River Man #2 - Biohazard Tape 

The Riverman called me this morning. Usually he calls in the afternoon so I thought it was an emergency. No emergency. He just wanted to check that life in the city was alright and remind me to 'get my arse down' at the first sign of stress.

An hour into conversation, he was talking about biohazard tape. Telling me a story about the wedding of two of his friends. The riverman has the best stories because he’s lived through so many.

“Barry was a pisshead and Sheryl was a proper artist. She would get stoned and then get started on making these little wooden heads. When the alien film came out, she made one of that, it was great it was and she would give it to people, I have one some somewhere.

Anyway, for their wedding party we taped their whole house in biohazard tape. Even the outside. It was just a joke but the police knocked on the door wondering what was going on.

And for their wedding they forgot to buy confetti. Sheryl’s mum was in an old people’s home at the time, just around the corner. So we went there, grabbed anything we could find. Cornflour, flour, lentils, you name it. We got handfuls of it in the end. All from the old people’s home. Bowls of it. And Julianne had a load of it and was stood behind the door waiting for them. There’s two great photos of Barry and Sheryll, covered in the stuff.

But whatever this stuff was, cornflour I think, went everywhere. Everyone had it one them and it went all sticky. Everyone’s drink had a layer of it floating on the top. And Pete, another piss head, he was going around, poking his finger in all the left-over drinks, then pouring it all into one glass.”

“Ah a shit mix!”

“Yeah something like that, funny man that old Pete, proper pisshead he was”.

“I remember someone, I think it was my cousin, he used bird seed for confetti. I thought that was a nice idea. Throw it and then have all the pigeons come pecking around your feet.”

“That’s right, pecking around your feet, getting in the way…”

“…yeah, then accidently treading on them, having them shit all over your white dress…”.

We laughed.

From my window I watched the neighbour opposite take out his rubbish and then move the dustbin onto the road in front of his house. He then leaned a long plank of wood on top. He does it every day, to save the parking space.

Biohazard tape! It would look much better if he used biohazard tape I thought. I then imagined his whole white, terrace house striped in bright yellow, and the police knocking on his door. “What’s going on here then?”