White Goods (33 page)

They’ll have
other things on their minds,
Della had
rightly predicted.

Much to Della’s relief,
Crinky wasn’t in residence.

‘The police released his
body to the undertakers yesterday and we got permission to sort
through his things this morning,’ Chrissie explained, as she
ushered us in.

‘Not treating it as
suspicious then?’ Della inquired, and several sets of Tankard eyes
glared at her. She’d definitely said the wrong thing.

Chrissie broke the spell
of apparent ill-will.

‘No,’ she
said, throwing her kids a look that said
thought-you-had-things-to-get-on-with?
‘No, not being treated as suspicious.’ She stopped for a
minute, caught up in something, but then the moment was over and
she was back to the task in hand. ‘Now, we’ve got a system going
and what we really need is your elbow grease.’

Della gave me
a look that said
don’t-make-any-stupid-comments-you-know-exactly-what-she-means
;
yet it wasn’t necessary - that look. I wasn’t playing word games
anymore, was I? Then, Della asked Chrissie where she’d like us to
start.

‘We’ve only cleared one
of the back rooms so far, so if you can make a start cleaning in
there, that’ll be great. You two talking yet?’

Suddenly, Chrissie had
switched from talking to all three of us to just me.

I shrugged, not certain
of what to say.

‘Bad as each other,’
Chrissie eventually uttered over my silence, before walking off.
‘Della, put the kettle on and then get your two chaps started up.
Sooner we start, sooner we can get out of here.’

Russell followed her into
the kitchen.

‘Not suspicious?’ I heard
him whisper, urgently. ‘How can it not be suspicious?’

I think Justin heard,
because he looked up from what he was doing – wrapping up cups and
plates in newspaper and putting them in a thin wooden crate – and
gave Russell a silent glare.

‘Right. Justin, Scot. You
follow me.’ Chrissie was back. ‘Della and loverboy will be fine in
here on their own. I want you two to pack up the stuff in the spare
bedroom.’

I followed Chrissie, and
heard Justin behind me, scuffing his feet against the floor as he
went, making his presence known without speaking. I wasn’t sure if
this was some kind of threat or just his way of showing a little
reluctance at being in the same place as me.

‘Right, as with the other
rooms,’ Chrissie instructed, ignoring the icy atmosphere that was
evident between me and her son, ‘you need to clear out all the
newspapers and magazines first. Take them to where Stevie is in the
garden. Once it’s clear, come back to me for some boxes for the
other stuff. Okay?’

We both nodded:
okay.

‘Oh good,’ she said, a
little sarcastically, as she went to leave. ‘And while you’re at
it, you sort out whatever you need to sort out. I know stuff has
been going on, but if you ain’t talking by the end of the day, I’ll
bash your heads together until you are. Get it?’

I nodded, allowing a
small smile to curl up on my lips. I liked Chrissie’s tough-love
ways; if she ever told you off, there was always an element of fun
involved, even if it was just a parting comment. I looked to
Justin: his face kept its cold, stony exterior and it looked like
nothing was gonna shift it, short of one of Chrissie’s fearful
slaps.

‘Break a smile, or I’ll
break a tooth,’ she threatened, and, whilst his mouth kept its
pose, his eyes twinkled a little in response.

Once his mother had left
us, however, it was back to where we’d started: glaring looks and
unyielding silence. So, I simply focused on the task in hand and
began to sort and remove piles of old papers, magazines and letters
from the late Crinky’s spare room, carrying them out through the
hall, into the kitchen, out the back door and into the garden,
where Stevie-the-little-shit was in charge of the next stage: a
bonfire to incinerate the lot.

The spare room at the
back was no different from the rest of Crinky’s house: every
possible space filled with paper. Paper he had collected and kept
over many years. As we started to clear it, I wanted to talk about
it, maybe find out a bit more about Crinky, but I knew I’d get
nothing from Justin, so I kept all my questions inside. It took us
nearly two hours just to clear the mess we could see. Once done,
the room appeared like any other bedroom. The floor wasn’t carpeted
– just bare boards, with loose rugs. There was a double bed, with a
thick, purple eiderdown across it. There was bedside furniture and
a chest of drawers, all made from mahogany wood. However, once we’d
cleared up what was initially on view, further areas of work
appeared: under the bed, inside a double wardrobe, inside drawers,
and inside a built-in cupboard in the corner.

‘We’ll be here all day,’
I said, hoping to catch Justin off-guard, but he was on full
friendship-attempt-alert and didn’t pull a single facial muscle in
response.

Crinky’s collection
wasn’t just newspapers and letters. He kept a whole range of
paper-based items: food wrappers, including a whole pile of Heinz
Baked Bean tin labels; paper bags of all shapes and sizes; wrapping
paper – Christmas, birthday, plain-brown; used notepads; old school
books; bills for the electric, gas and telephone; shopping
receipts. The wardrobe itself was solid with books: not books you
could still read, though, because Crinky appeared to have torn off
the covers and simply kept the loose pages, and they weren’t in any
order, either.

I kept
expecting to find something interesting along the way. Maybe
something dodgy? Crinky had a strange reputation after
all
. Or maybe I’d find something that gave
a clue about Crinky’s life, or revealed a secret. But there was no
pattern with this hoarded material; it was all random. The books in
the wardrobe were anything from Charles Dickens to car manuals; the
newspapers covered the
Sun, the Express,
the Times, the Guardian,
the lot; and his
magazines were anything from
Women’s
Realm
to copies of
Smash Hits.

‘How come you know him?’
I said, without thinking, lost in my reflections for a minute. Then
I remembered. ‘Oh yes, you still ain’t talking to me. Oh, well
done, you’re doing a great job,’ I added, grabbing a pile of the
books and taking them out to the garden, to where
Stevie-the-little-shit’s little bonfire was letting off a fair bit
of heat.

‘Just keep an eye on it!’
Chrissie cried out from a window, fag flapping in her mouth. ‘Don’t
let it spread!’

When I got back to the
room, Justin was sitting on the bed, like he was waiting for me.
When I entered, he spoke to me for the first time.

‘He’s sort of
a relation,’ he said, shrugging as he said it. ‘On Dad’s side. No
one really speaks about it. Mum doesn’t like to, either. She’ll
defend Crinky. Defended. Made us come here – Christmas, Easter,
birthdays. Despite the weirdness. But she didn’t like to talk about
it.
He’s just a relative, one of your
Dad’s, that’s all you need to know.
So,
that’s all I know.’

‘Okay,’ I said and we
half-smiled at each other, melting a little bit of the frostiness
between us. I had another question too, another question about
Crinky that maybe Justin would answer. ‘Was he really a danger to
you lot?’

He screwed his face up, as
if he didn’t quite understand.

‘
Just
something I heard once. From your mum. In the Chequers one
lunchtime.’ I lowered my voice, suddenly feeling conscious. This
was Crinky’s house after all, even if he was dead. ‘She said you
couldn’t be left with him, that you guys didn’t feel
safe.’

Justin shrugged, then he
seemed caught up in his thoughts for a bit, before he spoke
again.

‘
There was one
time. Ages ago. We were left with him for the evening, and we were
a bit freaked.’

‘
What did he
do?’

A pause – as if unsure he
should share; maybe wondering, like me, if our discussion wasn’t
just a bit disrespectful.

‘
It was
Stevie. What Crinky did to him. Nothing pervy or anything. He got a
bit tipsy and gave Stevie this big hug. He was only about six or
seven at the time. He wouldn’t let him go. And he was
crying.’

‘
Stevie?’

‘
No, Crinky.
Really crying, like a baby. We were a bit freaked out. I shouldn’t
be saying.’

‘
Sorry.’

Another shrug from Justin.
‘S’okay. Guess that must be it. Don’t remember Mum leaving us with
him again. Quite glad, though. He was a bit odd, you
know?’

‘
Thanks.’ I
paused, thought about my next word, and then decided to go for it.
‘I’m sorry. Really sorry. I was just so scared. But I’m
sorry.’

Justin simply looked at
me for a minute: cold again, his eyes blank of expression. Then he
nodded and shrugged, simultaneously, like there was nothing to say,
I guess.

‘How long do you reckon
it’ll take before Stevie burns the neighbourhood down?’ he
eventually asked, a grin splitting open his face, warming it
up.

‘I give him five
minutes!’

‘Ten tops!’

And then it was like the
Jubilee Park incident and my near-hanging hadn’t happened. Like all
the damage was repaired. Only those incidents had happened and the
damage was there, just beneath the surface. Waiting to break
through and crack the smooth exterior of things. That would come, a
month or so later. For now, we just revelled in the glory of being
friends again.

As the room
got clearer and clearer of Crinky’s rubbish, we made a few
discoveries. Under the mattress on the bed, we found an out-of-date
passport in the name of one Richard Albert Crunch. The photograph
in it was in black and white and was of a teenage boy, but it was
clearly Crinky. A young, thin Crinky. Justin found some underwear
in one of the bedside cabinets: a pair of nylon pants; huge,
patterned with brown and orange paisley. Justin suggested we both
get in them, for a laugh, but I recalled the incident with his
whatsit at Christmas and declined his offer. We’d never
explain
that
one
away. In the same cabinet as the pants was a single, felt purple
slipper, with its foam sole all picked away on the
bottom.

‘Why would you keep
that?’

Then a brown envelope
caught Justin’s eye, sticking out from under a worn, green rug.
Inside, there were half a dozen Polaroids. He had a quick flick
through, shrugging as he went.

‘Bit boring,’ he said,
handing them over to me, and then flicking back the rug, having a
look behind it. ‘What’s this?’ he continued, but photographs had
distracted me and I didn’t respond.

You see, they meant
something to me; they were something I had come across
before.

‘Scot, look!’

I put the snaps aside,
making sure not to lose them amongst the remaining scraps of paper
that surrounded us, and finally Justin had my attention.

Justin had rolled the
faded rug up completely and revealed something in the floor: a
square trap cut out in the floorboards.

‘Come on, let’s
look.’

There was a ring of metal
attached to the door and Justin pulled on this, pulling it up,
creating a dark, square hole in the middle of Crinky’s nearly empty
spare room.

‘What do you think it
is?’

‘Must be a cellar or a
storage place?

‘Shall we go
in?’

‘What?’

‘Shall we go
in?’

I was reluctant. Justin
had a devilish look on his face – a look that often preceded us
getting into trouble.

‘Come on, how’s it gonna
hurt?’

‘We don’t know what might
be down there,’ I protested, a little uneasy.

‘That’s why we need to
look – to find out.’

‘Okay, okay – but you
first.’

‘JESUS!!’

The sound came from the
garden: Chrissie’s voice in its highest, hardest form. It had
followed a loud ‘pop’ sound and was succeeded by yet
another.

‘WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU
PLAYING AT?!’ she continued, panic and fear flooding her smoky
vocals.

Momentarily, we were
distracted from the trap door and leapt up, heading outside. There
we found the predictable source of the chaos and shouting:
Stevie-the-little-shit. In his enthusiasm to get the fire really
cracking, he had thrown whatever he could get his hands on onto the
blaze. This included not only the endless supply of paperwork that
all the helpers were providing, but some logs from a store shed, a
stack of fruit and vegetable crates he’d found and – to add that
little bit of excitement to the proceedings – several empty
deodorant cans he’d found in carrier bags by the back door. Guess a
man the size of Crinky got through his fair share. It was the cans
that were now creating the ‘popping’ sounds, as well as creating
blue and purple flames that flew out of the main orange glow of the
pyre.