A Short True Story from a Rubbish Dump

…first new writing after three years of curating other people’s soul stories here on Substack

I’m on the second week of sudden, unexpected bedrest at the end of an overfull few years. And a writer who has stopped writing even a diary since my mother died last August.

This is the first time I’ve felt able to tell a short story of my own such as this in the three years since my memoir was published and I began instead curating stories here on Substack from its readers.

It’s a shy feeling to tell even a short tale again after so long, so if anyone reads this and takes time to respond or even share with others on Notes (which I never got the hang of): thank you.

[I wrote it first just now as thread straight into Bluesky - a new place for me, where I’m only playing by posting photos of rooks from my collective Birds of Firle project. It came out fast, with each paragraph just fitting into the character limit: a right and good feeling after the seasons of painstaking editing that went into making The Cure for Sleep. I’ve resisted tinkering with it, though there are typos which I’ll tidy as I find them.]

A Short True Story from a Rubbish Dump

It’s August back on my home coast in Cornwall. The worst season to be trying - alone - to clear my late mother’s small flat a year after her death, but the first time I’ve felt able to return there. It’s the place I got her into during pandemic when she finally - at almost eighty - overcame the shame of ‘what others would think’ and left a terrible forty-year second marriage.

I was clearing her flat alone because I’m an only child and I wanted my two teenagers and kind husband to have a gentle summer after so many years of emergency care of elders (my mother was dying all through mid 22 to mid 23, then my father-in-law began his dying time and was buried in June this year). I was also doing it alone because I was ashamed of how few good memories were in her remaining possessions for me.

Because my mother and stepfather spent my childhood smashing things in temper, I am unable to break even a plate in anger or to mistreat the kind of flashy tacky stuff they spent their money on. So I knew I would have to handsort hundreds of ugly-to-me objects, carefully rehoming them with her few friends and taking then the larger part to the Recycling Centre some miles out of town.

It took an hour to get out through the town’s holiday traffic to the dump with the first of what would be many loads of clothes, ornaments, furniture. A staff member came over to offer help - which I refused, smiling, saying I was strong and also what I was doing and why I’d therefore be there again and again for the next four days…

He was younger than me and said he hadn’t had to face that yet but saw a lot of people here doing it. They usually just tried to throw it all in the main skip for burning. So I explained - still smiling (in that odd way we do when talking about sad things) that she and her man, my stepfather, broke a lot of stuff so that I don’t.

And so the days took on a rhythm. I cleared one cupboard after another, carefully, carefully. Went slow to the dump, and each time the man was there, and he smiled but let me do all my own heavy lifting. Told me, when I asked, where to put each type of thing so it wouldn’t just be automatically smashed or burned.

Then it was the last day. Rainy, cold. Even harder to keep going back and forth. At my first trip out he asked when my very last one would be. I said I’d be making two more, I thought. On the next one, our pattern continued. I lifted, he smiled, pointed the way. Driving away, I realised I didn’t really need to make a further and last trip. The remaining few boxes I could bring back up country and sort at home in Sussex. No need to do another painful slow drive through the holiday traffic, and I was exhausted.

But the man had asked several times when my last visit would be and it felt discourteous not to bother going back for a proper goodbye. So I drove back through the rain with my last few boxes.

This time I let him do the lifting, and thanked him for keeping my spirits up all the long weekend of doing such lonely work. And this is when he said that he was only there for a quick site visit the day I first arrived, but changed then his shift pattern to be there for me for all weekend…

…and that while he’d watched me be so careful with china ornaments, crockery, knives, forks, more: the one thing I’d been tossing into the skip for burning were photos. Ones of the man he supposed was my step-father. But also ones of me - as a child, a bride, a mother of young children…

…and it had made him sad to see so many beautiful photos go into the rubbish like that but knew it wasn’t his place to rescue them. Except perhaps this one? Maybe I hadn’t meant for this one to go?

It was one of me aged about forty laughing by a stream I was damming with my children when they were still small.

Children, he said, who didn’t look serious like I did in the all photos of young-me I’d thrown into the skip.

Tanya Shadrick aged ten: one of the Polaroid photos I would have thrown away when clearing my mother’s flat - it fell out later from paperwork of hers I had to keep. A birthday morning after another terrible night.

How can I thank you? I asked. Meaning all of it - the photo, yes, but also the noticing, and just being there quiet in the background of all that hard lonely labour.

Can I bring you back some lunch? Pasty? Beer?

Could you just give me a hug? He said back.

Of course, I said. And we did - a real one, like old friends give. Not a quick thing with those fast pats on the back which signal for release but a proper bear hug. The sort that says oh you good person I’m glad I’ve met.

And then I’m driving away from this wholly good thing, with the dreaded work of sorting my mother’s left-over life behind me. But I start to feel bad.

What if he’d also found my name and home address in the paperwork I’d tossed away? What if - old, exhausted and unmade-up though I was - he began bothering me? And my hug of gratitude was seen as some kind of invitation?

I drove on, panic rising. Stupid stupid me. Why didn’t I just go to the dump all weekend and keep my mouth shut. Be an invisible fifty-something woman. Why all the stories. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Making a fuss about nothing always…

The man never bothered me afterwards. He was just a kind person who quietly chose to keep me company through a hard few days.

And the feelings of shame and fear that flooded through me as I drove away were those of the kid whose face I’d been throwing into the skip for days…

The one who sort-of smiled in a school photo one year when I’d been up all night in a remote countryside bungalow hearing a man and woman fighting, adults who had no care for how it was for me to be a child in those rooms with them. The child who was told I was making things up when I tried to get help.

And there’s no neat ending to this. Dumping the photos, being helped and hugged, not being stalked afterwards - I’m not cured fully and forever of the past. Life’s not that neat, even though people raised in chaos like me will always want it to be.