It is eleven thirty in the morning. Dorothy is brushing her teeth for the third time. She is sitting on her bed and leaning forward to watch the comings and goings in the street. The toothbrush lags behind her head as she looks this way and that. She has a beaker of water in one hand and every minute or so she sucks on the brush, spits into the beaker and returns to her labour. Yesterday she stood in her porch while swigging from a bottle of mouthwash. Dorothy is worried because the dentists are closed for all but urgent cases. If she had an emergency she would not attend a central hub where she would be obliged to put herself in the hands of an unknown dental surgeon whose credentials she has been unable to examine.

Dorothy’s recycling has undergone radical changes since the country was told to stay at home. Before, she either dragged or kicked the little green skip along her path and nestled it against her front wall, beside the street lamp. Dorothy used to do this under cover of darkness, as though unaware of the stark white streetlight which illuminated the scene perfectly for any neighbours drawn to their windows by the echoing scrape of skip on tarmac. In the past, these unseen spectators might have commented to their partners about the amount of bottles that little old Mrs. McGinty, who lives on her own and who has no visitors, was getting through. Now they’re the ones sneaking out after dark and keeping away from the treacherous glare of those damned new lights.

Nobody sees much of Dorothy in the flesh, although she is often in the windows or lurking in the porch. In the first week of lockdown her downstairs curtains were open until Friday evening. Late night joggers, reclaiming the street from the rows of dusty cars, may have noticed the glare from her television, but wasn’t everyone glued to the rolling news? She didn’t put her skip out that week and the following week it was one of many that caused the recycling team to scratch their heads with their blue-gloved hands. It was the same for the next two weeks, but only Adam and Jenny from number twenty seven took note of how Dorothy’s bottles were covered in cobwebs and labels that had been half-eaten by slugs or snails. Jenny, who is spending a lot of time looking out of the window, saw Mrs. McGinty through the window of her dead husband’s shed and also spotted that the garage door had been left open one afternoon. Jenny thinks Dorothy has been having a clear out, but rather than old clothes, magazines, broken tools and unwanted crockery, Jenny suspects that Dorothy has been digging away at a mountain of empties.

At three fifteen, after a cup of coffee and her last Lotus biscuit, Dorothy fetches the toothbrush she keeps in the cabinet above the basin in the downstairs toilet. In the kitchen, she fills a glass with water, hurries into the front room and feigns surprise when she arrives at her favourite spot in the bay window. Over at number twenty seven, the nice couple who have called twice to check if she is okay are also in the window; but they are looking at each other and do not realise they have an audience. Whether this would concern Jenny is moot, as she is two glasses in to one of the bottles from this morning’s Wine Society delivery. The only thing that is bothering her is whether they have enough to see them through until next week. She did not appreciate Adam’s observation that they will be fine if they agree not to open a bottle before six o’clock and that is the thrust of the conversation to which Dorothy is bearing sole witness. Dorothy wishes for the sixth time this week that she had one of those bar stools so that she didn’t have to stand up to see over the hedge. She could go upstairs, but she is enjoying the sunlight and she might miss something. She likes Adam and Jenny and she likes watching them; she doesn’t feel guilty about that because she knows that Jenny likes watching her and as she has said many times, albeit to herself, they really are a lovely couple.

Adam is attempting to convince Jenny that what he said about the wine was a joke. Jenny might be tipsy, but she knows that Adam touches the mole on his neck when he lies, and sure enough, there goes his finger. Jenny is sad, not angry; she admits she has been drinking too much again, but apart from Mrs. McGinty and the Sikh family on the corner, everyone has been upping their intake, as those bulging green skips would tell you. She’s not sure if she really believes that it takes one to know one, but she has been watching Mrs. McGinty ever since they moved in to number twenty seven and what she sees in the old woman’s endless teeth cleaning is an addict replacing one obsession with another. The last time she saw the old woman step outside the house, Jenny noticed that her gait had settled and her steps were more confident than of late. Granted the elbow length black gloves and matching head scarf looked a bit odd in the middle of the day, but Jenny preferred to picture cocktail parties, cigarette holders and impossibly thin women who drank martinis and picked at tiny sandwiches. Jenny thinks that one way of delaying tomorrow’s first glass would be to start writing stories like she has been promising to do for ever. She has a title for the first one: Mrs. McGinty’s Heyday.