by S. K Munt
It wasn’t a glamorous job at all, and there were a million other jobs she would have preferred to do, but paying jobs were hard to find, especially for kids in her age bracket. In fact, the ones that weren’t potentials, like Aaron and Jade, were expected to volunteer their services three times a week in return for the king putting a roof over their heads as part of a mandatory system so yes, she was very, very lucky to have been earning anything at all because the gods of poverty knew that she and her mum needed every chip they could get.
Finn still resented the system though, because not only did she have to work a lot harder than the volunteers did, but because she had to work a lot harder than the other Potentials had to in their own roles too. Cara and Michelle, for example, got to man the counter at Suave, spending two afternoons a week sorting through clothes that were brought in from ruined homes in Broadsound- which was a job that most of the volunteers would have happily done for free, because it meant they got first dibs on anything cute that came in. Mila Viti got to teach kick-boxing classes to the strongest kids that were looking to sign up with the Tutelary one day, (she’d been kick-boxing since early childhood, and had the smoking bod to prove it), and Georgia Janks put in two days a week at the castle’s aged-care facility, reading to people that had somehow survived the Strike but were incapable of taking care of themselves now.
Bonnie Sullivan had landed the most prestigious job and happily earned her pocket money teaching the princess Abigail to sing in private lessons, but Madeline Rowles, one of Georgia’s former Girl-Scout buddies, had landed the job that Finn wanted most, and spent two afternoons a week working as an assistant librarian in what might very likely be the only library left functioning between there and Brisbane. Finn had applied for that job at the start of the year, but Madeline had actually been a volunteer library assistant after school before the Strike at the Broadsound Public Library, so Finn’s own previous work experience- pamphlet delivery- hadn’t been impressive enough to compete.
Not all of the jobs were cushy, however. One Potential, Whitney, had gotten stuck milking cows in Pleasant Valley, and another girl had been given the task of mending the royal family’s clothes, so although Finn wasn’t alone in her misfortune, she still felt more like one of the Outcasts that she was expected to supervise, than someone that was supposed to be ‘special.’ But money was money and though the work she had to do was hard, Finn took pride in the fact that she really was making a difference in the world- even if it was just to one acre at a time. And even if it did mean mostly working with people who’d fallen out of society’s favour.
‘Good afternoon Finn!’ Granger greeted her in his usual, cheery fashion as she skidded her bike to a stop in front of the tip office, which was actually just a tiny shed. He motioned to the small clock on his office wall (which she couldn’t read from the other side of the metal mesh screen between them) and said: ‘Cutting it close today!’
‘How close?’
‘You’re about forty-five seconds off being late.’
‘I’d better punch in first then!’ Finn said, leaving her bike on its side as she hurried over to the office and pulled her punch card out of its holder and quickly slid it into the antique machine, which took a big, satisfying chomp out of it. ‘There… done!’ she panted. ‘With at least fifteen seconds to spare.’
‘You live on the edge…’ Granger teased, his black sunspots danced like stars on a flag in the wind as his ageing features hoisted high in a crinkled grin that brightened her day, even through the mesh screen that divided them. ‘Written me that story yet, girlie? I’m getting desperate for some new reading material.’
Finn chuckled as she walked over to prop her bike against the tree that she always padlocked it to there. ‘I already told you, what I’m writing is non-fiction, and seeing as how you’ve already lived everything I have to say, I don’t think you’d get anything out of reading what for all intents and purposes, is just a journal...’ She clicked the padlock shut and then dug The Great Gatsby out of her bag, sliding it under the mesh screen and across the counter to her supervising Tutela. ‘But I just finished this again in detention, so you’re welcome to borrow it. It’s due back at the library on Wednesday, but I’ll just pick it up Tuesday after my shift, okay?’
Granger was almost as old as the punch card machine was, so he didn’t look anywhere near as dapper in his Tutela uniform as the younger ones did, but when he grinned at her again then, his smile was reminiscent of a young boy who’d been handed candy. ‘This is a great one- thanks!’ Granger studied the book for a moment before flicking through the pages, making them whisper and crackle. ‘Mind you, I’ll probably be done with it by the time you finish up this arvo tiny little thing it is…’
‘A word more would have destroyed its magic, though,’ Finn said, winking at him as he nodded. Then she went over to collect the stack of cardboard boxes that he’d set aside for her- eight in total. She was lucky to be able to fill four a day, given how difficult they were to lug once they were full, but she appreciated his optimism. ‘So, Granger tell me...’ she blew a lock of fine blonde hair out of her eyes as she picked up the nestled stack of old cardboard boxes. ‘How many happy volunteers do I have today? Ten right? I’ll bet it’s ten!’ But Granger didn’t respond to her and when Finn looked back around the corner of the booth, she smiled to see that he’d already started reading and was already so engrossed that he hadn’t even heard her- reminding her of exactly why he was her favourite guard in the whole Tutelary.
Finn? She thought, smirking as she recalled that famous line from the fictional world that Granger had already been sucked into. What Finn?
Smiling, shrugging and deciding to let him be, Finn walked around the back of the booth and into the rubbish tip by herself, thinking of what a perfect place the world would be if the people who ignored her did it because like Granger, they were too busy improving their own lives, to be ruining others!
*
Finn ended up with three volunteers that afternoon: two Outcasts that she worked with all the time, and one Outsider, who was looking for every spare chip he could get now that he had a new-born baby to provide for.
‘It’s really just a quarter of a chip for every box?’ the man named Tim asked, and Finn nodded as she extended a box and a pair of gloves to him, wondering if he was actually going to take them, or make his apologies before backing out the way so many others had.
‘Well, you can get two chips for a box of glass or scrap metal,’ she said, ‘but that’s harder to find now that so many are aware of that. Mostly, it’s just straight-up litter we find. Or rubble...’
Tim looked like he was in two minds about going through with his mission as he warily eyed the mountains of trash that were piled up around them, but then he glanced back in the direction of the main camp that he’d just come from and sighed, taking the proffered items out of her hands as he murmured. ‘I guess a chip a fortnight is better than nothing, right?’
Finn nodded and swatted a fly away. ‘Can I ask you what it is you’d like to buy with your earnings?’ she asked, before handing Sean, her most regular Outcast volunteer, two cartons and a pair of gloves before handing just one of each to Malry, her other regular.
‘A baby sling,’ Tim said wistfully. ‘One that you can wear on your front or back, so if we opt to migrate north, we won’t have to worry about carrying the baby in our arms.’ He inclined his head back to the camp he’d come from by the dam. ‘One of the other Outsiders, Leigh, is selling one, but they’re hard to find and in high demand, so she’s got two chips on it, and won’t take a trade in its place because apparently, someone else has their eye on it too.’
‘That’s a lot... but if it helps get you up to the East Cape, it’ll be worth it, right?’ Finn asked eyeing him with interest. He didn’t look like he was of Aboriginal descent, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t. Besides, they took white folks in at the Cape too- it just wasn’t often that you met a white guy that was eager to move so
mewhere where they’d be part of a minority. ‘I mean, I’ve heard it’s pretty nice up there now that they’ve cleaned up the city...’
‘My girl’s cousins headed for the region almost a year ago and haven’t come running back yet,’ Tim glanced around him, ‘so it can’t be worse than this, can it?’
‘Send me a postcard after you get there to let me know,’ Sean joked, ‘and if it comes through, we’ll know to follow suit.’
They all snickered at the idea of there being a functioning postal service anywhere, and then ambled off down the dirt road together, headed away from the pungent dump and toward the spot that Finn had earmarked for sanitisation that day; the fork in the road that connected Laidlaw’s shoddy dirt road, to the Peninsula’s pothole riddled, but pre-apocalyptic bitumen road.
To the volunteers that had been there before, Finn knew it would just be another day’s work to them, but for Finn it was a milestone- because she knew that once she’d cleaned up that prominent fork in the road, she’d officially be able to say that she’d cleaned up every inch of Laidlaw Kingdom in the eleven months since she’d started the job, which was pretty suave.
Not just pretty suave… she mused, bending to pick up a bottle cap. It’s epic! Seriously! Who else can say that they’ve helped clean up an entire region?
Back when she’d first started, Finn had had more volunteers than she could count because everyone on the Outside had been eager to earn as much as they could. But the work was hard and the pay was crap, so she’d seen the numbers drop every week until she’d been lucky to have two helpers a shift. People still needed money of course, and the Laidlaw Chips were literally worth their weight in gold because that was what they were made of; pure, stamped gold that Amory had had stashed away as bullion since before the Strike. But most of the Outsiders had worked out that they’d be better off if they spent that time fishing or making something by hand that they could sell or trade, then they would picking up litter, so they rarely came back for a second shift unless they were desperate for something that could only be purchased with coins.
It was a lot more difficult for Outcasts to turn the work down though. Yes, the chips definitely made a difference to their lives, but what they really wanted to see was their name printed in Granger’s ledger of workers; written proof that they’d seen the error of their ways and were trying to make amends because King Amory had sworn that the Outcasts who voluntarily helped her one hundred times each would be rewarded somehow when they reached that milestone. None of them knew what that reward would be, and Finn often fretted that it might not be enough, but Amory was a powerful man who could make a real difference with even the smallest of gestures, so Malry and Sean worked toward his forgiveness like they were building careers out of it.
Finn personally had no way of knowing if her Outcast volunteers even deserved a second chance, because she’d never asked them what they’d done wrong, and they’d never readily volunteered the information. They’d never asked her what she’d done to get such a crappy job herself though either, so given the nature of the work, they probably assumed that she was being punished for some reason too. Finn didn’t like it, but she didn’t want strangers to know that she worthy of kidnapping and ransoming off either, which was why she (and all of the other Potentials) hid their necklaces when they were outside of Laidlaw’s walls- in the interests of keeping a low profile. Of course, it would be easy enough for people to learn their names and identities, but there was no reason to make it a no-brainer for everyone that they ever crossed paths with, especially while she was out there on Reliance Creek Road, when the only Tutela in sight was a seventy-six-year-old former mall cop who’d probably only stayed in Laidlaw because he was too old to try and make it up to the East Cape, where he would have been celebrated as an elder.
There had been times where Finn had overheard the Outsiders discussing the Outcasts, which was why Finn was fairly certain that her second most ambitious volunteer, Malry, had attempted to seduce a married man with children, and that Sean had been suspected of stealing from another Outsider’s crab pots, but she knew from personal experience how dangerous and wrong gossip could be, so she’d opted to treat both the same way she would anyone else until they proved themselves to be unworthy of common courtesy. Which was a basic courtesy that she wished that her peers in school had extended to her after Georgia Janks had gone on her gossipy rampage so many years before.
As unpleasant and demeaning as the work was, however, it was pretty straightforward. Basically, when that fragment of comet had gouged a hole out of the earth it had sent all sorts of debris flying in every direction sometimes for dozens of kilometres, which had resulted in a rain of trash falling from the sky and back down to earth, landing in fields and waterways. Then, the survivors had combed through all that was left of the cities before migrating away from it in hordes, thoughtlessly leaving everything from fallen kin to used diapers in their wake. That might not have been a massive issue back in the time of city councils, sanitisation departments and environmental activists, no… but that era had come to an end so now, the trash was piling up and no one was really in a position to do anything about it while keeping their bellies full and their families alive was still everyone’s top priority. No one but King Amory, who didn’t want to rule over a kingdom surrounded by refuse. He knew that it would take decades for the area to return to being as pristine as it had once been especially with refugees coming and going on a near-constant basis, but he was the kind of man that tackled big problems in little pieces when he couldn’t go at them full-force, and so he’d created Finn’s position of ‘Sanitation Supervisor’ in the hopes of slowly cleaning up the landscape around them, square metre by square metre. Not just by having someone pick up every single bit of stray trash by hand, but by then carrying it back to the refuse centre that Granger was the caretaker of, where it would either be sorted out for the sake of recycling, or used as landfill just inside the tree line of the forest, where a meteorite the size of a car had punched a hole that now required filling in the sloped earth. It wasn’t traditionally the kind of job that required a supervisor, but Amory didn’t want just anyone picking up trash and bringing it in because there’d be no way of knowing if the people were actually cleaning up the area or just boxing up camp trash so they could claim it as a reward. With Finn there though, monitoring things, he could be sure that some people were doing the right thing.
Back in January, when she’d first accepted the job as glorified litter-duty girl, most of Finn’s effort had been concentrated around the castle’s exterior fence-line and in the open valleys that had been earmarked for future development, picking up garbage from what was now classed as crown land. It had taken months to clean up the perimeter, but Amory had made littering in the Outside illegal since and had had some of his Tutelas cull all of the stray dogs that had prowled the area before, which had given Finn the chance to start slowly working her way out into the surrounding countryside.
Obviously, she’d moved faster back when she’d had dozens of helpers every time and had gleaned a lot more satisfaction from a job well done and swiftly... but she got paid a whole chip for every shift she supervised in addition to a quarter chip for every box of trash she collected, so she tried not to let the lack of volunteers get her down because at the end of the day, it just meant more work for her. Sure, she would have preferred to be working in a clean environment like most of the other Potential girls did, but the way she saw it was that if she did her job right then sooner or later, she would be. She just had to work hard to create that opportunity for herself first- just like she did with everything else.
*
It took just over half an hour to get to the fork in the road, and because it would also take them another half an hour to work their way back, that left them with only an hour to actually tidy up within. Usually, that would have bugged the volunteers like Sean who were determined to fill as many boxes as possible, but the crossroads had been messy since before the St
rike given how much traffic had gone through there, so they filled their boxes to the brim before it was time to head back anyway, leaving plenty to return for later. Finn ended up filling two boxes, but she asked Tim to carry one back for her, promising he could claim the reward for it if he did, which was an offer that worked well for both of them because it lightened Finn’s load while giving him the chance to earn another quarter chip. Yes, Finn could have used that extra coin, but Tim needed it more and sooner, so she didn’t mind handing it over. Besides, she earned a flat rate for supervising, and the ride home was always hard, so the less she exerted her scrawny self, the better.
Overburdened, sweaty but pleased with themselves, the four of them trudged back to the tip and happily handed over their cartons to Granger, who carefully recorded their personal hauls, their caste status and their names into his ledger. Then, once he was done with them for the day, he’d go about sorting all of the trash into its separate piles, making sure everything got to where it needed to be.
‘Just go down to the castle gates in the morning and tell them your name, and you’ll get your two quarter chips in compensation,’ Finn explained to Tim as she unlocked her bike. ‘Pay day is always Friday though, so keep in mind that if you work next Tuesday, you won’t get compensated for it until next Friday, okay?’
