Ross Raisin - Waterline

One morning, he gets up off the settee and goes straight upstairs. He strips the walls in the boys’ room of the few dog-eared photos stuck above the beds. Then into the bathroom for the framed one above the lavvy; the staircase; the lobby; the photo packets in the kitchen drawer.

He begins piling them in rows on the floor in front of the television, like an audience.

After half an hour, the collection has spread to the settee — a crowd of Cathys laughing and posing, the head always turned a touch the left of the camera. Himself in a lot of them too, stiffly smiling next to her. There are more still with the boys in as he selects through the packets: quite a few from when they were schoolweans, trips to the theme park, the pair of them tired and wet in their macs, or chasing about in their first Rangers kits. One of these, he takes out and puts on the floor with the others. It’s of the four of them all together, sat on a bench eating open bags of chips, Craig squeezed in next to Cathy, clung to her like a little demon. He can mind the day still. The first time they’d let the boys on the rides, Robbie biting his ear the whole afternoon for a handful of smash to go on the arcades, and some poor wee lassie boaking up on the rollercoaster, these long tendrils of vomit flying past their faces.

He can’t get a fix on her. Even if he stares for minutes at each one, trying to mind what the occasion was, what she’d been saying as the picture was took, it’s no use. And anyway, all this, it’s just confusing matters, because these photographs cover years, decades, and she looks different from each one to the next. They are all of her, clearly — the pretty, smiling teenager, or here with the gelled fringe and blonde bubble perm — but when does the picture stop changing so that he might get a final hold on who she is? Not at the thin, sagging shape that she’d become, no danger. Even if he could pick out an image and say, aye, that’s her, that is her , it wouldn’t fucking be that one.

There aren’t any photos of her like that though. The collection stops a few years back, when the camera seized up. The last one is Robbie’s wedding. Himself, Cathy and Craig stood in their best, sweating in the sun under this giant tree and looking pure uncomfortable, done up hot and greasy as fish suppers.

It’s no doing any good, this. He should leave it by. Plus he needs to get something to eat. The stomach is spitting tacks, and he’s got to get something down him. Hard to move but. To get out the room and stop staring at all these pictures laid out on the floor. Each time he thinks he’s going to get leaving a new photo will catch his eye and he’ll crouch down in front of it trying to remember, trying to be inside it. One here that normally hangs in the lobby near where the coat hooks are. Port Melbourne. Cathy is knelt in her shorts battling on at the garden, her forearms stained up to the elbows in dark, red soil. She never could make anything grow. It was too hot and dry for all the wee shrubs and flowers that she fussed and footered over. In seven years, the only thing he can mind growing in that small, square garden was a single yellow dahlia. The rest the time it was full of balding lilac bushes and brown dead things. She is smiling but, in the photo, ever hopeful. Smooth plump arms. The tan line on her chest as she arches over, going at the ground with a trowel. Was it already in her then? Dormant. Waiting. How could you know? You couldn’t. She looks the picture of health here, that’s what anybody would think, and Craig’s babby toys are there in one corner of the garden so this is past thirty years ago, but it’s possible it was in her even then. Probably it was. They’re saying now it can be forty years, the incubation period, hidden away inside the body, inactive, until the moment it decides to crawl out and stiffen you. He peers in closer, even though he knows there is nothing to look for. And even if they had known, even then, would it have been any the better? Would the doctors have been able to stop it? Would they hell. Once it was in, it was in, like Thatcher. The end inevitable, no matter how long and hard the struggle. Better never knowing, is the truth. Better sudden and final.

Stupit, but he studies the other photos, looking for signs, anything. Something they should have spotted at the time. Obviously there’s nothing but. Nothing. Only her getting older: smile creases around the eyes; the body a wee helping heavier; grey seams developing in the hair, until for a whole packet it’s brown again, and then she lets it have its way and the grey returns.

Enough of this. He needs something to eat.

He goes in the kitchen and keeks warily at the fridge-freezer, and he is about to go toward it, but instead he starts scanning round the shelves and the cupboard tops. He opens a drawer and takes out the cookbooks and then the messy pile of gossip magazines, putting the lot in a pile on the counter. Then he’s into the cupboards, taking out a mug, the biscuit tin, a handful of teacloths from another drawer, even a fish magnet from the fridge together with the faded offie coupon underneath. He brings it all through into the living room. He works quickly, too quickly to get thinking about what he’s doing and stop himself for being a complete fucking eejit. He goes up the stair to the bathroom. There are things in here too. Her books: she kept the Barbaras in here for some reason he’d never been able to fathom, stacked by the door next to the wash basket, the covers curling over at the corners from damp. He picks up an armful and hurries them down the stair.

As he comes out of the living room again he sees the front door mat and pulls it out from under the post. He stares at it a moment. Then he puts it in the living room with the rest, and goes back up for her lotions and potions — all of it still there untouched — shower cap, lady razor, her bloody toothbrush even, dried out now as a thistle.

He stands by the television and looks out over what he’s done. The settee covered with all this stuff, a wet patch on the arm under the shower cap. Nothing. It looks like a bloody jumble sale.

He needs suddenly to be out of there, out of the house. The heart is going like the clappers and he can feel panic taking a grip of him, this sense that somebody’s going to come in any moment and see what he’s done.

There is nobody about. Only the sound of his own feet on the pavement, as if the city is emptied from around him. A fine day but. A beauty. The highest windows of the multis glinting in the sun. He carries on along the road and he is going toward the cemetery, simple as that, it’s no a decision that he’s made, it’s just what’s happening. When was the last time he spoke to anybody? There’s a question. Robbie. No. Lynsey. The thought of it now, talking to somebody — a conversation — he can’t imagine it. What would they talk about?

Still but it’s good to be out the house. And the sun, a bit of sun on the face, it does you good. He is feeling relaxed. When he gets there he might have a bit of a sit down — there are these benches that he’s seen, these old wooden ones that don’t exactly look the height of comfort, with three slats for the arse and another three for the back, but so what, who’s counting? See if there’s one in the sun. A sit down. Maybe a wee snoozle.

It is quiet in the cemetery. The grass has been newly mowed. The smell of it is in the air, and there’s shreddings on the path as he walks through past the large older headstones, ruined and leaning like teeth. When he gets to her plot he stands there a while, looking down. The mound has sunk a little, he notices. An odd thing, the peace of it. It’s no as if she is here with him, he doesn’t believe that — a presence of her beside him — and no that he believes the other either, that she is gone with the Big Man. See if they’d both believed in that, then she’s more likely to be in the Bad Fire the now, the way they’d spoke about Him over the years. Anyway about it though, there is genuine a peace here, a slowing down of things, and it is making him calmer. He closes his eyes. Imagines the coffin, lowering slowly into the hole, the steady white-knuckle concentration of the pall bearers guiding it down like cargo. Until that point, there’d been nothing to associate her with this place. They never came here. She’s never stood here folding up washing, or eating her tea, or going through him for this that the other that he’d done. Maybe it’s because this is the only place she isn’t missing from, maybe that’s the peace of it.