Waterline Page 12

  A noise outside the door makes him jump. Somebody pounding down the staircase. Quietening down the next flight, quieter, then silence. His heart is racing at the suddenness of it. Just a noise. It was just a noise. Somebody running down the stair, it’s nothing out the ordinary. But he is panicking and it’s a struggle to get control of it as he presses the side of his head into the pillow, hearing the thump of blood in his ear. That’s just the problem but – it is out the ordinary. No like he hasn’t heard people running down stairs before, but no here, no in this place he hasn’t.

  Just a noise, just a noise.

  But he’s got nowhere to put it. A fucking noise, man – they’ve gone by now – but it’s bouncing around inside him, unable to come to rest because everything else is jumbled up and bouncing around together, and he can’t act or think normally because what is fucking normal? Answer that one. What is normal? There isn’t a normal. He swings his legs over the bed and sits up. Everything racing and rushing. He is sucking for breath but it’s no good, sitting up is making him feel boaky, so he lies back down again and gives up trying to stop it. Thoughts hurtling in, he can’t keep them out. She is normal. That is what normal is. There, he’s said it. But now everything is birling around and it’s all to fuck because that’s the thing he’s been trying to steer clear of, thinking about the wife, and now he’s let it in and there’s no controlling it. She is ordinary life – she’s as much a part of him as his legs or his stomach – and without her all the rest has lost the plot. The stomach fucking especially.

  Cry, man. Just bloody cry. Nobody’s watching. But he can’t let himself – it’s there, he can feel it in his throat like a furball, retching and stuck, but he’s too feart to let himself. It’ll just make him the worse. And then he definitely won’t be able to stop, he’ll be here the whole day bloody greeting.

  There are voices in the room below. So what? He’s staying in a Bed and Breakfast – well, a Bed – what do you expect, he’ll have to deal with it just. He can’t hear what they’re saying but it sounds like there’s a few of them, a family, because there’s a baby shrieking or crying or making some kind of a racket. He gets up off the bed and pulls the table that’s under the window over to wedge against the door. Then he gets back on the bed. No television, so no easy way to ward off the brain, except for sleep, closing the eyes and sleeping, he could sleep all day, he could sleep forever.

  Later he goes down and gives another £25 to No Breakfast, who counts the money carefully and slides it in his pocket.

  That night he sleeps fitfully, in and out, a lot of it just staring at the orange glow through the window.

  The people down the stair are arguing. A woman shouting. It goes on for quite a long time and then there’s a door shutting and it goes quiet. He needs to get some food. No easy thing going out into the day but. What he needs to do is just blank everything out, kid on that he isn’t actually existing and do the zombie walk to wherever the shop is. Nobody knows him anyway. That’s what he has to tell himself. Nobody knows him.

  He finds a Costcutter after the bridge. There is a radio playing but he can’t hear the words. He gets a damp pasty in a packet from the fridge, a couple of lager cans and a sandwich for later. He doesn’t look up at the man as he pays. Another guy by the door as he goes out, sat behind a kiosk like some silent gremlin, selling phonecards.

  The next few days he slips into a routine. Out to the shop in the morning, and forcing the food down when he gets back. Then sleeping and drinking and keeping the brain quiet until he has to go down and give No Breakfast his money. The wee patter between them: how’s it going, pal? Oh, not too bad, thanks, business pretty steady at the moment thanks to you and as well the family downstairs. Good, good, I’m pleased. Clutching for a normal. It is some kind of an ordinary, however crap.

  Chapter 18

  He opens the Southside News and gets to the page:

  Major hotel chain, UK airports: Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester, London Heathrow. Staff wanted, all departments: Housekeepers, Food and Beverage Assistants, Breakfast Chefs, Kitchen Porters, Reservations Assistants. Live-in positions.

  Work. Work is what he’s came down here for, and work is what’s going to get him back onto his feet. Spend too long without employment and what else are you going to do but occupy the whole time alone with yourself until the brain is turned to mince? That’s another reason he’d never go on the broo. Work is busyness at least. So he needs to get off his bahookie and get some, get on the keel and give Robbie a call, because this keeping him in the dark cannot go on. And so what if he’s never been a kitchen porter before? He can do it, he can lie if he has to, and it’s perfect, really: something different from what he’s done before, no reminders. Plus as well the money situation: he’s running out.

  He washes himself, or tries to anyway, with what little water he can bleed out of the shower head. Afterwards, a good examination of the face in the mirror. He could fine well do with a shave, but he doesn’t have a razor. Still, it’s long enough now that he has a decent beard on. A respectable beardie man, a Sean Connery type, that’s the way he should look at it. Although being honest, respectable is probably up in the air when they get to looking at his clothes. He’s got on the shirt and trousers that he had in his bag, but the problem is that both of them are crumpled as a toad’s foreskin. See what he should do, he should probably give a phone down to room service and ask No Breakfast for a lend of the iron. He forces a smile at the idea of it. He feels okay. He feels fine. He is going to get on.

  He packs his bag and leaves away into the street. What he needs is a good shovel of food, to keep him going the rest of the day, and where better to get it than at your man’s down the way, the cheery Turk.

  After eating, he gets negotiating the subway. Finding it is easy enough, although the actual thing itself is genuine a bit more complicated; a Rubik’s Cube of colour-coded trickery compared to the one he’s used to. He manages but. He is managing.

  There is a young guy on the line of seats opposite him. He’s got on a pair of tight blue trousers and pointed white shoes, his legs crossed over like a woman’s. The pointy foot joggling in the air with the bumps of the track. He’s reading a magazine with a cartoon drawing of two men on the front with comic stretched faces. He’s about ages with Robbie and Craig. What would they make of him? Just then but the train comes to a halt and he has to concentrate to get hearing the driver, and he is able to stop the thought before it can develop. He needs to keep focused. The brain is a genuine minefield of all these thoughts that he’s got to keep himself from thinking, for the moment at least, just for the moment, until he’s got himself back on his feet. Then he can see where he’s at.

  The hotel is one of a fair number along a drag that he has to cross a great tangle of carriageways and multi-storey car parks to get to. It’s huge – they’re all huge – and ugly. A block of grey, stained concrete; the only colour is the massive lettering of the hotel’s name above the doors. The woman that he speaks to on reception is friendly enough but.

  ‘The operations manager is in a meeting until three,’ she tells him after she’s put in a call. ‘Do you mind waiting?’

  ‘No problem.’

  The operations manager, it turns out, after he’s waited a long while on a seat fixed to the table in an empty restaurant, surrounded by plastic plants, is a woman. She doesn’t shake his hand. ‘You’re a kitchen porter,’ she says, going behind the bar to make herself a coffee. ‘You’re not agency though?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have a CV?’

  ‘No.’ Great start. Bloody haddock. ‘See, I was in the shipyards, and then my last job I was a cab driver. But when I was younger I used to work in kitchens. Hotels and that.’ A pretty obvious lie. She is behind the bar still, looking at him as she stirs a sugar into her cup. It isn’t the face of an impressed person.

  ‘I saw the job advertised in a paper.’

  She frowns. ‘When?’

  ‘A while back,
actually.’

  She comes out from the bar. ‘Well, it’s up to the chef anyway. Come this way.’

  He follows her round a corner into a passageway where the carpet stops, and there is a pair of swing doors with small porthole windows. Blinding bright inside, mobbed with men in white jackets. She goes in and he waits outside, a tight feeling in his chest. Relax. Just relax. She is stood just inside the kitchen, and a tall man is coming over toward her. Behind him, at a gas range, one of the chefs is pouring a packet of something into a pan. The tall man keeks at him through the porthole.

  ‘. . . is him,’ he hears her say as the doors swing open. She walks off without looking round and the man is stood in front of him.

  ‘You’ve not done KP before, then?’ He is Irish. He’s got baggy red and white checked trousers.

  ‘No, mean, not for a while.’

  ‘Scottish?’

  ‘Aye, Glasgow.’

  He folds his arms, narrowing the eyes and smiling.

  ‘Here’s the million-dollar question, then – Bhoy or Bluenose?’

  Mick smiles. ‘Bluenose.’

  The chef gives himself a comic slap on the forehead. ‘Fucking typical.’ He grins. ‘No, it’s fine, it’s fine, I don’t give a shite. And you’re the right colour anyway.’

  He goes in the swing doors and Mick follows, keeping the head down and avoiding looking up at the other chefs. He reaches for a pen on top of a whiteboard by the door.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Mick.’

  He writes it down next to BREAKFAST: MICK WASH 1.

  ‘You’ve timed it well in fact – we had a guy left yesterday.’

  They walk through the kitchen. He is staying calm. Heat, young men with shaved heads, the sound of a radio. They go past a heap of crates, and the kitchen throats into another room, smaller, dimmer than the main one. A very black man in dark green overalls is clattering a pile of frying pans into a sink.

  ‘Eric, take this fella down to the staff rooms.’ He turns to Mick. ‘Take whatever one is free and get yourself settled in for today. Breakfast starts at six so get here just before and I’ll sort you out some overalls,’ he says, and leaves.

  The black guy hasn’t looked up from the sink, and Mick wonders a moment if he has understood. In a minute though he stretches off his rubber gloves and goes out through a fire door, the tap left running.

  He follows behind him as they go down steps and through corridors, and it’s becoming clear enough that your man here isn’t going to speak, walking slowly ahead, the bare back of his neck shining under the fluorescent strips. At one point a stretch of tubing is out, and they walk on in near complete darkness until the next lit corridor, then down more steps, right into the bowels.

  ‘Here,’ the black man says, and goes back the way they came.

  He is left in a long corridor with doors both sides. One of them is open, and he sees inside that it is a bathroom. He goes down the line of doors. Low music coming from one; snoring, another. Otherwise the place is silent. He stands there, wondering what is his next move. This is mental. Unreal. It’s that far removed from reality in fact that it’s hard to believe there’s not some kind of chicanery going on, the auld brainbox playing tricks. But to these people it’s just ordinary; he is ordinary even, that’s the strangest thing. All of them – the manager, the chef, the kitchen porter – it’s like they expected to see him here. He hasn’t caused the barest ripple of an interruption. Go downstairs and go in your room and you’re working at six the morrow, and everything just carries on as it was.

  Somebody is coming out of a door down the way. A girl. She’s in her pyjamas and barie feet. He stands there rooted as she comes toward him, and he’s about to have to say something when she turns into the bathroom. She didn’t seem to notice him even. What, are they on drugs, these people? He feels like he’s totally lost his bearings, the quiet sounds of snoring and music and humming strip lights around him, a girl in her pyjamas, and he’s losing track already if it’s day or if it’s night. The toilet is flushing. She comes out and starts walking back to her room.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he calls out. She doesn’t hear him.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  She looks back blankly.

  ‘Can ye tell me which of these is free, please?’ He can see now that she’s been asleep, the eyes half closed.

  She shrugs her shoulders. ‘I think maybe this one.’ She points to a door by the bathroom, and pads off.

  He pushes the door open slowly and the shapes inside become clearer as the light from the corridor filters through. The room is empty, the bed made. He finds the switch and the bulb takes a moment stammering on. It is like a compartment in a storage warehouse, threadbare and windowless; tiled drop ceiling. There is a sink and a chipped white Formica wardrobe, a waste bucket, a chair and a small table with an alarm clock, the hands pointing just the back of four. Unreality has hold of him now, carrying him numbly on as he arranges his few clothes in the wardrobe, takes off his shoes, puts them under the table and gets lying down on the bed. Careful. He needs to be careful. Too easy to get maunderly and think about things – the lack of daylight, for one, Christ – but actually what he should be thinking is good positive thoughts. He has found himself a job. He is on his feet. He has got himself what he was looking for. What was that, well? It was an anonymous room in a place with no reminders and no bastards to pity him or stick the boot on. The image of Craig in the cemetery comes suddenly to him, but he knows he has to shut it away, shut it right away. He looks about him. See if he gives the room a bit of a spruce up it might not be so bad. A mini television. Plants. Maybe he could knock a couple of plastic ones out the restaurant even – there ye go, now you’re talking man, now you’re bloody talking.

  There is noise outside the door just before five: foreign voices, shouts, a woman laughing. Then it goes silent for half an hour, until all at once the noise returns and there’s a few minutes of activity before it quiets down again. After that, there’s just the occasional sound: doors shutting, a voice coming past, the flush of the toilet through the wall behind his head. Later the evening he leaves the room and finds his way eventually out of the hotel, making his way over to the terminal, where he gets a jacket tattie and a pint.

  He doesn’t sleep the best, so the early start isn’t a problem. He is up at the kitchen for quarter to six, waiting in the potwash. Through in the cooking area he can hear the Irish chef instructing his shaven-headed team to get set up. After a few minutes he comes into the potwash holding a fryer smoking with bacon fat, and sees Mick standing by the machine.

  ‘Shite, yes.’

  He goes off a moment and returns with a pair of overalls. ‘He’ll show you, but it’s easy enough. Wash 1 means you stand at this sink and scrub most of the crap off everything, then you stack it in these trays for him to put through the machine. And you clean the kitchen stuff.’ He points at the bacon pan hissing in the sink.

  There is nowhere to get changed so he puts the overalls on in there, on top of his clothes. And that is the first thing he learns: not to wear anything underneath. Within half an hour he is pure sweltering from his exertions and the heat of the machine. Wash 2 is fine but. He’s got the right idea – just the bare black skin visible under his overalls whenever he bends down to stack something – he’s genuine fine and breezy. No that he’s said as much: he’s hardly spoke a word since he came in. It isn’t the same one as yesterday – he’s taller, this guy, and he’s fucking fast. It’s hard work keeping up putting the plates and cups in the trays before he grabs and trammels them along the runners into the machine – the hoosh of steam as he pulls it down and sets it running. Thirty seconds and they come out dry, it seems, because he piles the lot straight up and takes it over to the racks. When he does speak, it’s to tell Mick that he’s doing it wrong – ‘No. No’ – and he’ll stand in front of him and start stacking the trays himself. It’s doable but. He is doing it. He is managing. First day on the job and he’s
on top of it.

  It is a separate world but, the potwash. He’d’ve thought it would be different to this – all noise and shouting and Gordon Ramsay, waiters running about with their arses on fire – but it isn’t. It’s oddly quiet in there, cut off, just him and Wash 2 scrubbing and stacking, scrubbing and stacking. There is the clanging and jouncing of ovens and grills from in the kitchen, and each while a chef coming through, shouting, ‘Hot pan,’ but even through there, there’s no noise, no patter. Strange. It’s fine but. It suits him. Ye keep the head down, ye do your job. Scrub, stack; scrub, stack. The faces of waiters appearing at the hatch above the sink to dump the dirties on the ledge. You new, pal? What’s your name? Good to meet you, how’s it going? They don’t speak. They don’t see him even. Fine. That’s fine. And there’s something quite satisfying about the work as well – no exactly stimulating but it’s mechanical, you get into a rhythm, repeating the actions, challenging yourself to get the pile down. The empty ledge. A wee pat-the-back moment of job satisfaction. See that, Wash 2? First shift but no messing, eh, no fucking messing about, look.

  Of course but he’s jumped the gun. There he is thinking he’s such a big man for keeping his piles down, while there must be hardly anybody in the restaurant. It doesn’t start coming properly until an hour in. Plate piles begin growing on the ledge, tall teetering columns of bowls and cups; the cutlery bucket swelling like a haemorrhoid; and the waiters finding their tongues at last, beefing that they’ve no space to put the dirties. He’s not keeping up and he’s soon enough sweating all over the place in a panic, desperate to get it down before the Paddy chef comes through and sees.