WhatsApp Group:
Karen: Can't believe it's Saturday again!! Wtf!
Vyshali: Saturday ??? X
Vyshali:😱
Me: How's everyone?
Karen: Slightly better now that I've had my daily meltdown and threatened to divorce Dave about 6 times. Waste of time though. He doesn't believe me anymore. He knows I'm losing the will to live so I'm hardly gonna find the strength to fill in any legal forms 😩
Vyshali: Same. Kids are climbing the walls now. Thanks for the stuff you gave me last week, Daisy. That wine was 👌😘💕
Me: No problem hun xx
Sarah: Still stuck with Dickface!!! Think he's gonna be able to move into a bedsit across town once the students move out for the summer.🤞🤞 Sick of him cluttering the place up with his video games and beer cans 😤
Karen: Arsehole!!
Sarah: By the way girls, pretty sure it's Friday😕xx
"John!" I yelled. "Apparently it's Friday. We've forgotten to put the bins out."
You'd have thought that I'd told him that there was about to be an alien invasion by the way that he came running down the stairs, buttoning up his jeans. "Jesus, Daisy! Now you tell me!"
"What the hell do you mean by….. "
"Is it glass and paper, or plastics today? Think Daisy, think!"
"I don't ….."
"We need to act fast. It's nearly ten already. You go out into the street to look and I'll make a start on the bags." He sped off through the kitchen.
I opened my mouth to call out, but I knew it was futile as I watched the rear end of the truck slowly turning the corner, a young man following behind, throwing the last bag of recycling from our cul-de-sac into the crusher. John obviously heard it too, as he was standing behind the side gate, slowly shaking his head in dismay.
"Too late," I confirmed. "I …. I did all I could but ..... there was nothing I could do. We were too damn late."
"How could we have allowed this to happen?" he asked. I heard the clinking of glass as he dropped a recycling bag to the ground. "Look what we've come to, Daisy. We can't even keep up with bin days." His head hung as he turned to go back into the kitchen.
"I know, John. I know."
Of course, John revisited this all day. By the afternoon, it had become Gordon's fault. "Why didn't the bloke tell us?" he asked. "He obviously saw that we hadn't put ours out. You'd think he'd have called over the fence and reminded us."
"I don't think that you can blame this on Gordon, John. Anyway, I'd have thought that you would have spotted him and the rest of the neighbours putting their bags out, while you had him under bloody surveillance. You spend half your life in the window."
"Hmph," he puffed. "I'm gonna have to put it all in my shed for the time being."
One thing I'd learned about this lockdown was that everyone had their low moments - me, my friends, my colleagues. Everyone had different little things that pushed them towards that moment. For John, it was missing the bins! Over the course of the last 67 days he'd been subjected to hours of home-schooling, been terrorised by coughing strangers in shops, suffered numerous incidents of marital disharmony, been attacked by dogs and cautioned by the police on a number of occasions; but for him, forgetting bin day was a step too far.
He couldn't be tempted out of his melancholic mood by wine or cake. At 9.15, even though the sun was still out, he told me that he'd probably just have an early night. Poor John. Still ….. no one else wanted the main telly, choosing instead to play on consoles and phones in their rooms. I pulled down the blinds, poured myself a glass of wine, retrieved the Wispa that I'd stashed under the kitchen sink last week and looked through Netflix for something exciting. Shame to waste the opportunity. It had been a long time since I'd lost myself in a zombie apocalypse movie. 🍫🍷
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