Ross Raisin - Waterline

He doesn’t stop going. He’s there each night for his free meal and his free entertainment, listening to the night terrors erupting through the hall. He has a shapeless awareness that he needs to be doing something, but it’s getting more difficult to hold the thought and do anything with it. The brain is unable to deal with it. The Hallelujahs aren’t but. They keep going on at him about it. Especially the guy Yann. Does he know there’s a laundry and showers at the daytime centre? Has he had any thoughts what he’s going to do when the shelters close at the end of February? He’s going up to Glasgow, he tells him. Going back to see the family. Yann is delighted. That’s good, Mick. That’s very good.

What will happen to all this lot then? Where will they go? They’re that settled into the routine, some of them. Maybe they are actually in fact secret bloody millionaires and when this all packs up they’re away in their jets to their lochside mansions, and that’s how they’re all so unbothered about it, who knows? Because that’s what they are. Unbothered. It’s true. Rare there is an incident. Sometimes but. Nothing much. The odd squabble a couple of times, arguments over who’s took whose sleeping space, but that’s usually it. It is a while before he sees anything like a proper fight, and when he does, it’s two women. The one of them starts screaming at the other that she’s stole her gloves, and when she denies it and starts walking away, the accuser jumps her from behind and gets clawing at her face. The Hallelujahs are straight in there, breaking them up, wheeling out an extra divider the night.

Beans reckons he knows the whole back story. He is sat down at the same dinner table laying it off to him.

‘She’s had they gloves for years, see. She was gave them as a present by somebody, so ye can see how she’s angry. I’d be angry, somebody lifted my hat. I’d be fucking beeling.’ Mick sits drinking his tea. ‘Know what I think?’ Beans continues. ‘I think it’s no about the gloves. Probably there never was a pair of gloves even. Sometimes it’s like that, know what I mean? Christmas is aye the worst. This place is eggshells then. Depends what like is the family situation, course, but most of these lot are biting the carpets.’

Christmas. He’s not even noticed that it has came and went. He must have been at the hotel. He tries to mind when it would have been, if there’d been any sign of it, but he can’t think; the whole thing is a fog. Plus as well this great bampot right in his face.

‘See me, I’m no staying around much longer.’ He is looking intently across the table at Mick.

‘How’s that?’

‘Mean, I know this place, close, quite close, beds, kitchens, comfy, ye know, no like this.’ He turns and looks about behind him a moment. ‘All I want is to go for a crap in peace.’

He is grinning at his joke. Mick notices there are bits of dandruff on the outside of his hat.

‘See how I’m telling ye is because you should go there too, we should both of us go there. Ye can’t stay here.’

Mick looks away over to where the tables are getting folded back up for the night. The first of the sleeping mats being rolled out onto the floor. He’s right, obviously. The memory then of the pub backyard, the cold humming generator. At least this guy has got something going on upstairs, unlike himself. He’s thinking, at least. Even the headbangers have the march on him these days.

It rains a couple of days solid. Quiet down by the river during this time, the fast-flowing water foaming and stinking with the downpour. The occasional determined jogger dragging past. It is too wet to stay there. He’ll be sat thinking it isn’t so bad because the bench is partly covered over by a tree, but then a branch will give up under the gathering weight and dump a bucket onto his head. He goes up the coach station. He sits in the bays, drookit and shivering, frightening the passengers. Pneumonia but, it’s good for the handouts. Both days, he taps a pitying face for the price of a can and goes to drink it under the railway bridge, or on the walk over to the night’s church.

Beans is sat near the end of a long table, on his own. Mick goes over and sits in opposite him.

‘Alright?’

Beans is away with it though, staring down at his untouched chicken and chips.

‘What ye said before, mean, I think I might take ye up on the offer.’

Beans looks up slowly. ‘Offer.’

‘Aye, what ye said, this other place.’

Beans doesn’t say anything. He stares off now to the side, at nothing, at the wall. Maybe he’s bevvied. He doesn’t smell but; no of drink, anyway.

‘Well, I thought I’d let ye know, okay.’

He doesn’t push it after that, and carries on eating his food while Beans sits there, vacant, until after a while he pushes his chair out and walks off, leaving his food where it is.

Mick watches him, over on the far side of the room, sitting down with his back against the wall. A new one, this. He’s never seen him when he hasn’t been bouncing off the ceilings and chewing everybody’s ear off. He continues staying there, alone, while the tea comes out and then the chairs and tables are cleared away, and he’s still there, unmoving, while Mick and the others are getting into their sleeping bags for the night. A Hallelujah goes over to him eventually and he gets up slowly, moving over to his pitch.

The next evening though Beans comes up to him in the car park where Mick is stood waiting for the church doors to open. He does mind the conversation. And no just the first one either, but the no-conversation last night as well.

‘So what I thought was Sunday.’ There is a scaffer sat smoking on the steps who tilts his head up to listen, and Beans pulls Mick off to the side. ‘See the thing is Sunday’s a good day to try cause there’s always chuck-outs the weekend, after people have been on the batter.’

‘I’m no sure, mean it’s —’

‘Nay worries, I’ll sort it, I’ll sort it. I know the place, see, I know how to play it.’ He grins. ‘A bed, man. A fucking bed, eh.’

Hard to know what to think, and hard to think at all anyway, so he doesn’t. He sits near Beans at tea and half observes him rattling on ten the dozen to anybody that goes near him. They eat. Go to sleep. Up the next morning and he’s out again into the cold, away the long stiff journey to the shelter of the coach station. His feet are pretty swollen getting. The walking, or the temperature, or his socks, which cling now like a second skin. One moment to the next. That is all he can do. One moment to the next. Avoid the Hallelujahs and sit quietly as he gets his ear chewed off by this strange creature that is smiling at him now. ‘Come on, then.’ Plates getting cleared away. ‘Ye ready?’

‘See, what I’m saying is never let them think that ye’ve hit the scrape because if they do then that’s you screwed, man, terrible, fucking terrible. They’ll never leave ye alone. Plus as well they’ll give ye the worst of everything — room, bed, fire alarm, giro, the whole bag all to shite.’

Mick looks down at the pavement. It is dark. Cold. Their breath fluming in front of them as they walk. Actually, no — Beans’s breath fluming in front of them — because he never shuts up. Since they left the church it’s been non-stop: benefits, religion, piles, the population of birds. He needs to rest but he’s too tired to think about doing anything but trail along with this guy through the dark streets, stumbling into busyness where the pavements are hoaching at bus stops and crossings; down deserted side roads, past closed shops, pubs, a girl with her arms tightly folded, smoking in a doorway. The problem with birds, he is saying, is that they’re all dying because the farmers are greedy arabs and they’ve torn down all the hedgerows, the same as they tear down the tenements and now there’s nothing, everything is bare just. Mick is trying no to listen. This place they are going to was supposed to be close by, but they’ve been walking Christ knows how long and he doesn’t recognize any more where they are. To close the eyes just. Close the eyes. Sleep. No have to think. No have to listen.