Trash - Andy Mulligan [60]
No police cars, nothing – but we still took no chances, saying goodbye to the cycle boys finally, and creeping in sideways up the canal.
My first thing was the school – the Mission School. So I took a great handful of notes, put them down my shirt, and I did just what Gardo had told me we’d do. I skinned up the corner and was in through the bars. It seemed my good old friend Father Juilliard – you still hadn’t fixed them, sir, I could still get through: maybe you were hoping I’d be back – I’m joking. I put the money on his desk and grabbed a pen. I put my name again, big and black – and next to that all I could think of was flowers, so that’s why I drew you a bunch, fast as I could, bursting up and open. Then I had my next very brilliant idea which – who knows? – maybe saved our lives like all the other times. Gardo says all I do is brag and take credit – we all had good ideas all the time, but this one was genius, because how else would we have blended into the morning?
Why it hit me, I don’t know – I guess all of us have to keep thinking ahead and looking out for danger, or maybe Gabriel and José were still with us even this far – maybe they’d been pushing that bike with us. Or maybe I just saw the cupboard, I don’t know. The point was – this was Father Juilliard’s office – there were cupboards full of odds and ends, and one of them was the crazy school uniform store.
Little shirts and shorts! They’d been donated to us years before by some charity volunteer who thought all the kids ought to look the same, like proper schoolkids – but it never caught on. To make us feel like a real school, I imagine, this kind person had given about a hundred white shirts, and a hundred blue shorts and a hundred little dresses. There were packets and packets, little slippers too. There were backpacks – the kind kids put their schoolbooks in, but there was scarcely a book in the place! What are the kids here going to carry apart from trash? The backpacks had the charity name, big and bold, all over them so you’ll never forget who’s being so nice.
So I grabbed a load of everything, and pushed it out of the bars. Then I followed them down where they fell, and we didn’t even need to speak – we knew where we were going.
First we opened up four of the backpacks and stuffed them with dollars. We stuffed them full and zipped them up.
Then we turned back to what was left, which was most of it, and we took off every paper band – the bands that keep hundreds bundled into ten thousands. They were blowing around already, so we got them in the sheet and the sack and bundled them up again. I tell you, the dumpsite was alive now, because of the wind. Dust and grit was blowing about, and little bits of trash were whirling. The plastic roofs were flapping too, and a bit of metal sheet was banging. There was a very little bit of light in the sky, way over by the dock cranes, but no one was about just yet – or nobody saw us. We probably had ten or fifteen minutes before dawn, before the ghosts had to say goodbye and slip away. So we hauled everything to my old home, to where the big broken belt – belt number fourteen – just points up at the sky doing nothing.
No, I did not go down to see my friends the rats! Pia stayed on the ground, looking up at us, with the clothes and the bags. Then I went up first with the rope end, and pulled on it. Gardo and Raphael came next, taking the weight, and I went up