He wakes up hot and confused. Light outside, but he can’t fix out what time of day it is. The racing sensation as his brain tries to make sense of where he is, whether he’s awake or not. He is on the bed. Flakes of pastry on the pillow by his face. He flicks them onto the carpet and closes his eyes, everything spinning around.
Worse than these daytime dreams but is being awake the night. The darkness out the window seeming like it’s going to go on forever and him hot and stiff on the bed, fragments of memories coming at him out the dark from nowhere. The drink helps. It pulls him under and he sleeps deeply for a few hours, but then always there is that point in the night when he wakes up and it is a long while until morning and he knows he’s going to lie there just, a sore feeling behind the eyes, edgy at the slightest sound out the window or through the floorboards.
The daytimes when he is drowsing, he’s in and out, on the border of dreams and memories. Not all about her, either; some of them good, wee things from the past. Another dream he has, that isn’t so much a dream as a pure lifelike recollection of something that happened once at the yard. It comes into his head from nowhere. Charley Gordon. A great bear of a man, with a thick red neck and the half of his teeth missing out the big daftie smile. This when he was a plater’s apprentice at John Brown’s and Charley was his journeyman. A Catholic. One of the few, but Charley could handle himself, he aye enjoyed it even, the argle-bargle and the bigotry. All these stories he’d tell Mick of this or that wee nyaff that’d put the mix in and he’d had to sort him out. When he wasn’t telling him these stories he was sending him off to the stores for whatever parts it was he needed. Mostly it was something simple and he’d go ask direct from the storewoman — flange nuts and mating screws, all these strange names that the things had — as he shuffled about and looked at his feet, too shy to talk to her. Other times there’d be a whole load of things that Charley would be wanting, and she’d let him in the stores to collect them up himself, up and down the sliding ladders to get them into his sack.
This one time Charley had gave him a long list of parts for a bevelling job he had to do, and Mick knew he’d expect him to be half an hour or so to fetch it all, but, cocky wee imp that he was, he reckoned he knew that store better than anybody, and so the idea comes to him that he’ll chance legging it up the road to the pool hall for a quick game, before slaloming around those ladders and getting back in time. Course but when he does get in the store, he can’t find half the parts, and by the time he’s collected everything it is gone an hour and Charley is spitting teeth, they ones he’s still got, anyway. He hardly speaks to him the rest the afternoon and he makes him work like a dog, ordering him everywhere to do all these tasks for him. It takes a few days until Charley’s forgave him, and by then it’s all a great joke: the tapping on the wrist and the big smile whenever Mick’s back rushing in from the stores. So he thinks it’s all forgot about, but then later the week Charley sends him off, and he’s that wary of making any mistakes it doesn’t even occur to him what he’s doing as he goes up to the storewoman and asks her if she’s got a pair of large red nipples. The slap she gave him, he could still feel it an hour later, stood at the countersinking machine with Charley chuckling away next to him.
Sometimes a memory like that, it appears from nowhere and it sets you wondering about things, like what happened to Charley? He still alive? Did he ever get himself that wee sailing boat and fuck off to the islands like he used to say he would? Who knows? Probably. Aye, probably. He didn’t mess about, auld Charley.
No Breakfast is back again. Maunderly as ever. Sometimes it’s him, and sometimes it’s the friendly one, wanting to chin him for a conversation. He has a sense of floating most of the time now. He’s outside of everything, outside of himself, giving the same attention to the world as he would to the TV on in the background — the handing over of his rent; the pamp of a car horn outside on the road; a street cleaner changing a bin, bits of newspaper and a banana skin falling onto the frosted pavement. He watches him absently from the window. A black guy. He’s got himself a job, well. How did he do it? Probably he’s qualified for something else, like Dia and Eric, washing dishes with a degree in the pocket. They get on with it but. They aren’t too proud for any of it because they’ve got a purpose, is how, they’ve got a family to provide for and a house to build, so it doesn’t matter how many times these English bastard employers stick the boot on, they’ll always get back up and get on with it just.
It is night outside. He’s not ate in a while but the truth is he can’t be arsed dragging himself out to the shop. Hard to believe that no long back he was on the march across town looking for jobs, arranging interviews, speaking to people on the telephone. It takes him a long while getting up the energy to go out, and when he does, it is because he makes a deal with himself that he’ll stock up with enough supplies that he can make them last.
He hooks the carriers on the window latch where they can hang outside in the cold. The food he wraps up in another carrier inside the bag, to keep it dry if it rains.
Apart from the rent visits down the stair, and the toilet, he doesn’t leave his room for a couple of days at a stretch, each time moving only when he has to nick out for new supplies. The bathroom is on the floor below, and he waits listening through his door until he’s sure the coast is clear before he comes out. One morning but, he gets caught out. He’s about to go into the bathroom when a door opens to his side and a woman near walks into him.
‘You going in there, mate?’ She is young, wearing a baggy green sweater and tights.
‘Aye, but you go — go on.’
‘No, it’s alright, I’ll wait.’
He sees a sliver into the room as he walks past: clothes on the floor and a man having a hingie out of a window, smoking. Plants, a big poster on the wall. As if they are living there. He takes a pee and feels suddenly conscious that the woman will be coming in there after him. When he’s finished, he takes a couple of pieces of toilet roll and wipes away the dark yellow spots that he’s dripped on the rim.
The money envelope is getting thinner. As well, the last stores he bought in were badly got by the rain: the sandwiches are eatable, just, but they’re too damp to last more than one meal. The cans are nice and cold but. See one thing that’s for sure is that as soon as any employers start checking him up in their computers, they’ll know straight away from the Employers’ Federation or whatever that he’s got something of a radical about him — with the work-in and the unions and that. Plus the episode with the hotel now as well, don’t think they won’t have that logged too, because they will.
There is a programme on. He watches it for a while. It’s a good one. Interesting. It’s about bears, grizzlies and polars, how global warming is forcing them to live closer together. The Arctic ice cap is melting that much each summer that the polar bears aren’t always able to swim north to it like they used to, because it’s too far away getting, so instead they’re turning south toward the Canadian mainland. Which is where the grizzlies live. The inevitable sectarian battles resulting. But as well what’s different is they’ve started mating with each other. The programme shows this photo of the first cross-breed bear, dead, killed by a hunter. Being honest, it looks to Mick pretty much like a polar bear, but apparently it’s got a lot of the grizzly’s features. In the photo, the guy that shot it is grinning away like a nutcase. He’s got a massive army camouflage coat on, and is knelt down beside the bear with his hands splayed across its back. Stupit bastard. You have to wonder how that meeting went, when the hunter met the biologists: look, I’ve found you the world’s rarest bear, a true wonder of nature, and I blasted it through the neck. The programme doesn’t go into that but. Instead it shows all these polar bears loundering the streets of these freezing remote towns, bold as fuck, petrifying the locals outside the minimarket.