Ross Raisin - Waterline

Outside, pulling into the slots a bit further on, the Glasgow coach. He watches uneasily as the passengers start to spill out. How long since he came here? It seems like forever ago but it’s only a few months probably. He can’t be sure. No the best few months, being honest. Very funny ye sarcastic bugger. The Weegies are started filing past the windows and he looks down. Hardly likely there’ll be anybody that knows him, but so what, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. It might. In fact it’s a racing certainty the way things are going, so he keeps the head down, stares at his feet. His neck starting to strain. Waiting for it — a tap on the shoulder. Someone who recognizes him; someone who’ll go back up to Glasgow and say that they’ve seen him, tell the Highlanders, tell Craig — and just for a split second he allows in the thought that maybe he’s been looking for him, maybe actually it’s him on the coach coming down on the search for him because how can you know? You can’t, and all he does know is he has to get rid of the thought, get hold of it and get fucking shut.

‘Hello. Are you okay?’

A young girl, sitting in beside him. He pulls back. Confusion and panic stiffening through him. ‘Would you like something to eat?’ He sits up and looks about to see if anybody’s watching. The girl is sat turned toward him, smiling. She’s got a wool cardigan with big wooden buttons; a woolly hat with these two bobble-danglers either side. He doesn’t say anything and she starts going in her bag. He stands up. He has to be away. The heart is pounding. He moves down the bay; a man watching him over his newspaper, flicking the eyes back down as he hurries past.

A crawling, scunnery feeling follows him as he moves away down the road. Only one place he’s headed the now; screw the rules.

He orders himself a pint. Three pound fifty pence, but no surprises there, he is in London. For some reason. For some reason he is in London. There is a game on the television. A few in watching it, but it’s obvious no a football pub because they don’t look too interested. The pint is calming him, settling the nerves. He stays and drinks it slowly. Takes his time before swallowing up to leave. Now what? Careful. Best no to think about the big picture right now, because it’s just too bloody big, is how, and he’s too close up to be able to see it properly. What he has to do is focus on one part at a time, stepping back until he can see the whole thing clearly and figure it out. Wee steps. He is cold, and he is hungry. He does his jacket up to the neck and sets off looking for something to eat.

He finds a kebab shop and goes inside, warmth and grease clinging about him as he joins the line of men at the counter intently giving the guy their sauce and salad directions. He feels comfortable in here. Warm. Unnoticed. The kebab man skilfully shaving strips of meat off the doner like a barber working at a throat. One thing’s for sure, he could fine well go a kebab the now. Too expensive but. When it comes his turn he gets himself a bag of chips instead, and goes to sit at a stool in the window, biting them in halves and watching the steam lick out of the soft potato insides.

It is late. He steps out of the shop. This torpor all through him that he can’t shake. He starts walking back the way he came; nay other suggestions rolling out the carpet for him. To get warm just. A wee nip of something, just to get warm, it’s as far as he can think. Shortly before the pub he notices a side street, dark, too narrow for lampposts. Without much of a thought, he goes down it. It is cobbled, and a couple of cars are parked with the one tyre perched onto a pavement, and at the end there is just a wall, the back of another building. He steps onto a concrete lump and looks over the line of palings into a small rubbish yard at the back of the pub. Weeds and dog-ends and black wheelie bins.

There’s only a few customers still in. The television is off, and he sits down at a table underneath it, slowly sipping at his whisky, feeling the warmth of it spread through him. He gets a second, and by the time he’s near the end of it the barmaid has the mop out, doing behind the bar counter; she doesn’t notice him leaving.

He drops the bag down and clambers messily over the palings, scraping the skin off the back of his leg. There is no lighting out here, but he can make out the push bars on the fire exit and, next to it, a stack of bottle crates. Further in, a large humming box like a generator, with gas cylinders propped against it. He puts his bag down behind the box, the other side from the fire exit, and sits down, hoping it might be giving off some warmth. Nay such luck. Here we are well. No an expected turn of events. He sits blankly for a time, more and more uncomfortable getting with the cold and the hard uneven ground knuckling into his arse through the bag.

After a while he gets up and goes on a search for anything that might improve the situation. And he’s in luck, because lodged behind the wheelie bins is a whole load of flattened McCoy’s crisps cardboard boxes. Okay. All it needs now is a bottle or two of beer left in one of these crates and he’ll be laughing. He checks. There isn’t.

The cardboard does improve things, laid out on the ground underneath him, but it’s impossible to sleep still, no with this cold knifing at his body. Even with the whisky inside him he’s pure frozen. And alert. Listening for the fire exit or anybody coming down the side street, propped rigid against the generator with his bag tucked behind him and the raw skin on the back of his leg stinging against his trousers.

He doesn’t sleep, hardly at all, a few snatches just. The cold, and his back ridged against the generator, he’s stiffened up and he can barely move. All of him is numb. A few times during the night he tells himself he needs to get up, keep moving, go find somewhere covered he can be warmer, but the effort of it is too much. The aching body will not budge. A pain that began in his feet and his hands, tightening over his frame until it has grip of every part of him starts, after a while, to lessen; the outside of him deadened, and the cold then working its way inside, into his nose and his throat, stopping the breath in his lungs and getting inside the brain, forcing it to press, paralysed, against his skull. Noise is increasing. Traffic on the main road. A bus braking. When he does move, he does it very slowly, muscle by muscle. It is dark still but there is a blue gloom to the sky. He gets out from behind the generator; stands up and perches his sore backside against it, looking at the dim yard. Dog-ends outside the fire exit. A cracked glass lampshade leant in a crate. A stack of rusted metal chairs lurching against the wall. He tries to pick up the cardboard and put it back behind the crates, but his fingers won’t work so he shunts it behind the generator, then takes a few goes attempting to get his bag and his body to struggle over the palings.

Most the shops are closed. He keeps walking, the autopilot on; cold, still cold. The feet throbbing in his shoes. He finds himself headed for the coach station, as if the body is handling things on its own by now, no trusting enough of him to discuss such matters any more. Fine but. Fine. It’s warmer in here, and he sits down in one of the bays. Quieter than yesterday, but it’s early yet, and he looks over at the board — 06.53 — the whole day in front of him, unending. He pushes back into his seat with his bag on his lap and falls asleep.

He wakes from an uncomfortable and confusing dream with an immediate sense of alarm that goes twisting right into the stomach. He scans about him. There, again, is the cunt opposite, looking at him over his paper, tapping away with the foot. And there’s others too, a whole line of them, watching him, just fucking sat there watching him. He stands up. He can’t stay there, all these eyes, and no to mention either the ones in the roof — the cameras — sure they will have clocked him as well, sat two days in a row without getting onto a coach. He goes out of the station and stands by the entrance in a state of near-total unclearness. A man coming up to him jabbing a newspaper in his face and he tries to shake his head but the guy keeps sticking it to him.