Garbage Man

by Joseph D'lacey

  Rock stars, film stars, West end stars, critics, debutantes, lords and ladies, journos, paps, escorts and rent boys, dealers, pimps and spies. He’d caught them all at one time or another and in doing so he’d achieved three things. Fame, money and a nervous breakdown. It was inconceivable to Mason that his work could be seen as so influential. They called him a genius and this brought him more than a reasonable share of hate and adoration. For the years he spent on the London scene, he was ‘known’ everywhere. To him it was the ultimate irony; he had no personality and yet London turned him into a personality. In those days, he’d even appeared on late night chat shows where most of the guests and even the hosts were too stoned or pissed to be working. Back then, such things had seemed like good, highbrow arts programming. In reality it was egotism and bullshit of the worst kind. No one should have been paid to do it but they all were.

  Mason had watched and snapped his way into photography’s hall of fame in just three years. Within another two he had disappeared from London and the photographic scene forever. And no one knew where he’d gone. The rumour was he’d entered rehab on a long-term basis but the truth was Mason never had the stamina to be an abuser of substances. Too much of anything introduced to his system made him ill. Also, it clouded his photographic eye, and so he’d steered clear of every narcotic.

  What he’d really done was move out of his flat, sell everything he owned including the bulk of his photographic equipment, and bought a tiny mobile home. The vehicle had space for a single occupant to sleep in the back. He drove his new home away from London and didn’t stop until he reached the north coast of Scotland. He had money in the bank enough to live comfortably until he died. Instead he lived like a hermit, eating little, walking miles each day before returning to his four-wheeled home, still hating himself and everything he’d become and still not having any way to define who or what he was.

  The barren Scottish wilds hurt him with their emptiness almost as much as London’s overpopulation and amorality had affronted him. There were no trees to speak of, only vast, layered ranges of hills and mountains, blasted by wind and carpeted with heather. His eyes needed more than this and so he left, driving down the west coast to the Lake District and onwards until he crossed into Wales. On the far side of Snowdonia, near the coast, he found oak-lined hillsides from where he could both see and smell the ocean. The hillsides were silent and the oaks there were ancient and twisted. He spent several days exploring the smallest tracks until he found a remote farm at the centre of a huge, unpopulated stretch of land. The farm was lost at the centre of the property, so rundown it was becoming part of the hillside. The land comprised high, steep hills inland, sloping down to densely wooded valleys so overgrown it seemed no man could have walked there for centuries. Below the woods the land levelled out towards the sea.

  He parked beside the rusted skeleton of a tractor. A crooked woman opened the door to him when he knocked and the farmhouse exhaled the smell of living human decay. Mason had stepped back. The woman left it to him to speak.

  ‘I’d like to park on your land.’

  ‘We don’t allow camping.’

  ‘I’m not camping.’

  ‘What would you call it then?’

  ‘I just need some . . . quiet . . . for a while.’

  ‘How long’s a while?’ she’d asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll pay you. I’ve got cash.’

  She’d looked at him more closely then. Noticed his lengthening beard, his yellowing teeth - not age but neglect. Seen the sick caverns of his eyes and the closeness of his skin to his bones. She saw his posture. She was a judge of animals not men but she must have seen he was carrying some burden. He found her assessment uncomfortable.

  ‘You committed a crime somewhere, have you, boy? You on the run? We don’t want you bringing your problems here.’

  ‘I’ve done nothing wrong,’ he said and he was able to look into her eyes as he spoke.

  The crooked woman had squashed her already juiceless lips together as if deciding.

  ‘My husband’s sick. I don’t need more troubles.’

  ‘I’m not in trouble. I just need quiet. I just want some time.’

  ‘I’ll have to ask him.’

  She’d shut the door then and he heard her scuffle away along what he imagined to be a dark, claustrophobic passageway. Then there was silence.

  Mason turned to look at the hills and the rugged dry stone walls hewn from those hills. All around were dilapidated fences with rotting posts and broken barbed wire. The farmhouse was falling apart. Slates were missing from the roof. In the steep fields sheep cropped the grass. Shit matted their rear ends and many of them limped with foot-rot. Far on a hillside he saw grey-beaked rooks pecking at the torn open carcass of a ram. It began to rain, lightly at first which he found refreshing. The rain became heavy and determined. The water dripped from his unwashed hair into his collar and down his neck. He stepped under the broken porch which kept him dry, but the wind took lively and sprayed the water sideways onto him. He walked back to the minute campervan and got into the driver’s seat. From there he watched the rain distort and obscure the landscape through his windscreen and he thought about how the way he saw things didn’t really change what they actually were.

  He fell asleep.

  It was still raining when a rap that sounded hard enough to break the driver’s side window woke him up. His heart was out of control at the shock of it and he couldn’t catch his breath. The woman’s face was smeared and deformed by the rain. Her presence so close by frightened him. She held beside her a shepherd’s crook. To him it looked like a black iron hook. Rain fell hard and loud on the roof and the windscreen. She rapped the glass again even though she must have been able to see he was awake. He returned to himself then and opened the car door.

  ‘You’ll be coming in,’ she said as if the rain meant nothing to her. ‘He wants to see you. See your face.’

  ***

  ‘Shouldn’t you be revising?’

  ‘Fuck off, dork.’

  Donald Smithfield stood in the doorway of his sister’s bedroom. Aggie was trying so hard to be a woman but she was still a girl. Even though he was only fifteen, he knew this. And she knew he knew it. This, he supposed, was why she acted like she hated him all the time. But then, even with only a few moments of hindsight, he knew he probably could have come up with a better opener.

  ‘What I mean is, I could help. You know, test you on stuff.’

  She knew him too well. These things, these family understandings, they worked both ways.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Nothing. What do you mean? I just thought we could. . .’

  He watched her measuring him up. He couldn’t hold her gaze under such conditions and he looked away. Then he looked down. That was a mistake.

  ‘It’s about a girl isn’t it?’

  ‘Course not.’

  But now her mood was different. She was curious. She was - miraculously, and there was no telling how many seconds it might last - not pissed off any more. This change made him think twice about the wisdom of coming to her for advice.

  ‘A boy then?’ She asked, knowing the power of her words.

  Perhaps they’d shared too many secrets already. Though, now he thought about it more carefully, it had probably been him who had spilled his guts four-to-one over the years. Why was he so stupid? Why did he keep trusting her when she used her power to crush him?

  ‘I’m not into boys.’

  ‘Not this time.’

  ‘Just forget it, Agatha.’

  Using her full name was one tiny weapon he could employ. All it would do, though, was let her know for sure that she’d needled him deep; giving her more satisfaction, if that was what she wanted. He turned away from the door and pulled it closed, hating to break the connection but
knowing he had to save some part of himself, keep something intact if he was going to work things out on his own.

  Before he’d taken two steps she was standing in the open doorway.

  ‘Wait, Don. I’m sorry.’ He stopped, his back to her. ‘I shouldn’t have said that, I know. I’m . . . look, it’s just me, okay? I’m in a rat. I’m pissed off with everything. I just want to get out of here and I can’t. Can you understand that?’

  He supposed he must have nodded.

  ‘Come in. Shut the door and we’ll talk. I’ll help you, I promise.’

  She sounded genuine enough but she could still have been reeling him in. He turned to look at her. The malice was gone. The need to dominate was gone. She wanted him in her life again. God, how stunned he was by the necessity of his sister’s love. He didn’t know what he’d do when she followed her dreams away from home and he never saw her. Who would he talk to then? Who would understand him?

  She stepped out of the doorway to allow him past but he hesitated. He didn’t move because he knew that to walk into her room now was to walk into that future, the one in which he had to grow up and survive without the protection of Agatha. She loved him. She cared for him. There was no one else he could talk to about things. Stepping into her bedroom was stepping closer to that time when she would be out of his life. Where all this emotion was coming from, this passion, he didn’t know. All he knew was that everything he thought about hurt. Life was a rainbow of pain and he wasn’t sure he could live with any of its colours.

  ‘Don’t stand there crying, Donny. Come in.’

  He hadn’t even realised but now he reached up and found the dampness on his cheeks.

  ‘Shit,’ he said, walking through the door.

  The first thing she did was take hold of him and hug him tight. And he was weeping and weeping and he didn’t even know why.

  ***

  Pictorial fragments of Mason’s memories coated the walls. He peered now at one of the only colour photographs he’d ever kept.

  The light source came from the small window in the picture and it barely lit the scene. A flash would have killed the daylight, though, what little there was, and destroyed what he’d seen in that moment. This was the nearest he - or his equipment - had ever come to apprehending a moment fully and honestly. It had nothing to do with the fact the shot was in colour - there was barely enough pigment in the room to make that clear. The walls were almost grey, the furniture so faded it too might have been charcoals and ashes. The wood was dark enough to appear black at first glance and even the face the picture showed was drained of the bloom of life.

  The man sat in an armchair that must have been as old or older than its occupant. It had certainly moulded itself to the sick lines of his body. His hands gripped the armrests and the veins on them stood out like wiring. He wasn’t looking at Mason. He was staring out of the window at a landscape he must have known better than the contours of his own gnarled body. The man’s grey hair was thin but long and pushed back as though by an invisible wind. It looked like his chair was a flying machine and he the pilot. Only the profile of the man’s face was visible but even so, anyone looking at the photo would have known that this man had sight beyond the power of normal human eyes. He was looking at the landscape, only part of which was visible in the photo, but he was seeing more than anyone else could see. He was seeing beyond.

  That was it. An old man; a dying man as it turned out, his knees wrapped in a torn and threadbare tartan rug, his fingers spread like claws into the worn upholstery, in a room in a crumbling farmhouse cupped in the palm of the land. It wasn’t much of a subject. It wasn’t like the photos he’d taken in London. Critics would not have understood it and if they had they might not have wanted to give Mason much credit for it. It was too simple. Too unusual. Too real.

  It was probably the only photo he’d ever taken that had any true value and it was not a value measurable in money. When he took it he’d been living in the woods a mile from the farmhouse for almost a year.

  ***

  Richard Smithfield was having trouble breathing. The problem had started when he realised his computer contained enough evidence to destroy his life.

  He stood in the cold of his workspace at the back of the garage, wheezing slightly and unable to completely fill his lungs. In the kitchen Pamela was doing her best to make a tasty evening meal for the family. No doubt she would be unable to achieve such a thing. Aggie would be inspecting herself in the mirror or texting her vile girlfriends about, well, God knew what. Donald, if he was anything approaching a normal fifteen-year old boy, would be wanking himself braindead in his bedroom.

  He sighed in the gloom and switched on the fluorescent strip-light above the work bench. It illuminated what he was holding. The flattish, grey metal case was heavy in his hand. It contained the weight of his secrets. Not only that, it was designed to take punishment, to withstand knocks and accidents.

  This wasn’t going to be any kind of accident.

  Patiently, Richard Smithfield peeled off the metallic stickers identifying his product and set them aside. Using several sizes of screwdrivers, he separated the two halves of the dense casing. Another metal plate was riveted over the disks of the hard drive - there was no way to remove it without force. He levered the plate off, snapping and shearing small pieces of steel.

  There inside, pristine and unmarked by a single particle of dust lay the stack of five cobalt alloy disks. They were the colour of blue slate but mirror bright. At certain angles they gave off a rainbow shimmer. He removed the steel spindle holding them in place and lifted them off. Hard to believe so much information could be stored on these beautifully simple looking components. Hard to believe such engineered matter held enough information to condemn him to prison and the life of an outcast.

  But they could and they had to go.

  He placed the disks on a large old rag and folded it around them several times. He turned this bundle over so that it would keep itself closed. He pounded the bundle with a claw hammer until there was nothing inside but shards and powder. He placed all the dismantled and shattered components of the drive in a black bin liner and put it in the boot of the Volvo. Early in the morning he would drive out, ostensibly to fill up with diesel, and drop the bin liner into the huge compressor at the tip. In a few days it would be untraceable at the bottom of Shreve’s vast landfill.

  Then, and only then, he’d be able to breathe again.

  ***

  The sensation of floating is wonderful at first. She feels giddy, light in her core.

  Then she sees the building, far in the distance, piercing the sky to some degree but failing to attain heaven. She begins to fly towards it, not wanting to. She has no control. She is not flying, she is being carried, forced to fly. Perhaps then, she could also be made to fall. The earth is very far below, she would fall for a long time. She has a sense of being on a precipice, held there by something untrustworthy. A clip which might be faulty. A belt which might be old and frayed. Or perhaps something worse, the whim of a tormentor. Some entity she must trust to hold her even though it has the power to destroy her.

  Like this, always on the verge of losing her balance or being pushed, she is propelled towards the building.

  Reaching it and seeing how it thins to a thread as it extends downwards, she realises how tall it is. Miles, perhaps ten miles, from roof to foundation. Steel and glass and concrete. The entity holding her drops her and she begins to understand the true nature of falling. Wind pushing up at her but not enough to slow her down. The feeling that she’s left part of her insides behind. No net, no parachute, no safety line, no jutting branch or handhold.

  The entity is not ready to let her die yet. It wants her to see something. She stops falling. No deceleration, nothing below to catch her, she just stops. It hurts at such velocity. And now she is hauled high again, flying ag
ainst her will, back up towards the roof of the building.

  She sees the baby and feels as though she must have seen it a thousand times; the crawl-leather on its hands and knees and feet, the bruises on its head. The entity has brought her here because no matter how many centuries it has been searching this roof, the baby’s journey is only just beginning.

  Something new now. It looks so familiar but she can’t remember if it was there before or not. Now that she sees it, she supposes it’s always been there. The baby has found a sky light. It is made of angled panels of glass which meet in a shallow apex. The baby does not know what a sky light is. The baby knows nothing but the will to crawl and search.

  It thump-thumps up onto a glass panel, eager now that it has discovered something new. Its hands and knees slap against the glass as it climbs the gentle gradient of a sheet of glass many times its size. This is a new feeling beneath its fingers. Cold, yes, but smooth and comfortable.

  A crack appears. It makes a scratching, creaking noise and the baby stops crawling for a moment. Sound. A sound other than the slip and slap of it patting its leathery limbs on concrete day after day, year after year. She can see the crack is right under the baby. If it keeps crawling, it might leave the crack behind, make it to the safety of the apex or even that of a stronger sheet of glass.