The Red Bicycle

Tariq had worked the Saturday shift at the recycling centre in Leeds for three months now. His job was to sort the donations that people left at the gate: clothes in one bin, books in another, toys in a third.

That morning, an older volunteer named Brenda showed him a box someone had left overnight. Inside was a child's bicycle, small and red, with a bell on the handlebar.

“I used to have one just like this,” Brenda said. She rang the bell, and it still worked. “Mine was blue. My dad fixed it up for my seventh birthday.”

“What happened to it?” Tariq asked.

“Oh, we gave it away. That's what you do. A bike that one child has finished with becomes a benefit to the next.” She turned the bicycle over and checked the wheels. “This one needs a little oil, but it's good. Some family will be glad of it.”

Tariq thought about the consequence of throwing such a thing away — a good bike, in a landfill, for no reason.

“Originally I thought this job was just rubbish,” he said. “Sorting other people's rubbish.”

Brenda smiled and combined two boxes of books into one. “It's not rubbish until you decide it is,” she said. “And it's the only job where you meet the whole town, one box at a time.”

She put the red bicycle by the door, where the families would see it first.