– I’m sure we did but on the walls of caves we carved pictographs and symbols – moving images. Those symbols were telling stories before people were chit-chatting around a fire. They were our first poems – our first way to impart knowledge. To teach. To learn. To comment. To show others what we think and see how they respond. We were writing words before we could walk upright. We used to carve them on the walls – language is an ancient and deadly form.

– And now, it’s your trade.

– It’s my way of being.

– But ye can’t leave it once you’ve started?

– Some can.

– You can’t?

– I can’t, no. I couldn’t leave it if I wanted to.

– Why?

– For those of us who have fallen – into the affliction of addiction to a virus sent to humans from the origins of time – we don’t understand exactly how it simultaneously rewires our hearts, souls and minds – or how it is allowing us to evolve a part of the mind barely understood yet. We can’t explain, even to ourselves, why we would steal for the time to do it – but there is no doubt poets and writers have died for this, sacrificed their lives for it. Those few born ones, they will do anything at all for it.

– Would ye get arrested for it?

– Yes. They’ve banned my work in plenty places.

– What is it that addicts you?

– There is an energetic imprint of the original source that travels via words.

– God?

– I don’t like that idea necessarily, but I couldn’t refute it, no.

– You think that words are a kind of time traveller of an imprint of the energetic light we originally come from? The light source, the God source as some people would see it?

– Exactly that, you’ve got it.

– I’m gonnae be having some interesting conversations at the morgue tomorrow.

– I see it like this, my precious man: it is the written word that was the first virus and it made the spoken word possible. Maybe the word virus is wrong, don’t quote me on it. Maybe if it is a programme within the wider programme we are all residing in – a code if you like – then maybe this written form is the most ancient of arts. Then think on this: codes are there to be broken. When that happens they lead us to truth – perhaps words are the only thing that can lead us to truth and those willing to go into the programme completely bring truths back out that they barely understand.

The two men hold each other.

Stand at the window watching lights come on all over Edinburgh.

Bill’s fedora is sat atop the prongs of the television and all around the walls the words appear to move by the light of the lava lamp.