Ross Raisin - Waterline

He packs his bag and leaves away into the street. What he needs is a good shovel of food, to keep him going the rest of the day, and where better to get it than at your man’s down the way, the cheery Turk.

After eating, he gets negotiating the subway. Finding it is easy enough, although the actual thing itself is genuine a bit more complicated; a Rubik’s Cube of colour-coded trickery compared to the one he’s used to. He manages but. He is managing.

There is a young guy on the line of seats opposite him. He’s got on a pair of tight blue trousers and pointed white shoes, his legs crossed over like a woman’s. The pointy foot joggling in the air with the bumps of the track. He’s reading a magazine with a cartoon drawing of two men on the front with comic stretched faces. He’s about ages with Robbie and Craig. What would they make of him? Just then but the train comes to a halt and he has to concentrate to get hearing the driver, and he is able to stop the thought before it can develop. He needs to keep focused. The brain is a genuine minefield of all these thoughts that he’s got to keep himself from thinking, for the moment at least, just for the moment, until he’s got himself back on his feet. Then he can see where he’s at.

The hotel is one of a fair number along a drag that he has to cross a great tangle of carriageways and multi-storey car parks to get to. It’s huge — they’re all huge — and ugly. A block of grey, stained concrete; the only colour is the massive lettering of the hotel’s name above the doors. The woman that he speaks to on reception is friendly enough but.

‘The operations manager is in a meeting until three,’ she tells him after she’s put in a call. ‘Do you mind waiting?’

‘No problem.’

The operations manager, it turns out, after he’s waited a long while on a seat fixed to the table in an empty restaurant, surrounded by plastic plants, is a woman. She doesn’t shake his hand. ‘You’re a kitchen porter,’ she says, going behind the bar to make herself a coffee. ‘You’re not agency though?’

‘No.’

‘Do you have a CV?’

‘No.’ Great start. Bloody haddock. ‘See, I was in the shipyards, and then my last job I was a cab driver. But when I was younger I used to work in kitchens. Hotels and that.’ A pretty obvious lie. She is behind the bar still, looking at him as she stirs a sugar into her cup. It isn’t the face of an impressed person.

‘I saw the job advertised in a paper.’

She frowns. ‘When?’

‘A while back, actually.’

She comes out from the bar. ‘Well, it’s up to the chef anyway. Come this way.’

He follows her round a corner into a passageway where the carpet stops, and there is a pair of swing doors with small porthole windows. Blinding bright inside, mobbed with men in white jackets. She goes in and he waits outside, a tight feeling in his chest. Relax. Just relax. She is stood just inside the kitchen, and a tall man is coming over toward her. Behind him, at a gas range, one of the chefs is pouring a packet of something into a pan. The tall man keeks at him through the porthole.

‘. . is him,’ he hears her say as the doors swing open. She walks off without looking round and the man is stood in front of him.

‘You’ve not done KP before, then?’ He is Irish. He’s got baggy red and white checked trousers.

‘No, mean, not for a while.’

‘Scottish?’

‘Aye, Glasgow.’

He folds his arms, narrowing the eyes and smiling.

‘Here’s the million-dollar question, then — Bhoy or Bluenose?’

Mick smiles. ‘Bluenose.’

The chef gives himself a comic slap on the forehead. ‘Fucking typical.’ He grins. ‘No, it’s fine, it’s fine, I don’t give a shite. And you’re the right colour anyway.’

He goes in the swing doors and Mick follows, keeping the head down and avoiding looking up at the other chefs. He reaches for a pen on top of a whiteboard by the door.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Mick.’

He writes it down next to BREAKFAST: MICK WASH 1.

‘You’ve timed it well in fact — we had a guy left yesterday.’

They walk through the kitchen. He is staying calm. Heat, young men with shaved heads, the sound of a radio. They go past a heap of crates, and the kitchen throats into another room, smaller, dimmer than the main one. A very black man in dark green overalls is clattering a pile of frying pans into a sink.

‘Eric, take this fella down to the staff rooms.’ He turns to Mick. ‘Take whatever one is free and get yourself settled in for today. Breakfast starts at six so get here just before and I’ll sort you out some overalls,’ he says, and leaves.

The black guy hasn’t looked up from the sink, and Mick wonders a moment if he has understood. In a minute though he stretches off his rubber gloves and goes out through a fire door, the tap left running.

He follows behind him as they go down steps and through corridors, and it’s becoming clear enough that your man here isn’t going to speak, walking slowly ahead, the bare back of his neck shining under the fluorescent strips. At one point a stretch of tubing is out, and they walk on in near complete darkness until the next lit corridor, then down more steps, right into the bowels.

‘Here,’ the black man says, and goes back the way they came.

He is left in a long corridor with doors both sides. One of them is open, and he sees inside that it is a bathroom. He goes down the line of doors. Low music coming from one; snoring, another. Otherwise the place is silent. He stands there, wondering what is his next move. This is mental. Unreal. It’s that far removed from reality in fact that it’s hard to believe there’s not some kind of chicanery going on, the auld brainbox playing tricks. But to these people it’s just ordinary; he is ordinary even, that’s the strangest thing. All of them — the manager, the chef, the kitchen porter — it’s like they expected to see him here. He hasn’t caused the barest ripple of an interruption. Go downstairs and go in your room and you’re working at six the morrow, and everything just carries on as it was.

Somebody is coming out of a door down the way. A girl. She’s in her pyjamas and barie feet. He stands there rooted as she comes toward him, and he’s about to have to say something when she turns into the bathroom. She didn’t seem to notice him even. What, are they on drugs, these people? He feels like he’s totally lost his bearings, the quiet sounds of snoring and music and humming strip lights around him, a girl in her pyjamas, and he’s losing track already if it’s day or if it’s night. The toilet is flushing. She comes out and starts walking back to her room.

‘Excuse me,’ he calls out. She doesn’t hear him.

‘Excuse me.’

She looks back blankly.

‘Can ye tell me which of these is free, please?’ He can see now that she’s been asleep, the eyes half closed.

She shrugs her shoulders. ‘I think maybe this one.’ She points to a door by the bathroom, and pads off.

He pushes the door open slowly and the shapes inside become clearer as the light from the corridor filters through. The room is empty, the bed made. He finds the switch and the bulb takes a moment stammering on. It is like a compartment in a storage warehouse, threadbare and windowless; tiled drop ceiling. There is a sink and a chipped white Formica wardrobe, a waste bucket, a chair and a small table with an alarm clock, the hands pointing just the back of four. Unreality has hold of him now, carrying him numbly on as he arranges his few clothes in the wardrobe, takes off his shoes, puts them under the table and gets lying down on the bed. Careful. He needs to be careful. Too easy to get maunderly and think about things — the lack of daylight, for one, Christ — but actually what he should be thinking is good positive thoughts. He has found himself a job. He is on his feet. He has got himself what he was looking for. What was that, well? It was an anonymous room in a place with no reminders and no bastards to pity him or stick the boot on. The image of Craig in the cemetery comes suddenly to him, but he knows he has to shut it away, shut it right away. He looks about him. See if he gives the room a bit of a spruce up it might not be so bad. A mini television. Plants. Maybe he could knock a couple of plastic ones out the restaurant even — there ye go, now you’re talking man, now you’re bloody talking.