The poet looks up at the ceiling and his eyes are watery. The air around them changes. Outside there is a fairground somewhere. Buskers and a band play on the street. All of Edinburgh is alive and pulsing just outside their window. The day has done what it always does – it has passed the humans onto night so it can take a shift. There have been four seasons in one day. This early evening has brought an azure sky.

– I did do it, yes.

– And they put you in prison?

– No.

– Why not?

– Because I come from a wealthy family and they don’t punish people like me. What happened was a mistake, that’s all. A hideous, and highly regretful mistake.

Bill takes his hat off.

He looks older without it on.

John hands him a perfectly brewed cup of tea.

Tears.

Eyes.

– You are the most precious form of kindness, John.

The words of cut-up running alongside them on the wall begin with ‘I am’.

I am Nixon.

I am an industrial robot.

I am the first teacup to orbit Earth in an American.

I am but you’re not.

I am a word, but words have birds, birds are the words and I am birdy.

I am the arse snake – you are the idolator.

I am Maker and Melody and Plan.

The younger man traces his older lover’s hands and stops at the lower part of one of his pinkies which has been entirely cut off.

– Where is your fingertip?

– St Louis.

– What’s it doing there?

– Just being a fingertip. I don’t know, maybe they buried it. Farewell, small digit! They put me in the psych ward for this, you know. I delivered it as a young man to my psychiatrist one day and he did not appreciate it.

– He clearly never had a cat.

– Quite.

– Okay, Bill, how about music instead of the cinema? Shostakovich is playing with the London Symphony Orchestra, he has eight cellos in his ensemble. I think I prefer Vishnevskaya. I used to play Shostakovich when I was preparing bodies at the cemetery – it’s meditative.

– All they want to know is what he thinks about Stravinsky and to concoct some story of a rag-and-bone boy done good. Europeans are obsessed with that kind of stuff. He’s a nervous man and he’s talented, they should leave him alone.

– I wish that parrot would stop screeching. What the hell is going on downstairs?

John thumps on the floor with his foot but the cacophony of bangs and noises and squawking only appears to keep building.

– The media is used to hound and censor free thought.

– I’d agree, Bill.

– The problem with mind control is finding ways to create enough distance so that even for a short time, you can see it quite clearly for what it is. I find putting my brain in the middle of the universe helps immensely.