White Goods (34 page)

Stevie had positioned
himself on the far side of the garden and we could see him jumping
about, grinning with delight at the mayhem he had caused. Chrissie
kept her distance, rattling both her fists and a long list of
expletives in his direction, swearing all manner of harm would come
to him once the flames had died down and the imminent danger
receded.

‘Come on, let’s get
back,’ Justin suggested, once we’d seen enough, and we headed back
in doors.

Justin went straight back
to the spare room, to continue our adventure, but I didn’t get to
return there. Ian had arrived: me and Della were needed at
home.

‘Time for tea,’ Ian said,
giving Crinky’s domain a quick, quizzical look.

‘You should have seen it
before we cleared out all the newspapers,’ I said, before saying a
few brief goodbyes and heading off home with my
siblings.

It was almost six; apart
from a break in the afternoon when I’d popped to Justin’s for
squash, biscuits and a wee, I had been clearing out papers at
Crinky’s for nearly a whole day.

‘Reckon the debt must be
paid by now,’ I said aloud, referring to the one we owed Adrian
Tankard.

‘Must be,’ Ian said,
distracted, his mind brewing up another question. ‘That Crinky
bloke?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Anyone say how he
died?’

I shrugged; I hadn’t
asked anyone. It had seemed a bit rude.

‘In the bath.’ This came
from Della, who was just a little bit behind us, strolling along
with Russell, holding hands.

‘How d’you
know?’

‘Russell
asked.’

‘Really?’

We all stopped, to check
Russell out.

‘I was curious,’ he said,
suddenly defending himself. ‘So I asked Sharon. She said he’d been
found in the bath.’

I was wondering how he
would have got in there: surely it had been full of newspapers,
magazines, or even books? And surely, even if it had been empty,
Crinky couldn’t have got in it?

‘It was a walk-in one,
for disabled people,’ Russell added, as if reading my mind. ‘I had
a quick look. Pink, it was.’

‘What, did he drown or
something?’

‘No. It was a sit-in bath
– he couldn’t have drowned. But Sharon said he killed
himself.’

‘Shit.’

‘Yeah. Nasty, too,’
Russell continued, no longer concerned about how we might view his
insensitive inquisitiveness, as he had a captive
audience.

‘Nasty? How?’ Ian asked,
and what Russell said, every word of his reply, caused the little
hairs on my skin to stand up on their very own.

‘Electrocuted himself.
Had an extension lead coming from the kitchen to the bathroom, with
one of those fan-heaters plugged in at the end. Reckoned he had it
on a shelf near the bath. He knocked it in the water. And that was
it. Gone. You alright Scot?’

‘Scot?
Scot?’
That was Ian
shouting, as I did the only thing that made sense to me at the
time: I ran. I was only running home, but I had to get away. Away
from Russell’s macabre tale, away from any eyes that might have
been scrutinising my reaction to it.
‘Scot?!’

I had ten minutes on them
at home. And in those ten minutes, I composed myself. And I thought
back. Back to the playground. Back to when I’d spun my tales about
Mum’s death. The dishwasher. The hair-drier. The electric fan
heater. They had all been the culprits in her grisly deaths. But
who had been there? Who had been in my little circle of listeners,
making notes in their heads, stealing my nasty little ideas and
storing them up for future use?

Hearing Ian
and Della come through the front door, finally catching me up, I
knew I had one more thing to do. In my back pocket, I took out the
photographs we had found in Crinky’s spare room. Getting down on my
knees, I reached under my bed. I found the letter with
Jackie
written on the
front, slipped it inside the envelope containing the photos and
then put it back, hidden away.

‘You okay?’

Ian was right behind me.
I hadn’t heard him come in. I wondered if he’d seen what I’d been
doing. What I’d hidden.

‘Yeah.’

‘It was a bit grisly, eh?
Russell got carried away there. Della gave him a ticking off. Guess
we all forget you are younger than us, sometimes. Sure you’re
okay?’

‘Yeah,’ I repeated,
adding a nod to confirm it.

‘Coming down?’

Another nod, after which
I came to my feet and followed Ian down to Dad’s homely meal of
grey lumps and burnt thumbs.

‘Bangers and
mash!’ Dad announced with triumph, chuffed with his culinary
output. He’d even done vegetarian ones for Della. ‘Went all-out, as
we have company,’ he added, referring to Auntie Stella and
Uncle
Gary, neither of
whom looked particularly pleased at the effort made on their
behalf.

‘Lovely,
Tone.’

‘A real treat,
cheers.’

Once doused in pools of
ketchup, we all tucked in, somehow managing to clear our plates and
keep the food in our stomachs.

No one mentioned Crinky.
Dad didn’t even ask how the day had gone. Not a word. Not a single
question; but then we were all avoiding questions now, weren’t we?
Yet, my head was still full of it. Full of Russell’s description.
Full of Crinky’s suffering. Full of that dark, square hole that
Justin had created when he rolled back the rug on Crinky’s floor
and revealed the trap door. Full of what we might have found in the
deep, black chasm below Crinky’s paper-crammed
existence.

But it was mainly the
Polaroids I’d found that filled my head. The six photographs that
I’d put with the letter I’d stolen. You see, they were very
familiar. I’d seen a similar collection before, under a bed, in a
room I wasn’t supposed to be looking in.

Looking up
from my plate, where one final charred mouthful remained, I
saw
Uncle
Gary’s
eyes flicker in my direction. He gave me a single, almost
undetectable nod. And I returned it, before sticking my fork in
what remained of my dinner and clearing my plate.

‘Now, who’s for
afters?’

17.

I went back the next
day.

I had to.

Went back to the late
Crinky’s lair and checked out that spare room.

Checked out what I had
merely glimpsed the day before.

Once everyone was asleep,
I decided to creep out.

I quietly
slipped on my jeans, t-shirt and a jumper, all the time listening,
trying not to wake up my room companion, knowing he wouldn’t let me
go out. Not on my own. Not without an endless stream of
questions.
Where are you going? Can I come
with you?
But he didn’t wake. So, I pulled
on my trainers, stood up slowly and tiptoed my way out.

The back door caused a
little difficultly: as well as an old-fashioned key in its lock,
there were bolts at the top and bottom. They were stiff, and when
they eventually budged, the door rattled a bit. I stood completely
still, steadying my breath, listening through the dark.

Silence.

Satisfied that I hadn’t
disturbed a soul, I finally crept out and headed back to
Crinky’s.

Getting into the house
was easy: there was a key to the back door under a loose tile. I’d
seen Chrissie check it was still there the day of the big clear
out. I padded slowly through the darkened bungalow, feeling a
little nervous. I knew the Tankards had left, and I obviously knew
Crinky was nowhere in sight, but I still felt eyes upon me, as I
moved quietly through the rooms, heading towards the one at the
back.

I ventured on, over the
threshold of the late Crinky Crunkle’s spare room. The trap door
was closed again and a worn-out green rug was covering it up. I
quickly rolled it back and grabbed the metal ring on the door,
ready to haul it up. I hesitated.

‘You
absolutely certain?’
a voice inside my
head asked, as I paused in the darkness.
‘You certain you want to see what’s beyond that
door?’

Yes. Yes, I was. Without
a doubt, I needed to see.

Within seconds, the trap
was open and I was scrambling down steps. For a few seconds I felt
my way in the dark, feeling for a wall or a switch. I soon found
both. The switch was the chain type. I pulled it, but it took a few
minutes for the hidden room to light up. When it did, I exhaled a
small gasp and took in the surroundings: the single strip light
that stretched across the ceiling; the bare, concrete floor; the
deep purple paint on the walls. The purple room in my memory had
finally come back to me. All that was missing was the little camp
bed, with the white bedding and the grey blanket.

The Polaroid in my head
had come to life again.

It was nearly an hour
before I was back home, furtively sneaking around in another house
of shadows. There were no lights on to greet me, so I was certain
no one had heard me creep out, or realised I was gone. However,
back in my room, just as I drew my bed covers over myself, a little
voice called out from the corner.

‘Where have you been?’ it
asked.

I ignored it, but it
wasn’t prepared to simply go away.

‘
Where have
you been?’ it asked again, more urgent this time.

But what could
I tell him? I’d been instructed to keep quiet and protect him,
hadn’t I? That’s what Dad had told me. That’s what we’d all been
trying to do, all along. Protect him.
Anything but the truth;
Dad had made
it clear to me
.
So, I struck to Plan A and continued to ignore him. It’s what
you did round our house – you ignored the questions, hoping they’d
go away. This time it worked too: the tired, small voice in the
corner stopped asking, replacing inquiries with the gentle snuffle
of sleep.

18.

I wasn’t
looking forward to the summer half-term that year. Not with the
secrets flying around in our house, still freezing me out – still
no one had talked to me about Shirley and the boy. Not with
Crinky’s death hanging over me, too.
Not
being treated as suspicious,
Chrissie had
said. But she and the police didn’t know what I knew: I had
recounted the details of such a death in the playground, surrounded
by-. I tried to think. Tried to see their faces. Walter Smith, Roy
Fallick, most of the class. Tried to shake it: surely it
was
an accident, a
coincidence; surely my white lies about Mum hadn’t led to Crinky's
death. Surely?

Being back in
with Justin, however, saved the day. Saved the whole week we had
off, in fact. I didn’t have to stick around with a house of liars.
And Dad had stopped objecting to my hanging out at the Tankards’
house full stop. It had been more Mum’s rule than his, but he’d
still made the odd noises of disapproval. Now it was simply
anything-to-get-him-out-of-the-way.
I could read it in Dad’s and Ian’s faces – the
fear that I would open my mouth and those awkward questions would
come out. But it wasn’t worth the effort of asking, not for the
empty responses I got – even if it did unsettle them
both.

So, that
half-term, I more or less moved in with the Tankards, where it was
just the two of us – me and Justin.
The-two-of-us.
It wasn’t as good as
the
three-of-us
that I’d belonged to just weeks before. It was a good second
best, though.

The Tankards’
house was a bit bigger than ours. They never had any money and
didn’t seem to get all the mod cons that we did, despite the fact
that Adrian Tankard had access to everything you could possibly own
through Dontask.
It all goes on his drink,
her gambling, I’ll bet you
– Auntie Stella
once, after a couple of drinks and a round of poker herself. Yet
they did have a house where everyone had a separate bedroom.
Including Chrissie and Adrian, which we weren’t allowed to talk
about – one of the very few rules you had to follow at the Tankard
house.
Don’t mention the separate
bedrooms, ever,
Justin had warned me,
early days, as if it might have been the kind of thing I’d have
asked his mum.
You do ask some funny
questions, Scot, it has to be said,
he’d
added, justifying his first point.

Their house had started
life as a bungalow, very similar to Crinky’s round the corner, but
gradually new bits had been added on and it looked more and more
like a house. There were four bedrooms upstairs – three small
bedrooms squeezing into the roof of the original building, whilst a
bigger one sat at the rear, on top of the downstairs extension. The
rooms at the very front of the house that peered onto the drive
were the bathroom and Chrissie’s bedroom, the one no one talked
about. In the middle of the house were the dining room and the
kitchen. Then, at the very back, the extension: a lounge that
stretched across the entire width of the former
bungalow.