The Sound of Laughter (13 page)

Nine out of ten times it worked, but occasionally I'd get a smart one who'd just look at me and say,

'Aren't those the order forms in your hand?'

That's when I'd have to reply awkwardly, 'Oh yeah, so they are.'

Thwarted, I devised another technique that would take the 'no order forms' scam to the next level, literally. One night I had a woman stroll up to the counter just as we were cashing up. She was pulling a tartan shopping trolley that was piled so high with Tiger Tokens that they were spilling on to the floor as she walked.

Before she even had chance to open her mouth, I went over to a side door behind the counter and, tilting my head upwards I shouted,

'Kev, have we got any of those Tiger Token order forms up there?' (Then I paused for effect.) 'Next week you say. OK, I'll tell her.'

Disgruntled, the woman left the garage leaving a trail of paper tokens fluttering behind her.

As she got back into her car I could see her looking at the one-storey garage with confusion on her face. There was no upstairs, there was no member of staff called Kev and the side door behind the counter only led to a dusty store cupboard where we kept out-of-date Fruit Pastilles and melted Twixes.

The garage was the longest job I had. (Obviously that's if you don't count the one I do now.) The only reason I stayed so long was because I had such a good laugh. Lord knows, it couldn't have been for the money, because the wage Vernon gave me was a pittance. I got £1.80 an hour until I was eighteen and then it went up to £2.40. Downright disgraceful. But there was always plenty of overtime and any shitty part-time job had to be better than signing on. Plus I got to nick my own body weight in Duracell batteries and I never had to buy a blank video or cassette for the next five years.

Every year in August Vern and his wife Pam would go
on a golfing holiday to Florida, and before they went Pam would make up our wages and leave them in the safe. I opened mine one week and realised it was a couple of quid short. I was furious as I hardly got much as it was. Luckily Vernon had left the telephone number of the hotel in case of an emergency so I took the liberty of calling him – well, it was an emergency to me.

After much palaver and a few foreign dialling tones, I got through to a camp concierge called Brad who informed me that Mr Vernon Papworth and his wife were unavailable.

'That's OK, I'll hold,' I told him.

'But they may be some time, sir,' he said, slightly concerned.

'That's OK, I don't mind.'

'OK, sir, I shall do my best to locate them,' and with that he put me on hold.

I didn't mind – I had time to kill, and it was Vernon's phone bill at the end of the day.

After ten minutes of listening to Enya, I heard Brad come back to the phone.

'Hello, Mr Kerr,' he said wearily. 'We've managed to locate Mr Papworth and his wife. They're at the fourteenth hole on the golf course, so I've sent my junior concierge Mandarin out to meet them with our portable cellphone. I'll put you through momentarily.'

The next voice I heard was Vernon's.

'Hello, Peter, it's Vernon, is everything all right?' He wasn't even trying to disguise the panic in his voice.

'Yes,' I said, 'everything's fine.'

'The garage, is everything all right at the garage?'

'Yes, it's all OK.'

'Thank fuck for that,' he said. 'I thought the place had burnt down or summat. Well, what do you want then?'

'Well, it's just I that got my wage that Pam did before she left and it's a couple of pounds short. I just wondered whether I should take the money straight out of the till or wait till you get back?'

I literally had to hold the phone at arm's length, Vernon was shouting so much.

When he got home he gave me a bollocking but I didn't get the sack. Vernon knew he'd never be able to find anybody else to work for the wages he paid. We knew our jobs were secure. Perhaps that's why we pissed about so much.

After Vernon left the building at six o'clock we basically had the place to ourselves and we came up with plenty of ways to pass the time.

We started an occasional sweepstake just to see how long it would take for the police to arrive when we pushed the panic button deliberately. I won twenty quid once when it took the police over an hour to arrive.
When they did turn up we just blamed it on faulty electrics or the Red Arrows appearing at a local air show.

Sometimes when it was quiet we'd play baseball in the shop, using a tennis racket from the Tiger collection and packets of crisps as balls. We only played that occasionally because none of us could be arsed cleaning the crisps off the wall afterwards. In summer we used to have the most amazing water fights, with hoses and jet sprays. This was always great fun, especially when we took it in turns to ride through the car wash on a bike while it was switched on.

At Christmas we liked to make a bit of an effort with the punters. We used to jam ten-pence coins under the keys of the tannoy system in order to keep the microphone constantly turned on. Then we'd play a selection of Christmas music for all the customers to hear. And it worked a treat until Steve forgot that everybody on the forecourt could hear everything he was saying. In particular an attractive girl on pump four who clearly heard Steve say, 'Jesus, I wouldn't mind hanging out of that,' as she stepped out of her Renault. She just gave us the Vs and drove off.

Vernon decided to sell greetings cards and helium balloons for a while and after working a particularly arduous bank holiday weekend we thought it would be amusing to let these balloons go. That was only after
we'd attached cards to the bottom of them informing any persons who happened to find a balloon that they were entitled to an all-expenses paid holiday to the Maldives if they rang the following number. Obviously the number we put on was Vernon's private home number. Needless to say, he hit the roof when his phone started to ring. Apparently he got calls from 'winners' as far away as Llandudno. We just denied all knowledge.

Sometimes it was more like a youth club than a place of work. In fact, if it wasn't for the customers continually interrupting us I swear we'd have gotten a couple of snooker tables fitted into the car wash.

Of all the lads I worked with at the garage, Steve was my favourite. He was a drifter, a traveller, much older than me, and during our long unsociable shifts together he'd enjoy nothing more than regaling me with stories of his female conquests around the globe. He also used to bring his TV to work. He'd wait until Vernon left the building and then he'd get it out of the boot of his car. I remember an occasion one Saturday evening watching
The Return of the Incredible Hulk
with him on ITV. It was one of those piss-poor TV movies that they made in the eighties. The forecourt was quite quiet when Steve's ex-girlfriend screeched up in her Peugeot sparring for a fight. It was the same routine paranoia she had every weekend after his Friday night out with the lads.

He went outside to talk to her and the next thing I could see they were nose to nose screaming obscenities at each other. Then Dr David Banner started to change into the Hulk. We'd been waiting over an hour to see this and I didn't want Steve to miss it. So without thinking I shouted to him over the garage tannoy: 'Steve, get in here quick, the Hulk's changing.'

Steve just ran off mid-row and came back inside to watch the Hulk. This sent his ex over the edge. She got back into her Peugeot and melodramatically drove straight into a wall at the other end of the forecourt. I casually mentioned it to Steve but he didn't even look up, as he was engrossed in Lou Ferrigno.

'She's always doing it,' he said. 'She's just attention-seeking.' The next thing I knew the fire brigade arrived and they had to cut her out of the wreckage. Lord, did I feel guilty, she couldn't walk for a month.

The only time I never had any fun was during my Friday-night shift, when I worked with Wayne Paxton. The word fun wasn't in his vocabulary. I realised that when I overheard him trying to recite the whole of the phonetic alphabet with an off-duty fireman on the forecourt. 'It's alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot . . .' I think you get the picture.

Wayne liked to think of himself as the deputy manager simply because he was the longest-serving
member of staff. He'd started at the garage as a Saturday lad when he was just fourteen but now he was thirty-eight and it'd gone beyond a joke.

I hated working with him — he'd make my Friday nights hell. I couldn't have the radio on too loud, as he'd continually come behind the counter and turn it down or, worse still, stand at the other end of the shop with his hands over his ears, motioning at the speakers. The only time he used to turn it up was for the news or to listen to the shipping forecast on Radio 4.

We had a nickname for him – it was Champagne because of the champagne lifestyle that we imagined he led outside work. He was passionate about animals and drove around for six months with a sticker that we doctored in the back window informing people that 'A Dog Is For Christmas and Not Just For Life'.

Some nights Champagne wouldn't even speak to me, he'd be too busy with his hobby. He used to collect the plastic centres from empty till rolls. He would make us save them for him and he would lose his mind if saw one of us throwing them in the bin. He liked to glue them together into the shape of a Christmas tree or a sailing boat. How do you think I felt? – I had to work with him.

I used to go outside and sweep the forecourt, wash the pumps and empty the bins, anything to get away from Champagne. The back of the garage was just spare land,
there was loads of it – so much that we actually contemplated holding a car boot on it when Vernon went on holiday.

There was also a section where the rubbish was burned. For some reason Champagne liked to call this area the 'Pit' and every Friday he'd make me tip all the week's rubbish into and burn it. I was supposed to check through the bins for items unsuitable for burning but I never bothered. It never really mattered until the night I chucked three empty WD-40 canisters into the fire without knowing and almost blew up the garage.

The fire brigade came and Champagne was so embarrassed, especially when one of the fire officers turned out to be the same one he'd had the phonetic alphabet discussion with a few months earlier.

Like most things in my life, the garage was demolished after I left. It's wasteland now. All that remains is the 'Pit' at the back, no doubt with a can of WD-40 still smouldering somewhere beneath the earth.

One Saturday afternoon I was sat behind the counter reading
Viz
when I happened to glance up and see an elephant walking down the road. I froze. Now it's not something that you see every day of the week and I literally had to rub my eyes, but it really was there. An elephant strolling down the road.

I began to fear I had lost my mind. Was I hallucinating? Had I inhaled too many car fumes? I grabbed the tannoy and hollered for one of the other lads in the workshop: 'Steve, Mick, anybody, come quick, there's an elephant...' It turned out I must have missed the two coppers at the front who were stopping traffic when I was reading, and the elephant was leading a parade that was celebrating the end of Ramadan.

Of all the garage regulars there were only a handful of customers I actually liked and Leonard De Tompkinson was one of them. To say he was an eccentric would be putting it mildly. He was a walking ray of sunshine. I smiled the first time I ever clapped eyes on him as he pulled on to the forecourt in a pink Reliant Robin he named Hercules. I later found out he used to call into the garage on his way to the Church of the Nazarene round the corner. We got to know each other and after a while he'd come in for a brew and sit behind the counter with me, chatting for hours about his remarkable life.

What I liked most about Leonard was the fact that he was such a positive person. He loved every minute of life and he was always telling jokes and singing, which I found all the more humbling when I discovered that he was registered as disabled and suffered from an acute heart condition.

'Hey, I've never let it hold me back, cocker, and many a good tune can still be played on an old fiddle providing your strings don't break.'

He was always coming out with daft sayings like that.

Unable to work, Leonard used to deliver free newspapers every week and he also used to help out at the old people's home on Lever Edge Lane. He'd serve food to the pensioners, make them laugh, and in return the staff would give him a few free meals. Sadly a lot of people in the area thought he was a weirdo just because he used to say hello to everybody and dressed eccentrically.

He loved charity shops and in fact seemed to spend his life in them, buying all kinds of shite for tuppence. He was forever calling into the garage to show us what he'd bought.

'Here, look what I got today,' he'd say as he excitedly pulled items out of a British Heart Foundation carrier bag. 'I got a fancy sailor's hat, a rainbow-coloured sarong, a couple of novelty salt and pepper mills in the shape of Cagney and Lacey, oh and a gym body eight.' (You know, one of those things you attach to your chest and it's supposed to work your muscles while you're watching
Emmanuelle.
I'm guessing probably not the best thing for an acute angina sufferer.)

Once when we were sitting behind the counter I asked him if he ever got lonely. He just shook his head.

'No, I haven't got time to be lonely, I'm always busy and I've too many friends and I love life. Sometimes people say that they get bored with life but how can you get bored when you don't know what's coming next?'

Leonard was a devoted Christian and he was always quoting the Bible to anybody who'd listen. He used to stand in the town hall square in Bolton and preach to people. Now that takes some guts. I remember some lads walking once past shouting 'Hello, JC to him and Leonard shouted back, 'He's coming soon, lads, and he'll save us all.'

'I've always been a believer,' Leonard once said 'God's been good to me but not just to me, to all of us. Every day is a blessing, every day is a gift and that's why I spread His good news.'