White Goods (22 page)

‘
Urgh, couple
of queers in here,’ Stevie shouted, and before you knew it, whilst
Justin buckled himself back up, he’d called in other residents to
look at what he’d discovered. ‘They both had their todgers out!’ he
exaggerated to Sharon and her boyfriend Lee, who had just turned
up.

I tried to defend my own
position, but no one was listening.

‘
Fucking
poofs,’ Lee offered to my innocent yet reddened face.

‘
Did you touch
it?’ Sharon asked and, just as I wondered if I was going to survive
this nightmare, someone hollered life-changing words up the
stairs:

‘
Time to go to
Crinky Crunkle’s!’

I was saved.

The Tankard
siblings instantly headed down the stairs, Lee following Sharon.
For just a few moments, I was by myself in Justin’s room – my
window of opportunity had arrived. Without wasting a second to
think, I went to the first drawer under his bed and pulled it out.
And there it was, easy-as-that, on full display, like he’d not had
much chance to hide it properly: rolled up and placed in his
Who Shot JR
mug, the
hundred-and-fifty quid he stole from Nan Buckley’s Jubilee tea
caddy.

‘
You still up
here?’ a voice called, a voice that was coming up the stairs
towards me, so I slammed the drawer shut and got to my
feet.

It was
Chrissie Tankard. She gave me a look that said
you’re-up-to-something
, but it
remained just a look.

‘
You coming
with us to Crinky’s?’

Crinky Crunkle was the
fattest man I had ever seen. He was usually in the pub – the Barley
Mow or Checkers being his local haunts – perched on a corner seat,
taking up most of it, with a pint of ale on the table in front of
him; a table that had to be pushed far forward to make room for
Crinky’s enormous gut. He was like a human-sized Humpty-Dumpty; he
had no waist or backside – he was just round from the neck down,
with hands and feet sticking out, breaking up his planet shape. He
wore these big tracksuits and big gold chains around his thick neck
and wrists, like he was Jimmy Saville or something. And he smelt
funny too, probably on account of it being impossible for him to
have a bath. (‘He goes to the car wash once month,’ Justin
reckoned, and I believed him, too, as I’d seen him heading towards
the one on Oving Road in his custom made electric chair that he was
allowed to drive on the pavement.)

‘
Marmite,’ I’d
concluded once, telling Ian. ‘He smells of marmite.’

‘
Shush, you’ll
be heard,’ he had told me, but he had listened, because from then
on we stuck to jam on our toast.

Crinky Crunkle
was somehow attached to the Tankards. He wasn’t a direct relative
and he didn’t appear to work for Adrian Tankard or anything,
because he couldn’t work. It wasn’t even like he bought Adrian
pints or babysat for Chrissie, as he didn’t have any money and
Chrissie
couldn’t-leave-the-kids-with-him-as-they-didn’t-feel-safe,
respectively. I overheard the latter comment one
day at the pub, when both our families were there together; a rare
occasion that Mum had strongly objected to and was only
attending
under-great-sufferance.
So, I asked why – what was so dangerous about
Crinky? I got a few looks from the adults, who in turn looked at
each other, wondering how they were going to respond.

‘
Is it in case
he sits on one of them, squashes them?’ I offered as their silence
continued.

‘
Yes,’
Chrissie had confirmed, her shoulders starting to go, along with
Dad’s and Adrian’s.

Mum had her face on that
wondered what you were all laughing at.

That Boxing Day, Chrissie
was attending with her children, so I guessed it was alright –
she’d ensure no one was squashed, I was certain. Yellow Nanny came
along as well.

Crinky didn’t live far
from the Tankard house. We cut across the green to the left of
their house, past the post where Tina Tankard was hanging
out.

‘
Prozzie!’
Justin called her, as we went by, thinking he was funny.

‘
Justin!’
Chrissie scolded him, giving Tina a wink. ‘Watch your tongue, young
man.’ I could feel the hard slap as her hand smacked against his
arm. ‘And you’ll behave in company, too.’

Stevie-the-little-shit
grinned and stuck his tongue out at Justin, glad he wasn’t the
focus of Chrissie’s chiding for once.

‘
And you can
watch it too, you little sod,’ she barked, accompanying this with a
second slap that struck the back of Stevie’s head.

Once we were across the
green, it was a five-minute walk down Church Lane and then,
sandwiched between the cemetery and the local dump, was Crinky
Crunkle’s bungalow.

Rumour was that the dump
used to be a housing estate, but it had been knocked down, as the
ground was all marshy and not good for building on, but on the day
they had demolished them, Crinky hadn’t been able to get himself
out of his chair in his sitting room. So the demolition men had
simply left his place where it was. Justin told me that Crinky’s
house had something called subsidence and that eventually it would
sink below the ground, taking Crinky with it.

‘
Unless he’s
at the pub,’ I’d proposed and Justin had agreed, and then we had
debated whether the pub might sink too, given how much time
Crinky’s colossal bottom spent weighing down that corner
seat.

Standing outside Crinky’s
house, I couldn’t see any evidence of it sinking so far, but I did
wonder if it was safe, what with me and the entire Tankard clan
adding to the total pressure on the foundations.

‘
Come on
then,’ Chrissie uttered, ushering me in, giving me no choice, and
we opened the widest front door I’ve ever seen and entered Crinky
Crunkle’s house.

Inside, it seemed very
small compared to the outside, like the opposite of a Tardis. But
that could have been the amount of people inside, or maybe just
because Crinky was taking up a family’s worth of space. Or maybe it
was the clutter. There was stuff everywhere.

Crinky’s bungalow had six
rooms that came off a central hallway: a lounge that led into a
dining room on the left, a kitchen and a bathroom on the right,
with two rooms at the back, which I guessed were bedrooms. We were
led into the lounge, which had a concertina door leading to the
dining room. The door was folded right back, making more space, but
still it felt crowded.

My eyes gazed around the
room, trying to take it all in. The wallpaper in the lounge was
stripy – green and cream, with thin gold strips in between. It was
smothered in plates. Posh plates. The kind your nan might have, or
the sort that you could get for special occasions, ordered from
magazines, with foxes or the Queen on them. Looking into the dining
room, you could see that he’d had to start putting them on that
wall too, as he ran out of space. It wasn’t just the walls that
were busy – there wasn’t much space on the floor, either. There
were two sofas, one of which Crinky occupied, his feet each resting
on a footstool. There was a coffee table in the centre of the room
and two more chairs. And there were newspapers and magazines too;
stacked in piles between the furniture, or shoved underneath. In
one corner there was a book cabinet, with glass doors, but instead
of books Crinky had shoved more newspapers in there.

Justin read my
stare.

‘
Don’t throw
nothing out,’ he said to me. ‘You should see the bedrooms and the
garden. Full of stuff.’

‘
Come on, move
on in,’ Chrissie Tankard was telling me before I could reply to her
son, pushing me a little further into the room and somehow we all
fitted in: the Tankards, Yellow Nanny, Lee-the-boyfriend and me.
And Crinky Crunkle. And all I wanted to do was sneak out, sneak
back to the Tankards’ house, which I knew had a dodgy backdoor, and
get Nan Buckley’s money back for her. But I was crammed in on all
sides by sofas, newspapers and Tankards, with no escape
route.

‘
You alright,
Scotty?’

It was Crinky
Crunkle himself, addressing me, and I noticed the whiff of Marmite
coming off him. He was gazing at me in a strange way; giving me a
long, almost creepy look that made me feel uncomfortable.
Couldn’t-leave-the-kids-with-him-as-they-didn’t-feel-safe
flashed in my head.

‘
Yes, I’m
fine.’

‘
Of course, of
course,’ he said, an air of sympathy in his tone, still staring.
‘And have you visited your mother this Christmas?’

I sensed that everyone had
stopped breathing.

‘
I’m going
later,’ I told him, thinking that I really should. But after I’d
got the money back.

‘
Well, you say
hello from old Crinky,’ he said and Chrissie looked at him like
he’s mad. But I got it and I couldn’t help but smile.

‘
I will. I’ll
tell her you said hi.’

And finally he broke his
gaze.

‘
Right,’
Chrissie cut in, pushing me just that bit further in, ‘how about we
have a drink. What you got in your cabinet, Dicky?’

And just as I wondered who
this Dicky was, Crinky solved the small mystery by
speaking.

‘
Oh, well,
just you have a look out the back. I’ve got all sorts
in.’

Crinky was referring to
the dining room and we were all encouraged to move on out there. It
was as equally as cluttered - newspapers piled so high under a
dining table that one of the legs was off the floor – but you kind
of got used to it. As well as drinks, there was food laid out – not
a proper spread with homemade cakes and sandwiches, but there were
crisps, chocolate bars and peanuts. With Crinky’s size, it was
probably the best effort he could make. I had a few peanuts, but
was still distracted with making my escape. The Tankards were only
intending on staying for an hour.

‘
It gets
crowded after a bit,’ Sharon understated, sharing a packet of
crisps with Lee-the-boyfriend.

‘
You really
queers then?’ Lee asked me between open-mouthed
crunches.

‘
No,’ Justin
sulked, keen, I could tell, for us all to forget the incident,
particularly me.

‘
You kids
hogging the nuts?’ Chrissie asked, and we all laughed, seeing the
joke in her timing, apart from Justin, who just pulled a
face.

My opportunity to slip
away came five minutes later, when Crinky announced it was time for
presents. We had to move back into the lounge area and I put myself
in the doorway, as near to the front door as possible. Crinky had a
big bag of presents, which he somehow dragged into the middle of
the room, without even getting up.

‘
One at a
time,’ he instructed, but the Tankard kids didn’t listen, and
delved straight in, ripping paper off in seconds.

With no one
watching me, I stepped back, silently opened the door and made my
escape. Once I got to the end of the path, I crouched down until I
had cleared the white picket fence that enclosed his front garden.
Then I ran – past the church, across the green, past Tina, along
the side alley of their house, pushing open the dodgy back door and
not stopping till I was back in Justin’s bedroom. I pulled open the
drawer under his bed, took the cash from the
Who Shot JR
mug, pushed the drawer
back and stood up to leave, stuffing the money into the pockets on
my jeans.

Then I heard three words
that made my skin jump.

‘
Justin, that
you?’

For a second, I froze. Not
knowing what to do. I hadn’t accounted for Adrian Tankard. Had just
assumed he was out working for Dontask. (They expected you to work
on Christmas some years, Dad could vouch for that.) Yet, there he
was, sleeping off his lunch and booze session. But I couldn’t
afford to stay frozen for long: the others would be back
soon.

‘
My piss pot
needs emptying lad,’ he mumbled, and I remembered that Justin’s dad
had an old fashioned china pot under his bed, to save him having go
downstairs when he was desperate for the loo. ‘Boy? You
there?’

I was terrified. I had
broken in and was stealing from his house, after all. How would I
explain that? And I knew what he was like; knew how Adrian Tankard
operated. I’d seen his temper rise and charge like a rhino,
battering his intended prey in seconds. I’d seen Justin and
Stevie’s bruises the morning after a thrashing, so I knew he wasn’t
someone to mess with.

I trod carefully back out
onto the landing, onto the staircase, praying I wouldn’t make any
more noise. But a floorboard creaked. And he saw me – laying in his
bed, he turned, looked out through his open doorway and saw me on
the turn in the stairs.

‘
You?’

I don’t know what stopped
me running, what kept me where I was, glued to the spot, but
something did. And something opened my mouth for me and pushed a
few words out.

‘
I’ve come
back for my Nan’s money. Justin was looking after it.’

And all he did was nod at
me. Like it was okay. And that nod worked like a trigger, because
all of a sudden I was running, jumping the last steps and out their
back door, over the wall at the end, taking the back-route, and on
my way to my next destination, not looking back once.