The Other Side of the Page · The Evening of the Bin Weeks

This is the same evening as "Every Moon", the seventh book of "The Day Before". Lan's mother was not on the Green.

The council had changed the recycling in the spring, and nobody on the Green had forgiven it.

It used to be simple. Everything went every Thursday. Now the black bin went every Thursday and the blue bin went every other Thursday, and the council had sent a letter explaining it, with a little calendar printed on the back in two shades of grey that were very hard to tell apart under the kitchen light. Lan's mother had put the letter somewhere safe. She could not now say where safe had been.

So she went by feel. Thursday came, and she would stand at the back door with her coat on at ten to five in the morning, on her way to the early shift, and look at the blue bin, and think: is it a blue week? It felt like a blue week. And she would drag it down the path to the pavement in the dark, and come home that afternoon to find it standing there exactly as full as she had left it, with a sticker on the lid from the binmen that said, politely, NOT TODAY.

That had happened three weeks running. Or rather it had happened, then she had skipped the next week to be safe, and that one had been a blue week, and the lorry had gone past, and then she had put it out again and it had been wrong again. She was now, as far as she could tell, exactly out of step, the way you sometimes are with a person you are walking beside, every step a half-beat behind no matter how you try to catch up.

The blue bin was full. More than full. The lid stood up like a hat on a pile of cereal boxes, and the cardboard from the wedding order had gone in on top, and on Monday a fox had got at the bottom of it and there had been yoghurt pots across the path.

Tonight was Wednesday. Tomorrow was Thursday. Either it was a blue week or it was not, and she had no idea which.

Here was the sensible thing, she thought, standing at the window with a cup of tea she had let go cold. She would sit up. Not all night, but late, and then early, from four, in the armchair by the front window with the blind up. When she heard the lorry turn into the top of the Green she would know. If it was the blue lorry she would run out and drag the bin down to the kerb before it reached their house. It would cost her a night's sleep before an early shift. But it would be certain.

She was moving the armchair round to face the window when Lan came in from the Green.

Lan came in the way she came in when she had been somewhere with Inkling, quietly, with leaves in her hair that had no business being there in this month. She looked at the armchair, and at the blind, and at her mother.

"What are you doing?"

Her mother told her. The blue bin, the lorry, the four o'clock.

"How do you know which week it is?" said Lan.

"I just—" said her mother, and stopped. She had been about to say I just know. She had said it to herself every Thursday since the spring. She had just known three times, and been wrong three times.

She let go of the armchair.

Lan went to the fridge. On the door was the whiteboard where they wrote the shopping, and the magnets that held up the dentist's card and Lan's swimming certificate. Lan wiped a corner clean and drew two squares side by side. In one she wrote BLUE. In the other she wrote NOT BLUE. She took the little magnet shaped like a strawberry off the swimming certificate, which slid down the door and nobody caught.

"Every Thursday," said Lan, "after the lorry, we move the strawberry. Across. Then back. Then across."

"But which one do we start on?"

Lan thought. Her mother could see her thinking; she held very still when she did it, the way she had when she was small and somebody was telling a story.

"Is there a week," said Lan, "that everybody knows for sure? Not by feel. A real one."

The letter. The letter from the council, with the grey calendar on the back. Her mother stood in the middle of the kitchen and tried to remember safe, and found it: inside the recipe book, the old one, in the page for Christmas cake, where she put things she must not lose. She pulled it out. In two greys, under the kitchen light, she and Lan worked it out together with their noses nearly on the paper. The first Thursday of the year had been a blue week. The council said so. It was printed.

They counted on from there on the calendar by the door, two weeks at a time, Lan touching each blue Thursday with the end of a pen. It took longer than it should have, because they kept losing their place in March, and in the end Lan fetched a pencil and ticked them.

Tomorrow was a blue week.

"So last week I was a week out again," said her mother. "And the week before." She could see it now on the paper, her three wrong Thursdays sitting exactly in the gaps between the right ones, as neat as if she had planned them. Lan, kindly, said nothing about this, and her mother noticed her saying nothing, and was grateful.

Lan put the strawberry on BLUE.

Her mother looked at it. It was a ridiculous thing: two squares and a strawberry. It also did not care how she felt about Thursdays. It would be right because it was counted, and the count was pinned to something printed in a letter that was not going to change its mind.

She put the armchair back.

At ten to five the next morning she dragged the blue bin down the path without stopping to wonder. When she came home that afternoon it was standing on the pavement empty, its lid neatly closed, no sticker. She wheeled it back up the path, went to the fridge, and moved the strawberry across to NOT BLUE.

Lan was doing her homework at the table.

"Where did you get the strawberry idea from?" her mother said.

"The moon," said Lan, and went on writing.

Her mother did not ask whose. There were things Lan brought home from the Green that came with explanations and things that did not, and she had learned that the second kind were best left to grow on their own. She stood by the fridge for a moment longer than she needed to. There were other things in this house that came round, she thought. The gas. The car's MOT. Her mother's birthday, which she had now nearly missed twice. She had been carrying all of them on feel.

She wiped another corner of the board.

The question for your own table

What comes round in your house that you have been keeping track of by feel?

Something to do

Pick one thing that repeats. Count it with something you move each time it happens, and start the count from a date written down somewhere, not from memory.