Garbage Man (2 page)

The figure from the building approached the cab. The window was open. A tattooed face looked out, grinning and chewing.

‘Alright, Stig.' said the driver through crackles of gum.

The gate-man nodded, not missing the open-mouthed smacking.

‘Still trying to pack in the cigarettes?'

‘Nah. Given up giving up, mate. Addicted to the bloody gum as well now. Fackyin' . . . look at this.' Chewing all the while the driver with a bad painting for a face rolled up his sleeve. His eyes were open very wide. ‘Nicotine patch, that is,' he said pointing as though the gate-man might miss it. ‘A fag's just not the full bifter without the patch and the gum. I have to take a couple of beta-blockers with a few swigs of scotch before I can think about gettin' any kip at night.' The driver stared out into the night. ‘Fackyin' . . .'

The gate-man considered a light-hearted jibe about rehab and let it pass. The driver was lean and had a reputation for getting out of his cab to settle slights. Instead the gate-man said:

‘Know where you're going?'

The driver nodded. Too fast. Too many times. Like a viper-strike his hand came out of the cab window. The gate-man flinched but he needn't have. The hand was thin and grimy, fading turquoise webs and dots extending down from the wrist, a swallow near the thumb. Between the long fingers a wad of dirty twenties. The gate-man smiled and took them, flicked through, and pocketed the lot.

‘Who's overrun their quota this time?' he asked as the hand withdrew upwards.

‘It's not that,' said the driver. ‘The incinerator at the hospital's bust, innit. Fackyin' . . . can't burn up the cut off arms and legs and lumps of cancer an' that. Amazing how much “waste” they create. I ain't going in a hospital, Stig. Not ever. I'd come out half the man I am now.' The driver looked down and grinned, eyes chalky, already thinking about something else. Briefly, he came back to the moment. ‘Tell you what else, Stig. It stinks. The worst stink of anything I've ever had to shift. Shit and disease and rotting meat, all from people like you and me. Went into hospital in one piece, left with bits missing and a super-bug. Never going in there, mate. Fackyin' . . . never.'

The gate-man nodded and stepped back.

The driver slammed the truck into gear and ground away along the temporary road leading to the landfill cells. Very soon, when the canyons of trash were all filled, the whole landfill would be sealed and covered with soil. They'd turn it onto a public park or sports centre or playing field and, in time, no one would remember the network of feeder roads that led the trucks to the huge mouths in the earth that swallowed the town's muck silently and willingly. All this would be gone but the gate-man would be doing something similar somewhere else - at least for a while. There would always be waste and there would always be a need for waste managers and refuse engineers. He smiled because he knew he'd never be out of work.

Until he wanted to be.

The sound of the truck's engine receded into the darkness along with the glare from its headlights. The gate-man half wished the driver would make an over-stimulated miscalculation and bury himself and his truck as well.

Fackyin' . . . forever.

But where was the charity in that kind of thinking? Besides, without the hyperactive driver, whose name he still didn't know after years of after-hours interactions like this one, there would be no backhanders for burying the town's unauthorised waste. Not to mention the loads brought in by other drivers from other towns in other counties all around the country. Landfill space was running out fast. At two-hundred quid per unauthorised load - and there were several of those every week - the gateman was amassing a serious retirement fund. He looked through the chain link fence at his battered car and smiled. No one would ever guess he was a wealthy man. Only when this job was long behind him and he was living in a country where the weather and the people didn't bring you down every single day, only then would he allow himself to live the way he wanted to.

It was going to be a lot of fun.

2

To anyone else it would have been the filthiest place on Earth. To Mason Brand it was a place of power, even more sacred and essential than his precious vegetable garden. He broke in there most nights to make contact with the land.

He stood barefoot on a layer of freshly-dumped soil. It was about a foot thick, just enough to keep the smell down and the animals from digging through overnight. Below the thin, yielding earth millions of tons of compacted waste rotted. Through his soles he could feel the warmth of it rising up like living radiation. The warmth came in the form of gas - noxiously sweet-smelling methane mostly - and in a simple emanation of heat; a subterranean fever.

The expanse below, filled with every kind of rubbish so compressed it was solid enough to build upon, was alive with decomposition. Tiny bugs were multiplying and eating the waste, breaking it down a particle at a time. Even the metals were being oxidised and consumed. All manner of human leavings and discarded materials were locked below him in cells the size of canyons excavated deep into the earth. Tramped down, by huge machines with toothed wheels, covered with soil to be forgotten and ignored. An entire county's dumping ground. A place no one ever thought about unless the wind was blowing the wrong way.

But Mason Brand thought about it a lot.

There was something very dangerous about Shreve's landfill. Here, after all, was the most poisonous site in the Midlands - in the country perhaps. More polluted than the run-off from any of Shreve's factories. More pregnant with disease than the sewers. Cut yourself on a piece of rusted metal here and the wound would corrupt your entire body with sickness, end your life in a few days. These were the things the people of Shreve might have thought about the landfill, if they'd had a spare moment. And, of course, if they thought about it a little more carefully, they might have realised they were incredibly fortunate such a place existed; a place of severance and forgetting, a place of great convenience where all their waste could be covered over and ignored.

Mason would have been the most optimistic of all of them. For him there was something very beneficial about this place of gathered mess and heaped destruction and filth. Something almost holy. He had a gut feeling about the land and about its influence. This instinct was something which came from generations who'd existed long before him, woodsmen and wanderers, the generations who'd lived close to the land. Mason had lived exactly like them for a time, like a neolith. It was a part of his past he tried hard not to think about.

He had a sense of the Earth's ability to heal and transform. This power came in the form of a pull or draw - not gravity exactly but a force of similar quality. The body of the planet, its soil and dust, was something like a living poultice. He had used this quality to cure himself of various ills over the years. A pack of wet soil wrapped in muslin and applied directly to his skin had cleared him of an attack of boils five years previously. Two years later, the same treatment, combined with crushed herbs from his garden, had relieved him of scabies.

For deeper maladies, wounds to the soul, Mason Brand was in the habit of digging a shallow trench, lying down naked so his skin would touch the loam and covering himself with earth up to his chin. There in his own back garden, hidden among his fruits and vegetables, he would lie awake all night with the worms and the slugs progressing around him. The Earth would draw the spiritual sickness from him and by the dawning he would be clean. Clean as the day his mother had expelled him, innocent and unprotected, into the filthy world of men.

It wasn't something he talked about with his neighbours. Mason Brand rarely talked to anyone if he could avoid it. The landfill was a place where, by necessity, the Earth's drawing was very strong indeed. And that was why, at night, when the compactors stood still as drugged giants and the rest of Shreve slumbered within their clean brick walls, Mason would climb through the hole he'd made in the perimeter fence and stand barefoot in this place of entropy and rot.

A quarter of a mile away, near the workers' huts and the contractor's offices, a small tower stood like a black candle against the light-polluted sky and at the top of this candle a flame, only visible at night, burned soft blue: the ignited exhalations of the earth, the collected methane being burned to save the atmosphere from its deleterious effects. But it wasn't possible to collect all the gas and sometimes Mason would see violet will-o-the-wisps flash and shimmer and disappear as a small pocket of vapour ignited spontaneously. He saw these flashes as signs of the Earth's life, blips on a monitor, pulses and heartbeats, messages of goodwill rising from deep within the body of the world. And from these portents he took faith in the way of things and experienced a simple gladness about the rightfulness and righteousness of decay.

He curled his toes into the soil, gripped the Earth, held on to her. She took away his leavings too; bad energies, bad thoughts, sickness before it had the chance to take root in him. Wrongfulness was pulled down through him, leaving him pure.

A sickle of moon rose up from the opposite horizon, as if to balance the disappearance of the sun. It was nothing but a cool glow at first, indistinct and pale behind the low, filthy clouds. As it rose it shrank and its edges became honed until it slit the fleshy vapours near the ground and floated free. A crooked smile, a slash in the night sky where the light from a pure universe seeped through.

Mason was hypnotised. He had no way to measure the slippage of overlapping moments. He might have been doing no more than focussing on an object through a lens or he might have been standing there a whole season, growing roots through the veneer of loose soil and deep into the landfill. Finally, he blinked and looked around him, feeling it was time to go home. He needed to rest. Even the Earth slept, half of it slumbering through darkness as it rotated its spherical face to the blessing of the sun.

Every part of his body was cold but the soles of his feet, still receiving warmth from the ground, still bleeding out his darker energies. He would never be completely pure - nothing and no one could be. For then an absolute state would be reached and the motion and flow of things into each other would, therefore, have ceased. Such a state, he believed, was synonymous with the end of the world and, no matter how well he felt he understood these things, he was not ready for that.

But the moon held him, its bright blade incising his eyes, the hook of it snagged into his mind. He could feel its draw on him too, coaxing his water, pulling him up. He closed his eyes a moment and hauled himself back taking a deep breath. Yes, time to go home.

His feet were welded to the ground and came away reluctantly. He stumbled and almost fell over trying the take his first couple of steps. Then the grip of the moon and the grip of the Earth were eased and he was liberated.

He didn't get far before stopping again. There was wetness underfoot. Strange. The weather had been changeable but there'd been no rain for a few days. No puddles or muddy troughs belonged here, especially not on newly scattered soil. He looked down and scanned the darkness where only his feet were recognisable, fungus white against the black humus. Around them, oily liquid blackness was spreading out. The viscous fluid reflected the scalpel-sharp moon and even the yellow glow of the streetlights coming from Meadowlands, the estate where he lived.

All manner of possibilities sprang into his mind. A water main had burst nearby and was flooding the landfill. A blockage had caused the canal to burst its banks. Something in the landfill had burst and its filth was seeping upwards. None of the explanations fitted what was happening. They came and went in a sliver of a moment leaving only fear behind. Something was wrong here; profoundly, unnaturally wrong. The longer he looked at the welling of black fluid around his feet, covering them now, the stronger became this conviction.

Without taking another step, he crouched a little and put his hand to the surface of this rising flood. It was warm and slightly greasy between his fingertips. He held the substance below his nose and inhaled. It smelled rusty. This made sense to him. The landfill was full of oxidising iron and steel. Perhaps the leachate from the landfill had been blocked somehow and was backing up. Just as soon as he had this notion, it too was dismissed. The fluid should have smelled of things other than metal decay. It should have smelled of shit and rot. It didn't.

He walked now, suddenly and with purpose, away from the newly covered area of landfill and back towards the fence-line. The substance under his feet was tarry and when he reached a place where the fluid no longer welled, the loose soil stuck to his tacky soles. He collected his shoes and socks by the gap in the chain-link, bent low and stepped through. He turned and used his pocketful of wire ties to sew the fence breach together again.

The way to his back garden twisted through low shrubs where small, well-used tracks had been made by badgers and rabbits. It led out onto an expanse of brownland where the grass that grew was sparse and clumped. Underfoot was coke and slag from the open cast coal mine that had been there before the days of the landfill. If this wasn't hazardous enough to bare feet, much of the waste ground was littered with shattered glass from discarded bottles and other litter. Mason didn't care; whatever was on his feet, he didn't want to get it on his socks and in his shoes. He kept waiting for the substance to itch or burn the skin of his feet but it didn't.

And so, as he did so many nights of the year, he crossed the brownland like a shadow returning to its sleeping owner. He was lucky, he believed, to reach his back gate without cutting himself. Instead of letting himself in through the back door of his house, he unlocked the garden shed, stepped in and switched on its single bare bulb. After the darkness of the landfill, forty watts was like staring at the midday sun. He blinked until his pupils adjusted and sat on a woodwormed pine chair.