White Goods (47 page)

This admission
came from Ian, in a garbled rush of tears and words, falling out of
his mouth and head like conkers tumbling across a playground. He
came home to find them here, in the kitchen, he confessed. Jackie
was already dead, swimming in a lake of his own blood. Mum –
Theresa
– was dazed,
confused, but she too was covered in blood. Some of it was her own,
some of it her son’s. My dad’s.

‘When Dad came home, we
covered it up. To protect her. There was no saving him, Scot. I’m
sorry. The damage was too much. So, we saved her instead. At least,
we thought we had. But…’ Ian’s voice trailed off, his sentence
ending itself silently.

‘Where is he?’ I
asked.

‘He’s gone, Scot.’
Tony.

‘I want to
know-.’

‘I know, but it won’t
help. It won’t change anything.’

I thought of the body
from the night before: the one in Adrian Tankard’s arms, dripping
blood in our alleyway. The one Auntie Stella had directed he put in
the chest freezer; directing with such ease I recalled. I would
check there, I told myself. If they wouldn’t tell me now, I would
check in the freezer later.

‘Would you like me to
tell you about your mother, about Emma?’

Accepting my
previous inquiry would not be satisfied, I nodded. I was ready to
hear about her: Emma, my birth mother.
Emma.
When Tony said it, there was
warmth in his voice; with warmth came hope.
Would you like me to tell you about your mother, about
Emma?
Yes, there was hope; his warmth
suggested affection, indicated a connection. But that was all it
was, a hope, a false one at that; once these final links with my
true ancestry were forged, the ones with the man who had
been
Dad
for
thirteen years were severed.

And, like the
rest of my re-written history,
Emma
came with more surprises and even more
loss.

Later, in the
middle of the night, I did something I hadn’t done for years, not
since as long I could remember. I snuck into my parents’ room
–
their
room,
Tony and Theresa’s – got under the covers and snuggled up. Tony
moved about, half-waking and put an arm around me. With the lies
stripped away, despite the fact they cut every familial tie between
us, I felt very close to him and that feeling reassured me:
everything had changed and yet nothing had changed too.

Oddly satisfied, I fell
back asleep within minutes.

Two weeks
later and my journey was at an end: I had reached my destination,
the Tankard house. My five-minute walk had taken me from one set of
grandparents to another. The time was 10:30am; I was half an hour
early. Both Chrissie and Adrian’s cars were missing from the front.
I considered sitting on the step, waiting there for them to return
from wherever they had gone. But I had an urge: an urge to find
their hidden back-door key, let myself in and have a look around
this family dwelling.
My
family dwelling. I wanted to look on it with my
new perspective: I was no longer Justin’s oddball friend in the
silly coat. I was someone else entirely.

So, I slipped down the
side of the house, let myself in and explored.

As I went through their
kitchen, through the hall, nosing in the lounge, nosing quickly in
Chrissie’s downstairs bedroom – the existence of which we were
still not to acknowledge – I had no fear of being disturbed. If I
was, I knew I wouldn’t be punished. People were giving me a lot of
slack, in particular long-lost relatives. Besides, the Tankards
didn’t want to upset or fall out with me – they needed me; I was
all they had now.

Auntie
Sharon and
Uncle
Stevie-the-little-shit were still in custody. I
didn’t know where. I hadn’t asked Adrian directly – I was still
calling him Adrian – but Tony had mentioned this to Ian -
Uncle
Ian – and he in
turn had updated me.

‘Will they be coming
back?’ I had asked him.

‘I don’t think so. They
admitted what they did, so there won’t be a trial or
anything.’

‘What about
Justin?’
Uncle
Justin; I could finally ask about him.

‘No news. He’s still
missing,’ Ian confirmed, looking directly at me, searching beyond
my eyes, looking for something else. ‘They haven’t mentioned him,
you know. They haven’t said he was involved.’

It made no
difference: I knew the truth and everyone else had assumed it. When
the police had turned up at the derelict house,
Auntie
Sharon and
Uncle
Stevie-the-little-shit were still there, but
Uncle
Justin had fled. I
later wondered if he had come after me, to check what I’d seen, or
even to shut me up. Maybe he had gone looking for Roy and Clint.
Neither had said a word about being there, as far as I knew. I’d
never get the answer to my questions. The moment he had looked back
at me, finally realising I had witnessed the killing, just before I
fled the scene of the bloodbath; that was it - our final moment
together. I would never see
Uncle
Justin again. None of us would.

At the
Tankard family home – in
my
Tankard family home, I kept reminding myself – I
felt myself drawn to his room. The memories it would hold for me. I
thought about him bringing Tina along on all those trips into town
and the swimming pool; thought about the trip to Nan Buckley’s
replacement, the money he stole; thought about the attack in
Jubilee Park. I recalled his insistence that we compared our
whatsits and the embarrassment it caused that last Christmas. The
latter made me laugh, but then I made another connection that left
me sad again: the trip to Crinky’s on Boxing Day.

‘I had no
idea,’ I thought, turning up the stairs, heading to
Uncle
Justin’s room,
mulling over more loss.
Sorry for your
loss.
It was a phrase I just couldn’t
escape, no matter what happened to me.

Once
inside
Uncle
Justin’s room, I took a good look about.

Nothing had changed. It
was as neat as ever: the two single beds were hospital-tidy; his
collection of shoplifted tapes sat in a perfect tower on top of his
chest of drawers, next to his mini tape recorder; everything was
politely in its place. Pam and Bobby were still on the wall, Pam
with her black marker moustache affliction. Everything had changed
and yet nothing had changed.

I looked
about in the other bedrooms.
Auntie
Sharon’s was a jumble of clothes, magazines,
make-up and toiletries.
Uncle
Stevie-the-little-shit’s was a disaster of
bedclothes, empty crisp packets, stinky trainers, crumpled tissues
and skiddy pants. Adrian’s was relatively sparse and tidy, an echo
of
Uncle
Justin’s. There was an unpleasant smell in there, however,
the source of which was an old-fashioned chamber pot. Poking out
from under his bed, I could see it had something in it. My stomach
churned, and I think I got a bit of a glimpse of what Mum –
Theresa -
had been
protecting me from. A glimpse of the shame she was
avoiding.

Adrian’s room
afforded a view of the garden and, before I left, I checked it out.
It was like a small scrap-yard of abandoned white goods. Fridges,
freezers, washing machines sat there in silence. Stout, proud
monuments of yesterday: respected, but no longer functioning.
Scattered around this were other, smaller relics: kettles,
hair-driers, toasters, hoovers, music centres, speakers, TV sets,
radios. Exposed to the elements, gathering dirt and bleeding rust;
abandoned, forgotten, replaced by newer models that served their
purpose better. Looking at it all, awash in a sea of metal, glass
and plastic, an amusing thought crossed my mind: Adrian Tankard was
hoarding. But that made me instantly think of Crinky Crunkle and I
felt a sense of loss again.
Sorry for your
loss.

Hearing a car crunch on
the drive at the front of the house, I began to turn away from the
scene, but something caught my eye. To the side of the small
landfill site, on the right, was a patch of freshly dug earth; it
had a slight mound, like a small grave.

‘So, they moved you
here?’ I thought to myself, seeing the lifeless body draped across
Adrian’s arms. He hadn’t meant to kill her; she ran out into the
road and Adrian hadn’t had a chance to brake. In a panic, Adrian
had come to us, not really thinking it through. I felt some comfort
in the thought that she was no longer in our chest
freezer.

Chrissie’s voice broke my
thoughts. She was crying out and charging up the stairs at the same
time.

‘Justin! Justin, is that
you?’ There was a twist of grief and agony in her voice; a tone
that unravelled when she came upon me at Adrian’s window, leaving
her with just the sound of pain. ‘Scot,’ she uttered, recovering,
trying to hide her aching.

Chrissie was greyer than
the last time I’d seen her, turning monochrome with anguish, I
guessed. She was looking less like Auntie Stella and a lot more
like someone else I knew.

‘I let myself in,’ I
said, feeling the need to explain.

Chrissie
didn’t comment, but we were soon joined by Adrian, as he came
upstairs
to-find-out-what-the-fuss-was-all-about.

‘Hello there, Scotty,’ he
said, seeing me there, a small puzzle creasing his brow, as he
momentarily questioned why I was in his room. ‘Shall we go
then?’

The next part of my
journey was just with Adrian, but it was similar to the previous
one – it involved a short walk over familiar territory and I was
going from one grandparent to yet another. From the Tankards’
house, we walked along Church Lane, past Crinky’s and the dump,
keeping our eyes averted when we came to the derelict house. We
crossed the road to the crematorium and went into the
grounds.

‘Nearly there,’ Adrian
said, every now and then, as if I needed that
reassurance.

Entering the
crematorium, I thought about the shortcut it provided to the mental
hospital beyond. I thought of Mum, of
Theresa, Nan.
She was missing again.
Hadn’t been seen since the day of the killing. Ian eventually
confessed what he knew: he had taken Shirley White’s son from her
flat and taken him to see Mum –
Nan
– at the hospital. It was his way of punishing
Shirley: she had taken Jackie from us and this was his first step
towards taking her son away from her. Her son; my half-brother. He
was called Jackie too. Ian had only left them together for a moment
– sent off on a false errand by Mum – but on his return both
grandmother and grandson had vanished.

At first, Ian
said nothing, fearing the trouble he would be in for taking the boy
in the first place. But when he saw a report on the local news
regarding the missing boy, he confessed to Tony and they went to
the police. Mum had written a little note for Ian, which he had
initially slipped in his pocket.
We’ve
gone to put things right,
it said. We
didn’t know what it meant and it didn’t provide any help or clues.
Shirley White insisted that there were no charges pressed against
Ian. I thought this was nice of her, but when I said this to Ian,
he was cross with me.

‘It’s the very least she
can do,’ he had snarled, but he didn’t explain his anger and I
didn’t ask him to. Whatever it was, it could wait.

Mum was still
missing. Mum,
Theresa, Nan.
Whoever she was to me. So was little Jackie; my
little half-brother. If Shirley White was mad with grief and
sorrow, I didn’t know. We had all kept away from her and I hadn’t
seen her about, either.

Visiting my
final grandparent –
Emma’s father – was an
odd occurrence. We sat on him; at least, we sat on a wooden bench
that had recently been placed in the crematorium, in memory of him.
Crinky Crunkle. I thought about the visit to his place on Boxing
Day and the long looks he had given me. Long, lingering looks I had
thought were creepy, were somehow wrong; they were just love and
admiration. I hadn’t realised, but taking me there, that had been
the Tankards’ Christmas present to him. I thought about how he had
died – partly at my hands, my story-telling having planted the seed
in Roy Fallick’s head – and I felt heavy with sorrow once
again.

‘Sorry,’ I
said to the plaque that simply said
In
memory of Richard Arthur Crunch.
I wish it
had said
In memory of Crinky
Crunkle,
because that was the man I knew,
if only briefly. That was who he was, in spite of what was written
on his birth certificate, on the old passport
Uncle
Justin and I had found in his
house. He was who he had become, not who he had started out
as.

‘Crinky was the only one
of us who would have Jackie in his house, after he got in with
Shirley and the drugs,’ Tony had explained to me. ‘He missed Emma
so much and the connection with Jackie was his connection with the
past. He did ask to see you, but, well, we had made a decision on
that. But eventually, even he had enough. Jackie did something very
bad and Crinky wouldn’t have him back. That’s when he started
hoarding. Keeping hold of everything, unable to let anything else
go.’