by Ross Raisin
The neighbour’s name is Paul, he tells him before Mick’s managed getting back into his room. He’s okay. He’s a yap but he’s okay. They have the same conversation a couple of times. No too clear if Paul can mind he’s told him already, or if he’s honing the details just. They aye change anyway, the details. The next time he sees him, Paul is washing up a load of mugs in the kitchen, and it isn’t Cyprus where he was deployed, it was Afghanistan. So what though? Even if it’s made up, what does it matter? No like he’s writing the guy’s biography, and if he wants to keep talking about himself then that’s fine, it’s better than him asking questions.
A half-hour walk from the hostel, there is a park. No a scratty job either, but a big green one with ponds and boulevards and sunbathers. He takes to going up early each afternoon, to be doing something just, no just sitting in his room festering. There is a bench at the top of a large sloping lawn, in front of a rose garden, a bit out of the way. A view of the tennis courts, off to one side; and, in the distance, a group of homeless that he has to walk past on his way to the bench, who sit drinking by a plantation of young trees. East Europes, they sound like. Strange, it occurs to him as he’s sat there on the bench, how there’s none in the hostel.
He keeps on with the book. It’s quite gripping, actually. This woman, Nicky, she meets an old photographer friend while she’s reporting on the Tiananmen Square protests, and the two of them start getting increasingly friendly on each other, but she’s still haunted by the death of the dashing English aristocrat. No the less, the photographer’s got a farmhouse in Provence and there’s the inevitable steamy lovemaking when she goes to visit. The relationship going from strength to strength, until she gets watching the news one day and she sees the dashing English aristocrat in a crowd. Not drowned, as it turns out, and so she sets off across Europe in search of him.
He finds himself sat up in the bed with the cup of tea and the plate of biscuits reading it. Sometimes it’s no a tea, but there ye go, such is life. The book is a genuine doorstop and it takes him a few weeks to finish it. A strange mood that comes on him afterwards. A sense, which dogs at him and he doesn’t try blocking out, of emptiness now that the book is gone.
Chapter 35
A lot of the time now, he is having thoughts about the boys. Unsettling ones, which make him want to shut himself away in his room and go to sleep. The smallest thing can set them off. He’ll be sat quietly drinking on the bench with nothing rattling about in the brainbox, the dull distant thwock of tennis balls over on the courts, when a toddler comes tottering toward him, falling onto her hands and lying there with the head up, silently looking at him until her maw is along to scoop her up and away. And then the thoughts will kick off. They don’t know where he is. He is sat here on a bench in the sunshine and nobody knows it but himself; and a great wave of self-pity will come over him, the sense again that he is abandoned. No. No, he isn’t and don’t fucking try acting it any different, because if there’s any abandoning went on then it’s him the one that’s done it. That is the fact of the matter, fucking go deal with it.
Renuka brings it up sometimes during their meetings. Does he have any feelings of blame, or guilt, toward his family? No, he tells her. And then he’ll go silent while she moves on to talking about activities and employment and housing solutions.
Beans has joined the art class. Mick laughs when he tells him this, in the canteen while they’re eating a watery chicken curry.
‘No, see it’s alright, serious. And it’s good for the points too. That guy Robin is always on at me to join this or that group and get exercising the auld grey matter, so I thought, fuck it, why no?’
‘What do ye do, paint?’
‘Aye, paint, draw, all that. I’ve only been twice. Ye should come.’
The next time it’s on but he gives it a bye, deciding instead to stay in his room and batter his head against the walls.
It’s no until the following week, after a fair while of Beans protesting, that he steels himself and goes.
It is a bright room with a few large school tables put together into a square. He sits on one side, next to Beans. There are four others – two men and two women, who have obvious all been coming for a while, because they’re giving it the patter with the teacher, Chris, an Englishman, twenty stone, white curly hair and glasses. An okay guy, it turns out. Friendly. He asks Mick his name and tells him to help himself to the tea and biscuits. As he’s getting the kettle on, he looks over the room. They are all busy with paintings that they’ve started a previous week. The suit and tie man is here. He is humming away to the radio, each now and then quietly muttering something to himself.
Beans has got a lot of paint onto his paper. There’s parts of it where he’s went over a dried bit from earlier and the paint has formed into a kind of ledge. It isn’t clear what he’s painting exactly. The sea, maybe. A sunset.
‘It’s me on fire,’ he says when Mick asks him.
‘Aw, right. It’s good, aye.’
There is nothing himself he can think of to paint, so he sits there a while, drinking his tea and observing the others. The two women stick close together, talking, occasionally a wee joke with the suit and tie man. One of them is quite a bit older than the other, and it’s clear enough the young one looks up to her, leans on her. A mother and daughter? No, how could that work? Maybe but. How does any of it work? Fucked if he knows. The teacher is coming over again. He asks if he’s struggling for ideas, and then he says why doesn’t he try and think of something that he knows really well. Then he moves on to Beans, and Beans is looking at him intently as the guy examines his painting. It’s good, he tells him. Maybe be a bit lighter with the brush though. And away he goes to the other side of the table to speak to the women.
He starts painting the QE2. It’s quite a good likeness, actually, except for he’s done the mooring line too thick and it looks a bit like there’s a tail behind it. It’s relaxing but, painting. Quietly getting on with it, the mumble of the radio and the suit and tie man in the background.
The next session he keeps going on the ship. Paul is there, sat with him and Beans, they two yapping away while Mick paints and listens. Both of them are agreed when he’s finished it that it’s a decent painting. So too are the others, at the end of the session when the big fella asks them all to show the group what they’ve done. Detailed, the two women say about it. The young one has done a sunflower, and the other woman has done a picture of her daughter, who from the looks of it is black, so that rules out the young one unless she’s had a mix-up with the paint.
They are allowed to keep what they’ve done, so he takes his painting to his room and puts it up on the wall. He has spruced things up a little with his giro payments and the room now contains: a collection of mugs, a mini television that he saved up quite a time for, a mat, a kettle, and as well two more Barbaras and a potted plant on the windowsill.
Something he thinks about quite a lot these days: what would she think if she knew? He is staying in a homeless hostel and the family is disintegrated. Of all the guilts putting the boot on, it’s this which is aye the worst. This feeling that goes with it, crawing at him, that it’s too late. That things are too far gone the now ever to be put back.
Each while, Beans goes into one of his maunderly phases. He’ll cloy up and keep to his room or stay outside all day, until the point comes when he’ll disappear, for days, sometimes for weeks. His key worker tearing the hair out wanting to find out from Mick where he’s went to, but he genuine has nay clue either. Usually a fair bet the skinny neighbour and his squad have something to do with it though. One night, Beans is asleep in his room and a mob of them are outside in the corridor, digging him up, banging on his door every few minutes. The next night it’s the same story, and the next, until eventually Beans snaps and he charges out the room with a wine bottle. A mighty scrap in the corridor, one guy’s face getting ripped, then the polis arriving and the whole pile of them away in the meat wagon to the station.
Soon afterwards, Beans does the disappearing act. No sight or sound of him for two whole weeks until one evening he’s suddenly there in the canteen, cheerily queuing up for shepherd’s pie. No word about where he’s been. The usual performance. Everything back to normal. After they’ve eaten they go up the day room for a game of pool, and Beans is once again full of the usual patter.
At one point, he is bent down about to take his shot, when suddenly he straightens up and starts into a life history of Chris the art teacher.
‘Know he used to be a serious artist? Ten, twenty years ago. He was selling paintings and he was a proper somebody, mean, he was known in the art world. See but he liked a wee refreshment. A bevvy-merchant. So what happens, he’s been to this party, an artist party, and he’s driving himself home totally out the game, and he knocks into another car, a young couple on their way back from holiday. Dead. Instantaneous. Your man gets put away for a good long stretch, and when he comes out the clink he’s totally hit the scrape. Too drunk to paint, and even if he could, the art world has gave him the swerve because of what’s happened. So he’s going about staying on people’s couches, bedsits and that. Ten years, a total wipeout. Now he doesn’t paint any more, but he does this class because he used to stay here one time. And he does them in the prisons as well. A decent guy, serious. Just the bottle, man, know what I mean, it ruins ye.’
He leans down, finally, and takes his shot.
Mick stands looking at him.
‘How ye find out these things?’
Beans shrugs the shoulders just. ‘Don’t know. I keep my ears about the place.’
Both of them keep going to the art class. Most weeks it’s painting – oils, watercolours – but sometimes they do other things as well, like pottery, T-shirt printing. Renuka is pleased that he’s stuck with it. It helps with his move-on. Activities, jobseeking, reduced bevvying, it all counts toward it. They last two maybe haven’t been quite so successful as the activities, but such is the way of things. Renuka seems happy anyway. He’s been a couple of times to this room in the hostel where they’ve got some kind of link with the jobcentre and they try fixing you up on these volunteer schemes, training programmes and the like. Although to be honest, fuck that. Trainee. Him employed twenty years in the shipyards and now to get working for nothing. Even these jobs that he keeps applying for, the main reason he’s doing it is there’s no choice: they want to see work-related activity, as they call it, if he’s to get his giro.
Strange to feel that way about it, when normally work has always been the answer. And he knows as well that he does need to get doing something, to get out of the building, get out of his room; but he’s just no got the will for it. Back in the day, at least he knew it was going somewhere, the money. He needed it. There was a family to support and he went into work and could aye see what he was working toward because it was bloody right there in front of him: eighty thousand tons of it, sat on the water. But why apply for all these crappity jobs that you can’t get anyway because apparently you’re no good enough? And then even if you did get them you’ve still nay chance earning your rent, so you’re never going to see any of the income because all you’re doing is trying to tread water with the benefit money.
It goes up and down, how busy the art class is. Some weeks it’s just him, Beans and the two women, but other times there might be nine or ten turn up. Some who are pretty decent at the artmaking; others who come just to sneak a mug of sugar under the coat and leave. One or two who spend the whole time in your ear giving it the life story, or – like Beans – everybody’s life story but their own; and as well the ones who sit and barely speak a word. Probably there’s a lot more of the quiet types staying in the hostel, just they keep themselves hidden. The yaps are about all the time, in the canteen and the day room, or hanging about the reception biting the receptionist’s ear off, but the silent ones stay in their rooms. Mostly they’re only likely to come out if there’s a fire alarm – which actually is about three times a day – everybody gathering outside in the car park in their bedclothes and their baries; keeping to themselves, or pattering with the firemen that stand in groups waiting for the all clear.
He is outside Renuka’s office for the weekly meeting. She is running five minutes late, she tells him round the door, and he waits in the corridor until she’s ready for him. When he comes in she asks if he’d like a cup of tea, as is the routine, and he gets sat silently while the kettle boils and she finishes off tidying some papers away.
‘So,’ she says, sitting down and looking at him across the desk. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Fine. Okay.’
‘Good. That’s good.’
She is looking right at him, like she’s testing if he’s telling the truth.
‘I’ve received a letter, Mick, that I need to show you.’ She reaches for a piece of folded paper from her in-tray. ‘It’s been forwarded to me from the Missing People charity – and I should just say right now that whatever happens from here is entirely up to you.’
Confusion. The brainbox jumbling.
‘I know this must seem quite out of the blue, but you were registered as missing in February. Obviously the charity will have been making efforts to locate you, but the letter simply asks if you would like to get in touch with them to decide on a course of action.’
His head is spinning. He steadies his mug on the desk and fastens the hands tightly around it.
‘Robbie?’
‘The letter doesn’t say.’
‘How they find me?’
‘It doesn’t say that either. Here, would you like to see it?’
She passes the paper across.
He takes a moment and tries to read it. They would like him to contact them. They never disclose information about people’s whereabouts without the missing person’s permission. Missing person. He is a missing person. Course he fucking is, what else is he: a holidaymaker?
‘It’s up to you, Mick. There’s a number of options.’ She is looking at his hands on the mug. ‘You don’t have to do anything, would be one. Or, I could write back to them and say that you would like to initiate contact. But if you don’t want to do that, or you don’t feel ready yet, we could ask them simply to let your family know that you are safe and well, without saying where you are.’
He feels sick. Renuka is smiling faintly at him. The side of her computer that he can see flicks now to a picture of a wean by a swimming pool, and it’s actually funny, the absurd pointedness of it, he could in fact laugh out loud only he’s feart he might boak up onto her desk. She is still smiling, and he realizes what a massive cunt she must think he is. He has abandoned his family. He has abandoned his family and now he is sat there at her desk and if he doesn’t feel ready he may pass on a message to inform them he is safe and well. But if they want to know where he is then get to fuck, they can’t.
They leave it at that. He is to have a think about it. He takes the letter and stands up to return to his room.
He barely sleeps that night. Or the next. He sticks the television on and keeps it quietly going in the background. The letter on the windowsill, weighted under the plant. How is it his decision? That’s what he can’t understand. How is he in charge of the situation, and they’ve no say in it? They. Is it? Is it they, or is it Robbie, or maybe is the whole of Glasgow out the now looking for him? The not knowing about any of it is what’s chibbing at him. He keeps to his room, gets his own food in. Misses the next art class. The wardrobe stocked again with superlager, no that it does any good: it’s lost the ability now to numb the brain. In fact it’s bloody turbocharging it. February. They declared him missing in February. Which means he must have been gone a few months before they notified anybody. So what? What difference does it make how long it took or who did it or if Alan’s involved, or if Robbie’s had to keep coming back from Australia, or any of it, because it doesn’t; what matters is what he has done, what he is going to do. The idea of making contact. Hello, it’s your da, how’s
it going? Unthinkable. Totally unthinkable.
Chapter 36
A girl is sprinting down a path through the park, her bandy legs looking like they are about to knock each other over at any moment. She passes the rose garden and begins to slow down, out of breath. A group of her friends are sitting in a circle in the middle of a wide, open area of grass, and she goes to join them.
It is hot, and she rolls up the bottom of her T-shirt, then she lies down and rests her can of Coke on her belly, the way the others are doing. For the last few days, the man on the bench has been there the whole time they have, and they’ve had to move further away from the rose garden. He never does anything though. He just sits there being drunk or falling asleep. They think he is probably mental. Sometimes he starts talking to himself, not loudly, like the mad woman who is always in the bus stop, but anyway you can see his mouth moving even though there isn’t anybody next to him or anywhere near him.
There are quite a lot of drunk and mental people in the park. Further down the path, there is a group of Polish homeless men who lie on the grass by the little trees and get drunk. Sometimes they stand up and chase each other about, and once they came over to where her and her friends were and started shouting something in Polish, so they ran away and that’s when they started sitting up by the rose garden instead. And, as well, there is a pub near the entrance on the other side of the park, where the drinkers come over the road to lie on the grass and take their shirts off to drink with their big red bellies out.
