Ross Raisin - Waterline

He gets a good long hug off them both.

‘Like I said, Da, I’ll come over again soon. That’s a promise.’

‘Ye don’t have to promise me, Rob. I know the score. It’s okay.’

After the taxi has left he comes back inside and carries upstairs the pile of bedding that Jenna has left neatly folded by the settee. When it’s all put away he comes back down and makes himself a cup of tea.

He gets a window open in the living room. Let the place breathe a bit, lessen the aroma of farting sons. Poor Jenna, serious. She for one must be looking forward to being in her own bed again, that’s a banker. Getting back to the baby. It’s been a long time away for them, new parents that they are, and he’s genuine grateful they stayed this long. Robbie might well say that he’ll be over again soon but it’s a daft promise to make, which is how he wasn’t entertaining it, no even for a moment. Maybe if they leave it a while, then next time Damien might be old enough they can bring him too. Get him introduced. It’s one of the things he’s had a struggle with, Robbie, that his maw never met the baby. He knows that, because Jenna told him. Robbie didn’t want to say anything about it himself because he thinks it’s too close the knuckle and he doesn’t want to make things any the harder for his father. Which is daft, obviously. It’s something he wouldn’t’ve minded talking to him about. But that’s Robbie: always this sense — whether it’s the Highlanders, or it’s Craig, or it’s the compensation — that he’s trying to protect him. Keep things from getting any the worse. That he doesn’t completely trust him to cope with things on his own, without him, without Cathy.

He goes into the kitchen and opens a drawer. From under magazines and cookbooks he takes out a card, then goes to sit down at the table and read again the letter that is tucked inside it.

Mick,

I am so sorry for your loss. I wouldn’t for a moment tell you I know what you’re going through because it’s different for all of us, but I know nothing can prepare you for when it happens. And when it does you need to know your friends are there for you, like you and Cathy were for me when John went.

It’s not my place to say it Mick but you can’t blame yourself. We didn’t know in those days. How could we? There wasn’t all the studies like there are now. I know it’s a difficult situation for you because of Alan being in the management and now’s not the time for it either, but if you want I can tell you the people to go to if you’re thinking about going down the justice and compensation route. Like I say, I know you probably don’t want to think about any of this yet but they knew, Mick. Even back then. They should have done checks. For Christ’s sake, John used to come home in his overalls white as a baker and I’d shout at him for getting the dust in my carpets. It’s not about the money. It’s about justice. If you want to talk then please do give me a call. I’m on the same number. God knows, it might do me good myself. Take your time.

All the best

Alice

After a moment, he slips the letter back inside the card and returns it to the drawer. The idea of it — justice — seems pure absurd. Alice is gone down that route and fair enough, that’s her decision, but the thought of it — how many thousands have died and still you’ve to tear yourself inside out dragging through the courts before any of these bastards will admit for a moment it’s their fault. And it’s no even him dead. Him that played snowballs with the stuff and came home with it stored in the turn-ups of his trousers. Justice is a word for it maybe, getting the payout, but it doesn’t feel sitting here like the right one, no the right one at all.

He goes back through and flicks the tellybox on, settles himself into the cushions, and it isn’t long before he is away to sleep.

She is there in his dreams again. They are that real — that’s what’s hard to get the head round. The two of them are washing and drying up. They’re eating chips. They’re arguing in the garden. Short dreams that come and go but don’t finish, carrying on one to the next but connected somehow, linked up, like a chain of islands each with their different goings on but the same backdrop all around, the same light, the same weather following through the dreams so that if in one of them the wind is blustering at her washing while she hangs it out, in the next she’ll be there in the crowd at a ship launch with everybody holding on top of their hats.

The sun is on his face, and he spots the postie turning in through the gate. He gets sat up. The body feels heavy, solid. He listens to the footsteps on the concrete and the clank of the letterbox. He is awake, that’s obvious enough, but he has this sense of being detached from things. As if all these goings on around him — the sunshine, Phillip Schofield grinning on the television, the post tummelling onto the mat — they are all part of some other life, one that he can see, but he’s not involved in. Mental, really. But that’s what it’s like. And even though he knows fine well that she isn’t going to come down the stair and collect the post — open the door, chat with the postie — he can’t shake the feeling that she will; that she is part of this other life, this real one, which he is outside of.

He will need to give work a call later, tell them when he’ll be back. They’ve said he can have as long as he wants, but obviously there’s the money to think about, and anyway there’s no use really him rotting about the house doing nothing.

He gets up and goes over to look at the photo of Damien on top of the television. He’s a cutie, that’s for sure. Nay wonder they’re keen to get back to him, the wee sausage-fingers. He is grinning away under a massive floppy white sunhat, sat on a rug on a crowded beach, all these brown bodies, baggy shorts, bikinis in the background. His own fat little body though is whiter even than the sand, which you know will be his maw protecting him from the sun, no doubt wary of the wee man’s Scottish ancestry. You can see clear enough but that he’s an Australian. Even at six months, that’s clear enough. It’s the eyes, the same as his mother’s, big and happy, and no to mention the baggy shorts he’s got on already. He’s easy-oasy, you can tell. Not like Craig was. Jesus. Craig was never an Australian baby, that’s for certain, never mind he was born there. Even as a tiny wean, he was Scottish as thistles, that boy. Greeting or sulking the whole time, and these great red skin rashes he got at even the slightest bit of heat. It was as if he knew already he was a Weegie even before they moved back.

No that the two of them had coped that much the better, being honest. He can mind well enough, even looking at this beautiful beach here, how it had been; how they’d become more unhappy the longer they stayed out there. Port Melbourne. It had seemed like a dream at first, Cathy stood queuing on the dock in her new dress, a whole shop’s worth of creams in her handbag. After ’72 and then the final ship completion at John Brown’s, all the closures and the lay-offs everywhere, here was something to feel hopeful about at last. Free passage. Settling-in allowance. Secure job. Hallefuckinglullah. And it was a decent life too — sixty dollars a week, and no freezing your balls off like on the yards at home — although, that said, it did get sometimes too much the other way, and you’d be there in the plating shed thinking you were going to die of the heat. Stable work but. Strong unions. The wife got a job as a shorthand typist for a shipping firm and for a few years they were happy, they really were. There was the card schools on Fridays and the trips to the beach for the women — a giggling procession of them wrapped up like nuns, they were that feart of the sun. A whole clan of Weegies down there eventually, all staying together within a few streets. The Tartan Terrace. It was bloody true. Didn’t last but, didn’t last. After Robbie was born, and Cathy pure homesick to get back, biting his ear the whole time to tell him Alan had another job lined up for him, at Govan, where he was a manager the now. The funny thing as well: it probably made it the worse having all they Glaswegians around. That just made her long for the place even more, made it all the more obvious that this wasn’t home, however much she tried to re-create it. Plus the heat. They never could quite get used to the heat.