9. THE DUSTMAN'S TALE

Another stranger turns up with a story...

The Deity Dingleboot smiled grimly at his pupil.

“Have you any idea how important it is to always report evil when you see it?” he asked. “There is cruelty about, everywhere it seems, and it should be reported.”

“Then I’ll report you,” mumbled the pupil.

The deity swiped him as hard as he could across the face. “Watch this!” he hissed.

So the pupil did.

Through the mists he saw the lounge bar of the Westminster Arms, and the people in it.

“Now then, now then, now then!” exclaimed a voice from the door. Yet another newcomer stood there, dressed in jeans and a leather jerkin and with the ruddiest complexion imaginable.

The Judge sighed. “You must be a dustman,” he muttered.

“An environmental hygiene operative, if you please,” replied the dustman, but his eyes twinkled at the enormity of his self-importance joke.

“And what does one of your lowly status want with a company like our own?” asked the policeman, suspiciously.

“My status might be perceived as lowly, but I fulfil a vital job,” replied the dustman. “Without me you’d be swimming in your own refuse. Without me you’d be plagued by all manner of infestation, ranging, no doubt, from foxes to fleas! Without me there’d be cholera and smallpox and, worst of all, bubonic plague. So please don’t belittle me and my kind, especially those of us who have a story to tell. I believe that’s what you’re all doing here, exchanging narratives all of which have something to do with the princess of b*****s, the late Edna Tomkins?”

“So what if we’re doing?” demanded the librarian.

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Keep your counsel to yourselves if you must!” The dustman sounded a little peeved, “but my account might be vital to a full understanding of why what happened did happen and what the consequences might have been if it hadn’t,” he added

“Tell us your tale, then,” yawned the physician, “because if you have a tale to tell you’d better get on with it. I have an appendectomy to perform tomorrow before noon!”

“My take is macabre, to say the least,” began the dustman, somehow finding himself an unoccupied chair and settling back into it. “You see, I empty the bins in the area where Edna Tomkins lived before she so foolishly did herself in, so to speak.”

“Are you sure that’s what it was?” asked the Judge, suspiciously, “I mean are you sure she did herself in? Are you absolutely certain that she wasn’t done in?”

“I only know what I read in the papers,” replied the dustman, “and contrary to popular opinion I can read! And in the paper I read it stated quite clearly that mid-brag and whilst standing on top of a spiky pole the lady slipped and impaled herself until her meat was, as they say, cooked...”

“Not cooked. Spiked it how I’d put it. Thoroughly spiked,” contributed the physician.

“If I may continue,” said the dustman tetchily, “and my tale may enlighten you beyond the state of enlightenment you are all currently in.

“Whilst emptying refuse bins it must be stressed that since recycling of this and that and the other was made mandatory, we have different coloured bins to empty, and one of the jobs of we operatives is to glance into the bins prior to disposing of their contents into the wagon and ensuring that their owners have actually put the right stuff into the right bin. You might find it difficult to believe, but there are some individuals who can’t get it into their heads that some things are beyond recycling and need to be dumped, and those people have to be sorted out and their bins left unemptied as a lesson to them to get things right next time.

“And it wasn’t so long ago that I chanced to glance in Edna Tompkins’ bin. It was the recycling week, so it ought to have contained items intended to be recycled, like cardboard, paper, plastics, tin cans and bottles. And when I looked in I got the shock of my life. There were the correct items in her bin, and additional bits and pieces that had no right to be there. There were very wrong things in that bin. Things that I blanched to look upon.

“For lying amidst empty cereal boxes and baked beans tins were fingers. Human fingers with the blood still on them. And toes. Little titchy toes with well-tended toenails coloured red. And a male organ. There was a human male organ in that bin, all shrivelled and nasty and turning blue. It was a horrible sight to behold and I fainted right there on the street.

“Somehow the Tomkins woman saw me where I lay on the road outside her house and came rushing towards me. My colleagues thought it might be to offer assistance and succour, but it wasn’t.

“’What were you doing, staring at the rubbish in my bin?’ she squawked, ‘you have no right to be doing that! Your job is to cart it away so that anything accidentally left in there might gain the sort of anonymity it deserves and not end up being traced back to any particular region of your round!’

“It was then that the manager of our shift came trundling up and he set her straight. ‘All the operatives have to ensure that the bins are correctly loaded with the right items,’ he said, ‘and nowhere in the bin man’s handbook it does it say he must convey body parts for recycling! Why he mustn’t even convey body parts for landfill disposal! Body parts are incinerated once they’ve been registered, and that’s that!’

“Then she came out with the killer question, the one that gets everyone who answers to the affirmative wondering if they ought to back down and run away.

“’DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?’ she asked in capital letters.

And I did know who she was. Of course I did! She was already just about famous as a politician who nobody liked despite her outrageous physical beauty. And already I was preparing to forget the presence of body parts in her recycling bin, though I did wonder who had donated them to her. And so, I could tell, was my line manager.

‘Back to your jobs, lads,’ he said as though all that had happened was the sun had started shining or a child had been born.

“And that’s what, to our shame, we did. We went back to our jobs and finished our round and not one of us mentioned fingers or toes or wrinkled detached willies ever again. Until now, that is, because I’m here mentioning them. And we did that because we knew precisely who the woman was.

“She was Edna Tomkins and hidden inside her rare beauty was even rarer evil.

“But I did keep my eyes open for reports of people complaining that they had body parts missing, and the papers were full of them. A newspaper boy here, a vicar there, a charlady somewhere else, and saddest of all was a handsome young pop-star who said he was suddenly and painfully sterile. But now that the b***h is dead I want my experiences to be reported, and that’s why I’m here.

“To tell the world how glad I am that she’s dead. And how right it was if somebody killed her, though the papers called it suicide...”

“It was the Daily Mail,” murmured the prostitute, “and everyone knows it tells lies...”

© Peter Rogerson 28.09.18