Ross Raisin - Waterline

Robbie has managed though. He’s adapted much better than they ever did. Strange to think about it now, all the fights they’d had about him moving out there — he was only eighteen, what was he going to do? How was he going to live? — but he’s proved them all wrong, that’s for sure. He picks up the photograph and puts it on the small table by the settee. Tomorrow, after he’s gave work a call, he’ll go up the high street and get a wee frame for it. A good plan; that’s definitely what he’ll do. He is just sitting down again when the sparrow flies right up to the window, perches there, looking in. Here ye are, fat arse. He hops about a moment, and flies off. Poor wee guy, he’s been waiting for something to eat round the other side, but he’s been forgot about again. A feeling of guilt comes on him, and it’s enough to make him get up and go through the kitchen to find the poor bird something to eat.

He empties the last of the bread onto the grass and stays there a moment, waiting for the sparrow. He doesn’t come, of course. He’s waiting himself, for Mick to clear off back inside, so after a minute Mick turns and gets leaving. He glances over the fence at next door’s washing on the line, a baby-sized Rangers kit inamongst the socks and pants. Without even thinking about it he is looking in their garden, and he sees a cot and then the woman next door sat outside her kitchen with her Bristols out. Christ. He ducks down and turns straight around to look the other direction toward the houses on the other side. Fucksake — did she see him? If she did she’s going to think he was spying on her, and how’s that going to look? The wife’s dead less than a fortnight and he’s got his tit-goggles on already. He wonders then if in fact she knows about Cathy, if any of the neighbours do. Maybe they don’t. But what does that matter — it doesn’t — it’s no like they spent much time with any of them all these years that they’ve stayed here. There’s no noise of her moving about on the other side of the fence, luckily. He starts walking, slowly, stooped, back into the house.

Bloody hell. Still, you’ve got to laugh. He opens the fridge, but it’s almost empty. Some sausages left though, so he pulls them out and gets a fryer going on the hob. Cathy would knot herself at that story, guaranteed. It’s pretty funny, really. The sparrow is there out the window now, and he minds that’s the last of the bread, so a sandwich is out the question. When the sausages are ready, he puts them straight onto a plate with a dollop of tommy sauce. He’s no that hungry anyway.

He brings the bedding down and sleeps that night on the settee. It’s pretty comfortable. More so for him than it would have been for Craig, clearly, himself being a good few inches the shorter. He stays there into the next morning, the sheets pulled over him most of the time because he’s getting the occasional shivers, even though the sun is streaming through the gap in the curtains. He lays there and tries willing himself to phone in to work. He should tell them he’ll be back by the end of the week. Crazy but he feels genuine nervous about it, even picking up the phone. Like he’s a teenager who’s met a lassie at the dancing, and he feels all jookery-pokery about ringing her. He minds that first time he called Cathy. Nervous as hell waiting for next door to finish on the line. All they prompts of jokes and conversation ideas written on the back of the Record , and his maw eavesdropping through the curtain of their room and kitchen.

‘Hello, Muir’s Private Hire.’

‘Oh, hello, Lynsey? It’s Mick Little.’

‘Mick, how are ye?’

‘Fine. I’m fine. See I’m just calling to say when I’ll be back.’

‘Aw, right.’ There is the noise of the dispatch radio in the background. ‘Look, Mick, don’t worry about that. It’s no problem. We don’t need you.’

‘No, really, it’s nay bother. I can be in Thursday — actually, the morrow, I could come in the morrow.’

A storm of static on the radio and then a voice he doesn’t recognize.

‘Mick, do ye want to speak to Malc? He’s just come in the door.’

‘Naw, it’s alright.’

‘Okay. How are ye anyway? The family are there staying, I heard.’

‘Aye.’

‘That’s good. Must be a comfort eh?’

‘It is.’

‘Look, Mick, take care of yourself, and take as much time as ye need, alright? We don’t need you in, really we don’t.’

‘Right, okay. I’ll see you, well.’

‘See you, Mick.’

That’s that done, then. His heart is beating quite hard as he puts the phone down and leaves the lobby into the living room. There he is again, the bloody sparrow. He for one knows what Mick’s been up to, lazing on the couch, even if nobody else does. Come on well, ye greedy wee bugger, come on.

There’s an unopened box of thin toast biscuits in the cupboard, something the Highlanders must’ve got in. He takes it outside, keeping crouched down, and breaks up the toasts, emptying the whole of one plastic packet onto the grass. He shakes out the crumbs, then he unsnibs the shed lock for one of the fold-out chairs and puts it up against the back of the kitchen. Better sat out here than sweating indoors. He opens another packet and eats a toast. Quite nice. He eats a couple more. There is the sound of a chair scraping on the other side of the fence. A moment later, and there’s another. Impossible to know exactly why he does it but he slowly lifts his chair a touch closer, quietly, until he can see a tiny sliver through a crack between the fence slats. Part of her arm is visible. A bit of magazine. It’s no that he’s being a pervert, that’s no it at all, it’s — he doesn’t know what it is — but he goes in a little closer so the angle widens and there, again, is her breasts. One of them, anyway. Christsake, man, what are ye doing? But he stays looking, transfixed, with a kind of wonder, no really even aware of himself doing it, as if him and the breast are existing in two different worlds and somehow it’s not actually happening.

A breast. It’s pure jolted him. When was the last time he’d touched one? Actually touched one, except to sponge underneath? He hasn’t thought of sex, he realizes, in a very long while. Not really. Not in a real way. The illness ate away at his own desire for it the same as it ate away at everything else. After a certain point, as she got worse, the need to get her comfortable, to stop her being in pain, it started overpowering all the rest. Even just the physical desire to be touching each other — not just the sexual ways, and let’s be honest it’s no like they’d been jumping all over each other exactly for quite a long time — but even just needing to be touched, you lose it. You forget. He turns away from the fence. No that it was like that at first though. He’d felt it keenly enough then. The fear of losing all that, their physical needs for each other, as it started becoming visible, even a couple of months in, that the disease was taking hold. She wouldn’t let him see her. She started getting changed in the bathroom, and wore his trackie bottoms to bed. When once, near the beginning, he tried to touch her, she had turned away from him, sobbing, and after that he didn’t try again for fear of upsetting her.

So that tit in the fence, it’s a surprise. He gets up from the chair, looking the other direction — a man two gardens down the way sat with his giant white belly out, drinking a can — and goes back in the house.

There’s a jumble of post on the mat. He gives a flick through it. A couple of flyers for a new pizza carry-out; more browns; what looks like a few extra condolence cards. He leaves the lot where it is on the mat and goes back through to the living room. Still this leaden feeling about him, lying in his stomach like a brick. The sausages? No. That was yesterday, and he’d only ate one of them. In fact he should get eating something, and that’s maybe it even — the lack of eating anything — because he hasn’t ate a full meal since Robbie and Jenna left. He’s no hungry but, that’s the problem. He’ll think about it soon, he resolves, but for now he stays on the settee. Coming inside has made him feel a bit of a chill, so he gathers the covers over him and tries getting warm and comfortable. There’s this sense he’s got as though he’s waiting for something to happen. Everything is dulled, even his hunger. He really is not hungry. Which is a new one. Normally he’s a genuine trougher.