White Goods (10 page)

‘
Here we
go!’

We had been speculating
about it all week.

‘Reckon it’s a new
stereo, a stack system.’

‘A new TV.’

‘What if it’s a dog?’ Ian
and Della had reverted to their usual partnership of sniggering
when I said this.

‘A
dog
?’

‘Right!’ said Dad, the
plastic white strips cut away, the brown sticky-tape ripped off and
the box open. He reached inside and pulled out a big black metal
box.

‘Another TV,’ Ian said,
but he was wrong.

‘It’s your new
mother!’

I’ll swear that’s what Dad
said.

‘
Someone to
help us get by!’

Della
corrected me later:
‘He said microwave
oven, and ‘something’, not ‘someone’.’
She’d been quite cross at the time, not sure who with. But I
reckon she knew I was right - whatever he’d actually said, it’s
what he meant: your new mother.

‘Oh, Tony. Very nice.
They’re new, aren’t they?’ Auntie Stella.

‘She’ll help
us get by,’ Dad added, nodding a ‘yes’ at Auntie Stella,
tapping
her
on
the top, like he was proud. ‘What do you think of her,
kids?’

We all said
we liked
her
very
much and then our Dad carried her through to the kitchen, where
Auntie Stella fussed, helping him to find a place and plug
her
in.

It was Della
who starting calling her
Marilyn.

Dad didn’t know and
neither did Auntie Stella, who kept having nights over and started
wearing Mum’s dressing gown regularly.

‘That’s Mum’s,’ Della
told her one morning, in case she’d forgotten.

Her tone was
a bit cold, leaving a frosty crust over the atmosphere. Auntie
Stella cracked it with a quiet, verbal ice-pick:
‘
Was,
Della.’ Her
voice a subtle, metallic tap. ‘But your daddy gave it to
me.’

Della said nothing else,
like she’d gone dumb for a bit, struck mute, what she wanted to
stay trapped behind sewn-up lips. She didn’t like it, though. Not
one bit.

None of us
did.

Carry-On-Auntie
, so it seemed, had
joined the unspoken competition to replace our Mum.
Marilyn
was the only
other contender and, despite initial misgivings from me, was
clearly the favourite for the three-of-us. The
three-of-us:
down from the
four-of-us
, as Dad
appeared to be backing Auntie Stella. She still slept on the sofa
when she stayed, but we were
just
waiting.
Well, Ian and Della were, so they
said.

‘But what you waiting
for?’ I asked several times.

‘You
know
exactly
what,’ was the gist of their replies and I let it
go.

Marilyn did have a lot
going for her, though.

A timer, for starters –
so she heated up our food to the temperature it actually needed. No
less – and no more. ‘Ping,’ she said, whenever she was done. Not:
‘Oh, bugger, gonna have to open another tin of ravioli, kids. The
little sods have stuck themselves to the pan.’ The burnt meal was a
casualty of Auntie Stella painting her nails and not moving the
wooden spoon.

Marilyn didn’t get
fag-ash on your bread and butter, either. ‘Oh, just rub it in and
stop fussing.’

Marilyn had built-in
instructions on how to cook different types of food.

‘What tin
tonight then, kids?’ was Auntie Stella’s main offering, other than
‘a fish supper’ that she deliciously announced one evening – a dish
that spoke of tender flavour and much promise, but turned out to
be
Harry’s
battered best.

People were generally
impressed with Marilyn, too. Couple of the neighbours coming round
to ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ like she was a newborn. Justin reckoned they
were getting one, too.

‘My Dad says we’re
getting one next week,’ he bragged, but we knew about his Dad. He
could get hold of them – just like our dad could - but Adrian
Tankard just sold his share on. His family never saw the money,
either – the pub did. But I wasn’t supposed to know that and I’d
definitely never say it to Justin.

Best of all,
though, Marilyn just stuck to what she was good at: cooking. No
branching out; no pretending she was something she wasn’t. No
pretending she’d make a nice housekeeper. No ironing iron-shaped
patterns into our Ian’s football shirts; no tidying away our stuff
into the bin by accident; no putting a perfectly good parka coat
through the wash and pulling out nothing but foam and loose rags
from the machine. In short, Marilyn’s big achievement was
not
making herself
public enemy number one.

‘We don’t need a new
mum,’ Della declared, as I sat in front of the washing machine,
tears dripping from my face onto the remains of my protective
armour. ‘Maybe you were right. Maybe Dad did introduce Marilyn as
our new mum. Maybe she’ll do.’

I giggled and sniffed
away some tears and snot.

‘Marilyn? Who’s
Marilyn?’

‘Marilyn Microwave, of
course.’

Another shared moment;
another sticky plaster stuck over the wounds that had divided us
the summer before.

‘How do we stop her? How
do we keep Auntie Stella just as our auntie?’

‘We need a plan,’ said
Ian. We were still in the kitchen, sitting on the red and black
lino that was covered in foamy lining from my special parka. Ian
was stood in the doorway, his feet in the back room. A big grin
covered his face. ‘A good plan.’

Our campaign
to
curb-Auntie-Stella’s-advancement,
as
Ian put it, took several weeks to work. There were a few
facts-of-life
– Dad’s
words – that didn’t help our cause.

‘Your
auntie’s lost her flat,’ we discovered one evening, when Ian asked
Dad to explain why a red leather suitcase had appeared in front
room. We recognised it from annual caravanning trips. It was
where
Lady-Muck-kept-her-war-paint,
according to Mum. I was certain it belonged to
Auntie Stella, but I was quickly hushed-up when I said this in
company. I’d been right though, because there it was, full of
tights, knickers, bras and short skirts, when Della had a nosey,
and no sign of any paint tins. ‘So, I’m kipping on the sofa and
she’s having the upstairs room for a bit. Whilst she gets
sorted.’

The upstairs
room.
Dad used to call it
our room.
Dad couldn’t
bring himself to call it that anymore, Ian had said
later.

We had all gathered to
plot things in Della’s room.

‘How could
she lose her flat?’ I asked, acting up all puzzled. It wasn’t like
losing your purse. Although, it could have been a bit like losing
your mind, and I didn’t get that one either. For starters, your
mind is invisible, so how could you know that you’d lost it, even
if you
could
lose
it.
Sorry for your loss.
I said all of this to Ian and Della, but they
didn’t really answer.

‘She’s behind on the
rent,’ Ian eventually said, and I tried not to over-think that
phrase too. I imagined her queuing up behind something that wasn’t
really a physical thing. ‘So, her landlord kicked her out. I heard
Dad saying that most of her stuff was at his lock-up.’ The lock-up
was where Dad kept the big stuff that came in big boxes; things
that wouldn’t fit in our front room or under the lean-to out the
back. He kept his big van there too, the one he’d driven on our
last caravan trip. I’d never been there, but I imagined a big
warehouse, with huge doors and lots of padlocks keeping people out.
A fierce dog, too; but no one had ever mentioned a dog.

‘What about Gary?’ Della
threw in and Ian shrugged. ‘Couldn’t she live with him?’

‘She’s gone a bit quiet
on that front.’

It was true.
In the weeks that had followed the funeral, we hadn’t really
seen
Uncle
Gary.
He usually came round, delivering stuff, several times a week. We’d
had no white boxes of any shape delivered to our house since the
police had come. Only Marilyn, and she didn’t count because she
wasn’t
business.

‘Maybe we should have a
word with him?’ I suggested, but Ian ignored the
comment.

Ian sighed. ‘Look, let’s
just stick to what we’ve agreed for now. It might work. So, just
play it cool. Nothing too obvious. Just make it look like things
have gone back to normal. Like nothing has really
changed.’

But that was
easier said than done, because things
were
changing; things were moving
on. Not everything, but most things.

Ian was true
to his word – Mum had been gone less than a month and he was back
to his late night huff-puffing and grunting palaver.
Just make it look like things have gone back to
normal.
But I wasn’t sure there was much
normal about making a tent with your bed covers and shuffling about
the way he did.

Della didn’t quite go
back to normal, because she was still being nice to me; surely that
was enough to make our entire family suspicious that something was
up?

I did my best to act like
nothing was different, but it was difficult without my coat. What I
needed was a new one – I needed a plan for that as well.

Alongside acting as if
nothing had changed, the plan to oust Auntie Stella by playing up a
bit.

‘
Put her off
us as much as possible, okay?’

Ian stopped
washing himself, did lots of farts and burps, and left his plate on
the table at mealtimes. Della followed suit - minus the bodily
malfunctions - and left dirty clothes and wet towels on the floor.
Both were cheeky to Auntie Stella and sometimes ignored her
completely, but only when Dad wasn’t about. I tried to join in, but
found it hard – I didn’t want to blow off all day or let her find
my grubby pants on the floor; I felt a sense of pride. So, I tried
a different approach – I tried to make our dad look bad instead. I
took one of Ian’s magazine’s from under his bed and put it under
Dad’s pillow, knowing Auntie Stella would find it there when she
went to bed.
What you do that for?
Ian had cursed, when I told him.
Get it back now, before Dad finds out!
Following that particular failure, I put a
spoonful of curry paste inside a pair of Dad’s pants and left them
under the sofa where he was sleeping. This met with greater
success.
Oh, Tony, really!
I heard Auntie Stella cry, rushing them off to
the outside bin. I quietly cheered to myself, thinking I’d cracked
it – but she remained.

‘Sooner or later, it’ll
all get to her,’ Ian had reassured us. ‘Slowly but surely. You’ll
see.’

So, we stuck to the
plan.

With Mum
gone, there were
some
things that changed for the better - like hanging out with
Justin. She couldn’t stop me anymore. Dad didn’t really notice; he
had
business-to-attend-to
most days.

So in the last weeks of
the summer holidays, as Mum started to fade away and we quietly
worked on getting rid of her unwelcome replacement, I started
hanging out with Justin Tankard more and more, and didn’t really
bother about who knew or who cared.

Hanging
out
with Justin meant going into town. I
wasn’t entirely sure if going into town was allowed, but I’d never
been told I
couldn’t
go, whereas I was definitely to keep away from the estate,
the river and
that Tankard
household.
(Mum’s words.)

Justin turned up one
morning, with a towel rolled up under one arm and Tina at his
side.

‘Going to the pool in
town. You allowed out?’ he asked.

Justin saw me look at
Tina and he grinned.

‘She ain’t coming in,’ he
reassured me.

I’d never been to the
swimming pool without school or my parents before. Something else
Mum hadn’t allowed.

‘Not until you can do it
without armbands,’ she had insisted.

Ian and Della were
allowed to go, though – on Sunday mornings, stopping at the old
fashioned sweet shop by the park on their way home, 50p each to
spend. I had to stay at home; bored. Nothing better to do than
visit Nan Buckley – or Red Nanny as we had started to call her on
the sly. Red on account of her perfectly painted nails and her lips
that peaked like a heart at the top, just under her
nose.

I knew the pool though –
through school swimming lessons and watching Della in the evenings,
when she did her championship stuff that one year.

‘You still heading for
the Olympics?’ Red Nanny would say on every visit, lips and nails
perfect like she’d been born with them, a red tartan blanket across
her legs, whatever the weather.