He goes inside his coat for his phone and makes a call.
‘Yes?’
‘Yes, my name is Juraj. I am arriving in London tonight.’
‘Got an address?’
‘Yes.’
‘Passport?’
‘Yes,’ he lies.
‘Right. You’ll find details where to come in the morning. There will be a van waiting. Bring the passport, and the driver will need your expenses up front. He’ll take you straight to the site.’
‘Okay. Okay. The flat is not shared? My wife and son come here soon. The other man said it is not shared.’
‘No, not shared. Polish?’
‘No. I am from Slovakia.’
‘Right, well. Plenty of Polish there. Slovak too probably. You come at six tomorrow. Details are in the flat.’
He puts the phone back in his coat and continues to wait for the coach. Things will not be easy once he arrives; he is not stupid. When the agency in Slovakia arranged for him to come to Glasgow, they told him the same thing. You will have your own room. It will be comfortable for your wife and child when they join you. And on the outside, the red brick building did look beautiful, if you ignored the — ‘Govanhell’. . ‘Fuck off gypos’. . ‘Scum’ — local poetry. He could not bring them to a place like this. Five cramped streets: no privacy, no heating, no landlord. White and Asian gangs. In London, at least, they will be hidden — Roma, Polish, Pakistani — nobody will care.
An old woman is standing in front of the statue. She looks at it for a moment, then moves away to where a line is forming in front of the glass doors. Back home, it is getting more dangerous: last month, his wife’s brother was badly beaten and left in the tip next to where they live. There is no choice now but for them to come here; it is the right decision. The driver is opening the doors and climbing onto the coach. He stands, picks up his bag and goes to join the queue.
There are no empty pairs of seats left on the coach, so he sits down next to a man who is staring out of the window with his hands on top of his bag, clasping it to his lap. Past the man’s head, he can still see the statue through the glass wall of the station, and he continues looking at it until the engine starts up and the coach rolls off. He grins. When my wife arrives here, he thinks, this is how I will touch her bottom.
A young guy with a shaved head is come and sat in next to him. It’s okay but. He doesn’t look like the type that’s going to be chinning him all the way down for a conversation. Which is good, because it’s a long-enough journey. More than nine hours. Arriving in London in the wee hours, when the pubs are shut and the cafes aren’t yet open. He could’ve planned it better, serious. He could have planned it at all, in fact.
By the time they get leaving the city and the sudden leap of green at the end of the schemes, the gloaming is come on outside the window and he is falling asleep. When he wakes up the lights are turned off and it takes him a moment to mind that he’s on a coach, people snoring around him, a dim strip of lighting along the aisle floor, fallen crisps and a crisp packet and legs stretched out. He looks out of the window into the rushing darkness. He doesn’t feel jittery. He feels okay. He doesn’t feel anything.
A while later and the neighbour is awake. Mick can hear him shuffling forward and unzipping a bag down by his feet. The sound of paper, or plastic, tearing. Then the smell of food, a sausage roll, which he brings up to his mouth and starts eating. Okay, well, a plan. The first thing when the coach gets in is to eat: probably he’ll have to find a petrol station or a 24-hour minimarket and wait in the coach station until everywhere else starts opening up. Then onto the job hunt. For starters, this one he’s seen in the Southside News.
The guy is looking across at him.
‘You know where is King’s Cross?’ he asks, as if they’ve been pattering away all this time.
‘I’ve no idea, pal, sorry. I’ve no been to London before.’
The man nods and carries on eating his sausage roll, then after a while he gets out his mobile phone and starts thumbing away. It’s a pretty decent point — does it matter that he’s never been there before? No, it doesn’t. That’s the best bloody thing about it. He needs to keep things simple. Keep away from any reminders. Go see about this job advertised in the paper and get on top of himself, fix things out. Englandshire. Nobody will guess that one. He’s only been twice before: the six months in Newcastle was the last time, and way before that, when they weren’t long married, a visit to Cathy’s cousin and the husband in Northampton. Fucking terrible. There were a few of her relatives set up in England, and they’d spent a miserable week with these, himself going about the place trying no to spill and break things and none of her lot speaking with him unless it was to ask him stupit questions about the yards, that same way people use when they ask a wean how school is going. They didn’t come to the funeral, that pair, as far as he can mind.
It is raining. He sits back and looks at the giant windscreen wipers going back and forth on the front window. Thinking about England. Newcastle. How he’d felt going down this very motorway, moving further away from home; the argument that him and Cathy had got into the night before he left, both of them shouting, Thatcher on the television in the background, bringing the poll tax to Scotland. See in truth he’d been lucky getting a job at all, because Swans had went the same way as everywhere else — privatized, shrunk — but he hadn’t felt lucky; he’d felt fucking terrible. He’d rented a room in a house with quite a few Swans workers, young lads mainly, and a guy his own age from Southampton, he can’t mind his name. They’d all go out together to the bars, come back and get the landlady raging. But the clearer memory is of the nights he’d spent alone in his room, drinking, wondering what in hell he was doing in this place. Sat there on his days off, the TV on, until it got too much and he’d go the long walk to the phone box a few streets away.
The neighbour is snoring. Mick turns toward the window, trying to shake the mood that has come over him. Remind himself it wasn’t all bad. Because it wasn’t. They were good men, for one thing. Mad for their football, anyway. There were always games down by the jetty after lunch; races up the bank by the young lads at the end of a shift; nicknames — Big Yin, they’d called him right from day one, because they knew Billy Connolly had worked on the yards. He never really felt part of it though. He couldn’t, no with Cathy and the boys up in Glasgow. And it wasn’t his yard; his river. He didn’t belong there. Didn’t get the same feeling from it: that sense of the river always being there, around him, inside him. The sheer thrill of a ship on its stocks, grown from just a few small pieces of metal, walking toward it each morning and seeing that it was bigger, looking like it was parked there at the end of the street, looming over the end tenement. He can mind exactly the feeling of it. The sound of the hooter. The gates opening and the mass of workers teeming through. Getting into the yard and seeing that the graffiti on the hull had been added to — jokes, patter, Proddy slogans — so that when the ship was near completion you’d look at her and the whole of her side would be a mess of chalk scrawlings. Comic pictures of the managers. Competitions of who could write the highest. Two-year-long conversations. And then, when she was built, it would all be painted over and there’d be no clue as to what was written underneath; except if you looked hard enough, the tiny scribbling along the waterline where the painters had wrote their nicknames.