Garbage Man

by Joseph D'lacey

  ‘What are you doing here, boy?’

  The kid jumped, not knowing he’d been observed.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, Mr. Brand. I’m looking for two stray dogs. Staffordshire bull terriers, they are. Have you seen them?’

  ‘How do you know my name?’

  ‘I deliver your papers. Post office always writes your name in the top corner. Have you seen the dogs? Two brindles called Ozzy and Lemmy.’

  Mason acted like he was thinking about it.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ he asked. ‘They your dogs?’

  The kid looked exasperated.

  ‘No. They belong to Mrs. Doherty at the other end of Bluebell Way. I said I’d ask around.’ The kid was losing interest and turned to go. ‘If you do see them, maybe you could let her know. She lives at number twenty-seven.’

  Mason let the boy get back onto the pavement before he spoke.

  ‘Didn’t have any collars on, did they? Shouldn’t let dogs out like that.’

  ‘You’ve seen them, then?’

  ‘People who don’t look after animals properly shouldn’t be allowed to keep them, I reckon.’

  The boy walked back towards him. He seemed unusually committed for a youngster, unusually concerned.

  ‘They haven’t been hurt, have they? Tam . . . Mrs. Doherty’ll be heartbroken if anything’s happened to them.’

  Mason opened the gate to the side walkway of the house and sauntered away into his back garden. He heard the kid scuffing along behind him, lace tips clicking and bouncing along the flagstones.

  ‘Have you got them back here?’ The boy asked.

  Mason walked down through the rows of leafy vegetables to the shed that was now partially obscured by a small square of tall maize plants. He reached into his pocket and took out a key, jiggled it into a heavy old padlock on the shed door and snapped it open. Inside there was heavy movement and

  scratching. The boy heard it too.

  ‘Blimey,’ said the kid. ‘Managed to catch them, did you? That can’t have been easy. They’re a real handful that pair.’

  ‘See for yourself,’ said Mason and opened the shed door a few inches.

  It was midday, the sun almost overhead and bright enough that they were both squinting. Mason knew the kid couldn’t see what was in the gloom of the shed. He would see what Mason saw, something moving in the shadowed space.

  13

  The snapshots Kevin found in the large envelope were poor quality and rushed-looking. He studied them whilst sitting at the breakfast bar with a cup of coffee. Some of them were smeared by movement. Others had out-of-focus leaves, branches or other objects in the near view, partially obscuring the two figures beyond. They weren’t going to win any photographic competitions.

  But they were meticulous and they were telling. Somehow, the inexpert handling lent authenticity to the secret moments the camera had stolen. They were secret no longer.

  Kevin stared at the shots of him sitting with his arm around Jenny Chapman on the bench in Shreve Country Park. Holding hands over a table at The Barge. A kiss - on the lips - beside his BMW. There were no images more intimate than that but, taken together, it was enough.

  What he noticed most strikingly was the ease of their togetherness. Unless he was imagining it, it came through even in these hurried photos. The pictures made him realise something he hadn’t been able to fully admit before he’d seen them. He wanted Jenny, wanted to be with her, and he was ready to do anything to make that happen.

  There was also a letter in the brown envelope, written in a fastidiously neat style. Certain he was being blackmailed for money, he hadn’t understood it at first. The letter implored him to see the sin in what he was doing. It told him he was one diseased microbe in a world drowned by a moral plague. Did he not understand the seriousness of the vows he’d made in the sight of God? Did he not realise what would become of his soul? The letter told him to confess everything to his wife, end the affair and make good on his marriage vows. If he did not tell Tamsin, she would be the next to receive a brown envelope.

  He had to read it three times before he realised there was no demand for money or anything else. The letter said he was not alone in sinning and that he would find out why soon enough.

  It was signed Mavis Ahern.

  Kevin folded the letter in half and replaced it and the photos inside the envelope. It was pure luck that he’d been there when the post arrived and Tamsin had been out. Otherwise she’d have opened his mail for him like she always did. The photos weren’t a bad thing. Not a bad thing at all. In the space of a few minutes, they’d helped him make a very simple decision.

  He took out a pack of Camels - no more low-tar nonsense - and lit one with his pink Bic. The kitchen filled with smoke. He flicked the ash into his half-full coffee cup and waited.

  ***

  She’d taken his hand somewhere along the way and it struck him as a gesture of innocence. He imagined how they looked together, him in his shorts and hi-tops and hat and her in her long dark gowns, her piercings concentrating the sun to bright pinpoints.

  We make it look as though love transcends boundaries.

  He smiled to himself.

  I must be really drunk.

  She didn’t speak much as they walked and Ray was so relaxed with the drink and the heat that he didn’t feel uncomfortable. Sometimes he looked to the side to take in her strangeness again, to remind himself who he was walking with. It was very clear he didn’t know who she was at all. He didn’t care. The near anonymity of it was exciting. In those moments she would look back at him, quite unashamedly assessing his eyes and they would both smile. That was enough for Ray to be happy. If that was to be the extent of their afternoon together it would be a very simple and good thing.

  Tomorrow, he already knew, much if not all of this walk would be unremembered history, at least on his part, so he sank himself into their shared moments totally like a man stopping swimming and letting himself sink to the bottom of a lake. There on the bottom, he found he could still breathe.

  They passed people and shops and the ends of streets and old Victorian houses and estates. They walked along A roads then B roads and then on rural footpaths and finally, as an agitation began to niggle Ray’s booze-soaked nerves, they were in a wood. She’d passed through a stretched gap in a badly-maintained barbed-wire fence, holding her skirts and sleeves about herself to avoid tearing her clothes. Ray stooped and followed.

  The noise from the road receded. Soon Ray could hear nothing but the sound of their footsteps on the brittle grass and last year’s desiccated oak leaves. Much of their progress involved crouching or pushing branches out of the way and it took only seconds for Ray to be lost. Pleasantly so. It was like being on an alien world. He felt a euphoria he knew it would be difficult to recreate and he realised that coming here in the future - if they had any kind of future together - would never again be the surprise it was turning out to be. Imagine, he thought, a Goth out here in all this free air, this absence of all things urban. As he watched her creep between trees, over fallen logs and under branches, he saw that she fitted this landscape. She looked like a witch in her natural habitat; the wilds.

  They stopped in a tiny clearing, not much bigger than a room in a house. It was an accidental den, it seemed, where there was nothing but grass - dry and yellow, with the ground showing through its bald patches. Five twisted oaks formed the perimeter and between them high bushes of sloe and hawthorn.

  ‘Nice place you have here,’ said Ray.

  ‘I’m trusting you not to tell anyone about this,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a secret.’

  He dropped to his haunches and collapsed against a tree. His feet were hot in his All Stars. He decided to remove the canvas boots, hesitating only for a moment when he realised this would leave him exposed.


  ‘Do they stink?’ she asked. He shrugged.

  ‘Not really. I’m a nice clean boy.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  ‘I’m easily influenced.’

  Delilah grinned and then turned away. She knelt with her head in the bushes. There was a shaking and rustling of branches.

  She dragged an old wooden ammunition crate into the clearing.

  ‘Where’d you find that?’ he asked.

  ‘Same place you got your shirt. Army surplus.’

  ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Luxuries. You’ll see.’

  She brought out a couple of tartan car blankets with ragged edges, an opened, half-empty bottle of vodka and two cushions.

  Ray was impressed.

  ‘You’re a woman of . . . hidden attributes,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t know the half of it.’

  The last item out of the crate was a clear plastic bag scrolled into a neat cigar and secured with rubber bands. She unfurled it and handed it to Ray. He inhaled the aroma of the contents with his eyes closed.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘that is fresh and strong and good in the extreme. Want me to skin up?’

  ‘I prefer a pipe. Got one in my bag. You don’t mind do you?’

  ‘Not at all. Long as I don’t go comatose.’

  ‘It’ll give you a serious kick in the head but you’ve had a chance to sober up a bit after the walk. I think you’ll manage.’

  ‘I will, I will. I will manage.’

  From her velvet patchwork handbag, she withdrew a short, olive-wood pipe. It was intricately decorated with tiny figures. The way she handled the pipe was reverential.

  ‘What are the carvings?’ He asked.

  ‘They’re tree spirits.’

  Tree spirits. Right.

  She loaded the pipe with the sticky-looking weed, put a lighter to it and took a long toke deep into her lungs. She coughed but managed to hold on to all but a single snort of smoke that puffed from her nostrils. She passed Ray the pipe and he followed her lead.

  The grass vapour rose up like a cobra and bit him in the mind. For a few moments he came loose from his body and soared. Soon the rush settled and he felt the vibration extend to the tips of his toes and fingers. His head cleared and the drunk was suddenly gone, replaced by clear-sighted, enhanced awareness.

  ‘Enlightening,’ he said.

  ‘Isn’t it.’

  They sat on the blankets with the cushion behind them propped against a squat oak. She took his hand again and it seemed he could feel her communicating with him from her aura to his. They turned towards each other and kissed with taser lips, sparking tongues. Delilah came alive. She pushed away from the tree and swung a heavily skirted leg over Ray’s lap. Kneeling there she kissed him harder, inhaled him as though he were the magic smoke. He was shocked to begin with. This was not what he was used to. This was not Jenny, waiting for him to make a move before anything would happen. This was a woman who desired. Delilah needed. He could taste it in her saliva - a clean elixir on his tongue. He could feel it on her bloated lips and in the heat that seeped from her crotch. She was confident of her sexuality, easy in her longing, fluid in her drawing.

  Her garments became a restriction and she struggled against the clinging length of her dress, the numbness of her spurred motorcycle boots. She stood up from Ray and caught hold of the dress’s hem, lifting it and freeing herself. She flung it to the dusty grass and stood naked before him. Black at the armpits, black at the crotch, black at her boots. Ray stared at the dark manliness of her sexual hair and the paleness of her strong hips and heavy breasts. His erection crystallised into hot glass.

  Delilah took her boots off and she was the witch of the woods then, still pulling him in with her eyes.

  ‘I’m going to come just looking at you,’ he said.

  She knelt between his legs and cupped a hand to the seam of his shorts.

  ‘Judging by the size of your bollocks, that’s not going to be a problem.’

  She helped him undress.

  ***

  There was a thing in Mr. Brand’s shed, something twice the size of a man with the face and jaws of a dog. Donald wasted precious seconds trying to understand what he was seeing and in that time, the thing rose from a crouch to a hunched standing position. It placed a limb against one wall to support itself. It was taller than him but looked crippled and thin. Donald knew the difference between real and imaginary, between the living and the dead but this creature, this beast, didn’t fit any category.

  The thing in the shed looked like a child’s primary school project, a collage of useless, broken items. It was the melding of animal flesh and bone with the flotsam of the dump. Tiny veins ran into hollow electrical flex then disappeared beneath fur or bristle or skin. The hollow legs of plastic classroom chairs made for its femurs, hundreds of tiny mammalian ribs bound with wire formed the cavern of its chest. Coils of innards pulsated within - all visible because there was not enough skin to conceal it. Flattened rusted cans were its shoulder blades. The eyes and jaws of a dog protruded from the front of its amalgamated skull.

  Mr. Brand had definitely seen the Staffies.

  The thing made the insistent snuffles and squeaks of foraging animals. It creaked and grinded as it moved its improvised joints. It smelled of diseased excrement, of bleach and ammonia, of sulphur and dried blood.

  A hand made of an old weeding fork took hold of Donald’s throat so tightly he could neither scream nor breathe. It was far stronger and quicker than he could have anticipated. A desperate intelligence forced itself out through the insufficient eyes of the dogs and searched his face, scanned his body. The expression of the thing was one of utter desperation and yearning. It was single-minded and yet it was contrite.

  For a moment, Donald wondered why such a tormented thing would ever feel such remorse. It was only for a moment.

  The hand forced him down to the splintered, dirt-covered floor of the shed.

  Donald saw Mr. Brand’s bearded face looking in through the mesh-covered window with his hands cupped around his eyes to keep out the brightness of the afternoon sun. It was all too unreal to make any impact on Donald. It had happened so quickly and was so outside his experience of the world that he was still waiting for it all to end as a practical joke or, at worst, some sick lesson Mr. Brand wanted to teach the youths of the community by making an example of him.

  He only accepted the reality of the situation when the thing in the shed began taking him apart.

  ***

  Mason watched the creature pinion the boy on the floor.

  There were long moments in which the shed-thing assessed and gauged the supine teenager. Its cobbled-together skull, reminiscent of a dog’s but moving in some robotic imitation of a human head, swept up and down the length of Donald Smithfield’s body, making calculations Mason didn’t want to guess at. The shed-thing was frantic to perceive the bounty it had received but it did not yet possess the organs necessary to fully sense its captive. Its inadequate eyes roved and explored face and neck and chest and limbs while the boy silently choked in its grip. It sniffed the boy too, eager to measure the wealth of materials his body might offer.

  It stopped for a moment and turned its head up towards the window to meet its guardian’s stare. Never yet had Mason seen so much life behind those eyes, so much intelligence and potential. The shed-thing was on the cusp of becoming, perhaps in the way the boy must have been close to becoming a man. The shed-thing nodded to Mason, or perhaps it was more of a bow. In thanks, in deference, in awe.

  It sheared off Donald Smithfield’s left hand with filth-dripping bolt cutters which unfolded from its chest. Its own fork hand had the boy’s throat so tight he was barely breathing; nothing more than a high-pitched rasp escaped the boy’s mouth. B
ut no grip was strong enough to stop the expression of shock and agony creasing the boy’s face as he felt his hand severed.

  The moment it separated, the shed-thing forced the bleeding stump into its own chest. Its entire body appeared to expand. The boy went pale, his eyes widened. Mason saw Donald’s thoughts playing out for a long time in those perfect irises, irises which screamed in glistening crystal blue. Hope and passion and belief in a world of choice and freedom - all this was taken from the boy a piece at a time. The shed-thing didn’t seem to understand that by not killing the boy outright, it was extending his agony; bringing the child to the precipice of sanity and hurling him over still conscious. Or, if it did, it didn’t appear to care. While Donald still breathed, it opened him up from pubes to sternum. It began to select and remove his organs, holding them up for inspection in the angled bars of sunlight penetrating the shed, before thrusting them into itself through the many openings and unmade sections of its own body. When it began to clip through the boy’s ribs, Mason had to look away.

  The clattering of metal against wet bone emanated from behind him. The shed-thing was trembling as it worked. Mason sensed its eagerness and excitement. As soon as it could finish, it would return to the landfill with its new brains and bones and skin, with the fine, healthy organs of a young human. There would be no slowing it down now. Risking daylight and detection, it would collect more garbage and redesign itself. It would be more powerful. It would be larger. It would have a suitable vehicle for the innate intelligence it had displayed since the morning Mason found it.

  Mason had no idea what he would do when it returned.

  14

  Steel panels and shattered glass; plastic bags and shitty, rotten nappies.

  Old shirts and mouldering dishrags; torn corduroy trousers and moth-eaten jumpers. Crushed, jagged baked bean cans; short loops of flex; plastic cartons, plastic packaging, broken plastic toys; tubing, stuffing, plasterboard, bricks; oxidising springs, hinges and wire; splintered planks and bent nails; light fittings; smashed picture frames and burnt things; peelings, leftovers and cooked bones; raw bones; dead rats, guinea pigs and hamsters; aborted foetuses; grease, fat and oil; upturned drawers and their unwanted contents; retired desks and lamps; keyboards, mice, PCs, laptops, hard drives, monitors, TVs, satellite dishes, speakers, mobile phones, SIM cards, software.