‘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, sceptical. His profile is momentarily strongly redolent of Susie’s, against the morning winter sun, and I get a sharp pang, that stupefaction of remembering her loss. I’m perversely glad it’s a shock again.
‘Hmm, really? Would we recognise 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 was 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 a 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 chippy.’
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 centre 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 criticising the disinhibited nosiness that comes with camera phones. I tell myself it’s the modelling 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.
We must give bored school pupils a run for their money with our workmanlike efficiency in getting round 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 the musty, woodsy smell of the interiors. I’m disorientated not to have a worksheet to fill out on Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century afterwards. 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 rubber.