my dad is ready to go to the dump, so I plug my feet into my gumboots one at a time and pull up the hood on my hoodie. if I tug on the drawstrings that line the inside of the hood, a blue canvas aperture closes around my face and the world appears smaller, a vignette of the world, circular, shrouded by this peripheral blue iris. in this vignette I am watching my dad tie knots in the faded yellow rope we use to secure the tarpaulin to the sky blue trailer. he is very good at it, and pulls the knot tight by levering his weight against the side of the tray. I help by slipping the silvery loops over the hooks at the four corners of the underside of the carriage, and when my dad says yeah I stand opposite him and straighten the guiding rope while he strains and pulls a half hitch.
when he is ready to leave he slaps his hands together and looks around the yard–one, two–his hands automatically coming to rest on his hips like an old woman. there is a soft dew still resting on the grass, but it will not last long today. sometimes I think that the faded yellow rope is my dad’s best friend.
because it is an overcast day and the air is still muggy and damp with summer, the dump will be very smelly today. when I think of the dump I imagine the big wide arms of the birds as they fly low overhead, sometimes lower, at eye level, where you can look into the pure blackness of their eyes. they are intent. intent means that they are set to do a certain thing. I am not sure what it is that seagulls do, or what they mean by circling over the piles of human rubbish at the dump, but I assume that they are looking for food, because humans tend to throw out a lot of food and this can account for some of the smells at the dump.
at school I learnt that seagulls used to be dinosaurs, like raptors, but they have devolved, which is a new word. they have devolved into being just birds. my dad says that they are scavengers. he is probably right.
once, when I was younger, I was bouncing on the trampoline and I bounced so high that I went right up, way above the city and the long brown river, and the timber yards and all the little people, and while I was looking down on the roof of my house, which was painted cobalt grey, I met this enormous seagull. seagulls are much bigger than they appear to be when you see them in person. when they are in the sky, and they can spread their wings, they look as big as a dog, or a wolf, or a human. this seagull had great orange stripes like a tiger, and his beak was hooked for picking up and smashing clams or cans of sardines. his legs were tucked beneath his body as if he were an aeroplane. and because I was suddenly weightless and my stomach was floating around next to my heart, I couldn’t breathe. and because I couldn’t breathe I couldn’t communicate with words. but me and the seagull sort of communicated anyway, only with our eyes and our faces. I remember that it was beginning to rain and I could smell the wet sawdust on the wind from the timber yards, which is a warm smell. I thought that the seagull would have said something stupid the way that other birds seem to say stupid things with their faces, like squawk or nice weather for seagulls, but he didn’t. he was a very smart seagull, I think. because when he looked into my eyes he seemed to be saying to me how small I appeared up there, in the sky, as opposed to down there, on the ground, which is like the opposite but also, like the truth. sometimes we are in our own element, and sometimes we are not.
sometimes I wonder if people are actually made from the earth, like it says in the Bible, and if feathers are actually made from the clouds, or from the wind, or the rain. I wonder if seagulls have brains that talk to them the same way that humans do, and if they have friends, and if they see their friends on the other side of the sky do they shout hey, Tony! and go over and fly around together? I doubt it.
I hop into the passenger seat of the car and watch in the wing mirror as my dad pulls the trailer out of the driveway. in the mirror, the trailer seems to shine brighter than ever. its two sleepy eyes and its mouth nearly drag on the ground from the weight of all the leaves. there is the blue sky, the sky blue trailer, the ocean blue tarpaulin, and every now and then a fleck of brown as a leaf whips up out from beneath the load.
the entire trip to the dump I watch in reverse, as my house recedes away from me, the sky behind it growing and growing, then my street, my neighbours’ houses, the industrial area with the timber yards and the train tracks, then the wharf and the little jetty where somebody is catching a fish and the red fishing rod is getting smaller and smaller in the person’s hands, just as the person is getting smaller and smaller to be swallowed by the river, which gets bigger and bigger, as the city disappears through the wing mirror, and I begin to forget, to forget the way home again, and forget my name and my phone number and what I am doing here. but I am with my dad. and my dad is in control and that makes everything okay.
the car stops when we round a corner and a few white clouds brush slowly across the mirror. there are so many new clouds, every day. I can smell the musty decay of grass and tree branches, and the trash, and over the fence, something unfamiliar burning and smoking, black and hot and shimmering into the air like a stream of filthy water.
we undo the knots in the heat. my dad twists the rope, tightening the faded yellow coil in order to pass it back through the loop. I stand on the other side of the trailer and watch for the rope to slacken, then put my hands into the wet leaves and whip the rope off at the sides. I love the whirring sound the rope makes as it is pulled through the hoops, buzzing and buzzing until it lies like a dead yellow snake on the concrete.
once the tarpaulin is off and the yellow rope is wound and stored safely in the boot of the car my dad sets himself to raking the dead leaves off the trailer with the wobbly-headed rake that lives in the shed. because the rake doesn’t fit in the car when we go to the dump, he slides it gently into the pile of wet leaves handle first, its little teeth sticking out the back of the load. when he removes the rake it is like watching a knight removing a sword from a grassy sheathe, the handle all wet and gritty. I watch his back heaving and the bald spot on his head, straining in the sun, as he drags and pushes the pile of wet leaves to the tailgate. he winces and groans and, slowly, a large vein appears across his forehead. he has forgotten about me for now. this is when I can go and look at the rubbish.
I kick my way along the dusty paths driven out by the grunting diggers. the diggers do not seem to have drivers, but they do seem to have eyes and a face and funny little arms. their hands are glued together and they can only lift things up to the sky the way that people lift their arms up to God. they grumble up and down the lanes of rubbish, or scoop small piles into even larger piles, like what me and my dad do with the leaves at home. they are hungry for the dirt, and their eyes are opened wide in expectation. I think that the diggers are also scavengers, but they do not see the rubbish as individual pieces of rubbish, the way that me and the seagulls do. to them, the rubbish is all the same rubbish. eventually, all of the rubbish will get broken down by their giant caterpillar wheels, smaller and smaller until it all becomes a part of the ground. under my feet there are hundreds and thousands of tonnes of rubbish and the air is thick with this certain smell, whatever it is, like the taste of sour milk. I have my hands in my pockets to keep them clean.
there are a lot of plastic bags at the dump, because people tend to put all of their rubbish into plastic bags. sometimes they swing into the air like they are talking to me, but they have no face and no eyes. sometimes they have an expression, like what am I doing here? they look like the little ghosts of the trash heap with no legs and no faces, just sadness.
somebody told me that when we die we don’t go straight to hell or straight to heaven. first, we have to pass through this other place that is like a waiting room, but it is much bigger than a room. it is like another earth. I imagine that it is a lot like the dump, with rows of old things piled up high into the sky, so high that you can never see out. but I don’t mind being at the dump. I think this makes me different from my dad. he hates the dump, even though he knows the guy at the gate, who always lets him in with green waste even if he has some other things like doors or metal or just more bags full of rubbish.
when I see something shining in the junk I climb towards it, over the tires and damp, dirty chippie packets, old nappies and flies and rubble and exploding rubbish bags. there are certain kinds of plastic I can make out from really far away. my dad says that I have a good eye. if something is highlighter green or purple, then it is most likely a discarded toy, and could even be something quite new. if something is shiny and metallic then it could be a piece of machinery, or something I could turn into a sword. (I have lots of swords at home. I hide them under my dad’s shed.) if something is round it could be a ball, or a bicycle, and if something is none of these things, then it is most likely something that I don’t really know about. when I find things I don’t know about I ask my dad or I imagine that they are something else.
here is a list of cool things that I have found at the dump:
BMX with pink tyres
soccer ball
tennis rackets
transistor radio
heaps of swords
dolls with grubby faces or with no eyes
electric fly swat
a box of blue bottles
two kittens.
we didn’t get to keep the kittens. dad put them in the tray of the trailer and I sat in the back to protect them while we drove slowly over to the man at the gate. they looked scared when his big hands came out of the box to hold them by the scruff of the neck, but they didn’t cry or meow. they disappeared through the hole in the office wall and I never saw them again. one was white, and one was grey.
once when I was roaming around the dump, and looking very closely for a change, I found a SEGA mega drive game cartridge, which was great because my dad had bought me a SEGA for my birthday. it was a game called Gain Ground, which I am now very good at, even though it is quite a simple game. in the game, if you progress past the first four levels you climb higher and higher until you reach a level which is in the clouds, but the clouds are mapped with dark grey and brown where the water has collected before the rain, and in order to defeat the level you have to manoeuvre your character around the soft, wet patches without falling through them, in which case you would surely die. whenever I play this level at home I imagine that I am me, roaming around the dump looking for the SEGA game cartridge, which gives me a funny feeling in my nose, like I am about to cry for no reason. when I am at the dump I imagine that all the piles of trash are big swampy waterholes, and if I am not careful I will sink right through them and plummet out of the sky.
sometimes I have this strange idea that I know what it would feel like, not just to fall out of the sky, but to die and go away forever. sometimes I feel a lot older than I am. but then I go to the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror and I realise that I am just a silly boy, and everything I know is just behind me, and everything I don’t know is outside of that, in the big wide world, in the night-time, in the dark somewhere unexpected or just around the corner and I have to look a lot harder for everything else before I pull away from the earth.
that is what I am doing now, in the trash. I am looking very hard for something new, or for something unexpected. there are rows and rows of old car parts piled either side of the path, and the dust is starting to dry, rising in small clouds beneath my feet. ahead I see the shape of a trampoline standing on its end and run towards it. it is broken, or the regular pieces have been salvaged, which is when they take them out to reuse them for something else. it is without its springs, and without its stretchy black elastic like a woman’s tights. it is normal. there are always trampolines with holes in them. I have seen lots of holey trampolines, almost everywhere I have ever been. some have big rips in the black mat where you can fit your whole leg through, or tears that have been sewn up with bright yellow stitching, but I have never seen a trampoline with no black inside of it whatsoever. the frame is kind of bent out of shape, and standing upright, leant towards me, it appears overly menacing. I trip towards it over the rubble. a seagull cries far above me.
I touch my hand to the cold metal frame and look up into the sky. there is an electricity in the frame which passes through me as I watch the seagull, and somehow the seagull feels the electricity too. it looks down, turning its head quickly sideways then away again. I mirror the seagull, twitching my neck to the side. our eyes eventually meet.
sometimes I think I am a seagull, or I was or will be a seagull in another life.
suddenly, the seagull flits awkwardly, diving down towards me, and zips through the frame carrying a whoosh of feathers and air. I can taste the seagull’s warm body, but I cannot see it anywhere. I whirl around in circles, searching the rubbish dump, but it has disappeared through the frame and into the walls of trash beyond, where the abandoned cars and refrigerators are rusted and turned to bronze. the seagull is gone. the dump is frozen and the sun has stopped moving in the sky, and the sky is empty and on the far side of the fence line I can see my dad resting with his hands on his hips like an old woman, the rake leaning against his shoulder, the pile of wet leaves sitting underneath the lip of the sad-looking trailer.
I begin to walk back towards my dad because I know that my dad is always in a hurry and this will stop time from being frozen, because my dad always wants to leave and is always very busy. sometimes I think that my dad makes time go faster, just by being very busy. once I had a dream that my dad was the motor that turned the earth, that every time he took a step the world turned beneath his feet.
but me, all by myself, I can stop time altogether.
I like to stand still and look up into the sky.
and suddenly there is the seagull, floating miles above me in the alien whiteness. he floats far over the river, until he is just a little wisp of sky himself, spinning around the blotchy sun and the mackerel clouds out over the beach. I look back at the frame of the old trampoline, the door to that secret level, the level that could take me up into the sky like a bird, to the bird-level, the next level. but I do not go back. if I go back and walk through the door then time will be stopped forever, I will move on from this level and it will remain frozen here, waiting for me to start again, to be born again, and my dad will turn to dust at the dump, and be ground into the dirt by the caterpillars and have to stay here for the rest of eternity. and my dad hates the dump. so I go back. I go back for him.
when I near the car, my dad turns and looks at me. he gives me the eyebrows that mean we are going now and I run and sit in the cool of the passenger seat. in the wing mirror the trampoline beckons to me, faceless, faceless, way back in the frozen world of dead things and broken cars and ghosts but I am tired and I want to go home, which is the place you never get to see in the game, the place where your character lives, and where his mum and dad are, and his little sister and the washing and TV and all those regular things.
while my dad hooks the tailgate back onto the trailer I wonder if the thing I saw really was a trampoline, or whether it was just a gateway that looked a lot like a trampoline, or whether it was either of those things. through the windscreen I can see the sky, and the clouds melting around the roof of the car, but there are no seagulls. it is silent inside the car. we are about to go back home, to the beginning of the story, and I expect that it wasn’t ever a trampoline at all. my expectations are sometimes limited by my knowledge of things. but I can always ask my dad as we drive back out of the dump, what is that over there? that thing that looks like an old trampoline, and he will look hard at it and then when we get to the gate he will pay the man and he will tell me the truth.