Garbage Man (11 page)

The man got out of his car, wearing driving gloves. He went to the boot of the car and opened it. Mason shrank back as Richard Smithfield
looked around
before removing a single black bin bag and walking quickly towards the dumping hatch. The bag looked heavy but barely filled. He threw it in. The sound it made was a kind of crash and clink. A metallic percussion. Mason expected Mr. Smithfield to take more bags out of the Volvo but he didn't. He slammed the boot shut, jumped back into the car and drove away. There was a five mile an hour speed limit around the tip. Mr. Smithfield must have been doing fifteen or twenty. Dust rose in the vehicle's wake as it sped away along the access road and back to the main ring road which looped the town.

***

Aggie Smithfield walked along Bluebell Way trying not to hurry. It was hard not to break into a run. Her mouth was dry with anticipation and, for the moment, she wasn't thinking about Mason Brand at all, only what his name on her photographs could do for her. He'd given them to her in a simple, plastic-coated cardboard folder with elastic drawn over a steel bobble to keep it shut. He wouldn't let her look at the photos while she was there.

‘Open it when you get home. Not before,' he'd said only moments before.

‘Fine.'

She'd tried to keep the hurt out of her voice. Had he noticed? It was hard to see his face through his beard. Hard to see his mind through his eyes. She had no idea what he was thinking. One thing she'd realised: he wasn't as old as the beard made him look. And he was all muscle. His downcast demeanour and his rumpled clothes hid a lean, strong man rippling with quiet energy. It was hard to admit to herself that something about him aroused her interest - her sexual interest. He was hairy. He seemed dirty. He wore no sprays or aftershave, made no effort at all to look . . . nice. But the orbs of his eyes were the purest white she'd ever seen. The whites of a fundamentalist. Somehow she knew this meant his body, his
insides
, were clean and unpolluted. No cigarettes. No booze. No skunk. And all he seemed to eat were the vegetables from his own garden. His irises were a gleaming brown-amber, somehow lit from the inside. Whenever he looked at her she had to look away.

Right now, none of that mattered. What mattered was getting home to her bedroom and locking the door. Then she could -

‘Where do you think you're going in such a hurry, young lady?'

Fuck. Not now.

She took a few more steps.

‘I asked you a question, girly.'

She stopped, turned and faced Mavis Ahern across the street. The hag was standing on the pavement outside her house. God knew how long she'd been watching for - Aggie hadn't been concentrating. She didn't want a confrontation this time.

‘I'm going home,' she said, trying to keep her voice from betraying her excitement, and now this unexpected frustration.

‘And where have you been?' That was enough, right there.

‘None of your business.'

‘It is if you've been up to no good. If I think you're getting yourself into trouble, I'll have no choice but to tell your parents.'

Aggie stood with her mouth moving and no words coming out. Was this woman for real? Why did the old bitch think she had anything to do with her life? Why was she even on this planet? Her mind made up to settle things for the last time, Aggie approached the Ahern woman directly, staring her out. There was some fanaticism in this woman's eyes too but nothing like the power in the gaze of Mason Brand. He saw things as they really were. This old bitch saw them through a fractured, opaque lens. As Aggie neared her, the older woman appeared to back up. Only a fraction but it was enough.

‘Someone should have told you this long ago, Mavis. You're a sad, lonely, old woman with nothing better to do than poke your nose into other people's lives. I'm sick of it. If you've got something to say to my mum and dad, you come with me and say it. Right now.'

Mrs. Ahern had lost her voice for the moment.

‘Come on, you curtain-twitching bitch. Come and tell my parents all about it.'

‘What did you call me?'

‘You heard.'

Aggie grabbed a hold of the woman's wrist and started to pull her along the pavement. The woman was stronger than she looked but she didn't let that stop her.

‘Come on, we'll go and talk to them right now. I want to get this over with.'

‘Let go of me. This is assault.'

‘You don't know the fucking meaning of the word.' Mavis Ahern snapped her arm out of Aggie's grip making

Aggie stumbled away. The folder flew out of her grasp. When it hit the pavement the steel bobble caught the kerbside and bent. The elastic snapped off. Silky sheets of monochromatic images slipped into the gutter. For a slice of a second, Aggie stood in hesitation, her secrets disgorged in the street. Then she dived to retrieve the spilled guts of her brand new portfolio. Mavis Ahern beat her to it. She had grabbed two sheets from the folder before Aggie could collect the rest up and shuffle them back into their protective shell.

For some reason, Aggie didn't try to take them back straight away. Here, for the first time ever, someone was seeing her as she had always wanted to be seen. It was her vanity that caused the hesitation, not the fact that she wanted Mrs. Ahern in particular to see her that way. She regretted it immediately. These things were still . . . private somehow. Aggie hadn't even seen them herself and now this psycho harridan had her sticky fingers all over them.

Still Aggie didn't move. She watched the vigilante's face. What she saw there gave her satisfaction. The woman was awed by the art and struck by Aggie's beauty. She was envious and disgusted. Aggie saw the flame of self-hatred rise into the woman's face before she denounced the images she held in her hand.

‘Filth. Degradation. What is wrong with you people?' That was it, wasn't it? The vigilante believed herself separate from the rest of the community - at least from those who didn't attend church or live by her painful, joyless morals. To her, Aggie was some kind of heathen invader in her perfect, religious world. Aggie took her chance and snatched the photos. Mavis Ahern was far quicker again than she'd expected. Aggie's fingers met empty air.

‘Give them back.'

‘I shall be keeping these for your parents to see. Possibly for the police.'

‘They're mine,' said Aggie. ‘My property. If you don't give them back to me I'll call the law myself.' She pulled her mobile from her pocket and stated dialling. ‘All I've got to do is hit dial and I'll be talking to the police. Do you want them to come down here and interview you in the street over an accusation of theft? How's that going to look in your precious church, eh?'

‘These are illegal.'

‘Believe it or not, Mavis, I know the law about this because I plan to make it my profession. There's nothing illegal about these images. The police will agree with me. All I have to do is get them to come here and look for themselves. Now, give me back my property.'

The vigilante didn't seem able to hand the photos back without her glance being drawn again and again to what she saw on those two sheets of black and white photography. Aggie's removal of the photos from her hand brought her back to something like full concentration.

‘You're damned,' was all she said. Aggie snorted.

‘I'm not damned. I'm liberated.' She placed the photos carefully back inside the folder with the others. She'd have to hold it all closed with her fingers now that the bobble was so bent. ‘I'll think of you,' she said to the crazy, lonely woman who stood before her. ‘I'll think of you often when I'm living far from here and you're still rotting alone with nothing better to do than pray and spy.'

She turned her back to the vigilante and hurried on. The anticipation of examining all the photos in the privacy of her room was only partially diminished by the confrontation. Some of the shots were dirty from landing in the gutter - those she would get him to reproduce for her. The sooner she got out of Meadowlands and Shreve, the better. She was one step closer now, a huge step closer to breaking free of this shithole forever.

Part II

‘Everything is alive . . .'

Statement taken from Mason Brand's journal dated June 19
th
, 2001

8

To Mason Brand the cycle of the seasons was the kind of certainty you could stake your life on.

Predicting the actual weather, on the other hand; that was an idiot's pastime. Especially this spring. For days there had been extremes that no forecasts had prepared people for. Monday had been cold, bright and crackle dry. Tuesday, the rain was as warm and heavy as a monsoon. The chill had returned on Wednesday and the rain had turned to snow - four inches of it that soon became a depressing brown slush.

Reports said storms were moving in.

Mason ignored forecasts. Each day he took a broad-brimmed, brown wax hat and a coat of the same material into the vegetable plot with him. Under the coat he wore three more layers, just in case. In his weathered, padlocked shed at the far end of the middle strip of his three planting beds, he kept his tools and a reclaimed pine chair. On a narrow shelf were the few hardback novels salvaged from the tip's recycling centre. The dust jackets were long gone and many of the books were stained and warped by damp. He read them in breaks between digging or when it was raining too hard for him to be outside. He was comfortable in the shed, a thinner skin between him and the free air.

The days smelled clean and blue. An insistent wind scoured the slumber out of the countryside and relieved the trees of their dead branches. Between the clear days and the gales there were showers that came and went as easily as children's tears. Nature puffed and cried and smiled its resuscitation attempts, impatient for the land to respond. In surreptitious moments, when it thought no one was watching, life returned.

It always did.

***

First, he rolled back the wet, mildewed strips of carpet that had kept the light from the soil below.

Beneath it were satin-backed beetles and slaty woodlice, beating their legs in panicked rhythms and scuttling for cover. Pale orange centipedes twisted and writhed as if the exposure was burning them. Ants, their bead-black bodies reflecting pinpoints of sky, marched in the crazy corridors they'd constructed throughout the winter. Worms, previously safe, nosed their way downwards away from his eyes. A few white strands and rootlets had survived the darkness but had failed to grow. The sudden light would finish them off. The earth was tamped and flattened by the weight of the carpet but it was clear of weed and ready for Mason's fork and shovel. It begged to be broken open and sown. A dirty richness rose up to meet his nostrils and it was enough to make him salivate and smile. This unveiling, this undressing of the land was his favourite moment of the year.

In his shed there was a small window over which he had placed a tough wire mesh to prevent break-ins by opportunists after his tools. The window framed a view of Shreve's landfill site, beyond the garden wall of his house, far across the Meadowlands recreation ground and the brownfield land surrounding it. When he glanced up from his novels, what he would notice first were the distant seagulls. They turned in the air in their hundreds like particles trapped in a slow liquid whirlwind. In unpredictable moments, the twister would evaporate and drop them. They would fall to earth, their white backs disappearing into the camouflage of waste.

There wasn't really that much to see; the landfill was specifically designed not to be an eyesore. What was visible was a laterally-spreading volume of multicoloured trash. Each evening, the machines covered the newest waste with soil. In the direction that this solid river crept were man-made canyons - once an open-cast coal mine - awaiting the growing flood. The landscape changed so gradually it was impossible to define, even in the space of a day, what it was that had altered. But alter it did, and constantly. This kind of dumping was going on all over the country. What couldn't be dumped here was shipped overseas. He wondered how long it would be before the world smothered itself beneath a crust of refuse. Then, like a tightly crumpled ball of tossed scrap paper, Earth would spin through space, useless and dead.

He turned the soil. He read. He planted his seed. He watched the seagulls slow-whirling between the clouds and the creeping tide of waste.

When the wind turned, it bore upon it the odorous ghosts of a billion used objects - some degradable, others not. Mason's nose recognised it all. He smelled the composted tops, tails and skins of fruits and vegetables - none as wholesome as the ones he grew. He smelled greasy leftovers - inedible animal bones and fat. He smelled the soured excrement trapped in wadded disposable nappies and feared for the health of the children that had worn them. He smelled the owners of discarded clothes and shoes, knew them a little. He smelled old blood and tissues, the acid of batteries, smelled the abandonment of broken toys, the obsolescence of outdated computers and other electronic devices.

The run-off from these and many other articles, washed, rinsed and dissolved by rain, seeped downwards. Somewhere below it all was a warm, living broth - a kombucha of liquid filth festering and decomposing. Leachate was what the industry called it. This too he smelled or, at least, believed he could. It was supposed to be sealed within the landfill by plastic liners but he didn't believe for a moment that the leachate didn't escape into the water table.

That spring, with the fickle wind changing its mind daily, the smells came to him often. He thought he noticed something different, a vibrancy that didn't belong. Or was it merely that this spring was so much more eager than so many others he could remember? Perhaps he was smelling its expectancy on the air. He sensed that the growing season would be a fertile one: there would be a surplus of produce he could pickle and make into chutneys. There'd be enough to give to charity. For the moment, he was still living well off his crop of over-wintering vegetables.

He put in broad beans and garlic, leeks and potatoes. He sowed carrot and parsnip seed. He planted delicate broccoli and Brussels sprout shoots in regimented lines. Radishes, onions, beetroot, celery and lettuce made up his salad plot. Under cardboard boxes, to keep it sweet, he grew rhubarb. In their own corner, where there was more room to spread, he placed marrows and courgettes. On his fruit trees, like clusters of tiny white satellite dishes, blossoms sprang open ready to guide in their insect helpers.

Mason sweated over the land, no matter how cold the days, and his saline fell upon the soil.

***

The storm was savage and wilful. It was easy to see why the ancients believed it meant the gods were angry. That evening they were furious. It approached from a long way off like a giant travelling many continents for vengeance. Mason watched it come.

At first, early in the afternoon, white clouds multiplied upwards from the horizon. Like vaporous spawn, like rising balloons of fungus. The sun caught these clouds and they were so pure white they reflected it. Mason shielded his eyes. They reared up, swelled and loomed: mountain ranges breaking from the ground. Nodding at their appearance, Mason turned his attention to the earth once more, raking the larger stones from one of his beds. Each time he looked up, the clouds were higher. He stopped to watch and see them grow but his eyes could not catch the movement. Too slow to be noticed, too fast to be caught.

The storm strode across the land.

Within an hour, its bulk filled half the dome of the spring sky. Its highest point was anvil flat, the whole mass coming straight towards Mason's house. The whiteness of the clouds had gone. Now they were armoured grey and bulbous. The sun no longer beamed back from their surface but was swallowed there. The amorphous cloak of vapours darkened and deepened, spread its influence ever wider. Silent, cold-smiling, it came.

Mason stowed his tools and stopped work to watch the beast stampede his way. The clouds began to stretch over him and his garden. He felt his tininess and knew the storm could crush him under its boot heel. Every day, no matter how careful he was, he mashed insects under his own soles just as unknowingly. Even with the first clouds high over his head, the base of the storm was still beyond the horizon. The size of it drew a primitive response from within him. He retreated from the shed to the back door of his house, ready to go inside at any moment.

There had been a breeze all day, blowing towards Mason whenever he looked up. Now it died as though the storm had stolen the wind's breath for itself. The storm had been inhaling and expanding for hours; now there was pause. Mason smelled ozone on the air; a dry, dusty, charged smell. Far beyond the horizon and barely audible, paper thunder rippled across the sky. The hair on Mason's arms and legs lifted. A chill penetrated his stomach. He saw knotted expressions in the tempest's clouds and thought he could sense the skirl it was preparing to unleash.

The storm approached still nearer.

Its black base cleared the horizon. It walked on feet of darkness strapped into boots of night. The horizon disappeared. The clouds over Mason churned and twisted, boiling upside down. The wind returned, gently at first, like a hand pushing at his face, tugging his beard, urging him inside. He heeded the warning. Without taking his eyes off the storm, he backed into the kitchen.

Before he shut the door, the storm let go. It spat white teeth that bit into the earth. The after image was still glowing when the storm screamed, finally exhaling its first rush of gathered zephyrs. Mason clasped his hands to his head to block the pain from his eardrums and used his body to slam the door. He didn't move from the back window of his house for an hour.

Outside, the storm stopped moving and stabbed the land all around with crooked white swords, skewered it with blue fire-tridents, whipped it with electric silver birch. It shrieked at the land. It trampled it. It beat the ground with hammers of light. While the Earth was silent, it screamed, and raged and swore.

And though it raped and brutalised the land, the storm wept at its own unstoppable cruelty and the soil beneath it turned to mud.

***

It was six forty-five in the morning and still quite dark. Ozzy and Lemmy strained against their leads.

Their hanging tongues dripped saliva and twitched as they panted and choked. Their cheeks were drawn back, wrinkled into determined grins. Black claws dragged and scraped at the paved footpath. Like squat twins, the bull terriers leaned into the future. Two taut leashes attached them to Kevin Doherty, who was inclined backwards and walking forwards at the same time in an attempt to keep control. Just a few more metres and they'd be at the entrance to Shreve Country Park. Then he could relax.

Before they even reached the gate, the two Staffies were close to asphyxiating themselves. Kevin didn't think that eating long grass, sniffing strangers' urine and running yourself to the point of collapse was anything to get excited about, but he didn't pretend to understand dogs. Not like Tammy, whose ‘boys' they were.

Why it was him that had to walk them every day was another thing he didn't understand.

The car park was empty, but he still checked there was no one else with a dog in the immediate area. Ozzy and Lemmy hadn't been ‘socialised' but, while they'd never actually fought with other dogs or bitten anyone, Kevin was fairly sure it was only a matter of time before they gave in to their breeding and committed a multiple murder. He knelt down to the dogs to reach for their collars but they pulled away, dropping him to his knees in a puddle left by the previous night's storm.

‘Fucking hell. You hairy, stinky bastards.'

He rocked back onto his heels, reined them in and flicked them free of their leads. They shot off like a pair of short-legged missiles with spinning tails and snap-flapping ears. Into the trees, into the undergrowth, gone. Twenty seconds later there was a rustling and they reappeared, sprinting back to him and occasionally looking at each other to see who was winning. They split as they reached him, skidded into a tight turn behind him and raced away again. For the first twenty minutes or so, that was how it would be.

Kevin sat down on a bench, his knees cold, wet and dirty. He took out the cigarette he'd hidden in his glasses case and lit it with a small pink lighter. The rare rush of smoke flooded his bloodstream, dizzying his vision. There were
some
compensations for walking the dogs.

***

The roads wore a skin of dirty water which split and resealed with the passing of cars.

In a tired and dented black Rover, Ray Wade touched the brakes for a moment and then placed his foot back on the accelerator.

‘What?' said Jenny.

‘Nothing,' said Ray. But he didn't want to lie. ‘Thought I saw something on the grass verge. Light us a fag, would you?'

‘I saw it too. Looked like a -'

‘A body. I know.' Ray speeded up. ‘It was a bin liner full of rubbish. That's all.'

‘We should check,' said Jenny.

Ray looked across at her to see if she was serious and knowing that if she was he wouldn't get any peace until he did what she wanted. It was the same with everything. They watched the DVDs she wanted to watch, went to the clubs she wanted to go to, hung around with her friends, did sex the way she liked it.

Maybe he could defuse her this time.

‘It's somebody's trash, Jenny. The gyppos fly-tip along this road all the time.' He looked at his watch for effect. ‘Anyway, we're late as it is. Can I have that fag, please?'

Jenny had her arms folded, her lips pushed forward. Ray could tell she was thinking. Not a natural talent. She was more fun when she wasn't thinking.

‘What if someone's lying there? Hurt or unconscious? We should definitely check, Ray.'

‘
Jenny
. We can still make half of Bodger's lecture. If we stop we'll miss the whole thing.'

‘No. Everyone's doing that.'

‘Doing what?'

‘Everyone's driving past and seeing something there. And they're all going “Oh, it's just a bag of rubbish. Oh, I'm too busy to stop.” How would you feel if you were hurt and everyone was ignoring you?'