Summer’s Brew

It was the summer before the Greengairs Landfill blaze. Heat curled off the  pavements, making waves in the air like the grooves left in your mum’s good butter.  The town had become strange and hollow. The parks, despite the sunshine, were  empty. Even the chairs in the beer gardens were folded up in protest. People had  either gotten the first train into the city centre or camped out at home: windows shut  against the stench, blinds drawn against the sun, damp washing hanging from  bannisters making the whole house smell of wet dog. 

They had all turned their backs on the dump and dubbed it an act of chemical  warfare. I felt sorry for it. 

While my school mates escaped town in search of fresh air, I would gather my  sandwiches and flask of tea and head for the hills. 

There was a certain knack to climbing the hills of waste. The white goods, especially,  were not the stable footholds you might have thought. Your best bet was to stick to  the building-site waste while you climbed; broken plasterboards and faux-marble  countertops had better purchase on the makeshift landscape. I would climb to my  perch and look out onto the grassy hills in the distance, watching the few remaining  day-trippers braving the hill’s trails like ants upon a discarded sugar cube. 

When the smell first became unbearable, locals gathered outside the dump entrance  holding placards in front of their masked faces. “Stop the Stink,” the placards read,  while only metres away their own rubbish festered together in the heaps behind the  gates.

I wasn’t immune to the stench. The smell pawed affectionately at the back of my  throat until my stomach turned and I was retching repeatedly. After a couple of  weeks, however, I had the breathing technique down. I’d breathe shallowly into my  mouth (never through the nose) and, like something of an evolving homunculus, I  stumbled upon a new way of existing amongst the soup. It wasn’t easy by any  means, but like a fine whisky connoisseur whose nostrils burn as the glass is lifted to  their nose, I had gained a cultured respect for its potency only found in the  persistence of repetition. 

The piles of rubbish weren’t the main issue. It was something deeper. Beneath the  discarded artefacts of daily existence, a rich, soupy layer was fermenting in the dark  depths of the old mining pits. Underneath the surface of plastics, metals, cardboard  and broken furniture, the drippings of oil, suds, and organic matter- all of it had  collected and stewed into something dark as molasses below me. 

Day after day, the heat worked on it, thickening it under the sun, brewing the whole  city together. Never, in a million years, could you recreate this one city’s specific bin  juice, this one summer’s specific strain. All year, the residents of the Glasgow and  Clyde Valley areas had come together to collaborate on this cultural tapestry. And  then, once ripened to perfection, they had turned their noses up at it. 

After all, was it the remnants of grapes, swollen and splitting in the heat and  discarded after a picnic in Pollock Park mixed with the syrupy dregs left over in an  iced-cold can of Irn Bru that brought its floral base note to life? Or the first waste 

from a newborn baby mixed with the ash of a drag queen’s cigarette that conjured  the eye-watering top note of cadaverine? The nuance had been delightfully  submerged in the collaboration process until all that remained was a collective  momento. 

That summer, that brew was ours. There would never be another like it.