White Goods Read online

  White goods

  White goods

  by

  guy a johnson

  Ending.

  On the day that I finally understood the truth of things, I took the boy by the hand and made him face it with me.

  It’s strange the places where you find it, the truth. People like to say that it’s staring you in the face, or that it’s right under your nose. I’ve never found it in either place, though. And on this day, it wasn’t obvious – it wasn’t going to leap out at you, not unless you knew where to look. Luckily, I had quite a good idea. I’m not sure if I found it, or whether it found me. But we got there, the boy and me.

  All the way, he kept asking me questions. Where were we going? What time would we be back? Could we go back now? Wouldn’t people be worried? What was this all about? Was this an adventure?

  I liked the last question. Made what we were doing sound fun, so I went along with it.

  ‘An adventure, yes,’ I confirmed.

  Our journey together started at the crematorium, where we laid low for a bit. Waiting for night to come, so we could move about undetected. All part of this great adventure, I reassured him. Then, under the cover of a navy summer’s night, we got on with our quest.

  From the crematorium, we crossed the road and headed towards the dump. From there, we went past old Crinky Crunkle’s fat, short bungalow, along Church Lane, across the green next to the Tankards’ place, past the Chequers public house, turning right into the alleyway that led to the new housing estate, through that and then onto my road – Victoria Avenue – with its multi-coloured terraced rows. All the way, the boy was at my side, keeping up with my hearty pace. He glanced back a few times, as if looking for a way out, or keeping note of the route we had taken, but I kept him on track with a few instructions – ‘Keep up,’ ‘Left here,’ ‘Straight over.’ I said little else, but it wasn’t needed. He had stopped asking questions and was just doing as instructed.

  It was only when we finally reached my house that he stalled.

  ‘We’re using the back entrance,’ I instructed in a near-whisper, waiting for him to move again. To get to our garden via the back, there was an alleyway between two houses that you had to pass through. Then, you turned right, went through our immediate neighbours’ garden, before you reached a gate into ours. It was a weird set up and it always felt like we were trespassing, even though we weren’t.

  ‘Go on,’ I pressed, giving his arm a gentle tug, but he was still apprehensive. ‘Nothing to be afraid of,’ I reassured him; it made little difference, so I changed tack. ‘After this, it’ll be over, okay? All over.’

  ‘Do you promise?’ he asked, echoing my quiet tone.

  ‘I promise,’ I hushed.

  With that, he nodded in compliance and we finished the last steps of our excursion: through the alleyway, across next-door’s garden and into ours. We headed for the wooden shed at the very end; to the place where I was certain the truth was hiding.

  There was a key to the shed I’d kept under a stone. I retrieved it, slid it into the padlock on the door and we were in. I shut the door.

  ‘In there,’ I told him, pointing to the back. There, shrouded by a pile of old, musty blankets was a huge, rusting chest freezer. I threw off the blankets, opened its mighty, white mouth. The grey seal smacked apart like a set of thick lips and released a big icy breath into the air. I still had a hold of his hand, so I pulled him forward, and pushed that hand into the icy well, where he felt the cold, harsh reality that lurked inside.

  ‘The truth,’ I announced, not letting go, aware he was now trembling, the terror eventually manifesting in a wet patch at the front of his trousers.

  I couldn’t tell you exactly what decided my next move. I couldn’t tell you how I managed it, either. Physically, or mentally. Hours later - once I’d thought it through, thought about what I had done - it was too late. It had happened.

  ‘What you doing?’ the boy managed, defenceless with shock, as I hauled his little body up, shoving him sharp, tipping him over the edge of the freezer.

  Then the lid was down and the lock on the handle clicked into place.

  1.

  There has always been a bit of dispute over exactly who or what finished our mother off. Different accounts and stories, with pins of doubt and ambiguity tacked on along the way.

  Ian and Della, my elder siblings, reckoned it was inevitable. The way she had acted, what she did; all that led up to what eventually happened. Something-like-that-was-bound-to-happen-sooner-or-later, was the gist of it.

  Dad didn't say much himself, kept it all hidden inside. Kept very silent on the matter, like it was a secret.

  Auntie Stella, Mum's sister, was more vocal on the matter: she blamed Electrolux for the whole episode, particularly when she'd been drinking. Mum wouldn't have liked that; she didn't have time for drinkers.

  'Nothing worse than a bad drunk,' she used to warn us all, lighting up a Superking and pointing the red glow of its end at Dad's silver tray of spirit bottles on the front room sideboard, indicating him. Which we found odd, because he was quite good at being drunk.

  Mum smoking; the smell of it filling the lounge. That wasn’t something I thought I’d miss, but I did.

  Losing Mum changed everything. When she left our lives, there was a gap. And gaps need filling, don’t they? So, I started looking. Looking in between the gaps, looking for what should have been there; and finding what was there too, finding what was supposed to be long dead and deeply buried.

  But that was later and my story starts before then. It starts with an ending: with her ending, on the day white goods conspired to do-in our beloved mother in her own house, with her horrified family watching. And a bit before that, too; on our last holiday together as a family.

  You see, I have two beginnings. Two places where my story can start. And it's hard to know which one should come first, so I'll have to tell them both at once.

  Our house was number 45, Victoria Avenue. End of a terrace.

  ‘Semi-detached,’ Mum optimistically corrected, should anyone use that other, less well-to-do phrase.

  Number 45. A small front porch led into the hardly-ever-used front room, with an autumn-yellow carpet, patterned with leaves. Our best three-piece-suite sat in this room: bottle green velvet, with wooden arms – dark and glossy. A teak sideboard squeezed into the right hand alcove. Dad’s stereo was in here, with his speakers in each corner and his box of LPs from the sixties. And white boxes – this was where Dad kept most of his white boxes.

  ‘They’ll be gone in a day or so,’ he’d promise Mum, whenever she complained about them taking-over-her-whole-house. And, true to his word, they usually were – only to be swiftly replaced by another shipment.

  A door from the front room led to a staircase that cut straight across the house, with just a square of carpet separating you from the door to the back room. We played for hours on the stairs as kids. We’d shut the doors at the bottom and at the bedroom doors upstairs and pretend it was a different place. We would set up a garage of cars on the L-shaped landing and send the little vehicles flying down the stairs. I sent my Action-Man tank down them once and it hit Mum’s legs as she walked through.

  ‘You can stop that right now! Little buggers!’

  The back room was the room we used the most. Originally, this had been the kitchen space, before we had the extension – I’ll come to that in a bit. Later, it became our family room: a squeezed-in place, with too much furniture and not enough space.

  ‘You wanna knock through,’ my Auntie Stella was fond of suggesting, like she knew about these things. ‘Put a spiral staircase in the corner. Open it up. Oh, I’d love one of them.’

  But we never did. We never did anything to our house that we didn�
��t really need to. It was privately rented; that was Dad’s excuse. No point in putting in the effort when it wasn’t ours to keep. It was a point of pride – the privately rented bit. It wasn’t council was my Dad’s point. It set us apart: we lived privately.

  In a space ten feet square, my parents managed to cram a foldaway dining table, a sofa, an armchair, a TV set and a grey and red leather pouffe. There was also a door that led to the cupboard-under-the-stairs; another favourite play-place. The cupboard housed five foldaway orange-vinyl stools (used to accompany our dining table), heaps of coats and usually a large sack or two of potatoes. The floor of the back room was covered in beige carpet tiles and these in turn had a kaleidoscopic, circular rug over the top of it - a design of multi-coloured and multi-patterned triangles, circumferenced in a fringe of red tassels.

  Beyond this was the extension – a phrase that sat proudly alongside privately-rented and semi-detached. Here was our kitchen: long, narrow, with limited space and unlimited appliances. On the left, we had a tall larder, fridge, a gas cooker, and two doors that hid the airing cupboard and emersion heater; on the right were the washing machine, dishwasher, and the sink, with a gas-heater above it that got you instant hot water.

  ‘You a got a dishwasher?’ said my mate Justin, amazed. I just shrugged, playing it cool. ‘Where’d you get it?’

  ‘Comes from Dontask,’ I said. ‘Haven’t you got one too?’

  I wasn’t supposed to say where our stuff came from – that was one of Dad’s golden rules. But it didn’t matter with Justin. Our dads worked together, so it was likely Justin knew anyway.

  ‘Where?’ he asked, as if he’d never heard of it.

  ‘You know - Dontask.’

  Justin had just shrugged, like he didn’t really understand, so we changed the subject.

  At the end of the kitchen was the world’s coldest bathroom, with another door leading off to the world’s coldest toilet. The flooring throughout the extension was an ornate pattern of red and black vinyl that didn’t-show-the-dirt; the walls differed – pale green in the kitchen, garish pink in the bathroom, and toilet-flush-blue in the loo.

  There was a lean-to just outside the back door, which led to our garden and the big shed at the end. The lean-to – a roof of corrugated plastic – was where Dad kept the rest of his white boxes, the ones that wouldn’t fit in our front room. White boxes full of thingy-me-bobs and what-ya-ma-call-its. White boxes I wasn’t allowed to go poking in. Things from Dontask.

  Our house, then, where the five of us lived: Mum, Dad, Ian, Della and me. Until that day. Then it was just the four of us.

  When it happened, Ian was upstairs doing something-he-shouldn’t’ve, according to Della. He was 16 to my just-12, but I knew what she was talking about. I’d spied a strange ritual occurring a few times at night, when it was lights-out time.

  We shared a room, much to his discontent, and, through the shadows, I’d seen Ian bend his legs up under the bedclothes, making a small tent. This was accompanied by a low panting sound and some hand shuffling. It all started off slow and quiet, but built up in pace and volume, eventually ending with a sharp gasp – somewhere between joy and being winded – followed by a slow, satisfied sigh. Then, he’d roll over and go to sleep.

  I’d witnessed this several times before asking Ian about it. He simply went red in the face and mumbled something about finding-out-about-it-all-myself-one-day. I didn’t ask him again, and the nightly huff-puffing-shuffling seemed to stop.

  Ian was the eldest; Della was next at 14.

  Ian reckoned that Della should be sharing a room with me, not him, as he was much older and needed his own space to grow up in.

  ‘To do you-know-what in,’ Della had corrected. Had she too encountered Ian’s bizarre lights-out palaver?

  Mum had slapped Della’s arm, but she hadn’t corrected her.

  They were in the kitchen together, chatting. I was in the back room, with the door slightly ajar. They didn’t know I was there; didn’t have a clue I was listening. Didn’t have a clue about other things, too. But that’s how life works: you don’t know what’s gonna happen until afterwards. It’s not like in films or on the TV – you don’t get a preview; you don’t get to choose if you watch it or not. It just happens before you. None of us would have chosen to see what happened to Mum, but we all did. We all had to see it. No choice.

  ‘I’m never sharing with him again, anyway,’ Della continued, referring to Ian’s proposed reshuffle of our bedroom arrangements. The him was a direct reference to me.

  ‘Now Del, you know that was a misunderstanding,’ Mum said.

  ‘So he said.’

  My skin quickly pricked with bumps: I knew exactly what they were talking about. How could I ever forget? It had happened the summer before. On our last holiday together. And Mum was right: it was a just a misunderstanding; an obvious error of judgement on my part and a mortifying presumption on Della’s.

  And that’s my other beginning: an embarrassing incident that occurred on our last family holiday together. The last before we lost Mum.

  We went to Cornwall every year it seemed. Stayed in a caravan. All of us – Mum, Dad, Della, Ian, me and Auntie Stella. Auntie Stella was Mum’s slightly-older, younger-looking, child-free and more energetic sister.

  ‘The slutty one,’ Mum would say, with a curt sniff. ‘All fur coat and no knickers.’

  I didn’t get it: Auntie Stella had a leopard print anorak and I’d seen her knickers drip-drying on a makeshift line over the sink, when we went caravanning. So, I knew she had a few pairs at least.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ Mum insisted, throwing me an impatient glare when I questioned. But I insisted I didn’t. ‘She’s a bit fresh with men. Any men,’ she added, giving Dad a glance.

  I said I was finally getting it.

  On more than one occasion, I’d seen Dad rub right up against Auntie Stella in the caravan.

  ‘Bit of a squeeze in here,’ he’d said once and she’d giggled like Barbara Windsor off a Carry-On film.

  ‘Oh,’ I said to Mum, and the subject was dropped.

  ‘She likes to keep it in the family,’ Ian had said to me later, thinking it needed further explanation.

  I offered Ian one of my puzzled glances.

  ‘Forget it. But there’s life in the old dog yet, eh?’

  ‘What dog?’ I asked, keeping my baffled face on.

  ‘Fuck off, Squirt,’ Ian told me, rolling over on his bunk, saying he was going to sleep. I listened out for signs of the huff-puffing, but none was forthcoming.

  The misunderstanding with Della happened on the third evening of our caravan holiday that year.

  The caravan was small, but ‘quite modern’ according to Dad. We still had to queue up for a wash, but we had our own loo, a kitchen area, with a table that turned into a bed and a lounge area that had seats all round the edge. The lounge was where Della and Auntie Stella usually slept, apart from the nights that Auntie Stella didn’t come home. These seemed to be the occasions when she’d forget her knickers and the mystery fur coat would come out. At the other end of the caravan were two bedrooms: a double for Mum and Dad, and a narrow one with bunks for me and Ian.

  On the third day, we all went out for a day trip to a place called Lilliput Land; a miniature village populated with tiny people that lived in equally tiny houses. We had been there a few times before. Ian and Della had loved it when they were younger, but on this trip they moaned and dragged their feet all day. I still thought it was brilliant. There was a Gulliver, from Gulliver’s Travels, all tied up and surrounded by tiny people. He was about my size, but made from clay or something. Everything else around him was small; the little people about the size of my feet. There were other attractions too: a police station, a fire station and lots of scenes from books or nursery rhymes. Auntie Stella took lots of pictures of me stood next to things in my brown parka coat.

  Auntie Stella had brought a guest along for the day: Gary Perkins.

 
; Uncle Gary, she insisted we called him, something we all squirmed about, including him. Everyone knew Gary from home – he worked with Dad and Justin’s dad at Dontask. Calling him Uncle was weird for a number of reasons; not only were we not related, but he was also only a few years older than Ian.

  (‘Old enough to be his mother,’ Mum had muttered, referring to Auntie Stella, but when I did the maths it didn’t quite work out.)

  ‘Look who was passing?’ Auntie Stella cheerily announced, like it was all a coincidence.

  ‘Your meal ticket’s here, Stel,’ Dad had joked, when he arrived, but he soon stopped making jibes when Uncle Gary offered to pay for our entry into Lilliput Land. ‘Well, if you insist…’

  ‘Won’t you be hot in that coat?’ Uncle Gary had said, referring to me and my brown anorak. ‘Sun’s out and that.’

  Auntie Stella pulled his arm and whispered something, which caused him to say ‘Ok, alright,’ and look at me with a frown. ‘Shouldn’t they get him a bigger one, though?’ I heard him say later, when I wasn’t supposed to hear at all.

  The Battle of the Brown Anorak had begun when I was nine. It was still quite big then.

  ‘A bigger size will last longer,’ Mum had insisted, in the shop. The thing had swamped me and we’d had to roll the sleeves up till they were thick like polo necks. You could just about see my fingers then. But Mum had seen it in the window of Millets, reduced in the sale and that was the overriding appeal factor. ‘Just what we were looking for,’ she’d said, continuing to ignore the fact it didn’t fit. ‘We’ll have it.’

  When I reached ten it fitted perfectly, but a growth spurt six months later changed things dramatically in the other direction. But I wasn’t giving it up by then. I liked the smell. And it kept me safe, made me feel safe inside.

  I knew exactly what Auntie Stella had whispered to Uncle Gary. Knew every word. He. Wears. It. Everywhere. That’s what she’d said. It wasn’t true. Didn’t wear it in the bath, or in bed. And I let Mum wash it too, despite what Della claimed. But if I was outside, I wore it. Like I said, it kept me safe.