On What Matters

The Night of the Black Wheelie Bins

The walls were grey, the carpet was grey, even the faces of the town councillors at the 11 o’clock meeting were indisputably grey. It was a Thursday and Thomas Faulk was having a Bad Day. Not a bad morning, or a dull meeting, but a Bad Day. His father was sick. The pound had fallen, again. His sister had been promoted to partner of a prestigious PR firm in London. And now he was sat in another bloody 11 o’clock meeting on another bloody Bad Day discussing another bloody Boring Matter. The opposition was furious.

‘This woman would have you believe that if we introduced yellow wheelie bins to the town, it would turn into some cesspit of immorality! This is simply not the case. What we are looking to encourage is a sense of progression, of the future, of an accepting town that welcomes whoever, whenever and above all is fun-'

‘Fun?!’ bellowed Richard from across the grey room. ‘Fun?! No one elected us so we could be fun, they elected us so we could make the town work!’

Amid eye rolls and tired sighs from the opposition, Leslie stepped in. ‘Richard is right. We have a functional system. Green for recycling, blue for waste.’

‘What do we want Risley to be?’
‘Well, clearly your lot want it to be confusing!’
‘For who?’
‘For its residents!’
‘Do you think they’re stupid?’
‘And yellow isn’t st-'

‘Oh shut up!’ Thomas stood up, surprising even himself. 'They're just wheelie bins! Wheelie bins! They don't matter! They do not matter!'

Richard turned to Thomas in amazement. 'Do you have something to say?'

'Yes! Yes I do. I ran for election because I wanted to start making a difference in the world. And we're here - talking about sodding wheelie bins! And we talk about wheelie bins, and postal collections, and litter removal, and shmooze our way to the top table at the Association Christmas lunch just so we can return next year-'

'Thomas-'

'I'm not finished, not yet. Did you know that there are eight thousand people sleeping rough in London tonight? Have you seen the fires blazing in schools in Aleppo? And we want to debate, spend our time, spend public money - on wheelie bins? They just don't matter.'

The room began to smile on him with some forced tolerance. Smarmy little upstart, that Thomas Faulk. But his father was a council grandee, a hero. His father had introduced the cycle lane and cleaned up the playground. The Faulk son had to be listened to.

'I have a proposal, if you'll consider it.' His voice began to falter a little. 'I have a proposal.'

Leslie put his pen down. The room knew its arguments had failed in the face of the son of the man who had stopped their toddlers tripping on crisp packets.

'One colour for all wheelie bins. Put an end to this sodding argument. Make them black. Keep them functional, consistent - and keep them as just wheelie bins. Because that's all they are. They just don't matter. Then we can focus on the things that do.'

The opposition narrowed its eyes. Richard nodded. 'So...the things that matter?'

------------------
That night, Thomas sat in The King's Head and bought two rounds with his school friend Billy.

'Well I won, didn't I? Now we can focus on the things that matter.'

Billy eyed his friend and weighed the free beer against ten long years of friendship. 'Thing is, Tom-'

'I can start to do what I set out to do now.'

'Yeah but mate,' Billy said gently. 'Does anyone really know what matters, until it does?'

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It began with Eileen Idbury. She had lived in Risley for sixty five years and had no intention of stopping now. Even if the local kids had replaced lager cans with strong-smelling smoke and the supermarket was now full of people she didn't recognise and everyone she'd grown up with was starting to die. Even if the council was full of dreamers who kept changing the colour of the bins and still charging her tax. Her daughter Laura was off in London, engaged to a hedge fund manager who would give her everything plus children and her son had moved to Portugal ten years ago, but she had everything she needed here in Risley and she was not going to leave now.

One night everything changed. She had always been a fan of Agatha Christie - she liked a good murder - and had had a very satisfactory evening by the radiator in her best armchair, reading And Then There Were None, the really scary one. She was in her favourite state of spooked, in her quiet little house at the top of Eiderdown Road, keeping the lamps on and shivering deliciously at the wind in the cherry trees.

Until, that is, a cyclist had the bad fortune to whizz around the corner onto the steep Eiderdown Road and, not seeing the shiny new black wheelie bins all lined up for collection, rode headlong into one. He fell hard onto the road as the bin of Number 23 tipped onto its wheels and headed straight for the bin of Number 25, ploughing into it and driving it clean into the bin of Number 27. This unholy trinity of wheelie bins began to career down the road with an almighty cacophony, smashing into lampposts and scattering glass bottles and charging towards the main road like oversized bats out of hell.

Eileen Idbury was found next to her radiator in a state of nervous shock the next morning as her neighbour came to fill her in on the gossip.

The racket of the three wheelie bins clattering down the road made even Dave Parker start awake and realise his wife Sara was not in bed; the bins did not stop hurtling down Eiderdown Road until they hit the parking meter at the foot of the drive, bounced off its side and smashed through the door of the Best Food cornershop, at which point the sound of Sara shrieking from inside the shop reverberated back up the drive. Upon hearing his wife’s distress, Dave jumped out of bed in his yellowing boxers, pushed his hairy little legs as fast as they would go to Best Food, where he saw his wife in neither the pyjamas nor the distress he had imagined, but just a little shaken in a tight blue dress and lipstick, well away from the broken window and hand-in-hand with Mr Ellwood, their son’s art teacher. In Mr Ellwood’s other hand was a bottle of Rioja – the £8.99 stuff, not the £5.29 hooch – in a green-striped plastic bag.
Meanwhile Archie, the eighteen year old who had been left in charge of the shop overnight whilst his father slept off a twelve-hour shift upstairs, slumped next to the window with his head in his hands as blotches of red seeped angrily through his trainers.

The three black wheelie bins met their match in the food aisle, their course halted by bag upon bag of penne and fusilli. They crashed in a heap, spilling cat food and snotty tissues on the floor to mingle with the smashed jars of pitted olives in brine which had fallen from the shelves. One bin lay defeated and horizontal, its wheels spinning lamely.

The ramifications of the night of black wheelie bins echoed through two divorces, fourteen broken bones in a foot that was intended for the football pitch but ended up under an estate agent’s desk, a hefty care home bill for the Idbury family that caused the break up of Laura Idbury’s engagement, and several thousand pounds worth of repairs to the neighbourhood, footed eventually by an angry council.

Thomas lost his seat at the next election, and his place at the top table of the Association Christmas lunch. Fires still blazed in the schools of Aleppo and eight thousand people still slept rough on the streets of London.

But, we can’t leave it there. Sara and Mr Ellwood moved to Bristol and lived in some happiness for a while, until his bearded ideals took him to art college in Glasgow and the charms of a twenty year old student called Elena. Sara’s son eventually forgave her and, as the years wiped his eyelids clean of the graphics that had plagued his imagination, he would even spend the occasional weekend with her. Dave wallowed unhappily back in Risley until the day he met Mr Ellwood’s ex-wife, an Amazonian redhead who had trained lions in the circus and reported from the Gulf. They spent an afternoon seething over flat whites, which became beers, and sealed an angry friendship. Dave wrote a book about her and married her sister. Poor Archie, of course, became fat and miserable. But his father gained a new story to tell to his local following, which grew and grew as news spread of the night he heroically saved a woman and her husband from being crushed on the night the black wheelie bins escaped.

And Thomas? Thomas kept drinking with Billy and agreed a little more often. He wrote petitions for military interventions, donated monthly to Medecins sans Frontieres and drove to Calais to work in the Jungle. And every day when he saw the black bin bags arrive with clothes and tins and shoes, he shook his head a little and thought of what mattered.