Dot steps back and gouges another, bigger hole out of the wall. In the attic above her all the insects pause. Hundreds of thousands of deathwatch beetles take a collective breath. She taps. The beetles tap back. Dot stops. They await instruction. The beetles clearly consider her tapping – to be that of a new and great mother. She is the giant Death-watch Beetle Princess. They rejoice! The eternal mother has come back to them. They have eaten the structures (almost) away but she has come to them in the end. What good fortune to live in an entire tenement of oak-rot-donkiopora! The beetles’ most favourable conditions have been cultivated by endless gutter leaks, abject building neglect and hundreds of years of damp Edinburgh weather. Mass colonisation wins. Dot taps again. The spirits don’t want her to stop looking. They don’t want her to leave them. They need her. They would compete with the living for her loyalty, except there is nobody alive who wants her. The other world is fighting for her presence – hard.

– You want me?

Wind echoes up the building’s cavities.

– For good?

Why do the living hold on so hard to this life?

– Take the tablets, Dot.

Her friends would say that if she had any. The doctor gives people like her tablets to stop them thinking and friends find it too tiring in the end often too, Dot does not know how to think small or chit-chat idly, time is short and there are things to do before the end. Those other friends in her head, the ones that never leave and have nothing good to say to her, the words that come unbidden as thoughts, they would ally with those who know her but they’d tell her to take all the tablets and give in to the great quiet time of faraway. If this world wants rid of her it can carry her out questioning and fighting. She won’t aid its inertia, not one fucking bit. Like when she moved in here, she has friends that would be shocked, that would say she should have gone to them in her moment of need, but everyone knows that is what people say yet rarely what they mean.

Bloody useless things, other people!

Dot lights a joint.

Exhales a small row of smoke rings.

She decides to stop and take a break and drink the remaining half bottle of wine before doing anything else.

– Come on, little Dot, take all the tablets.