Trash - Andy Mulligan [1]
‘What you got there?’ I say to Gardo.
‘What d’you think, boy?’ says Gardo.
And I know. The interesting parcel that looked like something nice wrapped up? What a surprise! It’s stupp, and Gardo’s picking his way on, wiping his hands on his shirt and hoping to find something we can sell. All day, sun or rain, over the hills we go.
You want to come see? Well, you can smell Behala long before you see it. It must be about two hundred football pitches big, or maybe a thousand basketball courts – I don’t know: it seems to go on for ever. Nor do I know how much of it is stupp, but on a bad day it seems like most of it, and to spend your life wading through it, breathing it, sleeping beside it – well … maybe one day you’ll find ‘something nice’. Oh yes.
Then one day I did.
I was a trash boy since I was old enough to move without help and pick things up. That was what? – three years old, and I was sorting.
Let me tell you what we’re looking for.
Plastic, because plastic can be turned into cash, fast – by the kilo. White plastic is best, and that goes in one pile; blue in the next.
Paper, if it’s white and clean – that means if we can clean it and dry it. Cardboard also.
Tin cans – anything metal. Glass, if it’s a bottle. Cloth or rags of any kind – that means the occasional T-shirt, a pair of pants, a bit of sack that wrapped something up. The kids round here, half the stuff we wear is what we found, but most we pile up, weigh and sell. You should see me, dressed to kill. I wear a pair of hacked-off jeans and a too-big T-shirt that I can roll up onto my head when the sun gets bad. I don’t wear shoes – one, because I don’t have any, and two, because you need to feel with your feet. The Mission School had a big push on getting us boots, but most of the kids sold them on. The trash is soft, and our feet are hard as hooves.
Rubber is good. Just last week we got a freak delivery of old tyres from somewhere. Snapped up in minutes, they were, the men getting in first and driving us off. A half-good tyre can fetch half a dollar, and a dead tyre holds down the roof of your house. We get the fast food too, and that’s a little business in itself. It doesn’t come near me and Gardo, it goes down the far end, and about a hundred kids sort out the straws, the cups and the chicken bones. Everything turned, cleaned and bagged up – cycled down to the weighers, weighed and sold. Onto the trucks that take it back to the city, round it goes. On a good day I’ll make two hundred pesos. On a bad, maybe fifty? So you live day to day and hope you don’t get sick. Your life is the hook you carry, there in your hand, turning the trash.
‘What’s that you got, Gardo?’
‘Stupp. What about you?’
Turn over the paper. ‘Stupp.’
I have to say, though: I’m a trash boy with style. I work with Gardo most of the time, and between us we move fast. Some of the little kids and the old people just poke and poke, like everything’s got to be turned over – but among the stupp, I can pull out the paper and plastic fast, so I don’t do so bad. Gardo’s my partner, and we always work together. He looks after me.
2
So where do we start?
My unlucky-lucky day, the day the world turned upside down? That was a Thursday. Me and Gardo were up by one of the crane-belts. These things are huge, on twelve big wheels that go up and down the hills. They take in the trash and push it up so high you can hardly see it, then tip it out again. They handle the new stuff, and you’re not supposed to work there because it’s dangerous. You’re working under the trash as it’s raining down, and the guards try to get you away. But if you want to be first in line – if you can’t get right inside the truck, and that is very dangerous: I knew a boy lost an arm that way – then it’s worth going up by the belt. The trucks unload, the bulldozers roll it all to the belts, and up it comes to you, sitting at the top of the mountain.
That’s where we are, with a view of the sea.
Gardo’s fourteen, same as me. He’s thin as a whip, with long arms. He was born seven