Ross Raisin - Waterline

Everyone’s in their own group — the baldies at one table, the waiters another, the receptionists — all of them keeping in with themselves. It’s like school. And it’s so quiet, that’s the strangest thing. Hardly anybody talking, just chowing their food down in silence, the only noise in the room the sound of knives and forks hitting plates. Most of them look foreign, maybe that’s part of it, the lack of mixing. Still but, who’s he to talk, the cloyed-up Scot there at the end of the row.

He is finishing off when the head chef comes in and walks over to him. He stands stooping opposite him, his hands pressed on the table.

‘Go okay today?’

‘Fine, aye, once I’d got the hang of it.’

Some of the women are looking over.

‘You need to get your speed up, that’s all.’ He stands straight, looking off toward the door, then back at Mick. ‘Next staff food is at five, and your late starts at half past, okay?’ He pats once on the table and walks away.

He doesn’t go to the next staff food. He holes up in his room, laid on the bed in his pants and his socks, done in, drifting in and out of sleep through the afternoon.

The late shift is longer, relentless, more types of crockery. At least but he is in the bare scuddy underneath the overalls, which is a pure blessed relief compared to earlier. And as well he manages to wrestle a few more words out of Dia, who is on with him again.

‘Where are ye from?’

‘Ghana.’

He realizes it’s coming to a close when the waiters are only leaving tea and coffee cups, and these wee pots skinned with leftover mustard and ketchup.

When the kitchen start bringing all their pots and pans through, Dia gives him a hand scrubbing them clean, and afterward shows him where the mop is to follow where he’s already swept. They are about done when one of the baldies comes through with a bottle of beer in his hand, sheer-legging over the wet floor to reach for his knife bag off one of the shelves. A beer. That would be pure fucking heaven right now. He doesn’t say anything to Dia though, and they finish up, draining the machine and bringing out the rubbish bags before they leave, away back to the staff quarters.

He gets into his room and tummels onto the bed.

The next day is much the same; and the next. His body is feeling like it’s took a kicking. By the time his day off comes, he’s that exhausted it is all he can do to get out of bed in time for staff food, and he spends most of the rest of it asleep.

The rota is two shifts each day out of breakfast, lunch or dinner, and one day off a week. His mind is occupied, near enough, and then when he’s no working he’s too tired even to think. He gets kept on Wash 1 for the first week, either with Dia or with Eric. He doesn’t try getting any patter out of them so it’s aye quiet working, but no that it’s frosty or anything, it’s fine, it’s just work. They two have their own reasons they don’t yap on, the same as he does, and so they get on with it just, silently working as a team while the baldies flash in and out with hot pans and the waiters gurn through the hatch.

The afternoons, which are only a couple of hours if he’s on a lunch, he rests up in his room, or he goes out the back fire exit to the terminal for a pint, or sometimes, if he can’t stomach the idea of returning for the lunatic buffet, a sandwich.

The later staff food is harder going even than the breakfast. Usually there’s a tray of mince, without tatties, and a tray of carrot omelette, or onion omelette, or sausage omelette. Then it might be chips, which are away in a second, and hard, chewy rice that gets stuck between your teeth. He sits at the correct table now. Takes his place with his African co-workers and chows away silently next to them. He asks the other two their names. Obi and Vincent. They wear the same green overalls, but they work in a different kitchen, he doesn’t know where.

One day after the breakfast shift, the head chef comes in the potwash to tell him he needs to go up and see the operations manager: she has to get his details on the system.

He goes after staff food. Her office is on the same level as the kitchen, through a corridor with the same scuffed carpeting and bare walls as the rest of the staff side, but the occasional plastic plant and a wall clock with the hotel logo on it. A few shabby efforts at perking up the gloom — it’s in fact no unlike the walk used to be up to Alan’s office — which maybe explains how his stomach is feeling right now. Away, it’s Mick! Good to see you. You’re a kitchen porter now, I hear. Good for you, that’s great.

He’s about to chap the door, but he hears voices inside, what sounds like an argument, and he hangs back. Hard to make out what they’re saying, but it’s two women. Probably he should get leaving. But then there is movement inside, and he presses back against the wall as one of the housekeepers comes out, leaves the door open, and is away muttering down the corridor. The operations manager appears, sees him, scowls.

‘I’m here to fix out my details.’

She turns away. ‘Wait.’

The door shuts, and a few moments later she shouts him to come in.

She gives him a sheet of paper to fill in and ignores him, busy writing quickly onto a pad. She’s rattled, clear enough. He can feel the movement in the desk as she writes. A great black printer between them with Post-it notes stuck on it: Tronc adjustments. Gerry, Plane Food, 4 p.m .

Scottish, he puts on the form, and Mick; the rest he makes up. He’s filling this out on a need-to-know basis, is how it’s going to go, and there’s fine well certain things they don’t need to know. Provan, he calls himself, after Dave Provan who played for Rangers when he was a wean. As he passes the form to her, he says that he doesn’t have a bank account. She doesn’t try hiding the scunnered expression that comes on her face, but it seems at least she believes him. They’ll pay him in cash, she says, until he’s got one. An envelope job. Nay problem. Nay problem at all.

When the first paypacket comes, handed to him by the head chef at the start of one dinner shift, he doesn’t have any pockets to put the envelope in, so he tucks it in the top of his pants. When he’s signed out and he gets back into his room to take a look, one side of the envelope is clabbered with sweat and it pulls apart easily. There is a wad of twenties. No a great lot of twenties, mind, for the hours he must have worked. He sticks it on the table, under the alarm clock. Next day off, he’ll go buy a mini television. Christ knows where but. It isn’t like there’s shops around; or pubs, minimarkets, offies. The area around the hotel is a demented wasteland of concrete and car parks, carriageways and flyovers. The only place to go is the terminal. From what he can tell, none of the workers much leave the building. They keep to their rooms, or they lounder about the basement amongst their own squad. Mostly, though, they work. There’s staff on twenty-four hours, and he’s got accustomed by now to the comings and the goings during the night: the banging of doors and shuffling in the corridor; the toilet flushing and the noise of the pipes in the walls as the different groups come on and off shift.

Mainly it is KPs and housekeepers down there in the basement. The doormen as well, and the night porter, whose room is across the way from his and he hears getting in each morning just the back of six. Each squad is divided by continent, it seems, as if these are skills you’re born into, the cleaning of saucepans and toilets. The KPs, apart from himself, are African; the housekeepers, South American; most of the chefs and the receptionists, East Europes; and the waiters, fuck knows.