There is a thick layer of stoor over everything: cars, cobbles, lamp posts, street signs. Dot stands right in the middle of the street as two police officers take down the barricade she placed around the skeletons. One raises her hand and calls out. Dot turns as a splitting sound ricochets over the sky – the skeletal wooden beams of Luckenbooth are fractured. She breathes in dusty morning air. Looks up at the David Hume statue with his eternal bloody robes. Statues of men! Like they’re the only ones who ever thought about anything. Where are the women? Buried into the bones of the building – that’s where the fucking women are! Buried into the building by men who couldn’t tame them. The cobbled road of the High Street runs away from her – down the hill – she wants to follow it – walk by all the shops and restaurants and bars, by the church at the crossroads, the Christmas shop with all its different baubles and wee wooden toys and Santas and the smell of cinnamon, the big hotel, her witches shop that she likes for pads and supplies, the Museum of Childhood, the World’s End pub, or the one she likes better around the corner from that – the Waverley Bar – where the old owner used to work with a crocodile pinned onto the wall. He was a tough man that landlord, ancient as time and tiny but nobody ever dared fuck with him – you could just imagine the man hunted down that crocodile himself and there was a room full of poets upstairs often reading or drinking. Past the fudge shop, that cafe that does cream teas, Mexican food in the restaurant where she had her first date, coffee outlets, knitwear, silver and trilobites, the old-fashioned sweetie shop (now gone), the poetry library and graveyards and old clubs sold off for student housing and all the way down to the palace and Scottish Parliament and from up here – a flash of blue – where the Firth of Forth greets the first day of the New Year – past the tat shop with its bagpipes and clayborns and all the way to the bottom of the Royal Mile, past Holyrood Palace toward Arthur’s Seat (perhaps she will go back to look at Mary Queen of Scots’ bathhouse – best building in this city) then up the crags to wash her face in the morning dew – cleanse the dirt from her pores and then on up to the raggedy road, or maybe she will turn left at the very top of the cliffs, walk through wet grass until her throat burns and the skies – they are so vast up there! So clear! Step by step, the city entire appears from the slopes of Arthur’s Seat. Calton Hill and the top of the palace and the high-rises at Dumbiedykes, all the church spires, the big hunk of rock that makes up Edinburgh Castle – she will go right up to the top and turn around to see the Firth of Forth encircle the city and she will look for the spot back up in town where Luckenbooth Close used to be – know that she is just like all the other residents in this city – or any other – passing through – temporarily – that she is just a Dot who took one building down.