The smell always struck him first. It was an earthy, musty scent, the smell of dank places hidden from sunlight, of air that sat still and unmoving. It always took him a few breaths before he grew used to the odor.
“Good evening, Henry,” Jonas said. “He’s here, I take it?”
He could scarcely see the figure at the door, so dark was the interior. Henry was a silhouette, scarcely five feet tall, skinny and slouched.
“Aye,” Henry said, moving back. “Where else would he be?”
Jonas spread his hands—his cold hands—in supplication to the universe and looked up. “Where else,” he sighed, “indeed.”
Every time he came here, he told himself that it couldn’t possibly get any worse. Every time he returned, he was proven wrong.
The front room—could one even call it a room when there was no room at all?—was completely filled. A little bit of illumination beckoned; a hint of reflected fire filtered down a narrow hallway.
It looked like a narrow hallway, at a first glance. At a second glance, one might have concluded that the walkway was a natural tunnel made in some underground cave. The walls seemed like jagged, discontinuous rocks.
It was only when one got close that one could see that this cavern was not made of limestone. It was made of discarded bits of furniture, old copper pots that had been broken and tossed in the midden. There were curving pieces of iron that looked to have been taken from the broken wheels of carts and barrels that had been staved in. These were all stacked together precariously. Dimly, he recognized the newest article to join the collection: an old stove, its boiler ruptured. It added a faint metallic rustiness to the bouquet of the room.
“Henry,” Jonas said, “you realize that to get to the bedroom, I’ll have to actually scuttle sideways at this point.”
The silhouette of Henry shrugged in the darkness.
“There is no room for anything else. You’ll have to tell him there’s no room, the next time someone brings something by. He must stop buying rubbish.”
Another shrug. “That’s what you said last time. But actually, if you can shove some of the smaller things over the barrels, there’s still nearly a foot of good space there.”
“Of course. Over the barrels.” Jonas rubbed his forehead. “And pray it doesn’t cause an avalanche. It doesn’t matter. Whether there’s space now doesn’t matter.”
Henry shrugged again. “If I tell him he can’t, he’s going to sack me like he did the others.”
Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked. Maybe…
Jonas knew he had failures enough, and a tendency to too much neatness and order was one of them. His fingers twitched if he saw a single picture frame skewed out of alignment. The disorder of this house gave him a full-body itch, one that settled just beneath his temples and could not be relieved.
He picked a few spoons off the floor as he made his way through the wreckage and set them, neatly in order, atop a metal box. It felt as if he were trying to close a mortal wound with two inches of twine.
The back room was, thank God, not quite so dire. That only meant that the rubbish that ringed the walls had only reached head-height, and that the area around the fireplace was mostly clear. There were a few boxes filled with grimy bits of metal strewn about. But at least there was a basin and soap and a table where a boy like Henry might prepare a simple meal.
Jonas washed his hands before heading up the stairs.
When he’d been young, there had always been rubbish around. Inevitable, really, when your father was a scrap-metal dealer. But it had been carefully sorted then, and had been kept in the sheds out back and the scrap-yards. Most importantly, the piles of scrap had left as swiftly as they had come in. But his father’s health had begun to fail, and he’d gradually stopped selling. He’d stopped selling, but he hadn’t stopped taking things in. By the time Jonas had finished his final year at King’s College, matters had come to this point.
He made his way up the stairs into the top bedroom. The steeped roof was low enough over the staircase that he had to stoop until he came into the center of the room. There was a second fireplace here, and a nice fire of coals burning. Mr. Lucas Grantham sat up in bed and was squinting at the stairwell.
“Well?” he demanded. “What have you got?”
Jonas spread his hands out. “It’s me, Father.”
“Hmmph.” The man folded his arms, tucking his hands into his armpits. “Well, don’t be long,” he groused. “I’m doing business today, I am.”
Jonas looked around the room doubtfully. “I…see.”
A wooden box was set up on one side of the bed, filled with chunks of rusting metal. At the foot, bits of splintered wood and paper were scattered about.
“Got some old barrels just yesterday,” his father said. “Good fastenings in those, if you know what to look for. Made my first fortune in fastenings, looking for those little bits of metal that other men couldn’t be bothered to find.”
Jonas looked around for a chair, but either the one that had been here yesterday had been dismantled for its nails, or it had been swallowed by the rubbish that crowded the north side of the room, spilling onto the floor.
“That’s how I won your mother, it was. Fastenings.” He made a happy noise.
Jonas settled himself gingerly on the edge of the bed. “Father,” he said. “You don’t have to do this any longer.”
Once, Mr. Grantham had owned a regular scrap-metal empire. He’d traded not only in fastenings, but in larger pieces—obsolete machinery from the factories, iron rails from train tracks that had fallen out of use, purchased at cut rates from bankrupted railways. He’d always been scrupulously frugal—one of Jonas’s earliest memories was his father plucking a horseshoe nail from the middle of the street, ignoring the filth it stood in, while Jonas stood three feet away and prayed desperately that none of the other boys would see him. But this…this was different.
“’Course I do,” his father replied. “Always have. Always will. Never too late to save a penny. I’ve got to do it.” He glared at Jonas. “I know what you’re about, boy—want nothing more than to have me dependent on you, dancing to your tune. But this is my livelihood, boy. Nobody’s taking it away.”
“I’d have no objection, if you sold what you took in. But—”
“As soon as I’m feeling well again, I’ll start up once more,” Mr. Grantham replied.