Trilogy Collection

It was a full couple of minutes before she appeared in the doorway – not dressed, as he’d expected, but still in her short flimsy nightie, her face still caked in the make-up she habitually went to bed in. She was sauntering across the room with a look that meant business. ‘Come here, you,’ she said, puckering her lips and making a grab for him. ‘Give us a kiss before you go.’

‘Piss off, you silly get!’ he protested as he tried to dodge her. ‘Fuckin’ hell, June, a sniff of a few bob, and you’re all over me like a cheap suit!’

Not that he minded, he decided, as she giggled at him coquettishly. ‘It’s not a few bob any more, you divvy,’ she said. ‘It’s a few new pence, remember? Has been for two years now, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

‘Fuckin’ decimalisation,’ he growled. ‘Never going to get the hang of it. They should have left well alone. Bleeding common market nonsense!’ He extracted himself from his wife and waved as he left. ‘Don’t forget,’ he called over his shoulder as he stepped out onto the pavement. ‘Wimpy at 12. Don’t be late, June, or you’ll fuck it all up.’

June laughed as she waved him off. ‘Don’t worry, love,’ she called after him. ‘I’ll be there with knobs on!’

He could still hear her laughing when he was halfway down the road, and when he looked back, she was still waving from the front-room window, the daft cow. Still, it gave him a warm feeling, made him puff up with pride. Despite their fall-outs, he still loved her to bits.

He quickened his step, his mind now back on the job at hand. Things to do, places to go, people to see. It was a good 20-minute walk into town, and a cold one, and he was anxious to get where he needed to be. He pulled the lapels of his coat a little tighter together, reflecting that there was perhaps one too many people involved in this thing. So he was nervous. He didn’t mind admitting it.

Josie came downstairs, minutes later, to find her mother in the living room, admiring her reflection in the mirror.

‘Not bad for an old bird,’ she was saying (to herself, presumably, Josie decided) and arching her drawn-on eyebrows. Josie never understood why she did that – shaving them off and then painting them on again. Why? Why not just leave them as they were? ‘And tomorrow you’ll look even better,’ June promised herself, grinning. ‘Once you’re wearing all your lovely new clobber!’

Josie stood just inside the doorway for a moment, watching her mother blow a kiss at her own reflection, clearly oblivious that her daughter was even in the room. It had always been a bit like that with her mum – and when Vinnie had been home, even more so. Put Vinnie in a room with them and it had always felt as if she became invisible. She was her dad’s girl, always had been, and Vinnie was her mum’s boy – that was just the way it was, just the way it would always be, probably. They were poles apart, after all. Her mum was so unlike her. So glamorous and girly. So alien. Something Josie knew she’d never be. Not any more, anyway.

‘What are you going on about, you silly old mare?’ she said now.

June jumped, startled, and turned round to see Josie staring at her.

‘You daft cow!’ she said. ‘You scared me half to bleeding death.’ She flapped a hand at Josie irritably and stomped off in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Go on, get ready for school instead of sneaking up on folk.’

Josie ignored that. It was still only eight, after all. Instead, she followed her mother into the tiny kitchen, the same thing on her mind as had been on it for ages now. It had been months since they’d heard anything from Vinnie. Months and months. And she’d written – what? – three unanswered letters? Four? And still nothing back.

‘D’ya think we’ll have a letter today?’ she asked as she reached to put on the grill, though even as she did so she knew it was more in hope than expectation.

‘A letter?’ asked June.

‘You know, from our Vin.’

June sighed as Josie pushed past her to get a plate from the shelf underneath the curtain-fronted worktop. ‘Titch, you know what he’s like. Sending letters counts as a privilege and pound to a penny he’ll be all out of those. So fuck knows when we’ll hear from him, frankly!’

‘Yeah, but he’s got to send one sometime! It’s been for ever!’

June drained her tea mug and banged it down on the Formica. Then, seeing Josie’s expression, shook her head. ‘Look, I’m just as upset as you, love. Honest I am. But you never know – he might be allowed a phone call this week, mightn’t he?’

Josie scowled as she stood on tiptoe to slide two slices of bread onto the grill pan. The business of the phone was a constant bugbear. ‘Well, if you paid the bill, we’d be able to phone him, wouldn’t we?’

‘Shut it, gob shite,’ June said mildly. Then she grinned at her daughter, which she’d been doing a fair bit just lately, her eyes lighting up, like she’d just been told she’d won the pools. She nudged Josie. ‘If this job goes all right for your dad, all the bills will get paid this month,’ she said. ‘Every last one of them.’

Which wasn’t what Josie wanted to hear. She’d heard enough about this ‘job’ of her Dad’s already. Like a lot of what her parents and their neighbours on the estate got up to, it didn’t sit okay with her. Why were they constantly trying to get things that didn’t belong to them? It made no sense. Not to her. ‘Goody two-shoes’ they all called her. Well, let them. ‘I don’t wanna know, Mum,’ she said. ‘All I know is that it’s dodgy. Half the fucking estate are on about it.’

June laughed, as she poured more tea and went back into the living room. ‘No,’ she called back. ‘Half the fucking estate are in on it, you mean!’

Josie turned the toast over and watched the other side brown in silence, feeling the familiar rush of resentment that her mother didn’t even seem to care that much about Vinnie any more. Stupid cow was too concerned with herself and her new ‘clobber’ to even give a fuck about him these days – and to think he was supposed to be her golden boy! Eighteen months he’d been in Redditch borstal – 18 whole months. Where had the time gone? It felt like he’d been gone for ever. It had been so long – there’d been the long spell before that, over in Manchester, at that St Augustine’s reformatory place, as well. Was he ever going to come home? She pulled her toast out and carefully unfolded the wrapper from the Adams best butter. And mother dearest, she thought as she scraped up slivers of glistening yellow, didn’t even seem to give a shit.

‘I’m off up to get ready for school,’ she shouted as she went back through the living room, raising her voice above the din of T. Rex on the radio that June had just put on at her usual stupid volume. ‘And maybe we could even go visit our Vinnie. When you’ve robbed me dad of all his wages.’ She headed for the stairs then, toast balanced on her palm, remembering to duck as she did so, to avoid a slap from June on her way past.

Vinnie had been sentenced to three years the previous January. It should only have been six months in Redditch borstal, that was all. Just six flipping months. And then they’d finally have him home again. But, Vinnie being Vinnie, he just couldn’t seem to keep his nose clean. According to June, who was the only one who’d seen or spoken to him – and only then because he was a minor so she had to be there when he was sentenced – he’d racked up four separate offences of violence and theft within the first month. And he was now paying the price, and it was a big one.

The only thing she could console herself with was that if he was good from that point on – well, according to what big tits Sally had said, anyway – that three years would be chopped by at least a third. Which, given that he’d already done 18 months there, meant he could be home by the end of the summer. Please, Vin, she thought to herself, please keep your nose clean. She missed him so much sometimes, it was almost like a physical hurt. Like someone had chopped off her left arm.

Having put her toast down on the window ledge that also served as her dressing table, she picked up her black, boy’s-style school pants from the floor. She shook them out and dressed quickly. It was getting late now, so she’d have to eat the rest of her toast on the way if she wanted to catch up with Carol. Shivering in the bitter cold as she buttoned up her school shirt, she had a glance in the triangle of broken mirror that was propped on the sill. The sight that greeted her was as unlike her mother’s as it was possible to be. Hair still cut short, boyishly, just the way she preferred it, her face – well, it was the same face that always gazed back at her. A mask behind which so much was always going on. A mask that said ‘queer’, that said ‘boy’, that got taunted. Not least, more and more, by her own mother.

‘Why’d you want to look such a scruff-bag, instead of a girl?’ June kept nagging, ‘You’re 13, Titch. You want to make more of yourself. You’ll never cop off with a lad looking like that.’

Fuck her, Titch thought now. Fuck the lot of them. She looked exactly the way she wanted to. They could think what they wanted. She’d always been a tomboy. Had always much preferred being like her brother than like her waster of a sister, and since Melvin – she shivered again – that monster, that bastard – no one was ever going to mistake her for a girlie girl.

Dressed and ready, and with the toast gone all soggy in her hand, she ran down the stairs and slammed the front door as she left, anxious to draw a physical line and forget about her own worries and catch up with Caz, who had enough worries of her own. Well, one, actually. That bastard Black Bobby. Who her mum never got shut of after all. Perhaps Caz should’ve taken a leaf from her book.

June was excited. So excited that it was like something bubbling away inside her. She drew the curtains in the living room and piled coal on the fire, dancing round the room as she went. Warmth. It was like a drug, to have coal in such quantity. It made such a change to be able to come out of the bathroom and get dressed without shivering her tits off.

It made everything better, she decided. She picked up her fancy new bra and twirled it around her head before putting it on. Then she smiled. She really loved Jock just lately. She must do, she decided, because since what had happened, she’d even been happy to put up with his fumblings under the sheets, which were happening pretty much every night. That was money for you, wasn’t it? While he was giving her his spoils – and the wherewithal to have all that glorious, glorious black stuff – she could just about tolerate anything.

Though it was hardly the crime of the century. Titch might think otherwise, but in the big scheme of things, it was hardly the Great bloody Train Robbery. She finished dressing, and allowed herself another leisurely cup of tea, before grabbing her bag and heading next door to Moira’s.

The ‘job’ had been a gift born out of real, regular work. Jock, Maureen’s Steven and their next-door neighbour, Billy, had, along with a few other blokes from around the estate, been offered a couple of weeks’ work from one of the lads down the pub who ran a demolition firm. He’d got the contract to knock down a large office premises, and needed a team to go in for two weeks to strip out all the unwanted office furniture the departing tenants – a loan company, an insurance firm and an accountants – had left behind. The better bits were getting sold on, the rest going into skips, and this was where the estate lads came in. Offered cash in hand for the fortnight and a bonus for finishing on time, there were no shortage of men keen to be included.

But, as it turned out, there was a much greater bonus up for grabs, as Jock and Billy found out the first day. They’d been at it a couple of hours, manhandling desks and chairs down from the loan company’s office, when they decided to tackle some of the filing cabinets. The saleable ones already gone, these were all destined for the skips, having broken locks or being otherwise in a state of disrepair.

Jock had just opened the top drawer to make the one they were currently hefting more manoeuvrable when he saw a sight that stopped him in his tracks. The drawer, which was otherwise empty, contained a huge bundle of club cheques – 50 books, it turned out, each containing £50 worth. The most unlikely – not to mention astonishing – sight he had seen in a very long time.

Club cheques were a well-known form of currency round the estate; a way for the chronically cash-strapped to help make ends meet. Unlike cash itself, they could only be used to shop in certain places, and the local loan company agents would go round giving them out, from house to house – up to the limit any one particular person was allowed – then collecting the cash back on a week-by-week basis. Charges were high; you often paid back more than you originally borrowed just in interest – sometimes double the loan value – but for the hard-up residents of places like the Canterbury Estate, these loans were often the only way they had available to them to pay off big bills or buy Christmas presents for their children.

Jock was astounded. Here were 50 books, seemingly just abandoned. A full £2,500 worth of cheques. And as he pointed out to Billy as soon at they’d got them out and inspected them, they were in cabinets that were destined not for another office building, but for skips; undetected, they would just get thrown away.

A meeting was called between the lads and a plan of action formed – the first being that Jock (having been the finder, now the self-appointed mastermind) would slip out to the nearest phone box, call his sister Maureen – who had a working phone – tell her to go and knock up June, and for the pair of them to meet the lads at lunchtime, in the Boy and Barrel pub in the town centre.

By the time lunchtime had come around, they had searched all the remaining drawers and cabinets, and had a haul of three bundles of club cheques in all – with a total value of £7,500. It was the sort of money that none of them had ever seen in their lives and, though not actual cash, it represented a means to make cash, by buying goods with the cheques and then selling them on. They could be minted in no time at all.

‘But we need to hold our horses,’ Jock cautioned at lunchtime, once they’d all gathered at the pub – him and June, Steven and Maureen, Billy and his wife Moira, plus the two younger lads that were working on the job with them, and who’d get a handsome cut just for keeping their traps shut. ‘We’ve got to be careful,’ he went on, ‘because we don’t know if or when they’ll miss them. There’s a chance they might realise they’ve left them, and go back to get them, then see they’re gone, and start asking questions.’

‘You’re not going to put them back, are you?’ asked June, who had by now stashed the bundle Jock had given her safely in her bag. ‘Not now we’ve got ’em. That would be fucking bonkers!’

Jock flapped a dismissive hand at her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve already been thinking about that. We’ll hang on to one bundle – that one you’ve got. Be senseless not to do that. You and Maureen can take it now and stash it safe at home. But we’ll leave the other two where they are and leave those cabinets till last. That way, if they do come sniffing round trying to find them, they’ll turn up two, think that’s the lot, and hopefully won’t miss the other one.’

‘But what about after?’ said Steven. ‘What if they don’t realise till after? I mean after the stuff has all gone down the tip and they realise the cheques have gone missing?’

‘We wait,’ Jock said. ‘Once the job’s done – assuming they didn’t realise they were missing and come and get them – we stash the other books and wait till we’re sure the coast’s clear.’

‘How long’s that gonna be?’ asked Billy. ‘It could take a long time for them to realise, couldn’t it?’

‘Why would they do something so fucking stupid anyway?’ June wanted to know. ‘I mean, how could you miss seven and a half’s grand’s worth of cheques?’

‘I was thinking about that too,’ Jock said. ‘Might be decimalisation. Might be that they’re old books and they’re going to get new decimal ones printed –’