Garbage Man (13 page)

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 attitude. 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.

A few minutes before, he'd placed a saucer of pure white liquid, still warm from the microwave, in front of its rag-box cradle. It had turned its single glass eye upon him as though he were torturing it. It had vented a moan of bleak destitution that punctured his chest.

Milk was not to be its nourishment.

Crying without tears, he'd left the shed and stood in the fertile surroundings staring through the newly-forming fruits and vegetables. Pods, gourds, edible flowers, seed heads, nourishing green stalks. All had grown up from the ash and dust of the earth. All had taken strength and vitality from dead or decaying matter, from things that had once lived.

The answer had to be here somewhere. He'd never known a problem that couldn't be worked out by spending time in the garden. His eyes focussed on the runner beans he'd planted a month earlier. Some of their flowers had already formed and dropped away leaving the tiny precursors to the long flat seed carriers that he would eat. The ones he did not cook or freeze would ripen and dry and he would keep the speckled purple beans inside them to plant the following year. Generations of runner beans had come and gone right here in his garden.

Miniature kidneys; that was what the beans reminded him of.

Below ground, potatoes were forming in clumps under flowering tops. In the miniature glasshouse, tomatoes were appearing in tiny green rows on the vine. They grew from a special compost that he'd devised over the years. Dead things fed the living. That was the natural way. And flowers, fruits and seeds were the organs by which those living things reproduced and flourished.

The thing in the shed was not living in the strictest sense. It had been born amid the slime and ordure of human waste. It had come from dead, discarded things and it had crawled away from its birthplace in its attempt to survive. Clearly, whatever it needed wasn't in the landfill. The dead feed the living. That was the law. But it was an old law now. This creature was something new; nature's new vision. A break from evolution. Something that would perhaps save the world from self-destruction if it had the chance to survive. He knew it was important. It was beyond important. The creature was the key to a fresh nature in the world, a new living logic that would reverse the destructive appetites of humanity.

Only one new logic made sense in this case: a reversal of the old natural laws. The creature's survival depended on it.

For a moment he smiled in understanding but it faded with the implications of what he had to do. He wanted to think of himself as the midwife of the new nature but he'd been too late for that, merely witnessing the birth from a distance. But if the creature survived, he might be remembered as the nursemaid of the new nature. Perhaps even its governess and teacher. He was half surprised to find he wanted the responsibility.

The guilt was something he would have to learn to live with.

Explaining what had happened had been impossible. They knew there was no way anyone would believe the truth but coming up with an alternative story had been almost as difficult. As Ray drove and Jenny held her mutilated foot against the dashboard they'd had a surreal conversation. Blood and effluent had smeared the moulded plastic.

‘You slammed a garage door on it.'

‘I'm not strong enough to do this to myself.'

‘All right. I slammed a garage door on it.'

Jenny, who had shown surprising stoicism since the ‘accident' started to cry. Ray pressed a little harder on the accelerator hoping to pass the van in front of them. Traffic appeared in the opposite lane and he had to ease off. All the time they spent between here and the hospital meant more time for Jenny's wound to be exposed to the filth of the thing he'd killed.

‘We dropped a manhole cover on it. Those things are heavy.'

‘What the fuck were we doing carrying a manhole cover?'

‘Uh . . . we were . . . going into the sewer to retrieve some keys. That will explain the, uh . . . you know, the smell and everything.'

Jenny had stared across at him then and Ray had felt a real rift open up between them for the first time. Or perhaps it was just the first time he'd admitted it to himself. When it came to handling things together, handling life, nothing worked. Stoned, they were fine. They were company for each other. Adequate company. He didn't know why it suddenly hurt to see it that way. She looked sick of him. Sick of everything.

‘A dog bit me, Ray. It bit my toe right off. We were by the river and there was a lot of rubbish strewn around. That's what we'll say.'

Ray had shrugged. Fine. It was her toe. It would be her story. As suddenly as the jab of emotional hurt had come, it vanished. He couldn't wait to get the odour of blood and shit out of his car.

Now, two hours later, he dropped Jenny off at her place. She was dosed up with painkillers and he'd bought her a half bottle of brandy for the shock. She didn't ask him in and he was glad. He held the door open for her and she thumped inelegantly past him on her borrowed hospital crutches. She still smelled terrible because there was sewage all over her jeans and jacket but the doctors had told her not to get her foot wet. Still, he hoped she'd have a bath.

‘Want me to come in and make you a cup of tea or something?' he asked, feeling obliged to make some kind of gesture.

‘I'll be fine,' she said. She collapsed onto her untidy couch, unscrewed the cap off the brandy and took a couple of large sips. ‘Don't you worry about me.'

She managed an ugly, forced smile and all Ray wanted to do was leave.

The doctor who stitched her foot up hadn't believed their dog story. They stood by it, though. Even when he pointed out it was unlikely a canine bite would look like this. He'd given her a tetanus shot and a week's course of antibiotics. He never even mentioned rabies. The doctor wasn't much older than they were and looked exhausted. Maybe that was why he hadn't involved the police. Either way, they were both relieved to get away from Shreve A&E without having to answer any more questions.

Now Ray looked at Jenny and thought about how this might be a story he'd tell his mates or his next girlfriend. One day, perhaps but not yet. For now, still not understanding what had happened and the shock of her mutilation would keep the event a secret.

‘You sure you'll be alright?' He asked.

She took another sip of brandy and nodded without looking up.

‘I'll see you then,' he said.

‘Yeah. See ya.'

He shut the door and walked slowly back to the car. Next stop was the pub. College would have to survive without him for a day or two. Ray had some forgetting to do. After a couple of pints in the snug of The Barge had released some of the weird tension that had built up inside him, he couldn't help a grim smile and a stifled giggle which drew a glance from Doug, the landlord: they hadn't found her toe.