Trash [New Year's Extravaganza]
Jan 12, 2019 15:49:11 GMT
Post by girl-like-substance on Jan 12, 2019 15:49:11 GMT
Another Extravaganza fic! This one's for Manchee, based on this prompt:
It started out as just a vignette, but then I got carried away and it became a whole one-shot instead. Warnings for strong language and alcohol. That's about it!
Someone adopting and loving a Pokémon that is typically viewed as "less-than" or "unoriginal" or "trash"
TRASH
Honestly, Rav hates London. He tells this to people he meets: I actually can't stand this place, but you know, where else am I going to go to work in this industry? Back when he was a kid, doing the rounds as an intern – Oneworld (who didn't bloody pay him), Duckworth (who barely bloody paid him), the ubiquitous couple of weeks at Penguin (with Viking, who at least did pay him) – people used to say that he'd come to like it better when he got used to it.
But it's been eight years and three actual real jobs now, and he is used to it, and he still hates it. Crystal chandeliers indoors and someone dying on the steps outside, sky-high rent and mould behind the walls, ageing public transport and cops who watch brown guys with backpacks like racist hawks. London. Like everywhere else, but more so.
“Gotta stop thinking of this, man,” he advises himself, waiting for the lights to change so he can cross the vehicular hellscape of Shoreditch High Street. “You're gonna give yourself an ulcer.”
The lights change, the timer starts ticking. Rav crosses, leaving the City dragon marker behind, and heads down the little graffiti'd alley leading onto Fleur De Lis Street. Two pigeons, each missing several toes, are pecking hopefully at litter in case any of it turns out to be edible; before they can be disappointed, a glossy grey rock pidgey dives in to shove them out of the way with a weak Gust and snatch the non-food for itself.
Rav had a pidgey like that, once. Back on his trainer journey. She evolved just before he challenged Lisette at the Brighton gym, and then he lost anyway.
He doesn't have any pokémon any more, though.
Trapped at another crossing, forced to stare into the heart of hipster darkness at the junction with Commercial Street, Rav considers that maybe he's just bitter about being here at all. It's a Saturday, and he wouldn't even be outside if he hadn't left the book whose press release he needed to write ahead of the Monday mail-out – the book he hasn't actually read yet – on his desk. Honestly, his plans for the day had only stretched as far as his Switch, his sofa and a giant bag of Maltesers; Rav considers the fact that he actually had to get dressed something of an insult.
He sighs, turns left at the Nando's onto the ugly little stub of a street that takes you into the narrow web of roads between here and Brick Lane. It's not that bad, is it? He probably needed the walk more than he needed the Maltesers, after all. The days when he could eat anything and not get any fatter are long since past now.
These side streets are always slightly depressing: high brick walls, narrow pavements, last night's bottles and abandoned kebabs. Office space here is eye-wateringly expensive, but the streets still look like shit. Once, coming home late, Rav saw a rattata eating a dead pigeon in the shadows behind a bin. He told Edward about it, a few months before they broke up, and he shuddered fastidiously and asked why on earth he'd felt the need to tell him that giant rats were eating bloody birds right there in the street.
Anyway. He's here now, turning the last corner, and there's the office, just a few yards down the street. In and out, that's the thing. Home by lunchtime, and the weekend can proceed as planned. Video games, chocolate, a door firmly closed on the capital and its sins.
He scowls. Someone's left a pile of trash outside the office again. There's a block of flats next door, and sometimes people's rubbish wanders, to put it politely, but after Greta went round to have a go at the residents, he thought that problem was over. People tend not to piss Greta off more than once; when she gets angry, she gets angry, and her malamar partner is frankly terrifying anyway.
But evidently there's still someone dumping stuff where they're not supposed to. Which, fine, that's bad enough, but it's also attracted a pidgey and two rats, which seem to be fighting over who gets to tear into the bin bag and winkle out its delicious rotting innards. All this, right outside the front door.
Rav likes his job, he really does. It's a point of pride that he was never one of those numberless kids who want to work in Editorial, that he always knew that Publicity was the department for him. But sometimes you push through hipster hell to see three animals beating each other up over a pile of decomposing garbage right outside your destination, and you just have no choice but to reconsider every life decision you ever made that might have led you here.
“Bloody hell,” he mutters, and trudges unenthusiastically on towards the office. “All right, you lot, show's―”
He breaks off suddenly. Something's not right here. The rats are biting, yes, and the pidgey is firing off little bursts of wind with each wingbeat – but they're not attacking each other. It's almost like they're aiming for the bag itself, he thinks, and then he hears it cry out in a thin, strangled voice, mouldering arms whipping weakly at the pidgey's face, and before he knows what he's doing something quickens and grows hot inside him.
“Oi!” he yells, breaking into a run. “Leave that alone!”
The rats scatter at once; as a pokémon the pidgey is braver, squawks at him and flares its wings, but even it isn't bold enough to risk getting into a fight with something ten times its size, and when it sees Rav isn't slowing down it kicks away from the pavement and flaps up heavily towards the rooftops.
“Hey,” says Rav urgently, bending over the pile of rubbish. “You all right?”
It shuffles around, fixes jaundiced eyes on his face.
Sssgghkkkk, it hisses, feeling the rents in its plastic skin with tentacles of stained newspaper and damp cardboard.
Rav's brain catches up with him then, as he stares down at the vile little creature he just saved, and asks him what he thinks he's doing.
And he is forced to reply that he is, apparently, rescuing a trubbish.
“Well,” he says, watching its movements, seeing its pain in the way it holds its limbs. “Uh … shit. Look. Let me take you to the Pokémon Centre.”
Is he actually doing this? Is he actually going to touch this thing?
He reaches out. The trubbish does not bite or whip or spit acid. It doesn't do anything at all except stare.
He picks it up, trying not to think about the smell or what its insides might be doing to his jacket, and hurries back towards the City, towards Old Street and the Northern line.
The London Pokémon Centre is near Waterloo, right? Somewhere just along from the South Bank, near the gym and the rest of the trainer industry stuff. Change at London Bridge, take the Jubilee line west.
But that will take time. And the trubbish – well, it's just shed a lump of something gristly from a hole in its side, and it's far too calm in his arms for a wild pokémon; if Rav's trainer journey is anything to go by, it should be hissing and thrashing, demanding he give it space for at least a week or two before it consents to more than the minimum of physical contact.
“Ravinder Singh. I'll spell it for you: R-A-V-I-N-D-E-R. Singh like singing, but with an H at the end.”
(One of the few things his parents had ever agreed on: we'll give our kids good Sikh names, yes, but there will be absolutely no -preets, -meets or -jeets.)
“Yeah, I can wait.”
(Scratching fruitlessly at the stains on his jacket. It's his favourite, the one he coveted for months and finally got himself as a present when he landed the job at Ramayana. The one that caught Edward's eye that night at the bar. But he supposes lives have to take precedence over fashion.)
“Thanks. It's, um. Been a morning.”
(The coffee is black and bitter. He considers asking for milk or sugar or something, anything to make this thing slightly more palatable, but in the end he just forces it down, trying to appear grateful.)
“Uh … Elaine, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, her name is Elaine.”
Seventeen years ago, Rav stopped being a pokémon trainer. He took two badges home to Slough – the Rainbow Badge from Brighton, the Cloud Badge from Glastonbury – and let his partners go. They joined him to get stronger, after all. They'd got that strength now, and he didn't have the time to keep training them. He had tuition, school, more tuition; he had to do well, after all, had to go to university and become a pharmacist or doctor or accountant and marry a nice Punjabi girl and have multiple sons.
That particular parental plan would never pan out, obviously. But at thirteen, Rav didn't know that, and so he returned his pokémon to the places he'd caught them, and for seventeen years after pokémon were just something he saw with other people or making their own way in the world. Parts of lives that were not his own. Even after he moved out and alienated his parents, even in the lonely pit of those two long years before they finally realised he was serious about both publishing and men and decided that they might as well rebuild some bridges, he never really thought of finding another partner. There was just too much else on his mind.
But, well, now there's a trubbish in his flat.
As far as reintroductions to the world of pokémon go, this is most definitely not a gentle one.
On Sunday morning, he wakes to a weird sweet smell like rotting trash, and, after a few moments spent lying there, sniffing and frowning, remembers what happened yesterday. He sits up abruptly, overcome by a sudden intense need to make sure that he didn't just dream it – and there she is, calmly nibbling at the edges of the newspaper nest he made for her to sleep in last night. Elaine.
His new partner.
“Ugh,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “You reek. Should've put you in the kitchen or something.”
Elaine tears off a tiny piece of paper and licks it up with a tongue that looks to Rav uncannily like a piece of old shoe leather.
Ghhhhkk, she says, patting the tips of her boneless arms together like a child clapping their enthusiasm. Rav stares, caught off-guard by the cuteness of the gesture, and then he drops his head into his hand and sighs.
“Okay, fine,” he says. “Stay here, yeah? I really don't need that smell while I'm making tea.”
But when he rolls out of bed and heads for the kitchen, Elaine whines and toddles after him, trailing her arms behind her like two huge, dead slugs, and as he waits for the kettle to boil he lifts her onto the counter to give her a spoonful of her medicine. He's prepared to be forceful about it – Gita got sick once and was not a good patient – but evidently trubbish like mysterious foul-smelling liquids; she leans in and engulfs the spoon in one big bite.
“Look, this is just till you get better,” he says warningly. “Then you can, I dunno, go back and eat those rats or something.”
Elaine looks at him, wide-eyed. Something goes snap.
“What? Oh no, tell me you didn't …”
He withdraws the spoon from her mouth and sees that it's been bitten off partway along its length.
Well, she did seem unusually enthusiastic about the whole medicine thing.
“Jesus Christ,” he says, as she starts to chew. “Are you … you know what, fuck it, I got some plastic spoons somewhere.”
He tosses her the other half of the spoon and goes to finish the tea. Elaine slaps her arms happily against the counter, leaving gooey brown marks, and starts making a series of utterly awful noises that Rav has to assume is the sound of a metal rod being chewed into pieces.
He stands there, pouring and thinking and fighting the ridiculous feeling swelling in his chest. Elaine is literally the worst thing that's ever set foot in his flat, with the possible exception of his landlord. She stinks. She's leaking toxic sludge onto his counter. She ate his fucking spoon.
And she is not going back to the streets of Shoreditch, is she. Because that thing has happened, the one where you and a pokémon look at each other and something clicks and before you know it neither of you can walk away again, and as much as he knows it's a terrible, terrible decision, Rav doesn't think he has it in him to let her go.
He sighs, turns around to face Elaine, still working on the spoon and probing gingerly at her torn plastic skin.
“Better go to Wilko,” he mutters, watching her. “Buy you a ball before I get kicked off the Tube tomorrow.”
“Rav, what the hell is that?”
He does his best to smile.
“I got a new partner,” he says. “Her name's Elaine.”
Greta stares at him. Behind her, Rutherford the malamar looms, his tentacles coiling and uncoiling above her head like the snake-hair of Medusa.
“It's a trubbish,” she says.
The sound of a wheelchair moving comes to Rav's ears. A moment later, Priyamvada rolls out backwards from behind the bookcase.
“A trubbish?” she asks. “Did I hear that right?”
“Elaine,” Rav says again, as if the name is going to change anything. “Her name's Elaine.”
It's a good thing only Greta and Priyamvada are in yet; that limits the number of staring eyes to four. Six, if you count Rutherford, but Rav always does his best to not do that. Anything with tentacles makes his skin crawl.
At his feet, Elaine makes a selection of vile noises and starts sucking on the tip of one arm, the other trailing at her side and leaking into the carpet.
“Rav,” says Greta, brows knitting. “Seriously, mate, don't take this personally, but – what the actual fuck?”
He shrugs.
“Yeah, I've been asking myself that for the last forty-eight hours,” he says. “Look, I've got an air freshener for my desk, right? And a tray for her to sit on. Catch the slime.”
Priyamvada's eyes meet Greta's.
“Are you feeling all right?” she asks. “You haven't … breathed in any fumes or anything?”
In truth, Rav has breathed in a lot of fumes; Elaine's stink is hard to run away from. At least it doesn't stick, though. When she leaves a room, the smell leaves with her.
“Nope,” he says. “I'm fine. And, uh, I still haven't read The Brick House yet, so I'll just … get to work, if that's all right.”
“Huh? Oh. Yeah, course.” Greta shakes her head. “Course. I'll, uh, let you get on.”
Rav makes his way over to Publicity – which is just his desk; Ramayana is that kind of indie publisher, where each department is one person and they all share a single gratingly eager intern – and swivels in his chair to watch Elaine shuffle after him, her arms leaving a thin moist trail in the carpet. It's probably okay. Yesterday's Googling taught him that while trubbish can't stop themselves oozing, the fluid they exude is actually just water, mixed with whatever particles of trash they can't assimilate. Give Elaine food waste, and her secretions will be full of rotting organic material; give her paper, glass and metal, and the worst that she'll leave behind will be lint or grains of iron. She needs both kinds of trash to survive, apparently, but Rav is trying to time her meals so she doesn't leak the foul stuff while he's at work.
“C'mon,” he says, switching on his PC and tapping the tray. “Over here, yeah?”
Elaine peers at it curiously, then leans in for an experimental bite; Rav works out what she's doing just in time and snatches it away.
“No, get on it. No, not like – no, oh my god, here.”
He lifts her onto the tray as gently as he can, but she still screws up her eyes and hisses with the pressure on her wounds. She doesn't attack, though – hasn't since they met, in fact. Rav is glad, but a little weirded out; she's way more chilled-out than a creature who's spent her entire life skulking on the edges of human existence has any right to be.
“There,” he says, taking his hands away. “Just sit tight, yeah? And don't eat anything.”
Elaine looks up at him with wide, soulful eyes, as if to say that she's never eaten anything in her entire life and she can't even comprehend how he could be so cruel as to insinuate that she has. Rav sighs and looks up to see Priyamvada, watching him with a mug of tea clasped in her hands and her mouth slightly open.
“What?” he asks, a little more acidly than he meant.
“Sorry,” she says, looking sheepish. “I'm just not sure I've ever seen anyone touch a trubbish before.”
“You know it's mostly just water. The slime.”
“It better be, or Amrit will kill you.” She nods at the trail on the carpet. “Anyway, um … sorry. I can see you two get along.”
It isn't what he was expecting. For a moment, Rav just stares, unprepared, and then he leans back in his chair and smiles.
“No worries,” he says. “Honestly, I'm sorta in shock about this myself.”
Priyamvada chuckles, holds out a finger for her fletchling as he swoops down from his perch atop her bookcase.
“I'm really glad you said that, because for a second there I actually thought you'd just turned into a completely different person.” She sips her tea and transfers the fletchling to her desk lamp, freeing her hand to run a finger over his delicate little head. “Why Elaine, though? I mean I know you're a slave to Western hegemony and all, but Elaine?”
Rav smiles. It's a joke they have: he refuses to go by Ravinder, she refuses to let anyone shorten Priyamvada – so obviously he's abandoned his heritage and she's a stubborn contrarian more dedicated to her foreignness than to reality.
“I dunno,” he says, glancing down at Elaine, sucking her arm and staring dreamily into space. “Just popped into my head.”
“Oh, so your head is full of white girls, huh?”
She says it like she's mocking him, but of course she isn't; she knows about him, same as he knows about her. He's never quite had the courage to say it aloud, but in his head, Rav calls theirs the gayest corner in the office.
“You said it,” he says cheerfully, and she smiles, shakes her head.
“Okay, Rav, Elaine. Guess we'd better actually do some work before Amrit arrives to drag us down to the ninth circle of Monday meeting hell.”
“Yep,” he says, swivelling back to face his twenty-eight unread emails. “Guess we'd better do that.”
He doesn't look at Elaine again, but he can feel her attention, calm and curious. He remembers Gita, always fluttering around him, wanting to see everything he was up to even though she never understood any of it.
Amrit asks him what the hell he's doing, bringing a trubbish into the office. (Worse than bloody foxes, he says.) Radhika the intern looks at him and Elaine for a long moment and then smiles awkwardly, asks if he'd like any tea. Nelson, when he finally arrives – he only does three days a week, tidying the accounts – says Christ, Rav, you're not turning into one of those die-hard pokémon welfare nuts, are you? Even trubbish deserve a hug and all that shit?
Don't you volunteer at that pokémon shelter in Hackney, asks Priyamvada, raising a devastating eyebrow, and Nelson coughs and says yeah, all right, whatever.
Cheers, says Rav quietly, after he's gone off to make tea. And Priyamvada shakes her head and says it's fine, Rav. Solidarity and all that.
It's a long damn week.
On Tuesday, as Rav makes his way back home through the darkening evening, some kid stops him on the street and says bruv, you know there's a trubbish stalkin' you, yeah? On Wednesday, when it is for a few hours freakishly, unseasonably warm, Rav takes his lunch to the little scrap of green space next to Christ Church, and gets told by a polished-looking white woman from another office that there's a trubbish trying to steal his food. On Thursday night, at the event that the staff at Waterstones seem unable to even begin to organise without Rav's guiding hand, he hears a thin, strangled cry and abandons his post massaging the talent to sprint to the back room where he left Elaine, just in time to stop a staff member chasing her out with his manectric.
She looks feral, crouched there beneath the table and shuffling her reclaimed teeth into a good biting configuration. Rav goes to pick her up and she slashes at his face with a toxic arm – but she's still injured, and he's full of fearful adrenaline, and he escapes a visit to A&E by half a centimetre and a heroic wrench of his neck.
“Hey,” he says softly, trying to cram his heart back down his throat into his chest. “Hey, it's me, man, it's Rav.”
The manectric guy's eyes bore into the back of his neck. Rav keeps crouching there, arms outstretched, wondering at every moment if this is the moment he straightens up and says screw it, just kick her out, and then Elaine remembers she has a partner and lowers her arms, shuffles forward to be scritched between the ears and leak something onto his Converse that he will never ever be able to remove.
On Friday, when Rav is replying to a book blogger who wants a review copy of Golden Cityscape and rubbing at the ache in his neck from dodging Elaine last night, Priyamvada turns to him and asks if he wants to get a drink with her and Arwa after work.
“Nothing fancy,” she says. “But you know. Might be fun. You can tell Arwa what a jerk I am and she can laugh and agree.”
Rav has to smile.
“Sure,” he says, although he isn't. “I'd like that.”
So he goes, to somewhere he's never been before near the LSE department where Arwa teaches (he can't remember which one, but he can't admit it, either); Priyamvada says it's the only wheelchair-accessible bar within a five-mile radius of Clement's Inn, which Rav really hopes is a joke, and Arwa says c'mon, that's not true, it's just the only one that's any bloody good, is all.
Rav has a cider – and barely gets change from a fiver, which he is furious to realise actually seems fairly reasonable to him after seven years in this overpriced hell city – and Elaine has a beer mat, which she chews with the meditative expression of a child eating her own bogeys.
“Precious baby,” coos Arwa, clasping her hands together. “You're a national treasure, aren't you? Yes, you are.” She looks up, eyes bright with an enthusiasm Rav isn't sure he understands. “Can I pet her? I mean it's okay if not, I know she's probably not that used to people yet.”
“Sure,” he says. “She's mostly pretty chill. Just take it slow.”
“Nice!”
As she bends down, murmuring happily, Rav catches Priyamvada's eye: what's up with your wife, man? She rolls her eyes, mouths that she had a weezing back on her trainer journey.
He wonders if that's why she invited him. They've known each other for two years, ever since he started here, and they've always been friendly, but this isn't a regular thing; aside from work stuff, they've probably only met up a handful of times. Honestly, Rav hasn't met up with many people at all, ever, or at least not anyone he didn't think he might have a use for in a professional capacity some day. Why would he? This is London. It's full of bloody Londoners. Much better to stay at home.
Still. If anyone were to ask him right now if he was enjoying himself, he'd have to admit that he was.
Arwa straightens up, still smiling down at Elaine on the floor, and takes some hand sanitiser from her bag.
“She's very cute,” she says. “How did you manage to find the sweetest trubbish in London? I swear every other one I've ever seen spat in my face and ran away.”
Rav shrugs.
“Oh, I dunno,” he says, because now that he's thinking about it that whole thing with the rats and the pidgey feels so ridiculous, like something he would be laughed at for admitting. “We just kinda bumped into each other.”
“Love at first sight,” says Arwa, the faintest trace of a mocking smile hovering around her lips. “How terribly romantic.”
She grabs Priyamvada's arm and lays her head theatrically on her shoulder; Priyamvada sighs and throws her off without mercy. Or apparently caring that this is a public place, and everyone is looking at the wheelchair and the trash bunny.
“How old are you, exactly?” she asks, shielding her drink from her curious fletchling.
“Oh, about twelve, I think.”
“Hah! Couple of decades too generous there, I think.”
“Wow. Harsh.” Arwa flicks her hair back over one shoulder with a sharp, haughty movement of her head. “But perhaps not undeserved.” She takes a sip of her Cinzano. (It's a kind of vermouth, apparently. Later Rav will need to Google what exactly vermouth is, apart from something you put in martinis, but he felt that was a question too far for this conversation.) “So, Rav,” she says. “Poison-type life! How's it treating you? Are you a social pariah yet?”
“I'm sorta surprised they even let us in here,” he admits. “I guess it's because we're right at the back.”
“She doesn't smell that bad,” says Arwa, taking a deep and frankly courageous sniff. “You know what I can't stand? Vaporeon.”
“What? But they're so cute.”
“Yeah, so you bend down to pet them and you suddenly realise they smell like fish and wet dog.” She sighs. “One of my students has a vaporeon and it's driving me crazy. I have to open all the windows the instant she leaves the office or I feel like I'm going to be sick.”
“Tell me about it,” says Priyamvada. “Greta's bloody malamar. In summer it's like a fishmonger's in the office.”
It is, Rav realises. How could he have forgotten? He barely notices him now in February, but in July … God, he remembers trying to write an email to what's-her-name at Curtis Brown, about something he can't recall now but which seemed at the time absolutely critical, and barely being able to concentrate for the stink of warm fish.
Worse than Elaine, probably. But he's made of meat, not trash, and also he could kill you if he wanted, so people don't feel like they can point that out.
“Ugh.” Arwa makes a face. “Fucking fish. Leave them in the ocean where they belong.”
“Malamar don't live in the ocean,” says Priyamvada.
“Thanks for backing me up, love.”
“Every time.” Her attention shifts, drags him back into the present moment. “You're a bit quiet there, Rav. All right?”
“Sure,” he says, tearing his eyes away from Elaine, who has just finished her beer mat and is prodding his foot in the hope that this will somehow magic up a new one. “Hey, uh, just a sec, I gotta get this glutton another beer mat.”
Bit by bit, Elaine is starting to heal. The doctor warned him it might take a while; fresh from the wild, her essence is weaker than that of a trained pokémon, and nobody's yet invented a kind of potion that will work on a sentient mound of refuse. She said she couldn't even patch her up because she'd just absorb the stitches. But it's been a week, and the splits in her skin are becoming gnarled plastic scars, and, well, now she's starting to become a little less satisfied with just sitting around and eating Rav's cutlery. She spends Saturday morning prowling around the flat, occasionally coming over to prod him as he tries to concentrate on Hollow Knight (the fucking Failed Champion, man, this fight will be the death of him) until at last it occurs to him that she probably needs to be walked.
So he pulls up Google Maps, because much to his embarrassment he actually doesn't know what the nearest park would be, and takes Elaine down to the green, where an exhausting array of pokémon, pets and children are zooming around and making far too much noise. He gets looks, of course, and a lecture from some asshole about bringing that thing to a place like this, are you trying to poison my kids or what, but he has to admit that he likes the hopeless enthusiasm with which Elaine chases birds. She's a lot faster than he expected.
And – honestly, when was the last time he even went to a park? He stands there underneath a tree that his city-dweller eyes can't identify, watching Elaine run after a shred of wind-blown trash, and out of nowhere a memory rises up and smashes through his brain: that camp in the League preserve on the South Downs. The whole world open before him, hills rolling down to the distant sea, and the trees standing tall behind. Gita and Sunny chasing one another around his tent while he sat there and let the peace soak into him, so deep and so perfect that he didn't even miss his Game Boy.
How long since he last thought of that? Years, surely. The wild places of the world always seem so far away, here in the depression and exhaust fumes of the capital. And yet all it takes is some grass and a pokémon, and somehow the magic comes rushing back.
“Hey,” says Rav, looking around for a rock or a stick, something Elaine won't immediately decide is edible. “Hey, Elaine, c'mere. Gonna teach you a game, yeah? You'll love it. Sunny always did. 'S called fetch …”
She does love it, even if she has some difficulty with the concept of bringing the stick back instead of jumping on it excitedly. When she finally realises that a stick, if returned, can actually be thrown more than once, she looks so shocked and delighted that Rav bursts out laughing.
“Told you you'd like it,” he says, ignoring the stare of a passing dog-walker. “Okay, one more. I'm too fat and you're to hurt to keep this up much longer.”
“Still got her, then? Haven't put her back in the trash yet?”
“I'm waiting for you to put Rutherford back in the sea,” Rav shoots back, tossing his bag on his desk and motioning for Elaine to settle down in her tray. “You want any tea, or is the smell too sickening for you to keep it down?”
Greta scowls, swivels away from her computer.
“Malamar don't live in the sea,” she says.
“And trubbish don't live in the trash. Tea?”
She looks at him for a long moment, Rutherford hunched over her like some betentacled Lovecraftian god, and then she clears her throat and nods.
“Yeah, sure,” she says. “Cheers, Rav.”
It's about as close to an apology as Greta is capable of. Rav takes her mug with a smile, and on the way to the kitchen gets caught by one of Priyamvada's shark-like grins.
“Didn't think Arwa would have quite that effect on you,” she says, as he pauses.
“So you did set me up.”
“Of course I did.” She holds out her mug. “Sometimes you're like a bloody Goodness Gracious Me sketch, you know?”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“Neurotic caricature of British Indian anxiety,” she says unmercifully. “Are you making tea or am I just going to make fun of you all day?”
“Sure,” he says, chuckling. “Milk and two sugars, is it?”
“Ugh. Don't you dare.”
She takes him places. That's part of what makes it so special. When the hell would he have gone out with Priyamvada and Arwa? When would he have gone to the park?
Or the specialist poison-type shop near Waterloo, for that matter? Rav likes that too. He goes in and a guy a little too young for him but nonetheless still strikingly handsome feeds Elaine a bit of spare plastic wrap and compliments him on having found the most laid-back trubbish in London.
I found her in Shoreditch, Rav says.
Well that explains it then, says the guy. She's a hipster trubbish! Far too cool to be anything but chill.
Rav laughs and goes home with a special nest of woven branches, too obviously natural for a trubbish to recognise as food, and stuffs it full of old newspaper to cushion her and catch the slime. Elaine circles it curiously for a while, then plops herself headfirst into it and burrows down deep. She sticks her face out again a moment later, making an absolutely horrendous noise that terrifies Rav for a full ninety seconds before Google tells him that apparently trubbish can purr.
“Jesus Christ,” he says, crouching down to scratch her. “You scared the shit out of me.”
One time she runs off down a street he's never even looked at before, chasing a flyer caught on the breeze, and accidentally leads Rav to a tiny and apparently nameless South Asian shop where, for the first time, he finds the spices mentioned in the dal recipe his grandmother told him, back when he was a teenager. Or no, he has seen them before, but they've always been labelled in English, and back then Rav didn't get on so well with his parents, didn't dare ask for help matching up the Punjabi words she used with their English equivalents.
Or maybe he just never looked. There are lots of these shops around, and any number of people who would have helped him, if he'd asked. There's Google Translate, for Christ's sake. But he's found the spices now – or Elaine has – and he makes the dal. And it doesn't taste like he remembers, but it's good, and he made it.
Drinks. Park. Shop. Dal.
Elaine.
A few weeks later, Rav is down the park again, throwing sticks for Elaine in the crisp morning air. It's cold, but bright, in a way that seems to hint at spring hiding somewhere nearby, waiting for its moment to burst out and paint the world green again.
He's getting used to being up early, beating all the other people who take exception to a trubbish oozing near the playground. It's weird, but he sort of likes it. Air quality in London is uniformly terrible, but it tastes a little cleaner at this time of morning. Feels almost … healthy.
Weird word to apply to himself, but there you go.
“Here,” he calls, throwing the stick. He bought Elaine a ball last week, but she ate it, which honestly he should have expected. She gallops off on all fours like a chimp, her body crinkling and deforming as her innards bounce around inside her. Vile. And precious. Rav watches her go with a smile, and then a frown, as she stops her pursuit of the stick and starts running back again.
“What?” he calls, walking towards her. “What is it?”
Sssghrr, she says, running past him and circling around, arms whipping. Ghhhrrrk.
“What― oh.”
He looks, and sees it: a huge iridescent mound of bilious sludge, rolling across the grass like some monstrous amoeba, its surface rippling into fleeting humps and hollows. Every so often, something white flashes for an instant before being swallowed up by the slime again. An eye? A tooth? A meal?
Elaine cries out, bouncing anxiously from foot to foot. Rav just stands there, frozen, completely unprepared for the fact that a muk might crawl out of nowhere and come to eat his partner's delicious polluted insides – and then it's right there in front of him, its substance surging upwards to form a rough, molten face, and before he knows what he's doing he has Elaine in his arms, turning away―
“Lancelot! Jesus Christ, Lancelot!”
There's a guy now, fuck knows where from, digging gloved hands deep into the muk's greasy substance and yanking him back in chunks.
“For God's sake, you daft bastard,” says the man, as the muk's face collapses in on itself. “Leave the poor guy alone.”
Lancelot bubbles unhappily, making a foul noise and a worse smell, but he subsides and oozes back a little, pushing his eyes out to his surface so he can see what's going on.
“I'm sorry,” says the guy, casting him a dirty look. “He's the worst.”
Rav says nothing. His heart more or less stopped when he thought Lancelot would eat Elaine, and it didn't even really get a chance to start again before the guy showed up and started being unbelievably handsome right there in Rav's face.
Because he is unbelievably handsome, is this guy. The story Rav always tells is that as a kid he used to say he loved Greek mythology, but really he just loved this one picture of Prometheus in this one book, and that was probably where it all started. This guy looks like that picture. Like he just wandered down from Olympus to pick up some more wine before heading back up to the party.
“Your trubbish is okay, right?” asks the guy, looking concerned. “I never even knew they could move that fast.”
“Yeah,” says Rav, suddenly aware again of Elaine in his arms, cold and wet and dripping into his sleeve. “Yeah, she's … a lot of people don't know that.”
“Hah, yeah. Poison-type enthusiasts' motto, huh. Nobody ever knows anything about our pals.” He pats Lancelot, who briefly sucks in his fingers before releasing them again. “Sorry, where are my manners? I'm Dimitris.”
“Rav,” says Rav, still unable to move. “And, uh, this is Elaine. Nice to meet you.”
“It is,” agrees Dimitris. “I'd shake your hand, but, uh, well.” He waggles his gloved fingers, dripping with muk-sludge. “Always good to meet someone else who's really into sentient pollution.”
Ghhhrrk, says Elaine, waving her arms in imitation of Dimitris' fingers, and he smiles as he would at a toddler.
“Aw, that is an adorable trubbish you have there,” he says. “Meanwhile, I've got this bastard.”
A long finger of slime spears disapprovingly upwards from Lancelot's substance before sloughing back into his body.
“Yeah, yeah, I love you too.” Dimitris shakes his head. “So hey, you here to avoid the crowds? I'm guessing that people like a trubbish here about as much as they like a muk.”
“Yeah, pretty much,” says Rav, grinning, starting to unfreeze. “Something something poisoning our kids.”
“Hah! Yeah. If I had a pound for every time I heard that one.” Brief pause. “So hey,” he says again. “Wanna walk together? Not often I run into another poison-type enthusiast. And I promise I'll keep Lance here in line.”
Holy crap. Right. Okay.
“Yeah, sure,” says Rav, keeping his voice carefully light. “I'd like that.”
They start to walk, Lancelot rolling along on one side and Elaine scampering on ahead, sometimes glancing back to make sure he isn't coming to eat her. Rav whistles, tosses her a new stick, and she goes running off like nothing ever happened.
“She fetches?” asks Dimitris. “I had no idea trubbish even did that.”
“Nor did I,” admits Rav. “Nor did I.”
Much later, long after the coffee, and the drinks, and the dinner – then, walking home in the dark with a loopy smile on his face and the ghost of Dimitris' lips lingering on his own, Rav will think of his parents, for some reason. Of the way that they insisted on the trainer journey, even though he could have spent that time studying, gaining an advantage over his fellow students on the long road towards being a lawyer or an accountant. Pass your 11+, then go, they said. It's important. And as he walks, Elaine bounding chirpily on ahead of him, Rav will finally understand.
