Walk with a dustcart
Jan Savage


I am walking behind the dustcart that takes our rubbish every Thursday, following this strange, cumbersome beast as it makes its faltering way down our street and the next. It’s a homage of sorts: the dustmen’s gang leader – a humorous, robust-looking man called Dave - died suddenly last week, a few days before he took retirement. I didn’t really know him, but liked his sharp cheerfulness, the way he dared to call me darling, how he turned a blind eye when my rubbish was over the limit, and how he waved from the cab when our paths crossed well beyond these streets. And I took pleasure in the way we both knew that this camaraderie was not entirely unrelated to the matter of a Christmas bonus.

As I walk I listen to the sounds of the dustcart, the disjointed song that was the backdrop to this man’s working life: the clunking of gears, the screeching and sighing of brakes, the jolting and jarring, the bleeping of reverse gear, the scrape of bins being dragged over paving, the sound of harder, then softer objects falling into the mouth of the cart, the men’s single-syllable, undecipherable cries to the driver – Wuerp, Wuerp……..

I watch the mounds of rubbish – the rags, the egg shells, old shoes, juice cartons - churning over inside the cart’s craw in unchosen intimacy. It reminds me of another death – my father’s – and how his body had to share an undertaker’s hatchback with an unknown corpse on their way to the funeral parlour. Perhaps it is the small satisfaction of this memory that makes me relish the slightly sweet, fetid smell that is the wake of the dustcart. Or perhaps it is that, in respect for Dave, I need to step in his footsteps, to smell what he smelt, and inhale the odour of our street’s collective waste, the entwined remnants of what we once craved, what we devoured and what we have chosen, often absent-mindedly, to reject.