The trolley people

On Monday mornings, the refuse collectors come; but, before that, armed with shopping trolleys stocked with the miscellanea of street lives, quite men and women drift from house to house, bin to bin, and sift the rubbish bags for something precious. There is rot, stench, there are flies; but deftly they untie the knots which neat homeowners use to hide old secrets and dirty lies, then reach inside the waste, and there they find invisible ships that bear cargo from exotic middle-class lands. Each knot is tied again, and so to the next. It is far too easy to pray: God bless the trolley people with half-eaten tins of tuna fish a few slices of stale bread and worn-out shoes and plastic bags to mend them and strands of cat-gut for shoelaces, that they may be well-fed, well-shod, when they move on and leave us in our comfortable places.

 

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