VPLA 2024
Garbage

Title: Garbage

Author: Hayley Elliott-Ryan

Photography by Sarah Walker

Judges’ report

Skinny is growing up in a tight-knit community in the remote coastal town of Tinker. Her mum has left, her dad is mostly away fishing, her aunt is distant and indifferent to her. The only adult looking out for Skinny is her grandma who is suffering from dementia. Flip is a few years older than Skinny, but the girls strike up a friendship. Flip’s mum is a social worker and her interest in Skinny’s welfare will have ripple effects through both girls’ lives.

The story unfolds in dual timelines – Skinny returning to Tinker after a long absence on the day of her grandma’s funeral and, the before, where we learn of each family member’s backstory and what lead them to be unable to care for one another. While the story is non-linear and circuitous, it remains easily engaging thanks to Elliott-Ryan’s quality prose and distinct voice. The judges agreed that a strong sense of place is a cornerstone of this tender story.

Extract

In the tideland she found Nikes. They were waterlogged but her size and in good nick, except they had feet in them. She squatted down. The skin was greyish. It smelled fish-rotten and came off in rubbery flakes. A low fog was crawling across the beach. It reflected in the pools and made the tideland look like melting snow. Further down the beach, towards the long jetty, a silhouette of a man threw a ball for a tiny dog. It skittered through the white puddles soundlessly.

If she turned the right shoe upside down, the foot stayed in. It had probably swelled in the water, although it would not be hard to dig out with a stick. One clean anklebone was poking out, so she placed a finger on the tip and tried to jiggle it around. Then she turned the other shoe upside down, but the feet didn’t budge. She took a Minty from her garbage bag, unwrapped it and sucked it down to a speck, then went back into the bag again and rummaged for something to wrap the shoes in.

To the west, industrial chimneys pumped out smoke that looked like gunk from a shower drain and ahead there were yellow stone houses with high telly masts, all linked together with wires and wooden poles. She slung the bag over her shoulder and hiked up the cliff trail away from town, towards the campground.

Behind her, a sliver of light pried the sea and the dark morning apart, and a coastguard vessel carved its way across the bay.

From the jetty, fishermen watched her walk up the cliff until she became a dim shadow. They stood in a row with their lines unattended, the lures glinting from where they were caught down in the weed beds. Standing with them, a lanky garbagewoman had stopped her collection and followed the girl through a pair of Featherlight binoculars. She lowered them slowly and squinted into the distance where the figure had vanished. The girl had been wearing a t-shirt and black jeans with tears in the knees. She was a scrawny thing, her hair seemed a dark scribble done in the air above her head, and she wasn’t wearing shoes. There was something unfinished about her, the way she moved and the way she looked, like a knotted rope undoing itself.

‘Who was that then?’ the Garbagewoman asked, but no one seemed to know. She looked back at the cliffs again, but the girl was gone.

Behind her, the coastguard vessel docked at the end of the jetty. Without turning, she knew it was Dashiel Penzance, red bearded and in full uniform, stepping with the confidence of a seafaring man from his boat to the landing. The fishermen looked up and nodded to him.

‘Anything to report?’ He walked between them, peering into their empty buckets.

They shook their heads and turned back to their lines.

‘Yeah, me neither. A quiet morning on the seas,’ he said, striding to where the garbagewoman had paused. ‘What about that girl then? He pointed at the Featherlights around her neck. Did you get a good perv?’

‘Somewhat,’ she said. ‘Don’t know her though.’

Ahead of them were two metal bins next to the bench area people used to clean fish. Even though the fishermen were not supposed to put fish guts in there, they always did. The garbagewoman was only rostered to empty them once a month, so by the time she got around to it, the contents were mucusy—soupish. She’d told Dash that the night before the task, she’d started having these nightmares and she’d wake up smelling the rotting fish before she even got to the jetty. Last night, she was inside a whale, wading through its slurry of decomposing organs—so this morning he’d turned up in what she assumed was an act of misguided chivalry. He had a massive head and a mouth that seemed to stretch all the way to his ears. ‘Alright, alright,’ he said smiling. ‘I’m here for my duties.’

‘You can stop grinning like that,’ she said.

He lifted the lid and immediately retched, just like she knew he would.

‘You don’t have to,’ she said, but he shook his head, turned back and started removing the bag, then retched again. It was typical. He was spewing into the wind and she was holding her breath and pulling the garbage bags from their bins like she always did. ‘I told you not to put your stinking fish guts in here, didn’t I?’ she yelled. The fishermen did not look at her, but shared side-eyed smirks at Dash heaving over the railing.
‘You right?’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said. ‘Just doing my duties.’ He grabbed one of the bags from her and slung it over his shoulder. ‘You know, I wonder,’ he said, looking into the middle distance. ‘Because of the funeral and all …’

They headed down the jetty some more before he opened his mouth again. She knew him well enough to know he couldn’t help himself. He was a terrible gossip. The kind that would lie just to fill a silence.

‘I wonder,’ he said again. ‘It couldn’t have been Skinny?’

‘On the beach? Nah,’ she said, as if she hadn’t been thinking the same thing. ‘No. I mean, I suppose so. I suppose it could have been anyone.’ But inside her stomach was knotting, because she had thought it when she’d seen the girl on the beach, just like she’d thought it every Christmas or funeral, and every holiday season when the town attracted a few confused looking tourists. She’d thought it for years, until it was less a thought than an impulse to look for something familiar in every strange girl’s face through her binoculars. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said again.

When they reached her truck, she lobbed the bag into the back with too much force and it split. Fish guts the consistency of snot flew out and oozed down the side of the tray.

‘Too bad,’ said Dash. His bag sailed in and landed with a neat thud. ‘You’ll be needing to rinse that down.’ He banged on the side of the truck and smiled.

She fished around in her pockets for her keys.

‘So, will I be seeing you there this arvo?’

‘What?’ the garbagewoman yelled. She was in the truck, starting the engine.

‘At the funeral?’

About the author

Hayley Elliott-Ryan is a fiction writer and researcher from Corhanwarrabul (Mt Dandenong). She holds a PhD in creative writing from Deakin University, where she works as a Lecturer in Writing, Literature and Culture. She is a founding editor of Cinder Journal, WORDLY Magazine, and the chair for Verandah Literary Anthology. Her writing has been shortlisted for the Right Now Poetry Prize and Judith Rodriguez Prize, and her theatrical collaborations have been performed at Chapel off Chapel as part of Melbourne Fringe Festival. Hayley is the percussionist and tap dancer for local pre-apocalyptic indie rock band, Leonardo’s Robot, and a researcher for the European Cultural Centre, Deakin University Biennale project: Venetian Bind 2024. When Hayley isn’t writing you can find her scavenging around Wantirna Transfer Station, tap dancing at Fairfield train station, or squidding off the Flinders jetty.