Garbage Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

from a boring age she had no interest in.
    Boring, boring, boring.
    â€˜Yes, mother. Of course I’m coming. Don’t rush me all the time.’
    â€˜Sorry, dear.’
    And don’t fucking apologise for everything.
    The soft footsteps retreated, a wound in their rhythm. Agatha felt guilt and disgust uncoil in her throat.
    The name Agatha was synonymous with boring. It was also synonymous with ancient, grey-haired people. It was no name for a seventeen-year-old woman of the third millennium. Plenty of other girls her age had used their middle names to escape the stigma of their first names. But Betty Smithfield sounded so similarly awful there was no point. Shit, what had her parents been thinking about when they named her? They’d refused her entreaties to let her change her names. She vowed to do it anyway as soon as she left home. It would be goodbye Agatha Betty. Maybe she’d even change her surname, begin a second life. In the meantime the contraction ‘Aggie’ was the best she could do.
    Downstairs, they’d all be sitting there already. Waiting. Don would have started eating even though their mother and father would have told him not to. Whenever she saw her brother, he was eating but there was no sign of it on his frame. The way he looked he might have been wandering the streets for a month. Nothing on him but sinew and gaunt, tight muscle. If she ate half as much as him she’d turn into a walrus.
    She swore softly and swung her legs off the bed. She smoothed down her clothes, feeling the gentleness of her own curves and enjoying it. She looked in the mirror. She was beautiful and she knew it. She had no idea why she was stuck here in the suburbs of a town where the future held no promise. There was no existence here which she could aspire to, other than single-motherhood and government handouts and daytime TV. Gossip and jealousy, binge drinking and bitter tears as life stole her looks. She wasn’t so stupid as to believe her beauty would last forever. If she wanted to use it, she had to get started. The sooner she left, the sooner her second life, her real life, could begin.
    It was the way out she hadn’t quite found yet. She knew it wasn’t as simple as hitching a ride to London and hoping for the best. She’d heard of other girls who had done as much. Some came back, beaten by the city and its takers, happy to sink back into the mould society had prepared for them, glad to be safe and obscure. Others had not returned but by the silence they left behind them, it was clear they had not succeeded. Not succeeded at anything except deviating from their grand schemes, succeeded instead at being exploited, succeeded at failure. It was no wonder they never came back, dragging the miasma of their filthy misadventures behind them like the smell of sickness. What family could live down such prodigality around here, where everyone talked and anyone could be destroyed by rumour without even knowing they were falling from grace?
    No. She was not going to follow that path. She was going to plan it and she was going to achieve her goals through careful preparation. There was a right way of leaving town and she would find it. She would leave Agatha Betty Smithfield far behind and she would transform. When she did finally come back, it would be with her head held high and against the odds. Those who weren’t proud of her would be nauseous with envy.
    Knowing this made it possible to walk down the stairs of her family’s uninspiring house, a house like too many others on the estate with an uninspiring family to match. Knowing this, she could take her place at the table and smile and eat the bland shit her mother cooked each day. She could do it because it was all part of her plan. Her time was coming. In months or weeks or days, the opportunity she was waiting for would present itself. There was a shiver of excitement in her stomach.
    Richard Smithfield looked at her over