White Goods (14 page)

‘What’s the idiot done
now?’ Dad mumbled, eventually coming to his feet, taking steps
towards the front where all the action was happening. We followed
him.

Auntie Stella
was holding a thin bunch of flowers in one of her hands and had a
huge grin across her face. Her teeth caught the light and seemed to
sparkle.
Like a diamond,
I thought to myself, which turned out to be
apt.

‘We’re getting engaged!’
she announced, still grinning at us, unaware of the paling effect
these words had on her doorstep suitor. ‘We’re getting married,’
she added, in case we still had any doubts, tears of joy staining
her face with dirty mascara tracks. ‘Isn’t it
brilliant?’

Yes, it
is,
I thought to myself, looking at
Uncle
Gary, who looked
like he was going to be sick.

‘And I’m going to move in
too!’ Auntie Stella added - the cherry on the cake - pushing past
us with her flowers, heading to Mum and Dad’s room where all her
stuff was.

‘What?
Now
?’ asked Dad,
stepping back, giving
Uncle
Gary a nod of approval. I’d expected Dad to be a
bit disappointed. But he wasn’t. Maybe we’d got that bit wrong?
‘Super. Be nice to have my bed back.’

‘Yes,’ Auntie Stella
replied, making her way up the stairs. ‘Why wait?’

Uncle
Gary continued to look grey, as he hovered in our
porch.

Thank
you,
I mouthed as we all turned to go back
in, whilst Auntie Stella packed up her stuff.

Uncle
Gary just nodded.

‘He looks a bit
shell-shocked,’ Della muttered to Ian.

‘Who wouldn’t be?’ Ian
replied and they both laughed.

‘You gonna
come in?’ I asked the man of the moment and
Uncle
Gary finally spoke.

‘Yes, of course,’ and
with that he seemed to liven up, as if he was just getting used to
the announcement.

‘Better open
some Asti!’ Dad cried from the kitchen, distracting me from this
observation. Seconds later, a celebratory
pop
cracked through the
atmosphere.

Once they were gone, I
sat on our front steps, looking down our road. It was getting
chilly, summer nearly gone for good again. It was getting darker
earlier, too.

I glanced back
inside our porch, looking at the hooks where we hung our coats.
Looking at the
big gesture
Dad had made after making me sick with the
stew.
Here you go,
he’d said to me, handing me a big
Millets
bag.
Just what you needed, eh?
It was a
new parka coat: navy, metallic blue, with a big fur hood, and
plenty of room to grow into. I hadn’t worn it yet. Hadn’t found the
right moment to break it in. Just hung it up on my peg in the
porch.

With the chill coming that
night, I could have pulled it off the peg and put it on. Zipped it
right up, with the hood up, so you could just about see my face
behind the circle of fur that surrounded it. But I didn’t. I left
it hanging there.

‘That’s better,’ said
Ian, joining me out the front, wondering where I was, referring to
the extra room we now had in our house.

‘Yeah,’ I
agreed, still looking down the road, at the now empty space where
I’d watched Auntie Stella disappear in
Uncle
Gary’s
Mandarin
Cortina, trying not to
think about his face when I thanked him.

Later, much
later, I thought back to that day. To one
moment in particular. Leaving Justin with Roy and the older
boy. You see, it was the start of something; the start of trouble.
What if I hadn’t run after
Uncle
Gary’s car? What if I’d stayed? Guess Auntie
Stella might have become our new mum. So, we were saved from that.
But something else happened instead. It was like we had swapped one
bad thing for another. For something worse.

Sometimes, I
just wanted to take it back. Change what I did. Maybe I got out of
the car and went back to Justin after my chat with
Uncle
Gary? Or maybe I
just waited till I got home and asked Ian to show me where
Uncle
Gary lived on the
estate instead? But you couldn’t change some things, could you? You
had to live with how things were.

You couldn’t change what
you’d done or what had happened. Just like you couldn’t bring
people back from the dead. No matter how much you wanted
to.

Could you?

5.

A week later, the summer
holidays were over. We were back at school and everyone – kids,
teachers, parents in the playground - wanted to hear about
Mum.

Tell us what
happened, Scot!

Is it true
the police came round?

Tell us
again, Buckley – tell us how it happened.

Dad had forgotten about
school – about what you needed, about the trip into town a week
before it starts to buy new shoes, new uniform, new pants, new
socks, and new pencils, pens, rulers and pencil case. Della needed
a new calculator this year. Nevertheless, he forgot it
all.

‘Your Auntie Stella was
gonna do that,’ he told us, as if it was nothing to do with him at
all. ‘We’ll have to sort you out at the weekend.’

He’d forgotten about
packed lunches too. It’s not that we couldn’t make them ourselves;
it’s just there wasn’t very much to go in them.

‘Here’s some money for
crisps and that,’ he offered when we moaned, his voice heavy with
sighs, as if we were expecting far too much.

So, my trousers were a
bit short, my pencils stubby from last year’s sharpening and I had
Marmite sandwiches and three Mars Bars for lunch. But that was the
least of my worries. The questions were my big concern – they
wanted to know; they wanted the detail.

Is it weird,
having no mum?

Do you get to
stay up later?

Do you miss
her?

Tell us again
– how did it happen?

Yeah,
Buckley, tell us what happened!

Eventually, I answered
their questions.

It was quiet the day it
happened.

No real noises in our
house. No music. No Della playing Abba to get up Mum’s nose. No
Della, full stop. No Ian. No me, either. We were all
out.

We all had alibis. That’s
what the police wanted to know: did we all have solid alibis? Yes,
we did.

Ian was helping Dad out
with a job – the police were very interested in that too, asking
many questions.

Della was at
her friend Melanie’s house, whose mum could verify
on-account-of-that-pop-racket!

I was at Justin’s,
something I said very quietly, as Dad was there, listening. I
wondered if it would come up later: my breaking one of Mum’s rules.
It didn’t. Had I mentioned exactly where I’d been - at the derelict
house on the edge of the dump - things might have been different.
But I didn’t, and my crime against our mother went
unpunished.

‘Are we
suspects?’ I asked, thinking it was the right thing to say, like
something from
Dempsey and
Makepeace
, or
Juliet Bravo
. Della sniggered,
coldly.

‘We just need to clear a
few things up,’ a policewoman told me, smiling kindly, not really
answering, though.

Mum had been in a funny
mood that morning. She wanted us all out of the house; out from
under her feet. She positively encouraged Ian to go with Dad, which
was unheard of.

‘Why don’t
you go with them?’
Mum said to me, almost
frightened I might not find something to keep me occupied
elsewhere.

‘I might stay
in,’
I told her, testing, seeing what
she’d say.

‘Thought you
might be out with that Walter boy,’
she
said, full of hope, taking a pound note from her purse and leaving
it on the kitchen counter as an encouragement to disappear. Walter
Smith was a boy from my school; I wasn’t friends with him, but he
was my cover story for when I sneaked off with Justin. I took the
money and headed off.

(
‘We could get some
Superkings,’
Justin suggested when I
called for him. But I had my heart set on some Drumsticks and a bag
of Space Dust.)

Della hadn’t needed any
incentive to leave the house; she was the first to head off,
stating she was hanging out with friends, no names
given.

So, one way or another,
Mum had the place to herself.

‘Some time just for me,’
she no doubt told the empty place.

We all just reckoned she
was planning to spruce the place up; getting us off the premises,
so she could have a thorough clear-out. Ransacking the cupboards;
chucking away broken toys; lining drawers with old wallpaper;
washing nets and dusting the pelmets over the windows; filling the
oven up with that deadly white foam; windows smeared pink with
Windolene; tea-stained cups soaking in bleach; bathroom gritty with
Ajax; kitchen floor sparkling with Flash; carpets peppered with
Shake ‘n’ Vac.

But that’s not what she
had in mind.

And that’s not how we
found the house.

She closed all the
curtains up- and down-stairs at the front of the house. And at the
back, she drew the back-room curtains and pulled down the kitchen
blinds. Giving her total privacy.

She left most of her
clothes upstairs – her blouse, her skirt, her tights. Her underwear
was in the bathroom, a little circle of it on the floor. Bits of
cotton wool, with smears of nail varnish remains on them, were on
the bathroom windowsill.

She must have filled the
bath up high, as there was water all over the floor, running out of
the bathroom and into the kitchen.

Finding her was the oddest
thing.

With the curtains closed,
the place was dark, shadowy. I tried the lights as I came in, but
there was no electricity. Another power cut, I thought at first;
we’d had a lot of those during that summer. I opened the curtains
in the back room and then, as I went into the kitchen, I saw the
long, white extension lead. Plugged into the socket above the
cooker, it trailed down over the top of the fridge; a thin, bright
white snake against the red and black of the lino. I followed its
trail under the bathroom door. Mini water waves slapped against my
feet at each tread.

Dad had bought the fan
heater home from Red Nanny’s sheltered flat only the night
before.

‘
It’s
packed-in, Anthony,’
she’d told him, using
her voice of disgust. I’d gone with him to
give Mum
a-moment’s-peace
.
‘Where was it purchased, again?’

Dad told Nan
Buckley that he’d bought it from
Covers
, a local posh department
store, which wasn’t true. Like everything else, it came from
Dontask. But it was the kind of thing Red Nanny liked to
hear.

‘
Well, you can
take it back and have them replace it,’
she instructed, so we brought it home with us. As you
couldn’t take stuff back to Dontask, Dad had a go at mending it
himself.

‘
Dodgy
connection! Ha!’
he triumphed later,
having got the whirry motor going again, filling the front room
with unnecessary hot air.

Mum had looked at it
suspiciously then; as if she’d known how it was all going to
end.

‘
I don’t like
those things, Tone,’
she’d said, sucking
sharply on her cigarette, leaving a lipstick circle on the amber
filter.
‘An accident waiting to happen.
You sure Doris is ok to use one of those things? You hear such
tales.’

‘
It’s not
clear exactly how the heater got in the bath water, or why she had
it going when it was a warm day. She could have had it balanced on
the edge of the bath,’ the policewoman explained to us all, kindly,
quietly, although you could read something else in her face, like
she was searching us for more. ‘Now,’ she continued, opening up a
small writing pad and clicking a pen, ‘I just need to ask where you
all were this afternoon.’

She would have died
quickly, Dad kept reassuring us, like a speedy death was a better
one. The shock would have been sharp but the electrics would have
blown almost immediately.

‘
Out like a
light,’ Auntie Stella had mumbled later, numbly.

But I kept thinking of all
that water, all over the floor, as if there had been a struggle,
and I kept thinking that it wouldn’t have been that quick after
all.

‘
Mr Buckley,’
the policewoman had asked, once we had all established our
whereabouts that afternoon, ‘was your wife unhappy with her lot? It
is possible she might have-.’