Skipping

A clear out, they say. We’ll feel better after a good clear out. Blow the cobwebs away, they say. Freshen ourselves up.

And so it was with Janis and him.

First the two wooden tennis rackets and their buckling guts of cat.

Then four bamboo fishing rods (two snapped in thirds) with their tangled twines, their rusting reels, and the small grey plastic carry box with its pull-out trays of colour-coordinated feather-swatted flies.

Four lobster pots next, three made from orange rope, the other twisted marine, then a dozen creels, a bouncing yellow buoy on a rusted chain, and his crab net, still hooked and levered and terribly, yes terribly, embattled and embittered.

It takes three shots, the crab net. Some memories are harder to toss overboard than others.

All of it on her back, under her arms, between her legs, up the fourteen steps from the cellar to the narrow hall, out the front door with the drab rose trailing over the drab brass bell, down the path between the leaning preening lavender bushes, across the pavement, past Mr Bishop’s three-wheeler, a dance across the cracked paving stones and their peering puddling push up daisies.

And into the skip.

The woman who delivers the skip, off the back of a lorry as orange as her lips and as grubby as her otherwise neat fingernails, smokes rollies and keeps a stick of chewing gum behind her right ear. Her name badge says Yvonne, but she calls herself Fiona and Janis doesn’t like to ask so she didn’t call her anything at all.

Janis quizzes the woman about skips. Tell me about the culture of skips, she says, offering the skip woman strong milky tea from a white chipped mug with a hand drawn badger humping a fox on it.

What are the social norms? she asks. Would people, and by people she means the Blackfords (MBE and OBE respectively) across the road, would people judge her by the contents of her skip?  Fiona or Yvonne does not reply. Fiona or Yvonne drinks half of the tea, keeping the chip well away from her orange lips, slings the rest of it on the leaning preening lavender, tells Janis to sign here I’ll be back in a week don’t overfill the bastard, and leaves.

Janis watches the skip woman’s thin denimed arse climb up into the lorry. She fancies herself in that decaying leaf lipstick. And that neat squat jump up into the truck.

Skipping is addictive. As is cellaring, bedrooming, kitchening and halling.

After the crab nets, her white silk wedding shoes (the right one still with its Blue Curaçao stain), her Great Aunt Celia’s incontinence pads, and the gunmetal safe with Uncle Eric’s secrets.

Or so it is said. No one has ever worked out the combination to the lock, and no one has ever thought Uncle Eric scintillating enough to get violent and force it open with a crowbar or a claw hammer or whatever one uses for such a hatchet job.

The chipper white mug with its fresh orange smear. Janis runs a finger along the half sticky rim. Applies the deadening leaf to her lips.

The teddies are next, sent out in order of size and age. Carlo Bambino the last to go. Hand knitted in Sicily with an actual metal gun between his teeth.

A moment’s respite for Jemima Puddleduck and her one overwashed duckling. Hold her up to the light. Whatever happened to the other one?

Henry’s first soiled nappy. Alicia’s afterbirth kept neat in the freezer for twenty-two years.

Her appendix, coiled curious in a plastic specimen jar.

Who needs rugs anyway. Their sole purpose on earth to ruin a woman’s back with hoovering. Rolling them up one by one. Ooft – heavy. Especially the one with him tucked inside.

And as for the retaining wall, what is she even trying to retain? Borrows a jack hammer, dons a climbing helmet, ties a teatowel across her decayed leaf lips as the dining room ceiling settles down about her.

A hailstorm of monstrous confetti and retainment and derangement and how she laughs.

His mother Whilma’s fishing trawler, Mary, who calls a boat Mary, winched out of Fisherrow, listing hard right on top of the whole sorry pitching shebang.

She overfills the bastard, that’s for sure.