Chapter 27
27
After unwinding a croissant and sipping the sort of black coffee that reminds me how coffee is supposed to taste in a metro-tiled breakfast room that was absent of Finlay Hart, I go back up to my room, brush my teeth, and head down at nine.
Finlay’s an imposing, ink-blue figure against all the wedding-cake white—unsmiling, hands thrust in pockets in his trench coat. He’s not unfriendly, exactly, but seems a little antsy, brisk, eager to get on. I shouldn’t mistake the splendor of our hotel for any pleasure he’s taking in this.
“Tourist traps, then the family addresses, is the plan,” Fin says, sounding stiff and somewhat disenchanted, as we emerge into the cold snap of Princes Street. “Following the plan set out in my father’s note.”
“Gotcha. How about a sightseeing bus?” I say, as one rolls past outside. “Cover more ground.”
Finlay looks up at the Coca-Cola-red, logo-emblazoned vehicle, skeptical. His profile is momentarily strongly redolent of Susie’s, against the morning winter sun, and I get a sharp pang, that stupefaction, remembering her loss. I’m perversely glad it’s a shock again.
“Hmm, really? Would we recognize my dad in a crowd, from a pigeon’s vantage point?” Finlay says.
“We’d get off at the stops,” I say. “How are we getting ’round them any faster, on foot?”
Fin shrugs his reluctant agreement and buys two tickets from the man in the lanyard, accepts tour leaflets, and we step on.
“Upstairs?” I say, to his shoulder.
“If you want,” Fin says, glancing back, wearing the look of a tolerant weekend dad with visiting offspring. He picks seats near the front. It’s almost empty, as you’d expect from the roof-free top deck of a sightseeing bus in a rainy country at a cold time of year.
Mercifully, it has optional headsets where you can plug yourself in for an audio narration, so we get to experience the city without the soundtrack of someone bellowing jovially into a microphone about Greyfriars Bobby, as we lurch corners.
Everyone else on the deck brandishes their phone aloft on portrait mode, with both hands, taking pictures or filming.
“Do you think any video taken on holiday ever gets watched?” I whisper to Fin. “People will film anything . How does it work, do you go home and then on a boring Tuesday say: get the beers, let’s watch three minutes of shaky footage of the Royal Mile? Or do they subject friends and family to it?”
“I don’t know,” Fin says. “I’m not a fan of the way the technology’s turned everyone into an amateur documentary maker. I saw an argument in The Bagel Hole the other month, and another customer stood there as if it was their kid’s nativity play.” Finlay mimes holding a phone and staring intently into it.
“Yeah, and it’s mad the way people act like they become invisible when they hold a phone up.”
We lapse into silence and Fin still looks tense. Does he anticipate a messy scene, if we do find his dad?
A shoal of French teenagers in rucksacks stream onto the bus, exclaiming “Edinbourg, Edinbourg!” in excitement, as if they expect the identity of the city they’re craning over the bus’s railings to look at might change. Then, confusingly: “Skiffle! Skiffle!”
“Skiffle?” I whisper, with quizzical expression.
“ Skyfall ,” Fin corrects. “The Bond film? Had a whole sequence in Scotland.”
“Oh hahaha. That makes more sense than love of The Quarrymen.”
Fin smiles back, but he’s indulging me, and the smile doesn’t reach his eyes.
I decide to relieve him of the burden of small talk by putting the headphones on, wrestling them out of their small plastic packet.
The Grassmarket is one of the most iconic views in the city. The market place lies in a hollow, well below surrounding ground levels, directly below the castle.
The bus judders to a halt and we climb off.
We wander past the lollipop-brights of the shop doorways, across the worn-shiny paving, scanning the passersby. We wander, but with secret purpose, and I find pleasure in the strangeness of it. Usually you’re obliged to enjoy this sort of activity; today we’re almost obliged not to, which is kind of freeing. Humans are irrational.
“It’s such a handsome place, isn’t it,” I say, blandly, wondering if I’m replicating bad date levels of chat.
“Would you want to live here?” Fin says, after a pause.
“Yes... I don’t know. If I could bear to leave the things I care about, back home.”
“What are they?”
“My friends, my mum. The really good fish and chips shop.”
As soon as I’ve said that, I immediately wonder if, especially post-Susie, this is sufficient reason, or if it’s an alibi for standing still. I know what my ex Mark’s vote would be.
“I believe Scotland’s pretty strong on chips,” Fin says.
I look around, breathe the damp air and try to picture myself in a grand new setting. It would be exhilarating. Scary, but exhilarating.
As soon as I’ve pictured escape, I think about how Susie has no more choices to make. I remember her in that last pub quiz, gaze bright over her bundled scarf, all the unspoken urgent communication flying between us that we had no idea would stay forever unsaid. My eyes well up. Whatever changes and dulls, I know this will be the case for the rest of my life, the ability of the thought of her to turn me to tears at a second’s notice. They don’t put that in the eulogies, do they: They will live on in your hearts, and in the way you find yourself weeping like a freak in Birds Baker, because you inadvertently recalled how much she loved an Elephant’s Foot pastry.
I blink rapidly to regain control and see Finlay’s noticed all of this. “It’s alright, you know,” he says, quietly. “You’re allowed.”
“Allowed to what?”
“... Be alive. Carry on.”
I don’t trust my voice to reply, so I simply nod. I’m spooked to be read by him so effortlessly, but I feel comforted too. He’s so assured. What are his feelings about his sister’s loss?
“Ah, the castle,” I say, in relief, as we find ourselves in a clearing with an impressive view. “That’s worth a photograph.”
I wrestle my phone out of my pocket and train the camera. I notice Finlay is in the far right of the frame. At first I covertly snap him gazing across at the castle.
Then a tableau of him waiting for me to finish: looking away, down at the ground, pensive, running his hands boredly through his hair, then looking right at me. I shift the center of the frame so he’s more in shot and run off rapid-silent snap-snap-snap extra pictures. I don’t know why I collect this stealthy memorabilia, and I’m amused at my own hypocrisy, after criticizing the disinhibited nosiness that comes with camera phones. I tell myself it’s the modeling thing: I’m curious to see if he’s as casually photogenic off-duty as he was for money.
When he’s in danger of sensing my eyeline isn’t on the “historic fortress,” I stop. Hah, Finlay Hart is a historic fortress all of his own.
W E MUST GIVE bored school pupils a run for their money with our workmanlike efficiency in getting around the National Museum, powering through the light-filled, vaulted central atrium with the dinosaur bones, separating to cover different galleries.
I text Finlay:
Can confirm it’s just me and the giant Panda Ching Ching in the animals section. She was embalmed in 1985 and still looks better than me
Yep drawing a blank in Art, Design & Fashion, though tbf I doubt 18th century corsetry is my dad’s thing. See you outside
“Feels strange not to have middle-class guilt at binning off the antiquities exhibition, doesn’t it,” I say, as we clatter back on the bus, lower deck this time, as the weather looks threatening. “My dad would be appalled.”
At John Knox House, I get a nostalgic rush at the combination of the respectful speed-shuffling from room to room, and musty, woodsy smell of interiors. I’m disorientated not to have a worksheet to fill out on Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century afterward. It’s only lacking the teacher asking if anyone needs to use the facilities before we get back on the bus and telling us we have fifteen minutes maximum in the gift shop. I’m almost tempted to buy a pot of unsharpened pencils and a rainbow eraser.
I sense Finlay’s mood plummeting further, each time we reboard the bus.
“Is it worth prioritizing things your dad would find particularly interesting?” I ask. “Is he a devolution junkie, would he be interested in seeing the Scottish Parliament buildings? Or... the café where J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter?”
“I honestly don’t know, it’s second-guessing someone I’m distant from, who is ill,” Fin says. “I think imposing old buildings are probably his taste.”
“Stay on for Holyrood Palace, then?”
“Yeah.”
Finlay can read me, but I can’t read him. Something’s bothering him and I can’t identify what it is. This was his idea. I’m here because he demanded I be here. Anyone watching would think it was the other way around.
We disembark at Holyrood and Finlay buys entrance tickets.
“Christ,” I say, surveying its colossal magnificence and general vast spread. “You take the west wing and I’ll take the east wing?” I make a grit-teeth face.
There’s an ominous grumble of thunder and as the heavens open, correspondingly, Finlay’s mood breaks fully.
“This is all we fucking need!” he splutters, both of us holding the hoods of our coats in place as we dash for cover across the manicured lawns.
“Let’s take shelter in the ruined abbey!” I say. “It’s a little further but this is just the moment to appreciate it.”
“How do you know about that?” Fin says, and I’m quite pleased with myself that I do.
“Like a Goth, I always research evocative ruined abbeys.”
I lead us there at a jogging pace, and on arrival, Fin says: “Not to be a nitpicker, but the place you’ve brought us to has no roof.”
I start laughing in that slightly helpless way you do when the weather and circumstances are attacking you.
“It has a beautiful fa?ade though. Here, this part still has a roof.”
We huddle in an archway, watching the rain beat down on ancient mossy stonework, interiors that are now exteriors. We’ve stumbled into a peculiarly unforgettable few minutes.
“Let’s just settle in for three hours of this then,” Fin says, eventually.
“I love it. Wish we’d brought a hot thermos.”
When Ed called this a Very Creepy Interlude, he might’ve underrated how much I like creepy interludes.
“How are you so perky? To the point of... revolting effervescence.”
Finlay says this unemotionally, in his usual crisp manner, face splattered with water. I get a squirm of pleasure in my stomach at this teasing, as I watch him yank his hood back down and try to pat the water out of his hair, which only spreads it around. He’d only dare be this familiar if he’s feeling comfortable around me.
“Am I perky?” I say.
“Yup. Dragged against your will to another country, by a man you don’t know, to look for another man who’s not in his right mind. Being drenched in what looks like a Game of Thrones set. And it’s like you’ve been handed a Coco Loco at a swim-up bar.”
“Sad is happy for deep people,” I say, and I’m rewarded with authentic Finlay laughter. I realize I’m talking to him like he’s Susie, and somehow I don’t know if I’m doing it on purpose or not.
“Is that original?”
“No, I nicked it from Doctor Who .”
“I don’t even know when you’re having me on.”
“While we’re being personal, why are you being a mardy arse?”
“A mardy arse ?” Finlay says, speaking the words as if smelling a stinky local delicacy cheese.
“It means grumpy—”
“I remember,” he says. “... Agh, it feels so futile and foolish. We’re a day behind him, if not days, we’re not going to find him doing stupid sightseeing buses. Not that I had any better ideas,” he adds, remembering it was my suggestion.
“Yeah. I reckon in a new place, he’ll stick to his former points of reference,” I say. “Where was his family home? Where he grew up?”
“Portobello, the seaside. Lovely day for it.”
“Let’s go back to the hotel, dry off, get lunch, and try that this afternoon.”
Finlay nods. “I think the forecast is actually dry, later.”
“I might get a photo of this before we go,” I say, looking out at the rain pelting down.
I pull my phone out and unlock it, and with sickening inevitability, the last thing I had open appears, my camera roll. Finlay Hart glowering at me, unaware he was my subject.
Fin isn’t quite close enough to see the full screen, but he can still spot himself well enough.
“Is that... me?”
“Yeah,” I say, re-angling my phone, glad that my hood is partially obscuring my face, and that I can legitimately not meet his eyes, shrinking into the fur. “You wandered into my compositions of the castle.”
“When I was standing still?” Fin says, with his infuriatingly sharp thinking. I’m momentarily without a comeback, sizzling with embarrassment, pretending to concentrate on focusing in on an archway, pushing at the screen with finger and thumb.
“I wanted general mementos of the trip,” I say, the pleasurable squirming now writhing internally.
“Mementos of people who don’t know they’re being photo graphed,” Fin says. “Do you also take locks of hair from your sleeping victims?”
I look at him in shame and his face is lit up in amusement.
“Oh, now you stop sulking, in your malicious glee!” I blurt, faux-indignant, but glad he’s not outright calling me sinister. “I’ll delete it if you’re that bothered.”
“No, don’t. I’m touched you’d want to remember a single second of this,” he says, in a diplomatic tone.
I put my rain-speckled phone away.
“Can you get rid of any of the ones where I have a double chin though?” Finlay says, with the insouciant flirtiness of someone who’s never been troubled by a double chin, and has slyly correctly guessed there’s photos, plural.
“It’s a deal. Though I’d remind you, vanity is a sin.”
“And I’d remind you that creepshotting is not ethical.”
The storm billows around us as we smile at each other under our hoods and I feel inexplicably... what’s the word? Soothed. I feel soothed.
Back at the hotel, I scroll through a series of unexpectedly luminous, sulky pictures of a man with dark hair in a blue coat and feel something that I wouldn’t call soothed , exactly.