THE DOMINO BOYS (a psychological thriller) (2 page)

‘I always do, Mrs Sugden. I treat him like a brother.’

‘I mean after I’m dead. Look after him.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Sure, Mrs Sugden. Don’t worry, I’ll look after him.’

‘You’re a good man, Alfie,’ she said, walking to the house.

*  *  *  *

He stared her straight in the face, and she stared straight on back. For a minute it seemed no one was going to budge. But Barry Stocker had no choice. They paid him his money, and had him by the short-and-curlies.

‘There ain’t any jobs to apply for,’ he said. ‘There’s a bastard recession going on.’

‘Please don’t use that language in here, Mr Stocker.’ Her voice was flat and lifeless, like she’d heard too much of it to have any real effect and she was going through the motions of reprimanding him. ‘So I take it you’re telling me you haven’t applied for any jobs recently.’

‘I didn’t say that. I’ve applied for jobs when something comes up. But nothing much comes up, and when it does there’re hundreds of people applying for the same one. What chance do I have?’

‘Everyone has a chance, Mr Stocker.’

She was pretty, he thought. Young enough to be his daughter. Young enough to treat him like an old codger who wasn’t relevant anymore. It was all about being young these days.

‘I’m fifty-five, I’ve been out of work a year now; nobody is interested in you when you get over a certain age.’

‘Six jobs. You’ve applied for six jobs in a month.’ She looked up from the official looking sheet of paper on her desk.

‘So?’

‘So there are more than six jobs on the boards right now, Mr Stocker.’

‘Some of those are out of town. Most of them don’t pay enough to live on, you know that.’

‘Other people get by on the Minimum Wage, Mr Stocker. You’re nothing special.’ Her eyes were emotionless, unblinking. Looking through him to somewhere better.

Nothing special. That really got him all heated up. It was like a body of steam was building up deep inside him and he had great difficulty putting a lid on it.

‘I need transport to get to get there, because they’re far away in the middle of nowhere – you can’t get to them on public transport and I don’t have a car, can’t afford to run a car on what you lot pay me – have you tried living off dole money? And if I landed one of those jobs they don’t pay enough to buy a car either. Makes no difference what they tell you in the papers or on telly, lady, dole is peanuts, just enough to scrape by on. Do I look like I live the life of bloody Riley? You try telling the wife there’s bread and jam for tea again. Christ, it’s like living in the 1930s! I don’t smoke, a beer’s a luxury. I ain’t a scrounger! All I can say is let those higher-than-thou busybodies who’ve never had to take a step into a stinking Job Centre like this try it for a week or two. You think I like begging for the government’s money? I’ve still got pride, you know. And you know what? I paid National Insurance all my life; so what the hell is it for if when you need it you get the  government coming over all tight-fisted over giving you what’s rightfully yours, branding you a scrounger in the process? That’s what National Insurance is for, ain’t it? For when you need it?’

He exhaled noisily, looked away from her, his hands clasped tight on his lap. How the hell did he end up here, he thought? Being lectured by a young snip of a thing fresh from school; she hadn’t the faintest idea what it was like in the world yet. What had he done so wrong?

‘There are a number of jobs on the board. Plenty more on the computer,’ she said evenly.

‘Yeah,’ he said, his breathing starting to come under control.

‘We have to have proof you’re actively seeking a job to enable you to continue your entitlement to unemployment benefit.’

‘I applied for what I could!’ he pleaded. ‘I showed you the rejection letters, those that bothered to reply.’

She cocked her head, looked at the papers again. ‘I think you could try harder,’ she said.

‘You do, huh?’ he said, desperately trying to hold himself in check. ‘You ever been out of work, lady? Ever been out of work in a recession, made redundant? In my time I’ve seen three recessions and been made redundant twice, and I can tell you it ain’t a barrel of laughs. That’s what successive governments have done to the North. They’ve taken the heart and soul out of it till there’s nothing left.’

‘You need to try harder.’

He sighed in resignation. Nodded meekly. It killed him to do so. Another bit chewed out of him. Soon, like the North there’d be nothing left of him if his luck didn’t change. ‘Sure,’ he said.

‘We’ll review your case in another month, and I hope by then you’ll have something more to show me.’

He fixed her in a steely gaze. ‘Sure,’ he said.

‘I’m not a bad man,’ he said.

The doctor didn’t say a thing, just looked intently at him. His consulting room was small, the tiniest of windows looking out onto a thick evergreen bush. Even his computer looked small. He turned to the screen, tapped on the keyboard. ‘Let’s see,’ he said. He rolled his tongue around the inside of his mouth in thought. ‘The medication isn’t helping?’

‘I dunno, maybe. I dunno. I still feel so damn down all the time. I’m not a bad man,’ he added.

‘No one is calling you a bad man, Mr Stocker. That’s just the way you’re perceiving things at the moment. And given your current circumstances it’s perfectly natural to feel depressed. Shall we up your medication? You’re on 20mg; I think we should increase it to 40mg. When it starts to take effect you’ll begin to feel a whole lot better about things.’

‘I didn’t ask to be made redundant,’ said Barry Stocker. ‘It just happens.’

The doctor tapped away at the keyboard. He produced a prescription and handed it over. ‘Try this new dose, see how you get on.’

‘I’m used to working hard for a living. I was a miner. That’s hard graft. Worked hard all my life, and then I end up like this.’

‘Have you given any more thought to seeing a counsellor?’

Barry shook his head vigorously. ‘I ain’t a nutcase.’

‘No one is saying you are, Mr Stocker, but it can often help, along with the medication, to overcome depression.’

‘I ain’t a nutcase,’ he reiterated. ‘They go for that over in America; I’ve seen it on telly enough, but over here…’

‘It’s a perfectly acceptable practice.’

‘Yeah, maybe for some people, but for me it ain’t. All that psycho-stuff, it freaks me out.’

The doctor smiled. ‘Not psycho, Mr Stocker; that has other connotations. Anyhow, give it some thought and maybe we can discuss it again in a month’s time. I can put a referral through to Mental Health whenever you feel it’s appropriate for you.’

‘There you go, Mental Health – what does that say about you if you go down that route?’ He rose to his feet, clutching the prescription. ‘I’ll try this, thanks. I’ll let you know about the mental stuff.’

He hated collecting his prescription at the chemist. Hated the fact they knew he was on tablets for depression. That was something he wanted to keep secret, not the sort of thing he wanted broadcasting. Every visit, without fail, he searched the woman’s face as she handed him his small white paper bag containing his box of tablets, trying to read what she was thinking about him.

‘Do you pay for your prescription?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said. And that pained him, too, because he was receiving benefits and qualified for free prescriptions, and she knew this also. It cut him up more than anyone knew, visiting the chemist.

He called at the newsagents to pick up the cheap local rag. Went and sat on a bench in the town’s small park, still hanging on despite the council’s budget cuts; they had to pare down some services and reckoned they couldn’t afford the upkeep of the park, so wanted to sell the land off. The locals rose up and prevented it, for now. He was glad. It always gave Barry Stocker a buzz to see the rose leaves bursting from their buds. Like they promised something special. Summer, hot weather, shorts, beers on the grass, barbeques, driving somewhere on holiday. Most of the things he couldn’t afford to do these days.

He flicked idly through the pages full of small-town gossip and troubles, made his way to the back page for the racing results. He liked to bet on the nags, once upon a time, but that was another joy he had to forego. He checked out the obituaries as a matter of course. He’d become increasingly obsessed with reading about who had died. Concerned that he knew a lot of them. Time was when he was reading about their weddings, then christenings, and now the guys he worked with in the mine were dropping like flies. Gave him the jitters. But he couldn’t help but read about it. Made him wonder what they’d say about him when he kicked the bucket.

Mickey Craddick’s obituary was there. A fair-sized spread, too. That figured, he thought. Mickey never did anything that wasn’t showy, even in death. He had the money for it. Sure, he loathed the man. Hated the fact he ever had to work for him, desperation biting so deep that he had to sink to Mickey Craddick’s level to get a bit of ready cash. The bastard loved that. He liked to think he could buy anybody.

Truth was, he could, and did.

Made him think, though, what justice there was in the world when a man like Mickey Craddick could afford that big Victorian house on the edge of town, God knows how many fancy cars, jetting off to foreign countries at the drop of a hat, and manage to have all those beautiful young woman – a man who looked like an Italian, in heaven’s name! OK, so maybe he never considered himself as handsome as him, but at one time he was a better catch than ever Mickey Craddick was. And yet Craddick was the one who had all the birds with the long legs and big tits. He had everything Barry Stocker ever wanted out of life and never got.

Well, that wasn’t strictly true. During the 80s, after the miners’ strike that rocked the town to its foundations, Barry was one of those who decided to take one of the early redundancy packages they offered. Some of his pals fell out with him over that, said he was selling out, especially after the bloody hard times they’d had during the strike. But Barry Stocker saw that the writing was on the pit wall and opted to get out while he could. Got a good payout, too. Fifty-five thousand pounds. Justly so, he thought; he’d been down the mine since he left school in 1975. Later on, as they gradually closed all the mines across the country, the redundancy payouts got progressively smaller, a fraction of what he got, so he was glad he did it when he did.

The money didn’t last long. He blew most of it on all the fancy things he’d never had. A big car, holidays abroad, TVs, new kitchen, new bathroom, new everything. For a while he knew what it felt like to have the cash that Mickey Craddick had. Some guys were using their redundancy to set up small-time businesses. Carpet cleaning was all the rage back then. That’s where his mate Alfie Parker bought his equipment, from an ex-miner who didn’t know the first thing about running a business. That was sad, though, thought Barry; why the hell would you need to do that, clean someone else’s damn carpets? Having worked all his life it was time to have a bit of me-time.

Anyhow, he had this idea that he’d keep twenty thousand pounds back so he could set up in business for himself. He had his eye on a little shop on High Street. He always wanted to run a sweet shop, the old-fashioned kind where they had jars of things lining shelves, like they used to have when he was a kid. He told his wife the twenty thousand was off limits. She complained about that, but it was his money, he said, and they needed a future now the mines were going down the pan.

When he heard his friend Duncan Winslade was in trouble, needed the money desperately, he freely gave it to him on the understanding he’d get it back. Seemed OK at the time, when he still had a fair bit still in the bank; sure, no problem, he could spare the cash for a mate in trouble. That’s what mates do. But he never got it back and he never put the money down on that sweet shop.

Then the next thing he knew he had nothing left of his redundancy and he was in debt. He hadn’t even bought his council house like others had done, so he ended up owning nothing and owing others plenty. Especially Mickey Craddick. He should never have taken anything from that bastard, avoided him like the plague, but he had no choice. The bailiffs were set to come to his house and take everything he owned. He had a wife and two kids, for Christ’s sake! They needed feeding, clothing, and he discovered his wife couldn’t kick the spending habit once she’d been bitten by it. Felt it was her right, like he thought it had been his. The debts mounted like snow on a roof. It was only a matter of time before it slid off in an avalanche and came thudding down.

And what now? Here he was, made redundant from a shitty factory job that had to rationalise because of the recession, his wife and he hardly talking, his kids grown up and left home with hardly a word from them, like they were ashamed of him or something; on the dole, no money and being talked down to by a kid half his age. Is that what they’d say about him in his obituary when the time came? That he was a loser? A nobody?

But at least there was one glimmer of satisfaction. Mickey Craddick was dead, and what he’d done for him had died with the bent bastard. At least that particular issue had been resolved for him. Tonight, when he met the lads for their weekly game of dominoes, he’d celebrate.

Mickey Craddick was dead, in spite of all his money, and that was worth raising a glass to.

*  *  *  *