Now that it’s done he steps out of the shed again and sets his sights on the house. He may as well get everything done in one go, collect more plates, a knife and a fork, and fill up the watering can with fresh water. Then he’ll be set.
He stands outside the shed and looks down the line of back gardens, all empty; wet leaves and rubbish strewn about. Five minutes and he’ll be done. Put the blinkers on, get in and get out. He starts toward the house. Grey pebble-dash; green back door. Strange but he doesn’t recognize it, it’s that unfamiliar somehow. If he’d been in the shed and he’d tried thinking what colour is the back door, what colour is the front door even, he wouldn’t have been able to say, serious, he wouldn’t. All they details: doors, carpets, furniture, they all merge into a general feeling you have, a habit, of being in the house. A place you return to at the end of the day after your toils, and relax. The familiar routines — putting your keys on the counter, sticking the kettle on, getting sat in your chair — it’s natural just, you don’t even think about it. All of it so far past the now. Gone. None of it fits.
The bulb is out in the kitchen. He goes to the cupboard for plates, working by the dim light coming in through the rain-smeared window. Grey shadows on the counter from the kettle and the toaster. He gets a cup, a knife, fork, then he rinses out the watering can; gets filling it with clean water. What would be a good idea as well is pulling the covers off Robbie’s bed: the nights are too cold getting, even with the extra blankets he’s brought out. He goes out of the kitchen and it’s the speed of things, the combination of them all happening together, that undoes him. The light no turning on. The tide of envelopes by the door. A noise upstairs — a bump. It all happens in a second, before he can get registering any of it, and his heart banjos right up his fucking throat and he has to shove against the banister, pressing his back to it and craning to look up the stair. His breathing is heavy and snatched, he can’t control it. It is gone silent up there. But then there’s another bump somewhere above his head; he makes a dart for the living room door beside him. Quiet as he can, he crouches down behind the settee and gets lying in the narrow gap between it and the wall.
His leg is murdering underneath him, but he doesn’t budge. Still nothing from up the stair. The blood in his ears is making it hard to listen, but he strains to hear, ready for any sound in the ceiling above him. Stupit. He is trapped, and whoever it is that’s up there is just waiting, because they know it, or they’ve went, or they weren’t even bloody there in the first place, Christ knows. So he stays put, the leg aching and his knees pressed into the back of the settee. From where he’s lying, he can see part of the video player under the television, but the display clock is blank so he can’t tell how long he’s been there, maybe only a few minutes, or maybe hours, who knows?
Quietly, stiffly, he gets himself out from the settee. His ears are pure bursting, he’s listening that hard as he edges out from the room and into the corridor, quickening his pace, coming into the kitchen and grabbing the things before getting out the back door. He clicks it softly shut behind him. A quick look at the upstairs window before he reaches the shed, but there’s nothing.
He is sat in the straight-backed hospital chair with the plastic peeling off it and the foam poking out, while she stares out of the window. The white curtain is pulled shut in a horseshoe around them, and there’s the peaceful hum of a dozen sleeping, snoring, dying women in the room outside. Through in the corridor, the faint hurrying patter of nurses’ feet. And beyond the window, where she’s staring, a gardener, whistling himself a tune as his pink head tots in and out of sight behind a hedge. After a while he comes round the near side of it, and he’s got his shirt-sleeves rolled up, it’s that sunny a day. The windows are open, and it’s awful welcome, the freshness of the air outside coming in with his wee tune, pouring into the stale room. All of a sudden there is a fart somewhere outside the curtain — a loud, long, trumpety job — which causes him to chuckle and look at her, but she hasn’t noticed it, she’s still fixed on the gardener. She has been asleep all morning and she’s lying restfully the now as he sits quietly watching her.
A nurse pops her head through the curtain at one point, gives him a smile and disappears again. She didn’t signal she was coming in, it occurs to him when she’s gone. But then what would be the point? She is the one that’s changing her clothes, helping her go to the toilet. There’s no need being discreet any more; it’s past that. Maybe if he’d been sat there himself in the bare scuddy, his balls sticking to the seat, then maybe she’d start giving the signal. He grins. Aye, probably.
There is the gentle hushed sound of a relative talking. Outside, the gardener is lopping the heads off a line of finished flowers at the bottom of the hedge. Still the bright, tireless whistle. He looks at her. Is she listening? Can she hear it? He realizes then that he doesn’t know if she can or not — if she’s listening, if she can see him, or if she’s just staring out at nothing. And that is when he understands. It’s the precise moment, in fact. Maybe she can hear it, maybe she can’t, but either way it doesn’t make any difference because it’s only time now, only time that is in the way. He stands up from the chair to move toward her, and her eyes shift to take him in. He smiles, and brushes the headscarf back to give her a wee kiss on the forehead; then he leaves out of the cubicle to go and get a coffee from the machine down the corridor.
Chapter 13
The biscuits are gone stale. There is the dull snap of wet fibreboard about them now, and the cheese has broke out in green spots and a white frilly moss. He opens the door a nook, pushing against the sludge of wet leaves gathered against it, and slings out what’s left for the birds. No use it going to waste.
The shed isn’t best equipped for this rainy period that’s come on. It gets in under the walls and the door, and drips down off the window. The blankets are pretty damp getting by now. Probably he’ll come down with some horrendous illness and go the way of the cheese. The sparrows the first to find him, to notice he’s copped his whack when they start pecking inside on the lookout for food.
Enough of that. Talk about maunderly. Jesus.
He is running out of shit pits. There’s nay chance he’s going back in the house, with its strange atmosphere and its lack of lights and its mysterious bumping noises up the stairs, so that just leaves the bucket at the back of the shed. He did consider using it before, when he stopped using the house toilet, until he came to his senses and realized that would be mental. Instead, he’d took a corner of the garden, the border on one side where Cathy used to plant her flowers, and used a trowel to dig a line of small pits, each with the mound of soil next to it to cover over after he’s took a crap. But now the line is almost filled. And as well, he needs to get some toilet roll. All he’s got left to use is torn out half-pages of the Southside News. A delicate operation, serious, though it doesn’t make much difference how gently he does it — the backside is getting sorer, and blacker, pasted each day with new articles about tenement regenerations and Roma beatings.
There is a noise coming from outside. A faint, distant, rolling sound. He thinks at first it might be the wind, which is piping cold pea-shooters at his feet from under the door, but he understands after a while that it’s Ibrox. There is a match on. He tunes in the radio, but the commentary isn’t the clearest so he gives that up and listens outside just, waiting for the wind to blow him a favour. It does, and a few times he hears a muffled roar going up. Maybe the new boy is on form. Taken the league by storm this past couple of weeks and making mincemeat of opposition defences. Whatever the score is, it seems like they’re winning, and the result is confirmed for him later, because there’s car horns pamping in the night, together with what sounds like a brawl away on the high street.