Ross Raisin - Waterline

Posters go up around the hostel for an outing to an open-air theatre production in the park. Beans and Paul are dead set on going, so he puts his name down. A sunny day, when it arrives, and the play is in fact quite enjoyable. It’s about this young Asian girl who is supposed to marry a guy she’s never met, but she’s fell in love instead with a white lad that works on the market. Racial differences. Argle-bargling families. Eventually the pair try to escape and there’s a tragic ending in a cash-and-carry car park. Pretty interesting, parts of it, although you’d think it’s actually the ten of them from the hostel who are the real show, the way the residents stare at them from their blankets. Beans, at least, enjoys the attention — laughing loudly at all the jokes and getting up each while to walk a circle around the back of the audience, his hands clasped behind him, smiling and pattering away.

He meets Renuka in the computer room and she shows him how to go the internet and get looking at properties. Incredible, really, all that just there at the fingertips. She has to demonstrate a few times, the same patient way she explains everything else, writing notes on a piece of paper so he can mind for next time. They put in his bidding number and look together through the vacant flats. A few decent ones; a few genuine shitholes. She does another session with him, and he puts a couple of bids in. If he prefers, she can do all this for him, she says, but he tells her no, he’s fine doing it himself. He wants to do it himself.

There’s never many in the computer room. Sometimes one or two with the giant headphones on, listening to music; and usually as well the young woman from the art class, sat quietly getting on with her own things. He doesn’t mind coming in here, especially now the weather is on the turn and the park is cooler and blowier getting. At least he is out of his room doing something. As well, there’s the anticipation through each week of seeing if your bid’s come in, followed by the inevitable finding out that you’ve went down again. One day he is getting up to leave, the same time as the woman is for the off, and they go out the door together. She slows down in the corridor, turning to speak to him.

‘You’re bidding for a council house, aren’t you?’

‘Aye. Ye doing the same?’

‘Yes — four months.’

‘Serious? Nothing?’

‘Nope. Well, I went to look at one a couple of weeks ago that was just a dump. Everyone ahead of me had obviously turned it down.’

He’s no heard her say this much before. Surprising how well spoken she is.

‘You on the Clearing House?’

‘The — mean, I don’t know.’

‘Well, maybe better not to be anyway.’ They are come to the reception. ‘Good luck with it.’ She smiles, and goes toward the main entrance.

The longer goes on, the more restless getting he is. Nearly eight months is by now since they notified the charity that he’d fucked off and left them. To get on his feet just, be in a flat. Then he could face them. Face the music. Could he? See that’s what he’s been telling himself — that’s what’s been driving him through — but, if it comes to it, is he actually going to be able to look at them and no just wither in a heap at their feet? And as well, who’s to say that they do want to see him? Consider that one a moment. There is a hollow feeling he gets when he starts thinking like this. Hard to stave off the drink but he’s trying. A loneliness that circles about itself, because then he’ll start thinking about Cathy, searching for her, this sense that she is there but out of his grasp; and it leaves him empty, longing.

He speaks to Renuka about the housing situation. The lack of a housing situation. She makes him a tea and puts her doctor’s face on. The problem with the letting scheme, she says, is there’s crap-all housing stock left in the borough. He can keep on as he is, and points-wise at least he’s no badly stacked, but there’s no guarantees anything will happen soon. Or, he can try for a private-rented tenancy. More likely he’ll get something that way, but more likely as well that it’ll be expensive and temporary and the landlord will be a bastard. No quite her words, but he gets the picture.

He asks her to stick him forward for it. At the same time though, he carries on with his internet bidding. The art class girl, Terri, is in the same boat and the pair of them are in there each week, talking about have you seen this house or that house. As well, Beans has got himself involved. No that they’re letting him think about getting his own flat — Robin is still doing his box in at how he carries on — but he can’t resist getting in the mix, telling Mick which flats he should and shouldn’t go for. Amazing, but he’s pretty good at working the computers. When he gets bored of looking at the properties, he turns to his own screen and starts pulling up TV shows, news, underwear models. Anybody’s guess how he’s learnt to do it. In other hostels maybe. Nay point asking him. Sometimes it’s easier leaving off the questions and just marvelling at the guy.

His benefits have been mostly restored and he is working at paying his service charge arrears. Still applying for the jobs that he’s even less of a sniff of now after the missing period, and starting on something of an economy drive: less bevvying, more of the Barbaras. He is reading one about another female reporter, in Kosovo, whose colleague gets shot and she leaves the war behind to do celebrity photo shoots. This playboy artist she meets and falls for, but everything that’s happened in the past continuing to plague her at every turn.

He keeps up with the art classes, and goes a couple of times to a film club that gets run in the day room by a chuckling retired Welshman called Peter. Sometimes as well there’ll be an event going on in the hostel. One day, a visit from a member of the English royalty, or the aristocracy, or Christ knows who he is, but Mick comes down to the thing for the same reason everybody else does: because there’s a free lunch going. It is an old guy with gold jewellery draped off his blazer, so maybe he’s the Lord Provost or something. He shakes the hands, keeps the stiff smile on his face, eats a polite amount of sandwich triangles and mini sausage rolls. The weeks continuing to go by. The outside colder and colder getting and the heating turned up to blasting so that everybody starts wandering about the place in vests and shorts. Occasionally new people being admitted, led numb and shivery through the reception.

His art collection grows to include a fruit bowl with no fruit in it, a painting of a tree and another of Ibrox, a papier-mâché swan and a T-shirt with Bluenose stencilled on it. He is passing time, waiting, but when one morning Renuka knocks him up with the news that a private-rented flat is become available, he feels, at the same instant as relief, a sense of foreboding; unsure suddenly if this is what he wants, if it wouldn’t in fact be easier staying put where he is.

There’s no great ceremony about it, thank Christ. No staff lined up to pat him on the back and give him advice. Nobody at the door to collect and drive him away. He packs up his things into a large holdall he bought in a charity shop and goes down to the reception, where Renuka hands him his new set of keys. She is arranging their meeting for later the week when Beans comes loundering in with a frying pan.

‘That you, well?’

‘That’s me.’

‘Good. Great.’ He shuffles about a bit, and holds up the fryer. ‘Here.’

‘Ye got me a frying pan?’

Beans nods.

‘Cheers.’ He takes it, smiling. The coating is worn off the inside rim and it’s quite possible he’s lifted it — the skinny neighbour, more than likely — but no the less, no the less, and he stands there looking at Beans as a lump of gratefulness and fear together lands in his stomach.