I sense Finlay’s mood plummeting further, each time we reboard the bus.
‘Is it worth prioritising 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 JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter?’
‘I honestly don’t know, it’s second-guessing someone I’m distant from, who is mentally 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 round.
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 chuffed 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 façade 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 realise 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—’
‘I can 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 hoying it 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 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, writhing internally.
‘Mementos of people who don’t know they’re being photographed,’ 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.
28
Although I appear at ten to one, in hopes of being first, Finlay is already sitting in the bar. He’s toying with the spoon in the saucer of a cup of tea, amid lots of young shiny people in 1920s fancy dress, buzzing from high spirits and midday alcohol.
They join in a lusty round of ‘Happy birthday Dear BOBBY!’ while a pleased-with-himself-looking cherubic lad with a side parting in a white tuxedo and lopsided bow tie raises a coupé glass to them. I notice the women, in feather headbands, dropped waists and kiss curls, are in badges saying ‘East Egg’, the dapper men branded ‘West Egg’.
‘It’s one of those passage of time ironies, isn’t it,’ I say, quietly, after greeting Fin and ordering a Diet Coke: ‘The Great Gatsby was about how wealth and glamour and social climbing will hollow you out and destroy you, steal the love of your life away. So naturally we appropriate it for “wahey, let’s get wrecked” costumes for parties that unironically celebrate those things.’