D. Mitchell - The King of Terrors

Yeah, Billy Crudd had plans. Just needed the money and his scheme would take off and fly, taking him with it.

Money, unfortunately, was the only sticking point. What he needed he just couldn’t earn at Speedy Save supermarket, not on minimum wage. Neither could he afford to escape living with his parents and rent a place of his own. He could hardly save the deposit needed for a flat, let alone pay the hugely inflated monthly rents they were asking these days. Since the housing crash, with people unable to get mortgages, the rental market had gone ballistic and landlords had been quick to sniff profits and raise their rates. People were paying small fortunes for stinking dives that nobody wanted a few years ago. So he was stuck with them for now; stuck with his parents and stuck with the name Billy Crudd.

His real name was William Krodde, his Dutch grandfather coming over to England after the war. No one at school could be bothered to pronounce it properly, so they called him Crudd or Cruddie, a nickname that stuck. Anyhow, it suited him that no one thought he was part foreign. He hated all those fucking foreigners coming over and taking all the English jobs, scrounging off benefits and sapping the National Health system. He conveniently ignored the fact that his own father hadn’t worked in ten years and knew the system well enough to claim a raft of state benefits. He played up his inability to get about, yet Billy had seen him active enough to know that was a lie. But so what? The system was fucked-up anyhow, and the government didn’t give a toss about you. You have to take care of yourself, son, he’d told him in a rare moment of paternal advice giving, and if that meant at the expense of someone else then that suited Billy Crudd too.

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.