Ava woke at dawn to the sound of crying Baby and the sweet, cloying smell of the fermenting trash and burning plastic. The constant noise of Manila’s eternally deadlocked traffic rumbled in the background. She rolled over, kicked the rat bat away, picked up a porcelain teacup, uncorked the pipe and groaned when only a dribble of water came out. She would have to have a look at the aqueduct later, but in the meantime, she had half a bottle of cola to feed Baby. She looked through the windows at the gulls above, hundreds of them circling and squawking. She wondered if today one of the gulls would land a shit on her head, it was supposed to be good luck. She gazed out over the trash as Baby guzzled the cola. Smokey Mountain looked the same as ever, a humid grey smog layer hovered above the piles of trash, trapping the heat and the smell. Sometimes, when the wind picked up, she had a glimpse of the blue sky.
They had made the rusty old bus comfortable, lucky to have been the first to find it. The bulldozers had shunted it up the side of the mountain and rolled it on its side. The gang had renovated the bus, dragging old mattresses and tarpaulins in to sleep on and decorating the walls with bright tapestries and posters of people they didn’t know. Plenty of room for sixteen of them. For Ava, this place was home. Her earliest memories were of crawling around the shifting piles of trash looking for treasures. She didn’t know how old she was, eleven, maybe twelve. She didn’t care. Time was meaningless here. Smokey Mountain was their home and like every good home, it provided. Ava liked statues, designer footwear and bright clothes. She liked cigarettes, sanitary wipes, bottled water, toothpaste, toilet paper and rocks. All things that could be found in varying states of repair on the mountain.
Ava checked her prized possessions. Statues, crosses, pictures and paintings. She did not know why the crosses had a sad, skinny man nailed there, maybe he had committed some horrible crime and was paying for it in the worst possible way. She liked the statues of the woman holding the baby, fantasising it was her mother. Ava would gaze at the woman’s sad eyes and wonder about her name and her story. Ronaldo said it was a statue of Mother Mary, whoever that might be. She also loved to collect rocks. Real rocks were a rarity on Smokey Mountain where almost everything was manufactured rubbish, so finding a hard piece of rock was a treasure. When Ava found one, she would clean it, polish it, turn it over in her hands, wondering about its origins and history. This rock had existed for millions of years and would outlive them all by millions more. She had collected a big pile in a corner of the bus. The Metalheads called her crazy, but rocks were good for lots of things including throwing at the heads of unwelcome strangers.
She often wondered about her mother, who must have abandoned her as a baby and thrown her out with the trash years ago. She loved her, missed her, and hated her all at the same time. Ava understood she would never know her mother, but it didn’t matter. She could look after herself. She was short, but she was strong. She had won lots of fights with cool karate moves. She hadn’t started growing breasts yet and hopefully she never would. She couldn’t see the point of having them. The Metalheads were her family, they had raised her, fed her, and taught her, and now she was one of the leaders. They were all abandoned children or runaways who had made a life on the mountain, it was the only life she had ever known. Her tummy rumbled, she grabbed the flat cola from the baby, drained the last few drops and put her prized Nike trainers on.
“Ava! Check out my new boot!” Messi held the big white gumboot up in the air like a trophy. “It’s got a steel cap! I’m going to kick Neymar in the balls.” Messi put the boot on his right foot, it was way too big for him, the top of the boot covering his skinny leg. He did a victory dance on top of a trash pile but tripped himself up and ended up in a heap at their feet. Footwear was the most important item of clothing; you wouldn’t last long walking over the trash in bare feet so finding a gumboot was a good score. Ava’s Nikes were getting too small, but she couldn’t bear to hand them on, they were so cool.
“You better grow some balls of your own before you go after mine, you little shit,” said Neymar.
Ava laughed and munched on the brown banana she had found in a pocket, stuffing pieces of it into Baby’s mouth as it gurgled in the sling. “Come on Metalheads,” she said as she grabbed her rat bat. “There’s supposed to be fresh trash over west side, time to make some money. Let’s fix up the aqueduct on the way. Here Neymar, you take Baby.”
“I don’t want Baby,” said Neymar. “He can’t even walk or talk, and he smells funny.”
“You were a baby once and I’m a better scavenger than you will ever be. You want cold cola from the mercado later? You take Baby or I’ll karate kick your ass.”
Neymar groaned and took Baby as Ronaldo led the way over the trash. Smokey Mountain provided as much useless rubbish they could ever want, but every day was a mission to find fresh food and clean water. Ava had rigged up aqueducts that ran from catchments at the top of the trash piles. Whenever it rained, the buckets and plastic drums would fill up and the water would run down a network of hoses, pipes, corrugated iron and old plastic gutters to bathtubs and buckets on top of the bus. It wasn’t the cleanest water but there was nothing like having a bus top bath with some scavenged soap. Ava was experimenting with little hydro powered dynamos that could power electric lights and even a television screen. The water levels were only high enough to power the dynamos in monsoon season, the perfect time to watch TV when it did nothing but rain outside.
The Metalheads climbed up the trash piles fixing the leaky aqueducts as they went. The pipes and gutters were forever getting pushed out of alignment by the shifting mounds of trash. They poked through the rubble with their rat bats checking for anything valuable underfoot. They did this every day, picking through the rubbish, foraging for metal to take to the scrap dealers and earn a few pesos. Ava liked having a routine, it was good to have things to do, kept you out of trouble.
She knew the landscape of the sprawling Smokey Mountain like the back of her hand. She knew the best places to find quality trash and she knew all the other child gangs in the neighbourhood. Some were dangerous, some were just dumb. The Malandi, or delinquents, were their closest neighbours operating in the same area. They sometimes traded with them and sometimes fought them. The Bunso, or the youngest, were all under six years old but they were vicious little bastards and not to be messed with. The Bostik boys were bad waster glue heads, always covered in rat bites because they were half asleep all the time and too fucked up to notice the rats chewing on their toes. The young Dugo’s, prospects for an adult criminal gang, who were excellent thieves. And the jumper boys who lived on the mountain but spent their days jumping from traffic bridges onto moving trucks to see what they could pilfer.
The Metalheads had drifted together out of necessity, if they were a family then Ava was the mother. Many didn’t arrive with names, so Ava gave them names from a tatty old football album she had found and taught herself to read a few words. There were thousands of children and adults living on Smokey Mountain doing the same thing, digging for treasure, bits of shiny steel, computer hardware, aluminium and competing for the biggest prizes, bronze, and copper. The Metalheads all wore dirty bandanas over their faces to protect them from the toxic smoke of wire fires, and they had old, cracked motorbike helmets held together with shiny silver duct tape. Ava had discovered crates of the dumped silver tape one day and they used it everywhere. Most of their clothing, footwear and even their bus was held together with the tape. Their numbers fluctuated between ten and twenty, the older ones, once they got to thirteen or fourteen like Neymar tended to move up to proper criminal street gangs, eventually ending up dead or in jail but there were always abandoned babies to raise and keep the numbers steady. Ava didn’t like to think about the past, but she didn’t think about the future either because she just couldn’t see one.
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They got to the top of a crumbling ridge to view the fresh load of dumped rubbish. “Shit,” said Ronaldo. “The Malandi beat us to it.”
Ava had traded with the Malandi, exchanging water for food. She viewed them with suspicion as they sifted through the fresh trash pile.
“Oi! Malandi! Anything good?” yelled Ronaldo.
“Fuck off and find your own trash,” came the reply.
Undeterred, the Metalheads clambered down the slope and began sifting around the edges. It soon became obvious there was nothing of value, the Malandi had already pilfered the good stuff.
“What the fuck is that?” said Ronaldo pointing to a giant, stinking grey pile of sludge. It looked like a dirty iceberg.
Messi scampered over and grabbed a big lumpy handful of it, held it up, had a sniff, screwed up his face and threw it away in disgust. “Stinky!” he yelled.
“It’s a fatberg, I’ve heard about these,” said Neymar, who had encyclopaedic knowledge of every type of trash on the mountain. “All the people that live in houses wash their fatty shit down into the sewers and it clots up into these giant bergs. They get so big they have to dig them out because they block their drains, and they end up here.” Neymar looked on in wonder, then his eyes narrowed with devious thoughts. “I’ve got an idea.”
They broke off as much of the fatberg as they could into containers and crept through the trash to a vantage point overlooking the Malandi. Getting into position, they giggled nervously, as they waited for the signal. Ava scooped up a handful of the fatberg and had a closer look. It was revolting. Like squishy, fatty soap, but full of hair, dead flies, and other rotten food scraps. It was disgusting and it stank like sewage and rancid fat. She stood up and addressed the Malandi.
“Oi! You better share your shit, or you’ll be sorry.”
“We told you to fuck off,” came the reply.
“Ok have it your way,” said Ava. Then she yelled, “attack!” The Metalheads all stood up and started pelting their rivals with stinking hairy clumps of fatberg. They had plenty of ammunition and the Malandi were soon covered with the congealing sludge. The Malandi hurled some debris back at them but found it hard to be combative and soon lost their appetite for the fight, they began to retreat looking like filthy, dripping snowmen. Ava led the Metalheads down the slope unleashing all their fatberg armoury on the fleeing Malandi, laughing, and slipping on the soapy fat as they went. They claimed the fresh trash pile as their own and sat down, a grinning victorious army enjoying their spoils.
They found some treasures, boxes of broken laptops with valuable circuit boards. There were people living on the mountain in clandestine hacking labs who would buy these and cobble together their own computer networks. Lots of plastic-coated wire for burning, magazines to be flicked through with pictures of happy looking clean white people with white teeth, some broken toys and even a bag of half-eaten chicken skewers for lunch. The gang started several small fires and squatted with bandanas over their faces watching the plastic melt.
Once the wire cooled and was rolled into coils Ava, Ronaldo and Neymar grabbed their rat bats and began the perilous journey to the scrap dealer. Carrying valuable goods like this made them open targets. You could get mugged for a few strands of wire, stabbed for a morsel of food, murdered for no reason at all. Sometimes kids would just disappear without a trace. The Metalheads took turns watching out for the government death squads that would occasionally sweep through the mountain shooting children and adults and leaving the bodies there to rot. The Metalheads didn’t know why, they understood these soldiers were the enemy. They all had good hiding places when the death squads showed up.
The young Dugo’s were patrolling the entrance to the scrap dealer looking to rob anyone on their way in or out. Ava, Ronaldo, and Neymar pushed under a hole in the fence to do their deal and left the same way with a hundred-peso bill to spend. They always went through the haggling ritual with the scrap dealer although they never got more than a hundred peso from the good-natured scrap man. They walked towards the market with a swagger.
“I’m rich! You should run away with me Ava,” said Neymar. “I’ll buy you a big house with a bath and a bed and chickens and we could go out dancing every night.”
“I would love to Neymar, but you are useless at dancing, you dance like a chicken!” Ava started running round in circles flapping her arms making chicken noises.
“I don’t care, I’m rich! I’ll dance any way I want,” laughed Neymar.
“Guys cool it, it’s the po-po,” muttered Ronaldo pointing to some uniformed officers patrolling the street ahead with a big black utility vehicle rumbling behind them. They melted into the crowd; not in any danger, but it paid not to attract any attention to yourself when the police were cruising the neighbourhood. They scavenged the biggest cigarette butts they could find and blew smoke rings over each other as they walked to the market, trying not to cough.
Ava loved the market, they walked through the clothing section marvelling at the beautiful multicoloured linen and the American style t-shirts, baseball jackets and trucker caps. The electronics section with the amazing smart toys, gadgets, phones and augments and the food section which you could smell long before you could see it. All kinds of sweet, salty, and spicy morsels being roasted over hot coals, fresh fruit, and vegetables of all shapes and sizes, and pungent herbs and spices. Rows of live critters in cages and even a few fish tanks with crabs and lobsters. They bought a few bottles of water, some coca cola, and a bottle of palapa sauce. They did a deal with some jumper boys for a bag of rice and that was their hundred pesos gone.
“Guess you can take me out dancing some other time,” said Ava.
“I would rather take her out dancing,” said Neymar pointing to a glowing neon billboard of a supermodel on the side of a building gesturing seductively at them.
“In your dreams chicken boy, hey speaking of chicken, check it out.” Ava had spotted a feral, featherless chicken with one leg poking around some boxes behind a stall. “It must have escaped, no-one’s noticed, let’s get it.”
“I feel like chicken tonight,” sang Neymar.
“Yeah, c’mon let’s get it,” said Ronaldo and they crept up on the unsuspecting poultry, trying to surround their prey. The chicken seemed to realise the danger it was in and eyeballed them fearfully. Neymar made a lunge, but the mangy bird avoided his grasp, squawking and losing its last few feathers. It flapped wildly but barely got off the ground. Ava dove at its one remaining leg; she got a face full of dirt as the bird desperately tried to escape but flapped straight into Ronaldo’s arms. The gleeful look on his face said it all as they raced off with their prize. They ran to the outskirts of the market, dodging the shoppers and stalls, but then Ronaldo tripped on a cobblestone and the chicken was free again.
It hopped off into traffic, squawking manically and only narrowly avoiding the slow-moving motorbikes as it crossed the road. Luckily, the vehicles were barely moving as they gave chase, furious moped riders shaking their fists and angry taxi drivers honking at them as they raced through the traffic. The one-legged chicken moved surprisingly fast, and they lost it in the swarming traffic. Ava thought she saw it nearing the other side of the road and gave chase, she caught a glimpse of it disappearing under a big black car. She was so intent on capturing her prize she didn’t notice the dark suited men standing around the vehicle. One of them grabbed her by the neck and lifted her off her feet, bringing her to eye level. Ava could see her own reflection in the man’s AR glasses before a big, gloved hand clamped over her mouth. She screamed and tried to bite his hand, but found herself being bundled roughly into the back of the vehicle. She wriggled and kicked out at the burly men, trying to punch, kick or bite anything that came close. Then something slapped her hard and she fell into aching unconsciousness.