The Sound of Laughter (14 page)

We lost touch for a while after his faithful Hercules failed its MOT. I didn't see him for ages until one night I was walking home from a friend's and there he was up a tree trying to coax a cat down. He didn't even know whose cat it was but he'd heard it crying and climbed up to get it down. Now he was stuck too. I helped him down and we had a chat. He looked much older and, sporting a big white bushy beard, he looked like a cross between God and Captain Birds Eye. Not that I've ever met Captain Birds Eye, you understand. It was so good to see him again. We hugged, we said our goodbyes and
a few days later I found out that he'd died later that night.

I went to the funeral the following week and only three of us showed up, including the vicar. It broke my heart, especially because Leonard always used to go on about how many friends he'd got. But I think at the end of the day Leonard was everybody's friend and yet he never had any real friends. Maybe he was right when he said,

'Live your life because you're a long time dead.'

Leonard certainly did.

As well as having the garage Vernon also had a sideline in car hire and sometimes after work on a Saturday night Steve, myself and some of the other lads would take one of his brand-new cars out for a test drive. Looking back, we would have been frigged if we'd crashed, as we were only on third-party insurance and that would have probably been invalid, with six of us crammed into the back of a Vauxhall Astra.

We used to go all over – Blackpool Illuminations, the multiplex in Preston for a late-night screening or sometimes we'd just head up on to the hills and park up. I loved those Saturday-night road trips. We'd just sit and talk for hours. Listen to music and laugh so much. We'd stay until the sun came up and then go straight back into
work and do a full shift. I could do that when I was young. Nowadays I get a blinding migraine if I stay up until the end of
News At Ten
and I have to have a siesta the following day.

Getting my own car insurance was one thing that I certainly didn't have to worry about, because I made less progress with Marion Moran than I had with Raymond. In fact she made him look like Stirling Moss she was that atrocious. As a result I'd failed my driving test twice in the last six months. I was at breaking point and genuinely considering giving up. But the only problem with giving up was that it would've meant that all those other lessons I'd had would have been in vain.

Marion was a good person. It's just that she wasn't really good at teaching me how to drive. She was more bothered about running errands during my lesson. I'd be driving down a busy main road and suddenly she'd shout, 'Carrots. Pull over.'

Then I'd be sat outside the greengrocer's with my hazards on while she was queuing up for veg. I felt like Morgan Freeman in
Driving Miss Daisy
every time I had a lesson.

She'd stop for food, magazines, clothes. Once she made me pull up outside a TV-repair shop and the next thing you know I was staggering through the door with a thirty-two-inch Hitachi in my arms. She said she
couldn't carry because of her back. More like her fat arse . . . and fat foot.

I felt like a complete mug and when I tackled her about it she said it was all part of learning to drive. Why couldn't I just find a normal instructor?

I was also turning into her marriage guidance counsellor. She had one or two problems with her hubby Graham and I got a running commentary every week. She'd ask me questions like, 'I came home the other night and there were two empty wine glasses on the kitchen drainer. What do you think? Is he seeing someone else?' All I wanted to know was whether I should turn right at the next roundabout and whether I should change to third gear now I was over 25mph.

She rang me at home one night supposedly to firm up on the time of our next lesson but an hour later she was still on the phone in tears, confessing her suspicions. She told me that her cocker spaniel Tara had puked up a condom in the middle of
Crimewatch
and now she definitely suspected her Graham of having an affair, what should she do? What the hell did I know? I was eighteen.

I reckoned it was extreme paranoia fuelled by HRT and too much Lambrusco. But Marion was no angel and she loved to flirt. I'd seen her as I sat outside the butcher's, running her false nails up and down his
brisket. She also liked to wear the shortest of short skirts, very unflattering especially with that club foot in tow. She'd bought them in bulk after watching
Basic Instinct
and they made my stomach turn. It was like sitting next to a meerkat every time we went over a speed bump.

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.

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.