A Tale For Telling In Everything

Now Tony, he was your old school bin-man. Mid-fifties when I joined up. I knew him for what – five years. He was like a sort of figurehead to the younger lads. Bit worldly wise and all that – on account of his age, ya know.
Any case, as I said just, he was old school was Tony – proper. A real round pounder, his job was his life and his life was his job. Ye see, back in the day, when we all worked for the council before they tendered it out to waste management firms and the like, being a bin-man weren’t all that bad. Fact being, it was pretty mint. I mean, work was nailed on like a Dockers cap, overtime if you needed it; pay was enough to get yourself by on – digs or board, few beers, packs of smokes, take a lass out to the Odeon on a Saturday night and I swear down I never took to looking at the screen for more than five minutes at a time, hands all over each other – we was teenagers back then and all that mattered was the immediate here and now.
I guess that’s why we all looked up to Tony, I mean his train was fair chuffing along the tracks towards old age so when he said something, we listened – just in case.
Every working day we’d gather up at the depot like protesters before a march, rows of yellow bin wagons being fired up as men and lads alike climbed into cabs, sparked up a tab and gave it some chat. And you know what, as we wheeled out of the drive at daft o’clock in the morning, the four man crew jammed onto the long back seat, the driver working the wheel like he was at the helm of some steam ship, I felt sort of powerful, kids and big toys I guess. And I can hear it now, the gruff, throaty engine building to a gearshift, dropping off and coming on again as the driver flicked the selector and to this day, I turn my head each and every time I hear anything like it.
Anyways, I took the job, back end of the nineties because...because it was something I could do without much thought. Either you ended up on a rural round, loads of road stomping and yards and yards and maybe miles between bins, or you got on a town round, much more compact, houses every second and heavy as hell. They were good and bad, both of em and there was no choosing, just got shovelled into whatever gap had appeared. Anyhow, I got myself on a town round and true enough; it was a proper stinger, days of hauling and mauling. Remember this was back before wheelie bins and recycling boxes, card sacks, and all that pish, we’re talking humping and dumping here. And I found a rhythm in pounding the streets, a karma in bending my back to oceans of toil, jagging in and out of ginnels, black bags slung over my shoulder like one of them coal men you used to see before that all went to hell. Clanking through gates and hurling other peoples detritus into the hydraulic maw of the bin wagon. Loved pushing the button that set the compactor to scrunching it all up and graunching it into belly of the vehicle, all those brittle sounds – like it was I that had the power to do that. To dispose of things. Like I was making some big decision every time I did it.
Tony was a round pounder like me, could have been a driver but he didn’t want it and the reason he didn’t want it is because amongst other things, he was a rooter. I guess I need to qualify that last bit, especially given that where some folks come from, rooting is a euphemism for getting it on with lady if you get me. This is different, way different. See, a rooter, leastways to us binmen, is one who delves into the very bags he was paid to dispose of, looking for stuff – interesting stuff, tokens, mementos – stuff to keep. Now that might appear beyond odd, dirty somehow, but I’m telling you straight, it is amazing what some people throw away. Not just things of value, strange things also. Things that set your mind to asking why and all the rest of that day you’d twirl over the possibilities, like playing shove ha’penny with your thoughts.
Now like most things in this world, there was a pecking order to be observed. The driver was the gaffer – fact. But he spent most of his time on his fat ass in the cab so seniority spilled over to the elder statesmen of the round – which for us was Tony. So he got first dibs, always.
There were two sorts of rooting. The first sort was looking for something you knew to be there – tips left in certain places, fivers or tenners even, folded and secreted under mats or in the hollow of a tree trunk, tinnies hidden behind a stack of bags, we got given all sorts, even spilled over into people inviting us into their homes and I fair near fainted the first time we all rocked up at this house and Tony motioned me to follow him inside and the five of us, kecked in all kinds of grime, sat in this old couples kitchen and partook of piping hot tea and ham sandwiches and I went in that house every single working Tuesday for the next five years – found out later that their son had left home a Royal Marine and come back a statistic. Maybe that’s why they did it, let us in, fed and watered us, maybe it wasn’t – who knows, anything.
The other sort of rooting, the one Tony was most interested in, was the simple act of ripping open bin bags and rummaging through whatever lay within prior to throwing them. Seemed he just picked bags at random and jacked em open like it was Christmas round the tree. I seen him take all manner of stuff and wipe a finger over it like it was a dusty old photo he’d found in an attic or some such. Dragged out the sublime to the not so – An Elvis clock, model of Blackpool tower, a plastic Jesus on an equally tacky cross, love letters and told-you-so’s, old screwdrivers, just stuff. And each and every time, he’d turn his find over in hands that were smirched with the sort of grime that you couldn’t rightly scrub out, before offering it to one of us. Less of course, it was a map. He had a thing for them. Found and kept dozens of em and I never really knew why.
I don’t think I ever turned down anything he offered me, wouldn’t have seemed right to, though God knows I sometimes wondered what the hell to do with half of it. Thing is, as my life moved on, I lost it all and now that I have, all I know is I wish to hell that I hadn’t – there was a magic in that salvage. Redemption of the sort that is the hardest to fathom and therefore the hardest and purest to find – one born not of dreams and aspirations but from a finger held to someone else’s world. Like looking into one of those snowstorm shakers that people wheel out at Christmas time and yes, he gave me several of them as well.
And that was us, day on day, week on week. You with me. A pattern then. A Modus Operandi. I pounded those roads and fought the never ending tide of crap that was the by product of lives that I glimpsed at, guessed at, saw winking fractions of through the lip-crack sneers of cinched curtains, listened in on as wall muffled voices chatted drama, observed physical changes to their very fabrics, a car gone, a bin bag full of cheap whisky bottles. A tale for telling in everything. That was one of his sayings and it’s bang to rights, a tale for telling in everything.
Back then, I never really thought about the passage of time, only it’s occurred to me since that it has more than one speed. You see, days, they unfold like a well-rehearsed play, scripted and acted and re-enacted until they are the well trodden lanes of your mind – it’s years that play tricks, they pass you by like speed skaters, as if you were staring straight ahead at the start-finish line and you get nothing...nothing...then whoosh, gone. And they keep on doing it until you’re a different shape and the mirror shows crows feet were once there was taught skin and the whole world seems to drift past in clumps of years even though days stay the same – the pattern of aging I guess.
So I never saw it coming, never thought it would – an end to what was at that time a damn near perfect life. A life where I didn’t have much because I didn’t want much. Just kept on keeping on, climbing into the cab, pounding the streets and hurling bag upon bag into the wagon before gleefully crushing it. Rain, snow, wind that fair made you lean into it, sun so warm that we were stripped down to the waist, we worked those streets no matter what.
As a consequence of all that shared endeavour, time spent in the pockets of your fellow workers, we got to know each other, yet never really knew each other. Ya get that. We knew all the surface stuff, which footy team each other followed, what we all liked on our butties, which girls you wanted to get it on with, and let me tell you, there was a stack of them my friend, a veritable mountain in fact – but we knew nothing beyond the veil. Has it ever occurred that you never really know what lies beneath someone’s skin until poom, one day it all gets dragged to the surface as if it were some ancient wreck foisted up from the clasp of the endless sea. The mechanism for which could be just about anything – good, bad or the infinite in-between.
It surfaced for me one pedestrian summers day, a day like any other as we followed the bin wagon down Ryle Street where it anchored up at the various piles of bags that had previously been pulled out and stacked at the side of the road in black plastic cairns by the lads who had walked the road ahead of us. Took it in turns see. Some days you’d fetch and stack the rubbish, others you’d follow the bin wagon and pile it all in.
It was no different to any pile. Tony slapped a few bags in the back, then, just as always, he grabbed one and ripped it open, leaning against the back of the bin wagon as he did. He delved within and cast aside empty cans and plastic bottles, boxes and such, the dropping of which gave a backbeat to the whole process. Then he stopped, dropped the misshapen bag and focused on what it was that head pulled free from its depths. I remember waiting for him to offer me whatever it was he had found, or to make some comment on its function and form but he did neither. He just kept on leaning on the wagon, looking at whatever it was that was in his hands.
I can still see him now, turning away from wagon, from me also, his head downcast as if in mourning as he walked on over to the grass verge and knelt down and by now, I was real confused, even the driver had got off his ass to come and take a look at what it was that Tony had found and...
...he was rocking slightly, kneeling and rocking and strike me dead if he wasn’t crying. I’d never seen a man cry before and it cut me cold. I just clammed up and stood there – as if I was a mute or something, all the spit dried up in my mouth. Just didn’t know what to do.
I remember stepping to the side to see what it was he was cradling in his hands, thinking all sorts of bad things and when I got in front of him he kind of looked up at me, relaxed a little and I could see that he was holding a dress, like one of those confirmation dresses, all white and special like. And he laid it out on the verge and I was spooked to hell, so was our driver and we just kind of watched him, not speaking. He laid it out and I remember thinking that it was odd enough to bin a beautiful little dress like that, stranger still because it was new, still in its wrappings, sat inside a lidless box in a nest of tissue paper and it came to me, sort of – I felt so scared then, so bad. Something wrong. Something very wrong.
Then he swept it up and took to his feet without saying a word, holding this box like it was – I don’t know how to say it, like it was sacred I guess. I don’t know where he was taking it or what he was planning to do with it, but before he could do much, a woman came out of her door, young, twenties I guess and now I did feel bad because she looked like he looked, empty. Voided, like a spent lottery ticket. I watched them as if they were mime artists as she came over to him, placed a hand on his shoulder, smiled a sort of ghosted smile that I won’t forget in a hurry and took the box from him. She looked down at it one last time and then tossed it in the truck. I near jumped out of my damn skin as it skittered into the back of the bin wagon, that little dress falling out of its box as it tumbled through the still summer air.
She looked at me and spoke. Only thing she said to any of us, help me please, I can’t look at it anymore.
Well, you remember me saying about how I loved to hit that button, the one that compacted all the rubbish? Gotta tell you, I didn’t love it that time, it felt like betrayal somehow, but I did it for her, for whatever it was that she was going through. I hit it and prayed to God that I was helping her and not making some terrible mistake. I had half a mind she’d start screaming and leap in to try and get that little dress back again. But she just nodded at me and mouthed thanks, placed a hand once more on Tony’s shoulders as she passed him, where he was still stood, rock steady like a sculpted man, then she disappeared back into her house.
I left the bins a couple of years later – got married, had children of my own, the whole nine yards and I never forgot Tony and I never forgot that girl, nor the house she had walked from that morning when everything changed, when I changed.
Working the bins isn’t what it used to be. Now you got your wheelie bins and separate boxes for bottles or cans, bags for card and the like. I guess rooting, like so many things, belongs to yesterday, yesteryear even. But every now and then I’ll take to looking, you know if I’m walking down the street and a lid’s off a recycle box, I’ll have a chuckle to myself over the empty tinnies and the bottles of plonk, and how you can gauge a life by it – the brand and type of rubbish and...
...I always remember to look if I’m on Ryle street, look at her house, at her bin, look for God knows what, a sign I guess – look for something to plait up the threads, some sign that in some small way we did good that day – that we made the best that could be made out of the cards we had all been dealt. I don’t know. Doubt I ever will.
A tale for telling in everything, yes. But not always your own tale. I guess it’s just as he’d said to me, last day I saw him. Just remember this, he had told me, his arm around my shoulders - You can read from the book of anyone’s life, but you can only ever live your own.