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1-2 minute reading

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Where did this story come from? How did Andy Mulligan to write it? Here ya go.

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For something called garbage, Andy Mulligan's 229-page thriller "Trash" is the exact opposite. Readers journey with the characters through the dark, but bits of humor and hope keep their spirits afloat until the end, which ultimately makes up for all the suffering.

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Let's make note of these characters THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE BOOK ; Who are they? What are their values? What do they want/Why do they do what they do? Why are they important to the story? Why is their story important? Do you like them? Would you be friends with them in real life? Why (not)? Scroll down.

Raphael Fernandez
Gardo
Rat (Jun-Jun)
Jose Angelico
Sister Olivia
Father Julliard
Gabriel Olondriz
Senator Zapanta
Pia Dante
Dante Jerome

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2 minute video

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Check out this article that is mostly images

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ASTOUNDING images reveal the lives of the 3,800 inmates behind the bars of Quezon City Jail in Manilla.

The squalid prison in the Philippine's capital city was built for just 800 but is now at almost five times the capacity, leaving inmates stewing in filth.

Lags sleep in shifts on stairways, a basketball court floor and hammocks fashioned from old blankets in the six decade old jailhouse.

The inmates can be seen washing themselves in the same water they clean there clothes, right next to where they cook in the overcrowded jail.

But some joy manages to break through the squalor and cramped conditions as they take part in group dancing competitions in their regulation yellow uniforms on the cracked open air basketball court.

The jail houses prisoners awaiting trial and one former inmate has returned after studying criminal justice in the USA.

Raymund Narag says when he was 20-years-old he was falsely accused of murder and spent seven years in a cell with 30 other men which was built for just five.

During his time behind bars Raymund lived on a diet of dried fish which he claims left him on the edge of starvation.

Now a Doctor of Criminal Justice having studied at Michigan State University, Dr Narag is now an assistant professor at the Southern Illinois University.

He returned to his former cage to study how Filipino prisons can be reformed.

Talking of his life behind bars, he has said: "I saw firsthand the intricacies of managing a crowded, underfunded, undermanned prison institution."

Dr Narang has said the food is not only inadequate but inmates can often find rusty nails and cockroaches leaving it inedible.

It is also served at irregular intervals at odd times of the day, making it impossible for them to gain any sense of routine to cope with the squalor.

The horrific conditions can cause serious health difficulties for the lags which can cause nasty rashes and boils to erupt on their skin.

Some of the men are even said to have suffered strokes as a result of sleeping in a squatted position.

Dr Narag said: "Inmates are prone to contagious diseases because of the poor living conditions in their cells.

"They sleep in overcrowded, poorly ventilated cells. The supply of potable water is very limited. Food rations have inadequate nutritional content. Sick and healthy inmates are grouped in the same cells."

"Every month in Quezon City Jail, around two to five inmates die of illness."

The crushing boredom and lack of sleep also leads to inmates developing depression and other mental illnesses.

Dr Narag said his seven years of hell in Quezon City made him determined to talk about the horrors he had witnessed behind bars.

He charted his experience of doing time in a book titled "Freedom and death inside the City Jail".

In it he describes the squalid conditions and describes the prevalence of bribery, corruption and torture which riddles the prison system.

He says officers have been known to force prisoners to hang like bats from bars for hours, suffocate them with plastic and even electrocute and pour hot candle wax on inmates' genitals.

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Harrowing images from inside overcrowded, disease-ridden Philippines jail that was built for 800 lags but now houses nearly 4,000

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ASTOUNDING images reveal the lives of the 3,800 inmates behind the bars of Quezon City Jail in Manilla. The squalid prison in the Philippine's capital city was built for just 800 but is now at almost five times the capacity, leaving inmates stewing in filth.

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"I have lived here for 51 years - and I have been trying to leave for 51 years," says Elvira Miranda. "The government want us gone, and we also want to go. But we need somewhere to go."

Miranda, 68, has been living with her husband and children in a teetering shanty above a stack of graves in Manila North Cemetery since 1966. It is the kind of situation you might find yourself in if, like Miranda, you're poor, you have no job and you live in one of the world's most notoriously crowded cities.

"We keep the cemetery clean ... The community has kept to itself," she says. "Most people here don't have an income, but we try and find odd jobs to make ends meet. We sell flowers to victims' families, make headstones or build coffins."

Manila is one of the world's most densely populated cities, as migrants from the countryside have poured in seeking better opportunities. On arrival, the majority find little work and nowhere to live except self-built communities.

Elvira Miranda and the Navotas cemetery, on the Manila coast. Photographs: Lynzy Billing

Some of these slums have developed inside public cemeteries. People sleep in haphazard shanties built on top of graves, or inside mausoleums. It's free, but there are no basic services such as sanitation, electricity and clean water, let alone adequate shelter.

There are no ghosts here. But when I am digging up a corpse I always apologise

Medina, exhumer

Cemetery slums have existed here since the 1950s, and generations of families now live in Manila North, the oldest and largest cemetery in the city. An expansive 54 hectares (133 acres), it is home to an estimated 6,000 slum-dwellers from 800 families, as well as one million dead.

Some of the community are caretakers, paid by relatives of the dead to maintain the graves; the fee can be as little as 600 pesos (£9) a year. Other residents own makeshift stores or work as masons, carving headstones for the 80-100 funerals that take place daily.

It is a difficult life, made more so by frequent violent anti-drug raids by the Philippine National Police (PNP); grislier still, some of the graves hold the corpses of the victims of the PNP's extra-judicial killings. President Rodrigo Duterte's "war on drugs" has killed more than 12,000 people since June 2016, and many of the raids take place in cemeteries.

One such raid occurred in Manila North on 3 August last year. Carmelita Bahacan's son, Irish, was killed. He was 37.

Ricardo Medina, who lives in the Pasay slum, near his son Ericardo's grave. Photograph: Lynzy Billing

"That night 50 police came into the cemetery," she says. "They shot him five times. He was dead after the first shot but they continued shooting."

Anti-drug raids happen every other day. They are shooting and killing us inside the cemetery

Bahacan, Manila North resident

Bahacan, 57, who moved to Manila North in 1992, now lives in a shanty built atop the grave of her son.

"I like Irish's body to be next to me. He is buried in a tomb with my father. Someday soon I will die, and I would like to be buried here also."

The PNP says crime and drug use are prevalent in cemeteries. "Many slum-dwellers are unemployed, some of them will resort to criminal activities so that they can support their families," says superintendent Erwin Margarejo of the Manila Police District. "Cemeteries here serve as hideouts for criminals."

A funeral takes place in the Navotas slum. Photograph: Lynzy Billing

"There used to be a problem with drugs here, but now people have stopped using," Bahacan says. "But anti-drug raids still happen every other day, in the evening or early morning hours when it is quiet and dark. They are shooting and killing us inside the cemetery."

She says a lack of money means they cannot afford to investigate the police shootings. And with no official record of populations living in the big cemeteries - Navotas, Pasay and Manila North and South - the residents remain targets for extra-judicial operations.

Ricardo Medina, 70, also lives near the grave of his son, Ericardo, who was killed by police on 16 November 2016.

In 1996, Manila North Cemetery residents appealed for a school, washroom and church. Nothing happened. Photograph: Lynzy Billing

"I was watching TV here and I saw Ericardo. His head was wrapped in packaging tape and he had a cardboard sign tied across his chest saying 'pusher', but my son is innocent," Medina says. Ericardo is now buried with Medina's wife, just a few metres from his house. "I like him close. I like that when I wake up I can see him ... I like that I can be the one to care for his grave."

Medina moved to Pasay cemetery in 1967. Back then, he says, "No one was living here, but look at it now." In his section alone, there are 50 families. "But there are only two water wells. These are basic services we need."

He works as an exhumer. Graves in this crowded city are leased for five-year periods; if the family cannot pay, the bones are dug up and incinerated.

A caretaker in Pasay exhumes a baby - its family can no longer pay to rent the grave space. In Manila most graves exist on a five-year lease. If it is not renewed, the bones are dug up and incinerated or given back to the family. Photographs: Lynzy Billing

"I like living here, the area is quiet. It is free, and my work is good. I can get 50 pesos to dig a baby's grave, 150 for an adult. There are lots of bodies and so lots of work for me. It allows me to feed my family and helps people. Somebody has to do it."

Unsurprisingly, he is not squeamish, and while speaking he holds up the hand of a decomposing corpse. "See, it doesn't matter if we're black, white, fat or thin, we all turn the same colour after death.

'The government say they want us gone.' Photograph: Lynzy Billing

"There are no ghosts here. But when I am digging up a corpse I always apologise, and say I am sorry for disturbing you. It is a matter of respect."

Despite Medina's claims, living conditions here are far below acceptable standards. In 1996, the residents of Manila North Cemetery appealed to the mayor for a school, washroom facilities and a church.

Plight of Phoenix: how long can the world's 'least sustainable' city survive?

Nothing has happened, so they now run their own classes for the local children. And while they wait - for housing, for jobs, for justice - they continue to work as masons, caretakers or makers of coffins, headstones and mausoleums.

"The government say they want us gone, but we are doing the jobs no one else will," Medina says. "We are part of the greater community, caring for their dead."
This week, the Overstretched Cities series examines the impact of the rush to urbanisation, which has seen cities around the world explode in size. Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to join the discussion, and explore our archive here

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Graveyard living: inside the 'cemetery slums' of Manila

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"I have lived here for 51 years - and I have been trying to leave for 51 years," says Elvira Miranda. "The government want us gone, and we also want to go. But we need somewhere to go."

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TRASH: Controversial? Inappropriate for children? What will you Think?

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TRASH: Controversial? Inappropriate for children? What will you Think?

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10-15 minute read AFTER Book is finished.

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Andy Mulligan doesn't look like the kind of author you'd expect to find at the heart of a controversy around the "suitability" of his work for children. A mild-mannered, scholarly-looking English teacher in his mid-40s, Mulligan's first novel was a comic tale for 10-year-olds about an absurd school, Ribblestrop. But it's his second, Trash, which has sparked a debate over children's reading. A thriller about streetkids living on a dumpsite in the developing world, it was shortlisted for the Blue Peter award by the prize's judges, only to be dropped when they were overruled by one of the programme's editors. Not that there's any of the heroin abuse or underage sex which usually gets adult readers of children's books hot under the collar. The book was allegedly removed from the shortlist over a scene of violence, and one use of the word "shit".

Mulligan describes himself as "disappointed" by a decision that came a week after he had been told he was a contender in the Favourite Stories category of the prize. The award is aimed at the TV programme's audience of, roughly, six to 12-year-olds - does he think his book should have been nominated for that age group?

"There are some books that are unsuitable for children. I'd be surprised to see Burroughs' Naked Lunch on the equivalent shortlist," he says. "But a good book will upset someone, because the moment you engage with someone's imagination, you take them into both light and dark. Ask Philip Pullman. Ask Michael Morpurgo. Ask even Beatrix Potter, whose cosy animals were hunted, shot at and traumatised. What's 'suitable' is the journey we ask our readers to make. If Trash was an exposé of horror, a Tarantino-style fix of violence made sexy, it would have no place in a children's bookshop - I'd even say cynicism has no place. But independent judges saw that it's the opposite of all those things. It asks children to engage with brave, fierce streetkids who dare to take on a dangerous world. They win, and in the process grow. There will be six-year-olds who don't get it, just as there will be 26-year-olds who don't get it. But there'll be a whole lot more who will, and I wish Blue Peter was interested in them rather than in some tedious parent who rings up over the word 'shit'."

For those who do "get it", Trash is a riveting, emotional read that doesn't pull its punches. It features three slum-dwelling streetkids - Raphael, Gardo and Rat - who we first meet trying to eke out a living on a landfill site in an unnamed developing country. The unbearable hideousness of their lives is brought out vividly - one of the first things we learn from Raphael is that the dumpsite is mostly composed of human waste and stinks accordingly - but this is no poverty-porn. Mulligan's signature quirky humour, along with the individuality and humanity of the key characters (the story is narrated by the children and those who help them) serves to leaven the mix.

The intelligence and resilience of the three boys quickly comes to the fore as they find a key among the rubbish. It leads to a deadly secret, and a mission that may change their lives. Along the way the boys meet corruption and violence, but also kindness and hope, especially from Father Juilliard, the head of the slum school and his assistant, Olivia, a well-meaning but naïve post-university gap-year volunteer.

Mulligan teaches at an international school in Manila which is twinned with a small dumpsite school run by a Christian charity, much like the school featured in Trash.

"All teachers at my school make a visit there and you are confronted with these biblical images," recalls Mulligan. "It's like one of the circles of hell. You are watching seven-year-olds crawling through the rubbish right next to 70-year-olds - and you have in that vision the absolute solid image of what that seven-year-old will become. You just think this can't really be true and you are overwhelmed by your own impotence - there is not a thing I can do about it."

Mulligan's response to that image was to think about what, for these children, a Willy Wonka-style "golden ticket" out of their situation might be. He toyed with the idea of fantasy, of a discovery of an invisibility cloak on the dumpsite, but quickly decided that the object had to be real - and by doing so, he created something far more magical. Keys, codes and doors recur through the novel, which poses the question, as Mulligan puts it, of "what keys do you need when you have nothing, or almost nothing, to start breaking through the barriers that us rich people are so good at constructing around the worlds of the poor?"

Keys and slamming doors feature heavily in one of the more claustrophobic scenes in the book - a description of a furnace-hot jail filled with the "smell of old food, sweat and urine" and men in cages, their arms reaching out through the bars to Olivia as she walks through with Gardo, having been duped to visit an old man whose story will unlock another door in the tale. Even more distressing is a scene in a police station when Raphael is beaten up by police - the section of the book that is thought to have worried Blue Peter so much. The violence is explicit but not gratuitously so, and it was important to Mulligan that it was included as part of the boys' story.

"Thrillers have to suggest reality, dip toes into genuinely scary worlds," he explains. "Blue Peter might not want to look beyond the cotton-wool world, but most children do want to know what's out there - and books help them explore. The police station scene is the most extreme in the book, and the boy who suffers is reminded that his life is worth nothing to those in power. That's how it is, and I think readers deal with it, and celebrate the fact that the villains don't win. If the book was some grim Trojan horse of despair, the kid would be dead! He survives, because in my experience street-kids know how to fight back."

The survival of the children in this novel is crucial to Mulligan. "I've got no interest in children's books that don't offer hope. I suppose I'm firmly wedded to the idea of redemption: that whatever you've done, whatever situation you are in, there is a possibility of finding a way out of it."

Mulligan's own journey has taken him from a childhood in south London to Manila via a brief career as a theatre director. He emerged from university in the 80s "thinking I would be running the RSC by the age of 25 and the world was waiting for me. I soon discovered that actually the world was very happy doing its thing," he says with a wry smile. Out of work, with Thatcher's cuts hitting the small touring theatre companies where he might have begun to fulfill his directing dreams, he decided to take a break from it all by visiting a friend in Calcutta who was trying to repair an orphanage there. It was to change the path of his life. "I had experiences in Calcutta that made me realise, I don't think I can go back to the UK and continue trying to beg money to put on a silly play," he says. Instead he turned to teaching and found his métier. "I discovered that you could have such fun in a classroom and every encounter with a class could be hugely enjoyable, though I imagine that any teacher reading this will want to shoot me," he says, drily. From a private school in Cornwall, the "luck of the TES" took him to Manila four years ago, a place he now considers home. Currently on a year's sabbatical from his teaching job, he has finished a second Ribblestrop book and is working on a new novel.

That early visit to Calcutta would also provide the germ of Trash when he encountered a street child who would, years later, provide the inspiration for Raphael. Mulligan was struck by the "natural charm and grace" of the boy, whose entire family, including his bronchitic father, lived with another family in a damp garage without water and electricity. The boy had clear, strictly financial goals to move somewhere dry, afford medication for his father and get together a dowry so that his sister could marry. "I was the tourist he had 'netted' and hoped was his passport to a different world," says Mulligan. He helped him then and has stayed in regular touch over the years, supporting the family through various changes.

"You're in this odd position where you are god," he muses. "If I am earning £30,000 a year as a teacher, suddenly I could change that boy's life, give him enough money to move out of his house and ensure that his sister is married. And you do and you think, well, that's a good thing that I've done. And then the next letter arrives and suddenly it's not enough because now he needs this or that and so you're in it for life. I'm sure it's a very good thing to do but it can get a bit expensive!"

There is an absence of sentimentality, of preachiness, in both Mulligan and his book. Perhaps it is this very lack of saccharine outrage, of easy responses to difficult situations, that so alarmed Blue Peter. That attitude frustrates Mulligan immensely.

"There's always some football-stitching Primark-esque scandal breaking, and it's rare to find anyone treating child readers to the reasons kids live these wretched lives. Kids take these awful jobs because they need to earn a dollar. No point going to school when the world economy has bonded you forever into slavery - you might as well weave carpets and pay off the family debt. It's grim - but to discuss that reality is a bit more honest than suggesting you can change it by saving your bottle-tops."
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Andy Mulligan doesn't look like the kind of author you'd expect to find at the heart of a controversy around the "suitability" of his work for children. A mild-mannered, scholarly-looking English teacher in his mid-40s, Mulligan's first novel was a comic tale for 10-year-olds about an absurd school, Ribblestrop.

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Self-Check your understanding AFTER you've read the WHOLE book.

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Self-Check your understanding AFTER you've read the WHOLE book.

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This is an unofficial check in so you know if you caught all the important details.