Junk - Melvin Burgess [46]
‘Do you like it? You can have it.’
He started leafing through it. There were maybe three drawings left, these little paintings of flowers from somewhere alpine, I think. They could have been photos, they were so lifelike. He got really enthusiastic about them. He got going about painting and flowers and how he liked to paint. Then he started getting worried about the book.
‘Someone must have thrown it out by accident,’ he said. ‘It might be worth something. We better knock on the door…’
I just laughed. He didn’t know about skips. He didn’t know about the kind of things people throw out. You can find anything in a skip. Carpets, clothes, books, radios, all sorts of stuff. You know… Granny dies and out it all goes because it’s old, or because Granny was an old bag and so everyone thinks anything she had is as useless as she was.
You can get anything in a skip. He was all goggle-eyed. He couldn’t believe that anyone thought of those piccies as rubbish.
I told him, maybe the rest of the book was in there. He looked at that skip like it was a treasure chest, which it was, really. And I thought, Ah, a convert. So we really got stuck in. He was keen. He ended up making a tunnel under an old door so he could mine his way right into it. He had his feet sticking out over the edge while I kept watch. It was great. We didn’t find the rest of that book but we found some other quite nice books, including one with plates in – just a few – drawings of hillsides and stuff. He was so made up about it.
‘This is crazy, fancy chucking this out,’ he kept saying. I just grinned. Those things didn’t mean anything to me, I’d have chucked them out myself. I’d rather have found a decent spanner or some cable. But he was thrilled.
When we’d found all the books, we cleared out a load of wood and carried it back to the house and dumped it in the garden. See? Free fuel. We heated the whole house over the winter out of skips and it never cost a penny.
Tar was beginning to get the idea. He was talking about how his dad used to go on and on about the cost of heating, when all the time he could have gone out and helped himself.
Of course his dad never would. People are ashamed to get things for free. If roast pigs were running about the street they’d let ‘em go because of the social stigma.
That’s how bad they had his old man. ‘But not you, eh?’ I said. And he smiled.
Tar went in for a bit to show the books to Gemma. I started chopping up some of the wood for later on.
Wood isn’t the only thing you can get from skips, but do you know, the amazing thing is, it’s still stealing? Someone even owns the rubbish! I was in a skip digging about – not for wood, someone had dumped a load of nuts and bolts and sheet metal in this one. I’ve got a whole workshop out of skips. Anyway, I turn round and there’s this policeman walking over, looking all important like he’s caught me kicking old ladies.
He nods at the stuff. ‘That’s someone’s property,’ he tells me, going for his notepad.
‘It’s been chucked out.’
‘That’s the owner’s business.’ He waves the notebook at me. ‘Name, please, sonny.’
I couldn’t believe it. ‘They don’t want it, that’s why they’re throwing it away,’ I pointed out.
‘In that case it belongs to the Council who will be disposing of it,’ he goes. ‘Now I’d like your name and address.’
‘The Council have to pay to get rid of it,’ I said.
‘Don’t argue with me, son.’ And he holds his pencil in the air and waits.
I mean, what can you do with people like that? I was telling Lily about it afterwards and she was furious; she started kicking things all around the room. She just couldn’t bear the thought of people like that wandering about causing trouble.
‘Bastard thought police!’ she growled, and kicked a hole in the door.
There was no point arguing with him. He would have had those books as landfill.
I gave him my name all right.
‘Mouse… that’s M O U S E…’ I pronounced