White Goods (25 page)

The shop was
called
Jennifer’s
Jellies
, although it didn’t sell Jellies,
as far as I could see. But it did have every variety of sweet you
could imagine. On the front counter all the tubes were lined up:
Fruit Gums, Fruit Pastels, Fruit Polos, Mint Polos, Pacers, Opal
Fruits, Refreshers, Spangles, Chewits, Smarties, Rolos, Munchies.
There was a section for chocolate bars too: Dairy Milk, Bourbon,
Milky Bar, Texan Bar, Mars Bar, Marathon, Twix, Aero – milk, mint
and orange flavours. Behind the counter they kept the big jars of
sweets: Rhubarb and Custards, Acid Drops, Pear Drops, Mint
Imperials, Space Dust, Flying Saucers, Black Jacks, Fruit Salads,
Chocolate Limes.

‘
A quarter of
Winter Mix,’
I remembered Mum ordering,
always to my disappointment. I hated Winter Mix, hard lumps that
tasted worse than medicine.

As well as sweets, the
shop sold a whole range of newspapers, comics and
cigarettes.

‘
How much are
your cigarettes?’ Justin asked, a pointless question, which made
the lady behind the counter raise her eyebrows at him.

‘
Ask me again
when you’re old enough to buy some,’ she told him, sniffing, as if
we were a bad smell. Which we soon were, because Justin had
secretly brought something along with him that would cause a
stink.

I knew Justin didn’t like
the lady who worked there. She had a fat, powdery face and fat
hands and fingers, as if she had eaten too many of the products she
sold. She also had warts on her fingers, with black bits in, which
was a bit off-putting. But that wasn’t why Justin didn’t like
her.

Whenever we
went in, she would watch him, her eyes following him around the
shop.
I’m watching you, young man,
she had said to him once, as if he was going to
nick something. So, after a while, whenever we went in there, he
started acting up on purpose, making a little trouble, but not
enough for her to do anything about it. Once, he’d taken
Stevie-the-little-shit in with him and his younger brother had
knocked over a whole stand of comics, before making a run for
it.

On this particular
occasion, I’d thought Justin was going to nick something, on
account of him having no money left. But he didn’t. After the
wart-lady refused to give him the price of her cigarettes, he
shrugged and went to leave. But, at the last minute, I saw him drop
a little capsule out of his right hand and gently crush it with his
right heel. Almost instantly, a sulphurous stench hit the
air.

‘
Oh, Jesus!’
wart-lady cried, sussing instantly what had happened, coming out
from behind the counter after us. ‘You little buggers!’

But we were off: Justin
laughing his wicked little head off, me in tow, torn between
finding it all funny and fearing that we’d get into serious
trouble.

‘
Come on,’ he
told me, running back into the park, heading towards the public
toilets. ‘Let’s hide in there. She won’t dare follow
us.’

‘
What if she
sends in the park keeper?’

‘
She won’t.
Come on.’

So I followed him,
thinking it was a place of refuge, a place to hide away from
trouble. But it wasn’t – trouble followed us in there and we were
cornered.

There was someone in the
toilets when we entered – in one of the cubicles. It was the old
man we had seen earlier, sitting on the bench in his cream mac. Old
Mac. When he flushed and came out, Justin stared at him, with a big
smirk on his face, but the man didn’t seem to notice at all. He
simply shuffled over to wash his hands. The toilets had those
steel, combination hand washer-driers: you pressed the top button
for soap, a second to get some water, then a third button to set
the drier going.

‘
Alright Mac!’
Justin said in an exaggerated voice that caused the old man to jump
whilst he was at the water stage, accidentally splashing some on
his clothes.

The man turned, scowled at
Justin, turned back to his cleaning task and pressed the third
button for hot air. Once he was finished, Justin simply stared at
him, as he shuffled out, no doubt back to his place on the bench
near the cricket pitch.

‘
What you do
that for?’ I asked, perplexed by Justin’s behaviour, surprised that
old Mac had let him get away with it.

‘
He knows
Crinky Crunkle,’ was his answer. ‘One of his weird
mates.’

With that, Justin took
himself off to a urinal in the corner. Next his zip was down,
followed by a trickling sound. I didn’t need the loo, but it felt
odd just standing there in the toilets. What if someone else came
in? What would they think? That we were up to no good, without a
doubt. So, I took myself into one of the cubicles, shut the door,
put the lid down and sat on it, drawing my knees to my chest, so my
feet were off the floor.

Seated there, I found
myself looking around, reading some of the graffiti that had been
daubed on the walls and door.

Suzie Green is
a slag.

Debbie Salter
sucks her brother’s cock.

Darren Barnes
is a bender.

Meet me here
for bum fun at 7:30 on a Friday.

Call 789923
for a good time.

Barry Jackson
takes it up the shitter.

There were drawings too –
explicit depictions of men and women’s wosnames in black marker
pen, many accompanied by phone numbers or a time and a place. I
wondered what would happen if you rang one of the numbers – was
someone simply waiting for your call? I thought about mentioning it
to Justin, but he would have gone ahead with it, dragged me to the
red telephone box in the park and made some calls.

He liked doing
that – him and Stevie-the-little-shit had a track-record of making
hoax phone calls from the telephone box opposite their house.
Ringing up neighbours or the operator and using a silly voice. They
called a fire crew and ambulance out once. Justin and Stevie were
off school for a week after that with
severe colds,
according to Chrissie.
But everyone knew that Adrian had beaten them black and blue after
the incident and they were out of sight, in case their social
worker got wind of their punishment.

The other thing about
public toilet cubicles that fascinated me were the holes people
made in the partitions. I didn’t understand why they did that.
Maybe it was for passing through spare toilet paper when your
neighbour ran out?

‘
It’s called a
glory hole,’ Justin reckoned, when I ventured to mention it to him.
‘People watch each other doing it through the gap.’

I just shuddered,
disgusted. I didn’t really believe him, though: why would anyone
want to watch you having a poo?

The cubicle I was in had
holes all over it, but someone had done their best to patch them
up: the door had three patches of wood nailed onto it; the
partition wall on my left had two small ones, both filled with
hardened chewing gum; the one on the right had a fist-sized hole,
like someone had smashed through it with their hand. It gave you a
good view of the next-door toilet and also of the urinals, as the
adjacent cubicle door was wide open. I could see Justin, having his
piss.

‘
What you
doing in here?’ a voice cried out, just as I was reading up on what
Sean Taylor’s mum was happy to provide
for
a tenner a time
.

The voice didn’t belong to
Justin: it was from one of the older lads we’d seen earlier. The
one who was hanging out with Roy Fallick’s soon-to-be step-brother,
Clint.

I felt myself shrink back,
pulling my knees up closer to my chest, making myself smaller, less
visible. I shifted on the toilet seat, moving further away from the
hole in the wall, taking myself as much out of view as
possible.

I could still see Justin.
His head was turned, facing the direction of the voice.

‘
Having a
slash,’ he replied, but he said it straight. There was no cheek, no
cockiness in his tone. That told me something immediately: Justin
sensed what I sensed. And I sensed trouble and felt
fear.

The older boy moved in a
bit closer. Through the hole in the cubicle wall, I could just
glimpse the edge of him: a slither of his right arm, the chunky
chain on his wrist, the white sleeve of his t-shirt, part of his
denim-clad right leg.

‘
You know what
this place is, don’t you?’ he asked.

His voice was neutral.
There wasn’t a threat in it, but it wasn’t friendly
either.

Justin didn’t
answer and two things happened: footsteps indicated that someone
else had entered and the first boy moved further into view. I could
see him head to toe: he had a shaved head and big black
boots.
Bovver-boots,
Dad called them.

‘
I asked you a
question, Blondie,’ he continued, addressing Justin, edging closer
towards him. ‘I said, you know what this place is, don’t
you?’

‘
It’s a
toilet,’ Justin replied, but his voice was sullen, and thick, as if
he was struggling to say it.

‘
Is it?’ the
older boy asked, and then he moved forward, closer to Justin.
‘Let’s see, shall we?’

I wondered if he was going
to hit Justin or kick him behind the knees, like the older boys at
school used to do, to make you get wee all down your trousers.
However, he simply stood next to Justin. I heard his zip go,
indicating he too was having a pee. But I didn’t hear him
go.

When Justin had finished,
he zipped his fly up and prepared to go, turning towards the
exit.

‘
You didn’t
wash your hands.’

This came from another
voice, one I vaguely recognised. It came to me quickly – he was one
of the boys who had laid into Ian that day at the crematorium. He
was out of view.

And the other one, the one
next to Justin at the urinals, Clint’s mate from earlier. He had
also been at the crematorium that day. Both these older boys had
been Ian’s attackers.

‘
Go and wash
your hands, you dirty sod.’

‘
You don’t
tell me what to do.’

‘
I just did,
now go and wash your hands.’

‘
Better do as
he tells you.’

‘
I don’t have
to do what you say.’

‘
Yes you do.
Fucking wash your hands.’

‘
Do as Rory is
telling you, queer-boy. Wash those dirty little hands.’

‘
You can’t
make me.’

‘
You ain’t
leaving.’

I couldn’t see much, as
Justin and the one called Rory had moved over to the exit. But
there was a build-up in their exchange. At each sentence, the words
were coming out quicker, the volume louder, the tone harder. I
couldn’t tell if Justin was scared – I’d seen him in arguments and
scraps before. He usually had back-up – his brother Stevie or
sister Sharon, both of whom would get stuck into a fight, defending
the Tankard name. But on that day, I was his back-up and at that
moment in time I was petrified. I could only think of myself. I
kept as still as was possible, kept my breathing slow and quiet and
hoped I would go unnoticed.

‘
He was
looking at my dick.’

‘
Wasn’t.’

‘
Fucking were.
Pretending to piss, but staring at my cock.’

‘
I fucking
wa-.’

‘
Fucking,
dirty poof.’

‘
I wasn’t, it
was you with your-.’

‘
You still
need to wash your hands, queer.’

‘
Fuck
off.’

‘
I said wash
your hands, queer-boy.’

‘
I said, fuck
off.’

‘
Do as he
says; wash the piss off your dirty hands.’

‘
Fucking make
me.’

‘
Fucking make
him, he says, Rory.’

‘
We can make
him, Jim.’

Jim. Rory and Jim – I
clocked their names.

I still couldn’t see them,
but it was clear what was going on from the scuffle and cries from
Justin: they were doing exactly as they had promised. They pulled
him over to the hand-drier and had set it going. Only it wasn’t his
hands they submitted to a wash – it was his head.

‘
Fuck off!’ I
heard a muffled scream from Justin, as they forced his head into
the machine, pressing the buttons for soap and then water. ‘Fucking
get off me.’

When the hum of the drier
finished, they let him go and he came back into view. I could see
his face: it was swollen from the heat and from the bashing it had
received. His eyes were wild with hatred, but he didn’t look afraid
at all. Just angry.

For a moment, nothing
happened. There was a stand-off, as if the combined heat from
Justin’s face and anger had created a barrier, a force-field the
bullies could not cross. Then, it started up again. Yet, this time,
they dispensed with the verbal build up and simply went in with
their fists: punching his face, kicking his legs, pummelling into
his stomach. Whilst Rory held Justin up, forcing his back against
the urinal wall, Jim took a fist and ground it again and again into
Justin’s crutch, his face collapsing in agony at each punch. When
Jim appeared to finish, Rory let Justin go and he slid against the
porcelain behind him. At that moment, the urinal began to flush,
hissing water out of the cistern, getting Justin wet down his
back.