Ross Raisin - Waterline

‘The neighbour.’

The two men are laughing at something with the guy behind the counter.

‘Which one?’

‘Him there, that skinny one with a face like underneath a fridge-freezer.’ He starts to get up. ‘Come on. Ye got any money?’

‘No, I’ve —’

‘It’s fine, I do, come on.’

They go down another flight to Beans’s room on the ground floor. It is pretty much identical to his own. Beans goes into the bottom of the wardrobe and pulls out a couple of cans, hands one to Mick, and they sit down on the bed.

The hostel is not far from where they were. There is a large map of the borough on a wall in the reception, and he has a study of it one morning when there isn’t much traffic passing through, only the woman on the desk, occupied at her computer.

He walks there the first time, getting sat in the old spot by the cash machines. Coming back that afternoon, he figures out there is a bus he can get that goes right down the road the hostel is on, and it’s one of these bendy ones you can skip the fare onto. A bonus. Plus as well, thanks to the en suite bathroom, he’s no boufing like he was, so his takings are on the increase.

Rare there are many people about on the corridors or in the reception. He has little difficulty keeping out the way. There are four floors, sandwiching the men and the women. Probably about fifty people in total, he calculates, but the only place he sees them usually is the canteen. A few looks but that’s all. It’s different here to the other places they’ve been. The scaffers don’t all look like scaffers, for a kick-off. A lot of them are clean and normal-looking. Decent clothes. Even one black guy that goes around in a suit and tie the whole time, the hair gelled into a side-shed and his shoes polished as steel. There are groups, obviously. Wee cabals. He steers clear of them, even though there’s none he’s seen yet that look like they might be trouble. Quite a few of the men and the women mix together, in fact, and the atmosphere is pretty calm, orderly.

He copies Beans’s idea of storing his lagers in the wardrobe. It’s allowed, it says in his agreement, but the better to be careful. And nay chance he’s leaving them in the fridge in the corridor kitchen, which he comes past on the way to his room, keeking inside at men from his floor, cooking, talking.

He meets with Renuka each Thursday in the small, cramped office that she shares — if the scattered papers and flyers are anything to go by — with Daniel Katongo, Complex Needs Worker. There is a shelving unit built into the whole of one wall, packed with box files labelled things like: Risk Assessments, Overdose, HEP/TB, Serious Incidents. They talk about his benefit claims, and where is his family, do they know where he is? No exactly his favourite subjects, so he usually cloys up and stares at the files or at the photos on the walls. One of a woman in a skirt suit shaking the hand of a bemused-looking old guy inside the hostel entrance; another of Renuka stood amongst a line of people in yellow T-shirts, their arms around each other’s shoulders, smiling.

On their second meeting she had asked him if he’s using drugs. No. He isn’t. Alcohol? Sometimes, maybe — who doesn’t? No like he keeps a bucket of electric soup by the bed. Does he drink in his room? He tells her he doesn’t. Time to time, maybe. She’s alright but, is Renuka, she doesn’t put the boot on. She is helping him get a bank account and sort out his claims, arranging his interviews for housing and broo money. The first time he goes up the jobcentre is a pretty fucking dreadful experience. A cheery enough black woman with dreadlocks that deals with him but he’s just too bloody shamefaced hardly to speak to her. He is leeching again. Him that once was pure sickened by the very idea of it, who watched others going down the broo office while he was too proud even to get off his bar stool, and now this. Moved from Beans to the broo. An unchancy pair, that’s for sure.

Beans isn’t having things so easy with his own key worker. Or, more likely, the key worker isn’t. He’s no comfortable sitting in they type of rooms, he tells Mick; he needs to get up and move around. Which is the first thing this guy Robin is in his ear about. Plus he hasn’t been too forthcoming himself about the drink. He’s told Robin he’s teetotal. Robin says he isn’t helping himself with this attitude, that there’s services in the hostel he could start making use of — but once he’s said that, Beans digs the heels in just and starts into the usual chicanery.

As well, there’s been some argle-bargle with the neighbour. The skinny guy has been putting the mix in, or Beans has been putting the mix in with him, it’s hard to tell from Beans’s account of it. Either way, this guy, even though he’s quite young, he’s obvious in with the bricks and he’s pretty testy about what’s his plate and what’s his fridge shelf and all this. Something to do with the fridge getting flooded that started it off and now the two of them are at each other’s throats at the flick of a switch. He fancies he’s some kind of hardman, according to Beans, even though he’s no but a scrawny wee fuck, and a couple of times the neighbour’s tried to hang one on him, the last of which ended with Beans sat on his head. Robin is very unpleased about it all. They’ve got the zero-tolerance rules to aggression here, and if he carries on like this then he’s out on his arse.

A slow, heavy sadness is weighing on him. He feels lost — adrift. Now that he isn’t distracted by the need to keep warm, keep safe, keep fed, it’s as though a layer of something protective is went away and now he’s floating in space with nothing to shield him from his thoughts. Fragments of conversations, images, keep coming at him and he is powerless to block them out. Robbie. Craig. He lies on the bed or sits on the pavement with his eyes tight shut and waits for them to pass, but then all he’s left with is this great unmoving solidness inside him. The drink no helping either; making it worse. Nothing to do. There is nothing to do. Sleep, that’s all there is, but even that is become totally random now: sometimes he won’t get more than two minutes at a time, awake for long stretches through the night, then other days he’ll hit the pillow and sleep for fifteen hours straight. He needs something to keep the mind occupied. To get him off the bed. There is the day room, which has a TV and a pool table in it, and sometimes he thinks about asking Beans if he fancies going a game, but then he’ll convince himself it’s a bad idea — nay doubt the skinny guy will be there and it’ll turn into a bloodbath. He could go up there on his own and watch a match, a film, but the idea of it straight away makes him uneasy, the thought of the room hoaching with people, eyes, noise.

He is lying on the bed one afternoon when it occurs to him that he’s got the book. The Barbara. He gets up and takes it out from the bottom of the wardrobe, then sits with it on his lap for a while, looking at it. Trying to work out if he recognizes the cover. Maybe. Hard to tell. They were all pretty similar, from what he can mind, always these good-looking women on the move in expensive dresses. He turns it over and reads the back:

Television war correspondent Nicky Wells is a media superstar. Courageous, beautiful and renowned for her hard-hitting reports from the world’s most dangerous trouble spots, her life is shattered when she loses the only man she ever truly loved — dashing English aristocrat, Charles Devereaux.

He chuckles. No Dickens, is it, hen? He flicks it open though, and gets reading the first couple of pages. By the time he puts it down to go the canteen and meet Beans, he’s already a fair chunk into it.

The battle with the skinny guy shows no signs of stopping, but his own neighbours are fine. One side doesn’t come out of his room much, and when he does he doesn’t say a great lot. Mick passes him sometimes on the corridor, or in the kitchen if he’s getting a cup of tea — quite long grey hair tied in a ponytail, and always the same green tracksuit on. They nod the head at each other, and get back into their rooms. The other side but is a different story. It’s almost a month before they cross each other’s path, but when they do it’s immediately obvious that the guy is a yap. They are both going into their rooms when he stops in his doorway and turns to ask Mick if he’s got a shelf in the fridge, before delivering pretty much his entire life story right there in the corridor as if Mick has just asked for it, which he hasn’t, he’s hardly said a word.