by Guy Johnson
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 Under the mattress on the bed, we found an out-of-date passport in the name of one Richard Albert Crunch.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.
Stevie had positioned himself on the far side of the garden and we could see him jumping about, grinning with delight at the mayhem he had caused. Chrissie kept her distance, rattling both her fists and a long list of expletives in his direction, swearing all manner of harm would come to him once the flames had died down and the imminent danger receded.
‘Come on, let’s get back,’ Justin suggested, once we’d seen enough, and we headed back in doors.
Justin went straight back to the spare room, to continue our adventure, but I didn’t get to return there. Ian had arrived: me and Della were needed at home.
‘Time for tea,’ Ian said, giving Crinky’s domain a quick, quizzical look.
‘You should have seen it before we cleared out all the newspapers,’ I said, before saying a few brief goodbyes and heading off home with my siblings.
It was almost six; apart from a break in the afternoon when I’d popped to Justin’s for squash, biscuits and a wee, I had been clearing out papers at Crinky’s for nearly a whole day.
‘Reckon the debt must be paid by now,’ I said aloud, referring to the one we owed Adrian Tankard.
‘Must be,’ Ian said, distracted, his mind brewing up another question. ‘That Crinky bloke?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Anyone say how he died?’
I shrugged; I hadn’t asked anyone. It had seemed a bit rude.
‘In the bath.’ This came from Della, who was just a little bit behind us, strolling along with Russell, holding hands.
‘How d’you know?’
‘Russell asked.’
‘Really?’
We all stopped, to check Russell out.
‘I was curious,’ he said, suddenly defending himself. ‘So I asked Sharon. She said he’d been found in the bath.’
I was wondering how he would have got in there: surely it had been full of newspapers, magazines, or even books? And surely, even if it had been empty, Crinky couldn’t have got in it?
‘It was a walk-in one, for disabled people,’ Russell added, as if reading my mind. ‘I had a quick look. Pink, it was.’
‘What, did he drown or something?’
‘No. It was a sit-in bath – he couldn’t have drowned. But Sharon said he killed himself.’
‘Shit.’
‘Yeah. Nasty, too,’ Russell continued, no longer concerned about how we might view his insensitive inquisitiveness, as he had a captive audience.
‘Nasty? How?’ Ian asked, and what Russell said, every word of his reply, caused the little hairs on my skin to stand up on their very own.
‘Electrocuted himself. Had an extension lead coming from the kitchen to the bathroom, with one of those fan-heaters plugged in at the end. Reckoned he had it on a shelf near the bath. He knocked it in the water. And that was it. Gone. You alright Scot?’
‘Scot? Scot?’ That was Ian shouting, as I did the only thing that made sense to me at the time: I ran. I was only running home, but I had to get away. Away from Russell’s macabre tale, away from any eyes that might have been scrutinising my reaction to it. ‘Scot?!’
I had ten minutes on them at home. And in those ten minutes, I composed myself. And I thought back. Back to the playground. Back to when I’d spun my tales about Mum’s death. The dishwasher. The hair-drier. The electric fan heater. They had all been the culprits in her grisly deaths. But who had been there? Who had been in my little circle of listeners, making notes in their heads, stealing my nasty little ideas and storing them up for future use?
Hearing Ian and Della come through the front door, finally catching me up, I knew I had one more thing to do. In my back pocket, I took out the photographs we had found in Crinky’s spare room. Getting down on my knees, I reached under my bed. I found the letter with Jackie written on the front, slipped it inside the envelope containing the photos and then put it back, hidden away.
‘You okay?’
Ian was right behind me. I hadn’t heard him c
ome in. I wondered if he’d seen what I’d been doing. What I’d hidden.
‘Yeah.’
‘It was a bit grisly, eh? Russell got carried away there. Della gave him a ticking off. Guess we all forget you are younger than us, sometimes. Sure you’re okay?’
‘Yeah,’ I repeated, adding a nod to confirm it.
‘Coming down?’
Another nod, after which I came to my feet and followed Ian down to Dad’s homely meal of grey lumps and burnt thumbs.
‘Bangers and mash!’ Dad announced with triumph, chuffed with his culinary output. He’d even done vegetarian ones for Della. ‘Went all-out, as we have company,’ he added, referring to Auntie Stella and Uncle Gary, neither of whom looked particularly pleased at the effort made on their behalf.
‘Lovely, Tone.’
‘A real treat, cheers.’
Once doused in pools of ketchup, we all tucked in, somehow managing to clear our plates and keep the food in our stomachs.
No one mentioned Crinky. Dad didn’t even ask how the day had gone. Not a word. Not a single question; but then we were all avoiding questions now, weren’t we? Yet, my head was still full of it. Full of Russell’s description. Full of Crinky’s suffering. Full of that dark, square hole that Justin had created when he rolled back the rug on Crinky’s floor and revealed the trap door. Full of what we might have found in the deep, black chasm below Crinky’s paper-crammed existence.
But it was mainly the Polaroids I’d found that filled my head. The six photographs that I’d put with the letter I’d stolen. You see, they were very familiar. I’d seen a similar collection before, under a bed, in a room I wasn’t supposed to be looking in.
Looking up from my plate, where one final charred mouthful remained, I saw Uncle Gary’s eyes flicker in my direction. He gave me a single, almost undetectable nod. And I returned it, before sticking my fork in what remained of my dinner and clearing my plate.
‘Now, who’s for afters?’
17.
I went back the next day.
I had to.
Went back to the late Crinky’s lair and checked out that spare room.
Checked out what I had merely glimpsed the day before.
Once everyone was asleep, I decided to creep out.
I quietly slipped on my jeans, t-shirt and a jumper, all the time listening, trying not to wake up my room companion, knowing he wouldn’t let me go out. Not on my own. Not without an endless stream of questions. Where are you going? Can I come with you? But he didn’t wake. So, I pulled on my trainers, stood up slowly and tiptoed my way out.
The back door caused a little difficultly: as well as an old-fashioned key in its lock, there were bolts at the top and bottom. They were stiff, and when they eventually budged, the door rattled a bit. I stood completely still, steadying my breath, listening through the dark.
Silence.
Satisfied that I hadn’t disturbed a soul, I finally crept out and headed back to Crinky’s.
Getting into the house was easy: there was a key to the back door under a loose tile. I’d seen Chrissie check it was still there the day of the big clear out. I padded slowly through the darkened bungalow, feeling a little nervous. I knew the Tankards had left, and I obviously knew Crinky was nowhere in sight, but I still felt eyes upon me, as I moved quietly through the rooms, heading towards the one at the back.
I ventured on, over the threshold of the late Crinky Crunkle’s spare room. The trap door was closed again and a worn-out green rug was covering it up. I quickly rolled it back and grabbed the metal ring on the door, ready to haul it up. I hesitated.
‘You absolutely certain?’ a voice inside my head asked, as I paused in the darkness. ‘You certain you want to see what’s beyond that door?’
Yes. Yes, I was. Without a doubt, I needed to see.
Within seconds, the trap was open and I was scrambling down steps. For a few seconds I felt my way in the dark, feeling for a wall or a switch. I soon found both. The switch was the chain type. I pulled it, but it took a few minutes for the hidden room to light up. When it did, I exhaled a small gasp and took in the surroundings: the single strip light that stretched across the ceiling; the bare, concrete floor; the deep purple paint on the walls. The purple room in my memory had finally come back to me. All that was missing was the little camp bed, with the white bedding and the grey blanket.
The Polaroid in my head had come to life again.
It was nearly an hour before I was back home, furtively sneaking around in another house of shadows. There were no lights on to greet me, so I was certain no one had heard me creep out, or realised I was gone. However, back in my room, just as I drew my bed covers over myself, a little voice called out from the corner.
‘Where have you been?’ it asked.
I ignored it, but it wasn’t prepared to simply go away.
‘Where have you been?’ it asked again, more urgent this time.
But what could I tell him? I’d been instructed to keep quiet and protect him, hadn’t I? That’s what Dad had told me. That’s what we’d all been trying to do, all along. Protect him. Anything but the truth; Dad had made it clear to me. So, I struck to Plan A and continued to ignore him. It’s what you did round our house – you ignored the questions, hoping they’d go away. This time it worked too: the tired, small voice in the corner stopped asking, replacing inquiries with the gentle snuffle of sleep.
18.
I wasn’t looking forward to the summer half-term that year. Not with the secrets flying around in our house, still freezing me out – still no one had talked to me about Shirley and the boy. Not with Crinky’s death hanging over me, too. Not being treated as suspicious, Chrissie had said. But she and the police didn’t know what I knew: I had recounted the details of such a death in the playground, surrounded by-. I tried to think. Tried to see their faces. Walter Smith, Roy Fallick, most of the class. Tried to shake it: surely it was an accident, a coincidence; surely my white lies about Mum hadn’t led to Crinky's death. Surely?
Being back in with Justin, however, saved the day. Saved the whole week we had off, in fact. I didn’t have to stick around with a house of liars. And Dad had stopped objecting to my hanging out at the Tankards’ house full stop. It had been more Mum’s rule than his, but he’d still made the odd noises of disapproval. Now it was simply anything-to-get-him-out-of-the-way. I could read it in Dad’s and Ian’s faces – the fear that I would open my mouth and those awkward questions would come out. But it wasn’t worth the effort of asking, not for the empty responses I got – even if it did unsettle them both.
So, that half-term, I more or less moved in with the Tankards, where it was just the two of us – me and Justin. The-two-of-us. It wasn’t as good as the three-of-us that I’d belonged to just weeks before. It was a good second best, though.
The Tankards’ house was a bit bigger than ours. They never had any money and didn’t seem to get all the mod cons that we did, despite the fact that Adrian Tankard had access to everything you could possibly own through Dontask. It all goes on his drink, her gambling, I’ll bet you – Auntie Stella once, after a couple of drinks and a round of poker herself. Yet they did have a house where everyone had a separate bedroom. Including Chrissie and Adrian, which we weren’t allowed to talk about – one of the very few rules you had to follow at the Tankard house. Don’t mention the separate bedrooms, ever, Justin had warned me, early days, as if it might have been the kind of thing I’d have asked his mum. You do ask some funny questions, Scot, it has to be said, he’d added, justifying his first point.
Their house had started life as a bungalow, very similar to Crinky’s round the corner, but gradually new bits had been added on and it looked more and more like a house. There were four bedrooms upstairs – three small bedrooms squeezing into the roof of the original building, whilst a bigger one sat at the rear, on top of the downstairs extension. The rooms at the very front of the house that peered onto the drive were the bathroom and Chrissie’s bed
room, the one no one talked about. In the middle of the house were the dining room and the kitchen. Then, at the very back, the extension: a lounge that stretched across the entire width of the former bungalow.
‘This was gran’s house,’ Justin had informed me once. ‘Dad was her only son, so we got it when she died.’
Della reckoned that they had all moved in before their gran had died, insisting she lived in a caravan on the drive, so they could have the house as there was more-of-them-than-her. But I didn’t know if that was true, and there was no way I was gonna ask.
‘I wouldn’t put anything past them,’ Mum had commented, but that was often Mum’s stock response, especially if Chrissie was involved. Wouldn’t-put-anything-past-those-Tankards.
On the Wednesday of half-term, I was invited along for a trip into town.
‘Just a bit of shopping, but you don’t have to come,’ Chrissie had said, when I’d turned up that morning.
It was 10:30 and they were in the kitchen, still having breakfast. Chrissie had tea, toast and a fag on the go all at once.
‘Cuppa?’ she offered, ash falling from the cigarette in her mouth as her lips moved, dusting the crusts on her plate.
I politely shook my head.
‘Suit yourself. SHARON!’ she cried, her voice abruptly soaring, shaking the whole house. ‘SHARON! YOU FINISHED WITH THAT DRIER YET?’
‘You said we’d go down the dump today,’ I said quietly to Justin, when I had the chance. His whole family – minus Adrian and Tina, who were off-who-knows-where – had disappeared from the kitchen to get themselves ready for town. ‘Said we’d make camps. Go to the derelict house.’
The dump was another place, banned in Mum’s day, which I was now free to explore.
‘I forgot,’ he said, shrugging. ‘And I have to go. We all have to go, when we do a big shop.’ When he said big, he raised his eyebrows, like it was a code, like I should know what he really meant.