Gone...

Now, we’d been in Australia for a while and we decided that we needed to find somewhere more permanent to live. We could afford it because I was working and besides, Dare was driving us nuts. It was bad enough living with his banging-about self, let alone with Bruce Willis and the rest of the cast of Pulp Fiction. I swear, if he’d banged another door I was going to shoot him. And, you know what? I could have done that.
So, we looked around and eventually we found this nice little apartment, or unit as they are rather unromantically called here (unit always makes me think it’s some kind of prison block. “Mr Coultas? Yes, you’ll find him in Unit Four, Cell Block Eight”).
It was a block of only five, built about 1965 and it looked nice and peaceful. I hate to say it again, but it just shows how wrong you can be.
Every Tuesday, for example, the garbos came around about three in the morning – yes, that’s in the middle of the night, but what can you do.
I reckon not many of us are fans of the cacophony of revving diesel trucks, tipped and smashed bottles, and the clatter of dustbins being thrown back on the nature strip – except that is for the old couple who lived next door.
They were rubbish experts and in my expert opinion (I have a mate of a mate who knows a doctor) they were bonkers.
Now, they were both deaf, but just to make things even more difficult for themselves they’d stand at opposite ends of their unit and shout at each other. This is one of their typical exchanges:
Him: D’you know him!?
Her: Know who?
Him: That bloke!
Her: What bloke?
Him: That bloke up the road!
Her: What road?
Him: Eh? I’m talking about that bloke!
Her: I know.
Him: You know him!?
Her: Who?
Him: That bloke!
It never got much more exciting than that.
Mr Garbo always wore the same clothes; a shirt, tracksuit trousers and a cap. They were a colour even Paul Theroux couldn’t describe. All I can say is, they were dark.
The first time I saw him out and about he was doubled over half inside a big rubbish bin in the local shopping centre, foraging like a tramp. He was engrossed with pulling litter out of the bin and putting it into the plastic bags he carried. When he came back home after one of these regular trips he said to his wife, “Look! Look what I found! Plastic bags! Loads of ‘em! Just thrown away!”
Another day he came back and said, “Look! I found this on the bus! Just left there!”
“What is it?”
“Chinese! Chinese meal! Half eaten! Just left there! On the bus! I picked it up! It’s in a plastic bag! See that?! Couldn’t believe it! Just left there! Half eaten! Let’s wash the bag!”
That’s the thing - Mrs Garbo would wash all the plastic bags her husband brought home and then she’d hang them out to dry on the washing line.
We were not surrounded by the chimes of wind bells or the gentle cawing of the native Australian pigeon or the rousing call of the Kookaburra, no, we were in plastic bag hell.
When the wind gets inside 40 or 50 plastic bags hanging out to dry on the line boy oh boy do you hear them. It is a sound I will always remember. It is a sound that will haunt me.
Alongside the plastic bag line, Mr Garbo also brought home aluminium cans, once again rescued from rubbish bins far and wide. Every Monday he spent the entire evening outside the back door stomping on the cans, turning them into small pieces of flat aluminium. This too is not the most pleasant of noises, not when it goes on for eight hours.
Now, I’m all for recycling, don’t get me wrong, but we are talking obsession here, we are talking rubbish-itis, we are talking being utterly bonkers.
On Tuesday mornings there was something of a party atmosphere in the air, well at least in their unit there was.
“The garbos! They’re coming! Coming soon! Let’s help ‘em sort the rubbish! See if they got any o’them plastic bags we can wash!”
So, they got up even earlier on Tuesdays, usually around 3.30am. Now, call me old fashioned but I consider this to be the middle of the night.
They’d pace up and down outside the bedroom window, going up and down the driveway, looking up and down the road for the garbo men and their trucks, cocking their ears, trying to hear the diesel engine coming to them on the breeze, heralding the appearance of the men in waterproof dungarees. Mr Garbo talked loudly, excitedly.
“I think I hear them! They’re coming! Oh no! They’re not! Not yet! But they will!” And she would hiss, “Quiet!” And he goes, “Okay! Okay! If I’m quiet we’ll hear them before they arrive! Okay! Fine! Quiet! That’s what we’ll do! Keep quiet!”
Of course, by this time I’d be wide awake and ready to explode.
One Tuesday in the dead of night I looked out of the window - after all I wasn’t going to get any more sleep - and I saw Mr Garbo do a little jig and raise his baseball cap high in the air and whoop out loud. He’d caught a whiff of decay.
Then he saw the garbos coming in their green and white trucks. Mrs Garbo clasped her hands together and smiled insanely and then they both hugged each other and danced on the spot.
You’d have thought relief had arrived for Mafeking.
When the trucks finally pulled up I saw no evidence that the professional garbo men paid them any attention at all, but Mr and Mrs Garbo tried to direct operations, excitedly pointing out plastic bottles they’d crushed, plastic bags they’d washed and a mountain of aluminium that each week was sufficient to make a small Audi.

to be continued...