Ross Raisin - Waterline

Hard to believe, looking at it now — at Bertie, old and trembling — that they’d won.

He gets up and goes to the bar for a final drink.

‘Half and a half,’ he tells the barman, watching as he reaches up to the gantry for his whisky. Christ but the drink makes him maunderly. These will definitely be his last. A maunderly old crapbag, is what he is, and he grins to himself, the guy coming over with his beer and his whisky. He’s a great beardie young fella, with small sore-looking eyes like a pair of arseholes, and an oversized T-shirt that says VAGITARIAN — one of they ones you only ever seem to see extra-large guys wearing. He puts the drinks on the bar top and Mick pays and goes back to his seat in the empty room. A cruel bastard, ye can be, Mr Little. A cruel auld bastard and ye know it. Aye, I do, I do, but see that’s the drink to blame again, if the truth be told.

An unexpected turn of events: he has found himself in an electrics megastore. How he’s ended up here it’s hard to say, and given that the stumbliness of the drink is taking effect and that he isn’t actually needing a new iPod the now, it probably isn’t the most sensible destination. It’s woke up the security guard though.

Nay chance he’s going back into work now. That is obvious enough. No with the length of time he’s been out for, and the smell of alcohol on him. He walks around at random, half aware of the guy watching him. There’s golf on the televisions all down this aisle he’s in, dozens of them all showing the same event: one of these sponsor’s tournaments with a few pros playing round with rich men and celebrities — retired footballers and elderly film actors, that type of nonsense. Alan would love it. He’s probably watching it the now even. Christ he’s probably playing.

There is laughter somewhere. It’s hard to tell where it’s coming from, how far away it is, but it is a man and a woman. He has grown to recognize the voices from hearing them talking together sometimes if it’s a warm day outside. They were arguing earlier the afternoon but now the sound is clearly of laughter, finding its way in under the door and through the cracks in the window frame.

He is cold. He has lain there with the covers pulled up all morning and there’s nay chance he’s tweaking the door open so he’ll have to live with the smell just — the clinging stink of a fish supper he brought back a few days ago. A while later but he is too thirsty, and he does get up, leaving the shed to go for a drink of water from the kitchen. He is turning the tap when the phone starts ringing in the lobby. It startles him. He stays there, frozen, with the tap still running and his arm beginning to shake. It rings a long time. He waits for it to finish and he turns the tap off, putting the mug on the counter, and leaves straight out the house by the front door.

Maybe he’ll take a walk down the water. Keep moving; he needs to keep moving.

He isn’t too sure the time, or even what time is safest to come these days and what’s best left alone, it’s that long since he’s been down. So he comes slowly up the path, scanning up the way ahead. There is a young couple he comes past, with their two tiny weans. One of them is in a pram, and the other running about, scampering between the headstones and her da trying to coax her back. She’s got the right idea but. Why no run about the place, instead of teetering around the graves? They’re dead, christsake, they’re no bloody sleeping.

There’s new flowers again. The ones Mick left himself are there next to them, gone dry and brown by now. He picks them off the plot and gets them slung over the palings. Strange Craig’s left them there, although — no, see even that is probably done on purpose, as a reminder, a marker of the da’s last visit. That’s exactly the kind of thing he would do, in fact.

It’s started drizzling, so he walks over by the palings and stands under a bit of tree. See what makes it the worse is it’s hard no to pity the boy. The same useless fucking pity that everybody’s so keen to stick on him, he’s doing it too, when he imagines him up there in Yoker alone and angry, naybody to talk to. Or maybe he does. Who knows? There had been a girl he was seeing, Tina, was she called, but there’s no way of telling if they’re together still. Maybe not, in fact. It had seemed like something of a loose kind of arrangement, from what Cathy had said. He should ask him. He gives a short laugh at the idea. He’s only once before been up to see him, and that was a few years ago. Into the dingy flat boufing with dirty plates and filled-up ashtrays, but no his place to say anything, so he didn’t; and neither did Cathy even because, as she says, it’s his life to do as he wants and see if he wants to make mistakes then he’ll make mistakes, and he’ll learn from them, same as the rest of us.

The family are on their way, ahead of him as he leaves along the path. The wee girl holding her father’s hand, and him leaning over and giving the wife a kiss on the side of the head. You don’t think, when you’re that age, about all this that might happen — that is going to happen, actually, a pure certainty it is going to happen. You’re too busy with getting the food on the table and clothes on the weans’ backs and feeding the wife’s bingo habit to start thinking about what like it might be when one of you is gone. And too right. Jesus. Too right. What a thing to think about.

There is a man outside the house. Mick has turned the corner into the street and is coming up the pavement when he sees him, standing at the front door. Mick turns straight around. Keeps moving. Gets back down the end of the street to the bus stop and spies through the glass. He’s still there, just stood, waiting. From here, he can’t see properly who it is, but he’s sure he doesn’t recognize him. He fights to get the breathing under control. Maybe it isn’t his house, and he’s mistaken, it’s actually next door. It isn’t but. It’s definitely his house. The man is peering in the window now, cupping his hands around his face. He chaps the door. Now what? Wait, just wait. The man turns and starts inspecting the grass at his feet, as if he’s looking for something, and then he’s up to the window again, spying in. For a second, a strange hopeful thought hits him that maybe it’s a robber, but just then the man turns and goes out the gate and he can see his face. It’s nobody he recognizes, a big guy in a shirt and tie, who is getting now into a dark red car parked on the street outside. It’s a while before he leaves but. The car stays there another few minutes before it starts pulling out from the kerb and swings round, moving off in the direction away from the bus stop.

Mick waits a moment longer, watching carefully. As he gets up and starts toward the house, there is laughter, and he spins around to see two teenage boys knotting themselves looking at him from one corner of the bus stop. He walks away quickly, checking around him, and gets in the gate and then the house, hurrying through it and out into the garden, snibbing the latch of the shed as he comes inside.

The cold. It is setting in. Keep the whisky flowing, my man, keep it flowing. He unscrews the cap and takes another bolt — a bottle he’d minded was in the kitchen, unopened, laid out on top of the cupboards. A present from Alan last Christmas. The usual gift from him, but no complaints, he’s bloody grateful, serious. The bottle carefully chosen, you can tell: decent enough it’s obvious he’s spent some money, but never a single malt, never something that the average man, in the brother-in-law’s opinion, should be drinking. But fine. Fuck it. Fine. Cheers then to the brother-in-law and to his charming wife, who haven’t as it happens been down once to visit the grave since they left. Which tells you everything, really, everything. Still but you can’t have it all ways, eh, and the better that he doesn’t have to see them; plus as well of course, how does he know for sure that they haven’t been? Maybe they have, see, maybe they have. No way. They haven’t. There would be some display of flowers or something. They have not been. See if they come at all, they’ll come when it suits them. When there’s a film they want to see, or they need a new computer.