Hope Housing Association doesn’t give a flying fuck what happens in their buildings any more. The tenants are getting wilder and more feral and the housing association don’t come out to check on anything. It’s all new builds they are investing in now, whilst the tenements slowly decay. Then they’ll sell them back on the private market. This attic is not what he expected though. It’s a mystery. How did grass even get up here? It’s so tall and green at the shoots but yellow at the top. Something crawls over his wrist. He slaps it off his skin. Ivor is a broad-shouldered man. Bugs do not bother him and darkness is his sunny day. He went to Woods the Barbers after his appointment at the doctor. Ivor got a shave and his hair down to a no. 1. It feels clean. He looks like a monk. A punk monk who is still more into the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag, and Hüsker Dü and the Slits and the Exploited and X-Ray Spex and NOFX and Nirvana and Minutemen and Sonic Youth and Lydia Lunch and Joy Division than he has ever been into anything else. He will let Esme listen to all his records. Teach her a few chords on bass guitar. He can educate her on the difference between punk and no wave and new wave and grunge and metal. Maybe she’ll start a decent band one day. It wouldn’t surprise him. Ivor stands in the corner on his tiptoes and looks out the first broken slates. He can see all the way across the city of Edinburgh – over Princes Street Gardens and the outline of the New Town and a hulk of Calton Hill, the Balmoral, all the way down the city until a navy belt divides it from the Kingdom of Fife. A sea view is a coveted thing in this city!

At some point a long, long time ago, someone was squatting up here.

It could have been fifty years ago or a hundred.

Time is passing everyone by; that’s what it is doing.

All over the world clocks tick, both in and out of time with each other. Ivor’s favourite is an astronomy clock. It is in Bohemia. It’s 10 p.m. here. It will strike midnight over there soon. Death will appear. It will beckon to a Turkish entertainer. The figures of Vanity and Greed will glide out. Spin on the dance floor. Twelve Apostles will flash from their windows. The Earth is centre. Sky is blue or black. There is Ortis (sunrise), Occasvs (sunset) and Crevscvlvm (twilight). There is the Tropic of Cancer. It has all the signs of the zodiac. Three arms rotate their way through existence. One holds a moon, one holds a star. There is a sun. A golden hand.