Ross Raisin - Waterline

It is six o’clock. There’s never anybody about in the building now except for one queer old ticket he sees on the stair sometimes, who gets up to give his dog a walk. It isn’t so bad, this time in the morning. He’s tired, but it’s fine. The back shift is the one that kills him. He presses the button and the lift doors are straight open. They cleaned it out a week or two ago, so it’s no bogging like it was, but it’s been wrote on already. CUNT, one wall says, nice and simple. He gets out on the ninth floor and goes toward Suggie’s.

He chaps the door. There’s a light on underneath. A good sign. He’s tired enough himself this time the morning, but he’s pure sparkling compared to Suggie. There’s times he’ll be banging five minutes before there’s any answer, and a couple of mornings he’s resorted to giving it a wee clang with the fire extinguisher off the wall fixing. The door’s looked better, in truth. Today though Suggie opens it on the second knock. He’s in his pants still, but he’s up.

‘Come in, mate.’

Joe follows him in and sits on the settee while Suggie goes in the bedroom to get dressed. The television is on and he looks at it without paying much attention. There’s a fair number of empty cans about, on the table, over the floor. Suggie must’ve had some mates round. No the less, he’s dressed quick enough, appearing at the bedroom door in a couple of minutes, red eyes, grinning, his yellow helmet in his hand.

‘Right, we off, well?’

Once onto the street the two apprentices get making their way briskly through the crisp cool morning toward the yard. They go over Saturday’s match again, a couple of times, but most of the way they walk without talking. The roads are near deserted. A few cars. The old boy from their block, coming back with his dog. They give him a nod.

It wasn’t always like this, course. Their fathers and their grandfathers have shown them enough photographs — photographs there’s plenty of in the grand crumbling library they are walking past now — how it used to be. These same streets a hundred years ago, sixty, forty even, mobbed with hundreds of workers starting out for the day shift. Tired and quiet, like this pair, getting moving. The noise of boots on the road, the hooter about to sound up the way and signal the start of work. The occasional wife in a tenement window in her nightdress, watching her man off, and him finding his way into his own team, grouping up as they move on — riveters, caulkers, blacksmiths, the welders clear visible in their spotted hats and their leathers, boilermakers, platers — the whole black squad marching on up the road. And at the back, the apprentices, pishing about.

A different story the now. Two lads in blue overalls walking through the empty streets like a pair of convicts who’ve just survived the end of the world; passing by the primary school, the park, the red-stone tenements, and the terraces of grey pebble-dash houses with their wee patches of front garden.

One of these, the grass growing longer than its neighbours, has a great flash Saab parked bold as day out the front. Inside, Mick is listening to the brother-in-law snoring loudly through the wall. He’s put them in the boys’ old room, so they will be lying there asleep across the way from each other, the two beds having been pushed years ago as far apart as possible. The sound he’s making, Alan must be on this side closest to himself. If there’d been anywhere else to put them, he’d have put them there, but there wasn’t, simple as that. So they’ll have to put up with it just, staying in a weans’ room. Nothing has changed in there since Robbie was eighteen and he moved to Australia — it’d hardly changed in fact for a long time before that — the opposing walls still covered with football stickers and Blu-Tack scabs, a great worn circle of carpet between the two beds, faded from years of board games and fighting.

He turns over, toward the window. The snoring unrelenting. Christsake. The man can’t keep quiet even when he’s asleep.

Down the stair in the living room, Robbie will be slumbering on the floor with an arm curled around the wife. They are on a pile of stale brown blankets Robbie found from somewhere. No that they two mind. They don’t. They’re fine. On the other side of the room the older brother lying there in his sleeping bag and his legs poking out from the end of the settee. Thinking his thoughts. Thinking his thoughts and keeping the lot of them to himself.

The truth is, it is good of the Highlanders to have come. They could have drove down for the funeral and then been away back to their lochside and their mighty brick stronghold and that would’ve been that, never to be seen again. They don’t have to be here. It is Alan’s choice that they are. That’s obvious enough, the way she pinpricks around the house. The peeved squeezed eyeballs every time she gets inspecting a piece of cutlery or a glass out the cupboard. Go on, well, Lynn, what is it ye think, eh? Because ye’re no making it quite clear enough with the subtle facial movements there. Ye think it’s a dump, eh? Well go on, then, and get to fuck why don’t ye?

The snoring has stopped. For a few minutes, the house is peaceful. A thin shaft of light is through the curtains, falling on the carpet at the bottom of the bed. After a while though, the snoring starts up again, quiet at first, then gaining force. See another way you could look at it: he’s retired a long while the now, so an event like this isn’t exactly getting in the way of things for them. They can make space for times like this. Births, deaths, the graduation of the miraculous son, no able sadly to make it yesterday because he’s over in America, making his millions, how lovely for him.

As well, their summer holiday is by. A trip to France this year, cycling round the vineyards and taking photos of each other in food markets examining the local sausagemeats. He shouldn’t be so hard on them. It can’t be easy of course for the brother-in-law either, let’s no forget, the responsibility he’s got to shoulder. The responsibility he’s aye got to shoulder.

Mick gets out of bed. It’s early still and everyone else will be asleep, but he goes in the bathroom to wash his face, puts on a short-sleeve shirt and trousers, and steps down to the kitchen. He checks in the cupboard to see if there’s any bread left, but it’s been finished, so he closes the cupboard door and sits down at the table, looking out the window, where a wee disappointed sparrow is hopping about the grass wondering how there’s nay food put out for him these days.

So this is grief, well. Sat at the kitchen table with all your joys and your miseries sleeping and snoring about you and you sat there wondering what to do for your breakfast. Maybe it’s by, maybe that’s it, he’s gone through ten months already and the moment when she’s dead actually marks the end of it because she’s gone now, she’s no laid there dying in front of him one day to the next. It’s over. He’d greeted back then, alright, when they’d been told. On his own, or the pair of them together sat clutching to each other at this same table. That day the doctor phoned them up and asked could they both please come in to see him. The X-ray results were returned. It wasn’t her back. Pleural mesothelioma. A total whiteout of her left lung. A year, maybe, at the most. He closes the eyes and tries picturing her, her face, before that, while she looked healthy still. It’s a blank but, the brain doesn’t want to go there, so he sits with the eyes closed just. A moment of peace. You keep on. What else can you do? You keep on.

Down on the floor by the bin he notices a box of cereal. He picks it up, gets himself a bowl and shakes out the last flakes and the sawdust from the bag inside. The Highlanders are going the messages later, they announced last night, so there will be plenty enough food for them all soon enough, even the wee chap outside, given up and flown off the now. It’ll be organic, course, but such is life, eh. Him and the sparrow aren’t complaining.