Garbage Man (6 page)

He walked out from his camper that day and into the rain, much gentler then than when he arrived at the farmhouse, and explored the area.

The gulley was small, nothing dramatic but it had to be negotiated on foot. On the side he descended were small boulders and rocks, all wearing a thick fur of bright moss. He lost his footing several times as he clambered down. At the bottom of the gulley was a tiny stream, black water flowing over coal-dark peat. It was probably no more than a footstep across the widest part. He crossed it. Beyond, was the opposite slope of the miniature valley. There, the grass was fuller and greener than the place where Mason switched off his engine. There were no rocks to slip on or trip over.

There, on the far side of the gulley, protected by moss-covered oaks dripping fronds of lichen and tears of rain, in the clean damp air he felt himself go silent inside. His mind stopped replaying his fears and insecurities. It stopped questioning the validity or lack thereof of who and what Mason Brand was. It was as near to true peace as he'd ever come. Given to him in a single moment. In that same moment he decided he would stay in those woods until he was ready to go back to civilisation.

And if that time never came, he knew he could remain there. Just
be
there until the end. Like the farmer.

***

In his bed, Don Smithfield held the memory of the woman he lived for in his mind's eye and wanked until his prick was sore. Three ejaculations later and he still couldn't rid himself of her, couldn't sleep. Instead of memories he tried a fantasy, took their fragile new love to an unexplored level. He couldn't come. His prick was chafed so raw there was no more pleasure in the pursuit. And anyway, this lonely stroking only left him empty, sorry and bereft.

He lay on his back in the darkness and wondered what to do. No answer came to him. Telling Aggie had probably been a mistake. She was incredulous at first and then, he thought, pretty impressed, though she hid it well. He made her promise, swear on their parents' death, that she would tell no one. He thought she'd taken it seriously but there was no way of knowing for certain. She might blurt it to a girlfriend ‘in confidence' or she might announce it in her class just to embarrass him. Maybe, just maybe, she would do as she'd promised and keep it a secret.

In a way, it would be cool if his mates found out but if it went any further there could be serious trouble. Police kind of trouble.

He'd had sex with a woman twice his age. That made her thirty years old.

And it made her a criminal.

None of this made it any easier to sleep. He slipped out of bed and sat at his desk, wincing as his pyjamas brushed the skin of his prick. The touch, though it stung, was enough to arouse him once more. He nudged the mouse on his desktop and a soft light filled the room. As his erection flared and reheated the skin was so dry it almost crackled. Then there was a sudden warmth and dampness in the crotch seam of his pyjamas. He looked down at his lap. A blot of blood was spreading across the cotton. Terrified, he fumbled his prick out for an inspection. The wound wasn't serious, just a split in his raw foreskin, but it bled enthusiastically. His erection went down fast. All he could think about was what he would tell his mum when the PJs went for a wash. He decided he'd throw them out.

I have to get my mind off all this.

Instead of surfing for porn, he looked at the online news. Shreve had been on national TV today but he'd been too preoccupied to listen properly. He looked up the story on the BBC.

- Doctors blame poor waste management for rise in health problems - read the headline. Apparently, Shreve's residents were suffering a far higher than average incidence of migraine, asthma and eye problems. Some hospital consultants in the area were blaming waste-leakage and fumes from the landfill site. During the day, Donald could see the huge dump they were talking about from his bedroom window. A local obstetrician had gone on the record to say he believed a recent and sharp rise in birth defects and childhood leukaemia to be directly related to the landfill.

Don blinked and rubbed his eyes. He looked away from the screen for a few moments until his vision cleared. Perhaps it was all the worry. Maybe he was highly suggestible. Out of nowhere a mean pounding was building up behind his right eye.

He could have sworn there was a smell of rot in his bedroom.

***

Ray took off his clothes and slipped in beside Jenny. It was after 5am now. He was exhausted and involuntarily replaying the scarier scenes from Revenant Apocalypse over and over again. His eyes hurt and the smell of rubbish from the kitchen bin had found its way into the bedroom too. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would empty it and bleach it. Somewhere between getting back from college and switching on his console there would be an opportunity.

He was high and wired, his skin super sensitive. Feeling Jenny's warmth beside him created current through his whole body. The current flowed towards his groin and in moments he was fully aroused. He lay down beside her and caressed her sleeping body, sparks from the dope igniting his fingertips. He could hear his heart and the whoosh of his blood in his ears. She pushed his hand off and rolled away before he could really get started.

His electricity coagulated into bile and frustration. Did she have something better to do? She could sleep any time. Where was the passion? Why didn't she want the comfort to be found by fucking in their private darkness at five in the morning? There were the lectures of course but he had a knack for absorbing information no matter how tired or stoned he was. Jenny, on the other hand, worried about every missed fact.

Fuck you, Jenny. You can sleep at your own place tomorrow night.

But he didn't say it out loud.

The thought that they might not be particularly compatible had been sky-written across the blue of his mind many times but, like most forms of advertising, he ignored it. Most of the time he was too high to be bothered with the responsibility of facing the facts.

He sat up in bed and lit a cigarette. Though it ought to have had the opposite effect, it unwound him. His erection collapsed, his frustration seeping away with it. The electricity in his skin turned off. He watched the glow of his fag brighten with each drag and the pulse of it soothed him. Tomorrow was another day. Another chance with Jenny. Another batch of classes he didn't need to worry about. Another opportunity to get wrecked.

And, in all likelihood, it would be the day of the katana. He crushed the butt out and fell asleep with a smile of anticipation not quite relinquishing his face.

***

Mason lived in the woods like a hermit for several months.

Occasionally, he walked to the nearest village for basic supplies. The farmer's wife gave him eggs from time to time. He drank the water which flowed from the hills and nothing had ever tasted sweeter or cleaner. He imagined it was purifying him.

He awoke when the light came and slept when the sun was lost behind the hills. There was nothing to do with his days and so he did nothing. The only activity was to watch the animals and birds around him and wander the forest of stunted, warped oaks.

Often, he wrote his thoughts and observations in a scrappy journal. This was the only thing he could consider to be an ‘activity'. The rest of his existence was the twig of his mind and body bobbing slowly along time's river. But the writing was something which had an intensity to it. He allowed anything in his mind to come onto the page without ever thinking to censor it. There was no one else to see it, nor had he thought far enough ahead to think there might ever be such a person in the future. These moments of writing were like fugues. He would lose himself to the wearing down of a pencil and its re-sharpening as he wove words onto a cheap jumbo pad he'd found in the village co-op.

Pages later he would look up and find the light of the day had changed. Whether hidden by cloud and rain or not, the sun might have shifted far across the sky and he would flip back through the indented sheets barely remembering what he'd put there. Nor did he ever read carefully over his scrawl. It didn't seem the words were his. They came through him like a voice. He came to think of it as a kind of calling. Though he wrote the words of the calling every day, he worked hard to ignore what they told him. All he did was marvel at the amount and strength of it and the way the activity excised him from time and reality for however long he did it.

The pages and the doing of nothing mounted up in comfortable drifts. He watched the animals. He watched the seasons. The tyres on his camper went flat.

He didn't care.

5

Mason looked out of his kitchen window into the back garden. Soon he would begin this season's planting.

All the produce from last year, even the over-wintering vegetables, were used up or preserved. The garden, with its many beds was a featureless patchwork of exposed earth where his fertiliser was melding with the soil and strips of variously faded and dirty carpeting he'd employed to smother down any and all weeds. He felt excitement as a rising jitter in his stomach and a vague urge to move his bowels.

Every year it was the same, a childlike eagerness to help the earth bring forth food for him to live on. He sniggered to himself at his overreaction but he felt no embarrassment. This was who he was now. Not a photographer, not a bold visual ‘genius' who owned all of London at the winking of his camera's shutter. He was simply a gardener. In fact, he believed himself to possess the soul of an agrarian. Even though he was no such thing now, he planned to be so in the future. Alone and remote on the land like the farmer he'd come to see as his teacher.

This period in suburbia was temporary but necessary. Before he retreated for good, he wanted to give people one last chance. He had changed and so he hoped he might see another side to everyone else, not be so deeply critical of every other human being on the planet. So far, though, his solitude here on the Meadowlands estate was almost more complete than it had been on the farmer's land. His time of living so close beside the earth was already years behind him. He was getting stuck again, as he had in London. He had to accept that soon the moment to move on would come.

Just one more season. Just one more season of being among people, even though he chased them away from his front door and did not speak to them in the street. Just one more year of being human before he became once more a creature of the land and of the forest.

He realised, as he surveyed his garden, that he was holding his breath.

He let it go.

He knew what the problem was. He could even admit it to himself. But he couldn't overcome it. He thought he'd been alone in London but he'd been wrong. His true solitude came during his time among the trees. It was so difficult. Life in the woods had been so tranquil and so restorative to him that it was painful to admit how much the loneliness of it hurt him.

As much as he wanted the peace, he was terrified of making the final decision to live alone again, even though it was probably the happiest he'd ever be.

It wasn't just the loneliness, of course. The depth of solitude was the obvious thing, the thing he would have talked about if anyone ever discussed it with him as a friend. There was another issue, however. The one he'd come to suburbia to avoid. Most of the time it was noisy enough that he didn't notice it. He missed it and feared equally. The land and the trees and all the animals he'd shared the woods with had a voice, one voice, a calling. And they talked to him as though he were their closest confidant. They talked and the land talked and they never shut up. His papers were full of their ramblings and even now, years later, he dared not look back over them to see what they'd said to him.

As though he'd created a moment of the perfect silence into which speech might come, as though he'd petitioned it, the calling came through the babble of suburbia's white noise right in that instant:

you're being a coward

‘I'm not finished,' he said, placing his forehead to the chill of the window pane and staring at the expectant garden. ‘I'm not finished with people. Not yet.'

have courage, Mason Brand

only the act which requires courage is the true act

He closed his eyes tight shut for a moment.

When he opened them, the face startled him so much he jerked away from the glass with a pounding heart. Like a man caught thieving. There was no time to recover himself. He stood there, red-faced, chest thudding, not knowing where to look. Could he have looked any fucking stranger than with his head pressed on the glass like a mental patient? Anger was the only response but his ire was hesitant like his words. He wasn't used to speaking.

‘This is private . . . ground. Land, I mean to say. It's my land and you shouldn't be here.'

‘Maybe I've got the wrong house. You're Mr. Brand, aren't you?'

He blinked at the girl, looked around, recovering himself, coming back to the room. This was his problem; too stuck in his head and his memories. Not
present
enough.

‘You shouldn't be back here. Can't you ring the front bell? Knock? Like . . . normal people?'

It was ridiculous. They were talking through the glass with raised voices, almost shouting. The girl - she wasn't a girl really, more of a . . . she smiled at him.

‘Look, I'm not here to steal your veggies, Mr. Brand. I just wanted a quick chat. Could you open the door?'

The part of Mason which remembered how to behave was screaming at him to act sensibly and open the door, offer tea and biscuits or a glass of wine - was she old enough for that? Of course she was - to do something, anything, and stop acting like a bloody psycho before she walked away.

But the back door, even with its six dirty panes of glass in peeling frames, was a barrier between him and the world. The world had come into his back garden, without any sort of invitation and she stood there now, still not leaving but with her expression fading from mild amusement at what could just be shyness and eccentricity into concern about her safety with such a man. He noticed her glance from side to side, probably checking if anyone was within earshot or working out how quickly she could run -