out the front of our house, on the low wall
that separated our property from the road.

‘What’s bad
enough?’

Russell had
arrived.

‘What’s
bad
enough
?’ he repeated, his initial enquiry
ignored.

‘Adrian Tankard wants his
pound-of-flesh,’ Ian answered, indicating me, acting jokey, trying
to be the old-Ian.

If I had been
the old-me, I would’ve asked him what he meant: what did
money
and
skin
have to do with
Adrian’s request? But I wasn’t the old-me anymore. I didn’t have
time for all those word games; I’d seen exactly what happened when
you played them. They took you further and further away from the
truth, and I was far away enough as it was. So, I’d decided: Dad
and Ian could mess with the truth all they liked, play with their
words till they got lost in their own stories, but from now on, I
was playing it straight.

In the end,
it was just three of us who completed what Ian referred to as
Adrian’s
task:
me, Della and Russell. A different version of the
three-of-us.

Initially, Dad had
objected to me going.

‘
I’m not sure
it’s appropriate,’ he muttered to Ian, thinking I wasn’t
listening.

‘
He won’t be
on his own, and circumstances are different this time,’ Ian had
replied and Dad agreed.

In the end, I did go
along, but Ian didn’t, excusing himself from the whole operation by
volunteering to help Dad move boxes for the afternoon. There was an
unspoken sense of relief I shared with Della; a brief glance that
said it was best not to have him around.

So, that left the
obligation to me; Della and Russell joined me out of concern and
intrigue, respectively.

‘Not leaving you there on
your own.’ Della.

‘Seeing is believing.’
Russell. Then he added: ‘Where did this Crinky chap live
then?’

I hadn’t been back to
Crinky Crunkle’s since my first visit: dashing out of there on
Boxing Day, in my quest to get back the money Justin had stolen
from Nan Buckley’s replacement at Beverly Courts. And it was
strange going back, for several reasons.

Firstly, because Justin
was going to be there. With Chrissie, Sharon and
Stevie-the-little-shit. All of them knowing that Justin had taken
that beating on my behalf, and worse. Even though Rory and his lot
nearly had me too, that wasn’t going to make much of a difference.
I was still a coward. Worse, a coward that their husband or father
had felt worthy of saving from a noose.

‘It won’t be that bad,’
Della had said, looking at my attire, rolling her eyes, as we
headed off.

I was wearing the parka,
hood-up, fully-zipped, so my face was looking out of the fur
porthole. She hadn’t objected this time – she was trying to impress
Russell with a warm sisterliness - but her disapproval was obvious
to me all the same.

‘Anyway, they’ll have
other things on their minds.’

It would also be strange
because of what had happened to Crinky ten nights
earlier.

‘But he won’t actually be
there,’ Della reassured me, just as we turned into Crinky’s
road.

We stopped for a minute,
looked at his short, fat bungalow, with the little picket fence and
extra-wide front door.

‘Will he?’

Although I’d never
established exactly how the Tankards were connected to Crinky
Crunkle, it was clear they thought of him as family. At least, they
felt obliged to pop in on him from time to time. As long as I’d
known them, he’d always been around. Not in their house or anything
like that – he couldn’t fit through any of their doors, in any
case. But he was around; he was part of their existence.

‘Was,’ Chrissie
reflected, as we came through the front door.

As expected,
the whole Tankard clan was there, apart from Adrian - who was still
with Dad and Ian - and Tina, who was at home
holding the fort,
according to
Justin – the first words he had voluntarily spoken to me since Rory
had pissed on him in the Jubilee Park toilets. But I didn’t get the
treatment I was expecting – no one was overly friendly, but,
equally, no one was hostile either.