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.
A light went on in the bedroom of the next door neighbour’s house.
Mason’s voice was a harsh whisper:
‘You’ve got to be quiet.’
The bedroom window opened and a man looked out. He seemed to scan the night blindly at first and as though he expected to see thieves making off with something from his own garden. As his eyes adjusted after the glare of the bedroom light he must have seen something on Mason’s side of the fence.
‘Don’t move,’ hissed Mason to the shed-thing. Thankfully, it lay completely still.
The neighbour saw him in the light emitted from the bedroom. There was no need for the man to shout. The night was otherwise utterly silent.
‘You’re a fucking lunatic, Brand. Leave your pissing rubbish alone until morning. If you wake us up again, I’m calling the police.’
The man withdrew and the bedroom window shut behind him. Mason imagined the brief explanation the man would have shared with his wife. The light went out.
After a long time, so long his knees had stiffened, he began to haul the shed-thing to safety. As soon as he touched it, it pushed him away. He felt the anger in the gesture. It began to pull itself along with its three remaining good limbs, dragging the broken leg behind it. Mason unlocked the shed and let it haul itself in. He had to lift the useless leg over the threshold but then it was whipped away from him onto the blackness. He stood in the cave-hole of the doorway for a few moments listening to the forlorn whimpers of the failed creature and wondered at the nature of its tears.
12
Jenny wasn’t great in bed but it was almost worth it just for the cigarettes that followed. Delicious, biting lungfuls of high-tar fags that made his scalp tingle and gave him a rare reason to smile. These thoughts gave him an immediate and physical rash of guilt across the back of his neck. Too many years spent with the wrong woman had deepened his cynicism. The truth was, for the first time ever, the quality of the sex didn’t matter. He felt something for Jenny he didn’t remember feeling for Tammy, even when they’d first met.
He would never tell the girl - and girl she was compared to him - but the simple fact was that Jenny was an amateurish fuck. Either she didn’t like it much or she wasn’t very experienced. More surprising than this to Kevin was that he didn’t care. In his experience, sex improved as a relationship lengthened. It was a small matter and there was plenty of time. When Jenny was beside him, in her bedroom or anywhere they met, Kevin felt like he was in the right place. Such a simple state of mind. A sensation he didn’t recognise but one he delighted in.
He assumed Jenny must have been used to having things her own way because she often said manipulative things. His response was to smile and tell her to piss off. Compared to Tammy, she was a beginner at mind games too - ironic, considering she was studying psychology at Shreve College.
There would be no more inference or atmosphere or undertones in his life. Just honesty.
‘If you’ve got something to say, Jen, just get it off your chest, eh?’
The first time he’d said something like that she went quiet for a while. Now she was learning the art of being up front:
‘I don’t like the way you look at every woman that walks past.’
‘Tough. It’s my programming.’
‘Change it.’
‘Alright. I’ll try.’ Or
‘Do you have to eat spaghetti that way?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s embarrassing me.’
‘How would you like me to eat spaghetti?’
‘By cutting it up first.’
‘No chance.’
She won some. She lost some. At least there were no misunderstandings.
Her missing big toe bothered him. It didn’t turn him off or revolt him but there was something about it that wasn’t right. At this stage, he didn’t feel he could ask her any more without upsetting her and that was the last thing he wanted. But wasn’t he doing the very thing he disliked in himself and others by not coming out with it?
She’d said she’d lost it using a hover mower at her parents’ house. The scarring around the remaining knuckle was still purple and shiny. When she moved her other toes the scar tissue turned white where the bone stump pressed out from inside. Something in the way she’d answered the question ‘how did you lose that?’ made him think she was lying and he couldn’t understand why. He didn’t ask her about it again.
Had it been something embarrassing? Something that would make her look like an idiot to him? If so, he didn’t care. He liked her laughing, stupid ways. Accidents happened to everyone and none of them ever looked cool. Maybe it had been an act of violence. Kevin’s mind ran with that one. Had she been kidnapped? Her toe sent as a sign of the abductor’s seriousness before she was rescued or the ransom paid and she was freed?
Other things gnawed at him. Where was her toe now? Perhaps she’d had an infection and it had been amputated. He assumed that hospital waste was taken somewhere very safe and burned but he could only guess. If the toe had been severed in the lawnmower accident, perhaps it was too damaged to be recovered. In that case the flesh would have rotted on a lawn somewhere, the bone stolen by a fox or left to sink into the earth. Two small bones, one joint between them. Lost, discarded, stolen, who knew?
One day, when they got to know each other better, when there was more trust, he’d ask her again. But he knew he was a traitor to himself by putting it off.
***
The next time Don visited Mrs. Doherty, he made sure Mr. Doherty was out. It took three more days of surveillance for the moment to appear. He saw Mr. Doherty back out of the driveway in his BMW Z3. Unaccompanied. Don didn’t care if it was for just ten minutes. Or only five. He had to see her.
He sprayed his ripe armpits with Lynx, what his dad called a gypsy shower, and did the same inside his Vans before he slipped them on and hurried out of the house. It was impossible to make it casual. Anyone looking out of a window nearby would see him, see where he was going. They would notice the purpose in his pace. He no longer cared. He walked fast but without panic straight up to her door and rang the bell. His heart was banging, fit to escape the prison of his ribs. He ignored it. What he was doing would put everything right. No more heartache. No more misery. A sore prick perhaps, but a fulfilled one. A few moments. That was all he needed.
He saw a figure through the frosted glass. He chewed back his heart, swallowed it down.
This time she answered the door. She.
***
They stood in the kitchen. She leaned against the breakfast bar with a coffee. She seemed to have a lot of make-up on. Her eyes looked tired. Something about her was different but Don didn’t know what it was. Worse, he knew that if he was older, with just a little more experience, he probably could have worked it out. He cursed his insufficient years.
She was wearing white cycling shorts and a tight blue running top. He didn’t know if it was just fashion or what - he’d certainly never seen her out jogging or returning home from anywhere looking sweaty. All he knew was that the outfit le
ft plenty of skin bare and clung to her curves like latex. He put his left hand in his pocket to shield his erection.
Silently, she appraised him, as though waiting for him to explain why he’d come. He didn’t know what to say. She’d merely turned and walked away leaving him to shut the front door and follow. He glanced from the floor to her breasts, feeling like what he was - a kid. He knew his time was running out.
‘Sorry to hear about your dogs.’
It was the only thing that came to him. It would have to do.
Immediately she was animated, shocked.
‘Why? What’s happened? Have they been hurt?’
‘No. I don’t think so. I heard you’d lost them.’ She flashed a look of angry impatience at him.
‘Tell me something I don’t bloody know, Donald. Christ, I thought you were going to tell me they’d been run over or something.’
Donald shook his head.
‘Nothing like that, Mrs. Doherty. I was just sorry to hear about it. If we ever lost Sasquatch, mum would be . . .’
There it was. Out before he’d even thought about it. He saw Mrs. Doherty as similar to his mother in some way. Not quite as old, but still, he’d even said it out loud and -
‘Two things, Don. First, don’t call me Mrs. Doherty. Coming from you it makes me feel like an old hag.’
Donald blushed. How pear-shaped could this go? He didn’t want her to feel old. He wanted her to know that she was beautiful and that he -
‘Second, what kind of a name for a dog is Sasquatch?’
‘What should I call you?’
She topped up her coffee from a cafetiere.
‘You should call me Tamsin. Don. Answer the question.’
‘What?’
‘Why on earth did you call your dog Sasquatch, for God’s sake?’
‘When she was a puppy, her feet were huge compared to the rest of her body.’
‘And?’
‘So I named her Sasquatch.’
Garbage Man Page 15