Is it theft or recycling?

I can tell he's not entirely sure if I'm not doing something illegal. Neither am I.

The early evening rain has become serious, making a tough job even more difficult, especially with a bad back, an affliction until the past few days to which I'd only lent a cursory ear, unempathetically waiting for this week's malingerer or compo-sniffing grifter to tie-off their well-rehearsed shopping list of enigmatic symptoms and just move on already.

Now I get it.

I'd ask him for help but his darting eyes suggest he's no Simon of Cyrene to my Jesus of Nazareth with a dodgy lumbar wrestling a heavy lump of lumber.

I suspect he views me more as Buffalo Bill, from The Silence of the Lambs; the entomologically inclined murderer whose handicapped furniture-wrangling shtick is a ruse to trap fresh victims in his van ... Are you about a size 14?

He's not far off, as it happens, although my predatory behaviour of the past quarter hour is more aligned with Michel Faber's wonderful protagonist Isserley, from Under the Skin, than Thomas Harris' Jame Gumb.

Faber's tortured Toyota Corolla pilot endlessly patrols northern Scotland's A9 in search of hitchhikers, specifically males "in prime condition".

Rarely does she stop immediately for a "magnificent brute", opting instead to drive on until out of sight, then doubling back to size up her specimen for a second time from the other side of the road.

Her method, although usually productive, does flirt with the danger of losing her quarry to someone else and Isserley constantly fears she'll return to "see only a vacant hem of gravel".

Sometimes the loss would be so hard to accept that she just kept driving, for miles and miles ... Cows blinked at her innocently as she sped by in a haze of wasted petrol.

I shared Isserley's dread as I took the roundabout and flew back to the industrial estate where I first spied the workbench, another "magnificent brute" definitely worth the effort and, potentially, a criminal record.

Thankfully, it was still there.

A primitive collision of 2x4s, it's well-built and seductively utilitarian. For months, I've been trawling tip shops and antique stores for just such an item and can't believe the good fortune of discovering this free gift with my (or possibly someone else's) name on it, apparently abandoned at the front of a warehouse, gates locked for the weekend.

I'm quite sure a network of CCTV cameras is capturing my every move, so if I am breaking the law, I'll no doubt hear about it, but the hero piece (far too bulky for normal bulky waste collection) is complemented by a few probative pallets, indicating the pine ensemble has been left on the nature strip in the hope a lone wolf in a white ute and an irrepressible sense of COVID-era frugality will simply turn up and collect the lot.

It does seem a little mad, but probably a reflection of the whole world at the moment, one where kids (mercifully enough) can't play the recorder at school anymore; where we're shrewdly shuffling our superannuation into surround-sound system futures and generating the kind of household waste and demand for electricity to rival that of a modest Chinese metropolis.

Although predominantly softwood, the bench (much larger in reality than in my minutes-old memory) is heavy and cumbersome, definitely a two-man job. The rain combines with cheap paint and the residue of an indentured existence of chemical dependency to produce an oily slick, as if the detoxing timber has entered rehab and is sweating out a fever. As I consider its brutal history, The Beautiful South's ode to domestically abused tables everywhere floats in my head: Treat me with some dignity, don't treat my like a slave. Or I'll turn into the coffin in your grave.

Indeed, as I struggle to even get a firm grip on the thing, it seems to assume a certain catafalque solemnity, and it's as my ceremony to move it from one realm to another begins, I lock eyes with my friend from across the street, who appears increasingly agitated under his umbrella.

As any thief will tell you, time is of the essence, so just as the likely stool pigeon, I'm sure, is tattling down his phone of my crime in a language I don't understand, I muster the kind of dormant strength normally reserved for mothers lifting cars off babies and lever (using a reliable fulcrum completely at odds with my own rusty hinge) the redundant employee onto the dual-cab and scrummage it forward with the passion of a classic Dragon under lights at Cardiff Arms.

MORE B. R. DOHERTY:

Chest heaving, I step back visualising a bum-in-a-bucket fit, only to find a pair of hind legs teetering on the edge of the turned-down tailgate by a few precarious millimetres. A long and greasy highway lies between me, my score and home, so I set about securing the load with every last length of binding I have stowed in the tray - I'm not a serial killer, promise - to enable confident passage through the gathering darkness.

Once mobile, I know I won't be able to keep the find to myself and I'll triumphantly speaker-phone the house, revealing dad's returning with something special; the kind of big-rig promise from the road that cocoons a family already tipsy on the rainy night delirium of Monday so far away in the full-blown inebriation of expectation.

Anticipating a heady dose of hunter-gatherer kudos myself, I recall the night my own father did something similar. After sealing the sedan in the garage, he excitedly ushered my sister and I from the house, promising he had a surprise from the roadside waiting for us in the boot. Like a signature Tarantino scene (Who's that? That's Beaumont.), as dad opened the trunk, a ferocious, white ferret fairly leapt for our throats, a la Monty Python's Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog, forcing us screaming kids onto the roof of the Kingswood and our broom-wielding protector into several insane minutes of mortal combat with a justifiably vengeful weasel.

I laugh at the famous familial incident while I busy myself with an insurance policy of superfluous half-hitches and as the operation draws to a close, a Mazda driven by a woman with two kids in the back, pulls up in front of my informant.

I rub my wet work shirt against my spasming spine as the man gets in the passenger seat and leans across to kiss the driver. He says something and they all look my way, effulgent teeth and dimples displacing the gloom.

They wave as they drive off into their own Friday night chrysalis.

I wave back.