Free Trash by Andy Mulligan Page A

his shorts and shirt were ingrained with so many months’ dirt they were stiff on his body.
    The looks I got walking him into the boys’ clothing department were something I’ll never forget. And the time it took him to choose was also something I remember. I’d asked the taxi to wait, thinking,
Shorts and a shirt – five minutes of shopping
. Unfortunately it wasn’t like that. Gardo wanted to take his time, and he was the most intent, careful shopper I’d ever seen. He wanted jeans, and he wanted the most expensive kind. I could not pay western prices for something that I knew was probably made for peanuts in this very city, so I managed to talk him down to a cheaper pair. Then he wanted a long basketball shirt, which I thought was totally wrong for the impression we were hoping to create. I took him to a rack with formal shirts on it, and he turned his nose up at all of them. I was beginning to get flustered by now, so again we compromised. We chose a T-shirt, which he insisted must be too big. Then we chose a more formal shirt with a collar, to wear over the top.
    He tried it all on, and we went to the checkout – or I thought we were heading that way, but suddenly I was inthe shoe section, and he was looking at trainers. Again, the prices stunned me, but I had to admit that a smartly dressed boy with bare feet – dirty bare feet – is not going to be convincing.
    We chose a medium-priced pair, and when we got to the checkout I put it all on my credit card. The reward, of course, was that I had never seen a boy so happy in my life, and – I have to say – so handsome. He emerged from the changing room, and he was simply no longer a Behala dumpsite boy! He was taller, he was bursting with confidence and smiles … he was even walking differently. I could not resist kissing him, which made the shop assistants howl with laughter.
    We got to the taxi. I gulped when I saw the meter. And on we went.

2
    Father Juilliard.
    I feel I ought to say that had I known what Olivia had agreed to do, I would have intervened and prevented it. I would have seen it for the scam that it was. The problem is, you never see them coming, and six years here in Behala have taught me that some of our children are the best liars in the world. I guess it is survival. It’s awful to say it, but … trust. You just shouldn’t put yourself in a position where trust could be betrayed.
    I am the worst, though. While they were working on Olivia, they had very special plans for me.
    Raphael and Gardo were smart. But little Jun … Rat. What he did took my breath away.
    Things were about to get very dangerous indeed.

3
    Olivia. And yes, I know. It was stupid.
    The taxi took me into a part of the city that was more squalid than I’d ever seen. You may say that’s strange, coming from someone who works in Behala, but it’s not. Behala is a huge, monstrous, filthy, steaming rubbish dump and you cannot believe human beings are allowed to work there, let alone live there. Rubbish and shacks – it’s extreme, it’s horrible and I will never forget the stink.
    Behala also makes you want to weep, because it looks so like an awful punishment that will never end – and if you have any imagination, you can see the child and what he is doomed to do for the rest of his life. When you see the old man, too weak to work, propped in a chair outside his shack, you think,
That is Raphael in forty years. What could possibly change?
These children are doomed to breathe the stink all day, all night, sifting the effluent of the city. Ratsand children, children and rats, and you sometimes think they have pretty much the same life.
    Colva, however, was something else again.
    We drove on cracked roads. The pavements were broken, and it looked as if there’d recently been an earthquake. We drove between low-rise flats, strewn with washing and electricity cables. There were people everywhere, mainly sitting as if they had nothing ever to do. The taxi’s