Ross Raisin - Waterline

‘I’ve been here a year, myself. I’m supposed to’ve got my flat but I was behind with my service charge and now they won’t move me on, even though they know I’m good for it. I am. I was in the army. Infantryman, but I got injured, see.’ He lifts up his jeans to show a dark scar on his ankle running all the way up to the knee. He looks at Mick; no clear if he’s expecting a challenge, or for him to be impressed.

‘Where were ye stationed?’

‘Cyprus. But then I got injured, right, so I went and lived with my brother in Stockport. He’s long distance with the lorries, so it worked out sound because I usually had the place to myself. You know those lorry parks? In Calais and wherever. Pretty much just brothels, honest to God, all these girls that work between the lorries. And the beds fold down off the sides so him and his mate are practically sleeping on top of each other. So what happens is, my brother, he’s always got a cob on when he comes back from a run, he doesn’t want me around, and eventually we have this big fight and he chucks me out.’

Mick stays quiet. Hard to put an age on him. He could be anywhere from twenty to forty. Behind him there is the sound of a television and a faint bogging smell coming through the open door, the walls covered in posters and magazine pages. He didn’t know you were allowed to do that. Maybe you aren’t.

‘That’s why I came down to London, because I had a friend I knew I could stay with. I knew him before I went in the army and he’s always been pretty sound. His mates are an alright lot too. There was always these parties. You wouldn’t believe it, just wild, man, like the wildest parties you’ve ever been to. There was this roof, and you weren’t supposed to go on it but everyone did, and you’d go up and there’d be the whole building out there on the lash. I remember one time somebody had got a pig — and like I’m talking a whole pig — fuck knows where they’d got it, but it takes about a dozen of us to drag it up there because it’s as heavy as a car, I swear. Then once we’d done it, somebody goes, hey, let’s chuck it off, so we get it to the edge and then’ — he does a pushing motion with his hands — ‘it hits the road and it must’ve exploded or something because it just sounded like this massive wet fart. And then this car pulls up in front of it, and a bloke gets out and stands there scratching his head, not a fucking clue what’s going on — he thinks he’s just knocked over a pig — and he never looks up but we’re there on the roof absolutely fucking pissing ourselves.’ Mick is started edging into his room, no sure when is the end to this story. ‘What I didn’t know though is that this lad, my mate, he’s stealing from me. Fucking stealing, right in front of my face, honest to God. I come in one day and he’s there going through my bag. Says he’s looking for fags but he’s lying and that’s it, man, I’m fucking gone.’

The neighbour’s name is Paul, he tells him before Mick’s managed getting back into his room. He’s okay. He’s a yap but he’s okay. They have the same conversation a couple of times. No too clear if Paul can mind he’s told him already, or if he’s honing the details just. They aye change anyway, the details. The next time he sees him, Paul is washing up a load of mugs in the kitchen, and it isn’t Cyprus where he was deployed, it was Afghanistan. So what though? Even if it’s made up, what does it matter? No like he’s writing the guy’s biography, and if he wants to keep talking about himself then that’s fine, it’s better than him asking questions.

A half-hour walk from the hostel, there is a park. No a scratty job either, but a big green one with ponds and boulevards and sunbathers. He takes to going up early each afternoon, to be doing something just, no just sitting in his room festering. There is a bench at the top of a large sloping lawn, in front of a rose garden, a bit out of the way. A view of the tennis courts, off to one side; and, in the distance, a group of homeless that he has to walk past on his way to the bench, who sit drinking by a plantation of young trees. East Europes, they sound like. Strange, it occurs to him as he’s sat there on the bench, how there’s none in the hostel.

He keeps on with the book. It’s quite gripping, actually. This woman, Nicky, she meets an old photographer friend while she’s reporting on the Tiananmen Square protests, and the two of them start getting increasingly friendly on each other, but she’s still haunted by the death of the dashing English aristocrat. No the less, the photographer’s got a farmhouse in Provence and there’s the inevitable steamy lovemaking when she goes to visit. The relationship going from strength to strength, until she gets watching the news one day and she sees the dashing English aristocrat in a crowd. Not drowned, as it turns out, and so she sets off across Europe in search of him.

He finds himself sat up in the bed with the cup of tea and the plate of biscuits reading it. Sometimes it’s no a tea, but there ye go, such is life. The book is a genuine doorstop and it takes him a few weeks to finish it. A strange mood that comes on him afterwards. A sense, which dogs at him and he doesn’t try blocking out, of emptiness now that the book is gone.

A lot of the time now, he is having thoughts about the boys. Unsettling ones, which make him want to shut himself away in his room and go to sleep. The smallest thing can set them off. He’ll be sat quietly drinking on the bench with nothing rattling about in the brainbox, the dull distant thwock of tennis balls over on the courts, when a toddler comes tottering toward him, falling onto her hands and lying there with the head up, silently looking at him until her maw is along to scoop her up and away. And then the thoughts will kick off. They don’t know where he is. He is sat here on a bench in the sunshine and nobody knows it but himself; and a great wave of self-pity will come over him, the sense again that he is abandoned. No. No, he isn’t and don’t fucking try acting it any different, because if there’s any abandoning went on then it’s him the one that’s done it. That is the fact of the matter, fucking go deal with it.

Renuka brings it up sometimes during their meetings. Does he have any feelings of blame, or guilt, toward his family? No, he tells her. And then he’ll go silent while she moves on to talking about activities and employment and housing solutions.

Beans has joined the art class. Mick laughs when he tells him this, in the canteen while they’re eating a watery chicken curry.

‘No, see it’s alright, serious. And it’s good for the points too. That guy Robin is always on at me to join this or that group and get exercising the auld grey matter, so I thought, fuck it, why no?’

‘What do ye do, paint?’

‘Aye, paint, draw, all that. I’ve only been twice. Ye should come.’

The next time it’s on but he gives it a bye, deciding instead to stay in his room and batter his head against the walls.

It’s no until the following week, after a fair while of Beans protesting, that he steels himself and goes.

It is a bright room with a few large school tables put together into a square. He sits on one side, next to Beans. There are four others — two men and two women, who have obvious all been coming for a while, because they’re giving it the patter with the teacher, Chris, an Englishman, twenty stone, white curly hair and glasses. An okay guy, it turns out. Friendly. He asks Mick his name and tells him to help himself to the tea and biscuits. As he’s getting the kettle on, he looks over the room. They are all busy with paintings that they’ve started a previous week. The suit and tie man is here. He is humming away to the radio, each now and then quietly muttering something to himself.