One Man’s Trash – by Piri Eddy
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
At sunrise, he shuffles through the cold, dark hut and gently rouses her. She blinks away sleep as she slips from the bed, stifling a yawn. As she eats breakfast, he crushes some peppermint into a thermos of hot water.
A winding path from the hut to the lake, the scent of eucalyptus and pine, bracken crunching underfoot. The inky sky lightens to navy, and by the time they reach the water, the oil-skinned lake reflects a pink dawn. A tin boat bobs on the surface, welcoming them back.
He helps her in, her little hand smooth against his. She doesn’t smile, because this is work now. And work you just get on with.
‘It’s an important job,’ he’d said the first time. ‘You’ll need to work hard.’
She had looked up from the kitchen table and nodded.
‘I can do it,’ she’d said, so grown-up and serious it almost made him choke up.
*
He had taught her everything he knew. How to secure the hook and sinker, what knots to use. How to feel the tension in the line – to work with your catch, not against it.
He showed her how to cut the skin, to separate the good from the bad. On the table, he laid out his catch from the lake: a bed spring, two cigarette butts, a crumpled-up bottle.
‘Where’d they come from?’ she asked.
‘From people,’ he said. ‘Back when there was always more.’
*
He picks up the wooden oars, his fingers closing around the familiar shape, smooth from use, and pushes off the pebbly shoreline. The momentum takes them out a little, and then he lets the oars cut the lake’s skin and rows them out until they reach the middle. Sometimes the wind from the valley whips up the water, but it’s calm for now.
She pulls back the canvas sheet, gathers the anchor, and just like she’s been taught, feeds it slowly into the lake. She watches the echo ripple outwards, the corrugated water reflecting the sky.
Next, they prepare their lines in silence. Used to be that the lake was busy with tin boats, just like theirs; all bobbing quietly, the men talking in hushed registers. Now it’s just them. He pours two steaming cups of weak tea and hands her one. They cast their lines in a wide arc, and they land with a soft thunk in the water. Then they sit and wait.
*
‘Things were different once,’ he’d said many mornings ago at the kitchen table. ‘People were profligate. Used to be you’d come back with enough to feed yourself three times over.’
He took the line and hook from her, a little frustrated, and laid it flat in his palm.
‘You’ve done it wrong. Again.’
She nodded, holding back tears. She took it from him, unthreaded the hook, started over.
‘That’s why you need to learn. To be ready. You’ll need to be able to get by on your own.’
‘I understand,’ she said.
He told her how, before she was born, all the men would sit on the bank with their feet cool in the sand, boats at the ready, and watch as the trucks arrived to drop their bounty into the frothing waters. And then later, as the feral drones danced with their luminous wings in the night air, cars with their headlights off would pull up to the shoreline, shadowy bodies hauling dark objects and stuffed bags into the lake.
They never went hungry back then.
He looked once more at her handiwork and frowned.
‘Again,’ he said, and then he turned to the window and the swaying gums outside in the grey sky.
She felt the weight of responsibility, cold and hard, like the sinkers on the kitchen table.
‘Why did they stop?’ she asks.
‘Stop what?’
‘Throwing things away.’
‘I guess they thought they were doing something good,’ he growls. ‘Or maybe they just ran out.’ He shrugs and then he turns to her and manages a quick smile. ‘We’ll be okay.’
*
By midday, they’ve got a meagre haul. An old bicycle tyre and a boot. She still hasn’t caught anything yet, not after weeks of trying, but every catch he makes brings her a thrill; she has to concentrate as he pulls the thing out of the water, weathered and cracked skin catching the light. It’s her job to grip the catch, then carefully unhook it. They put the things in a bucket of water to keep them fresh.
When she unhooks the boot, he takes it from her and examines it. He turns it this way and that, barely registering the snakeskin finish – once brown, now an off-yellow. He throws it in the bucket with a grunt.
‘We can’t survive off boots and bike tyres,’ he says.
She hangs her head in shame. The clouds roll in dark and snarling at the top of the valley. The boat rocks.
‘Time to turn in,’ he says.
‘A little longer,’ she pleads.
He scans the valley.
‘Please?’
‘Okay,’ he says, frowning. ‘Just a little longer.’
*
Some nights, when he was light and happy with spiced wine, he would sit with her at the kitchen table and delight her with stories of the old days and all the shining, shimmering things that no one wanted. They thought it would never end, those times. There was always the next season, the next craze, the latest model. Back then, he said, you could fill up the oceans, the rivers and the lakes twice over.
For a moment his eyes would shine with the memory and he would be happy. He’d rummage through his things, swearing he had a photo: him, salty eyed and beaming, next to a washing machine hoisted on a chain. But he could never find it. She didn’t mind. She could imagine the lake swirling and bubbling with activity. The light catching on those beautiful, unwanted things.
How strange and wonderful it must have been.
*
The wind is really whipping now, the lake choppy and unwieldy. Above, the sky is a scream.
But still their rods hang over the lake, the boat rocking violently. The incoming storm looks massive, the way storms are these days.
‘Time to go,’ he says.
‘We can’t go back,’ she shouts, eyes locked on the water. ‘I can catch something!’
She reels in her line and casts it back out again, but as she does, the wind batters her hard in the side, and she topples into the icy liquid. For a terrified, thrashing moment, she is sucked down, the water around her like cloying plastic. She settles, and the water stretches out before her, calm and quiet beneath the surface, seemingly empty. But then a yo-yo stirred up by her thrashing drifts past her left ear. She snatches at it, holding the thing in her little fist, and she feels his hand loop around her armpit. He pulls her up and she breathes air.
He fusses over her in the boat, sobbing that he is sorry, it’s all his fault. She says it’s okay, but he doesn’t listen. He wraps her in his jacket and then rows them back to the shore. The storm is above them when he lifts her from the boat and cradles her back to their hut. She clasps the yo-yo in her closed fist; that precious, unwanted thing.
Later, they sit around the kitchen table by the fire, wind rattling at the windows, a hungry storm. She pulls her towel around her and prays the roof won’t fly off as thunder and lightning crack the sky.
He tells her how sorry he is, and how he wishes that the world was a more wasteful place again, for their sake. Then, he falls silent, grave. She places the yo-yo proudly on the table. He looks down at it, and then to her, and breaks into a broad smile.
‘Well done,’ he says. ‘See. We’ll be okay.’
They eat in silence, a bicycle tyre, a yo-yo, and a boot between them, and they hope for more wasteful times. ▼
Image: Claudio Schwarz
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