Nicola Barker - Three Button Trick and Other Stories

Naomi called this type of behaviour ‘self-indulgence’ but Jenny was content to feel that she knew better. To see things clearly, to register, to comprehend, well, that was surely a great blessing.

Jenny had a temper. Of course she did. And when she saw things clearly, they had to be seen properly, and everything had to happen in a certain way. She had her routines. A break from a routine was always a bad thing. Any kind of hindrance or interruption was considered by Jenny to be unacceptable. Any kind of intrusion, unpalatable.

Chad, 38, of no fixed abode, had a problem with rejection. But like Jenny, God had given Chad a gift too. His gift was that he would see things of no value, things that other people did not want, things that others misguidedly considered ‘rubbish’ and he would immediately love them.

God had chosen to give Chad his special gift because Chad had had everything—a home, a family, a good education—but he had rejected them. God understood difficult equations. God understood that Chad had been offered everything on a plate but that Chad had tipped the plate over. That made him special.

Peter, the warden, 23, was very familiar with Chad, his comings and goings, his shopping trolley, his stink, his pilfering, his cold sores.

Naomi knew Chad too. She liked to watch him picking through the rubbish, early on a Wednesday morning. The bins and the bags were put out the night before—a shiny black cluster, buzzing and rancid, ready for collection.

Jenny knew nothing of Chad. This was probably for the best.

Unfortunately, in October, when the leaves on the trees were starting to crisp and golden, Jenny’s doctor decided to change her medication. He cut it down. He expected her to try to get through the night without her extra tablet.

So now, in the dark, she’d hear the clock ticking. So now, before dawn, she’d hear the birds singing. So now, after sunrise, she’d hear the cars on the main road close to her flat and the vans pulling into the unloading bay at the back of Safeways.

She even thought she could hear the drivers having a morning smoke, taking their fags out, the click of the lighter, the deep inhalation and the tinkle of the embers as they took their first drag. She convinced herself.

Wednesday morning, six forty-three precisely, Jenny heard something else. Much closer.

Outside, beyond the hawthorn hedge, Chad was carefully undoing the plastic knot on the top of a refuse bag. At first Jenny thought he might be a local stray, a cat, but when she listened more intently she decided that his technique was too deliberate, too careful for a creature with claws, too guided and thorough. So she threw off her blankets, clambered from her bed, walked to the window and gazed out. Beyond the hawthorn she saw Chad. Chad had gained access to the bag’s contents. He’d found a broken saucepan which Jenny had snapped the handle off the day before. He was staring into it and he was thinking: is it big enough to use as a planter? For a small tomato plant? Shall I store it in my trolley? Shall I?

Jenny rapped on her window with the back of her knuckles.

‘Oi!’

Chad looked up. Jenny stood at her window wearing a well-worn winceyette nightdress. The top two buttons were undone. Her navel was visible through a gap between the third and fourth. She had blue rings under her eyes. She hadn’t slept properly for almost a week.

Chad stared at Jenny for several seconds, grimaced, returned to the bag, as though its contents held infinitely more interest for him than she did. Inside he found a wafer-thin slither of soap. In his trolley he had a self-assembled soap-cluster-ball which he’d created from just such soap remnants. It was almost as big as a cabbage.

Jenny opened her window and leaned out of it.

‘Oi! Leave off!’

Chad looked up again, focused on Jenny, drew his lips back away from his gums and showed Jenny his teeth. They were brown and slightly peggy. It was an ugly expression, like the kind of face an ill-natured cur might pull. A snarl but nothing special.

Jenny gasped, slammed her hands on to her hips, marched into the hallway, appraised her emergency cord. Her fingers twitched but she didn’t touch it. Instead she walked back into her bedroom, pulled on her dressing gown and returned to the window.

Chad had completed his dalliance with the bins and was now beating a slow retreat, disappearing from view, pushing his trolley with a combination of dignity and finesse, his back straight, his matted head held at an assured, an almost saintly angle.

Jenny slammed her window shut, piqued and disgruntled. Chad, she just knew, was a thief and a parasite.

‘He’s a magpie,’ Naomi said, hours later, somewhat bemused by Jenny’s fury. ‘Don’t get so worked up over it.’

‘That’s my stuff he’s picking over,’ Jenny retorted. ‘My stuff.’

‘Don’t get so angry,’ Naomi whispered, hoping to calm Jenny by speaking quieter. ‘He doesn’t mean any harm. He’s only a tramp.’

‘It’s mine!’

‘Shall I call Peter?’ Naomi wondered out loud.

‘My stuff. Private stuff. You know …’ Jenny thought of something and stopped scowling for a moment. ‘… You know, sometimes people go through your bins when they want to find things out about you. And then sometimes the people whose bin it is calls the police.’

Naomi smiled patiently at Jenny who was still wearing her dressing gown and pink mules.

‘Michael Barrymore!’ Jenny yelled triumphantly. ‘They did it to him! Going through his bins to find out stuff! All his leftovers and everything covered in tea-grains and bits of potato peelings.’

‘You mean newspaper people, Jenny,’ Naomi said. ‘That boy’s only a tramp. He’s been going through our bins for as long as I can remember. You couldn’t call the police. They’d laugh at you. He’s not breaking any law.’

‘He’s like dirty vermin,’ Jenny said, ‘a rat or something.’

Naomi went into her kitchenette for a glass of water. She returned and handed it over to Jenny. ‘Taken your pills yet today, Jenny?’

Jenny took the glass but didn’t drink the water, only stared off into the distance.

‘Coming for how long?’ she asked tremulously. ‘How long?’

‘As long as I can remember,’ Naomi reiterated, then added, ‘I’ll tell you what he’s got in that trolley of his. He’s got a ball of soap almost as big as your head.’

‘What?’ Jenny’s eyes refocused. ‘Huh?’

Naomi made the shape of a ball in the air with her hands. ‘He gets all the soap, see? All the last bits of soap from the bins and he presses them together to make a big, round ball.’

Jenny was confused, Naomi could tell, so Naomi went into her own bathroom and brought out her soap. ‘See? When soap gets wet for a while the bottom goes soggy, then if you push it on to another piece they get stuck together when they dry, and that way he’s made a big soap ball from all the last, little bits. I’ve seen him take it out of his trolley. Big as a football.’

Naomi looked up from the bar of soap she was demonstrating with. Jenny’s expression was stiff and cold, frosted with disgust.

‘Not my soap,’ she said, shuddering involuntarily.

Naomi rapidly backtracked. ‘No,’ she said, ‘of course not.’

Jenny’s eyes widened as the full implications of the big soap ball had their impact in that special Soap-Ball part of her brain. She imagined how intimate a thing a bar of soap was and also, this dirty man, and then the rubbing of the soap into one ball. It triggered something in her. ‘Never!’

She sprang up from her chair, spilling water on to Naomi’s carpet.

‘Never!’

Naomi went and pulled her cord.

She’d been thinking about it, at night, when she couldn’t sleep. The Soap Ball. Her privacy. That saucepan he’d taken.