Trash (18 page)

Pia Dante was alone.

*   *   *

Gardo: We talked to a boy at the eating house, and for fifty got her space out the back for the night, and Rat laid her down, and got an extra blanket because a typhoon wind is cold for a child. I saw him smoothing out her hair, wrapping her up, talking to her and promising we’d be back to look after her. Then he came over to me and Raphael – he was crying. I’m putting that in because I think it’s important – it’s the only time we ever saw Rat cry.

All of us knew now that this was the time to thrash it all out and do the final, final plan. We ordered tea, and I – Gardo – spent seventy on a bottle of brandy, and I made us all take three fingers, because what lay ahead was the hardest, and yet in a way it was also just free-fall now, the plan so clear we couldn’t go outside it. Three fingers was enough, because we needed to be brave for the next bit – braver even than my friend and brother Raphael in the police station, because nobody goes among the graves on All Souls’ Night after midnight, because that is when the dead are left to themselves again, so the ghosts are getting sad. We knew we had to, however – there was no question – because it was the only time we could do what we had to do. Can you blame us if we stoked up on drink?

‘We need tools,’ I said, and we worked out what we needed.

‘We’re going to need a way out too,’ said Raphael, and we planned out our route.

I said, ‘What does six million dollars look like?’ I think the brandy was hitting me and making me smile. All of us then, we started to laugh – for the first time in what seemed a while. And do you know what, we knew it wasn’t ours, even then – and couldn’t be ours. We knew that a piece of it was all we wanted, and we knew we were so close, the air was buzzing around us, as if the ghosts were above us! That much money, if it really was there – six million. I promise you, the one thing we all knew was that it was not ours and we would not even try to take more than a little.

We split up to look for tools, saying we’d meet at the grave as soon as we could. We knew it without saying it: we had to go back and smash in the slab and get inside. I am sure we agreed that, without quite saying it. Raphael went off and found a sack and a cheap old broken knife. I went scavenging close up under the shanties where the graveyard turns to swamp and sea: I found a strong iron spike. It was tying up someone’s boat, so I tied it to a wooden stake, and took the spike, quiet as the breeze. Rat found rope and a plastic sheet, which was everything we needed.

I’d said to Raphael, ‘We do this job fast – once we start, we do not stop,’ and we hugged each other.

I’m Raphael. I said to Gardo, ‘It’s going to make a noise. We do it fast, OK?’ We finished the brandy and felt stronger and better.

*   *   *

Gardo again.

We climbed up to little Pia’s grave-box. I think there were ghosts everywhere, just watching. Raphael held the spike and Rat passed up a stone.

Everyone had gone, and most of the candles had blown out, because the typhoon was getting closer and the wind was strong and cold, nagging at us – I didn’t have a shirt and I could feel it, right in off the sea. I swear I could feel them all, those dead, around me still, watching me with wide-awake eyes. Dead men above and below, and dead kids and dead mothers – I could almost see them, watching and watching, and I so didn’t want to look up.

The stone was good in my hand, just the right size. Raphael had the spike in the corner, and I leaned back and gave it the most almighty crack. The thing moved right off, and the noise was more of a thud – a real, deep, dead sound. I guess because the seal was so new, it hadn’t got itself all fixed and hard, but the second blow punched it right in, and it fell on itself in three big pieces, one of them falling nearly on Rat’s feet, so he jumped back. Then he was up with rope and candles, right up against me, and we were lighting them fast inside the grave-hole where the wind couldn’t get.

The air was musty, but there was no bad smell. There was a coffin, white as white – for a child – and we all felt scared, I guess. It had a layer of dust, and the flowers on it were very dead – other than that, everything was fresh.
No smell – and we all knew what dead things smell like, because people throw dead things out on the dumpsite. I found a dead kid once, and there’s no mistaking that particular stink, once you’ve had it in your face.

We threw out the other bits of broken stone and eased her out.

Back to me, Raphael. Like Gardo says, the wind was getting up and it made us want to work faster than ever. Rat got the rope around the coffin. Then, as we slid her out, he squeezed right into the hole so he was safe and firm. That meant he could let it down to us, because six million dollars in a wooden box … I tell you, six million dollars in a box is heavy, if that’s what was in the box – don’t forget we didn’t know that for sure. We only thought we knew, but it felt as heavy as that kind of money ought to be. We got her on the ground, and though we’d all said we’d move fast, we had to see what it was inside, right there and then.

The knife was our screwdriver. Eight screws held the lid, and I know, lifting a coffin lid … you think of all the evil things in the world – in a graveyard, in the middle of the night – but I think all three of us knew in our hearts now, so we just did those screws and lifted it, and like Gardo says, the ghosts were around us, watching.

Oh sweet Lord, the money was there.

The money was there. It was packed in so snug it was like the box was made for it.

You want to know what six million looks like? I will try to tell you.

To me, sitting next to it, it looked like food and drink, and changing my life – and getting a way out of the city for ever. It looked like change, it looked like the future. I don’t know what it looked like. We stared a moment, and nobody spoke. We had the plan, and the plan was not finished yet, and none of us suddenly thought,
Let’s keep it all
– nobody even suggested we change the last part of our plan. We knew the money wasn’t ours, because even though I never met that man, Gabriel Olondriz – the way Gardo had told us about him, I knew he was a good man, through and through. It was All Souls’ Night, and he was there, I hope and believe, at the front of the ghost-crowd! Right there with us. I think he stayed with us too – I hope with José Angelico, arm in arm – with us all the way.

Jun – no longer Rat. My name is Jun-Jun.

And the boys have given me the last part of the story – I guess because the last part was my idea. They dispute that – Gardo says it was his, because he was the only one of us who met Mr Gabriel, but I was the one who knew how to do it – and it did get done at what was once my home, or just above it.

Also, Raphael – he had the whole first part of the story, and I think he knows we tell it together, better, because we are a team now. Who cares, in the end? Who cares who did what when the whole point was we did it together?

We’d talked it all out, asking the same questions: what do you do with six million dollars? How are you going to spend it? Or what would we do, the three of us? Line up in the bank the next morning and ask to put it in a safe? Bury it some place else?

The one thing we knew is that as soon as we had it, it would be taken away – you think we stood a chance of keeping even a million? So I said we should take it to Behala and put it in the trash for anyone who finds it.

Maybe it was the brandy, but what I remember is the boys just laughing at me, and laughing at each other.

We shook it all out of the coffin into the sack and the sheet. José Angelico’s money: the money stolen by the senator-vice-president from hell, from all his own people. We roped up the sack and the sheet and got them on our backs. We took them over the wall, just in case the gates were guarded – every gate in this city is … We stopped off for Pia, of course, and she was so sleepy I had to carry her on my back, so Gardo took one sack, Raphael the other – and off we went into the wind, which was getting strong now, racing along the streets and making a noise, rolling trash ahead of it.

Who did we meet? Who else could we meet but a little gang of baby trash boys doing the night shift, scavenging about with a cart. Gardo showed them a note, and it was like a charm. Half a minute and our bags were in the cart, and Pia was on the crossbar, and we were pedalling through the streets, all of us clinging on and singing out. Who’s going to stop a crowd of filthy trash kids fooling in the night? We passed a police car sitting by a junction, and we even waved. It was the early hours of the morning and the wind was behind us all the way, and we sailed past statues and all the quiet office blocks until
we found the road that goes up to the dumpsite. We put Pia on the saddle, and the rest of us got off and pushed, running as fast as we could, so she was laughing too.

No police cars, nothing – but we still took no chances, saying goodbye to the cycle boys finally, and creeping in sideways up the canal.

My first thing was the school – the Mission School. So I took a great handful of notes, put them down my shirt, and I did just what Gardo had told me we’d do. I skinned up the corner and was in through the bars. It seemed my good old friend Father Juilliard – you still hadn’t fixed them, sir, I could still get through: maybe you were hoping I’d be back – I’m joking. I put the money on his desk and grabbed a pen. I put my name again, big and black – and next to that all I could think of was flowers, so that’s why I drew you a bunch, fast as I could, bursting up and open. Then I had my next very brilliant idea which – who knows? – maybe saved our lives like all the other times. Gardo says all I do is brag and take credit – we all had good ideas all the time, but this one was genius, because how else would we have blended into the morning?

Why it hit me, I don’t know – I guess all of us have to keep thinking ahead and looking out for danger, or maybe Gabriel and José were still with us even this far – maybe they’d been pushing that bike with us. Or maybe I just saw the cupboard, I don’t know. The point was – this was Father Juilliard’s office – there were cupboards full of odds and ends, and one of them was the crazy school uniform store.

Little shirts and shorts! They’d been donated to us years before by some charity volunteer who thought all the kids ought to look the same, like proper schoolkids – but it never caught on. To make us feel like a real school, I imagine, this kind person had given about a hundred white shirts, and a hundred blue shorts and a hundred little dresses. There were packets and packets, little slippers too. There were backpacks – the kind kids put their schoolbooks in, but there was scarcely a book in the place! What are the kids here going to carry apart from trash? The backpacks had the charity name, big and bold, all over them so you’ll never forget who’s being so nice.

So I grabbed a load of everything, and pushed it out of the bars. Then I followed them down where they fell, and we didn’t even need to speak – we knew where we were going.

First we opened up four of the backpacks and stuffed them with dollars. We stuffed them full and zipped them up.

Then we turned back to what was left, which was most of it, and we took off every paper band – the bands that keep hundreds bundled into ten thousands. They were blowing around already, so we got them in the sheet and the sack and bundled them up again. I tell you, the dumpsite was alive now, because of the wind. Dust and grit was blowing about, and little bits of trash were whirling. The plastic roofs were flapping too, and a bit of metal sheet was banging. There was a very little bit of light in the sky,
way over by the dock cranes, but no one was about just yet – or nobody saw us. We probably had ten or fifteen minutes before dawn, before the ghosts had to say goodbye and slip away. So we hauled everything to my old home, to where the big broken belt – belt number fourteen – just points up at the sky doing nothing.

No, I did not go down to see my friends the rats! Pia stayed on the ground, looking up at us, with the clothes and the bags. Then I went up first with the rope end, and pulled on it. Gardo and Raphael came next, taking the weight, and I went up and up and up. The wind was just getting stronger, and my shirt was flapping – I felt like I was up on a ship because the whole belt-frame was moving. We got the first bundle up right to the top, right to the top, and I could see way over Behala, way over the city, way out to sea! Then Raphael came up next to me, crying out he was so happy – just shouting into the wind – and we held each other and howled. We took handfuls of the money then, and threw them up into the sky. The notes spilled out and whirled, and it was a storm of money. Typhoon Terese, I later heard, racing in from south China – and the next day the rains would burst. Right now, the wind got under all the cash we could throw, and pushed it up and out, and spun it right across the land.

Soon my arm was aching.

Raphael stopped shouting and just clung there, exhausted. We did the next bundle more slowly, and as it got lighter, Gardo came up too, right up to the top of the belt,
and he had strong arms, and he helped us throw the rest. When Gardo came, the wind rose up even more, and we were clinging to that crane! It was a hurricane, and a hurricane of money. We must have thrown five and a half million dollars out over the dumpsite, and that wild wind took it all over the whole of our big, beautiful, terrible town.

At the bottom of it all, what did we find? We found another letter, slipped in with the cash. It was from José Angelico, so Gardo stuffed it down his shirt. We dropped the sheet. We slowly climbed down, and we were dizzy.

Pia was waiting for us by the rucksacks. She’d unwrapped the clothes, and put the plastic packets into a pile, and was sitting on them. We changed. We washed our faces by the school tap. Then we made our way out of Behala.

I wanted to watch. I wanted to hang back and see what happened when the first trash boy of the morning hooked up – not a stupp, but a hundred-dollar bill. Gardo was firm, though – and I’d come to see that you didn’t cross Gardo, not to his face.

Raphael had goodbyes to say, and I could see him lingering. Then again, so did Gardo. In the end I think they knew it was easier to go without goodbyes – there was no choice – and I saw Gardo put his arm round Raph and lead him on.