‘What then?’
‘Who knows? That’s up to us, I suppose. We’ve gone fairly far astray. Look at how we live these days. It would take a hell of a wake-up call to get people to change. Even a little bit. Everyone’s too comfortable and too removed from the outdoors. They’ve forgotten how to touch the Earth.’
‘You’re losing me now, hippie-chick.’
‘I’m serious, Ray. You need to understand this.’
‘It’s a little difficult to take it all in.’
She stopped caressing him.
‘Yeah? Well make the effort.’
‘Ok. Sorry. But, come on, D, what do you mean by “touch the Earth”?’
‘Almost exactly that. Living in a house with double glazing and central heating, and sleeping in a bed raised up from the floor, and buying food in packets instead of growing it or hunting it; all these things disconnect us from the Earth.’
‘But why should that matter? We’re all still healthy - healthier than we’ve ever been. Besides, wherever we go, the Earth is all around us. We can’t get away from it.’
She regarded him with a playful contempt.
‘I don’t have to explain this to you, you know. Not if you’re not interested.’
He thought about it.
‘I want to understand. I’m just playing devil’s advocate for a moment. I mean, I see myself as fairly broad-minded but do you think anyone else will listen when you start talking about connecting with the Earth? If you can’t persuade me, what hope have you got?’
‘That’s easy enough. It won’t be me explaining it. It’ll be your friends. The ones I haven’t met yet.’
Ray knew she had a point. No one was going to listen to a voluptuous Goth girl - except him of course - but they might listen to a thundering, man-shaped tower of scrap and living tissue. Especially if he was backed up by the ‘friends’ Ray had seen.
Or maybe the prime minister would simply call in the army and blow it off the face of the Earth everyone was so averse to touching. Destroy it, like people did with everything else they were too stupid or too lazy to understand.
He was still puzzled though.
‘When the one I saw with Jenny bit off her toe, it was ravening. Do you think it would have stopped before it killed her if we’d just let it carry on?’
‘Absolutely not. It wouldn’t have left a scrap of her.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I don’t know for certain but I’m fairly sure. This thing - these things - it sounds like they start out as small groupings of waste. I bet they don’t survive long if they don’t consume living things. But if they get enough of what they need, they grow up like the one you saw coming out of the landfill. God knows what that one’s had to eat.’
‘Then they’re evil,’ said Ray. ‘Predatory, carnivorous, evil beasts. We’ve got to stop them.’
Delilah pushed him away.
‘You can’t mean that. They’re not evil, Ray. Are bears evil? Or lions or crocodiles? All of them are capable of killing people and many of them do. But does that make them evil? They’re just trying to survive.’
‘Maybe,’ he said.
He took the cigarette back and smoked it quietly. She watched him.
‘I haven’t convinced you, have I?’
‘To a degree, you have. But you haven’t seen the bloody things, D. Maybe they’re not actually evil but how will they know when to stop . . . adding to themselves? What if they don’t? Ever?’ He turned to look at her. ‘What will happen to us?’
He knew she would try to make light of it. She wanted a future with him too - he could read it in her face. As glad as he was of that, he began to experience a clean and simple dread. Here was something real and valuable, right here with him now. Real love. He recognised it because his mind and body were hard-wired to recognise it. Upon the strength of this emotion, the lives of human beings were built. But with this wonderful, joyful thing - intertwined with it - came this new possibility, the possibility that he could lose it all before he’d had the chance to truly be part of it. He couldn’t accept the cruelty of it.
But whatever witticism she’d hoped to use never came. Perhaps she didn’t want to dishonour what they were feeling with jokes and avoidance of the truth. She took the cigarette away from him and put it in the ashtray, still burning. She slipped down the bed a short way so that their heads were level. She held his face and kissed him. He gave himself to the kiss without thought. Lost himself to her.
What choice was there?
***
The canal towpath was overgrown with weeds only just beginning to die back after the long summer. Nettles leaned in from both sides of a narrow green corridor, kept open only by the regular passing of walkers and fisherman. On the walks Kevin and Jenny had taken since he’d moved in, they’d seen kingfishers, woodpeckers and even a few grass snakes. Over the last few days, however, the incidence of any wildlife seemed to have diminished. He assumed it was the onset of cooler, shorter days making the animals less active.
They kept away from Shreve Country Park. Kev didn’t want to be anywhere near his old home and he’d assumed Jenny wouldn’t want to run into Tamsin. She’d protested, though.
‘Why should we change our routines? What’s she going to do?’
‘It’s not that, Jen. I need the space for a start. And I could do without a nasty confrontation. I want some time to get my head together, plan something for us.’
She hadn’t pushed him further.
Now, as they walked in single file to avoid nettle stings, Kev felt that all things were in place, life was simple and good. He reached behind and Jenny took his hand for a few paces. Not far beyond, the path broadened. On their left was an ancient hedgerow and on their right, growing out of the canal, were crowds of rushes. As soon as there was space, they walked beside each other. Kev put his arm around her shoulder.
‘I’ve been thinking, Jen. Why don’t we move? Somewhere that’s got countryside all around it. Miles and miles of land and trees and rivers and hills.’
‘What’s wrong with Shreve?’
‘Nothing’s wrong with it, as such. But what have we got? We’ve got a stinky, silted up old canal. We’ve got a reservoir disguised as a park. And we’ve got one of the biggest landfill sites in the country. The rest of it is industrial estates and council houses.’
‘What about all these fields?’
‘Yeah, but we’ve had to drive to get here. And all this land is cultivated. I want to go to a place where you look out the window and it’s wild. You step outside your front door and you’re surrounded by nature. Untouched. As it was meant to be.’
‘What about your sports car?’
‘I’ll flog it.’
‘What about your wife?’
‘She could use a good flogging too.’
He watched Jenny’s smile and thought that it was reserved somehow. A little cautious. He stopped walking and turned to her.
‘Listen to me, Jen. This is not one of those situations in which the husband has a long-term mistress but never leaves his wife. Tamsin is out of my life forever as far as I’m concerned. She’ll do everything she can to take half of everything I’ve got but I don’t care about that if you don’t. I want to be with you, Jen. Full stop. End of story. Start of new book. Whatever we’ve got - love, money, dreams - let’s take it all and go somewhere we can enjoy it. Somewhere beautiful. I don’t know how it’s happened but being with you has opened me up to seeing the world in a different way. I feel alive like I never did before.’
If he’d expected a teary, joyful acceptance of his outpouring, he didn’t get it.
‘Is this the “something” you’ve been “planning”?’ She asked.
‘I suppose it must be. I didn’t really know what it was until it came out
.’
‘Look, Kev . . .’
Jenny trailed off and looked away.
He’d hoped that it would go so much better than this. That she’d be keen to escape with him. Escape what, though? Was that all he’d come up with in the time he’d been thinking about all this? Was he just finding a way to run away from it all? To avoid it?
‘Jen, I’m sorry. Maybe this is all too soon. I just thought. . . I mean I really believed that we were . . .’
Jenny wasn’t listening to him any more. She was staring at something in the rushes. He was about to lose his temper with her for taking no notice when he realised that her face had drained pale.
‘Jenny, what’s wrong?’
The rushes were shifting, rustling. Something in the canal was making them do that. Something large and heavy. Jenny was backing away.
‘Babe, hold on. It’s probably just -’
Her scream, disgusted and terrified, cut him off.
He stepped in front of her to see down from her angle into the rushes. Something writhed there, trying to heave itself up from the water. Its movement reminded him of a seal or walrus that was close to drowning. The thing had no grace of movement. It merely rolled and floundered, pulsated almost, in its attempt to be free of the muddy canal water and the clinging reeds. He had the feeling he’d seen something like this, something he could make no sense of, before.
But this was no déjà vu. Down in Shreve country park that morning, months ago now, the dogs had attacked something similar. This coiling, juddering shape gave off the same rank odour of effluent and trash. This time there was no mistaking the facts. It really was moving. The thing was alive and independent in its own right. Unless someone was playing a practical joke on them - he wanted so much to believe that was what this was. The thing’s movement was so jerky and so mechanical; it could easily have been some kind of home-made machine. He glanced around hoping to catch sight of someone with a remote controller, someone else with a hand held camcorder. They were alone.
And the thing was making progress. Part of it was on the towpath now. Shit. What was it? He could see eyes. Too many of them and none of them the same. He could see skin and animal pelts. He could see polythene bags of various colours, wrinkling and stretching taut as the thing heaved itself up. And then he saw an opening that could only have been a mouth. And in it he saw two horizontal, parallel knife blades, one in the upper part of the opening and one in the lower. The mouth hole closed and opened again. A shearing sound came from the blades.
Finally, Jen spoke in a whisper:
‘Run, Kev.’
‘What?’
‘RUN.’
***
They slept as they lay when it was over, tangled, sticky, elated. But Ray knew they’d both felt the first wounds of impending heartbreak. Their love, their lives, were fragile. Never more so than now.
A scream woke Ray. His eyes flicked open and he listened. For a very few seconds he was able to indulge the idea that he might have dreamed it. He’d dreamed so many in the last few days. Then he heard another. The first had been fear. This one was pain. Delilah was awake too by then. They both jumped out of bed.
There were other screams now, further away. Shouts of panic and shock nearer by. The sound of people running in the street. Ray looked out of the window as he zipped up his jeans. For a moment he was absolutely still. Delilah joined him.
‘Fucking hell,’ he said. Delilah was more specific.
‘It’s started.’
***
All along the canal side of the towpath, there was movement. The weeds shook and trembled and the water rippled.
Out of the corner of his eye, Kev thought he saw shapes swimming in the murky water. Up ahead, Jenny was sprinting. He’d never seen her move so fast. There was an unevenness to her running gait because of the missing toe but it didn’t slow her down. Every few paces she hurdled some agglomeration of rubbish that had squirmed into her path and moments later he was forced to do the same.
Bloated black worms of rubbish overflowed from the canal every few feet. Kev thanked God they were so cumbersome but he was afraid too that their lack of mobility was some kind of bluff and that, at any time, they might lash out and bring both him and Jenny down.
They reached the canal bridge where the towpath let up onto the road. Jenny hammered up the slope and he followed, already fishing for the car keys. He pressed the fob, the locks sprung open and they shut themselves inside. He fumbled the key into the ignition with shaking fingers, started the car on the third attempt and left rubber on the tarmac as they screeched away.
***
There was no sustained sense of relief. As Kevin drove, he saw more crawling, writhing shapes in the fields and, as they neared town, in the alleys and streets of Shreve. Groups of kids poked some of the bags with sticks or laid into them with booted feet. In other places people backed away when the numbers of trash things seemed too great.
‘Where the hell are they all coming from?’ he said, not really expecting an answer.
‘From the landfill,’ said Jenny.
‘How do you know that?’
‘I just know it.’
He was about to ask her again when she said,
‘Kev, where are you taking us?’
‘Home.’
‘Why? Don’t you think we should be trying to get as far away as possible?’
She was right, of course. She was thinking. He was panicking.
He took a left turn, heading for the ring road. From there they could reach the motorway and go north or south. Anywhere, as long as it was away from Shreve. But the traffic was mounting. Kev didn’t think anyone in the cars and trucks had realised yet that it was time to leave town, but the sight of the trash things invading Shreve was causing accidents. In front of them two cars had smashed into the back of a local bus. The driver had got out to dispute whose fault it was but now all parties were merely watching the laboured progress of the landfill creatures converging from every direction.
Kev drove around the knot of gawping drivers from the accident, almost colliding head-on with a speeding Land Rover. They both braked and Kev pushed through the gap, ignoring the horn and abusive shouts from the other driver.
They hit the ring road and the driving was better. There were no landfill creatures to distract anyone. Kev took the slip road that led off the bypass and out towards the motorway. Up ahead another car had done the same. The driver had seen the pile of ‘rubbish’ spilled all across the road and had tried to drive over it. Kevin imagined the man’s annoyance as the nails and blades hidden inside the self-sacrificing creatures had punctured all his tyres like a stinger trap. The man had stepped out of his car and was screaming now. Something in the mass of trash at his feet had a hold of him. He was trying to tear his leg out of its grip. Kevin saw blood welling through the man’s trousers, a whitening of the man’s face. The man stumbled and fell to his knees. He put out one hand to stop himself going down all the way and when he regained his balance he brought the hand up again. All four fingers were gone.
Jenny stifled her scream with two hands over her mouth.
‘We’ve got to help him,’ said Kev.
‘No. It’s too late. Turn around, Kev. Turn us around before we get stuck out here.’
He checked his mirrors. Another car was pulling up behind them on the slip road. He flicked on his hazard lights and put the Z3 into reverse. A second turn put him onto the hard shoulder. He passed the approaching car of a woman making wank signals to him through the glass. Down on the ring road he rejoined the flow of traffic to more blaring horns.
‘I’ll try the next exit.’
Jenny said nothing. She didn’t even nod.
Half a mile further along he signalled and pulled off the ring road again. This time he was ready for the roa
d block and saw it long before they came close. A moving tide of rubbish had stretched right across the slip road. None of it moved. It was waiting. He turned the car around between the hard shoulder and the gravel verge.
Back on the ring road traffic was building up.
‘Where the fuck are we going to go?’
‘I’m thinking,’ said Jenny. ‘Just give me a minute.’
‘I’m not sure how many minutes we’ve got.’
***
Mavis Ahern lay in bed with damp cotton pads over her closed eyes. She was dressed in a white blouse and navy cardigan, a calf-length grey skirt, tights and flat shoes. The curtains were drawn shut to keep out the light.
She’d come back to bed and lain this way since the sparkles at the edge of her vision had begun that morning. The sparkles had become streaks of blue lightning. Thunder followed in the form of pulses of agony that burst inside the entire right-hand side of her head. Her coffee and cornflakes made a swift reappearance. Traces of them stained her cardigan. She didn’t care. After seeing herself in the mirror; her face grey, the vein in her right temple raised by internal pressure, she’d gone directly to bed.
It was years since she’d had a migraine. She thought she’d outgrown them. This one had started as she watched two boys kissing behind the pavilion. They couldn’t have been more than eleven years old. One boy had unzipped the other’s baggy cargo pants. Put his hand inside. Flash. Crackle. The auras had begun.
Why had the migraines returned? Was it some kind of punishment?
Maybe it was because Tamsin had gone as far as threatening her with a knife. Perhaps the shock of that was only now sinking in. Her plan to reunite the Dohertys in the sight of the Lord had failed utterly. Kevin had left the marriage home. It could not have gone more wrong.
She was filled with doubts.
Had God deserted her? Left the neighbourhood? The whole town? Given up and abandoned it to eat itself away from the inside?
She was so sick now, she hadn’t the energy to look for a sign that He still loved her. The room pressed in around her. Icy sweat dripped from her head, palms and armpits. Her sense of smell was enhanced to the point where the insides of her nostrils felt stripped raw. She tried to breathe only through her mouth because the slightest smell made her nausea worse.
Garbage Man Page 21