And there it was.
It crept out of a corner and announced with a blaring self-confidence, “
!!!SEAL’S SCRAP, WASTE & REFUSE SERVICE!!!
!!WASTE NOT WANT NOT!!
VAT NOT INCLUDED
Oda looked at the metal fence and said, “If this is a symptom of your sense of humour . . .”
“You make it sound like a disease. And no, it’s not. This is where the blue van went. It’s somewhere in there.”
I nodded through an iron gate.
Beyond it, a long way beyond it, and in it, and over it, and just generally doing its impression of the endless horizon, was rubbish. Every possible kind of decay had been placed within the boundaries of SEAL’S SCRAP, as if iron and steel might, after ten thousand years’ compression, have mulched down into rich black oil to be tapped. Dead cars, shattered and crushed in the vices of lingering, sleepy cranes; dead washing machines, dead fridges, pipes broken and the chemicals spilt onto earth and air, broken baths, old shattered trolleys, torn-up pipes, ruined engines with the plugs pulled out, tumbled old tiles shattered and cracked, skips of twisted plywood blackened in some flame, bricks turned to dust and piled upon bin bags split into shreds, shattered glass and cracked plastic, white polystyrene spilt across the tarmac, cardboard boxes in which the weeds had begun to grow. It seemed to stretch for miles, oozing into every corner between the railway lines, locked away behind its see-through fence and a small cabin for the delivery men to sit in and have their tea.
Oda said, “Where’s back-up?”
I looked for the Aldermen, and saw none.
“Don’t know.”
“We could . . .”
“I’ve seen enough American TV to know what happens to people who go in without back-up.”
“Jack Bauer manages.”
“You’ve watched
She pursed her lips. “There’s a forum on the subject, but so far, no.”
“Is this why you’re a psycho-bitch with a gun?” I asked carefully. “You saw too many thrillers?”
“I think we both know that isn’t true, and I think we both want to avoid discussion on the matter.”
No smiles now. Perhaps we’d imagined it after all.
We waited. It started to rain. This is what usually happens when you’re outside and not too busy to notice.
Oda had an umbrella in her sports pack, along with a rifle and a sword. She didn’t offer to share.
I rang Earle.
“H-H-Harlun and—”
“Ask Earle where this fabled back-up of his is.”
The stuttering boy asked Earle.
Earle said, “Swift? What do you mean? They should have been there an hour ago.”
His voice was big enough that Oda could hear it over the phone. She looked at me, I looked at her.
We both looked at the scrapyard.
“Earle,” I said, “if I should die, I want you to know that the phones will scream their vengeance at you when you sleep.”
I hung up. I figured he’d work out the problem all by himself.
Oda said, “What do we do now?”
“Did you denounce
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It’s just a film.”
I wagged a finger at the scrapyard, half lost now in the falling rain. I felt dirty just looking at it, and the seeping through my clothes of heavy London drizzle didn’t help. “Let’s say, hypothetically, that back-up has been and gone and it ended badly. The biggest mistake made in
“Was going in after the monster?”
“Yes.”
“Then we should walk away.”
“But that’s the point, isn’t it? A blue van drove into the scrapyard with a kid inside who should hold the key to this entire farcical cock-up of a disaster. It didn’t come out. Now, if we go in there . . .”
“The kid is probably dead.”
“Then why not kill him at Raleigh Court?”
“You want him to be alive.”
“Yes! Of course I do! For so many, many reasons, and only one of them is mine! And if he is, and we just walk away then how stupid will we feel when everything goes splat?”
“You want to go looking for him. Now?”
“Yes.”
“In there?”
“Yes.”
“You know, I never had you for a fool.”
“Thanks, I think.”
“A coward, yes, but not a fool.”
“Wait here, then. You can save your bullets.” She sighed, reached into her bag, pulled out a gun, ugly, big and black. “Thank you,” I said.
“I know where my soul is going,” she replied sharply. “I don’t think this enterprise is helping the cause of yours.”
I was almost touched my soul had a cause to fail.
We went into the scrapyard, as the rain grew heavier.
There was no one inside the gate cabin. I found a kettle, as cold as dead men’s flesh. Our terror had subsided to a calm and level fury, as if every receptor for sense was so bombarded that the whole system had shut down for a diagnostic reboot, unable to believe this was the information it was meant to process. It gave the movement of our hands in front of us, the tread of our feet, a detached quality. We were observers, observing someone else, no more.
Rain pooled grey-black on the uneven tarmac floor of the yard. A few twists, a few turns, and all was lost behind the great piles of stuff, the endless cairns of dead equipment rising up taller than three basketball players with an acrobatic fondness for each other’s shoulders. The railway lines were quickly gone behind the tottering pyramids of broken metal, twisted plastic, rusted iron, pocked steel, rotten stuffing and slashed foam, just dead bits of comfortable lives, left over to no purpose that I could see. The rain helped keep it a bit real, tickled down the back of my neck and bit ice into my spine, oozed through my shoes — still not my shoes, still too big — and started wrinkling itchy around my toes. I buried my hands in my pocket, stuck my chin inside my collar and kept walking, scanning each great mound of abandoned nothing stuff from top to bottom in search of something softer than metal.
There wasn’t a smell, not with the rain and the heavy, sinking cold. There was a taste, salt and dry spilt chemicals, old bleach and broken bottles of things that shouldn’t have had the safety cap removed. Two turns in the maze and the sounds of the road were already a long way off; a train rumbled by distantly, wheels screeching like a maddened witch. I slipped on a torn pile of builder’s bags, sand still clinging to their inner edges; ambled past a wall of shattered safety glass, so safe that the million greenish pieces hadn’t had the heart to fall away from their friends. A fat black-brown rat scuttled away towards the gutted and half-burnt remnants of a sofa, the cushions long since vanished. I scuttled after it, bending down towards the ground and holding out my hands, cooing gentle
