Jack Can

Jack Can

8th July, 2008, 2.45pm

She squinted against the sunlight, holding a hand above her eyes to try and aid her vision in the brightness of the dawn. It filtered through the gaps in her fingers and cast slanted shadows across her face like prison bars. Incarceration, thought Jack, is half in the mind.

He stretched out a tentative hand and tweaked it a bit. His sunglasses weren’t dark enough to do anything except alter the colours of the world slightly. Brown. As if things were a bit shit, really.

‘What is it, though?’

He sighed. ‘You’re not looking properly, Ells, work it out!’

She walked around the garden in a large circle, careful not to get too close. Recycling and reclamation, he called it. Sticking together bits of junk to make more junk, she called it. Too many nights in front of ‘Scrapheap Challenge’ with a six-pack of Fosters slowly filling a bored mind.

‘It’s a recycling unit. It makes power from old cans. Crushing them releases energy, which we can use to power things.’

Ellie frowned, unconvinced. ‘How many cans does it have to crush to power a light-bulb for an hour then?’

‘Four hundred and eleven’, he grunted. ‘Only seventy nine for energy-saving ones, though.’

She sighed. ‘Not even you can drink that much beer.’

‘The whole neighbourhood would have to recycle their cans here, that’s the plan. We could leave the gate open, put up a sign…’

‘So we’ll have all the locals trudging through our garden?’

He shrugged. ‘We could ask Sainsbury’s to put it in their car-park with the recycling bins.’

‘Health and Safety’, she retorted.

‘Hmm.’ He mused, offering it another can to munch.

The machine sucked it slowly and politely from his hand. There was the creak and grudge of slightly rusty metal against slightly more rusty metal, a pause, and then the sound of the can crushing echoing out from the gaps in the mechanism. A trickle of power ran into the meter on the side, and the tiny, flat crushed disc that had once been the can rolled into the drawer at the bottom.

Jack grinned. He didn’t really care if Sainsbury’s took it on. He didn’t care if half the neighbourhood tramped through their garden. It was his invention. He’d built something that worked. Something that did what it was supposed to do. The tiny amount of power produced? Well, he could recharge his Ipod batteries.

Ellie wandered back in the direction of the back door.

‘Cuppa?’ she offered, looking back over her shoulder.

He lifted his head to grin at her.

‘Can of Fosters, I think,’ he said.