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.