DAY 9

The weekend is coming like an unannounced relative and Friyay is dead. Gordo now lives for the week. In fact, living is strong. His digital marketing workshops are far from living. He exists for the week. Friday night used to feel like an exhilarating, life-affirming plummet into Saturday; a nest of pillows stuffed with unbridled joy. Now, he sits in traffic and listens to upset and angry callers on radio phone-ins. The traffic all around his vehicle shouldn’t be here. Nobody is taking this lockdown seriously. The corpse of Friyay hawks him up like a twisted knot of phlegm and gobs him high into the air. Below, racing right at him, is Saturday, a dog-dirt smeared pavement strewn with burned out, cheap fireworks and chewing gum. Someone blares their horn and almost rams into him. The laugh rollicking out of his face as he flies out of the driver-side door belongs in a Japanese horror movie, not on the bypass.

Bethany observes the tabloid media outrage over Extinction Rebellion’s remembrance-day stunt; placing a wreath emblazoned with the words ‘Climate change, ACT NOW’ on the cenotaph. The Daily Mail go out of their way to allege that the ex-soldier involved is a convicted drug dealer. Admittedly, this one has not helped the cause… Yet not too many people express anywhere near the same venom over the government who runs their country, with a duty to serve its people, handing another £122m PPE contract, without tender, to a peer associate with absolutely no track record. Before her own sense of societal injustice can stick another boot into her happiness, she fires up another episode of Selling Sunset and laughs at the beautiful people.

 (Day 5 continued) Awadil finds himself staring straight through a lost cat poster taped to a street light. When focus returns to his eyes, he reads it. Bonbon’s safe return will fetch a reward of $200. His despair flips and mutates into hatred. Not hatred of the cat, but hatred for the flabby hypocrisy clogging up the arteries of the human race. How, he wonders, on the same street, can people be so tortured by the absence of a domestic pet, yet pick up a packet of meat without a second thought. Meat which threatens to cause mass famine, war and vast swathes of inhospitable land. Not to mention the panic and survival instinct bulging out of the eyes of animals waiting to slide down the throat of the ignorant, arrogant masses. Awadil finds his legs and marches ahead, gritting his teeth. No destination, no care for where he ends up. He makes it only 100-yards before sudden movement from the corner of his eye causes him to stop dead and snap his head to a fire-escape staircase out back of some apartments. Bonbon the cat is scratting at a burst bin bag. Awadil drops to one knee and beckons over the missing feline. He has no interest in the $200.