White Goods (5 page)

I turned away from him and faced where Della had been
sleeping earlier, looking directly into
Uncle
Gary’s
open stare. Holding my stare, I wondered just how many secrets this
small, cramped space contained. Eventually, he closed his eyes,
giving in to the heavy pull of sleep, and I guess I did the
same.

That was the year before Mum met
misfortune in the claws of what was otherwise an everyday, domestic
setting. My other beginning; I’ll take you back to that.

Ian was
up-to-no-good
in our
bedroom, and Della and Mum were in the kitchen, discussing my
status as a weirdo and peeping-Tom, along with Ian’s suggestion
that I shared a room with Della. I was listening in the back room,
just out of sight.

‘
Stop fretting about it,’
Mum had said, getting our dishwasher going. ‘It’s not going to
happen. Young ladies your age need your privacy. Now, give me a
hand with the washing.’

When I came in, Mum was setting the dial on the washing
machine, starting up a mixed load. Della was near the back door,
with her arms folded. She gave me
that look
, the one
she’d been giving me for over a year by then.

‘
Right, nearly done. Della,
you can pop that in the tumble drier when it’s finished. Won’t harm
you to lend a hand.’

In the last
twelve months, we’d had nearly everything new in our house.
Dishwasher, tumble dryer, TV, a video player. Stereo stacked up
high in the front room, with a double tape so you could copy
cassettes onto other cassettes. The latest arrival was on Dad’s
side of the bed, on his bedside cabinet – a teasmade that was also
an alarm clock and radio.

‘
Saving you a job there,’
Dad had said to Mum, as if he’d really bought it for her. She just
did her face: the Queen Victoria, Ian called it.

All this new
stuff was from the same place as everything else – Dontask.
Justin’s mum overheard me talking about it once. She’d chuckled to
herself, and I wondered just what I wasn’t getting this
time.

I
wasn’t really supposed to go round to Justin’s house – even though
his dad worked with mine – because his mum used the f-word
like-there-was-no-tomorrow
(according to Mum) and she didn’t
like that kind of talk from another lady. I did go round, though;
just in secret.

After a while, I needed the loo, which
was at the very back of the house. I had to walk past Della and, as
I did, she pulled the face she reserved especially for me: letting
her jaw hang loose, expressionless, and opening her eyes as wide as
physically possible, she twisted her head as I went by. It was
supposed to be an impression of me: a brain dead me.

‘
Della,’ Mum scolded
lightly. ‘Leave him alone. Alright Scotty?’

‘
Yeah,’ I said and
quickened my pace towards the toilet.

Whilst I was in there, I heard Della
again, talking about me. Talking about that last caravan
trip.

It wasn’t fair. I wanted to explain,
but I couldn’t. It was a year later and if I’d had to explain the
wafting sleeping bag, I’d have had to explain the rest – what I
saw. And I still couldn’t. So, I sat there, listening to her saying
that stuff, trying to ignore it. Trying not to let it get to me.
But it was hard and, after I’d flushed and was washing my hands, I
started to feel resentful and angry. Angry with Ian for going off
in the night; for what he let happen down at the castle. Angry with
Della, too. I decided I’d start saying something about her, to get
even. Yeah, I’d discover some awful secret about her. And I’d pass
it on to everyone whilst I was at it.

I stayed in the bathroom for ages –
thinking and calming down, too. No one seemed to notice. I always
found stuff to do, even when there wasn’t really
anything.

‘
That child could entertain himself in the desert.’
Mum.

In the
bathroom, we had a cabinet on the wall with three mirrored doors
that I liked to play with. The two outer doors opened into the
middle, so you could create an inner triangle of mirrors. It looked
icy – silvery and cold; slices of glass splitting into more slices
of glass. I could just about get my head in the middle of it all
and would spend endless amounts of time looking at my
multi-reflections, all sliced and layered. If you moved the outer
doors back and forth, the reflections and perspectives changed,
moving about in shape and size. Mum caught me doing it once and
laughed warmly.

‘
Make sure you don’t pull it off the wall,’
she’d added, shaking her head as she
left, a gentle smile curving her face.

So, whilst I dithered between getting
revenge on Della and calming down, I put my head in the middle of
the three mirrored doors and got lost in my own
reflections.

‘
You still in there, Scotty?’ Mum said to me at some point,
a hint of concern in her voice: what could
possibly
be
taking me that long?

But I didn’t
reply and I could almost hear her shrug, before she carried on
about her business. If I had spoken, would it have changed
anything? Would it have broken up the chain of events? Had my
silence been the real killer?

Instead, I stayed in there, inside my
small triangle of mirrors, looking at multiple reflections of
myself and planned Della’s downfall. And that’s what I was doing
when it happened.

Music was on suddenly, very loud: Abba in Della’s room. I
recognised the song:
Hole in
Your Soul.
There’s a bit at
the end, where the blonde one kind of screams and sings at the same
time. It goes on for ages. Mum hated Abba, but she really hated
this one in particular. I assumed that their conversation must have
ended in an argument, with Della probably refusing to help with the
household chores or something similar, because Della always put
this one on when they had fallen out.

Over this din I heard Mum calling out:
‘Della, Della, turn that racket off now and come and help me like I
asked you! Della! DELLA!’

And that’s exactly the moment it
happened: the scream from Agnetha and the scream from our mother.
Abba suddenly stopped, but Mum’s scream didn’t. In slow motion
terror, we all came to the scene, getting there as fast as we
could, but it was like we were in treacle. Terror-struck and
running in treacle, that’s what it was like.

We were all caught still in horror.
Della with her hands to her face, pale, silent. Ian came right
forward, hoping to rescue Mum, doing his flies up at the same time.
Me, I just stared at her. Her legs were on the floor, a pair of wet
jeans tangled around them, a python of denim that had tripped her
up.

That wasn’t all: there was blood
everywhere. Lots of blood, like a big red leak across the kitchen
floor. Jam, ketchup, tomato juice, I tried to tell myself. Not
blood. Not blood. Her body was draped across the open door of the
dishwasher, on top of the bottom drawer that had been pulled out.
Ian tried to move her, but something was pinning her to the spot,
sticking her. We knew what it was instantly, but we never talked
about it. He let go of her and we all seemed to stand there for so
long, doing nothing. I cannot remember which one of us found their
legs, found their voice and made their way to the telephone, but
someone must have.

Because sirens filled my ears within
minutes.

2.

A fragment that will
become a story.

I can see it in my head
and what I really want to do is go back there. Take the memory and
snap it with a camera – Polaroid after Polaroid, capture it fully,
frame by frame for my memory.

The house.

I remember the house
clearly.

There was a white picket
fence and gate, like a storybook garden.

Detached. The house stood
by itself and the front door was in the middle, with a window
either side, like a child’s perfect drawing.

A purple room – I remember
a dark, purple room. And a staircase; a staircase in one corner. On
the ceiling an ugly strip light – like a light sabre against the
artex. Glaring.

And a bed. There was a
camp bed, small, made up with white bedding and a grey
blanket.

I have no Polaroids, so
the memory is vague. Or even shattered.

But I remember the
room.

The purple room, with the
ugly strip light across the ceiling.

Glaring.

3.

I woke up
early on the day Dad was calling
‘the day
we say our goodbyes.’
Like she was going
on holiday; like there was a chance she was coming back.
Bought you a stick of rock, Scotty!

It was dead quiet in our
house to start with.

Later, it
would be lively. There would be a bit of drama at the funeral –
tears, silly hats and an appearance by Tina Tankard that was funny
and embarrassing.
Disrespectful,
someone said. And boozy singing at the house that
ended suddenly when the police came knocking.

But at the start, it was
soundless, still.

Heard a cough from Dad;
the floor creaking in Della’s direction. Ian was perched on the
edge of his bed, just staring ahead. Silent and staring; not
himself at all.

I looked about, wondering,
thinking, letting anything fill my head, to take the deathly quiet
up a notch to just plain old silence.

I looked at the curtains.
We hated them. They were green in colour, patterned with big brown
circles in different shades, and polyester-thin, so they let in the
light as soon as the sun sparked up. Bright lines of the new day
streaking our grey carpet. We hated the carpet as well.

‘
It doesn’t
show the dirt,’ is what Mum says. Said. Mum. ‘And it goes nicely
with your curtains.’

‘
How come
we’ve got grey carpet in
all
the rooms, then?’ Della quipped one time. ‘My
curtains are orange.’

‘
Grey is
universal,’ Mum had answered, trying to sound intellectual, drawing
out the last word – u-ni-ver-sal. ‘Goes with anything,’ she’d
added, dumbing it down for us.

‘
Goes with
nothing,’ Ian had grumbled, a twinkle in his eye that meant he was
joking, but Mum had missed that. The back of her hand hadn’t missed
the back of his head, though.

‘
Ow!’

‘
Don’t you
cheek me, sonny!’

Lighting up a fag
after.

‘
You alright,
squirt?’

Ian’s voice had brought me
into the present. I felt tears on my lips; I licked them off,
liking the comfort of the salty taste. I pulled my brown parka
around me a bit closer, finding comfort there too. It was even
smaller by then – two inches of arm showing and spitting foam out
at the armpits - but I felt fully protected. Nothing could touch me
in it.

I nodded, yes.

A lie I had
heard from nearly everyone since
it
had happened.

Yes,
they were all saying.
Yes, we are all fine.
Like it hadn’t
happened after all.

I was waiting for someone
to say something about the coat, but they hadn’t. Not
yet.

‘
Things will
have to change now,’ Dad had said, using a new sad voice I’d never
heard before. ‘We’re all gonna have to change a bit.’

I’d wondered
if that had been a reference to my over-tight parka, but he hadn’t
tried to take it off me. Even Della and Ian had given up teasing me
about it. Now
that
was change.

‘
Your father
will have something to say about that!’

Lighting up
again.

Pursing her lips between a
pink tissue after she’d run her lipstick over them.

Popping sweeteners into
her tea from that small, blue, oblong container.

‘
Turn that
racket down!’

‘
Ian?’

Back to the present
again.

His head was in his hands;
he twisted it towards me, still resting it in his palms.

‘
Yeah?’

‘
How we gonna
live with what’s happened?’

He got up, got onto my bed
and held me close, something he’d never done before; not that I
could remember. And he cried. Hard, shaking violently as he sobbed,
never letting go of his hold on me for a second.

The day is a blur in
places, like set pieces. Whole episodes I remember, but not always
in the right order and some of it is missing.

From Ian crying and
hugging me, I suddenly found myself at breakfast.

Dad frying
eggs, which meant you got no shell (plus) but they were brown,
frazzled round the edges (minus.) Streaky bacon, too, and fried
bread. Mistakes were made at breakfast, reminding us that
she
was gone.

She
was how people started referring to Mum, like she
didn’t have a name, like we had to fade her out a bit, and they
said it in a certain way, in a whisper, or simply mouthed it
silently. Making it easier on us, seemed to be the message. Making
themselves look stupid was the reality.