by Ross Raisin
Most of the time since they broke up they come and sit and listen to music or talk or usually just lie in the sun. She is going on holiday to Spain in a couple of weeks with her family. They went last year as well, but it’s not too bad, it could be worse. At least she’s not going to stay in a caravan like Carolyn with her mum and brother and Shitface Anthony.
The days when it’s not sunny she stays at home or sometimes Carolyn comes round and they watch TV, but usually it’s hot so they go to the park. One time the hobo has a friend in a woolly hat that comes and joins him, and he is properly mental. Whenever anybody walks near them he starts shouting or laughing, but you can’t understand anything he says because he is drunk too. Nisha saw him weeing into the rose garden, just standing on the grass and doing it over the little fence onto the flowers. Most days though the man that talks to himself is on his own. His face is all red and sunburnt. Even on really hot days he never takes his jacket off. If he is asleep and you get quite close when you walk past, you can see that the knees of his trousers are all muddy and his fingernails have got loads of dirt under them.
The last day before she goes on holiday is the hottest day all summer. No point going to Spain, really. When she leaves, the others are just lying on the grass passed out, and pretty much that’s where they’ll be when she gets back so it’s not like she’s missing out on anything. On her way back to help her mum pack their things, she stops and watches the tennis players for a minute, and then, because she is on her own, she takes the path to the other side of the park from where she lives, so she doesn’t have to walk past the Polish men.
Chapter 37
He tells Renuka to write back to Missing People. He is safe and well. He will get in touch with them when he is able. Pathetic. It makes it sound like he’s been fucking kidnapped.
Beans is back heavy on the drink, and they are returned now to the old routine. Away up the park and into the superlager. A few times Beans puts the mix in with the East Europes by the trees – for some reason he’s decided that’s where he wants to be sitting, and what right do they lot have taking the best spot? A couple of shouting matches but Mick is able to pull him away and get over the other side of the park before they both get skelped. One night, they have been drinking all afternoon, the both of them totally away for oil, and they don’t make it back to the hostel. They find a line of bushes along a path and collapse into it. The night is warm and still, and he lies there awake with the familiar warm weight of Beans pressed up against him. Safe and well. Blootered in a bush next to a madman, his head blaring with drink and sunburn, but he is safe and well, thank Christ for that.
When he is not up the park, he stays in his room with the television on, staring at it, or out the window. Thoughts about the wife, the family, hovering around him the whole time now. He doesn’t try to hold them back, there’s nay point, and sometimes it builds and builds until he feels like getting up and putting his fist through the window – but instead he just lies there on the bed, staring or greeting. That is another thing he’s doing a lot of the now, greeting. It comes on him out of nowhere: sat absently watching a cookery programme and suddenly he’s bubbling up and it will go on uncontrollably for a long while, until his face is as hard and sticky as if he’s just woke up under a tree. He lets himself do it; he encourages it even, searching for how many ways he’s failed her, trying and no being able to get a sense of her, and then blaming himself for that as well.
A chapping at the door. He ignores it. A few minutes later and it’s there again. He tries to blank it out, but the heart is going and he knows that much more of this and his nerves will be that ripped he’ll have no choice but jumping to his bloody death on the pavement below. He gets up and looks through the peephole. It is Paul. ‘You alright in there, mate? Mick? Everything okay, mate?’ He stays as still as he can and tries to control his breathing. After a while, Paul goes away. The sound of his door closing.
Renuka has been informed he’s stopped going to the art classes and has missed his benefits interviews. She is concerned about him. His eyes and his face and the general honk of him nay doubt pointing to the drink. Is the letter still troubling him? Does he want to think about a different course of action? Aye, I think we should get the whole family down here for a visit, have a tour round the place; then wipe the slate clean, let bygones be bygones.
Paul comes in the kitchen one evening while he is waiting for a plate of food in the microwave.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Okay, thanks.’
‘Not seen you at the art class for a while.’ He pulls a packet of ready-grated cheese out of the fridge. ‘Fancy a knock on the pool table later?’
‘Think I’ll give it a bye the night, thanks.’
‘No worries, no worries. If you do – just give me a knock, right.’
More and more, he is going over the time when she was ill. He tries to mind it, what like it was, what happened, how much of it he was there for. He hadn’t finished working until a few months from the end – he couldn’t, even after he sold the car, they couldn’t afford otherwise – but he can’t stop the thought of her alone in the house, in the bed, knowing she was going to die. See if they knew she wasn’t going to live, why was he working? Who was he working for? The rent, bills, food, keeping things going, how could any of that have been for her? The smell of the house when he came in off a shift. Going up the stair and seeing her, alone, asleep. Or with Craig. There at the bedside with her. All the wee details, he strains to mind them. Who had called round the house; what had he cooked for her; when did it first come up, the talk of putting in a compensation claim?
As well, an image he keeps recalling. She is picking up the front door mat, taking it outside and shaking it. He recalls it over and over, screwing the eyes trying to make her turn round, see her face, but it is always the same picture: him looking from the doorway, watching her beat the mat on the gate and a cloud of white dust puffing out with each clout. He dreams about this scene and when he is awake he finds himself searching for it, until he doesn’t know any more if it is actually a memory, or if he’s made it up.
Chapter 38
His benefits have been cut, and they are threatening to withdraw them on account of the missed interviews. As a result he has no money and he is got behind with his service charge. He keeps to his room. Reads a lot. A new Barbara he’s picked up, about this successful businesswoman that owns a string of international inns. She is preparing for her daughter’s wedding when she finds out she’s suffering from this strange illness that nobody can diagnose, and the only way she can find out what’s wrong with her is to go round the world uncovering all these secrets from her past.
All day and all night, even if he’s no directly thinking about it, he has an awareness of the family out there, somewhere. Searching for him. Fine well clear enough, the message he’s sent out, that he doesn’t want to be near them. Pure torture, thinking about it, but that’s what he’s engaged in – here’s my brain, my body, let them fucking stiffen each other. He isn’t interested in deadening himself with the drink any more; the torture is more relieving. No that he’s gave the drink the go-by but. He still gets to the offie with what little he has on his tail. It’s too instinctive not to.
An anxiousness is welling inside him that he cannot leave them hanging like this; himself, hanging. To keep them thinking that he doesn’t want to see them. Because he does; he does want to see them. Not all of them, obviously. But the boys – the pull of seeing them, it’s undeniable, and it wrests and knots at him because no matter how strong it gets, that pull, it’s never as strong as the one that is wanting to keep them away, to keep them from seeing him here.
Up until the letter he had been doing well, at least they seemed to think so, going the classes and up the broo office. He tells Renuka that he’s going to start again with the activities, that he’s cut out the drink. He goes to the next art class. Everybody says it is good to see him. Maybe they’ve been talking. Possible they know the score. U
nlikely but, seeing as he hasn’t told anybody about the letter, even Beans, who has been going through his own dark patch of late. They have been doing clay objects, bowls, ash trays and that. He makes a small pot, and digs up some soil and a wee flower in the park to put in it; sticks it on the windowsill next to the other one. It dies a couple of weeks later, and he washes out the pot to use as a mug for tea and superlager.
To have something to focus on, something to do, it is good for the nerves. Paul is going to the art classes too and he takes him up on the game of pool. Mick cuffs him. No that Paul seems to mind. He’s happy just being up there in the day room, it seems, talking. Amazing, all these things he says he’s got up to. One story he tells him. Each fortnight when he gets his giro, he draws a twenty out the cash machine and goes straight up the supermarket. The security guards are always on his tail whenever he’s there, so what he does, he tries to look as unchancy as he can, jinking in and out of the aisles, giving these shifty wee glances at the guards – then he grabs a bottle of champagne and something else expensive, a steak, or a pack of smoked salmon, and he slips them under his coat and legs it to the tills. Just as the heavy team are sweating and shouting up the aisle, he sticks them on the belt and pulls out the twenty, all calm and swaggersome, and the meatheads are left standing there just, panting and stupit. He’s okay, is Paul. He’s been on a script the last six months, he tells him, and he’s trying to sort himself out. There is a woman that comes round quite often to visit him: his girlfriend, Monica, who he knows from when he lived up north. She’s friendly too. A couple of times she comes in the day room and chats with them while they’re playing pool.
Renuka and him talk about whether he feels ready to start with the move-on process. Yes. A pure certainty he is. She explains to him that he needs to get his service charge on track, and then she lays out how it works: that they get given a quota each year to put on the housing register; that it’s no a very big quota; that it might take some time. Fine. Whatever it takes. He is compliant.
Posters go up around the hostel for an outing to an open-air theatre production in the park. Beans and Paul are dead set on going, so he puts his name down. A sunny day, when it arrives, and the play is in fact quite enjoyable. It’s about this young Asian girl who is supposed to marry a guy she’s never met, but she’s fell in love instead with a white lad that works on the market. Racial differences. Argle-bargling families. Eventually the pair try to escape and there’s a tragic ending in a cash-and-carry car park. Pretty interesting, parts of it, although you’d think it’s actually the ten of them from the hostel who are the real show, the way the residents stare at them from their blankets. Beans, at least, enjoys the attention – laughing loudly at all the jokes and getting up each while to walk a circle around the back of the audience, his hands clasped behind him, smiling and pattering away.
He meets Renuka in the computer room and she shows him how to go the internet and get looking at properties. Incredible, really, all that just there at the fingertips. She has to demonstrate a few times, the same patient way she explains everything else, writing notes on a piece of paper so he can mind for next time. They put in his bidding number and look together through the vacant flats. A few decent ones; a few genuine shitholes. She does another session with him, and he puts a couple of bids in. If he prefers, she can do all this for him, she says, but he tells her no, he’s fine doing it himself. He wants to do it himself.
There’s never many in the computer room. Sometimes one or two with the giant headphones on, listening to music; and usually as well the young woman from the art class, sat quietly getting on with her own things. He doesn’t mind coming in here, especially now the weather is on the turn and the park is cooler and blowier getting. At least he is out of his room doing something. As well, there’s the anticipation through each week of seeing if your bid’s come in, followed by the inevitable finding out that you’ve went down again. One day he is getting up to leave, the same time as the woman is for the off, and they go out the door together. She slows down in the corridor, turning to speak to him.
‘You’re bidding for a council house, aren’t you?’
‘Aye. Ye doing the same?’
‘Yes – four months.’
‘Serious? Nothing?’
‘Nope. Well, I went to look at one a couple of weeks ago that was just a dump. Everyone ahead of me had obviously turned it down.’
He’s no heard her say this much before. Surprising how well spoken she is.
‘You on the Clearing House?’
‘The – mean, I don’t know.’
‘Well, maybe better not to be anyway.’ They are come to the reception. ‘Good luck with it.’ She smiles, and goes toward the main entrance.
The longer goes on, the more restless getting he is. Nearly eight months is by now since they notified the charity that he’d fucked off and left them. To get on his feet just, be in a flat. Then he could face them. Face the music. Could he? See that’s what he’s been telling himself – that’s what’s been driving him through – but, if it comes to it, is he actually going to be able to look at them and no just wither in a heap at their feet? And as well, who’s to say that they do want to see him? Consider that one a moment. There is a hollow feeling he gets when he starts thinking like this. Hard to stave off the drink but he’s trying. A loneliness that circles about itself, because then he’ll start thinking about Cathy, searching for her, this sense that she is there but out of his grasp; and it leaves him empty, longing.
He speaks to Renuka about the housing situation. The lack of a housing situation. She makes him a tea and puts her doctor’s face on. The problem with the letting scheme, she says, is there’s crap-all housing stock left in the borough. He can keep on as he is, and points-wise at least he’s no badly stacked, but there’s no guarantees anything will happen soon. Or, he can try for a private-rented tenancy. More likely he’ll get something that way, but more likely as well that it’ll be expensive and temporary and the landlord will be a bastard. No quite her words, but he gets the picture.
He asks her to stick him forward for it. At the same time though, he carries on with his internet bidding. The art class girl, Terri, is in the same boat and the pair of them are in there each week, talking about have you seen this house or that house. As well, Beans has got himself involved. No that they’re letting him think about getting his own flat – Robin is still doing his box in at how he carries on – but he can’t resist getting in the mix, telling Mick which flats he should and shouldn’t go for. Amazing, but he’s pretty good at working the computers. When he gets bored of looking at the properties, he turns to his own screen and starts pulling up TV shows, news, underwear models. Anybody’s guess how he’s learnt to do it. In other hostels maybe. Nay point asking him. Sometimes it’s easier leaving off the questions and just marvelling at the guy.
His benefits have been mostly restored and he is working at paying his service charge arrears. Still applying for the jobs that he’s even less of a sniff of now after the missing period, and starting on something of an economy drive: less bevvying, more of the Barbaras. He is reading one about another female reporter, in Kosovo, whose colleague gets shot and she leaves the war behind to do celebrity photo shoots. This playboy artist she meets and falls for, but everything that’s happened in the past continuing to plague her at every turn.
He keeps up with the art classes, and goes a couple of times to a film club that gets run in the day room by a chuckling retired Welshman called Peter. Sometimes as well there’ll be an event going on in the hostel. One day, a visit from a member of the English royalty, or the aristocracy, or Christ knows who he is, but Mick comes down to the thing for the same reason everybody else does: because there’s a free lunch going. It is an old guy with gold jewellery draped off his blazer, so maybe he’s the Lord Provost or something. He shakes the hands, keeps the stiff smile on his face, eats a polite amount of sandwich triangles and mini sausage rolls. The weeks continuing to go by.
The outside colder and colder getting and the heating turned up to blasting so that everybody starts wandering about the place in vests and shorts. Occasionally new people being admitted, led numb and shivery through the reception.
His art collection grows to include a fruit bowl with no fruit in it, a painting of a tree and another of Ibrox, a papier-mâché swan and a T-shirt with Bluenose stencilled on it. He is passing time, waiting, but when one morning Renuka knocks him up with the news that a private-rented flat is become available, he feels, at the same instant as relief, a sense of foreboding; unsure suddenly if this is what he wants, if it wouldn’t in fact be easier staying put where he is.
Chapter 39
There’s no great ceremony about it, thank Christ. No staff lined up to pat him on the back and give him advice. Nobody at the door to collect and drive him away. He packs up his things into a large holdall he bought in a charity shop and goes down to the reception, where Renuka hands him his new set of keys. She is arranging their meeting for later the week when Beans comes loundering in with a frying pan.
‘That you, well?’
‘That’s me.’
‘Good. Great.’ He shuffles about a bit, and holds up the fryer. ‘Here.’
‘Ye got me a frying pan?’
Beans nods.
‘Cheers.’ He takes it, smiling. The coating is worn off the inside rim and it’s quite possible he’s lifted it – the skinny neighbour, more than likely – but no the less, no the less, and he stands there looking at Beans as a lump of gratefulness and fear together lands in his stomach.
Beans is grinning. ‘Off ye go, well. Flatman.’
The bus goes past another parade of shops and he tries to recognize where he is. To mind which is his stop. No yet. He keeps the eyes trained for the boarded-up pub which is where he has to get out. Nobody is noticing him. Strange, that he’s thinking they might, that all of them know the score somehow, when actually they don’t even see him. There’s the occasional wee keek over from a teenage lad across the aisle, but he realized a while back that he’s just looking at the frying pan and papier-mâché swan which are rested on his lap.
