Waterline

by Ross Raisin

  Once there, both men become somewhat agitated, and it is not possible to complete the induction that night. It is agreed that the forms can be completed the following day, to give a clear night for the men to settle, and orientate themselves in their new surroundings.

  It is a good result, and they leave the hostel relieved, walking quietly together back to the van.

  Chapter 34

  He sits now on the edge of the bed, torpid, brainless. He was awake most of the night, listening, and has slept through the morning. Everything in the room is white: the walls and floor, the curtains, the wardrobe, even the bedside table, which is pushed now up against the door. It’s like a hospital. A mental institution. He is hungry, but he’s no even thinking about food the now because he isn’t moving, he is not leaving this room; his eyeballs staying alert on the locked door in front of him.

  At the end of the room there is another door, and through it, a small bathroom. En suite, bloody believe that? There’s even towels and toiletries inside. A few times he gets up for a pish, but otherwise he stays on the bed. The room is silent. No sounds through the thick door, or the double-glazed window which looks out onto a road. Cars queuing. Shops. A sign on the second floor of the building opposite – Mumtaz Carpets.

  Earlier the morning, somebody came for him. Renuka, she said through the door. He had missed his appointment with her. It is very important they speak before the end of the day. He presses his head into the pillow; keeps quiet. The heart careering for a long while after she’s gone.

  Sudden moments of clarity keep interrupting him, in which he knows what he is going to do: he’s going to wait it out until dark and give Beans a knock, tell him he’s for the off and going back to the pitch. But he doesn’t know what room Beans is in. He doesn’t know where they are either, for that matter – Mumtaz Carpets the only clue. And then all his energy for the escape idea will disappear immediately, the brain dreiching over again. He has the thought a couple of times, until, as if accepting defeat, he takes off his jacket and goes to sleep.

  He doesn’t wake until late the afternoon. The small clock on the bedside table, its wire stretched taut along the wall to the door, is the only decoration apart from a mirror and a plywood TV stand at the end of the bed. He stares a long while at the clock, then at the imaginary television. What now, well? He needs a drink, but the possibility of taking out his bits of smash and going on the hunt for an offie – it’s too much of an adventure. Even in the silence, the locked door with the furniture pushed against it, he feels exposed. Defenceless. As if at any moment that door is going to open and some terrible calamity awaits him. He gets up and goes to the door hook for his jacket, puts it back on and immediately feels more at ease, a snail with his shell returned.

  A chapping on the door and he opens his eyes.

  ‘Mick.’

  He hunkers down pretending to be asleep, suddenly feart she is able to see through the peephole.

  ‘Mick, it’s really important we have our meeting. Mick. We need to get your claims put in, or we won’t be able to hold your place for you.’

  He can see the shadows of her feet under the door. They stay there a minute or two, then she goes away.

  She is back again the next morning though. From the sound of the shoe squeaks she is not alone this time, and she knocks more fiercely, her voice sterner.

  ‘I’m going to have to unlock it if you don’t respond.’

  He sits up, breathing heavily. A few seconds later he can hear the key in the lock, and the door starts shifting and butting against the bedside table.

  ‘Mick, you’re going to have to stop obstructing this door.’

  He gets up slowly, and pulls the table aside. The door opening, and he stands there stupidly in front of her. She is alone. Small, Asian. Annoyed.

  They go through the empty corridor, and into another room on the same floor. She is his key worker, she tells him. She motions him to sit down at the desk and then she starts laying it off about his licence agreement and how he has to begin cooperating. He sits there silently trying to listen, or at least act like he’s listening. When she is finished, they go out of the room for a tour of the other floors, him keeping the head lowered as they come past other people and she gets showing him inside all these doors he needs to know about: the canteen, the day room, the computer room. Through the window to the art room, a line of wonky clay pots humped on a window ledge.

  She leaves him back at his room, and arranges a time for their next meeting. When she’s gone, he gets warily down the staircase and through the reception, out of the hostel. On the busy road outside, he finds a minimarket and uses up what he has on a loaf of bread, a packet of ham and a four-pack.

  Beans finds him the next day. He bangs on the door, calling his name; Mick squinting through the peephole at the giant, scarred bawface. He opens the door, half expecting the familiar grin – ‘Breakfast?’ – but instead Beans just walks straight in and sits on the bed.

  ‘How’s it going?’ He is looking out the window. ‘Decent view, that.’

  ‘Okay. Yourself?’

  ‘Fine. Fine. Only this cunt in the door next me, plays his stereo the whole time. Quiet in here but.’ He looks about the room, then up at Mick. ‘Been the canteen?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come on, well, let’s go.’

  He hesitates a moment but Beans is already out the door, summoning him away.

  He stays close as they go down a floor and into the canteen. A few people milling about. Hard to tell which of them are the homeless. One or two obvious candidates but. A pale, thin girl talking to an older woman; a ramshackle beardie man in a wild assortment of clothing. They go up the glass counter and tell the guy what they’re wanting. Both of them take the full works: scrambled eggs, sausage, fried tatties and beans, then they get sat at one of the small round tables, away from where the other people are clustered together.

  ‘Who pays for this, well?’

  Beans grins. ‘You do, pal, so get beasted in.’

  They don’t talk as they eat. A murmur of quiet patter in the room. The pale girl comes past their table and looks at them, but he puts the head down, ignores her. Strange, but he feels easier with Beans. He keeps the world away, somehow. Mick looks over at him, eating and scratching away at his face and neck, something he keeps doing the whole time they are sat there. He’s still got the woolly hat on, pulled down over his ears. No the less, it’s visible enough that one of them is a write-off, the lobe dark and shrivelled into a wee currant.

  Beans finishes his plate quickly, clattering the knife and fork down.

  ‘How ye finding it, then?’

  He shrugs. ‘Okay. I’ve no really left the room.’

  Beans nods. ‘I know, I know. Seems – well, it’s pretty comfy, eh? Still got to keep the edge but. Don’t trust anybody.’ And as he is saying it, he gets glaring past Mick’s shoulder at two young men who are going up the counter.

  ‘That’s him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The neighbour.’

  The two men are laughing at something with the guy behind the counter.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Him there, that skinny one with a face like underneath a fridge-freezer.’ He starts to get up. ‘Come on. Ye got any money?’

  ‘No, I’ve –’

  ‘It’s fine, I do, come on.’

  They go down another flight to Beans’s room on the ground floor. It is pretty much identical to his own. Beans goes into the bottom of the wardrobe and pulls out a couple of cans, hands one to Mick, and they sit down on the bed.

  The hostel is not far from where they were. There is a large map of the borough on a wall in the reception, and he has a study of it one morning when there isn’t much traffic passing through, only the woman on the desk, occupied at her computer.

  He walks there the first time, getting sat in the old spot by the cash machines. Coming back that afternoon, he figures out there is a bus he can get that goes right do
wn the road the hostel is on, and it’s one of these bendy ones you can skip the fare onto. A bonus. Plus as well, thanks to the en suite bathroom, he’s no boufing like he was, so his takings are on the increase.

  Rare there are many people about on the corridors or in the reception. He has little difficulty keeping out the way. There are four floors, sandwiching the men and the women. Probably about fifty people in total, he calculates, but the only place he sees them usually is the canteen. A few looks but that’s all. It’s different here to the other places they’ve been. The scaffers don’t all look like scaffers, for a kick-off. A lot of them are clean and normal-looking. Decent clothes. Even one black guy that goes around in a suit and tie the whole time, the hair gelled into a side-shed and his shoes polished as steel. There are groups, obviously. Wee cabals. He steers clear of them, even though there’s none he’s seen yet that look like they might be trouble. Quite a few of the men and the women mix together, in fact, and the atmosphere is pretty calm, orderly.

  He copies Beans’s idea of storing his lagers in the wardrobe. It’s allowed, it says in his agreement, but the better to be careful. And nay chance he’s leaving them in the fridge in the corridor kitchen, which he comes past on the way to his room, keeking inside at men from his floor, cooking, talking.

  He meets with Renuka each Thursday in the small, cramped office that she shares – if the scattered papers and flyers are anything to go by – with Daniel Katongo, Complex Needs Worker. There is a shelving unit built into the whole of one wall, packed with box files labelled things like: Risk Assessments, Overdose, HEP/TB, Serious Incidents. They talk about his benefit claims, and where is his family, do they know where he is? No exactly his favourite subjects, so he usually cloys up and stares at the files or at the photos on the walls. One of a woman in a skirt suit shaking the hand of a bemused-looking old guy inside the hostel entrance; another of Renuka stood amongst a line of people in yellow T-shirts, their arms around each other’s shoulders, smiling.

  On their second meeting she had asked him if he’s using drugs. No. He isn’t. Alcohol? Sometimes, maybe – who doesn’t? No like he keeps a bucket of electric soup by the bed. Does he drink in his room? He tells her he doesn’t. Time to time, maybe. She’s alright but, is Renuka, she doesn’t put the boot on. She is helping him get a bank account and sort out his claims, arranging his interviews for housing and broo money. The first time he goes up the jobcentre is a pretty fucking dreadful experience. A cheery enough black woman with dreadlocks that deals with him but he’s just too bloody shamefaced hardly to speak to her. He is leeching again. Him that once was pure sickened by the very idea of it, who watched others going down the broo office while he was too proud even to get off his bar stool, and now this. Moved from Beans to the broo. An unchancy pair, that’s for sure.

  Beans isn’t having things so easy with his own key worker. Or, more likely, the key worker isn’t. He’s no comfortable sitting in they type of rooms, he tells Mick; he needs to get up and move around. Which is the first thing this guy Robin is in his ear about. Plus he hasn’t been too forthcoming himself about the drink. He’s told Robin he’s teetotal. Robin says he isn’t helping himself with this attitude, that there’s services in the hostel he could start making use of – but once he’s said that, Beans digs the heels in just and starts into the usual chicanery.

  As well, there’s been some argle-bargle with the neighbour. The skinny guy has been putting the mix in, or Beans has been putting the mix in with him, it’s hard to tell from Beans’s account of it. Either way, this guy, even though he’s quite young, he’s obvious in with the bricks and he’s pretty testy about what’s his plate and what’s his fridge shelf and all this. Something to do with the fridge getting flooded that started it off and now the two of them are at each other’s throats at the flick of a switch. He fancies he’s some kind of hardman, according to Beans, even though he’s no but a scrawny wee fuck, and a couple of times the neighbour’s tried to hang one on him, the last of which ended with Beans sat on his head. Robin is very unpleased about it all. They’ve got the zero-tolerance rules to aggression here, and if he carries on like this then he’s out on his arse.

  A slow, heavy sadness is weighing on him. He feels lost – adrift. Now that he isn’t distracted by the need to keep warm, keep safe, keep fed, it’s as though a layer of something protective is went away and now he’s floating in space with nothing to shield him from his thoughts. Fragments of conversations, images, keep coming at him and he is powerless to block them out. Robbie. Craig. He lies on the bed or sits on the pavement with his eyes tight shut and waits for them to pass, but then all he’s left with is this great unmoving solidness inside him. The drink no helping either; making it worse. Nothing to do. There is nothing to do. Sleep, that’s all there is, but even that is become totally random now: sometimes he won’t get more than two minutes at a time, awake for long stretches through the night, then other days he’ll hit the pillow and sleep for fifteen hours straight. He needs something to keep the mind occupied. To get him off the bed. There is the day room, which has a TV and a pool table in it, and sometimes he thinks about asking Beans if he fancies going a game, but then he’ll convince himself it’s a bad idea – nay doubt the skinny guy will be there and it’ll turn into a bloodbath. He could go up there on his own and watch a match, a film, but the idea of it straight away makes him uneasy, the thought of the room hoaching with people, eyes, noise.

  He is lying on the bed one afternoon when it occurs to him that he’s got the book. The Barbara. He gets up and takes it out from the bottom of the wardrobe, then sits with it on his lap for a while, looking at it. Trying to work out if he recognizes the cover. Maybe. Hard to tell. They were all pretty similar, from what he can mind, always these good-looking women on the move in expensive dresses. He turns it over and reads the back:

  Television war correspondent Nicky Wells is a media superstar. Courageous, beautiful and renowned for her hard-hitting reports from the world’s most dangerous trouble spots, her life is shattered when she loses the only man she ever truly loved – dashing English aristocrat, Charles Devereaux.

  He chuckles. No Dickens, is it, hen? He flicks it open though, and gets reading the first couple of pages. By the time he puts it down to go the canteen and meet Beans, he’s already a fair chunk into it.

  The battle with the skinny guy shows no signs of stopping, but his own neighbours are fine. One side doesn’t come out of his room much, and when he does he doesn’t say a great lot. Mick passes him sometimes on the corridor, or in the kitchen if he’s getting a cup of tea – quite long grey hair tied in a ponytail, and always the same green tracksuit on. They nod the head at each other, and get back into their rooms. The other side but is a different story. It’s almost a month before they cross each other’s path, but when they do it’s immediately obvious that the guy is a yap. They are both going into their rooms when he stops in his doorway and turns to ask Mick if he’s got a shelf in the fridge, before delivering pretty much his entire life story right there in the corridor as if Mick has just asked for it, which he hasn’t, he’s hardly said a word.

  ‘I’ve been here a year, myself. I’m supposed to’ve got my flat but I was behind with my service charge and now they won’t move me on, even though they know I’m good for it. I am. I was in the army. Infantryman, but I got injured, see.’ He lifts up his jeans to show a dark scar on his ankle running all the way up to the knee. He looks at Mick; no clear if he’s expecting a challenge, or for him to be impressed.

  ‘Where were ye stationed?’

  ‘Cyprus. But then I got injured, right, so I went and lived with my brother in Stockport. He’s long distance with the lorries, so it worked out sound because I usually had the place to myself. You know those lorry parks? In Calais and wherever. Pretty much just brothels, honest to God, all these girls that work between the lorries. And the beds fold down off the sides so him and his mate are practically sleeping on top of each other. So what happens is, m
y brother, he’s always got a cob on when he comes back from a run, he doesn’t want me around, and eventually we have this big fight and he chucks me out.’

  Mick stays quiet. Hard to put an age on him. He could be anywhere from twenty to forty. Behind him there is the sound of a television and a faint bogging smell coming through the open door, the walls covered in posters and magazine pages. He didn’t know you were allowed to do that. Maybe you aren’t.

  ‘That’s why I came down to London, because I had a friend I knew I could stay with. I knew him before I went in the army and he’s always been pretty sound. His mates are an alright lot too. There was always these parties. You wouldn’t believe it, just wild, man, like the wildest parties you’ve ever been to. There was this roof, and you weren’t supposed to go on it but everyone did, and you’d go up and there’d be the whole building out there on the lash. I remember one time somebody had got a pig – and like I’m talking a whole pig – fuck knows where they’d got it, but it takes about a dozen of us to drag it up there because it’s as heavy as a car, I swear. Then once we’d done it, somebody goes, hey, let’s chuck it off, so we get it to the edge and then’ – he does a pushing motion with his hands – ‘it hits the road and it must’ve exploded or something because it just sounded like this massive wet fart. And then this car pulls up in front of it, and a bloke gets out and stands there scratching his head, not a fucking clue what’s going on – he thinks he’s just knocked over a pig – and he never looks up but we’re there on the roof absolutely fucking pissing ourselves.’ Mick is started edging into his room, no sure when is the end to this story. ‘What I didn’t know though is that this lad, my mate, he’s stealing from me. Fucking stealing, right in front of my face, honest to God. I come in one day and he’s there going through my bag. Says he’s looking for fags but he’s lying and that’s it, man, I’m fucking gone.’