Garbage Man

by Joseph D'lacey

  The baby laughs, just once, a sort of gurgled ‘Ha!’ of triumph. It knows it has definitely discovered something new.

  The glass breaks.

  She flies through it with the baby. Follows it down.

  4

  There was a photo of the farmer’s wife too, also alone, and taken on another day.

  Somehow the opportunity to photograph her and her husband together never came up. This time he was using black and white again. He’d found her in the kitchen peeling potatoes at the table. He had his camera with him but not because he’d planned to take her picture. He stood in the doorless entry to the kitchen seeing that everything about the scene was right and his hands went automatically to the camera slung around his neck. Only when he had his hands on it did she look up at him.

  He’d asked her husband’s permission to take his photograph in his armchair by the window. This was something different, an opportunistic moment. He was about to ask her if it was all right when she looked back down at what she was doing as though he wasn’t there. He’d been around the pair of them long enough to understand how much they spoke without using their mouths. He relaxed a little, checked the light reading and brought the camera’s eye to his eye and when they were both seeing the same thing in the same way, he took the shot. But in the moment he’d found his composition, in the moment he’d committed himself to the shot, she looked up at him and her face opened.

  Here, take it all, she seemed to be saying, like a rape victim going limp with compliance, that passivity taking all the power from the rapist. This wasn’t a rape, of course, not in any sense. She wanted him to see what was in her face and she opened it for him. Just then and never again.

  Mason looked at that photo now. There was nothing in it to give it a date in recognisable time, except perhaps the quality of the picture itself. It could have been a hundred and fifty years old. There she sat at her table, a half peeled potato in one hand, a short knife, half worn away with sharpening in the other. Her fingers were crooked and had painful-looking arthritic nodules on them. The joints were swollen but still bony. A pile of peelings lay to one side. In an aluminium pan of cold water with a loose handle lay the clean, skinless potatoes. She looked up from her work and in her eyes there was history: the transition from carefree girl to practical farmer’s wife to widow-expectant in a single glance.

  Every time he looked at the photo, Mason thought he could see bitterness but there was no bitterness there. Only experience and tolerance; not resentment but forbearance. There was a solitude there too, the seed of which must have been growing for a long time. She did not have her husband’s sight and so could not share his view of the world. Not even his view from the window where he sat. Being with him, loving him so quietly as she did, had made her a lonely soul living firmly in this world while her husband looked into the next.

  Oh God.

  There was no help in staring at these fragments from the past - good work though they may have been. He wasn’t looking at the photos to remember who he was or feel better about the past. He was looking for guidance, for answers.

  The farmer would have known something about the bleeding Earth but he had long since followed where only his gaze had penetrated before.

  Mason severed the connection with the photos, disorientated by the clarity of the memories that accompanied his staring. Such was the power of photography.

  Little use it was to him now.

  The farmer and his wife had helped him back then. He would have said they’d helped him to regain a missing part of himself but the truth was, the missing part was one he’d never been connected to until he arrived in on their land. He had to lose the rest of himself on that stretch of ancient hillside before he discovered the part that had always been missing.

  ***

  I make it to the gates of the facility but it’s been slow going. Assailants stand everywhere in twos and threes. Watchful, sensing the air at all times, the merest whisper of my passing makes them turn their heads my way. I want to leap up and draw my sword, at least take out one or two groups, but I know the noise will attract more and still more of them until I am swiftly overcome. Again and again I’ve had to lie perfectly still and pray I haven’t roused them enough to come and investigate. I’ve pushed it, pushed it because my advancement has been so slow, but I’ve made it all the way to the facility car park without a single encounter. I am healthy. I am strong. I have weapons and skill. Dawn is only an hour or two away. All I have to do now is find a way inside the facility.

  It’s the perfect moment. Better than I could have hoped for.

  Ray Wade saved the game to his memory card and looked at his watch.

  Christ.

  4.45 am.

  There was a rotten smell in the house that the dope smoke barely disguised and his eyes were red and sore. As usual, the bin needed emptying and the late night screen-watching was burning his eyes. Or it could have been the worsening stench from the landfill - a toxic gas, so the papers said.

  Tomorrow - well, later today - was another day of lectures and classes. If he was lucky he’d get three hours of sleep. Jenny had been in bed for a couple of hours already - bored by his lack of attention. Either that or too stoned to stay awake any longer. Ray rubbed his face, dropped the controller and switched off the console and TV.

  His skin was still puckered with goose flesh. The zombies in Revenant Apocalypse gave him the serious creeps. Perhaps because of this, and the tension the game created, he was completely hooked on it. They were so . . . watchful. So awake. Sniffing the air like dogs, vigilant eyes backlit by disease. And the way they attacked was merciless. Shit, it was fast too. You couldn’t turn your back and stroll away. If you engaged them, you had to put them down. God, he’d wanted so badly to use that katana on the fuckers.

  That would be a treat for the following night.

  Well, really it was this night, wasn’t it? He smiled in the skunk-spicy darkness of his tiny living room. Not too many hours to go until he let slip the samurai blade.

  ***

  The baby chuckles, the first emotion it has ever shown other than determination - if that could ever count as an emotion. It has found its little hill of glass and scales it with confidence, with more strength than an infant ought to possess. She hovers above it unable to scream a warning even though she tries. The entity won’t allow her to interfere, only to observe. No, that’s not true; the entity allows her to feel everything, to empathise utterly with the chubby bundle, so hardened and bull-headed in its quest. She already knows something of the pain that is to come.

  But only something.

  There is no time here, she has decided. When she is here she recognises everything. When she wakes, all she knows is that she has dreamed this before. How many times, she has no idea. But when she is here, with the building, with the baby, she knows she has visited a thousand times. A hundred thousand. Revealing and discovering each part of the nightmare incrementally.

  It will never be over.

  There’s a squeaky cracking sound as the fracture creeps across the pane of glass. The glass gives way to the baby’s weight and it falls through. She’s right behind it in slow motion. So she sees how easily the edges that touch the baby open its unprotected flanks. The cuts are slow to respond, perhaps because they are the first wounds the baby has ever known. Or perhaps it’s simply because the entity wants her to see the details. Edges a mere molecule thick stroking innocent, flawless skin and revealing the flesh below. Then, finally, the wounds are obscured by a welling up of the baby’s life fluid.

  It falls in silence. So sharp are the blades which have cut it that it doesn’t even know it has been opened up. It is also still a relative stranger to pain. She knows this state cannot last. She knows worse, much worse, is to befall the innocent.

  Silence.

  They fall together in silenc
e. The baby first, she following closely.

  Concrete welcomes them with cold inevitability and unyielding hardness.

  The baby hits the floor in a rain of transparent razors. She does not. She is the witness.

  The baby is not dead. But it should be. It is still but for its breathing.

  Its left arm is broken. Not a simple greenstick fracture but a break. Radius and ulna snapped like tiny sticks of rock. Despite the hard pads on its hands and knees, glass shards have penetrated every part of the baby’s body which have made contact with the floor. Its mouth is a wet, red mess. If it had any teeth they would be gone. Instead the mandible is cracked and flattened. The upper palate is crushed somewhat, making the baby’s bloody face flatter, wider. It bounced when it hit, from its face onto its side and she can see the many places where the glass has pierced it ventrally and exited dorsally. It has developed ‘spines’ of glass.

  They have landed - no, the baby has landed - in some sort of corridor or hallway with many doors leading off to either side. She is dismayed in a way that she is not able to express. She is not allowed to express it. The entity makes her hold her feelings in.

  The baby opens its eyes. It is looking up. For a moment she thinks it sees her and her guilt deepens, colouring her very soul a warm red. But the baby does not see her. It looks through, beyond. And besides, she sees now that the baby only has one eye that still functions. From the other, the broad end of a glass lancet protrudes. This does not prevent the baby from trying to blink. One blink works, the other meets resistance.

  And now, finally, the baby is waking up to pain for the first time. It feels its wounds; all of them, and its solitude and it howls for all of this. She would love to be allowed to hear its scream; she deserves to, she believes. But the entity permits her only to imagine what this scream must sound like. The baby howls and weeps, the hot sting of its tears no sensation at all beside its abandonment and wounding. It cries like this for a very long time and she is not allowed to give the baby comfort. Cannot approach to lay a mothering hand upon its torn, dying body.

  But the baby is not dying.

  When it realises this, when pain and crying are unanswered, it stops its grizzling. The broken baby turns from its side onto its hands and knees again. Leaving etches of blood in grooves made by the glass that is now part of it, it crawls along the corridor. At each door it discovers, it raises its broken arm and flails for entry. For response. When there is nothing, it crawls on, scratching along the concrete in cherubic agony, in saintly silence, still searching.

  ***

  The photos were always evocative.

  Mason remembered how he’d driven his camper down a rocky track toward the trees. It was steep enough to make him wonder if the camper would ever get back up. His very next thought was:

  Who the fuck cares?

  The ancient track stopped being rock and became rutted dirt and shale nearer the trees. But the way was still clear and the gradient had eased. He supposed the farmer must have kept the track open with a tractor or quad bike - if not the farmer, then someone he hired to help. Under the trees it was darker, the unending grey of the Welsh sky not making much impression beneath the low leaf canopy. The track ended at a gulley where no vehicle could go any further.

  He walked out from his camper that day and into the rain, much gentler then than when he arrived at the farmhouse, and explored the area.

  The gulley was small, nothing dramatic but it had to be negotiated on foot. On the side he descended were small boulders and rocks, all wearing a thick fur of bright moss. He lost his footing several times as he clambered down. At the bottom of the gulley was a tiny stream, black water flowing over coal-dark peat. It was probably no more than a footstep across the widest part. He crossed it. Beyond, was the opposite slope of the miniature valley. There, the grass was fuller and greener than the place where Mason switched off his engine. There were no rocks to slip on or trip over.

  There, on the far side of the gulley, protected by moss-covered oaks dripping fronds of lichen and tears of rain, in the clean damp air he felt himself go silent inside. His mind stopped replaying his fears and insecurities. It stopped questioning the validity or lack thereof of who and what Mason Brand was. It was as near to true peace as he’d ever come. Given to him in a single moment. In that same moment he decided he would stay in those woods until he was ready to go back to civilisation.

  And if that time never came, he knew he could remain there. Just be there until the end. Like the farmer.

  ***

  In his bed, Don Smithfield held the memory of the woman he lived for in his mind’s eye and wanked until his prick was sore. Three ejaculations later and he still couldn’t rid himself of her, couldn’t sleep. Instead of memories he tried a fantasy, took their fragile new love to an unexplored level. He couldn’t come. His prick was chafed so raw there was no more pleasure in the pursuit. And anyway, this lonely stroking only left him empty, sorry and bereft.

  He lay on his back in the darkness and wondered what to do. No answer came to him. Telling Aggie had probably been a mistake. She was incredulous at first and then, he thought, pretty impressed, though she hid it well. He made her promise, swear on their parents’ death, that she would tell no one. He thought she’d taken it seriously but there was no way of knowing for certain. She might blurt it to a girlfriend ‘in confidence’ or she might announce it in her class just to embarrass him. Maybe, just maybe, she would do as she’d promised and keep it a secret.

  In a way, it would be cool if his mates found out but if it went any further there could be serious trouble. Police kind of trouble.

  He’d had sex with a woman twice his age. That made her thirty years old.

  And it made her a criminal.

  None of this made it any easier to sleep. He slipped out of bed and sat at his desk, wincing as his pyjamas brushed the skin of his prick. The touch, though it stung, was enough to arouse him once more. He nudged the mouse on his desktop and a soft light filled the room. As his erection flared and reheated the skin was so dry it almost crackled. Then there was a sudden warmth and dampness in the crotch seam of his pyjamas. He looked down at his lap. A blot of blood was spreading across the cotton. Terrified, he fumbled his prick out for an inspection. The wound wasn’t serious, just a split in his raw foreskin, but it bled enthusiastically. His erection went down fast. All he could think about was what he would tell his mum when the PJs went for a wash. He decided he’d throw them out.

  I have to get my mind off all this.

  Instead of surfing for porn, he looked at the online news. Shreve had been on national TV today but he’d been too preoccupied to listen properly. He looked up the story on the BBC.

  - Doctors blame poor waste management for rise in health problems - read the headline. Apparently, Shreve’s residents were suffering a far higher than average incidence of migraine, asthma and eye problems. Some hospital consultants in the area were blaming waste-leakage and fumes from the landfill site. During the day, Donald could see the huge dump they were talking about from his bedroom window. A local obstetrician had gone on the record to say he believed a recent and sharp rise in birth defects and childhood leukaemia to be directly related to the landfill.

  Don blinked and rubbed his eyes. He looked away from the screen for a few moments until his vision cleared. Perhaps it was all the worry. Maybe he was highly suggestible. Out of nowhere a mean pounding was building up behind his right eye.

  He could have sworn there was a smell of rot in his bedroom.

  ***

  Ray took off his clothes and slipped in beside Jenny. It was after 5am now. He was exhausted and involuntarily replaying the scarier scenes from Revenant Apocalypse over and over again. His eyes hurt and the smell of rubbish from the kitchen bin had found its way into the bedroom too. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would empty it and bleach it
. Somewhere between getting back from college and switching on his console there would be an opportunity.

  He was high and wired, his skin super sensitive. Feeling Jenny’s warmth beside him created current through his whole body. The current flowed towards his groin and in moments he was fully aroused. He lay down beside her and caressed her sleeping body, sparks from the dope igniting his fingertips. He could hear his heart and the whoosh of his blood in his ears. She pushed his hand off and rolled away before he could really get started.

  His electricity coagulated into bile and frustration. Did she have something better to do? She could sleep any time. Where was the passion? Why didn’t she want the comfort to be found by fucking in their private darkness at five in the morning? There were the lectures of course but he had a knack for absorbing information no matter how tired or stoned he was. Jenny, on the other hand, worried about every missed fact.

  Fuck you, Jenny. You can sleep at your own place tomorrow night.

  But he didn’t say it out loud.

  The thought that they might not be particularly compatible had been sky-written across the blue of his mind many times but, like most forms of advertising, he ignored it. Most of the time he was too high to be bothered with the responsibility of facing the facts.

  He sat up in bed and lit a cigarette. Though it ought to have had the opposite effect, it unwound him. His erection collapsed, his frustration seeping away with it. The electricity in his skin turned off. He watched the glow of his fag brighten with each drag and the pulse of it soothed him. Tomorrow was another day. Another chance with Jenny. Another batch of classes he didn’t need to worry about. Another opportunity to get wrecked.

  And, in all likelihood, it would be the day of the katana. He crushed the butt out and fell asleep with a smile of anticipation not quite relinquishing his face.

  ***

  Mason lived in the woods like a hermit for several months.

  Occasionally, he walked to the nearest village for basic supplies. The farmer’s wife gave him eggs from time to time. He drank the water which flowed from the hills and nothing had ever tasted sweeter or cleaner. He imagined it was purifying him.