Espying

I was visited by a mouse tonight.

It whispered out from behind a bin bag by the living room door on tiny feet (each little toe pink, translucent, perfect), a little sharp brown thing the size of my thumb. Quivery all over, graceful whiskers, intelligent face. A rush a few steps into the room, half turn, long pause. I was poised on the sofa, laptop in hands, Vaughan Williams romantic and wistful in strings from the speakers. I couldn’t read the expression on the mouse’s face.

It whirled and disappeared the way it came. Now I sit and turn my head at every movement in the corner of my eye, hoping for a new friend.

Eating In

In my world, food is an event. It is simple. It is visceral. It is an experience preserved intact from childhood, a lifebuoy in the fragmentary and bruising grown-up world. Tomato soup, macaroni cheese, boiled egg and toast soldiers. I use it to beat away the encroaching greyness.

Concluding

The fag-end of the Edinburgh festival is weary and rained upon. Acts worn out and close to breaking, bright-eyed with exhaustion. The elation’s gone. The first mad rush of it (like the madness of new love) is forgotten and left in its place the end of a party, deflated balloons wrinkly and pathetic and the happy chaos of the full swing now just a mess to be tidied up.

(I first came to the city just after the last of the festival crowds had been exhaled, and it was slipping into a dark cold winter. Everywhere, the shredded remains of pasted flyers, soggy, dismantled venues. The year-in, year-out burghers drifted about like, having no one to mug and abuse, they’d come a bit unstuck.)

Intuiting

Working with him keeps me internally on tenterhooks, a edgy feeling like the scrape of ceramic grinding against ceramic. He has hard grey eyes that I can’t read, a lean face that doesn’t change. People whisper when he leaves the room: poor guy, he must practically live here to keep the place running like it does.

When I tell him about my latest catastrophe, he seems for the first time since I met him at a loss for something to say. His gaze lingers on me for a second, two, longer than necessary. A little waver at the back of my mind, doubt trembling there, and the suspicion that grows into a certainty that shit, he’s concerned for me.

Now, a little fierce quick blaze along some angle inside me that wants to do him proud: my boss.

Trading Favours

Is this, I wonder, what I dreamed of, what I read of, when I was wet-faced and fresh behind the ears (and all that twaddle)? I never had any inkling that being a VIP, a mover and shaker, might have been just a façade behind which the pale-faced whelp struggled against a tide of insecurity and incomprehension. In my imagination, they shmoozed at the bar drinking Long Island Iced Teas and waved celebrities (about whom they knew filthy secrets) across the room to say hello.

I met the man at the bar after I finished work, relaxing in a haze of alcohol and acquaintances. We shared mutual recognition (seen you around, yeah, I know your face), and struck up a conversation that lasted longer than I wanted it to. He was another struggling comedian; wrote for big television names. We shared a taxi, as we were going in the same direction.

It pulled up in the damp enclave of my street, and I turned to look at him in the over-warm, breathy eggshell of the cab. “How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing, if you can get me on the guestlist for the Late Show on Friday.”

“Done.” Handshake. I opened the door, and skipped away, with mixed feelings.

Raining

Walking through my own lonely corner of 1am Edinburgh, I’m coming up on the brain-bashing, lazy nicotine dizziness of the last cigarette I smoked fast, holding out my palms face up into the rain. The sodium orange of the streetlights makes the slick cobbles bright. The brim of my hat drips. The raindrops hit cold and hard and die wet on my skin. My mind’s a weak muscle – I can’t empty it of his face.

Stuttering

Stutter.

Like my tongue’s tangled, like the words are too thick in my mouth, like my brain skipped (like it was a record). I make a running leap for a word and fail, come unstuck amidst these sticky consonants. Trying like an engine to turn over the syllable.

Wait. Stop. Take a breath, close my eyes a second, half a second.

Try again.

Watching

My heart’s thrilling with all this backstagery, like I’m in with the cool crowd at long last. The ace up my sleeve, my bona fide cred card: I work here. Yeah, baby. You don’t impress me like you do everyone else.

But he does. His solid, sure-stepped presence pacing lazy ovals along one side of the room. Eyes behind glasses (the audience never sees) on his notebook, and always his lips moving around that languid smile, the night’s jokes. I’ve never seen him straight-faced. God, he does impress me.

Having Been Taught

He makes me think of milk. That’s the essence of it, the quality of his soul (the spiritual world that he believes in as faithfully as in the laws of physics) that I perceive. Happily, heterosexually married, two sons. Middlingly English churchgoer. Pale button shirts to work, no tie. T-shirt and corduroy at the weekend. A whiter shade of pale.

His faith, remarkable faith, is his quintessence, though: he’s made of it, not of everyday clay like the rest of us – or if not the faith is what glues him all together, to the humdrum workaday world. He leaks his fiery belief (in goodness, in meaning, in everyone he meets) all over the rest of us, and it’s like we’ve been touched with grace.

Egressing

When I leave, what can I do? Train, coach, slides past giant knuckled mountainhills, deep pine woodland, Scottish wilds like a proud, scornful belledame. Can I tranq myself into another world? Can I put out my eyes so as not to see what I’m losing? Can I bring myself to run from my goodbye though it will break my heart?

Previewing

Tonight we tramped through the sodden, frazzled night for the sake of a puffy-haired comedian and his grand piano at the Pleasance. Edinburgh had an atmosphere of getting on with things under the turn-off of drizzle: the spotlights from the Spiegel Garden and the Udderbelly smashed into the night’s vague mist, white, green and blue. Odd jazz notes burbled into the night and mingled with the crowd’s clamour. Everywhere people, strolling, laughing, shrugging, hands-in-pockets-ing, their shoes flinging out little spits of puddle-water with every step.

The Pleasance Courtyard was its usual mad bustle, strung about with lights and strewn with stalls, wet and packed. The cobbles shone the night’s human yellow back from the rainwater. Everyone wore dark, soaked trouser-bottoms halfway up their calves. Flyerers dashed in and out, steaming; I caught the under-the-eyebrows, end-of-his-tether look of one, hands hard and disgusted around his bundle of leaflets now a soggy pulp.

After the show, we danced home, sucking up the life that sang in the air. Behind us, the castle stuttered out its colossal thunder of fireworks, lighting up the clouds with magic colours.