The Car

The car is full of rubbish because he never cleans it out - not
because he's lazy or anything, more because it just doesn't occur to
him that it should be done. But it's not total chaos in there. The
rubbish does have it's own natural order. Recent trash and
soon-to-be-trash is on the passenger seat or in the footwell in front
of it. Not quite so recent trash is scattered on the back seat, flung
there hastily when he needed to give someone a lift. Even older rubbish
is on the floor behind the drivers seat - swept down there when he
needed to give more than one person a lift. The oldest rubbish is under
the front seats themselves, having been kicked there by the people
sitting on the back seat. There's also a plastic bag of rubbish wedged
between the passenger seat and the back seat - the result of a random,
but failed, effort to impose tidyness. This bag contains rubbish from
all of the previous groups. If you cut it open it would probably be
quite like those geological charts that show the different ages of
man.

Most of the rubbish is newspapers. He's looking for a new job and a new
- cheap - monitor for his computer, so he tends to buy all the local
papers just for their classifieds sections. He reads them all at work
and then, because of some bizarre compulsion, takes them with him when
he leaves instead of throwing them in the bin there and then. When he
gets home he ends up leaving them in the car, if for no other reason
than because his hands are too full of keys, work keys and mobile-phone
to be able to carry them indoors.

A good proportion of it is food wrappers. And petrol receipts. He gets
through a fair bit of petrol because all he ever seems to be doing is
driving to and from work. He often wakes up too late to eat before he
leaves home, so he ends up buying pasties or chicken-curry slices at
the same time as the petrol. He opens them before he drives off and
eats them as he's sitting at traffic lights. The lights are a bitch
though. They always turn back to green just as he's about finish the
pastie, so he has to cram it all in his mouth and fling the wrapper
back on the passenger seat as he slams the car into gear. Of course the
first time he goes round a bend the wrapper slides off the seat and
gets wedged between the chair and the door, where it falls out
embarrassingly when he has to open the door for a passenger. Petrol
receipts tend to fall out too. He stuffs them in the little gap in the
door-armrest and they fall out as soon as he opens it. He has to pick
them up of course - it's not good to leave your Switch details lying
about - and they get flung on the floor with everything else.

The rest of the rubbish is just random clutter, such as coins, books
and crumbs from the pasties. Some this random stuff is just a little
too random though. Like hair-bands. He has very short hair indeed, so
has no use for hair-bands, but there are a couple of hair-bands there
nonetheless. Buried under the papers is a solitary shoe -which doesn't
fit a single person he knows. Then there's a huge wedge of plastic bags
in one corner - possibly explained by his friend's daughter's
propensity for car sickness, but still a bit odd. Perhaps the most
bizarre though is the log. There's a genuine, crusty-barked, knobbly
log all ready for the fireplace, and it's just siting there amongst all
the clutter. He says vaguely that he 'figured it'd be useful'.

And hidden under the bag of half collected rubbish there's a letter on
scented paper. Torn up, taped back together and screwed up in a tiny
ball. It's quite an important letter really but he doesn't want to read
it again, or even to set eyes on it again, but he can't throw it away.
It's just that strange compulsion he has to keep things. But it's ok
because he's not likely to have to see it again anyway, what with all
that other rubbish on top of it. Unless he gets a sudden urge to tidy
out the car of course, but that's unlikely. She was always the one who
kept the car tidy.