Old Town.
Two Halves.
The first time Erica took a walk in Tollcross, she came back with a typewriter. It sits at the window next to my laptop, stealing glimpses of the street below and wondering why time left it behind. Erica treats it as if it was her first-born, but the typewriter can’t transverse decades and adapt to them like a human can. It’s stuck in the 1930s.
She clunk-clunk-ping!s until three in the morning and I don’t even bother telling her to knock it off anymore. When I get up in the grey, hazy dawn there’s always a fresh flutter of pages paper-clipped to my brain because I can’t get the sound of typing out of my head. I told her it wasn’t very fitting to write futuristic dystopian fiction on a machine that lived through the Blitz, but she just looked at me as if I didn’t understand her at all.
The buildings on our street are soot-dusted Baronial masterpieces, with turrets on the roof to guard people’s third-floor castles. They criss-cross and curve round one another, intersecting all the way to the train station and Princes St Gardens. Our windows are wooden and flaky and won’t open when it rains, but Erica likes it that way. Down the road are glossy shop fronts with synthetic doors and plastic windows, pushed into the old stone shells of the Edwardian era. They sell ten different types of brioche and Venti macchiatos and shrink-wrapped meat, but Erica still prefers the taste of fresh blueberries in a paper bag and greasy chips wrapped in smudged newspaper.
From our living room the dome of Old College is visible, peeking above the crowds of weatherworn slate roofing. On the other side of the Meadows, students with faces fresh with life walk past the old man belting his Big Issue ditty from a weary, cold chest. Across from the concrete block of the university library and the smog-stained towers of campus are plaques that proudly denote the once homes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Walter Scott and oh, they’re very proud of this indeed, but now the buildings home offices and classrooms and nobody stays there longer than they have to.
Walking over South Bridge and beyond the Royal Mile takes you a few hundred years forward in time. Ahead is the New Town, all crisp stone and right angles, business and tourism. People may not live in the vaults beneath the bridge anymore but beggars still hang outside shop doorways and bus stops. A man is slumped outside a newsagent on the Royal Mile, clutching the fur of his collie and shaking a flat-cap at passers by.
“Can ye no’ spare a wee bit fer my Lassie?”
Erica drops a tenner in his hat and ruffles the matted head of the dog, smiling, before we board a bus back home. The double-decker weaves down tight streets as we sort through our purchases. My hands have grooves from carrying plastic bags with high-street brand names stamped across them, but Erica’s are just sticky with icing from fresh cinnamon buns.
A few hours after being woken at four a.m. by clunk-clunk-ping!, I go to check my emails. The desk we share is littered with scrunched up balls of paper, and the only intact sheet is still poised in the typewriter. I know she doesn’t like me to read her work, especially in the middle of creating the new, ultramodern world in which it is set, but one line jumps out at me.
“Can ye no’ spare a wee bit fer my Lassie?”
Maybe some things will never change.
She clunk-clunk-ping!s until three in the morning and I don’t even bother telling her to knock it off anymore. When I get up in the grey, hazy dawn there’s always a fresh flutter of pages paper-clipped to my brain because I can’t get the sound of typing out of my head. I told her it wasn’t very fitting to write futuristic dystopian fiction on a machine that lived through the Blitz, but she just looked at me as if I didn’t understand her at all.
The buildings on our street are soot-dusted Baronial masterpieces, with turrets on the roof to guard people’s third-floor castles. They criss-cross and curve round one another, intersecting all the way to the train station and Princes St Gardens. Our windows are wooden and flaky and won’t open when it rains, but Erica likes it that way. Down the road are glossy shop fronts with synthetic doors and plastic windows, pushed into the old stone shells of the Edwardian era. They sell ten different types of brioche and Venti macchiatos and shrink-wrapped meat, but Erica still prefers the taste of fresh blueberries in a paper bag and greasy chips wrapped in smudged newspaper.
From our living room the dome of Old College is visible, peeking above the crowds of weatherworn slate roofing. On the other side of the Meadows, students with faces fresh with life walk past the old man belting his Big Issue ditty from a weary, cold chest. Across from the concrete block of the university library and the smog-stained towers of campus are plaques that proudly denote the once homes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Walter Scott and oh, they’re very proud of this indeed, but now the buildings home offices and classrooms and nobody stays there longer than they have to.
Walking over South Bridge and beyond the Royal Mile takes you a few hundred years forward in time. Ahead is the New Town, all crisp stone and right angles, business and tourism. People may not live in the vaults beneath the bridge anymore but beggars still hang outside shop doorways and bus stops. A man is slumped outside a newsagent on the Royal Mile, clutching the fur of his collie and shaking a flat-cap at passers by.
“Can ye no’ spare a wee bit fer my Lassie?”
Erica drops a tenner in his hat and ruffles the matted head of the dog, smiling, before we board a bus back home. The double-decker weaves down tight streets as we sort through our purchases. My hands have grooves from carrying plastic bags with high-street brand names stamped across them, but Erica’s are just sticky with icing from fresh cinnamon buns.
A few hours after being woken at four a.m. by clunk-clunk-ping!, I go to check my emails. The desk we share is littered with scrunched up balls of paper, and the only intact sheet is still poised in the typewriter. I know she doesn’t like me to read her work, especially in the middle of creating the new, ultramodern world in which it is set, but one line jumps out at me.
“Can ye no’ spare a wee bit fer my Lassie?”
Maybe some things will never change.