What a Load of Rubbish (9 page)

Using her knowledge of circuit training, a skill she thought would never be needed once she had defected from the East and the referee’s whistle, she put Malcolm through the most rigorous training imaginable. She wanted her man back to his former self. And while she had breath in her body he was going to get there, whether he liked it or not.

Every day for a fortnight Malcolm would run, sprint, jog, sometimes forwards, sometimes backwards using Gisele’s eyes to see ahead, around pony tracks, nature trails, the athletics track. And Suburbiaville Newtown has a very large park indeed. Every couple of hundred metres she would blow,
PHEEP!
on the whistle, and have Malcolm do press-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups if there was an over-hanging branch nearby day in, day out for nearly eight hours a day. She would keep Malcolm’s energy levels topped-up with regular doses of sauerkraut-und-banana milkshake, which she would concoct at home using her liquidiser.

People love a
trier
, they like to see somebody making an effort. Early morning park users, joggers, runners and the like. Folk out for a stroll and horse-riders. Cyclists, birdwatchers and parties of
school children out for a nature ramble. The tots from the local infants’ school and others who just used the park because it was a nice place to be would look out for Malcolm and spur him on with cries of encouragement.

“Come on mate – you’re doing well!” an early morning jogger would yell. “Go on son, push it out!” These shouts of support were helpful enough but the thing that helped most was when the children of local junior school recognised who he was. The whole third form of Suburbiaville Elementary School were holding their summer athletics day in the park, when Malcolm ran past, prodded on by Gisele and the swagger-stick, urged on by shrill blasts on that darned whistle. They presented quite a spectacle to the hurdle-jumping, long and high-jumping, shot-putting, track-running and javelin-throwing kids.

Then one of them called out, “Look – there’s Malcolm.
Remember Malcolm?
Best street cleaner there ever was, my Dad says!” and he waved. “Whatcha, Malcolm!”

Other people began to recognise him too and the word went out: “Malcolm is on his way back!” and he began to feel that he was not alone. Cries of, “Come on, son, you can do it!” would push him along when his energy levels flagged. “Go, Malcolm, go!” the children would cry.

That was just what Malcolm needed. He needed to feel that people were behind him, that there was a point to this training. Challenging the council to a “winner take all” contest was one thing but he realised it had been sheer bravado. That “All-in-One-Der”, with that roller in front going round and round, those “Rubbish Robots” purging driveways and scrubbing the pavements and gutters. It was so fast – too fast. And he did not even have a barrow. But that child’s voice made him forget those problems, it ignited a spark inside him. His legs developed pistons and he ran flat-out to the war memorial, an obelisk mounted on six stone steps just outside the park, climbed every step and like the hero of a film about boxing he had once watched, he jumped up and down with his fists raised above his head: the “winner”, if only eh?

Gisele, on her bike, had to pedal quite quickly to catch up with him but she was very, very pleased now that Malcolm had suddenly been energised. She now felt she could begin
phase two
of Malcolm’s training programme.

As luck would have it, that obelisk outside the park was outside the local swimming baths too. Gisele chained up her bike and they went inside.

“Come-on,
Gise
, you know I ain’t no swimmer. Remember that day at the kiddies’ paddling pool? I nearly drowned in three feet of water. That attendant had to give me
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation
. I’ve never been able to swim…” Malcolm protested to Gisele where they stood, shoulder-to-shoulder on the side of the pool.

“Zen it is about time you ist learnink!” Gisele’s deep voice echoed around the baths and with a sideways flick of her hips sent Malcolm flying, with arms outstretched,
KERSPLASH!
into the water. Malcolm was still wearing his running shorts, his vest and the army boots that Gisele made him train in. It was a perfect swallow-dive, the only problem being that swallows are not very good swimmers and neither was Malcolm. The senior life-guard came running over to the poolside, and was about to dive in and save this drowning man. But Gisele warned him off with a scowl and a shake of the head. He was not going to argue with her, not with that fierce expression. Plus, with the weight of all those swimming medallions around his neck, he wasn’t that confident he would be of much help.

Every time Malcolm grasped the side of the pool to try and pull himself onto dry land Gisele would tread on his fingers, and he would have to flounder about
trying to snatch a breath. Luckily, that section of the pool was only two metres deep, so he could push up from the bottom and catch a lungful of the fresh stuff before descending to the bottom again.

In the end Malcolm tired of this and decided to try and make it over to the side. The life-guard was only too happy to give advice from poolside.

“Come on sir, you’re doing well – cup those hands, pull the water towards you. Breathing through the nose,
pull
that water towards you, good! Kick those legs – that’s it, you’re doing well.” Other pool users helped too by shouting encouragement, willing him forward. Wanting him to succeed. Oh, how people love a trier…

“Hey, I recognise you!” exclaimed the life-guard, “from the paddling pool.” It turned out that this life-guard and Malcolm’s savior at the paddling pool that day were one and the same person. They met and shook hands on the other side of the pool. From that day Malcolm became a regular user of Suburbiaville swimming pool which pleased Gisele no end. For Gisele had other important work to do involving her liquidiser and a sewing machine.

Late afternoon before the big day they were sitting on the wall outside Malcolm’s flat when he confessed, “Look Gise, I just can’t do it!”

“Nonsense, chatzy, look at you. You ist no longer mein liddle Malky, you ist mein gross stark herren. Do you zink ve haff been doink zis for nothink. Look at yourself – you ist haffing der butterflies. Das ist all!” She was right. Since she had been training him much of the old the old Malcolm had returned. A small miracle had taken place, muscle had returned to his shoulders, largely thanks to the swimming. His legs felt like tireless hydraulic pistons and thanks to both Gisele’s knowledge on training techniques, her liquidiser and the rich in protein milkshakes they produced, a lot, if not all of Malcolm’s stamina, strength and hunkiness had returned. He felt stronger, fitter and more energised than he could ever remember feeling before.

Listen to this kids, habits like alcoholism, smoking, drug and solvent abuse are very easy habits to fall into but they are extremely difficult to give up, so it is better not to start them in the first place. Luckily, though, Malcolm possessed more than the average amount of will-power and with Gisele’s encouragement and support, he was no longer feeling the need to go delving into dustbins, searching for discarded cans of hairspray and other dangerous substances that “should not be taken internally”.

“Yeah but Gise, that Eckerslike bloke was right,” Malcolm went on, “I ‘aven’t
even got a barrow and even if I ’ad one, it wouldn’t be my barrow, it wouldn’t be ‘Belinda’, ’cos they’ve taken ’er off me. And I can’t get it back ’cos it’s under lock and key – and who knows what else – at that museum of antiquities…”

“Malky leibe shon, do not be worryink so. You must be conservink der strength und haffing much einschlafen.” She shooed Malcolm into his flat, adding just as he closed his door, “Be leavink der worryink to me…” Jumping on her bike she rode flat out for home; an idea had been brewing for weeks. Now was the time to put her idea into action…

Tewitt-tewoo – Tewitt-tewoo!
Somewhere in the night an owl hooted. Crickets sang non-stop;
seesee-seesee
. It had been a pretty stiff climb of – ooh, maybe a hundred feet or so – onto the roof of
Suburbiaville Museum of Antiquities
. The walls were sheer, obviously an anti-burglary precaution, without handholds so the infiltrator had to climb a section of their own washing line to reach the skylight. A faint and constant scoring-sound of a diamond cutting through glass, followed by a gentle
thud
as the heel of a hand pushed a circle of the glass through.

Brief seconds seemed to take ages to pass before the cut-out glass disc, just wide enough to allow the infiltrator’s
body to pass through,
CRASHED
to the floor of the building shattering with an echoing
TINKLE
. Somebody must have heard that, security or a cleaner working overtime But lady-luck held, nobody came. All staff had gone home hours ago; the infiltrator had timed it to perfection. The museum – and Willy Eckerslike had shares in that too – would rather rely on its electronic surveillance equipment than have to pay wages at the rate of time-and-a-half to a night-time security guard.

Satisfied that the building was empty the infiltrator, Gisele dressed in black with a balaclava pulled over her head, abseiled to the floor of the museum. The hold-all belted to her waist by a belt through the handle made her body, silhouetted by the single shaft of moonlight through the skylight, appear a bit lopsided, like a camel with a puncture in one hump. Something else she had not mentioned to Malcolm was that before she had fled to “der vest”, with the Stasi – the East German secret police – hot on her heels, as well as being chief-trainer, physiotherapist and cook for the
East Berliner Ladies’ Amateur Shot-put Team
she had, also, been…

A
cat-burglar.
Well, the average weekly wage of an amateur ladies’ shot-put trainer in East Berlin, even a
chief
one is pretty poor – so she had to make up her
income somehow.

Disaster struck
– when, as she descended to the museum floor she found she had slightly underestimated the length of clothes-line she needed and was left dangling about six feet above the floor; plus the pulley-system she had devised, by tying a number of sliding-knots in the line, snagged up. Gisele cursed the inferior equipment. If there had been enough time she would have contacted her grandfather, in Liechtenstein, a former mountaineering instructor and he would have mailed her the appropriate gear – but time was a thing she had little of.

This left her with no other option but to cut through the rope on which she dangled, then freefall through the remaining six feet, to land with a
WHUMMP
! on her backside – it was quite a jolt on the old coccyx you know, it made her eyes water.

“ACH MEIN BUM!” Gisele exclaimed, hitting the floor at speed. In a split-second she was up, rubbing her sore behind whilst at the same time scanning the exhibits thoroughly with careful eyes – the way she had learned years ago. Minutely surveying the museum displays, ghostly reminders of days gone by. They looked spooky in the dark; there were portraits and bronze busts of the architects, engineers and designers
responsible for Suburbiaville’s futuristic layout, a seven foot marble statue of Alderman Archie Tuck who had laid the town’s first foundation stone – well, he was a big bloke. Plus other exhibits featured things like the bus-shelter with a self-opening roof, for use in heat waves or on sunny days. Also, there were the original sliding-doors from the indoor shopping centre. A revolution in their day; they opened vertically rather than sliding from left to right, and were designed in such a way that they could be dropped within two seconds, like a portcullis, on top of “smash-and-grab” burglars and ram-raiders. Unfortunately they had the habit of dropping down on innocent shoppers who passed beneath them, unaware of their function until it was too late. Eventually they were outlawed by health and safety experts when the casualty department at Suburbiaville General began to complain of an overcrowded waiting room. In the end they were taken down and displayed in the museum as a “novel but nevertheless unsuccessful” idea.

There it was
. Located dead in the centre of the museum, next to a supporting column rising from floor to ceiling, was Malcolm’s unwieldy barrow, “Belinda”. Leaning against the side of the galvanised steel dustbins were his brooms and his pooperscooper complete with the
snap-and-seal device, Malcolm’s very own invention, still fitted. A cleverly worded inventory, or list on the post next to this display, noted this as standard council-issue equipment. It made Gisele extremely angry to think that Malcolm’s ideas and ingenuity had been “poached” by Suburbiaville council to present the image of a council that cared so much, it was prepared to supply expensive equipment like this, so that the street cleaner could perform his duties “disease free”.

Even Malcolm’s bright yellow rubber-gloves were there, one was shown slung willy-nilly across a dustbin lid, the other had been strategically dropped on the floor, giving the impression he had just tossed them aside and had gone inside for a cup of tea. Gisele shook her head gravely; she could never remember Malcolm being so careless.

Putting on a pair of night vision spectacles, apparatus that she had cat-burgled from Stasi headquarters back in 1987, she took another careful look around. Laser technology sent beams of infra-red light over and around the entire display, encasing the equipment in an electronic spider’s web of multiple beams. The web looked impenetrable; if one of these strands of light was broken it would set off an alarm at the police station, immediately dispatching the riot squad, a team armed with tear-gas
grenades and pick-axe handles but no guns. Gisele
had
to locate the source of those beams. She took huge breaths, forcing her heartbeat down to a normal level. Until then it had been beating a passable rendition of the “Mission Impossible” theme-tune. In the past she often had problems with her adrenalin levels but experience had taught her to cope with these by deep breathing.

There it was
– a single beam of light generated by a box that looked something akin to an oversized video camera, was reflected from mirrors, to others concealed in other walls and columns which created the invisible web.

With silent footsteps she made her way over to the box, stroking an imaginary beard. “Ah!” She had an idea and delved into the hold-all, rummaging around until she found a small, oblong pack. “Kaugummi – I knew it vos in here somevhere!” She took all six sticks of gum out of the pack and unwrapped them, taking care to put the wrappers back in the bag. If anyone did catch her, she did not relish the idea of being charged with dropping litter as well as burglary. Placing the sticks one by one into her mouth she chewed and chewed for all she was worth, until her jaws ached. Then
FLOB
she spat the minty wad into her hand and
SLAP
applied it to lens of the box.

Hey presto! The infra-red web was
there no longer. Thank the Lord for night vision equipment, eh? Gisele grabbed the handles of the barrow and made for the fire doors at the far end of the building. It did not budge; the rims of the wheels were secured to the floor by metal strips that were held in place by metal bolts. She selected a small adjustable spanner from her hold-all, and with bated breath she set about removing the bolts – at any moment the saliva in that chewing-gum could dry-out, rendering it stiff and unsticky, meaning it would drop from the lens of that light-projecting box and reactivate the alarm system.
While Gisele was bending down loosening the bolts!
She had to work fast.

She did, and the chewing gum held. Soon she had the barrow free and was making a headlong dash for the fire escape at the far end. Thanking the Lord again that the fire escape was not locked Gisele, Malcolm’s barrow, his brooms, the pooperscooper and his rubber-gloves burst out of the museum and into the cool night air. The town clock was striking midnight.

With the
man in the moon
laughing behind her back, Gisele sped toward Malcolm’s flat pushing his unwieldy barrow before her. She stopped en-route outside the local primary school, factories, anywhere that stored rubbish outside the premises overnight and putting
it in the barrow.

Rat-a-tat, brrinng-brrinng – thump-thump.
Brinng-brinng, thump-thump, rat-a-tat. Malcolm awoke to a deafening racket at his front-door. Some joker was doing their best to make sure he would be too tired to do his best tomorrow. He had been having this awful nightmare in which the “All-in-One-Der” had simply driven over him, crushing him and his unwieldy barrow into a mixture of flesh, bones, galvanised-steel and rubber. That machine was so fast. And those rubbish-guzzling garbage-cans had made such short work of clearing the remains that there was not even a stain on the pavement to remind the town of Malcolm’s war with the machine. He glanced at his alarm-clock radio – but because he was receiving no pay from the council, he could not pay his electric-bill so it didn’t work anyway.

He switched on his torch and stumbled towards the noise, wrenched his front-door open and was about to give the cause of this racket a good telling-off. “’Ere, give it a perishin’ rest will yer. I’ve got to be up early enough as it is. An’ I’ve got to try an’ beat that blinkin’ machine – with that roller in front goin’ round an’ round…”

It was Gisele and she was excited. “MALKY! MALKY! ANSEHEN
LOOK
– SCHNELL! SCHNELL! SEE VAS ICH HAFF FOR YOU IN DER BACKYARD!”

“AW – LEAVE IT OUT, GISE. YOU KNOW I’VE GOT TO BE FRESH FER THE MORNIN’.” It had been a horrible dream, with really vivid images. “I’VE GOT TO GET SOME KIP! IF THAT MACHINE IS GOIN’ TO SWEEP ME ASIDE – I’M GONNA GO DOWN FIGHT…” Then he stopped dead.

There outside his own front door was his unwieldy barrow, well, it looked like his barrow. “Let’s see, now… Yup – it’s Belinda alright, there’s that dent in the front bin where the school bus run me over…”

Malcolm was beside himself with joy, so he walked round, stood beside Gisele and was about to hug her. But there was no time for pleasantries. “KOMMEN SIE MALKY VE HAFF VER’ VER’ LITTLE TIME UND VE MUST BE PRAKTISING VER’ VER’ MUCH!
DER KONTEST IS IN NOT A VERY LONG TIME!”

Gisele led him, still in his pyjamas, into his backyard. It looked like a tip – excuse the pun. She had emptied the contents of the galvanised bins all over his backyard and taken care to tread discarded cigarette-ends, old tea-bags, chewing-gum, sticky paper and whatever else you care to think of, and can be thrown away, all
over Malcolm’s backyard, before she had practically hammered his door down. The only thing missing in this slick was doggy-doo and Malcolm needed to practise the old
slide and scoop
technique that had saved so many pairs of shoes, to regain his manual dexterity.

By three-thirty that morning Gisele allowed Malcolm to flop exhausted onto his bed; his index fingers were still twitching, as though he was still squeezing the trigger-levers on the helping-hand and pooperscooper in an unconscious rhythm.

Satisfied that Malcolm had done his best she left him “out-for-the count” on his bed, his index fingers and thumbs twitching with an energy of their own, and went home. She had to walk too. She could not hope to control a bicycle, break into a museum and push that unwieldy barrow back to Malcolm’s flat on the same evening, so for safety’s sake, to guarantee success of the mission, she had left the bike at her cottage that evening. Blowing a fond kiss at Malcolm’s door Gisele put her best foot forward. She would not be getting much sleep tonight…