It is late. He steps out of the shop. This torpor all through him that he can’t shake. He starts walking back the way he came; nay other suggestions rolling out the carpet for him. To get warm just. A wee nip of something, just to get warm, it’s as far as he can think. Shortly before the pub he notices a side street, dark, too narrow for lampposts. Without much of a thought, he goes down it. It is cobbled, and a couple of cars are parked with the one tyre perched onto a pavement, and at the end there is just a wall, the back of another building. He steps onto a concrete lump and looks over the line of palings into a small rubbish yard at the back of the pub. Weeds and dog-ends and black wheelie bins.
There’s only a few customers still in. The television is off, and he sits down at a table underneath it, slowly sipping at his whisky, feeling the warmth of it spread through him. He gets a second, and by the time he’s near the end of it the barmaid has the mop out, doing behind the bar counter; she doesn’t notice him leaving.
He drops the bag down and clambers messily over the palings, scraping the skin off the back of his leg. There is no lighting out here, but he can make out the push bars on the fire exit and, next to it, a stack of bottle crates. Further in, a large humming box like a generator, with gas cylinders propped against it. He puts his bag down behind the box, the other side from the fire exit, and sits down, hoping it might be giving off some warmth. Nay such luck. Here we are well. No an expected turn of events. He sits blankly for a time, more and more uncomfortable getting with the cold and the hard uneven ground knuckling into his arse through the bag.
After a while he gets up and goes on a search for anything that might improve the situation. And he’s in luck, because lodged behind the wheelie bins is a whole load of flattened McCoy’s crisps cardboard boxes. Okay. All it needs now is a bottle or two of beer left in one of these crates and he’ll be laughing. He checks. There isn’t.
The cardboard does improve things, laid out on the ground underneath him, but it’s impossible to sleep still, no with this cold knifing at his body. Even with the whisky inside him he’s pure frozen. And alert. Listening for the fire exit or anybody coming down the side street, propped rigid against the generator with his bag tucked behind him and the raw skin on the back of his leg stinging against his trousers.
Chapter 24
He doesn’t sleep, hardly at all, a few snatches just. The cold, and his back ridged against the generator, he’s stiffened up and he can barely move. All of him is numb. A few times during the night he tells himself he needs to get up, keep moving, go find somewhere covered he can be warmer, but the effort of it is too much. The aching body will not budge. A pain that began in his feet and his hands, tightening over his frame until it has grip of every part of him starts, after a while, to lessen; the outside of him deadened, and the cold then working its way inside, into his nose and his throat, stopping the breath in his lungs and getting inside the brain, forcing it to press, paralysed, against his skull. Noise is increasing. Traffic on the main road. A bus braking. When he does move, he does it very slowly, muscle by muscle. It is dark still but there is a blue gloom to the sky. He gets out from behind the generator; stands up and perches his sore backside against it, looking at the dim yard. Dog-ends outside the fire exit. A cracked glass lampshade leant in a crate. A stack of rusted metal chairs lurching against the wall. He tries to pick up the cardboard and put it back behind the crates, but his fingers won’t work so he shunts it behind the generator, then takes a few goes attempting to get his bag and his body to struggle over the palings.
Most the shops are closed. He keeps walking, the autopilot on; cold, still cold. The feet throbbing in his shoes. He finds himself headed for the coach station, as if the body is handling things on its own by now, no trusting enough of him to discuss such matters any more. Fine but. Fine. It’s warmer in here, and he sits down in one of the bays. Quieter than yesterday, but it’s early yet, and he looks over at the board — 06.53 — the whole day in front of him, unending. He pushes back into his seat with his bag on his lap and falls asleep.
He wakes from an uncomfortable and confusing dream with an immediate sense of alarm that goes twisting right into the stomach. He scans about him. There, again, is the cunt opposite, looking at him over his paper, tapping away with the foot. And there’s others too, a whole line of them, watching him, just fucking sat there watching him. He stands up. He can’t stay there, all these eyes, and no to mention either the ones in the roof — the cameras — sure they will have clocked him as well, sat two days in a row without getting onto a coach. He goes out of the station and stands by the entrance in a state of near-total unclearness. A man coming up to him jabbing a newspaper in his face and he tries to shake his head but the guy keeps sticking it to him.
‘Fuck off.’
The man shrugs his shoulders and goes away, pointing it at a woman coming past.
He walks for a long time. Aimless. Trying just to shake the crawling panic that tenses inside him whenever he gets eyeballed, quickening past them, just keeping going, tired and sore but keeping on the move because he is too feart to stop. He is hungry, so when he comes to a minimarket he goes inside, picks up an egg sandwich and a four-pack and ignores the look on the auld bint’s face as she passes it over the scanner.
He is walking and looking for somewhere quiet to sit and eat, when he comes upon the river. And right there on the opposite bank, the genuine shocking sight of a massive red brick power station, long since closed down by the looks of it. There is a bench free and he sits down. No many people about here. A few joggers. A man and a woman both in suits further up the way on another bench eating out of plastic punnets with wee plastic forks. He starts to feel more relaxed. A kind of peacefulness about things here, watching the river and the different boats coming past; the great bulk of the power station and its four giant white chimneys across the water. He snaps open a can. The better keeping out the way of things. Minding his own business and no having to worry about digging up any bastard reading their newspaper or poking it in his face. And if there’s nobody about to look at him, then he doesn’t have to get considering himself either — and what a fucking affront he is to them, the newspaper-reading types of this world, the young women wanting to foist their sandwiches on him. His bladder is filled up, so he waits until nobody is about and goes a short way down the pavement to pish through the fence.
Later, when the alcohol has took the edge off the cold and the panic, he takes a walk down the water. A good stretch of it, he keeps going for a long time, craps in a Burger King and ends up on a bridge with a beauty of a view over Big Ben, watching lights catch on the water ripples, staring at the strange image of people dancing in silent frenzy inside a boat that comes past.
The pub is closed when he gets back so he won’t be paying them any rent the night. The cardboard boxes are where he left them, and he opens a couple out to put around himself like a tube. It is better, but no by much. He’s still fucking freezing. He closes his eyes and he can’t sleep, instead thinking about his big coat hung up in the lobby, how much warmer he’d be with it on than this jacket. The image of the house briefly staying with him, but fortunately the brain is too dumb with cold to imagine any further.