“When are you going to take the rubbish down?” said Meritxell, irritation gnawing at the edge of her voice.
Bernat stopped short in the kitchen doorway. The can of Estrella he’d just retrieved from the fridge burnt cold against his fingers. He glanced over at the blue binbags sat by the front door, each one swollen with accusation. Since the doctor had granted legitimacy to his wife’s leg pain, hauling their carefully sorted garbage down the four flights of stairs to the street, had become his sole preserve.
“I’m just going for a smoke first,” he said and headed to the balcony, ignoring his wife’s shallow sigh. What they needed was a lower floor flat or one with a lift, but their indefinite contract guaranteed them a rent which made a move impossible. Bernat took a swig of beer and retrieved a cigarette from the packet lying on the chest of drawers; their daughter looked on disapprovingly from her photo frame.
As he stepped out, the goldfinch began to flutter and chatter in its cage. He leant his not inconsiderable bulk against the metal railings and lit up, letting the late evening sun wash over him. The narrow street below was deserted save for a tourist couple poring over a map and a man walking his dog. He stole a glance into the flat across the street; the two Moroccans were preparing something in the kitchen. Behind him the TV fizzed into life.
“You might as well bring the washing in while you’re out there,” called Meritxell, over the competing sounds of pouring wine and the Pasapalabra theme music.
Bernat finished his cigarette and stubbed it out in the plant pot beside him. He was unpegging the first of his shirts, when he noticed a dusting of ash above the breast pocket. Frowning, he brushed it off revealing a small burn hole. He looked up at the terrace of the illegally let tourist flat above.
“Hey!” he yelled, scrabbling for his pidgin English; increasingly more valuable in the Raval than his native Catalan. There was no response. No doubt they were out getting drunk. Or still sleeping off last night’s performance.
“Hey!” he yelled again.
“Who are you shouting at?” called Meritxell from the sofa.
“Who do you think?” He stepped inside and thrust the evidence towards his wife. “They’ve burnt a damn hole in my shirt.”
“I thought you liked clothes with holes in them,” said Meritxell pointedly.
“For God’s sake,” snapped Bernat, grabbing a handful of his favourite checked jumper. “This is for round the house. It’s different.”
“It’s for the bin, that’s what it’s for.”
“You wouldn’t be so relaxed if it was one of your dresses they’d wrecked.” He turned to go back outside, then changed his mind. “And they say tourism is improving the area. Someone should bloody tell them!”
Bernat flailed his arm out for emphasis and the shirt flicked into their daughter’s photo frame.
“Careful!” Meritxell’s cry was accompanied by the clatter of the frame falling down the gap between the chest and the wall. She sighed heavily.
“I’ll get it,” said Bernat tightly.
He took hold of the chest, braced himself and began to edge it slowly away from the wall, his back protesting at the exertion.
“Don’t strain yourself,” said Meritxell, getting up from the sofa. “That should be enough.”
Bernat stood up with a groan, pushing both hands into the small of his back and arching it. The body which had once thought nothing of a full day of physical labour at the docks was long gone. Meritxell placed one hand against the wall and leant forward to peer into the newly widened space.
“You see it?” he asked.
Abruptly his wife stepped back and straightened up, her expression wavering between confusion and surprise.
“What is it?”
“I think it’s rats.”
“Rats?” Bernat stepped forward and found himself staring at a football-sized hole in the wall. He frowned.
“How long’s that been there?” he said, his unfulfilled anger transforming it into an accusation. Meritxell shrugged.
“You better get me the torch,” he said and began to lower himself carefully, his kneecaps protesting as they pushed against the tiled floor. From close up, there seemed to be something moving in the hole. Not an animal, but colours, green and blue, swirling in the darkness like an ethereal mist. A trick of the light. Meritxell handed him the torch and he flicked it on. The beam failed to illuminate even the interior sides of the hole, the blackness an impenetrable barrier.
“Get me something to poke in it,” he said, raising his head, but not taking his eyes off the hole. The uneven sound of Meritxell’s slippers against the tiles punctuated the tense music coming from the TV, as she went to the kitchen and returned with a black plastic salad spoon. Taking it with his free hand, he prodded it tentatively into the hole. Instantly something yanked it from him. His own surprised gasp mingled briefly in the air with a stifled yelp from Meritxell, as the spoon disappeared into the blackness. Bernat hurriedly pulled himself up, keeping his eyes fixed on the hole. A nervous sweat prickled across his skin and his knuckles glowed white around the torch.
“That better not have been a rat,” breathed Meritxell.
“It just surprised me that’s all,” he said, coating his words with a shaky confidence for her benefit. “I think I’ve still got enough concrete left from the bathroom to fill it in. Break a couple of glasses in the mix. That’ll keep it out.”
He headed toward the kitchen, without looking at her.
“Don’t even think about using our glasses,” she called after him.
He stopped, but didn’t turn around; “I am not going down four flights of stairs just to buy glasses to smash up.”
“You could always take the rubbish out at the same time.”
Bernat disappeared into the kitchen without another word.
By the time he’d mixed the concrete and broken glass, there was a folded blanket laid out by the hole for him to kneel on. He muttered his thanks and Meritxell nodded acknowledgement from deep in the sofa, her eyes remaining glued to the screen.
Bernat put the bowl of wet concrete down and lowered himself carefully onto the blanket, keeping hold of the metal trowel. Whatever had pulled the salad spoon out of his grasp had done so with some force. The sooner it was interred the better. He gave the concrete mix a cursory stir, the glass bits glinting intermittently, and slapped half a load onto the bottom lip of the hole. As soon as the trowel crossed the threshold, an unseen force began to pull urgently at it and he almost lost his grip again, instinctively wrenching it back. The wet concrete slipped into the hole before his eyes, as if it were being sucked in; a thin grey stream which gradually merged with the swirling colours and disappeared. It definitely wasn’t a rat.
Curious, he scooped out a larger helping of concrete and slapped it onto the same place as before. This time he held the trowel firm as the wet concrete again disintegrated around it, his arm trembling with the effort of resisting.
“What are you doing?”
Meritxell’s voice startled him and his grip loosened momentarily, the trowel slipping free. He watched, mesmerised, until his eyes could no longer discern it against the blackness.
“Bernat?”
“Come and look at this.” He motioned her closer, waiting as she manoeuvred herself along the sofa and draped a hand over his shoulder. Her skin felt rough where it touched his. He picked up the bowl of concrete mix and held it over the top of the hole. Before tipping it up, he looked over at his wife.
“Berna…” Meritxell’s protest died on her lips as the falling concrete veered into the hole. He felt her hand spasm against his shoulder.
“Amazing, huh?” said Bernat, putting the empty bowl down. “It just sucks everything in like a…well like a black hole. Must be what happened to the photo too.”
Meritxell continued to stare straight forward, saying nothing, her internal struggle to process what she’d just seen reflected in her face. A sudden idea occurred to him. He pulled himself up, his wife’s hand slipping limply from his shoulder.
“We should try putting the rubbish in there,” he said, unable to prevent a smile forming. No more trekking up and down four flights of stairs just for that. Meritxell didn’t immediately offer an opinion on the idea, so he retrieved the binbags from beside the front door and dumped that at his wife’s feet like a cat presenting its kill. He picked up the first one, glass clinking together inside, and…
“Bernat, no.” She waited until he looked up at her before continuing. “We don’t know where it goes.”
“It goes away, that’s where it goes,” he said irritably. “You just saw.”
“I don’t know what I just saw. And anyway it has to be recycled. It doesn’t do that, does it?”
A tut escaped Bernat’s lips before he realised. Recycling had become Meritxell’s pet project since their daughter had discovered they weren’t separating their rubbish, and spent the rest of Christmas lecturing them.
“Most of that probably winds up in landfill anyway,” he tried, thrusting a despairing hand out to one side. In fact it definitely wound up in landfill because the general waste bin was closer to the flat, but he wasn’t about to admit that.
“This is even better,” he continued. “It makes the rubbish disappear altogether.”
“It’s not natural. It’s bound to be trouble.”
“What trouble?”
“I don’t know,” she said firmly, in the voice she used to use on their daughters. “But I am not comfortable throwing stuff in there.”
“That’s easy for you to say, you’re not the one hauling garbage down four flights of stairs.”
“You think this is easy,” she said, pulling up her trousers to reveal one swollen leg, puffed out around the ankle like a squashed marshmallow. The trump card. Bernat sighed in defeat.
“Please push the chest back over it,” said Meritxell, collapsing heavily into the sofa and readjusting her trousers. “And then you can take the rubbish down.”
Bernat leant forward in his chair and looked over at their bird sat disconsolately at one end of its perch. He blew a thin cloud of smoke out into the heavy rain. Across the street, the Moroccans had the green shutters pulled across their balcony and the raindrops hammered insistently against it. He glanced at his watch. 10:30am. If she wasn’t sheltering from the rain, Meritxell would be back from her appointment at the clinic any moment.
He dropped his stub into the empty can of Estrella beside him, and swivelled in his chair to look at the latest collection of binbags piled up by the front door. He’d promised to take them down while she was out, but he’d been half asleep at the time, safely cocooned in the duvet. And he hadn’t expected it to keep raining. His thoughts turned to the option of the mysterious hole again. Quicker, easier and cleaner. Not to mention drier. Meritxell had remained adamant that hell and damnation awaited them if they used it, but nothing had happened so far.
He didn’t use it habitually by any means, but he had slipped a few things under the chest over the past two weeks; the odd beer can, the plate he’d accidentally broken, a few pieces of junk mail. Always while his wife was out of the room. On the two occasions he’d checked underneath with the torch, there’d been nothing there but the hole. It was true that throwing entire bags of rubbish in it would be a different level, and more directly against Meritxell’s wishes. But it was him who was in charge of disposing of the rubbish. Him who was suffering and would get wet. Besides, if she got back and the binbags were still there she’d be angry. If they were gone…well she need never know how.
The key turned in the lock almost half an hour after Bernat had pushed the chest of drawers tightly back against the wall. He was flicking aimlessly through channels on the TV. Meritxell entered, breathing heavily from the exertion of climbing the stairs, and rested her umbrella against the wall. The bottom of her trousers were stained dark from the rain.
“How was it?” he said.
“I’ll live.”
She changed into her slippers and joined him on the couch, resting an arm across his leg.
“Thank you for getting rid of the rubbish,” she said, without looking at him.
“No problem.”
Bernat waited until Meritxell had closed the toilet door, before reaching over from the sofa and sliding his empty can under the chest of drawers. He still never did it in front of her even after all this time, but she had to know by now. Had to have noticed the rubbish disappearing on days when neither of them had left the flat. Once she’d even walked in on him crouched between the sofa and the chest, feeding bottles underneath it. They’d stared at each other for what seemed like minutes.
“Dropped something?” she’d said finally.
“Er…yeah. My pen,” he’d said after a confused pause.
She’d simply nodded and disappeared into the kitchen, the incident never mentioned again.
Bernat opened another can as the screen flicked back to the smartly-dressed woman in the studio. The toilet flushed, sending water rattling along pipes older than him, and Meritxell ambled back to join him on the sofa. The presenter was saying something about illegal rubbish dumping in the south of Corsica. Spanish tourists were being blamed, the beach was being ruined, the protected marine life was being killed, Ares Mercer had this report. Bernat took another swig of beer and allowed his gaze to wander out of the balcony door.
Suddenly he felt Meritxell lurch forward in the sofa, her hand slapping onto his thigh and shaking it. He glanced over sharply, fearing she was choking or worse, but her attention was fixed firmly on the TV, her mouth ajar.
“Look,” she breathed, her other hand coming up to cover her mouth.
Bernat turned to the screen; an underwater shot of a reef covered in all manner of familiar household garbage, brightly coloured fish flitting obliviously in all directions. The picture was grainy, amateurish, but there was no mistaking the cause of his wife’s shock; the photo of their daughter sat centre stage, wedged between two rocks. Abruptly, it disappeared and he found himself staring at a white sand beach, the picture postcard beauty spoilt by dead fish and more rubbish along the tideline.
He felt his skin prickle as the camera picked over the cans of Estrella, the bottles of Meritxell’s favourite wine, the packaging from all their usual food, one half of the plate he’d broken, the black plastic salad spoon, the metal trowel, his…
He peered closer; “Is that my jumper?”
“Is that really what’s important?” said Meritxell, withdrawing her hand from his thigh, her voice wavering, close to tears. “Look what we’ve done, Bernat. That’s our rubbish. Everything that went into that damn hole.”
“I know, I…” he started, but could think of nothing to say. Instead, he reached an arm round to pull her close, but she shrugged it off and headed into the bedroom. He turned back to the TV, where a man in a lab coat held a cormorant in his arms, a plastic beer holder caught around it’s beak. Bernat changed channels, watching numbly as a group of youngsters clutching bottles of Estrella partied on a sun-drenched terrace.
The ball floated over, Pique rose highest and the net billowed. 3-1. Three goals in less than ten minutes. Bernat hit the arm of the sofa in frustration and lost his hold on the practically empty beer can in his hand. It clattered to the floor.
“Bernat!” scolded Meritxell from the bedroom, her sanctuary when the football was on.
“Sorry.” He pulled himself up. The can was lying between the sofa and the chest, a small pool of beer forming around the top, as if it were bleeding. Instead of picking it up he found himself thinking how easy it would be to just give it a gentle kick. The images from the news report the previous week flashed through his mind. The dead fish, the ruined beach; all that rubbish. Had it really all been theirs? Had any of it really been theirs?
There had to be thousands of Spaniards visiting Corsica each year. Wasn’t it more likely that some of them had dumped their trash on the beach, than that a hole in Barcelona had somehow transported it there? His old, checked jumper was hardly unique; even less so the trowel, the broken plate, the salad spoon. And the photo had been on screen no more than a split second; it could easily have just looked like his daughter.
Bernat pushed the can slowly forward with his foot, hesitating as it reached the bottom edge of the chest. The commentator’s voice became suddenly more excited and he glanced hopefully over at the TV, but a misplaced pass finished the attack. He looked back down. What difference would one more can make anyway?
Story © 2015 Keith Rosser, all rights reserved.