by Ross Raisin
He gets his sandwich, and he walks over to the cemetery to go sit down on one of the benches and eat it.
Still a blank. The familiar tightening of his body coming on and he has to relax. He has to relax. Normally he can do that in here, that’s aye how he comes, but he’s no helping things rubbing himself up like this; he should just calm it down, eat his sandwich. Craig. Craig is here. He’s going up the footpath. The first instinct is to duck the head. He’s walked right past him, and now he’s away up the path toward the grave. Did he see him? Impossible to know, he might’ve, he might, how could he not’ve – he’s come right beside him. The heart going mental. His body rooted to the spot, but nothing he can do: he can’t get up because that will obvious draw attention to himself so all he can do is stay put and hope he doesn’t turn round. He gives a keek up. The back of Craig’s jacket, a way up the footpath now. He watches as the boy passes through a line of trees to the next lawn and stops when he reaches the grave. He’s got his work clothes on, by the look of it, although it’s hard to tell from this distance. He’s just standing there, looking down. Me and you, Maw, it’s me and you against all the rest of them. He stands there a minute or two before he starts to bend and crouch down, and as he does so he turns his head. He is looking straight toward him. It’s a bare instant just, a single second, then he turns back to the grave.
He flicks the light switch out of habit but of course it doesn’t come on, but so what, he doesn’t need to see any of it, the less he can see in fact, the better. As it is, he can still make things out in the half-dark. The mound of post at his feet; the bare, ripped ribbon dangling off the wall. This needs to be done quickly, or if not he’s going to collapse in a heap no able to get up and that’ll be that, never to be seen again. Except by the man up the stair, of course, that bastard – he needs to be calm, concentrate – no think about a man up the stair. He keeps it all blanked out as he goes through the kitchen, fetching a carrier, and then gets up the steps to the bedroom. He moves quickly inside. Ignores the dark heap on the bed. He pulls open her drawer and grabs a handful of jewellery, dropping it into the bag. His breath is snatching now, coming in jolts, but he’s managing it, he’s coping, taking another couple of handfuls to empty the drawer, and the truth is it feels good – there – so fucking what? What difference does it make anyway? She’s dead. She’s not going to wear it.
He’d be pure raging if he knew. But he doesn’t, and he can get to fuck if he thinks he’s got any more right to her than anybody else. He goes out of the room and back downstairs, where he gets his jacket and the small battered holdall from the lobby, and starts putting things into it: the carrier of jewellery, then out to the shed for his change of clothes and the newspaper. Then he’s away. Gone. Goodfuckingbye.
‘Ye back, then?’
‘I’ve brought some more things.’
‘Go on, well, let’s see.’
He empties the carrier into the tray. She gives him a look but he ignores it, and he stares away toward the window while she inspects through it.
‘Is it for loan or sale, this?’
‘Sale.’
‘Okay, well we buy gold and silver by the gram, so I’ll need a wee while to price this lot up, that alright?’
‘That’s fine. I’ll wait.’
She gives him £250 for all of it. It’s worth a lot more, he knows, but no like he has much of a choice. There’s a ring in there that used to be her grandmaw’s, which must be worth a couple of hundred on its own, plus a few other things that were handed down to her when she was a wean in a big house in the Highlands and she hadn’t yet disgraced and ruined herself with the dirty plater husband.
It’s pishing it down when he gets outside. He could get on the subway, all this cash he’s got on his tail now, but he needs to be careful saving it so he waits for a bus instead, standing a long time with the wind blowing in and water dripping off his nose. He gets the next one into the centre and gets off at the coach station. There is only a short queue at the ticket desk.
‘When’s the next coach to London?’ he asks the guy.
Chapter 17
There is a bronze statue by where the man waits. A life-size young couple greet each other, a bag on the floor beside them, and he is lifting her up, their lips about to meet, one hand sliding down over her bottom. The man smiles, looking at it. A couple of girls come past and notice the statue; they start giggling. His own bag is not much bigger than the bronze man’s. In it, his few clothes, his work boots, a plastic wallet with his valuables and a little food for the journey. Already there is a large group waiting by the glass doors for the London coach, but he sits further off, on a plastic orange seat by the statue.
He goes inside his coat for his phone and makes a call.
‘Yes?’
‘Yes, my name is Juraj. I am arriving in London tonight.’
‘Got an address?’
‘Yes.’
‘Passport?’
‘Yes,’ he lies.
‘Right. You’ll find details where to come in the morning. There will be a van waiting. Bring the passport, and the driver will need your expenses up front. He’ll take you straight to the site.’
‘Okay. Okay. The flat is not shared? My wife and son come here soon. The other man said it is not shared.’
‘No, not shared. Polish?’
‘No. I am from Slovakia.’
‘Right, well. Plenty of Polish there. Slovak too probably. You come at six tomorrow. Details are in the flat.’
He puts the phone back in his coat and continues to wait for the coach. Things will not be easy once he arrives; he is not stupid. When the agency in Slovakia arranged for him to come to Glasgow, they told him the same thing. You will have your own room. It will be comfortable for your wife and child when they join you. And on the outside, the red brick building did look beautiful, if you ignored the – ‘Govanhell’ . . . ‘Fuck off gypos’ . . . ‘Scum’ – local poetry. He could not bring them to a place like this. Five cramped streets: no privacy, no heating, no landlord. White and Asian gangs. In London, at least, they will be hidden – Roma, Polish, Pakistani – nobody will care.
An old woman is standing in front of the statue. She looks at it for a moment, then moves away to where a line is forming in front of the glass doors. Back home, it is getting more dangerous: last month, his wife’s brother was badly beaten and left in the tip next to where they live. There is no choice now but for them to come here; it is the right decision. The driver is opening the doors and climbing onto the coach. He stands, picks up his bag and goes to join the queue.
There are no empty pairs of seats left on the coach, so he sits down next to a man who is staring out of the window with his hands on top of his bag, clasping it to his lap. Past the man’s head, he can still see the statue through the glass wall of the station, and he continues looking at it until the engine starts up and the coach rolls off. He grins. When my wife arrives here, he thinks, this is how I will touch her bottom.
A young guy with a shaved head is come and sat in next to him. It’s okay but. He doesn’t look like the type that’s going to be chinning him all the way down for a conversation. Which is good, because it’s a long-enough journey. More than nine hours. Arriving in London in the wee hours, when the pubs are shut and the cafes aren’t yet open. He could’ve planned it better, serious. He could have planned it at all, in fact.
By the time they get leaving the city and the sudden leap of green at the end of the schemes, the gloaming is come on outside the window and he is falling asleep. When he wakes up the lights are turned off and it takes him a moment to mind that he’s on a coach, people snoring around him, a dim strip of lighting along the aisle floor, fallen crisps and a crisp packet and legs stretched out. He looks out of the window into the rushing darkness. He doesn’t feel jittery. He feels okay. He doesn’t feel anything.
A while later and the neighbour is awake. Mick can hear him shuffling forward and unzipping a bag down by his feet. The soun
d of paper, or plastic, tearing. Then the smell of food, a sausage roll, which he brings up to his mouth and starts eating. Okay, well, a plan. The first thing when the coach gets in is to eat: probably he’ll have to find a petrol station or a 24-hour minimarket and wait in the coach station until everywhere else starts opening up. Then onto the job hunt. For starters, this one he’s seen in the Southside News.
The guy is looking across at him.
‘You know where is King’s Cross?’ he asks, as if they’ve been pattering away all this time.
‘I’ve no idea, pal, sorry. I’ve no been to London before.’
The man nods and carries on eating his sausage roll, then after a while he gets out his mobile phone and starts thumbing away. It’s a pretty decent point – does it matter that he’s never been there before? No, it doesn’t. That’s the best bloody thing about it. He needs to keep things simple. Keep away from any reminders. Go see about this job advertised in the paper and get on top of himself, fix things out. Englandshire. Nobody will guess that one. He’s only been twice before: the six months in Newcastle was the last time, and way before that, when they weren’t long married, a visit to Cathy’s cousin and the husband in Northampton. Fucking terrible. There were a few of her relatives set up in England, and they’d spent a miserable week with these, himself going about the place trying no to spill and break things and none of her lot speaking with him unless it was to ask him stupit questions about the yards, that same way people use when they ask a wean how school is going. They didn’t come to the funeral, that pair, as far as he can mind.
It is raining. He sits back and looks at the giant windscreen wipers going back and forth on the front window. Thinking about England. Newcastle. How he’d felt going down this very motorway, moving further away from home; the argument that him and Cathy had got into the night before he left, both of them shouting, Thatcher on the television in the background, bringing the poll tax to Scotland. See in truth he’d been lucky getting a job at all, because Swans had went the same way as everywhere else – privatized, shrunk – but he hadn’t felt lucky; he’d felt fucking terrible. He’d rented a room in a house with quite a few Swans workers, young lads mainly, and a guy his own age from Southampton, he can’t mind his name. They’d all go out together to the bars, come back and get the landlady raging. But the clearer memory is of the nights he’d spent alone in his room, drinking, wondering what in hell he was doing in this place. Sat there on his days off, the TV on, until it got too much and he’d go the long walk to the phone box a few streets away.
The neighbour is snoring. Mick turns toward the window, trying to shake the mood that has come over him. Remind himself it wasn’t all bad. Because it wasn’t. They were good men, for one thing. Mad for their football, anyway. There were always games down by the jetty after lunch; races up the bank by the young lads at the end of a shift; nicknames – Big Yin, they’d called him right from day one, because they knew Billy Connolly had worked on the yards. He never really felt part of it though. He couldn’t, no with Cathy and the boys up in Glasgow. And it wasn’t his yard; his river. He didn’t belong there. Didn’t get the same feeling from it: that sense of the river always being there, around him, inside him. The sheer thrill of a ship on its stocks, grown from just a few small pieces of metal, walking toward it each morning and seeing that it was bigger, looking like it was parked there at the end of the street, looming over the end tenement. He can mind exactly the feeling of it. The sound of the hooter. The gates opening and the mass of workers teeming through. Getting into the yard and seeing that the graffiti on the hull had been added to – jokes, patter, Proddy slogans – so that when the ship was near completion you’d look at her and the whole of her side would be a mess of chalk scrawlings. Comic pictures of the managers. Competitions of who could write the highest. Two-year-long conversations. And then, when she was built, it would all be painted over and there’d be no clue as to what was written underneath; except if you looked hard enough, the tiny scribbling along the waterline where the painters had wrote their nicknames.
The driver is pamping the horn to get everybody awake. Mick stands groggily, and presses into the line slowly moving down the aisle. As he steps off the coach, away into the terminal, it is the first chance he’s had to see the other passengers. There’s a fair number of East Europe types amongst them, it looks like. Something about the quiet way they get on with things, filing off to the exit and seeming to know exactly where it is they’re headed – even the neighbour, striding off with his bag over his shoulder, King’s Cross here I come.
There is a snack machine in the arrivals terminal and he gets himself a Mars bar, then sits down on one of the backless plastic seats, pulling his jacket tightly about him, and tries to get the brainbox working.
Somebody standing over him. A big fella with a meaty face.
‘You okay there, mate?’
A sliver of belly poking out beneath the shirt.
‘Do you know where you are?’
Mick chuckles. ‘I’ve no got a clue, pal.’ He notices then there’s the half-eaten Mars in his lap.
‘You can’t stay here, I’m afraid.’
‘It’s fine, see I must’ve fallen asleep for a minute just. I’m looking for a cafe that’s open, if ye know somewhere.’
‘I do actually. There’s one just round the corner, as it happens.’
He points Mick what direction it is and waits for him to get up and leave.
When he gets there it is open, like the man said. The pleasurable sound of chairs and plates and low conversation as he steps in and gets himself a table, reading the breakfasts off coloured sheets of card above the kitchen. A few coach-driver types drinking coffees. A street cleaner in a high-vis jacket, and he minds suddenly the incident with the parkie and the stolen flowers, but he shuts it out straight away as the guy comes over for his order. Bacon and eggs, and a tea. He’s pretty friendly, the time of morning it is, humming himself a wee tune. Turkish, if the poster above the kitchen is anything to go by. Things have started well. A hot breakfast about to arrive, in a little wink-wink of a place that he’s found, when instead he could easily be pounding about the streets right now for a petrol station.
When he’s finished, he goes up the counter and asks the guy if he knows anywhere nearby he might get a room for what’s left of the night.
‘Hostel? B&B?’
‘B&B, aye.’
He reaches for his order pad and pulls a pen from his trouser pocket, but then hesitates, deciding against it. He points an arm to his left.
‘You see this street? You go down, you go left under the bridge, and there – there are many places. Ten minutes.’
Mick thanks him and picks up his bag to leave. No bad, eh, this London. No bad.
He can see the bridge up the way. It is a railway bridge, he can make out as he gets closer, walking alongside the high sooty walls that follow the road beneath. There is a narrow street just before the bridge and he turns onto it, past a builders’ merchants and an MOT garage under the arches. A few minutes down and he spots a cracked white plastic sign: BED AND BREAKFAST: SINGLE £25, DOUBLE £40, FAMILIES £60. Fine. It will do. He just needs a bed for the night, it’s no like he’s choosy. He goes up the steps and there’s no obvious buzzer so he tries the door, and it’s open. He treads into a dimly lit corridor with a worn red carpet and the ribs of the floorboards showing underneath. Yellow, chappit wallpaper. At the end there is a sign – RECEPTION – and an arrow pointing up the staircase.
He goes up to the first stairhead, where there is a door with a crumpled plastic file pinned on it. A piece of paper inside. Back in 10 minutes. It doesn’t look likely. Probably it’s too late the now to get somewhere, but just then a man appears on the stairs behind him, another Turk, by the looks of him.
‘Have you lost your key?’
‘No, I just, mean, I was hoping to get a room.’
The man leads him up the next flight of steps, fishing a bunch of keys from his p
ocket, and unsnibs a door.
‘Single room?’
He nods.
‘Single room is £25.’ He stands there scrunching the keys down by his side. Ye reckon he wants the money up front, well? Mick gets out his wallet.
‘Whereabouts is breakfast served?’
‘No breakfast.’
‘Eh? No breakfast? It says “Bed and Breakfast” on the sign outside.’
‘No breakfast.’ He takes his money and leaves.
No breakfast, then. Mick stands at the door and takes in his room. Poky, a stale clinging smell, the same peeling wallpaper as the corridors, and what looks like a giant shite-mark on the carpet. It’s better than a shed though, so nay point complaining. There’s no curtains, instead a grey veil pinned over the window with an orange glow coming in one side of it. He climbs onto the bed, which seems clean, and is that tightly tucked it looks vacuum-packed. He lies on top of the covers. He should be doing a stock-take of the situation, he knows, but his head is aching and it’s hard to think clearly, so he lies there just, the eyes closed, vaguely aware of a streetlight buzzing outside, and at one point the rumble of a train going over the bridge.
Later the night he has to pee, the need for it building and building until it’s too uncomfortable, and he gets up. He waits at the door a while, listening to make sure there’s nobody about, then he comes out, and up the next flight of steps to a door marked BATHROOM. No that he wouldn’t have telt it by the smell: sharp, sour, mixed in with bleach, the bottle of which is left out, sat on a ledge under the sink. When he’s done he comes back in his room and snibs the lock.
Morning. He lies there a long time. His stomach is uneasy, and the whole of his body is aching like he’s just come off a back shift. The streetlamp is turned off and daylight sifts dirtily through the window veil, exposing the room. That scunnery brown streak on the carpet, he can see now that it’s a scorch mark. Christ. Ye dread to think.
