Day 198: Carrots

Home from a dull, interminable Sunday close, another shift tomorrow night the same. Serve customers, count the tills, do the bins. On and on it swirls. Only time of day I feel alive are these moonlit minutes, this moment snatched from the jaws of sleep, a steaming mug of tea by my side, my lamp blaring an amber glow out into the darkness of this lonely room perched at the top of this house.

The Uber driver was from Leeds, smiled apologetically. "I from not here. I know only sat-nav, or way you tell me." I said that the sat-nav would do fine, put my head back down, let the wheels roll on.

The bin bags were heavy and a wet thickness within slopped against my legs as I carried them out. Some of the bags had been pierced by cocktail sticks, still poking from the stretched polyethylene, or by bits of glass, and were leaking unidentified juice onto the mudied floor. I felt the warm, vegetal aroma hitting my nostrils, exhaled, picked up the bags, hoisted them dripping onto the street.

Fran's leg was coiled under her on the sofa as I left this afternoon. She had a chopping board balanced on the pouffe and was chopping carrots and onions for the evening stew. The tug of familial feelings as I left, memories of weekend evenings long gone, my father peeling potatoes on his lap in front of the football scores on Ceefax, the light outside failing, the pages scrolling into the weeds of the lower Scottish leagues, the rounded, lyrical team names - Airdrieonians, Dumbarton, Stenhousemuir - comforting me, signalling the drawing in of the day. Now, twenty-five years later, lost, confused, wanting only to stay in this warm front room with the television blaring and Fran and Chris and the dog for company. But instead turning, pulling up my coat collar, sloping off alone into the night.