Ross Raisin - Waterline

When he is not up the park, he stays in his room with the television on, staring at it, or out the window. Thoughts about the wife, the family, hovering around him the whole time now. He doesn’t try to hold them back, there’s nay point, and sometimes it builds and builds until he feels like getting up and putting his fist through the window — but instead he just lies there on the bed, staring or greeting. That is another thing he’s doing a lot of the now, greeting. It comes on him out of nowhere: sat absently watching a cookery programme and suddenly he’s bubbling up and it will go on uncontrollably for a long while, until his face is as hard and sticky as if he’s just woke up under a tree. He lets himself do it; he encourages it even, searching for how many ways he’s failed her, trying and no being able to get a sense of her, and then blaming himself for that as well.

A chapping at the door. He ignores it. A few minutes later and it’s there again. He tries to blank it out, but the heart is going and he knows that much more of this and his nerves will be that ripped he’ll have no choice but jumping to his bloody death on the pavement below. He gets up and looks through the peephole. It is Paul. ‘You alright in there, mate? Mick? Everything okay, mate?’ He stays as still as he can and tries to control his breathing. After a while, Paul goes away. The sound of his door closing.

Renuka has been informed he’s stopped going to the art classes and has missed his benefits interviews. She is concerned about him. His eyes and his face and the general honk of him nay doubt pointing to the drink. Is the letter still troubling him? Does he want to think about a different course of action? Aye, I think we should get the whole family down here for a visit, have a tour round the place; then wipe the slate clean, let bygones be bygones.

Paul comes in the kitchen one evening while he is waiting for a plate of food in the microwave.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Okay, thanks.’

‘Not seen you at the art class for a while.’ He pulls a packet of ready-grated cheese out of the fridge. ‘Fancy a knock on the pool table later?’

‘Think I’ll give it a bye the night, thanks.’

‘No worries, no worries. If you do — just give me a knock, right.’

More and more, he is going over the time when she was ill. He tries to mind it, what like it was, what happened, how much of it he was there for. He hadn’t finished working until a few months from the end — he couldn’t, even after he sold the car, they couldn’t afford otherwise — but he can’t stop the thought of her alone in the house, in the bed, knowing she was going to die. See if they knew she wasn’t going to live, why was he working? Who was he working for? The rent, bills, food, keeping things going, how could any of that have been for her? The smell of the house when he came in off a shift. Going up the stair and seeing her, alone, asleep. Or with Craig. There at the bedside with her. All the wee details, he strains to mind them. Who had called round the house; what had he cooked for her; when did it first come up, the talk of putting in a compensation claim?

As well, an image he keeps recalling. She is picking up the front door mat, taking it outside and shaking it. He recalls it over and over, screwing the eyes trying to make her turn round, see her face, but it is always the same picture: him looking from the doorway, watching her beat the mat on the gate and a cloud of white dust puffing out with each clout. He dreams about this scene and when he is awake he finds himself searching for it, until he doesn’t know any more if it is actually a memory, or if he’s made it up.

His benefits have been cut, and they are threatening to withdraw them on account of the missed interviews. As a result he has no money and he is got behind with his service charge. He keeps to his room. Reads a lot. A new Barbara he’s picked up, about this successful businesswoman that owns a string of international inns. She is preparing for her daughter’s wedding when she finds out she’s suffering from this strange illness that nobody can diagnose, and the only way she can find out what’s wrong with her is to go round the world uncovering all these secrets from her past.

All day and all night, even if he’s no directly thinking about it, he has an awareness of the family out there, somewhere. Searching for him. Fine well clear enough, the message he’s sent out, that he doesn’t want to be near them. Pure torture, thinking about it, but that’s what he’s engaged in — here’s my brain, my body, let them fucking stiffen each other. He isn’t interested in deadening himself with the drink any more; the torture is more relieving. No that he’s gave the drink the go-by but. He still gets to the offie with what little he has on his tail. It’s too instinctive not to.

An anxiousness is welling inside him that he cannot leave them hanging like this; himself, hanging. To keep them thinking that he doesn’t want to see them. Because he does; he does want to see them. Not all of them, obviously. But the boys — the pull of seeing them, it’s undeniable, and it wrests and knots at him because no matter how strong it gets, that pull, it’s never as strong as the one that is wanting to keep them away, to keep them from seeing him here.

Up until the letter he had been doing well, at least they seemed to think so, going the classes and up the broo office. He tells Renuka that he’s going to start again with the activities, that he’s cut out the drink. He goes to the next art class. Everybody says it is good to see him. Maybe they’ve been talking. Possible they know the score. Unlikely but, seeing as he hasn’t told anybody about the letter, even Beans, who has been going through his own dark patch of late. They have been doing clay objects, bowls, ash trays and that. He makes a small pot, and digs up some soil and a wee flower in the park to put in it; sticks it on the windowsill next to the other one. It dies a couple of weeks later, and he washes out the pot to use as a mug for tea and superlager.

To have something to focus on, something to do, it is good for the nerves. Paul is going to the art classes too and he takes him up on the game of pool. Mick cuffs him. No that Paul seems to mind. He’s happy just being up there in the day room, it seems, talking. Amazing, all these things he says he’s got up to. One story he tells him. Each fortnight when he gets his giro, he draws a twenty out the cash machine and goes straight up the supermarket. The security guards are always on his tail whenever he’s there, so what he does, he tries to look as unchancy as he can, jinking in and out of the aisles, giving these shifty wee glances at the guards — then he grabs a bottle of champagne and something else expensive, a steak, or a pack of smoked salmon, and he slips them under his coat and legs it to the tills. Just as the heavy team are sweating and shouting up the aisle, he sticks them on the belt and pulls out the twenty, all calm and swaggersome, and the meatheads are left standing there just, panting and stupit. He’s okay, is Paul. He’s been on a script the last six months, he tells him, and he’s trying to sort himself out. There is a woman that comes round quite often to visit him: his girlfriend, Monica, who he knows from when he lived up north. She’s friendly too. A couple of times she comes in the day room and chats with them while they’re playing pool.

Renuka and him talk about whether he feels ready to start with the move-on process. Yes. A pure certainty he is. She explains to him that he needs to get his service charge on track, and then she lays out how it works: that they get given a quota each year to put on the housing register; that it’s no a very big quota; that it might take some time. Fine. Whatever it takes. He is compliant.