The Scrap Eaters by Rose Hunter

The strangled barks from the dog next door leak like a wet rag into the night air, ending on a downward moan. There’s no fence you can build to stop that from coming through. If there were, Barry would have built it. Me, I don’t mind a barking or a moaning dog even, it reminds me something here is alive, at least in some sense. Barry can’t fathom that this sound (which is barely audible over the drone of the air-conditioner inside the house) doesn’t bother me. What could I do about it anyway, I said. If it did bother me. What is the point of being bothered?

This isn’t that dump we used to live in! he shouted. There’s plenty you can do! And he proceeded to write complaints to the local council, make calls and contact various regulatory bodies. I suggested he go over and talk to the guy. Like what, he demanded. What is the guy going to do? How do you stop a dog from barking? Which was my point, kind of.

They will order him to remove the dog or give us some sort of compensation, Barry emphasized, as though talking to a child. His face wrenched and his eyes seemed on the verge of misting up when he said that word: compensation. I feel the weight of this concept for him, this final vindication. He did not have a good childhood. He’s been kicked around in life as have I. As have we all or most of us. But we carry these things.

The dog starts up then comes to the end of it again, an emphysematic dribble. I’ve come outside to unwind. There is too much of my compulsion inside. I couldn’t catch my breath thinking about it. A door slides shut, a breathing run punctuated by a click. That’s the guy with the dog—who won’t speak to him anymore in fact (or me by extension). Barry’s pissed off pretty much all the neighbors. Another one had a boat ornament in his front yard that Barry objected to. He said it damaged the property value, which I thought must have been some kind of joke. Personally, I think our slightly improved living conditions have gone to his head a bit. Anyway, he said it was not a joke and served them with a court order to get rid of the ornament, which had sentimental value to the man since it had been given to him by his mother just before she died.

§

The gravel in the backyard is a brindled grey, like peccary fur. There’s one wonky cactus and a couple of suffering yuccas. At the bottom of the yard is a rusted shed with hedge clippers and rakes, and even a lawnmower, which is obviously not useful here. Barry says it’s his prayer and meditation spot, even though I’ve never seen him go in there. Prayer and meditation are an important part of the recovery support group we’re involved in. He is really serious about it, at least certain aspects of it. Our support group says to get rid of resentments, for example, rather than fan and fuel them like he does, but we are also encouraged to focus on progress rather than perfection, and he says he was worse before, so. He goes to meetings every day, sometimes twice a day, and will go out of his way to help the new member.

I know my disturbance has been here as long as I have. Soon after I arrived I became fixated on the amount of food Barry wastes as a result of his newly adopted “economical” buying in bulk. I mean there’s two of us. We can’t eat ten pounds of cheese. Seeing food hit the trash has always bothered me, but here it has taken on new proportions. I realize it’s me who is a bit strange in this respect. I have to remember how often I’ve been appalled to watch people scrape perfectly good food off their plates and straight into the bin, just because they weren’t going to eat it right that minute.

Barry will pull out four slices of bread and dump them in the frying pan to “toast” them and then say, oh, you don’t want any?—and boom, two of the slices hit the trash. Honey, I say, if you’d asked me first…. He just shrugs. A couple of slices of bread are nothing to him. I don’t know why, since even with the success of Barry’s recent bogus insurance claim we are still far from rich, and in other areas he remains a brutal penny-pincher.

One day I couldn’t help it, I picked the slices out of the trash. He jerked his head back and his mouth slacked open—a hinge-jaw effect he gets when he’s stonkered. Honey, I’ll make you more, he said. Oh no, no, I said, it’s fine. The five-second rule, right? That applies to the floor, he pointed out, not the trash. The bread had picked up some coffee grounds as well as splotches of ketchup from last night’s dinner. I brushed the slices off and sat them on a plate.

Do you want butter on that—or something—he said, with an open mouth. I shook my head. In that moment it seemed important to me that I just consume what was going to be wasted: no more, no less. As I took the first bite—a bit acrid, a bit fatty; soggy—a great river of calm flowed over me. My shoulders dropped and a warmth hit my belly. I closed my eyes. I knew I was doing some small good for the world, in taking in the unwanted, the discarded. I felt at peace.

It was from then on that I became a scrap eater.

§

It didn’t take long before I become more audacious in terms of what I would pick out of the garbage to eat. Sometimes I’d graze on things throughout the day; at other times I’d go through the day’s trash all at once, gathering the scraps together on a large plate, arranging it all in an artful pattern. Barry watched TV in the lounge while he ate all his meals. You could really do anything while he was watching TV, especially during football season, he wouldn’t notice at all.

At first I didn’t register too many ill effects, just a bit of diarrhea and general weakness, which I attributed to the fact that more carbohydrate and fat went in the trash than protein. To explain why I wasn’t eating with him in front of the TV I told him I was on a diet.

Well, he said. You don’t need to be. You’re perfect, baby.

I grinned and we had sex. The sex was good. It was possible that this fact clouded other issues somewhat, regarding our incompatibilities.

I think if I’d stopped there, the situation could have remained manageable. But, being an addict some might say, or for whatever reason, pretty soon eating mere food scraps wasn’t enough for me. I started to think about all the other things that went to waste and how I could consume them.

Firstly, eggshells. There were always a lot of eggshells since Barry ate a three-egg omelet for breakfast every day and sometimes for lunch as well, especially on the days he was lifting weights. The trick to eating eggshells was to grind them up into a fine paste with a mortar and pestle and shoot them down the hatch, maybe with some of the bulk-bought milk or hazelnut coffee creamer that had gone off. I’m allergic to hazelnuts, but none of that matters now. I do know that eggshells are not really food, at least not for humans; obviously I’m taking this too far. Obviously I need to just stop. That is easier said than done. You’d think my support group would help; that in some way I could see that my past alcohol abuse and my present scrap eating were analogous, but so far, no luck.

Fertilizer, I told Barry, when he caught me grinding the eggshells. For the yuccas. He gave me that hinge-jaw look and walked into the lounge and turned on the TV. Later he caught me in the kitchen, shoving a handful of coffee grounds into my mouth. They were mixed with chicken stock and mushroom peel with attached soil. The trick to swallowing coffee grounds is to make sure you don’t inhale at the same time. I stared at him, my brown maw yawning open a bit, breathing through my nose.

Good for you sweetie! he boomed. You see what you did? You changed obsessions. Can’t drink anymore? Just change obsessions!

And he burst out laughing; his booming, baritone laugh. He even shared about it at the support group that evening, which was embarrassing since it was obvious who he was talking about. He reported it as though it was a great thing, in line with his idea of changing obsessions. It may well have been good for a quick laugh but it was in bad taste to go on about it I thought, but he has twenty-five years sober compared to my six months so what do I know, and we’re not allowed to crosstalk anyway. I figured at least one person might suggest a group for overeaters, after the meeting or something. But they just looked at me and said: Keep coming back.

I am powerless over my scrap eating I am powerless over my scrap eating…. God grant me the courage to change my scrap eating….  

Well, it wasn’t long before I started trying to eat other things, further removed from foodstuffs. Tissues that had barely been used, then tissues that had been. Discarded kitchen sponges, which I cut into small pieces and put in the blender. Small packets and some kinds of wrap. Some things were clearly impossible to get down, like tin cans and containers, but at least those were recyclable, so I felt okay about letting them go, along with bottles, milk cartons, and newsprint. I was thinking of buying some kind of industrial-strength grinder for the rest, but I’d have to hide it somewhere. Or not. I wondered if Barry was actually concerned about me and just didn’t show it.

You can’t help someone unless they want to be helped, he said.

It’s a fair point, but sometimes I wondered why he wasn’t trying to help anyway. You know? I was amazed by his childlike ability to immerse himself completely in the world of the tube, even going so far as to laugh at the ads. At that point the dog could be howling up any sort of a storm also. I wondered if TV was his obsession change; his alcohol replacement. That and neighborhood outrage, etc. But you hang around our support group as much as we do, and it starts to seem as though there is one major issue in the whole of life, and that is addiction. And maybe that’s true too, for people like us anyway.

I’m aware that there’s alcohol in some of the fermented things I’m eating but Barry says I shouldn’t count this as a slip because my intention as well as my obsession—my infirmity—is directed at the scraps, not the alcohol. So I can keep my sober time.

You’d think considering the quantity of food I’m eating that I’d be gaining weight. Especially the leftover coffee creamer—that stuff is calorific and often it’s half the carton he tosses. My cheeks pucker from the sickly sweetness of it as well as the curdle. And all that fat off the meat, and the ground-up bones. But instead I’m losing weight—probably because I spend a lot of time vomiting or shitting stuff straight out. Obviously it’s occurred to me that I should eat that too, to close off some kind of circle, but it seems there are limits, even for someone as far gone as me. So far I haven’t eaten anything out of the toilet. In the support group they talk about something called the “haven’t yets.” This seems to suggest that I will one day, or might.

§

I hear shouts but it’s just the TV. Barry is probably eating by now. I go back inside. Sure enough, there’s a bunch of new stuff in the trash. Steak gristle, along with corners of perfectly good meat. Potato skins also. Those are very nutritious. I have not eaten this well in some time. Since this has turned into a special occasion I rummage in the cupboards and find candles in little glass cups, like the ones I used to buy at the dollar store in our old neighborhood. I suppose it’s a bit wasteful but I light two of them, and put them in the center of the table. It reminds me of the dinners we used to have, in my single room apartment, on my rickety camping table and with leftovers he’d brought from his apartment in yoghurt containers.

Rose Hunter’s book of poetry, glass, was published by Five Islands Press (Australia, 2017), and her next book of poetry, Anchorage, will be published by Haverthorn Press (UK, Feb 2020). She has been published once previously in The Los Angeles Review (no. 10, 2016). More information about her can be found at rosehunterwriting.wordpress.com.