White Goods (35 page)

‘This was gran’s house,’
Justin had informed me once. ‘Dad was her only son, so we got it
when she died.’

Della
reckoned that they had all moved in before their gran had died,
insisting she lived in a caravan on the drive, so they could have
the house as there was
more-of-them-than-her
. But I didn’t
know if that was true, and there was no way I was gonna
ask.

‘I wouldn’t
put anything past them,’
Mum had
commented, but that was often Mum’s stock response, especially if
Chrissie was involved.
Wouldn’t-put-anything-past-those-Tankards.

On the Wednesday of
half-term, I was invited along for a trip into town.

‘Just a bit of shopping,
but you don’t have to come,’ Chrissie had said, when I’d turned up
that morning.

It was 10:30 and they
were in the kitchen, still having breakfast. Chrissie had tea,
toast and a fag on the go all at once.

‘Cuppa?’ she offered, ash
falling from the cigarette in her mouth as her lips moved, dusting
the crusts on her plate.

I politely shook my
head.

‘Suit yourself. SHARON!’
she cried, her voice abruptly soaring, shaking the whole house.
‘SHARON! YOU FINISHED WITH THAT DRIER YET?’

‘You said
we’d go down the dump today,’ I said quietly to Justin, when I had
the chance. His whole family – minus Adrian and Tina, who
were
off-who-knows-where
– had disappeared from the kitchen to get
themselves ready for town. ‘Said we’d make camps. Go to the
derelict house.’

The dump was another
place, banned in Mum’s day, which I was now free to
explore.

‘I forgot,’
he said, shrugging. ‘And I have to go. We all have to go, when we
do a
big
shop.’
When he said
big,
he raised his eyebrows, like it was a code, like I should
know what he really meant.

‘How big
is
big?’
I
asked.

‘Depends,’
Stevie-the-little-shit added, joining us at that moment.

‘On what?’

‘On how lucky we get.’
Sharon Tankard answered the last bit, as she completed the Tankard
sibling line-up.

‘Lucky?’

And then Chrissie was
with us, standing in the kitchen doorway.

‘Right. All ready to go?
Yes? Good. And Scot, like I said, it’s just a bit of shopping.
Nothing special. Nothing really to see. So, you don’t have to come
along, not if you don’t want to.’

The Tankards might not
have had all the latest gadgets we had in our house. No dishwasher.
No teasmade. No Marilyn, either.

‘Marilyn?’ Justin asked,
when I referred to our microwave by her first name. ‘You call it
Marilyn?

But they did have some
things we didn’t, like their own shopping trollies, for
instance.

‘Aren’t you
supposed to take them back to the shops?’ I asked, when
Stevie-the-little-shit wheeled one out from the side of their
house. It had the word
Beejam
on the bar at the front.

‘We do,’ Justin
explained. ‘Then we fill it up again and bring it home.’

Then Sharon asked a
question that set the tone for the whole journey:

‘Right - who’s getting in
it first?’

There was always a sense
of worry when you went anywhere with the Tankards. A guarantee of
excitement and adventure, for certain, but often the fear and
anticipation could take the fun out of it. Justin and
Stevie-the-little-shit’s little escapade at Christmas had been
typical; the police or, at the very least, shop keepers would
usually be part of the drama. And there was always something free
at the end of it – pens, blank cassettes, scented rubbers, make-up
items; whatever was easy to pick up and slip in their
pockets.

I thought it
would be different with Chrissie there. Thought there would be
some
just-behave-yourselves!
and
no-funny-business-boys!
And
it
was
different:
it was organised.

‘It’s nothing
to worry about,’ Chrissie explained, as we approached the
supermarket, accepting that there was no getting of rid of me. I
was in for
the-long-game,
as Stevie-the-little-shit grinningly referred to
it, like we were gangsters or something. ‘Think of it as a bit like
bingo,’ she reassured me, searching for words.

‘Bingo?’

‘Yes, bingo. Always costs
you the same, but sometimes you win a big prize for your efforts.
And other times you just get what you paid for.’

‘
And we go for
chips afterwards, too,’ Sharon added, giving the whole event a
holiday feel, like a trip to the seaside.

‘
Only Scotty,
there’s one other thing you need to know,’ Chrissie concluded,
dropping her voice, sounding a little more serious. ‘It’s a
secret.’

This
translated as
don’t-tell-your-mum-or-dad-cos-it’s-dodgy-as-hell.

‘
You still
coming then?’ Sharon asked, as the Tankards ploughed through the
automatic doors of the shop.

After a moment’s
hesitation, I followed on, wondering just how this unique brand of
gambling was going to play itself out.

Initially,
the rules seemed to be quite simple. We split into two groups:
Chrissie kept Stevie-the-little-shit on her team,
where-I-can-see-you;
that left me, Justin and Sharon in team two. We each had a
list of what to get, a
playing
card,
if you want to follow the theme, and
we had exactly forty-five minutes to fill our trollies up. Chrissie
had the
Beejam
trolley and we borrowed the second one from the shop itself,
like normal customers. There were a few other essential and more
baffling rules we had to remember: once inside, we didn’t know each
other and there was no talking to the other team at all; if
Chrissie
accidently
nudged her trolley into ours that was our signal to
abandon
Operation Discount,
as Justin was calling it; and, no-matter-what, we
had to queue up at the same till, specified by Chrissie using a
series of winks, coughs and nods.

‘You got that?’ Sharon
inquired, moving jerkily down the cake and biscuit aisle, the
wheels of her trolley sticky, causing her to skid a bit.

Justin had
the list, and me and him were responsible for finding the items and
getting our
full house
before the others.

Despite a feeling that
any minute we were going to be caught out (without really having a
definite sense of what we were actually doing wrong), it was quite
good fun. The Tankards had good taste in food, it seemed; they were
allowed to have the things you saw on the telly, not just the
things you could get during the war. That summed up the diet at our
house – war food. Meat and two veg; bangers and mash; hard,
pan-fried chips and cold, fatty lamb; the final remains of any
Sunday roast regurgitated as a stew; and boiled potatoes with
everything. Plain biscuits and heavy, homemade cakes were our
treats – at least when Mum was about. Artic Roll, if we were very
lucky. The Tankards were quite the opposite: frozen pizzas,
crinkle-cut chips and onion rings for the deep fat fryer, anything
you liked from the Bernard Matthews range.

‘
Anything?’

‘
Anything!’

Trios, Penguins,
Breakaways, Clubs, Blue Ribbon biscuits, and bags of mini
Marathons; they were all piled in. Bottles of Panda Pops and cans
of Quatro; Golden Wonder Crips and Nik-naks; the list of what they
were allowed seemingly endless. And it was all well-known brands,
not the cheap shop versions Dad made us have – Heinz, Kellogg’s, Mr
Kipling, Pepsi-Cola, Captain Birdseye, Andrex, Bold.

‘Right, now
we gotta keep a lookout for Mum,’ Sharon instructed, as the final
items – three French stick loaves – were added to our bounty. We
weren't allowed anything as nice as that at home; generally Dad
didn’t believe in what he called
foreign
muck.
So, I was really hoping I’d get an
invite back for lunch. ‘Gotta watch out for Mum’s signal,’ Sharon
reiterated, pulling me back from my thoughts.

When the signal occurred,
it wasn’t as subtle as Chrissie might have liked. Having wandered
up and down a few aisles, keeping an eye on the checkouts, seeing
if Chrissie had joined a queue yet, we eventually encountered the
Tankard matriarch whilst we lurked in the dog food
section.

‘There’s your
mum,’ I whispered to Justin and Sharon, who were busy pretending to
be interested in dog biscuits.
(‘Gotta
look natural,’ Justin had said, although I could see nothing
natural about studying the full nutritional value of
Winnalot.
)

In the split
second it took them to abandon their reading matter and pay
attention to our next instructions, it was too late. It had been
Chrissie's intention to nudge our trolley, subtly, signalling us
to
abandon Operation
Discount
. However, the wheels on her
trolley had locked, so she’d given it quite a hard shove, the
result being she skidded towards us with unexpected
velocity.

What followed
was inevitable: our trolley went flying, knocking Sharon back, in
turn knocking Justin back, in turn unsettling a six-foot pyramid of
tinned
Mr Dog
.

Sticking to
the rules of
not-knowing-each-other
, Chrissie
apologised politely in her best voice (sounding like a posh Janet
Street-Porter for her efforts,) glared sharply and briefly at
Justin, who was helped to his feet by a flustered shop assistant,
and carried on her way to the tills.

‘I just need something
from the next aisle,’ Sharon announced, not waiting for either of
us. She pushed the trolley forward, turning left into loo rolls and
kitchen towels, and we didn’t see her again until we were
outside.

‘You alright?’ I asked
Justin, once the assistant had stopped fussing.

‘Yeah,’ he said, but I
could tell he wasn’t. If nothing else, he felt foolish, and
something told me Chrissie would have something to say about the
accident.

The
rendezvous point
was a
park bench, four shops down from the supermarket. Whilst we waited
for the others to catch up with us, Justin filled in the remaining
gaps regarding
Operation
Discount
.

‘Mum’s friend Janice is
usually on the tills. We’ve got a bit of a deal going on: she only
puts through every other item. Her husband, Donny, is a business
associate of Dad’s, so she’s happy to help us out. Think Mum shares
some of the goodies with her.’

Justin checked his
surroundings, seeing if anyone was taking an interest, listening
in. They weren’t. Up ahead, just leaving the supermarket was
Sharon, shaking her head, lighting up a fag.

‘
We usually
split up and have two trollies on the go,’ he continued. ‘One of us
fills up with essentials – the other with treats. If anything goes
wrong, we just buy the essentials we need and ditch the treats
trolley.’

‘
What happened
today then?’ I asked.

‘
Janice
went on her break early,’ Sharon answered,
finally reaching us, stressing the
Janice
like it was all her fault.
‘You break any bones, clumsy boy?’

When Chrissie
and Stevie-the-little-shit eventually joined us, the former was
tight lipped and scowling, whilst the latter grinned from ear to
ear, giving Justin a look that said
you’re-in-the-crap.
Justin didn’t
say anything, but a quick glare from Chrissie indicated that she
indeed intended to place the blame in his direction.

It turned out that
Chrissie Tankard shared a skill with my dad – she had the power to
reduce strong individuals to quivering wrecks with the use of just
one word.

‘
Shoes!’ she
cried, exercising said talent, storming ahead.

Stevie-the-little-shit sauntered on behind, pushing
the
Beejam
trolley of boring essentials, his swagger full of gloating;
overjoyed he wasn’t the one with his neck on the line.

‘
Gotta get new
school shoes,’ Justin explained, a bit deflated, a bit worried,
too, you could tell. ‘You coming?’

I think he
knew the answer before the question left his mouth: the prospect of
waiting for three sets of Tankard feet to be measured, with
Chrissie in
that
mood, didn’t hold much appeal. So, when they all headed
for
Freeman, Hardy and Willis
– ‘three hard willies,’ as Justin called it – I
decided to call it a day.

‘
Call
what
a day exactly?’ the
old me would have questioned. But I wasn’t playing word games any
more, was I? Someone else was running that department now. Instead,
having enjoyed a real sense of family that morning - despite the
drama - I decided I needed to see mine. Not the ones that were
lying to me; I just wanted to see one that spoke the truth; I went
to see Mum.