Ignition

Dump.

Donate.

Dump.

Donate… "Donate? Would anyone want that?” Caroline thought out loud, holding an old mobile telephone to the dusty light that filtered dimly out from the broken lampshade above her. The grimy buttons on the keyboard fell out as she turned it. No. Dump it is.

“This bag is almost full, take it out would you, Ash,” she asked, not looking up as she continued to trawl through the sea of discarded belongings that had long flooded the web-veiled room. Ash, a large, heavy-set man of indeterminable age grunted and hauled the heavy duty bin bag out over the tidal mark of stained laundry and empty food packets to the empty skip waiting outside, where it clanged loudly and several glass items smashed with a cacophony that Caroline was all too familiar with in her line of work.

The old lady who had lived here passed away a month ago, and in the absence of a next of kin, the government stepped in to absorb the real estate and pay Caroline’s company to get rid of all the contents. Sure, she could’ve easily just thrown out the lot instead of sorting it through her ‘Triple D’ system, but the job didn’t pay much and sometimes some real treasure emerged in someone else’s trash.

So that’s where she found herself, yet again, on a hot, muggy Monday afternoon in someone’s house that had been too long boarded up. Her gloved fingers were stained with black, grey and brown where she was handling items that had last seen the light of day decades ago.

She took one glove off to tap a finger onto the screen of her phone. The app she wanted pinged open and a small drone that she had placed on the newly cleared carpet connected to her device, glowing green as it began to hover in the air, its blades stirring dust and papers and dead moths from the towering piles of books and magazines that lined the room. A line of blue light emitted from the drone’s centre when it reached ceiling height and it scanned the room carefully, before it let out a siren and a red beam trained upon a small collection of black books tucked into an alcove in the corner.

Bingo.

It would’ve taken Caroline and Ash days to get this far through the mess, and she couldn’t risk her junior employees coming across dangerous material if they’d found it before her. That’s the main reason she was here, after all. Besides clearing up an old house, she and Ash were tasked with finding anything handwritten, classed by the government as ‘hazardous material’ and destroying them. Notebooks, and diaries as these probably were due to the dates written onto white tape on their tatty spines, were considered the most volatile at all.

She gave the drone the command and it scooped up the books into a red bag before delivering them to Caroline. She tucked the drone back into its box, all the while aware of the contents lurking in the bag, books bristling with secrets.

The air seemed to thicken now that she was aware of their presence, and the noises from outside, children laughing, cars roaring past, faded. All she could hear was her own heavy breathing as she gingerly opened the red bag. Five black notebooks. She’d never found this many before. They’d pay her good money for this. Five grand each book, in fact. Her fingers shaking slightly, and holding her breath- listening out for Ash’s slow steps on the stairs- she reached into the red plastic and pulled one out.

Innocuous though they appeared on the outside, she could feel her pulse quicken as she leafed through their pages. Line after line of scratchy, blue, sometimes black ink, penned by someone in an apparent hurry, or with a lot on their mind. Why were they in a hurry? What could have been so important? Why- She snapped the cover back quickly. Too much. Don’t get sucked in.

That’s why she was here, to find and remove articles just like this. Personal, uncensored voices from the past didn’t belong in the intimately connected world of the present. It was usually just old shopping lists or sticky notes that sometimes cropped up in forgotten houses like this one. But this, five notebooks… she’d get a commendation for this, surely. Caroline Scrivener, awarded Highest Order in Removal of Forbidden Material for biggest haul this decade.

Ash was heaving himself up the staircase- she could hear the rusty bannister creaking as it supported his weight- quickly, she peeled back the thin black cover to steal another glance at the writing. She didn’t know how to write by hand, they stopped teaching it in school decades ago, replaced by typing lessons onto blogs. That way, everyone’s thoughts could be accessible easily by everyone. No need for paper or pens, it saves the environment, money, time. Her finger traced a scratchy letter ‘a’ absentmindedly tumbling into the next letters to make the word ‘away’. How did it feel to put a sentence on a page without the world scrutinising every word? Did this writer think anyone else would ever read what was on this page?

Suddenly, she couldn’t bring herself to put the diary back.

Four notebooks, she typed into the app. Twenty grand, straight into her account.

“You found something for the ‘destroy’ bag then, eh?” Ash wheezed, eyeing the red plastic bag in Caroline’s hand. She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Not looking inside, he took the bag from her and pointed a small device attached to his tablet into it. After a momentary blinding white light, only a single charred ball of red plastic remained with the smell of burnt paper that pierced the stench of decay from the towers of rubbish all around them.

Ash gave a grunt as he bent down to pick up what remained of the hazardous material and threw it into a black bag. Caroline hesitated for a moment longer, her gaze still fixed on the spot where the notebooks had been obliterated. Her vision blurred and she felt tears stinging the back of her eyes. She bit her lip, shaking the tears away, furious at herself for feeling this way. The smell was nothing new, she’d destroyed scores of items before- usually she was the one with her thumb on the diminutive destruction device. There was something about stifling the voices on those pages that now made her feel uneasy.

Stealthily, she patted her waistband. The fifth notebook was tucked in securely against the sweaty small of her back.

“I’ll see ten grand in my account later?” Ash fixed her with a steady gaze, which she couldn’t meet so she nodded, ducking her head to pick up another black bag. He shuffled away to begin shovelling more filth, barely paying attention to Caroline’s system.

“Just nipping to the van,” she called to no one in particular, and took the stairs down two at a time, almost tripping on the detritus spilling from rooms off of the hallway before she was outside where the muggy air was less close than inside that dank, depressing house.

Caroline opened the trunk to her grubby van and found a corner where the fabric on the sides was coming away. With one more glance at the first page of the notebook- They came in force, and they took Richard away. There was nothing I could do- she slammed the door shut on her secret, but she couldn’t extinguish the myriad of questions that had ignited in her mind.