Orna Mulcahy on people we all know.
According to Maria, a skip is the answer to most of life's problems. Hence the presence outside her door of a €300 midi that is helping her get over her latest emotional shock. She can't talk about it just yet, it's too soon; suffice to say that his favourite armchair is now sitting out there in the rain, legs up to the sky, while in a tornado of rage, she has also managed to clear out the garden shed and have a go at under the bed in the spare room. An air of deadly, uncluttered calm has now descended on the house, as she considers her next move.
Meanwhile the skip is unfillable because people keep coming along and taking things out. It was piled up like the Manhattan skyline on Thursday, and almost empty on Friday. She has been watching them - the vultures - from the upstairs window: all sorts of well-dressed individuals walking by, eyes glued to the contents, and if they don't have a rummage there and then, they come back later in the dead of night, brazen as anything. You'd think they'd at least knock on the door and ask, instead of being so sneaky. Even though she's throwing things away, she doesn't necessarily want anyone else to have them, especially not the professional skip cases who come around in white Transit vans, pretending to be interested in the bit of old copper piping, but really throwing an eye over the level of security on the ground floor.
As for the neighbours who have been quietly dumping horrible things into the skip, well they always were a low crowd around here. Apart from the embarrassment of having her skip filling up with things she wouldn't be caught dead throwing out, never mind owning, there are environmental issues, too. Yesterday there was a filthy old fridge on top of the pile, and she knew it was from number nine because she could see where they had dragged it through the gravel in their front garden. But this morning it was gone again, to be replaced by a pair of mouldy chintz curtains, a bucket with a hole in the bottom and a bag of clothes. Ugh! Well at least it wasn't as bad as that time she woke up to find a Mini Minor sitting on top of her skip.
And what about the people who pull things out, have a good look at them, and then leave them on the footpath? Even now there's a woman out there, trying to get the door knob off the old scullery door that's holding everything else in. Go on, take the finger plate while you're at it. What sort of woman goes around with a screwdriver in her glove compartment anyway?
After 22 calls to the skip company, a man finally comes to take the bloody thing away, but not before he makes her take out some bits of wood that are pushing it over regulation height. Then it's gone, leaving Maria with a big black oily stain on her gravel and a sudden, terrible thought that the box in which she keeps her passport was in there somewhere.