Rubbish

Some mornings Karin wondered why she had bothered getting out of
bed.

Her nostrils smarted with the stench of chemicals and putrefying
organic matter, period pains had kept her awake for most of the night,
and one leg of her suit was spattered with a pale, yoghurty substance.
She crouched, encircled by sweating grey-brown trash mounds, and tried
to wipe off the worst of it with the back of her glove.

"Hey? hey, come look at this!" Dolenz was kneeling on the crest of one
of the mounds, scraping at the dirt with his hands. He pulled an object
from the ground, brushed away some of the muck covering it. He got to
his feet and held it out for Karin to admire.

It was a bottle.

"What am I supposed to be looking at?" she said.

"Don't you know anything?" Dolenz snapped. "It's a genuine wasp-waisted
Coca-cola bottle." He ran his thumb over the raised lettering. "Not a
scratch."

"So what's the big deal?"

"Big deal?" he said. "It's vintage, that's the big deal. Worth loads to
a collector."

Karin shook her head, trying not to scowl. Through her visor, the
ceiling of cloud that framed him was tinged with green. Thick,
flocculent fingers of vapour pointed accusingly earthward, their tips
straggly and unravelled, like tufts of wool caught on barbed
wire.

"I hate to burst your bubble," she said, "but they still make
those."

Dolenz shot her a dirty look. "Can't resist it, can you?"

"What?" She took a step forward and refuse crunched beneath her
boot.

"Forget it." He held the neck of the bottle between thumb and
forefinger, pretending to scrutinise its contours in the weak
light.

"What's the matter, Taki? Something's been eating you ever since we
touched down."

Dolenz slotted the bottle into the slip-pocket of his boiler suit. "I
thought we had a job to do." He turned and started descending the mound
in heavy scrunching strides, arms spread for balance. A juice carton
popped and wheezed like punctured bellows when he trod on it.

Karin was left alone. All around her, the landfill stretched out like a
desert, with wide mosaic dunes and rolling speckled gullies. It went on
for kilometres in every direction, an ocean of festering history. She
sat down on an old tractor tyre, raised her face to the sky and let out
a yell of frustration.

* * *

Karin tapped the scoop with her finger and the last few clumps of dark,
brittle earth dropped into the container. As she screwed on the lid she
glanced over at Dolenz. He had filled and labelled five in the time she
had taken to finish one. She had been too busy watching him.

They were in one of the deeper refuse valleys, working alongside the
corroded skeleton of a combine harvester. The black, moist bellies of
bin liners swelled from the ground like blisters. Her gloves were slick
with grease. Suddenly, Dolenz put down his samples, turned to
her.

He had an unusual face: eyes set deep in their sockets, a sharp,
prominent chin, cheeks like canvas stretched over poles. Unusual, but
not unattractive. Intermittent blades of stubble pierced the skin
around his jaw. There was a red mark like a tick just under his bottom
lip where he had cut himself shaving. Dolenz always cut himself
shaving.

"I got a message from Memenko this morning."

"Oh?" Karin tried to keep her expression neutral.

"She says she's pregnant." His gaze dropped to a disinterred crisp
packet next to where Karin had been digging.

"But I thought she?"

"Yeah, so did she. So did everyone, but? there you go."

"Oh, well? that's great. I suppose congratulations are in order."

"Yes," he said. He reached up and scratched at his helmet's neck seal.
"I mean, we didn't plan for this, but?" Karin watched his eyes tighten
at the corners. "Yeah." He looked at her and pulled a smile. "It's
great. Of course." He picked up his scoop, began turning it over and
over in his palm.

"Taki." The spectre of the deceased combine harvester loomed in his
visor as he tilted his head. She squinted past it, made eye contact.
"It's all right, you know." She smiled, nodded. "I'm okay with it.
Really."

Dolenz closed his eyes. After a moment, he sighed, as if to say he
understood.

They finished their work in silence.

* * *

After loading the ship, Dolenz stood with his hands behind his back,
gazing out towards the turbid snarl of green and ochre on the horizon.
Karin waited a few feet back, listening to the slow, tidal rush and
drag of his ventilator gauze.

"Looks like the weather's coming our way," he said.

"Yeah," she said. The breeze was beginning to pick up, redolent with
the stink of fossil fuels.

"Funny," he said.

"What?" she said.

"I used to think that exploring history like this would make me feel
closer, somehow, to how things used to be."

"It doesn't always work like that."

He pulled the Coca-cola bottle from his slip-pocket. "It does exactly
the opposite. The more crap I dig up, the more proof I see of how dead
the past is. You can never get it back."

"So I've heard," said Karin, softly. "Maybe that's why it's so
precious."

"Hmm." He took a pace back, then flung the bottle as hard as he could.
It arced through the air, turning end over end before it curled down
into the ground and shattered. "Let's bust a groove."

He hoisted himself into the passenger side and yanked the door shut
behind him. Karin lingered a moment, gazing across heaps of corroded
cookers and refrigerators, hollow television sets with broken screens,
rusting bicycles, cars, decaying mattresses, iron bed frames, doors
from wardrobes, old radiators still spotted with paint, picture frames
and photographs behind cracked glass.

"Hey!" Dolenz called. "We've got to go." The wind rose to a shriek.
Karin reluctantly clambered in through the cargo hatch. It closed with
a hiss. As they waited for the cabin to pressurise, she punched in the
coordinates for the residential compound.