This short piece was written almost four years ago.
To the city of Edinburgh, its light, its shadow, and all the people in my life there that kept the sun shining.
致 Iris
Walking down Cowgate at twelve in the morning and my coat snaps at my legs, pulled tight against my chest. Winter’s chill hangs in the air like a detective waiting to break the news of her husband’s murder to a widow. My clothes are frosted, and I brush icing from my shoulders more from habit than discomfort.
Head bowed and shoulders hunched, I focus on obliterating continents of snow stained as last night’s slurry crumbles under the weight of my boots. Overhead on Southbridge snatches of conversation drift below the cobblestones. They’re punctured by an old and sad song I should have remembered, crooned by a drunkard possessed by the soul of a poet. My head bristles with late-night Trainspotting-phobias, the vague fear of muggers lunging out at me. Distant figures huddle together on the steps of houses or stagger into alleys. Obscured by blinking lights they are gargoyles squatting in the fog, backs crooked with regret.
A young girl (she looks about my age) walks past. Mascara dribbles in rivers of black ichor down her face. I feel my hand reaching out to stop her, ask if she’s all right. I watch her stumble past in a fog of shame and reasonably expensive perfume. Stupid of me, really. I realize how I must look: black coat smudging into the shadows like printer’s ink, lamplight catching on my glasses and transforming my eyes into owlish discs. I stand there for a few seconds. The echoes of her sobs hang back awkwardly as if waiting to start a conversation.
For some reason, I still haven’t moved. I don’t, until the last hints of grief dissipate into the night. Gone, along with the cigarette fumes from the crooked L of a man pressed up against a wall away from the wind. Then I keep walking.
There’s a mist hanging off the pavement, steaming out the corners of the slabs like vapour from an athlete’s body. When I look at the windows of slumbering pubs, take-out joints, karaoke bars and restaurants my reflection fights to keep up. I leave it behind, watch it pause, a child lost at a supermarket. When it catches up to me, I cannot help but shudder.
It’s around this time I realize I’m all alone, and I can’t recognize my own face no matter how hard I look at it. I run my fingers over the pale skin, pinching the bruised bags under each eye from one too many all-nighters and wonder if this is some kind of costume. It might be the lack of sleep, but I can’t help but wonder if a human being can be haunted by themselves.
I stare down my wavering twin in the oily window of a kebab joint. At any moment that figure might step outside the panes, straddle the gap from shadow to man. The thought twists in my stomach and catches on something. It’s a sick trick, a Ghost of Christmas Present prematurely dredged up on an October evening. I forage ahead, but the shade waist in my computer after every short story deleted in disgust slithers at my boot-heels. It coalesces in parked vans and the black of hibernating road-signs. A passing motorbike’s headlamps spill over me and I see that thing sucking in icy breaths, savouring them.
Can a person be haunted by themselves? Maybe if every 3 a.m. insomniac thought, every i buried resentment festered into bitter pus, an ectoplasmic ooze that dribbled from every pore. Perhaps, like the best kind of ghost, it is something to be summoned. Dragged from a Limbo of unseized opportunities and squandered second chances.
I’ve reached the Royal Mile at this point, having turned up one of Cowgate’s forked, sloping wynds, taking the long way back to my accommodation. I nod imperceptibly at the other stragglers ambling up and down the stretch of road. The wraiths come thick and fast, rushing into the faces of strangers I feel I should have known.
The Ghost of Semesters Past gives way to the Ghost of Wasted Futures. That long-haired guy in the leather jacket leaning his girlfriend’s head against his shoulder, I’m just his other half. The warning shown to a Dickensian hero if he doesn’t mend his ways. The youth in the poster for a book-signing at the John Knox house…. I could see strokes of myself in that dimpled smile. A chattering student blows past me, moving in a cluster of his mates to another party, another nightclub. His name, lost in a peal of snickers, sounds like mine. Shuffling my feet, I wait for the traffic light to change at a crossing by the World’s End pub. There are no cars. In the sanguine glow of the STOP sign, I’ve become the phantom, dogging the footsteps of those merry travellers of the night.
I’ve turned right, down, breezed past the roundabout leading up to Pleasance, passed my accommodation. I can’t risk seeing that apparition again, ten feet tall in the windows of the building. By the time I’m aware of where I’m going, I’ve overtaken Dynamic Earth’s squat, hedgehog scaffolding and am at the foot of Arthur’s Seat. The curves of its hills dwarf me and just then the noise building up behind my forehead stops. Obliterated by the mass of earth and stone stamped against the skyline.
Grass squelches softly underfoot as I make my way alongside the Seat, a wavering comma framed against trees and bushes. Maybe another time they would have pawed at the cuffs of my trousers, running brittle fingers over my clothes. Here, amidst the silver fog and the whistle of the wind they scatter the boggarts cackling in my mind.
Deep breaths: long, quiet, inhalations that suck up an air that escaped petrol fumes, cigarettes and ripening trash.
This is not the quiet of a bated breath before a murderer strikes, but the rise and fall of a cat’s chest as it curls up on its side. There is no noise save the beating of my heart, marking out its verse in iambic pentameter. Mist spills over the sides of the hills like a bed-side confession. Deep breaths. There are no reflections to hide brooding spectres here, no fun-house mirrors to distort regret. There is no one left to haunt, and the condensation on my brow is a baptism.
New apparitions form out of the wisps of smoke: a trek with a crew of high-school friends, new companions and flat-mates, a makeshift picnic of battered takeaway feasted on whilst the April sun set in the horizon. A spring-time evening cushioned among flowers and another semester bid adieu. The banshees of past, present and future slink away. I shrug and let the thin faced phantasm lurking behind me slide from my shoulders.
Before I turn home, I indulge myself. Night restores the ruin of St. Anthony’s chapel into Camelot. From the haze I see a child (small even for his age) emerge, running breathless along the knolls. He is brandishing a stick, battling Balrogs alongside bearded wizards and knights in shining armour, striking left and right. His blond hair is dipped in quicksilver under the moon, glasses slipping off the edge of his nose. Two other shapes sprint to join him, a fellowship of three. I watch them crest over the hill, whooping, bickering, giggling, fading. Yes. Some parts of myself are worth bringing back from a grave I dug far too early.
One last haunting. I am long gone to my bed, but I leave the ghost of my smile among the Scottish peaks.
Pablo Lacalle Writing 