The Sound of Laughter

by Peter Kay

  The final straw came when she started to turn her attention towards me. I told her a story about the time my dad had taken me to Blackpool Pleasure Beach. I was only a boy and when I saw the ride called 'Grand Prix' I pronounced it as it was spelt – 'Grand Pricks'. Just then she brushed her hand against mine on the gearstick and said,

  'I've had some grand pricks in my time and I could do with one right now.'

  Enough was enough, I'd seen The Graduate. I pulled the car over and got out. The next thing you know I was walking up the ring road in the rain. What was wrong with the world? All I wanted to do was drive.

  Chapter Ten

  4 p.m. till Raid

  I was still on the performing arts course, and at the start of the year I collected my grant cheque. But as it only stretched to a new parka from Primark and a Terry's Chocolate Orange, I decided to take on a second part-time job. I'd heard through a friend of a friend that there were jobs going down at a local cash and carry situated on an industrial park behind the abattoir. And so I got a job working there a couple of evenings and at weekends. The hours fitted nicely around my shifts at the garage and I really needed the money if I was at least going to continue with my driving lessons.

  I settled in straight away. My job title was Shop Floor Assistant, which basically meant I dragged food pallets out of the warehouse on a forklift, then I unpacked them and stacked the produce on to shelves. It was the height of glamour.

  There were a few female members of staff working on checkout and in the office doing admin but the majority of staff at the cash and carry were male. Most of the lads I worked with were older than me and as it was the early 1990s many of them spent their weekends attending illicit raves in farmers' fields and most of their wages on drugs. I was trying to grow my hair long as I was going through a bit of a Jim Morrison phase at the time, but instead of getting beautiful flowing locks it just grew straight up like Marge Simpson's.

  We used to work in pairs and one lad I frequently ended up with was Rob Grundy. Rob liked to work hard and play hard. He was always popping pills at the weekend and Sunday mornings could be a nightmare working alongside him. He'd either be miserable as sin because he was still coming down from the night before or he'd still be high as a kite and hugging me every five minutes. Some days he just wouldn't show up for work at all, like the time he spent the night in the police cells after throwing a litter bin through a McDonald's drive-thru window, just because they'd run out of ketchup.

  The cash and carry wasn't open to lay members of the public like you or me. It was the card-carrying shopkeepers of Bolton that were our main clientele. And if I thought the customers at the garage were miserable then it was only because I hadn't met this set of grumpy tight-fisted bastards. It was like watching Van Morrison do his big shop. They used to moan about everything, the price of this, the price of that, there wasn't enough of this, there wasn't enough of that. There used to be a stampede every Saturday morning for the fresh bread. Grown men would elbow each other in the ribs over a Toasty loaf. I remember one Asian shopkeeper losing his rag because there was no thick-sliced bread left.

  'I vanted tick,' he shouted in his heavy accent.

  'You wanted what?' I said.

  'I vanted tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick,' he said repeatedly.

  'Everybody take cover,' I shouted, 'he's going to explode.'

  He wasn't amused.

  The other thing that I didn't enjoy about the cash and carry was the amount of managers that they had floating about. On a good day there could be more managers in the store than customers. They'd follow us around shouting orders and hurling abuse at us in a feeble attempt to justify their jobs. But after working at the garage for so long I now knew how to give them just as much back.

  I was pulling a pallet of Lucozade across the shop floor once. It was a heavy load and I was having to struggle quite a bit with it. It was on special offer that month and that meant it had to be positioned directly opposite the managers' office. A few of the managers were gathered outside chatting. I could see them elbowing each other out of the corner of my eye as I approached them. Mr Tickle was a smart-arse from Dundee and a real big mouth. When he saw me coming he shouted,

  'That's it, Kay, keep going, we'll soon get a bit of that weight off you, boy.'

  Then they all laughed. I stopped dead in my tracks, turned to him and said,

  'I'll have you know I do over a hundred sit-ups a day.'

  'A hundred sit-ups a day? That's nothing, the bloody dog at home does more than that,' said Mr Tickle.

  'Why?' I said. 'Does she not work?'

  The other managers tried hard not to laugh and I could see Mr Tickle turning a violent shade of purple. I'd made myself an enemy and he had it in for me from that day onwards.

  Mr Tickle saw that I was transferred over to the fruit and veg department to cover for another member of staff who was absent due to a death in the family. The bloke in question eventually returned to work only to discover that he no longer had a job. Mr Tickle had taken it upon himself to fire the bloke after deciding that he was taking too long to grieve. We advised our co-worker to take the matter further but nobody gave a shit. Part-time members of staff like us were ten a penny.

  So now I was stuck in the fruit and veg department. It could be a tough job, having to lug big bags of potatoes and carrots around all day, but I just kept my head down and got on with it. Mr Tickle would stroll past occasionally and I remember he leaned over once and whispered right into my ear:

  'You'll be gone by the end of the month, Mr Kay, because nobody fucks with me.'

  'I know, I've heard,' I shouted after him as he walked off.

  My incompetence at the job proved to be a blessing when I mistakenly mispriced the iceberg lettuce as cabbage. Well, they looked exactly the same to me. How was I supposed to know the difference? Apparently there was a big difference in price, but none of the hard-faced shopkeepers bothered to tell me. Instead they just took advantage of the situation. I had visions of them high-fiving each other as they loaded their transits.

  It went on for four days and nobody discovered the cock-up until they did a weekly stocktake. This all reflected badly on Mr Tickle who apparently shouldn't have left me in charge of a department without having had me obtain the correct health and hygiene certificate first.

  Totally humiliated, he hit the roof.

  'You made me look a right tit, how could you not tell the difference between a lettuce and a cabbage?'

  'They look exactly the same.'

  'You see this? This is a banana, this is a tomato, recognise them?' he said sarcastically waving the fruit in my face. 'You've just lost this company a fortune in produce, my boy.'

  I hardly think it was a fortune but he gave me my first verbal warning as a result nonetheless. Apparently that incident became known in the trade as Green Wednesday.

  Surprisingly, I remained on the produce department for the remainder of the week until I stabbed myself and ended up at the hospital. One day, due to sheer boredom, I decided to re-enact a scene from the film Aliens featuring the knife-wielding android called Bishop. I laid the palm of my hand flat out on the counter face down and with my fingers spread I proceeded to stab in between each of them with a sharp knife. Only somebody shouted my name and, looking up, I stabbed the knife right into the back of my hand. Ow! With blood spurting all over my nectarines I wobbled off to A&E.

  Head office had a management overhaul later that month, and in an effort to make the store appear more consumer-friendly, the managers were forced to have their photographs taken and put on display in the entrance area for all to see, with their job titles emblazoned underneath. We thought the photographs were hysterical, all of them posing uncomfortably with stiff, forced smiles on their faces. And as Mr Tickle's photograph was particularly terrible we decided the time had come for us to take our revenge.

  One night, at the end of our shift, we discreetly removed Mr Tickle's photograph from the display case in the
entrance. Later that night we all piled round to Mark Berry's house. He was a computer wiz who worked in the non-foods department. There was nothing that boy couldn't do with a flatbed scanner. We spent the next few hours designing a fictitious poster featuring Mr Tickle's photograph, next to a headline that read: 'Urgent Police Warning: Have You Seen This Man?', with some more bogus text underneath, including the lines 'do not approach him' and 'mentally ill'. I think you get the picture.

  Mark did a convincing job, but it was Mr Tickle's leering smile on the photograph in its new context that made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. One final touch was a contact telephone number at the bottom of the poster that came courtesy of the miserable Asian shopkeeper who had a penchant for impersonating exploding thick bread.

  We printed out about two hundred posters and spent the weekend fly-posting them up around town and beyond. I'll never forget Mr Tickle's reaction when he left the building to find an A5 flyer jammed under the wiper blade of his Ford Capri Ghia. We were watching him out of the canteen window. He did a fabulous comedy double take, his jaw dropped and then he started to twitch.

  The news filtered fast and within a week Mr Tickle was mysteriously transferred to the Isle of Man. As he left I took the greatest of pleasure in handing him a gift-wrapped iceberg lettuce.

  The big boss of the depot was Mr Husbands Bosworth or, as everybody called him, HB. He was a bit of a silver fox in his fifties and ready for retirement.

  'I've forgotten more than you lot know,' he'd proudly shout to us over his precious speaker system.

  I'll give him his due, HB could be as sour as all the other managers but he knew his onions when it came to running a cash and carry. The first time I ever met him he gave me a lecture on shelf-stacking.

  'Whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing?! Don't put that down there!' he said as he single-handedly lifted a case of baked beans off the bottom shelf and placed it on to the middle one. 'Eye level is buy level, Mr Kay, that's golden rule number one. If the customer can't see it, then the customer can't buy it, now think on.'

  I always thought that 'Eye Level' was the theme tune to Van der Valk, but as it was only my second day I didn't think it was an appropriate time to set him straight.

  HB was also a huge fan of Hill Street Blues and in a tribute to the series he'd subject us all to an early-morning roll call. Barbara, his assistant, would pull out her specially made flip chart on castors and he'd proceed to bore us to death with the depot's sales figures and targets. He was obsessed with beating a rival cash and carry up the road.

  What used to make me laugh was the way HB always used to end the roll call by saying, 'Let's go and do it to them before they do it to us,' and then for some reason he'd fire an air horn at us. He loved his air horn, he'd carry it around with him all the time in a specially upholstered leather pouch that Barbara had made for him. He could pounce with this air horn at any time. You'd be leaning up against a shelving unit casually having a chat and he'd suddenly fire it down the microphone of the speaker system. You'd jump right out of your skin. 'If you've got time to lean then you've got time to clean,' he'd shout down the microphone – that was another favourite catchphrase of his.

  He loved that microphone, he was never off it. He'd spend hours dictating and creating scripts with Barbara. I remember when we had a new line of product from Cadbury's once called Secret. It was a soft-centred chocolate bar covered in milk chocolate sprinkles, and on the day it arrived in store HB crafted a very special script.

  'Do you want to know a secret, ladies and gentleman?' he said in a stage whisper. ' It's the biggest thing to hit the confectionary market since the Walnut Whip and we have it in store for you today, it's not a secret any more, it's Cadbury's Secret and in a special opening promotion if you purchase two cases or more we'll throw in a complimentary case of Strawberry Push Pops.'

  He must have read out the announcement every fifteen minutes that day. We heard it so many times that by two o'clock we were mouthing the words along with him.

  Another problem with working at a cash and carry was that everything was in bulk. This proved to be a nightmare if you fancied something to eat on your break. If you wanted a can of Coke, for example, you had to buy a case of twenty-four; if you fancied a packet of Quavers, you had to buy the whole bloody box. The only alternative was to 'accidentally' drop a case of your choice from the top of a shelf, then take it back into the warehouse and stuff your fat face. There were always a lot of damaged items on our shift. Especially when Ramadan came around. The sun had barely set and the warehouse would already be full of Muslim lads pigging out on Mr Kipling's apple and bramble slices.

  I don't think I've ever witnessed as much pilfering as I did at the cash and carry. Loads of us were at it. So much so that I'm surprised there was enough stock left to go out on the shelves. As we unpacked and stacked the shelves we'd accumulate a lot of waste, cardboard, polythene. What we used to do was (well, when I say 'we' I'm obviously referring to the royal we – the last thing I want to do is incriminate myself) shove the rubbish into a big box and then we'd take it round to the back of the building and tip it into a skip. But not before we'd hidden a few stolen items underneath the rubbish at the bottom of the box. Then we'd finish our shift and go home.

  If it was a Sunday I'd usually have a bath and watch Highway to Heaven before enjoying one of my mum's sumptuous roast dinners. I'd then retire to the front room for a nap in front of The Clothes Show and a slice of a dairy cream sponge. Then I'd wake up during the Top 40 countdown, grab my rucksack and cycle back down to the cash and carry in order to collect my winnings.

  What always made me laugh was the sight that I'd frequently witness when I cycled round the corner. Half the lads from the shift would already be wading into the rubbish skip round the back in an effort to retrieve their stolen goods.

  Cigarettes and booze were always a popular pilfer, though I always preferred the more obscure items like a pack of fifteen TDK three-hour blank videotapes or an Alabama Chocolate Fudge Cake with pecan nuts. And, Mum, if you're reading this I can only apologise for my actions and I hope this goes some way to explaining why we always had so many bottles of fabric softener by the side of the fridge.

  Retribution came calling in January 1991 when I was involved in an armed raid at the cash and carry. Quite a frightening experience and one that quickly made me realise the error of my thieving ways. Catholic guilt kicked in, plus with CID scrutinising the building after the robbery I didn't relish the idea of them catching me climbing out the back of a skip with four boxes of Black Forest gateau under my arm.

  It was a Thursday night just like any other when the robbery took place. I was pricing up tuna fish with Kevin Broughton and suddenly we heard Simone in the cash office screaming over the sound system, 'MR HUSBANDS BOSWORTH!!' Now print obviously doesn't do Simone's panic-stricken squeal justice but suffice to say Kevin and I both knew that something wasn't right.

  Quickly, we both ran round into the pop aisle to be confronted by three armed gunmen wearing masks and waving sawn-off shotguns (well, I don't honestly know if they were sawn off but it doesn't half sound exciting). Everybody at the checkout was lying face down on the floor except Bill Sands, a disabled shopkeeper. He just sat in his wheelchair with his head bowed.

  What I couldn't comprehend was why the raiders' masks didn't match. We had Pluto, Mickey Mouse and . . . Colonel Gaddafi. Certainly not a well-known trio.

  It's funny how you react in that type of situation, but I remember that it took me a great deal of self-control to stop myself from asking them why one of their masks was an odd one out. 1 knew no fear. Nick Ross says that it's common in those situations, especially with so much adrenalin pumping through around your body (and he'd know, wildcat that he is).

  One of the gunmen must have heard me and Kevin charge round the corner, because he turned to us and shouted,

  'YOU TWO, GET DOWN!'

  And with that I dropped to my knees and shouted back at him, '
What? You mean dance?'

  I think my reply must have thrown the gunman for a second or two because he didn't reply.