They raced away at less than knee high and disappeared into the sea of grass. He watched dew drops sparkle off the tasselled grass tips as the dogs tunnelled through below. Knowing there was plenty more time, he wished he’d brought extra cigarettes. Quitting was the second hardest thing he’d ever done. Pretending he hadn’t taken it up again was the hardest. But walks were the best time to indulge because the fresh air blasted through his clothes and took away the smells. Between the outdoors and his gold-top breath freshener, he’d managed to keep his relapse a secret from Tammy.
He reached a stile leading to the next section of footpath and turned back to see where the dogs were. There was no movement in the field. The throw had really tested their retrieving skills. That was a joke, of course; when the pair of them did return with the ball, neither of them would let go of it and yet they would prance around and hassle him to take it and throw it again. He’d have to wrestle it from their slimy, spittly mouths. Dogs. He just didn’t get them.
He looked around before he shouted out:
‘Ozzy! Lemmy! Here.’
He hated calling their ridiculous names - Tammy’s idea, naturally - and withered inwardly if anyone was near enough to hear.
On the other side of the field there was movement in the grass and then a single line of disturbance approaching fast. Lemmy appeared from the hip-high jungle with the red sphere plugging his mouth. Ozzy was right behind him. Their coats were dark-streaked with fallen dew. Lemmy stood quivering in front of him, offering the ball, wagging.
‘Clever boy, Lemmy. Want me to throw it again?’
He reached down to take it and Lemmy turned away. Ozzy tried to steal the ball from his mouth so he turned the other way. Kevin reached again. They both started to bounce and cavort around him.
‘Right. Piss off then.’
He stepped over the stile. Delighted - laughing it looked like to Kevin - Lemmy and Ozzy went under it, dropped the ball and sprinted away up the path.
He caught up to them a few minutes later. They were sniffing at a split bag of rubbish.
‘Hey, get out of it, you two!’
Bloody hell, he thought. Why did people dump stuff this way? And in a nature reserve of all places. He clapped his hands twice.
‘Oi, OUT! Come on.’
They looked back, guilt on their faces, and ignored him. It was a big bin liner and much of its contents were strewn out behind it into the water. It looked like it had burst open when someone tried to drag it out. He stomped over to the dogs, sick of being disobeyed. As he bent down to grab their collars he saw that the rubbish wasn’t rubbish at all. It was moving.
It was alive.
9
Ray and Jenny left the car on the other side of the road.
Now they stood on the grass verge with the traffic slashing past over the wet tarmac. They were close enough to the road that some of the spray from the cars sprinkled their legs. Ray had his arms folded across his chest. He felt stupid standing there. People would drive by and think that they were the ones dumping stuff illegally. But he was half happy too: Jenny owed him. Big style. Doggy style.
‘What did I tell you? It’s just someone’s unwanted crap. I can’t believe we’re doing this.’
Jenny didn’t answer. She was looking at the elongated, comma-shaped pile of junk and black plastic as though it had hypnotised her.
‘We’re late,’ said Ray. ‘Let’s get going.’
Jenny walked around to inspect it from a different angle. He couldn’t understand why; the stuff stank of rot and shite. She crouched down.
‘Jenny, this is mental. We’re leaving.’
‘No.’
‘What do you mean “no”? We need to get to lectures.’ She turned her head and stared up at him.
‘Ray, look at this, will you?’
She was pointing at something near the fat end of the trash pile. Ray hadn’t seen it until then. It was the body of a rabbit but it was flat, like it had been run over. The eyes were missing from the head. It was a patch of grey, fur-covered bones.
‘Road kill. If I stand here much longer, my breakfast is going to make a reappearance.’
‘I don’t think it was hit by a car.’
‘Jenny, I don’t care if it was assassinated or died in its sleep. I’m going now. If you don’t want to come with me you can hitch to college.’
He said the words but he didn’t leave and Jenny didn’t stand up to come with him. Typical, he thought, his self-respect leaking away as it so often did when dealing with her. On the road the traffic was decreasing, the rush hour almost over.
‘Ray?’
‘What.’
‘Is it me or is this moving?’
‘If that rabbit’s moving, it’s because it’s got a skinful of maggots.’
‘No. Not the rabbit. The rubbish. Look.’
She pointed to the oddly shaped lump of debris. Ray looked more carefully. It seemed to rise and fall as if it were. . . breathing. The thought of missing lectures suddenly lost its importance. Ray became mesmerised by his concentration, his attempt to recognise what he saw. Jenny beat him to it.
‘I think there might be someone stuck inside all this,’ she said.
She reached out and began to remove items of refuse from the pile but each thing she took hold of - an old noodle carton, a crushed nine-volt battery, a piece of rag - remained attached to the whole as if fused. She pulled harder, tried to dig her fingers through a section of black plastic. The rubbish rolled towards her and she fell back onto her bottom in the waterlogged grass.
‘Shit.’
She still held the tongue of an old tennis shoe in her hand. She attempted to get back onto her feet. Ray, watching it all, saw the bulk of the rubbish pile in a different way now. It seemed heavy, muscular. He saw the eyes before Jenny. Two tiny brown eyes that glittered. They were charged with a life and intelligence far superior to that of the rabbit they had once belonged to. With unreal speed, the mass of rubbish surged towards Jenny, knocking her flat on her back. Before Ray could move, it had swamped her legs, humping its way over her like some junkyard walrus.
She screamed: fear and disbelief. Ray couldn’t move.
She screamed again: pain.
‘RAY. It’s BITING me. Get it OFF.’
He looked at the thing, still not understanding it. Not knowing how to begin to save Jenny from a living, breathing pile of litter. Another scream. She looked at him, eyes wide and beseeching.
‘PLEASE, Ray. DO SOMETHING.’
Finally the animal in Ray surfaced from below the constant haze of spent marijuana. Wrathful and vicious, he put the boot in like a rioter kicking a downed policeman. The steel toe-cap of his Dr Martens hefted into the rubbish again and again, penetrating the black plastic, forcing crumpled cans and crisp packets deep inside the thing. It ruptured easily and liquid filth spilled forth. The stink made him retch and still he kicked, fear and ignorance devolving him into a savage. He kicked and choked and kicked again, tearing the thing open. It had covered Jenny to her chest by this time but the damage Ray’s boots had inflicted had overcome it.
Soon he was kicking a deflated pile of rubbish. Pieces of it flew away with each new shoeing, sending litter and paper across the verge. He kicked and kicked. Jenny pushed the bulk of the thing off her body and rolled away and still he kicked it. The eyes, the tiny clever rabbit eyes, watched him as if interested in what he was doing to the rest of its body. He saw them and stomped them out, stomped them dead into the wet grass until they were mud and mucus. Tears streaked his face and then, exhausted, he coughed up his breakfast amid the strewn trash.
Jenny was standing awkwardly and weeping in shock and pain. As she cried, she scanned the ground and limped through the scattered remains of the creature. Ray saw the torn end of her shoe and the way her blood r
an so freely from the wound there.
‘We’ve got to get you to hospital.’
‘Not yet,’ she said.
‘Yes, Jenny. We have to go now. You’re losing blood.’
She looked at him, pleading again, yet somehow still in control.
‘Please, Ray. We have to find my toe first.’
***
Mason found the thing early on the morning after the storm.
He’d seen something moving around the bottom of his runner bean canes and thought initially that it was a cat taking a dump or a sick rabbit looking for refuge. Neither would have bothered him much. He’d have moved the cat shit - no telling what toxins might be in it - to a place where it wouldn’t affect the purity of his crops. If he’d caught the rabbit he’d have ended its myxomatosis misery or put it back out in the scrubland beyond the garden. It only took a few seconds of watching to see that it was neither of those things. The colours were too man-made. The movements were wrong.
With a mug of tea he’d only taken one sip from in his right hand, he shuffled barefoot into his wellies and flop-footed his way out to the bean canes. His mind worked hard to make sense of what he was seeing but there was no context for it. Partially obscured by the lower leaves of the runners, it was the contents of an overturned dustbin, it was the run off from a sewer, it was the scum that forms over drains, the pin mould of the cellar. He smelled it before he reached it and knew immediately where it had come from. He stopped, feet chilled in his Wellingtons, right hand hot from the tea mug.
The thing was an accident. It was an abortion. Yet it lived. The shape of its body was that of a huge, bloated tadpole. He could see echoes of embryo, attempts at foetus, but it was all wrong: plastic and cardboard and glass and paper did not live, could not move. He had to be seeing it wrong. He had to be looking at an animal or newborn baby which had somehow entangled itself in waste. Perhaps some underage girl had given birth in secret and then thrown away her child. Perhaps it had survived.
He experienced a ripple of guilt rising along his spine. It passed immediately. He’d done nothing wrong, broken no trusts or taboos. He’d looked, passed time, taken the photos. He’d been professional, as he’d been in his old life. That was all. And this was nothing to do with it.
And still, he felt responsible. Even if it was nothing to do with the girl, it was something to do with him, was it not? He knew it was.
Mason trusted himself. He trusted his eyes. What he saw clenching and twisting on the fertile ground of his garden was neither human nor animal. It was something new, something more. Not only did he know where it had come from, he knew exactly what it was. Suddenly the calling he had recorded in pencil in dozens of pads in the woods and since then on those occasional nights in his dead camper van, suddenly all of it made sense. The blood, the earthquake, the rising of new life. He had written all of this down years before. It was a message about this time, this era. If he hadn’t wanted to believe before, now he was obliged to.
Something swivelled in the ‘head’ of the thing. It was a child’s marble, rainbow swirls of colour rippling within it. The ball was covered by a layer of transparent plastic, part of a clear supermarket weighing-bag for fruit or vegetables. The plastic crackled as the thing tried to look up at him. Then the tiny body swelled up. A split, formed by the opening of an old polystyrene burger box, appeared below the eye. The thing deflated, venting a wail of need and perdition more heartbreaking than the cry of any child.
He knelt down and reached out to it.
***
A moment after she opened the back door, Tammy Doherty’s coffee mug hit the top step and broke into three uneven shards. Her screams started before the impact and finished long after, so the brief, sharp sound of shattering china was swallowed and lost.
***
Kevin Doherty took a firm hold of each collar and hauled the dogs away from the thing. They each had their jaws embedded and so it moved with them. Frustrated, Lemmy and Ozzy shook their heads, trying to rip into their prey. The black plastic tore and rubbish spilled out accompanied by a viscous brown slop. Kevin, smelling shit, turned his head away.
‘For fuck’s sake . . . LET GO.’
He wrenched the dogs backwards and they lost their grip. They spat out the trash from their mouths and licked their lips in disgust as though they’d only just realised what they were doing. The torn tube of refuse rolled away down the small slope towards the water. Kevin watched it, not certain of what he’d seen.
He laughed.
‘I must be going soft in the head.’
The rubbish was just rubbish. It wasn’t living. With the dogs chewing and tearing at it, of course it had been moving. And now that they’d let go, gravity had rolled it back down the incline to the reservoir. He shook his head, finding it hard to believe what conclusions the mind would draw given the right circumstances. He didn’t make any attempt to clear up the rubbish, though. That was the responsibility of whoever had discarded it in the first place. He told himself that if he saw the park warden, he’d report the dumping. He clicked the leads onto the dogs’ collars and turned back towards the car park.
***
Mason lined an old mushroom box with rags from under the kitchen sink and placed it in the corner of his shed. It seemed the best place. He certainly didn’t want the smell in his house. The thing’s weak mewls made him feel a kind of panicked accountability. He didn’t want it to die. It was inevitable, wasn’t it, that sooner or later something like this would happen?
The more he thought about it, the more it excited him. Something new had been born from the badness and unwantedness of the world. There was something natural in that, something logical and right. Didn’t compost make his garden grow better? Didn’t the grass eventually grow thicker and greener from below an old cowpat? The thing wept. Mason recognised the cry of hunger, a cry that without him would soon become the miserable tears of starvation.
He went to fetch a saucer of warm milk.
***
It was hard for Kevin to ignore the spilled pile of rubbish at the back doorstep. The dogs were so muddy and smelly after their walk that he’d tied them up to their post in the garden before letting himself in through the back door. The sight of the trash disturbed him. It would have been different if he’d known it was from their own dustbin - Tammy might have dropped it whilst taking it out - but Kevin didn’t recognise any of it. They didn’t eat microwave quick-rice for a start. They certainly hadn’t thrown away an old radio. And the smell of the sewers that rose from the slack pile was worse than any odour that had ever come from their house.
There was a broken coffee mug on the top step and a pale stain where the contents had splashed the stone. One of the broken pieces was sticking into the rubbish pile. To Kevin it looked like a blade buried in a strange body. He touched the trash with the tip of his shoe but it was inanimate. Once again, he found himself laughing at the hair trigger of his imagination. He stopped laughing when he looked through the back door into the house and saw Tammy crying at the breakfast bar attended by a neighbour.
He stepped inside.
‘What happened, babe?’
Mavis Ahern from across the street looked up with accusing eyes. As though he had caused Tammy’s tears, as though he was a guilty man. She tightened a protective arm around Tammy’s shoulders and answered for her.
‘She’s had a shock. Might not have happened if you spent more time here.’
He’d never liked the woman; younger than she looked and dressed, but a good deal more fucked-up than any close neighbour ought to be.
Mavis Ahern was Tammy’s friend - well, more of an acquaintance really - but did she really have the right to talk to him that way in his own house? Her gall took him by surprise and he was silent too long to react spontaneously. Instead he thought about why Miss Ahern would take such an attitud
e. A spinster to her marrow, of course, but was that deliberate or accidental? Did she really hate men or did she just like women more? There was more to the way she held her arm around Tammy than simple shielding; she was milking the physical contact somehow and fearful of its ending. Kevin was that end.
He approached the breakfast bar and when Tammy saw him, she reached out leaving Mavis the way she looked like she belonged; standing alone. He drew Tammy tight, holding her head to his chest and allowed his eyes to meet their neighbour’s.
‘Thanks for coming over, Miss Ahern. We’ll be fine now.’
He smiled at her, barely sincere, knowing she had no option but to leave. The woman left by the back door, stepping with care around the spilled rubbish. He comforted Tammy in silence for some minutes, her degree of upset puzzling him. She wasn’t the type of girl to freak like this. She was tough, hard-edged. It was one of the few things he still admired about her.
Eventually, he stepped away from her and opened the cupboard under the sink. He took out a roll of black bin liners and snapped one free. From the utility room he picked up a dustpan and brush. As he made towards the back door Tammy spoke,
‘Don’t touch it. There’s . . . something . . . in it.’
Unmoved, Kevin said,
‘It’s rubbish, babe. That’s all. I’m going to get rid of it for you.’
‘But it was . . .’
‘It was what?’
Eventually she shook her head.
‘Doesn’t matter.’
Kevin, lips clamped tight, stepped outside.
***
Its wailing drove nails of guilt into his heart. Guilt for not satisfying its needs. Guilt over what he might have to do if he decided to fulfil those needs.
Garbage Man Page 11
