MEN OF THE WASTE By Krishan Coupland Around the waste there is Grundy and the clown and the man who comes to fish. The man who comes to fish wears a faded brown body warmer, and pitches his line at the very edge of the scum pond. Grundy watches him, from a distance. Watches as he wrestles the flippering silver bodies from the water and smacks them dead against a rock. Why, Grundy wonders, do the fish keep coming and biting at the line? Don’t they smell the blood? What is it to them to see their fellows yanked abruptly skywards, never to return? Today the man who comes to fish has not caught a single thing. He sits in his little green chair, still as a mannequin, eyes cast into darkness beneath the brim of his cap. Grundy, watching from the opposite shore, from a tangled hide of bushes and leaves, wonders if he is asleep. Perhaps, if he is careful, he can sneak over and search the man’s pockets, poke through the canvas bag. Or perhaps he could kill him — smash that cap deep into his head and take everything for himself. Grundy imagines heaving the body into the scum pond and watching it sink, bubbles rising slowly to the surface as if through jelly. Down there in the dark the fish would turn, dive, set to work with tiny mouths. On the opposite shore the rod jerks and the man leans forward, evidently awake, to take the strain. Grundy watches as another shining muscled body is lifted from the water. He spits, disappointed. * The clown comes and goes, wandering the waste almost as much as Grundy does. He and Grundy have a cautious appreciation of each other. When they meet they make fleeting eye contact, nod, lips thinning to a semi-smile. They carry on their way without a word. He wears a costume: elaborate rainbow frills dulled by a thick spattering crust of dried mud. Plain white makeup with black stars around the eyes. His face is long and wide-mouthed, the lips ringed by a brown scurf of stubble. Grundy doesn’t watch the clown like he does the man who comes to fish. No interest. The clown doesn’t bring meat or shiny things or cigarettes. The clown doesn’t bring anything except himself. Grundy has thought about killing him too, in the way he sometimes kills the swamp midges that stray too close to his skin. * Grundy lives in a shack on the far shore of the scum pond. In the morning the wasteland is sunk in mist, the looming lonely shapes of the pylons emerging from it like cresting aeroplanes, calm and cold. Grundy didn’t always live in a shack. Once, long ago, he had a house by the sea. People came to him and sat with him in a warm clean room with a fire and a table, books heaped on shelves in uneven humps. There was a cat, he thinks — or perhaps he imagines that bit. But if the cat was real it would sit on the arm of his chair and sleep while he talked with his visitors. The journey from the house to the shack by the scum pond is one that Grundy cannot fully trace. For a moment this morning when he wakes he knows his mind is gone. He lies there, cold to numbing on a swatch of filthy blankets, listening to the birds clamour outside. He is afraid. Soon enough the fug inside his head will rise again and he will be Grundy, that wild animal, the thing that has no seeming connection to the man who once lived in the house by the sea. Minutes pass. Grundy’s eyes glaze and when he wakes again he knows that he is hungry and sickening and cold, and he knows the waste and the scum pond and the clown and the man who comes to fish, and that is all. * After washing in the creek, Grundy must have breakfast. The man who comes to fish sometimes leaves the wimplings of his catch lying on the shore. Else there are the rabbit snares (clumsy loops of wire that most often catch nothing) that Grundy has set down. When both these avenues fail he picks blackberries and sour apples and rips up wet handfuls of cress. Today he is lucky. The man who comes to fish has left a fair offering of meat. He snaps the fish open with his hands, squeezes out the guts, picks and scrapes until he has the good flesh. Washes the blood away in the scum pond and dries his hands on his own stiff jeans. Blood and scraps of watery flesh stick between his teeth. He’s just finishing when he sees them. Across the scum pond and far down the bank. Two of them: men in yellow hats and yellow jackets. Grundy freezes, then turns slow and burrows down into the brush. He watches. The men have tripods and tools and are measuring things, taking sightings of something Grundy cannot reckon. Council men, more than likely. Above death, Grundy fears the council. Death can be averted, avoided, held back if you’re careful. But the council... He watches, immobile in his hiding place, ignoring the flies that come to feast on fishblood and the beetles that crawl up his back. The council men are loud, unafraid. Grundy can hear their almost-shouted voices quite clearly, but he doesn’t understand the words. * On the way back to his shack Grundy meets the clown. He’s in among the trees, smothered in mud and so still that Grundy doesn’t realise until he’s almost upon him. Their eyes meet, both angry, both immediately on guard. They’ve never been this close before, practically near enough to touch. The smell of gunpowder wafts from the clown in yellow waves. Eyes still on Grundy’s he raises a finger to his lips, then points. There. There among the trees are the council men. Not measuring this time. They’re looking at something on the ground. Grundy lowers himself, animal, nerves singing. It’s one of his snares. One council man is teasing out the wire with the tip of his boot, pulling the loop till it slips over itself. The man beside him mutters something in their weird council language and the others laugh, guttural. The clown is taut and shaking. And Grundy is shaking too, on the inside, guts roiling with blind hot rage at the men in his waste, breaking his traps. Neither of them move, however. Both know better than that. The council men stalk around, trampling undergrowth, spitting, one of them lighting up a half-smoked cigarette and then throwing it away minutes later. Eventually they leave, the sound of their voices audible long after they’ve disappeared through the trees. Grundy and the clown turn to one another. The clown bares his teeth, rolls eyes. Grundy growls in agreement. The council men are bad. Bad and vicious. He watches the clown creep forward to where the men stood, root something up from the dirt and slither back. He holds it out to Grundy; it’s the cigarette, still just barely smouldering, a good finger’s-width of white paper remaining. Grundy takes it. Thereafter, he and the clown are friends. * The council men come back the next day, and the day after that. Grundy watches them whenever he can, keeping careful mark of the way they roam the waste. At first some are hesitant, picking through trees as if afraid of bite or poison, staying always a distance from the edge of the scum pond. Soon enough though they lose their fear. Grundy hates them more for it. Their stamping, laughing, lounging confidence. The clown watches them too. On occasion Grundy will sight him, his pale face peering from the bushes, or from the canopy of the trees. He is good at hiding. Both are, and so are good at finding hidden things. The council men are oblivious, lost as they are in their measuring and counting. Twice, Grundy and the clown watch the men together. The clown is good company, silent company. He knows how to lie still and not be seen. And he knows not to talk to Grundy, that they can never understand each other, that it is not worth trying. They are different species, and with this the clown and Grundy are entirely at peace. * Grundy has no plan. For many years Grundy has been beyond the ability to think of the future. He still watches the council men. It is important. The wastes are his and he must know what happens in them, what things and people share his land. Sometimes in the long hours of hiding, listening to the grunts and snoring words of the invaders, Grundy thinks that he might understand. He recognises the shape of the sounds they make, the civilised tongue. It makes him think of that other place, that old place, warm and soft and buried beneath layers of waste-mud in his mind. The cat that would sleep on the arm of his chair, or not. * A week after they arrive the council men catch the man who comes to fish. Grundy had not thought that this might happen. The man who comes to fish arrives in the early morning, before the light is fully up, and stays only until the middle of the day. The council men come after that and stay until night. But today, perhaps, the man who comes to fish has stayed longer than usual, or the council men have come earlier. Grundy hears shouting from where he lies in his shack, and snaps awake. The coughs and barks of the council men in anger. Grundy spits, scrambles from his shack into a cold wet mist of rain. It feels silvery on his arms. When he breathes the rain swirls into his lungs like blood in water. The shouting is coming from the scum pond. Grundy runs at first, then creeps through the last stretch of trees between him and the water. There they are on the opposite shore. Four council men and the man who comes to fish. The council men are shouting, pointing, jabbing the tools they use to measure into the air like dull weapons. The man who comes to fish is red in the face. His little canvas stool lies on its side in the mud, his rod and bucket held protectively behind his back. Grundy digs around in the coarse slush of the bank until he finds a stone, big and jagged. The muddy coat of it adheres to his fingers, drags on his spindly arm. He watches, anxious not for the man who comes to fish (who, after all, Grundy would happily kill himself if hunger demanded it) but for his wasteland, and his fish, and what might happen if one of the elements of his world were to be removed. There is shouting. Lots of shouting. One of the council men tries to take the fishing rod, but the man who comes to fish won’t let go. They struggle, then the council man stalks away, barking madly. The others jeer. The man who comes to fish darts forward and picks up the little canvas stool, peeling it from the mud like a sliver from a wound. He turns to go, and as he walks away the council men howl at him. He turns around only once, red-faced, bucket swinging loosely in his hand, but then a stone thrown by one of the yellowjackets plops down into the scum not an arm from where he stands and he startles, burrows hurriedly away into the trees. Grundy watches all this from his place on the shore, the rock glued to his hand by its caustic coating of mud. It feels as though something has been ripped out of him, taking breath and heartbeat with it, leaving his other insides to cave slowly into the empty space like floes of melting ice. He drops the rock and sinks down to watch the council men, hating their loudness, their arrogance, their smooth shiny heads encased in armour. A hand finds his shoulder. It’s the clown — he knows without even looking. Grundy hisses silence at him. The clown is on all fours, muddier than ever, face long and scared. He points at the council men, pulls a monstrous face, points at Grundy and himself, then jerks his head towards the trees. When he goes, Grundy follows, creeping with muscle-straining care until the both are out of earshot of the yellow-jacketed men. * The waste is vast, Grundy knows. Bigger than he could possibly hope to reckon, stretching through the world like a cat’s leg crooked and bristling with tributaries. His part comprises the scum pond and the pylon and the fat block of land that leads down along the brook. He follows the clown this far and then stops, uncertain. The clown pays no attention, not even looking back. This reassures Grundy: he prefers it that the neither of them care. A sharp slope plunges from the trees to the grease flats. Part scum and part mud and lacquered with oil that sits sludging and self-satisfied atop the wet. As they splash through inch-deep puddles rainbows fracture and wobble themselves into pretty shapes, then disappear. The clown’s baggy silk trousers are already dried black to the knee, and soon Grundy is spattered as well. At the far end of the grease flats the forest picks up again. They lose themselves in the thin line of trees, walking until the clown comes to an abrupt halt, gloved hand held skyward. They creep, edging, leaving a trail of oily leaves and blackened footprints. The clown points ahead, through a screen of bitter greenery. There. Sitting in the midst of an earthen nest is a thing as yellow as the council men, but many times larger. In memory, Grundy has never seen a thing like it. It reminds him of the pylon, but squatter, more complicated, loaded with threat. No clean, high lines of metal. No reaching wires and space and firmly planted feet. Instead it sits on mud-gunked wheels, a yellow arm enfolded like a scorpion’s tail, the scoop at the end worn down to silver metal teeth. Even from the trees, Grundy can smell it. Stench as thick as rotting, but twisted over on itself, chemical in its complexity. The clown looks at him with wide eyes, a rim of white makeup still staining the lids. * Night. They sneak up on it from the trees, crawling low through the earth and dirt and expecting any moment a light or the council men or the thing itself to roar to life. The clown goes first, hauling himself up onto the wheel and flinging open the door to the cab. There’s no council man inside. While the clown busies himself there Grundy circles the beast, noting the deep cuts it has made in his earth, the mud and leaves that cling to the tracks. Thick wires curl like loops of gut from the crook of the arm. Grundy steps up onto the scoop and rips at them. Bolts pop. He loses a fingernail, sticks the injury in his mouth then pulls again. Something gives. The clown has found a rock and is smashing the controls, each impact ringing like the hum of the pylon. The wires slither out, bunched in Grundy’s fist, and he pulls them till the holdings snap. He flings them down and spits. * That night Grundy sits outside his shack and chews the last of his cigarettes, the tobacco turning muddy between his teeth. At night, in the great distance, there are lights above the marsh. Steady sometimes, or else blinking like flares of gas. The lights are the world of the council, all complicated and boxy. No mud there, no scavenge, no thick water. No waking to birds, no smell nor soft moistbody warmth of shack. Grundy was part of it once. He senses this, even when his mind is at its most senseless. It had him, and he escaped, like a bird ripping itself from the fangs of a cat, leaving behind a part that will never regrow, that the cat will eat down to bones and shit back into the earth. Grundy shakes himself, scratches his neck till it reddens, then crawls into his home to sleep. * They come for him the next day. Early morning, earlier than he’s ever known the council men to be abroad. He wakes to the shack falling in with a bang and a crash. After weathering storms and floods and the onslaught of winters the whole thing doesn’t stand up to more than a hammer blow, and the boards fall onto Grundy and knock his ribs in. He splutters up into pain and red breath. Hands claw through the detritus. He explodes. Up on his feet even though his chest feels like it’s gaping open. Five of them, a few with hammers or hacksaws, low on their haunches, faces bared. He spits and screams at them. When one crashes into him from behind he finds a muscled arm with his teeth and bites down until loose hot flesh falls onto his tongue. One wails away, but more pile in. Hands seize wrists, legs. Something heavy slams into his spine and he is squashed down face first into mud, still thrashing and kicking all the while. Something hard and rounded taps his skull and the world, the scents and the stinks of it, comes unspooled. Grundy tastes fish. Something thin and leathery cinches around his wrists. They carry him at a quick trot, face down, the ground rushing by underneath. Grundy growls and hollers and gnashes his teeth. He can’t move, and it’s only the very tips of their boots he can see. He would spit at them, but when he tries the spit comes out sick and stringy. He recognises the thick mud of the grease flats. Cold blobs of it fly up and paste themselves into his face. And then they drop him, and a steel-toed boot pins him by the chest. They are in the clearing with the machine, the ghastly yellow thing now lying in shivered pieces. Grundy feels happiness at the sight of it. Wild, roaring happiness. And then he sees the clown. Most of the makeup from his face is gone to blood and bruising. The swollen star around his eye weeping into a slur. Slumped in the scoop of the yellow machine like a sacrifice, like one of the fish the man used to leave. Maybe dead. Grundy sees this, and sees all the council men, the army of yellow hats and jackets that fill the clearing and the happiness turns vicious and black, snapping at the bottom of his lungs. But the boot and the leg that fills it still weigh on his broken chest. They’re all waiting for something. Someone. Grundy waits too. Every time he breathes it feels as though his ribs fall a little further out of their spaces. The yellowjackets stir, and some of them part, and in the space there is a council man in a suit, a white hat, long black legs sheathed in rubber boots. There’s a snug sheaf of papers beneath his arm, emblazoned with markings in black and red. Grundy feels himself go very still, every bright internal instinct freezing like a fawn. The yellowjackets don’t matter anymore. The worst they could ever do was kill him. The whitehat makes noises and the men coo and moo and circle about. Some of them have hammers, and one holds a dented red can which sloshes as though full of grease. A yellowjacket holds up Grundy’s head by a handful of mud-cracked greying hair. The council man bends close enough to smell (like the yellow machine, like fat and stained knives) and pulls out a little black box. Grundy squirms, but the hand is firm and it only strains his neck. Click. A bright light from the box that pierces right the way through his skull. The whitehat makes a note on his papers. One of the yellowjackets unreels a length of metal tape. Grundy is so absorbed in spitting and cursing the yellowjackets that he doesn’t see the clown move. He’s still dazed from the light, and when he hears screaming he looks up to find a yellowjacket already floundering in the mud, blood pissing through his high-vis. The clown is free, leather ligaments still wrapped around his wrists but frayed away, grated down to thread against the sharp angles of the yellow machine. As the clown comes splashing over, arms wide, some sharp jag of metal glinting in the grip of his glove, none of the yellowjackets move. All stare in shock at their fallen man. The whitehat yammers and windmills back. The one pinning Grundy goes too, arms up, slow to bring his hacksaw to bear. Grundy thinks that the clown might murder him first, and the savage happiness roars back... but no, he bulls through, drops to his knees and swiftly severs the ligaments that hold Grundy’s hands. Grundy springs, raging, elemental. All the yellowjackets are still stirring through the muck. He seizes the bit of shrapnel from the clown (a brief fight for it, the clown’s mangled face toothy and wide) and finds it big and lumpy, trailing fittings and bits of wire. He falls on the whitehat and drives it home, into the soft bit of his face, in deep below the helmet, which tumbles off to reveal a bald and burnished scalp. Then, as the yellowjackets start to muster, the clown and Grundy run. * Both are sprinting when they slither down into the dry bed of the creek. The clown is ahead of Grundy, blundering along kicking up dust and stones. Where the creek dries up they scramble into the woods and stop, just within the shade of trees. Grundy spits and heaves, hands on knees, shrugging. Ribs like knives now, like a rack of razors dipping in and out his lungs. From here they can see the pylon, and the other pylons after it, descending towards the horizon, hand in hand like soldiers gradually sinking into quicksand. The wires that swoop above them buzz now, and Grundy thinks that even at night they will be able to follow the wire, its yearning growlish sound. Distantly too he can hear the yellowjackets slobbering through the grease. There is time to catch his breath, to huff and clutch until the stabbing stitch of his lungs recedes. And then they run again, towards the next metal tower and the next and the next, leaving behind what Grundy knows, losing themselves in the endless waste.