MARTY HAD BOUGHT three packs of extra-strong rubbish bags. The cheap ones from the pound shop just wouldn’t cut it. He had started in the back corridor where he would fill two bags at a time and then cycle them all the way to the dump, the bags tied to the handlebars of his BMX. Then, when he was there, all the way at the other side of town, he would chuck them over the dump wall as no one under sixteen was allowed on-site. Which was stupid, but they were the rules and there was a weaselly little man in a high-visibility jacket who kept on trying to catch him. He’d managed eight whole bags so far, but to be honest he hadn’t made a dent in the stuff. His mother was concentrating on sorting out the kitchen, but every time she seemed to be making progress, more stuff would just seem to appear. It was like everything was compressed together and the more you cleared, the more stuff you found.

The worst thing, however, about the whole exercise was that to get to the dump he had to pass the housing estate on the other side of town where all the “new-sneaker kids” lived. They’d noticed him passing back and forth on his bike and had come to hang about on the corner waiting for him. There was Gerry, the thinnest and the tallest, who always had the new phone and the new games, and then a shorter dark-haired one called Owen—he was a pain in the backside. Marty didn’t know the others. Of course, they were going to laugh; Marty wasn’t expecting them to do anything else, but they were also shouting out horrible, nasty things.

“Your mum still alive in that house?”

“Bet she’s dead under all that rubbish…”

“Look! It’s trash carrying trash!”

Marty kept on riding his bike, swearing like a trooper under his breath all the way. He tried going a different route, but the road still brought him back to this one-way road to the dump. It was hard enough as it was, balancing two bags of rubbish and cycling forward at the same time. He’d try to fill each bag to the same level so that the weight was equal, that much he had learned in physics, but it was still a tricky operation without people shouting things that made your blood boil. If he and his mum could only make the place presentable. They could convince the council that they were doing something. Taking action. Maybe that would be enough to make them leave them alone for another little while.