Wheelie Bins Quotes

As she made her way through the tedium of check-in lines, security lines, boarding lines, she noticed several people wearing paper surgical masks. She wondered if they were being paranoid about that new virus she’d been hearing about. As she stepped from the jetway into the plane, it struck her that for fifteen hours she’d be sealed in a metal tube with hundreds of people. She wished she’d thought to get a mask for herself. It was good she was leaving when she was; if the virus spread, it might get complicated to fly. But then she looked around at all the people cramming their wheelie bags into overhead bins, adjusting their neck pillows, scrolling through the in-flight video choices, and dismissed the idea. Restless humans. You’d never stop them traveling.

We’re still standing outside the front gate of the shell cottage as a boy in football socks stomps down his driveway to retrieve a wheelie bin. Now we watch as he drags it up through the laurel and back to the house. All his gestures are exaggeratedly huffy, though there’s no one to witness his protest, no one but you and me, and the boy didn’t even see us. We walk from the thistles to where the cliff drops into open Atlantic and there’s nothing but luscious, jumping blue all the way to America. I’m still thinking of the boy in the driveway, of how he doesn’t realise how lucky he is to live here where there’s space to run and the salt wind ruddies his cheeks each day, how he takes it all for normal and considers himself entitled to be huffy with the wheelie bin. Now I wonder was I was lucky too, and never grateful? Sometimes a little hungry and sometimes a little cold, but not once sick or struck and every day with the sea to ruddy me. Perhaps I was lucky my father took me back when the neighbour woman rang his doorbell, lucky he never drove away and left me on the road again. But it’s too late to be grateful now. It’s too late now for everything but regret.

In this green, scratchy muddle Finn eventually ended up barking at a bush. I couldn’t see anything in it, but not for the first time in our partnership I shouted a challenge at an inanimate object because Finn told me to. I’ve shouted challenges at more bushes and trees than I can remember down the years – not to mention cars, vans, cupboards, lofts, roofs, boxes, wheelie bins and haystacks.

October mornings peeled the night cloud back to its subcutaneous lilac tissue. The leaves earned their name by leaving the trees. Browned and blistered foliage cascaded from the sycamore, swilling into the exterior nooks of the house, ruffling the gravel, snagging on the tortured remains of the thistle, bottlenecking and compacting in the corner where the wheelie bin was kept, so that when it was taken off for collection, its absence created a rectangular hollow the shape of a short, stocky pillar that held its shape for several seconds before crumbling.

Leila wished she were at home too, enveloped in the warmth of bed covers with her cat curled at her feet, purring in drowsy contentment. Her cat was stone deaf and black – except for a patch of snow on one paw. She had named him Mr Chaplin, after Charlie Chaplin, for, just like the heroes of early cinema, he lived in a silent world of his own. Tequila Leila would have given anything to be in her apartment now. Instead she was here, somewhere on the outskirts of Istanbul, across from a dark, damp football field, inside a metal rubbish bin with rusty handles and flaking paint. It was a wheelie bin; at least four feet high and half as wide. Leila herself was five foot seven – plus the eight inches of her purple slingback stilettos, still on her feet. There was so much she wanted to know. In her mind she kept replaying the last moments of her life, asking herself where things had gone wrong – a futile exercise since time could not be unravelled as though it were a ball of yarn. Her skin was already turning greyish-white, even though her cells were still abuzz with activity.

He was so stocky. He was like a wheelie bin.

The ends of his moustache have been waxed into little tips. Here on the Lower East side, he is the absolute pinnacle of sophistication. McAvoy cannot help but think that back home, in Hull, he would be found in a wheelie bin with a cocktail shaker wedged somewhere invasive.