White Goods

by Guy Johnson

  ‘Oi, don’t ignore us!’ Roy shouted, getting closer. ‘What you got in that bag? Oi! What’s in the bag, wanker!?’

  The bag he was referring to was a big Army and Navy carrier bag I had with me and I didn’t want them getting their hands on what was inside. So I walked faster and faster. Without realising it, I was almost running when I got to the zebra crossing. But I made the mistake of looking back. That’s when they started running; just Roy and the older boy, Clint. Justin kept back.

  ‘Gonna get you Buckley!’ Roy cried out, laughing, catching up on me. When he did, I was just outside Beverly Courts. ‘Fucking little shit!’ he uttered and I felt something hit me hard across my back. Not his fists this time; he’d used the branch he’d been carrying. As well as cracking against my spine, its knobbly bark scraped my skin.

  ‘You bastard!’ I cried and he went to hit me again, but the caretaker came out of the front entrance of the sheltered flats, waving at Roy and Clint to bugger off!

  They hung around laughing at first, taking the mickey as Geoff Warren – the caretaker and my only salvation at that moment in time – hobbled towards them, his right fist his weapon, his somewhat gammy left leg his hindrance. When he got closer to them, they finally scarpered; maybe it was his guts scaring them, as they didn’t have any themselves and didn’t know what power guts might have given the 55 year-old war veteran. It didn’t stop them calling him cripple and spazzer as they sped off, leaving their branch behind. Justin seemed to follow on, still at a distance. I tried not to think about him.

  I knew all about Geoff – not just his age, but his wife, kids and grandkids, his part in the Second World War, what he did on his days off (fishing if the weather was right, getting-under-her-feet when it wasn’t), how often his injury played him up. Some of it I knew through him, as he was chatty whenever you came to Beverly Courts; some of it through Nan, because he was her knight-in-shining-armour.

  That man’s a saint.

  He’d do anything you ask him.

  No job’s a bother.

  He’d give you the shirt off his back.

  I turned my nose up at the latter; I’d seen his shirts and they were a bit grubby and holey. Red Nanny said it was just a work shirt, giving me a puzzled look as she said it, and you couldn’t expect Sunday best when he was doing handyman jobs.

  ‘You alright there?’ Geoff said to me that Sunday, as I straightened my back. I winced. ‘You visiting today?’ he added, hobbling along beside me, opening the front door for me and walking me right up to her door and even waiting until she answered her door, like I was one of his old people.

  Nan Buckley always took about half an hour to answer the door.

  We had lots of theories about that.

  Takes her a while to get out of her coffin – Ian.

  She has to put in her teeth and pull on her wig – Della.

  She has to get Geoff out of her bed and out the window – Ian and Della.

  Take her that long to shave off her beard – me, only Dad overheard that time and threatened that I wouldn’t sit down for a week if he heard-the-like-again.

  When she eventually answered the door, her face dropped a bit – it’s just one of you, her face said, and it was definitely not Ian. Ian was her favourite, after Geoff the caretaker, of course. Ian could do no wrong and Ian’s favourite biscuits were always in the tin at Red Nanny’s.

  ‘Hello There,’ she said, forgetting my name again. I’d been There since as long as I could remember. Her face lit up a bit, as she saw the war hero hovering over my shoulder. ‘Hello Geoff,’ she flirted, waving a hand at him, her perfectly painted red nails flickering.

  And then I was in.

  ‘Scot,’ she announced abruptly, smiling. She’d remembered. ‘Kettle,’ she added and then scuttled off to her little kitchen, which was really just a big cupboard in the corner of her room.

  Old. She was suddenly old. The shuffle in her slippers and the single word sentences. She did this sometimes. One minute she’d be the chatty, snobby Nan Buckley we’d all come to – my mind pauses, thinking – appreciate. Next thing she’d be a bit lost, looking for things in her mind she couldn’t find. And what she eventually found was just little bits, single words. It was as if she was a completely different person, but I liked this version.

  Whilst she was making a pot of tea, I sat in her little flat and looked about, waiting.

  Nan Buckley’s flat was a glorified bed-sit, according to Mum, but only when Dad was out of earshot, because you always had to watch-what-you-said-about-her-Majesty. I wasn’t sure what a normal bed-sit was like, so I had no comparison - or what it had to do with speaking in front of the Queen - but Nan Buckley’s flat wasn’t very big. It was mainly one room, where she had a couple of armchairs, a TV and her old record player that played 78’s. Her bed was tucked away in one corner. She also had a foldaway table for playing cards on. She had to eat her meals-on-wheels from a tray, which she’d tell you with a twitch in her nose, as if this wasn’t quite good enough. She had a bathroom as well, with funny toilet paper that was like tracing paper and not very good for wiping your bum at all. She had the cupboard-sized kitchen too, with just a small hob, fridge, sink, toaster, kettle and a couple of cupboards on the wall for her food and plates.

  ‘It’s just a stop gap, whilst I sort myself,’ is what she told people if they asked how she was getting on in that place. But Nan Buckley had lived at Beverley Courts for as long as I could remember.

  On top of her TV I noticed something different: the gilded, ornate picture frame that sat on top of it didn’t have a photograph in it anymore. It was empty. It used to house Mum and Dad on their wedding day. Dad had big sideburns, a moustache the size of a sausage under his nose and wore a blue pinstriped suit. Mum was dressed in a beige skirt-suit, something else that Red Nanny turned her nose up at, even though she had had it on display as long as I had been visiting her.

  ‘I do wish you’d worn white, Theresa,’ she’d said to Mum once.

  ‘Oh, Doris, you said people like me weren’t supposed to,’ Mum had replied and Nan had done her tight-lipped-look-to-her-lap thing.

  We had all been squashed in there on that occasion, apart from Dad who was seeing-a-man-about-a-dog - again.

  But now it was just me.

  ‘I’ve brought you a present,’ I told her.

  ‘Have you?’ Nan Buckley was suddenly asking, back in the room, bringing in a small blue plate with four biscuits on it. (Ian was allowed to choose from the whole tin.) ‘Pop back in the kitchen, will you, and bring those teas in.’

  When I came back from her cupboard-kitchen with two teas in proper cups and with saucers, she had a waiting look on her face.

  ‘What is it?’ she repeated.

  The last time I had come to see her, Red Nanny had mentioned the empty photo frame.

  ‘I need a new picture for that frame,’ she’d instructed me from her chair, red blanket over her knees, nails and lips to match as usual, in multi-word sentence mode. ‘Something nice and pretty to distract me when the Nine O’clock News gets a bit depressing.’ (Nan Buckley only watched the BBC and only specific programmes.) ‘I don’t like those sad stories,’ she’d added, picking up a biscuit and making a small squeal of delight, like she’d discovered something. ‘Look Sean, your favourites.’ Then she’d seen the look on my face and then my face in general, realising her mistake. ‘Scot,’ she’d said and we were back to One-Word-Nanny again.

  The present I’d referred to was a little something for her empty frame. I found it in a drawer in the cupboard-under-the-stairs in our back room. We had lots of photographs in there: some in books, small ones in tins without lids and some loose. The one I chose was a big black and white one of Mum when she was eighteen. It was just her face and her hair, which was really large; backcombed and lacquered, was how Mum described it. Her eyes were really on you, though, watching, reading inside your head, I reckoned.

  ‘Oh,’ One-Word-Nanny said when I pulled it from the
bag, a little bit of alarm in her features, as if it wasn’t quite what she was expecting.

  I guessed the eyes were reading her instantly, knowing all the things she had thought about Mum over the years. Knowing her secrets, too, maybe.

  ‘Shall I put it in the frame?’

  Red Nanny paused, still looking doubtful.

  ‘Who is this again?’ she asked and I reluctantly explained. ‘Oh, yes,’ she continued, regressing to a two-syllable sentence.

  I took the gold-coloured frame from the top of the TV and carefully took the back off, making sure I didn’t touch the glass, and slid the monochrome photograph of Mum in place. When I put it back, we both stared at it, sipping our tea, held captive by the ghostly gaze of my absent but very much present mother. Eventually, I spoke.

  ‘Auntie Stella’s got engaged,’ I said and Nan Buckley came back to life again – back to Red Nanny this time.

  ‘Oh, did she?’ she uttered, voice a little haughty. ‘How many times is that now?’

  I couldn’t help it – I had to smile. And Nan Buckley gave me a wink. There was a real naughty twinkle in that eye.

  ‘So, tell me all about it.’

  The engagement party had been just the week before.

  It turned out that Uncle Gary wasn’t asking Auntie Stella to marry him after all – just to move in. But, she’d jumped in too soon. When he finally got round to explaining this to her, they had a huge row. Worse, she threatened to leave him and move back in with her family where-she-was-loved-and-wanted. She did for a bit: moved back for a whole hour-and-a-half, and sat in the front room we never used, with-her-bags-and-her-pride (Della) waiting for him to do something. Him being Uncle Gary. And he did – turned up after 90 minutes and got down on one knee, saying it had just never occurred to him, but now it had, it was all he wanted, couldn’t imagine life without her. (‘Grovelling,’ Della called it.) Then we had the squealing and the shrieking all over again and Dad reluctantly opened another bottle of Asti.

  Their party was at Uncle Gary’s place on the estate. Juniper Court was his address, number 12. I was almost expecting it to be like Red Nanny’s place, with a name like that. But it wasn’t; it wasn’t what we expected at all.

  Neither was the estate. For all Mum’s comments about it – council (spoken with a shudder as if she’d just licked a dog shit), rough, dangerous – I was expecting it to be a bit run-down, full of houses like the derelict one me and Justin secretly hung out in at the dump. Druggies on the corner. Smashed up telephone boxes smelling of wee. Crisp, fag and chip wrappers everywhere, mixed up with white dog turds. Fridges and mattresses dumped in the street.

  ‘That’s at the other end,’ Uncle Gary explained, when I mentioned it to him.

  The end of the estate where he lived was privately owned, which sounded even posher than our privately rented property. The streets were clean. The houses and flats new, in beige bricks, with driveways, garages and tidy little front lawns.

  Gary’s home was a flat. First floor flat, he explained, somehow elevating it in status. You had to climb a staircase to get to his door, but it was all his; it wasn’t a shared entrance. Inside, we met the unexpected again.

  I knew it would be clean – his car was always immaculate – but he always had a few tacky things in it. Furry dice dangling from the rear-view mirror; traffic-light air freshener; small fluffy cushions on the back seat. The flat was different; the flat was...

  ‘Modern,’ Dad said, undecided on whether he liked it. I realised instantly that Dad hadn’t been inside before either. ‘And pricey,’ he added, and you could tell he was wondering how Uncle Gary could afford it all, working like he did with him and Adrian.

  But it was more than that.

  ‘It’s like Tomorrow’s World,’ I added and Della smirked, but Ian gave me a look like he thought I was on to something.

  ‘Have to smoke in the entrance, Tony,’ Gary commented, as we entered; Dad was about to spark up. Instead of putting it away, he stepped back out again and had his fag in the upstairs hall, taking in the view from a window. On the way out, I noticed a burn mark on the woodwork of the windowsill; Dad’s bitter act of spite for being sent-outside-like-a-naughty-kid, Ian told me later.

  When you walked into Uncle Gary’s flat there was a long hallway, with a kitchen and bedroom off to the left, a bathroom and bedroom off to the right and a big lounge at the end, stretching across the width of the place. The walls were plain – not wallpapered like in our house.

  The hallway was a dark green and the ceiling olive green, with a paper globe lampshade hanging from the centre, constantly lit-up, so we could see where we were going, I guess.

  The kitchen was all browns and oranges: a fitted kitchen, Gary told us, with chocolate cupboards and drawers, mandarin tiling, marble work surfaces and black and white lino flooring, like on the Flash adverts. He had jars all over the work surfaces, with various things we recognised – tea, sugar, coffee – and various things we didn’t – muesli, fusilli, lentils. ‘Len who?’ Dad had joked, thinking he was funny, but no one laughed. Uncle Gary also had various food processors on display – all in white, so clean you wouldn’t think he’d ever used them – and a stack of cookery books leaning against the wall at one end.

  ‘Bit of a chef, eh?’ Dad said aloud, like it was an insult, you could tell.

  ‘Oh, my Gary’s a proper Fanny Craddock,’ Auntie Stella beamed, accidentally adding on to what Dad started and Uncle Gary blushed, before offering to open some wine, which made it all much worse.

  ‘Jesus, Gary, why don’t you just poor me a Martini and give us a fiddle while you’re at it! Now, have you got some bitter?’

  Moving down the hallway, I glimpsed into the bedrooms – plain walls in red on one side and black and white on the other, double beds and fitted wardrobes in each. The bathroom was sludge green – ‘Avocado’ - with sludge green tiles – ‘Avocado, Scotty,’ – with a fluffy white carpet that was just-asking-for-a-piss-stain – Dad. But it was impressive – walk in shower and two loos. That’s not a loo, Scotty, Ian later explained, forehead creased-up, thinking how we’d clean it up when there wasn’t a flush, just a fountain of water that apparently washed your bum off like-in-France.

  It was the room at the end of the hallway – the lounge-through-diner as Auntie Stella introduced it – that was particularly impressive. It was cream and white – completely cream and white throughout. Thick cream shagpile carpets. Cream leather sofa and chairs. White walls, doors and skirting. A white display cabinet with a glass front. A white TV and stand. Cream curtains made of corduroy. In one corner, four white chairs were crowded round a circular glass table. There was also a glass coffee table in front of the sofa. It looked immaculate.

  ‘Shoes off,’ Auntie Stella instructed, before we were allowed to enter this part of the flat.

  We obeyed, although there was a bit of embarrassment all round, as I had holes in my socks, Ian had neon green fluffies on and Dad’s white ones were long overdue a wash – you could tell this with both your eyes open and shut.

  Auntie Stella did her best not to notice, and carried on with her list of instructions: white wine or clear spirits only in the lounge-diner, all other drinks and food in general to be nibbled in the kitchen.

  We’d arrived around 7pm; by 8pm, it was still a bit quiet. About eight of Uncle Gary’s mates had arrived and were crowding up the kitchen. His mum and sister were also there, drinking wine, but looking uncomfortable, worried, it seemed, by Auntie Stella’s strict house rules. We mainly stayed in the hall, hovering in the kitchen and lounge-diner doorways, wondering what to do.

  ‘I’m bored,’ I told Ian, and he shushed me, as Auntie Stella was passing. ‘But there's no one here for me.’

  ‘No Justin, you mean. Thought you weren’t mates anymore?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘They weren’t invited anyway.’

  That was Della.

  ‘Overheard Gary tell Dad that Auntie Stella had made a point of not in
viting them.’

  ‘That doesn’t usually stop them turning up,’ Ian added, laughing a little. ‘Gary’s in business with Adrian. He’s got to have asked him.’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  Ian was right, though: it didn’t usually stop them and it didn’t that night, either. At least, it didn’t stop the Tankard women: at just after 9pm, Chrissie Tankard and daughter, Sharon, made their entrance.

  Chrissie had bought a big bottle of champagne with her, so Auntie Stella couldn’t really tell her to leave.

  ‘Congratulations,’ she said, handing it over to Uncle Gary, her boobs wobbling a bit under her leopard-print top. She had a black leather skirt on, fish-nets and black stilettos too.

  Mutton-dressed-as-lamb, Mum would have said. It was one of several things she said regularly about Chrissie Tankard. Others included: swears-like-a-soldier, smokes-like-a-trooper and open-all-hours. (‘Like the TV programme?’ I’d asked Mum, referring to the latter comment. ‘Yes, Scot,’ she had answered, refusing to elaborate further.)

  ‘Alright, Scotty,’ Chrissie said to me. ‘Not seen you round ours in a while.’ At which I blushed, as I still wasn’t officially allowed to go to the Tankard’s house; Dad didn’t hear her, though. ‘So, Stella, let’s have a look at your fella’s gaff...’

  I liked Chrissie Tankard, despite what Mum had said about her; despite the fact she clearly hadn’t liked Mum either. She was a bit rough – there was no getting away from it. She swore a lot, smoked at every meal, and was known for her public shouting matches with her big scary, hairy husband, Adrian. But there was something about her. She was a laugh. If you were at their house at a mealtime, she’d just include you. She didn’t make you go and wait in the garden, like Mum did if friends came round at the wrong time. In a way, she was somewhere between Mum and Auntie Stella: she had Auntie Stella’s brassy nature and dress sense, with a bit of Mum’s sense and love about her.