Big Trouble in Little Widnes

a story by

Mike Blue

I grew up in a small north-western town between Liverpool and Manchester called Widnes. At one point I was living out of my Dad’s garage (that has the potential to sound quite rebellious and Kerouac-esque but that wasn’t the case. It was a decent little converted garage with a bed and WiFi – it didn’t have a functioning toilet but anyway, I digress). At the time I was working two jobs: a retail assistant at a video game outlet in the mornings and a waiter in a local Chinese buffet in the evenings. It was my day off and I was in my garage pottering about, thinking about what I was going to do with my life when there was a knock on my garage door. This was quite a strange event in itself, I never got visitors and my Dad never knocked, he’d just walk in to see me (fair enough – it’s his garage). I opened the door to find a man and a woman dressed in black with clipboards in their hands, official looking lanyards around their necks and a menacing aura of authority about them. In my mind, when I think back and let my imagination take over a little, they remind me of those agents you’d see in animated TV shows, dressed in all black, stone-faced, complete with wayfarer sunglasses and an earpiece each. This might be a good time to drop in this little disclaimer and say that this is a true story, but for the sake of good storytelling, I will be letting my imagination run loose at certain points of the narrative – but only a smidge.

Anyway, back to the garage.

“Hello,” I said quite naively, not knowing what I was in for.

“Michael McDermott?” they asked quite seriously, with no offering of jovialness or typical English pleasantry.

“Yeah, that’s me”. After all, it was me and there was no disputing that. Why would I dispute it? And why did the thought even cross my mind?

They introduced themselves briefly, I can’t remember their names. In my head it was something like: “I’m agent Shrader and this is agent Gomez (I’ve been re-watching Breaking Bad recently) we’re from HMRC Inland Revenue Service and we need to urgently discuss a matter with you, can we come in?”

What? HMR-Who, Inland Revenue-What? These were all big names that I’d heard of in passing but never really understood. What 19-year-old would? My heart sank – that feeling like the world was going to fall out my arse. Somehow, I kept my composure. Probably because deep down I knew whatever this was, it was a mistake and I was an innocent bystander in whatever path of bureaucracy they were embarking on.

“Yeah, sure thing. Do you mind If I get my Dad first?”. Daddy to the rescue.

They gave each other a quizzical look before allowing, “Yes that would be fine.”

I ran into the house and told my dad what was going on. Ironically, I think he was doing his taxes when I burst in. He laughed in disbelief but did follow me into the garage, like he was about to show me that there were no monsters under my bed. He was just as shocked as me when we entered the garage to see two agents stood there waiting. I thought I’d let him lead, being the certified adult and all.

“So what’s this all about then?” he said, taking the reins.

One of the agents turned around and took off their glasses (no, wait they didn’t have glasses, that's just in my imagination.) Looking at me, she said something I’ll never forget.

“You can drop the act now Mr. Cheung, we’ve got you.”

My Dad and I did that classic comedy-movie look at one another, wide-eyed and lip parted in total confusion.

“Eh?” my Dad uttered.

“You can drop the act there Kevin,” she said. Kevin Cheung, what a badass name, I thought. “We know you’ve been masquerading as this,” she looked at her clipboard, “Michael McDermott and you can just stop right there.”

My Dad and I took a second and then proceeded to burst out laughing. Their stone-faced expressions did not barge. My Dad was the first person to speak amidst the fit of giggles, finger pointed at me: “Does he look like a ‘Kevin Cheung’ to you? This is my son, Michael.”

“It’s true,” I said. I am he.

One agent looked back to the other with a look of cautious acceptance, as if what we were saying could be plausible.

“Do you have any forms of I.D with you Mr. Cheung?”. Sly, I thought, trying to catch me out. Could it be possible? Could I be this Kevin Cheung? Maybe It was me, God, I couldn’t be sure anymore, I better take a look.

“Of course – I have all my passport and documentation here”. I had a box where I kept my passport, NI number, birth certificate and all that kind of stuff. Lucky habit. I grabbed it, as well as my provisional licence out of my wallet. Together that bundle had my name, my address, my everything – I let them take it all in. I was still kind of nervous as they were going through it all. I started to think this was some kind of conspiracy and that I was going away no matter what. They were telling us that this Kevin Cheung was involved in some kind of tax-scam where he was pocketing cash from his workers at the local recycling plant he was working at, claiming it was tax and keeping it for himself. Ran up to something like £112,000 in total.

I’ll never forget my dad laughing and saying, in my typical dad fashion: “Ey, come on mate, look around you, does it look like he’s sitting on over 100k? He’s not even got a pot to piss in”. I swear his laugh echoed in the broken chemical toilet sitting ominously in the corner.

They finished examining my documents and pondered over my dad’s lingering words whilst convening with each other quietly in the corner of my garage. My dad and I were in the opposite corner, like some weird boxing match was about to break out. They turned around to us.

“Clearly there has been some sort of mix up here and we sincerely apologise for the inconvenience we might have caused.”

I took a huge sigh of relief and we all ended up having a good laugh about it. To this day I still don’t know how Mr Cheung got hold of my personal details – I’d never worked at the recycling plant. I’ve just put it down to one of those freak cases of identity theft you hear about all the time (not so much in Widnes, but generally speaking.) It was such a big deal that I remember a few weeks later being in my local co-op and seeing these big headlines in one of our local papers: “Recycling boss who pocketed £112,000 from employees' tax is jailed.”

Wow I thought, dodged a bullet there, feeling as if I was Kevin Cheung all along. The Kevin Cheung that got away with it, looking at a paper with my mugshot on the cover – me – Michael Edward McDermott. Scary, I thought. I remember it got me thinking as I waited in the que to pay for my meal deal. There’s a Kevin Cheung in all of us, and a Michael McDermott. It’s up to you to decide which one you want to be. 

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Mike Blue