Ross Raisin - Waterline

A hand on his shoulder. There is activity in the room, voices, light streaming in through the large, high windows. Somebody stood above him; walking away. He lies there rigid and watches as the cocoon next to him squeezes itself out. No a butterfly, that’s for certain. He is old and scarred, the hair clotted, deep trenches in his face. Mick doesn’t move, watching from inside his bag — all these hopeless creatures stooping and coughing, gathering up their beds. There is one pair that look young enough they could be schoolweans. Blacks too, Asians, the whole circus. Yann is there, chatting with a few of the other Hallelujahs, who bring out long tables and unfold them at one side of the hall. Women start appearing. Broken-looking women, worse gone even than the men. He sits there in a stupor taking it in. He’s seen plenty enough scaffers before, in bookies, the park, on the street, but this is something different, seeing them all together in a room. Yann is coming over.

‘How did you sleep, Mick? We have breakfast now, so if you want to queue up, they’ll have it out in a moment.’ A line is already forming by a table at the other side of the hall. ‘Here.’ He hunkers down beside him and hands him a leaflet. ‘Each of these churches opens for a different night of the week. You can self-refer to any, but you’ll need to book your place first.’

He half listens to the rest of Yann’s spiel before joining the back of the queue, behind a woman with no socks on, her baries scarlet and bloated. None of it is registering properly. He sits down where there is nobody next to him. Staff food all over again. Except this is a better meal at least: scrambled egg, bacon, beans. Head down, he eats fast, ravenous and wanting to get out. Somebody is pulling in opposite him but. Mick keeks up, then back to his food. A man in a red woolly hat. His giant bawface blistered and shot, a drinker. If he can just get eaten up, leave this place, no talk to any of them. But this guy is staring at him.

‘Ye don’t always get the beans, know. Serious, ye don’t.’

A bloody Weegie. Unfuckingbelievable. Mick doesn’t look up. He resolves no to let a word slip out of his mouth.

‘See the bacon is always — ye always get the bacon but the beans is hit and miss. Believe that? I’m telling them, get more beans. Beans is cheaper for them and it fills ye up the better.’

Mick nods, picking up his plate and standing.

He puts the plate and cutlery into the buckets on the table. How can somebody like that look at him and think — aye, there’s a guy that’s on my wavelength? No point dwelling on it but. Probably a headbanger. He goes warily over to his bag and then makes for the door, getting out the building before any other nutter can clamp onto him.

A man in a suit is sitting on a bench. A short way down the towpath, an elderly Mediterranean-looking woman in a huge fur coat is waiting for her small dog to finish shitting beside a tree. The man knows full well that she is not going to clear it up. He knows it, and it is irritating the hell out of him that he knows it, but still he cannot move his eyes away: the dog squeezes out the final pellet, and he watches in silent fury as the woman slowly wanders off in her enormous coat.

The man turns back to his lunch, but that just serves to annoy him further, so he looks up at Battersea Power Station instead — something reassuring about the size and solidness of it. He could kill for a sausage sandwich right now. That was his old routine: after the first couple of weeks last summer when all the new advisers would go together from the Department for Business building to the pub for lunch, he had taken to walking down to the river and buying a sausage sandwich en route. He looks down miserably now at his Boots meal deal: the juice drained in one go, sandwich vanished, colourful delights of the fruit salad still to come. The homeless man is there again. He is sat three benches further up, and there’s little chance he could have seen him but even so the memory of yesterday returns, and he experiences for a moment the same sense of panic he had felt as the man had approached him, the crazed look on his face. He seems to be keeping to himself today, ignoring the passers-by and just glaring out at the river in what appears to be the same dirty brown jacket and torn trousers as he had on before.

He attempts the fruit salad. It is dry and soapy; he compresses a piece in his mouth but no moisture comes out. He knows that it is almost time to return to the office, but as soon as he thinks about leaving the bench he starts to become a little nauseous. There is a pre-meet at one to brief the Idiot for his afternoon meetings. No doubt the others will be prepared: they’ll have been planning over lunch, devising a briefing strategy. They will have choreographed their spiel; and when, at the end of the brief, the Idiot turns to him and asks if he has any input, he will look every inch the pointless fat fool as he replies that he believes it’s all been covered. In his whole time there so far, his single most significant contribution was the moment during a meeting with the Federation of Small Businesses when the Idiot passed him a squiggled note that read: What is the minimum wage these days? Remembering the stupid flush of pride that he had experienced on sliding back the answer causes the sick feeling in his stomach to increase now, as he rises from the bench.

A runner comes past in a gold-coloured pair of lycra trousers, his large muscular buttocks seizing as he pounds down the towpath. The man starts back toward Westminster, but immediately as he does so the strange, horrifying image enters his head of himself in the same pair of trousers, entering the building and suddenly everybody looking at him — the security guards suppressing their mirth as he passes through the scanners — and the sight of his fat golden arse repeated all around him in the unending glass and mirrors and polished flooring. Suddenly he stops right there on the towpath, looking round to check nobody is nearby, and, with the fruit salad punnet, he scoops up the four small nuggets of dog shit from beside the tree. He ties up the Boots carrier bag around it, continuing alongside the river, and drops the package into the next dustbin he passes.

Further down the water, Mick is viewing across the way to the power station. One thing that must be admitted: it’s bloody big. When did they close it? Who cares, what does it matter? It doesn’t. Probably the Milk Snatcher but. We don’t want power stations, what we want instead is more apartment buildings — these ones you can see here all along past the bridge, curving swirls of bright blue and green.

He pulls out the leaflet and turns it over. One thing that’s obvious, looking at the map: these churches are spread miles apart. And, on top of that, the Monday one is the other side of the map from Tuesday, which does not neighbour Wednesday, and so on, and so on. Obvious it’s done on purpose. To make things difficult, for whatever reason. The absurdity of it all. An absurd situation, would ye no agree, Mr Jogger, in your — and let’s be honest here — pretty daft leggings? Fucksake, he needs a drink. The pub just a little way down the road but him sat here with no money on his tail. Cruel. Very cruel.

It takes him two hours to walk there, and he arrives while it is still light. Maybe that’s how they keep them so far apart. To give the scaffers something to do. Pass the time. The Hallelujah that comes to the door isn’t as friendly as the other one. He’s in fact quite annoyed that Mick’s turned up out the blue without booking his place. He’s not supposed to arrive before seven. He should have phoned ahead. A good one, that. See the thing is I was going to call ahead on the mobile phone but then I was that busy on the line with clients and contractors and all that, I forgot. He doesn’t bother arguing with the guy. No the energy or the pride, so he keeps quiet and the man agrees to book him in, only he has to go away the now and no come back until seven o’clock. He leaves, walks about, wondering how he’s supposed to know when seven o’clock is.