It was 9.30pm before he put on his works uniform — white shirt, black trousers, black shoes — and stuffed the horrible lime green coat he was forced to wear into a Speedy Save carrier bag. His dad was stretched out on the sofa; the news on the TV was playing to itself. Fresh rioting had broken out in London. Good for them, he thought. The fucking government, driving everyone deeper into poverty with their bastard austerity measures, deserved to get a stiff kick in the ministerial balls. If he were there in London he’d be joining in too, helping himself to a new TV. He could do with another TV.
‘I’m off,’ he said, but his lardy lump of a father didn’t hear; he was asleep, his rounded belly rising and falling like a partially deflated balloon.
His mother was out at bingo, squandering hard-earned money, his dad said. Mainly mine, thought Billy, still incensed that his mother had recently increased his board because the electric and gas bills had shot up and she had ranted that it was all the fault of him playing all day, every day, on his Playstation.
‘It doesn’t use gas, you silly mare!’ he’d said, but she gave him a wallop for being cheeky and made him feel like that weedy little kid all over again. He hated that. He desperately wanted to get out before he took an axe and did them both in. He’d read about such cases and could understand why someone would do that. Another movie played in his head as he left the small terraced house; a horror movie, blood splashing everywhere, his dad’s head rolling down the hallway like a bowling ball…
As he trudged through the largely deserted streets, the sun set to gasp its last and let night have a go, a couple of police cars screamed by him, lights flashing, sirens blaring. He didn’t pay them much attention; there was always something going down in this part of Manchester. In his opinion it was a slum, a blighted, sleazy dive of a place where there were two sets of people: those who did their best to escape the vice and those who came in to find it.
Speedy Save supermarket reflected the aspirations of the locality. It was owned by a decent Asian family called Patel, but stuck in a place where your Tesco or Sainsbury wouldn’t be seen dead. It dealt in lots of foreign food bought on the cheap, dented cans and out of date packets to pad out the precious few brand names on show. It was doing OK. People round here couldn’t afford to be choosy. Most of them were on the dole, and anyway a good wash would remove the fishy smell and green tinge from the chicken breasts.
It was a good business model, thought Billy enviously, and one that he was keen to emulate. This was his Big Plan; to own his own small food store somewhere. He’d spent time chatting to the girls in the office, got to know a few supplier contacts, and reckoned if he had enough behind him he’d be able to set up shop too. But it wouldn’t have a name like fucking Speedy Save. Billy wanted it to sound class, even though it would basically purvey the same kind of suspect crap. He didn’t know yet what that name was going to be as he wasn’t hot on words, but that was the least of his worries. He needed the readies and no bank was likely to offer it to him, even less so since the bastards had stopped lending money to anyone these days. So he’d lined up a meeting with someone who would give him a loan, no questions asked. A big risk, for some maybe, but not for him. His business wouldn’t fold because he knew exactly what he was doing. His business model was foolproof.
The approach to the side door of the supermarket, past the main entrance, was always a time of dread and bottled up anger. The thought of facing another night working alongside all those zombie shelf packers on the graveyard shift grabbed at his intestines and gave them a squeeze. The place had its fair share of weirdos and night appeared to bring them out. It was only because it was one of the few jobs on offer around here that Billy took it on in the first place. That and to escape the dole-dishers who were forever on his back. Sponging off the government was something his father might be accomplished at, but he’d never acquired the same skills. He was glad to shrug them off, petty, bureaucratic bastards that they were.
The store was run for Mr Patel by Slimer (real name Derek Pritchard, or ‘Prickhard’ as the office girls laughingly called him behind his back). Mr Patel turned a convenient blind eye to his store manager’s dodgy employment practices and the night shift hid any number of illegal immigrants and tax dodgers, mixed in with one or two guys with severe mental health issues you didn’t want to explore with them in a lonely place. You didn’t choose to work nights at Speedy Save, not if you had anything about you. It was a sort of saloon bar for the desperate. Billy, well he was just biding his time till the Big Plan took off.
So he was immensely glad when into the gloomy squalor of his dreary existence came Beth Heaney. It was a year ago now. Fresh-faced, quiet, youthful, ball-achingly attractive Beth.
He fell for her straight away. So too did the rest of the morons who drooled like slavering Rottweilers on heat whenever she came near. She caught the attention of Slimer, too. He sometimes worked nightshift — a version of worked which looked a lot like sleep — and his eyes were out on stalks, his tongue scraping the dust from the floor whenever he was around her. Which was as often as he could be in the first few weeks. Like some kind of jailer he organised his aisles according to where they appeared on his scale of hard case. He liked her so he put her on the soups and gravy aisle with a harmless old timer called Bernie. Bernie had been a Jap prisoner during the war and never talked to anyone. Slimer put all the quiet ones here. Nobody but nobody wanted to be put on toilet rolls and bleaches because that’s where the weirdest of the weirdos were. Duty of care to his staff, Slimer said. So Beth got soups and gravy with Bernie, until she refused to play game with his lecherous advances and he stuck her next door to the Aisle of the Damned. She didn’t bat an eyelid though, which impressed Billy. Just kept herself to herself, shrugged off the lewd comments like it was acid rain and she was waterproof, till it didn’t rain comments any more.
Beth sat alone in the canteen at break times, she in one corner of the room, Bernie in another, and small groups of weirdos in between. Billy avoided talking to her for a full month, as he avoided talking to any pretty young woman. Their very presence tied his tongue up in knots. But there was something about this woman that had sunk its soft hooks into him. He became increasingly besotted with her. The calm, unruffled way she carried herself only added to her allure. Then one evening he marshalled every ounce of courage, which even on a good day wasn’t much, preparing himself for the inaugural meeting by paying particular attention to wearing a clean shirt, combing through his thinning hair a dozen times, and brushing his teeth for a full two minutes without stopping.
At break time he took his flask of coffee and plastic sandwich box and sat down at her table, opposite her. He felt all the weirdos’ eyes burning at his back, heard the phrase ‘get in there my son’ and ignored them.
‘Hi,’ he said, hardly daring to look in her eyes. She glanced up from her half-eaten sandwich, smiled politely, nodded in greeting and bent down to eating again. She had copies of the Times and Guardian spread out on the table in front of her. ‘Reading in stereo?’ he quipped.
‘I like to keep up with events,’ she said.
‘I’m a Sun man myself,’ he admitted.
‘I prefer words to pictures,’ she returned.
Ouch! He jerked back a little as if punched, then saw that she wasn’t serious, or if she was she made it look like it was harmless. He laughed, too loudly. ‘Yeah, right, pictures!’ he said. The pause hung around for a little too long to make it comfortable. ‘I’ve got egg,’ he said, snapping the lid off the box and a strong farty smell confirmed it. He cursed himself for talking a load of crap. It wasn’t what he’d rehearsed. She’d think him some kind of retard or something, he thought. One of the weirdos. ‘Can I buy you a drink from the machine?’ he asked. ‘It tastes like shit but it’s warm and wet.’