DAY 20

Kim Kardashboard was booked for a month of Sundays at various clubs and functions. With 17 cancelled dates and January on thin ice, given the inevitable spike in post-Christmas cases, Tony Hardman has to hang up the wig for the foreseeable. The garage light blinks on and he pulls back the dust sheet covering his bricklaying tools. He can already hear the hiss of murmurs awaiting his sheepish return to Screwfix.

***

Yeadley D. Burke boasts a net worth of £12m. He is a retired, single football agent without too many stories of his own. During the 1st part of lockdown, he ordered things from the internet to keep each day alive. Some new piece of machinery, technology or fine clothing would arrive and he would watch excitedly, in his silk gown. In June, he spent £142,000 on cake forks made from precious metals hewn from some never before accessed cave in Argentina.

Now, sat in the booming silence of the guest quarters following a documentary about the perils of crossing the Mexican border, the lack of danger in his life coils around his throat like a python and leaves him struggling for breath; the idea that getting a £125,000 per week striker £140,000 at a slightly better club should be his biggest thrill before the pandemic. Terrified of waiting for a normality that might never return, he leaves the giant property barefoot, sets fire to a neighbour's paper and cardboard bin and sniffs up an indulgent lung-full of the deadly fumes. Every few days since, he does this and his life has become an unfolding toxic mystery. If he wrote down the unanswered questions each morning after, it would be thicker than a novel from Stephen King’s coke days. Yesterday, he found his own £2,000 shoe in a shopping trolley and has no recollection of even getting them out of his wardrobe. It had an empty can of Redbull in it. While off his nut, he's been mugged 3 times. For the first time in his comfortable life, he feels alive.

(Day 15 continued) As he says this, Awadil falls to his knees, tears breaking fast, like a river bursting its banks and all rage leaves his body, drowned by despair. Bonbon finally gives up on the caged chickens and brushes up against the legs of the poultry shop lady. She does not know whether to approach this broken man or not.

“Kill it…” he whimpers, “KILL IT!!!”

“What? Can we at least talk about it?” Bonbon struts back towards the birds, ears moving curiously back and forth. Awadil continues to sob, slides down the wall, pulling his knees up to his dripping chin.

She messages her manager, explaining there is a situation involving a troubled stranger, but it’s under control so to be closeby, but don’t come in. She manages to calm Awadil down with a glass of water and he seems thrown, a little more lucid when she explains that she is a 36-year old mother of two. Her name is Bilhah, which she explains is Jewish.

Between despondent, slurred sentences, mumbling about the hypocrisy of humans, Awadil’s neck will intermittently jerk stiff with rage and he barks barely decipherable profanity. How can people eat meat kept and killed in barbaric surrounds, the production of which is destroying the world’s forests and our futures, but pamper another species into luxurious docility? He presses Bilhah for an explanation about why she looked horrified at the idea of killing the cat when all those birds live in hell. She considers the idea and explains that she does this job to support her young family and keep a roof over their heads, but underneath the learned emotional separation is a young girl who dies a little more with each snapped bird neck.

Bilhah draws a slight smirk from Awadil when she explains that if he found her name on one of those cheap key-rings, it would say ‘rash action and confusion’ and gets him to agree to a cup of hot chocolate. In the corridor, she looks at the door back to the street. 5 paces to freedom…