An efficient system – in a heartbeat, hundreds of thousands tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. In all the building’s limbs, deathwatch beetles mate, wriggle – scurry. Do they suck – fuck – clatter – spit? Each insect flies along wood on furious, tiny, spiky legs. Ivor has worked on houses with deathwatch beetles. Untreated, the whole fucking building will get eaten. The beams are well tattooed with boreholes from xylophagous larvae which is still an earlier stage in their lifespan. The deathwatch beetles will eventually emerge on graduation (thirteen years later) as fully grown Xestobium rufovillosum. The deathwatch beetle itself is seven millimetres long but working together there is no wooden structure they could not destroy.

That tap, tap, tap, tap reminds him of being down the mine shafts.

Overalls on, hard hat in hand, whistling.

His place.

Torch switched off.

Eyes like a cat – the boys always say that about him.

Descending down into layers of the pit, further down into the earth, the smell of it, coal underfoot, wooden joists holding up the tunnels, a feeling that something was disappearing just out of vision. In the corner of his eye, a disappearing motion. Just like in this building. On every floor, something is just out of sight. Esme knows. It’s why she’s having nightmares. It’s nothing! He needs to tell her that. Men get it down the mine. Hear songs being sung. See wee kids running away. A bright yellow canary flies by. Things are stranger the further into the earth you go. Ivor has a feeling that right at the core of the Earth – there is a heart – withered as a walnut. It is the Earth’s heart. A tiny eternal thing – sending out its own faint beat toward everything. Ivor touches a beam and it is already rotten. The rest of them will go in time. If he had money, he’d move Esme and his sister right out of this building. It’s only going to get worse.

This building is too many things.

Too tall, too run-down, too many floors. It’s so high – it is rare, even for an Edinburgh tenement. Ivor peers across the attic eaves. Can see all the way through this eave into the next building. The attic eaves lead into every other tenement for three streets. Sometimes they are used as a route for burglars. Or a penthouse for rats. Burglars get into eaves via the attic hatch in a stairwell, or they climb onto the Chinese takeaway roof and shimmy up a drainpipe. If you don’t know how many floors a burglar can shag his way up (via drainpipe) to sniff your knicker-knackers or pawn yer paltry diamonds for porn and cocaine – it is twelve. There are many reasons to never leave dirty knickers on the bathroom floor. Encouragement of knicker-sniffing burglars is just one of them!