Garbage Man (17 page)

His mind screamed at him to stop, turn around, go home, think it over.

His heart battered away making it hard to breathe. His throat dried out and he knew he'd have no voice, only the expression on his face when he saw her. That would be enough, said his heart, more than enough. Then they would touch - a spark to the high-octane fuel - and he would enter a painless ecstasy.

For a few minutes, his mind said.

That will be enough, replied his heart.

He was there somehow. Without remembering a single step that brought him. His chest hurt. He knew when he opened his mouth all she would hear would be the drum and bass of his heartbeat. A hand reached up to knock, he saw it and couldn't believe it was his. It was. The hand knocked an urgent double-rap on the white-painted wood.

Footsteps in the hallway. The door opened and he saw her

fucking hell

husband standing there in his dressing gown. Unshaven, bleary eyed. Unhappy.

He couldn't speak. He couldn't look the man in the eye. He was sure his face was the colour of the scarlet roses in her front garden. The man looked confused and impatient.

‘What can I do for you?' asked Kevin Doherty. But Donald heard the barely veiled ‘piss off, squirt' in his tone. His throat locked.

Mr. Doherty opened his eyes wider, craned his neck forward in a we're-all-waiting-and-we've-all-got-better-things-to-do gesture of encouragement. Then Donald saw recognition on the man's face. There could be nothing worse.

‘You're the paper boy.'

‘Uh . . .' said Donald.

. . .

‘I'm s-sorry,' he added.

. . .

And finally,

‘No papers today.'

Mr. Doherty shrugged.

‘Thanks for the warning, but who cares? There's nothing in the local rag worth reading about. Do me a favour, son, will you? Cancel our subscription.'

The words stopped Donald's heart. The paper was his only connection to her.

‘It's all right, son. I'm sure you won't lose your job over it.'

The husband closed the door. Donald's legs turned him around and took him away as fast as possible. A shout from behind stopped his heart again.

‘Hey! Come here a second.'

Donald stopped walking and considered sprinting. His body wouldn't do it. He rotated towards Mr. Doherty like a robot and took a few reluctant steps back towards the door. The man's voice dropped to a whisper.

‘I want to ask you something.'

Donald started thinking up the frantic denials, lies and excuses. None of them were believable. Mr. Doherty was going to smash him into unconsciousness. Maybe strangle him to death right there on the doorstep.

Mr Doherty looked from side to side at the quiet neighbourhood and beckoned Donald closer. Two steps were all he could manage.

Mr. Doherty's voice became even quieter.

‘You haven't seen a couple Staffordshire bull terriers, have you? They're easy enough to recognise - got these stupid grins on their faces most of the time. Thought you might have noticed them on your paper round.'

***

Ray Wade's days took on a lethargic monotony that was utterly comfortable and utterly safe. He arose some time in the hour before midday and would see the pile of books that needed to be read before the end of the holidays. Bypassing them he would spend fifteen minutes or more frowning over a month-old crossword as he sat on the pot. Breakfast at Luigi's café varied a little, but not much - some version of the full English highlighting his favoured fried food of the moment - and then back to the flat for his first spliff of the day. There was no hurry in any of this.

He made a mug of tea and set it on the coffee table while he constructed a complex pattern of cigarette papers, licking and ripping until he had the shape he wanted. Then he crumbled hash over the innards of a Marlboro, made a roach from the dwindling packet and rolled the whole lot into a pristine cone. The first blast of hot, tearing smoke hit his lungs like spicy fog and jammed his brain with sparks and dizziness a moment later.

When he'd recovered from the first rush, out came the games console and in went disc 2 of Revenant Apocalypse, the scariest and most satisfying game he'd ever played. There on the rumpled couch he would stay for the next three or four hours, moving only to make tea, relieve himself or roll new joints.

In the late afternoon, both spaced and creeped-out by his one-man war against the undead, he would rediscover the world of sunshine outside the flat and walk through Shreve to The Barge, a pub overlooking the canal. There, in the gravelled beer garden, he would sit and stare at the ducks - cold pints of cider taking the edge off the build up of game-induced paranoia.

The walk home would include a stop at Rockets Video Rental for a couple of DVDs - comedies usually - to counteract the terror of half a day spent hacking zombies to pieces with a sword. The final leg would then depend on which takeaway he required and whether or not he needed to visit Monkey Man for a new block of hash.

Ray intended to make the most of the student loan he knew he'd spend many miserable years paying off.

And at three or four in the morning, too stoned even to masturbate, he knew that all the things he put into his body and distracted his mind with each day had only one purpose. No amount of brain haze could hide it: they helped him not think about what was missing in his life.

***

It became Mason's ritual to rise at around half past three in the morning and sit in the kitchen with the back door open drinking tea until he heard something. He sat there now, halfway through his third mug, cold between his cupped palms. A night breeze teased his bare ankles in the darkness and he shivered, put the tea on the window ledge. It was out there right now, far across the scrubland, sifting waste while Shreve slept.

It was impossible for Mason to sleep when he knew the shed-thing was at large in night's obscurity, picking over the landfill for better parts. He didn't fear for the animals or people it might find while it searched for augmentations. He worried he wasn't taking good enough care of it, that it would get lost or hurt or buried out there on its own in the middle of the night. He thought of it as an orphan whose guardian he had become.

The noise he waited for was a scratching on the wooden gate at the bottom of the garden. It was an unmistakeable sound. It had that presumption to it, the way a child might knock on its own parents' door. The scratching said so much about the shed-thing, this creature which could not speak a word. It telegraphed the shed-thing's vulnerability:
let me in, give me sanctuary, I need to be safe now.
It communicated urgency:
I'm hungry, sustain me
. It wordlessly spoke of a terrifying solitude:
I do not know what I am or why I am like this, let me see you, let me be with you again.

Sometimes he worried he was putting words in its makeshift mouth, that it was nothing more than an abomination, death rekindled into living death, trying mindlessly to survive.

Each night he let it out and each morning, long before dawn it returned; larger, altered. It developed itself. The process made Mason think of hermit crabs discarding shells they'd outgrown in favour of something more spacious. But there was so much more to it than that. The shed-thing didn't merely make itself larger. It improved itself, it self-modified. It appeared to learn as it went what the best combinations were for a strong, resilient frame. This was not the behaviour of senseless, dead matter.

It was using some of the flesh it had taken as muscle and sinew to hold its newest parts together. Corroded copper pipes, pieces of garden hose and bicycle tyre inner tubes had become its veins and in them, judging by the smell, flowed the filthy biochemistry of recycled bloods and the slimy leachate from beneath the landfill. It was a more complicated thing to look at now. Mason found it bewitching in the way of sunsets, for, like them, the creature was never the same two days in a row. It was mysterious; Mason knew what was in it, what it was
of
, but not how it fitted together. Not how it lived. The shed-thing was animate; sentient, junkyard mechanics. It was improvised biology melded with reclaimed human wreckage. The shed-thing defied entropy - more than that, it opposed and reversed it. It was beautiful and new the way the shimmering fur of a tiny wild fox cub was beautiful. It was as feral as a wolf, as intelligent as . . .

Mason tried not to think about that.

Every day the creature budded in some new way, reliant upon the amount and nature of the live flesh and organs he fed it. It added to itself continually. What remained obvious, despite its many flaws and deformities, was its unceasing intent to evolve from its quadruped form. It was trying - and it was failing every time - to become humanoid in shape. There were aberrations, of course - vestigial limbs that survived for only a day, extra toes and ears which disappeared or dropped off and rotted so quickly they appeared to evaporate. Many mornings the creature had a tail but by the end of the day it would have vanished.

It was no animal, even though it had the nature of an animal and the vitals and ligaments and tissues of an animal. No. What it aspired to was humanity.

Since the bounteous day that two stray bulldogs had been drawn to the food in the garden, the creature had added a great deal of body to itself. He'd come to think of it affectionately as the shed-thing but it barely fitted inside the shed any more.

And that, if nothing else, troubled Mason deeply. For, if it was no longer a shed-thing, what would it be?

The noise came. It was not a scratching.

It was a knock. A soft, surreptitious knock on the garden gate. Three taps. He almost didn't hear it over his own breathing. The spacing and the volume were a code and, once again, Mason heard the inference from the speechless shed-thing. It was a signal meant only for him.
I'm back, let me come in.
All of this was their little secret.
Come quietly, don't let anyone know.
There was something else. Something he hadn't heard before. Usually the scratching was insistent but somehow fatigued, as though the shed-thing had exhausted itself in its nocturnal seeking.

The three taps came again. A little louder. A little faster. Urgency.

The shed-thing was excited. There was something it wanted to show him.

In his slippers and worn-through pyjamas, Mason crept quietly to the bottom of the garden. The fronds and leaves of his vegetables left dew on him as he passed, raising chicken-skin from scalp to toe. He saw the lighter coloured square of his back gate and beyond it a shape. He had the impression of something crouching there and for a moment he lost

all his confidence. He stopped on the paved path a few steps from the gate. Beyond it a shape moved in the darkness. There was no way to identify it except that it was no shape ever seen before. Not by him. Not by anyone.

It did not tap again. It knew he was there.

Why couldn't he step forward and open the gate?

The answer was in his heart rate, his life-pump swelling in his chest. Mason was afraid.

The silence of the shed-thing was full of patience. It was full of excitement. That was what scared him.

He stepped forward and reached for the latch. He pressed the thumb lever, the black metal cool in his fingers. The well-oiled workings made no sound as he lifted the latch and pulled open the gate.

***

There was a moment of mental safety in which Mason reasoned that what he now saw beyond the gate was all in his imagination. There was nothing new here. Rationality helped in this brief delusion. The shed-thing was still just a pile of trash and animal parts which crawled on four legs. In the darkness, all he could see was the jumble of mismatched structures and appendages he'd come to expect when the shed-thing came home each night. Similar but larger, exactly as it usually was.

Then the shed-thing did something it had never done before. It moved in a new way. Instead of crawling towards him, it
uncoiled
. Upwards.

Mason took several steps back up the path. It rose up to show him what it had become. It was proud to display itself, he could see that in the way it moved, turning a little to each side so he could see it against the wall of night behind. The shed-thing stood now on two legs, swaying like a toddler taking its first steps.

Mason put his hand over his mouth to keep the gasp inside. The gasp which might have escalated into some louder expression of disgust.

The shed-thing had found enough pieces of furniture and angle iron to make itself a pair of legs. But these new limbs, although larger and longer than before were insufficient for the task. It had used the bull terriers' limbs as a template and so it stood now, only partially upright, on limbs with thick rounded haunches, skinny-looking ‘tibia' and ‘fibula' and elongated, front-flexing ankles. And, just like dogs, there was no way it could stay standing on these hind legs for very long. Still, Mason noted the sense of achievement the shed-thing was displaying. It had found a kind of confidence in itself he hadn't seen. Before, it had laboured for itself with a will and a sense of urgency. Here was its first moment of a more human emotion, something approaching self-belief. Mason despaired; it had built this pride on sandy foundations.

Even as Mason thought these things, the shed-thing's ungainly swaying worsened. A tearing came from one if its new legs as the weight of the rest of its body overcame the poor structure. The shed-thing's left leg snapped at the ankle. Not understanding what had happened, it tried to take a step towards Mason. Instead it fell through the entrance to the back garden, forcing Mason to sidestep into his cabbages. The noise the fall made was loud, like someone had dumped a small skip onto his path. For a moment there was silence, the silence after a child falls over and before it fully realises it's hurt. And then came a keening wail from somewhere deep inside the shed-thing, a moan of failure and pain and frustration.