Pull the door firmly closed.

I don’t let them into the apartment ever and barely do they get even the briefest sight of Elise.

– Is ma sister okay?

– They are both fine.

– Are you?

– Aye.

I go down the stairs slowly enough to make sure they are trailing behind me.

It is a magician’s trick.

Look at this hand! Over here! Look at me! Don’t go in there and look at them.

They are even worse than ever, lately.

Fighting.

Elise can’t have been off the pipe a day since last October. The girls march away home. They eye people suspiciously in this part of town. I walk up the High Street. Breathe in clean cold air. I love mornings like this. The errands must be done while they are sleeping. Everything is on account. I never pay. I go along George IV Bridge and then down Chambers Street and cross over into James Thin’s bookshop. I like it in here. There is a parcel of books waiting and I’ve nae time to browse. I wish Elise and I would have a tiny bookshop somewhere. It would have four cats and a pot of tea always brewed and Hope to play in the aisles and talk to customers at the till. Then when she was bigger she’d take the place over and Elise and I would tend a herb garden with things in it to cure everything. We’d make jam and kiss each other and be glad for each of our days together.

I have got all the messages my love will need when she wakes. An orange, freshly peeled, so she can smell something good before she opens her eyes, a tiny perfume bottle, her books and then just a brief stop at the candy man’s basket – Elise has the sweetest tooth of anyone, she is like a child in a woman’s body.

I pick up a small box of Turkish delight.

– Flavoured with rose!

– Braw.

It is the only thing I pay for with cash. I hurry back down the close. The building is almost finished now. He’s been years at it. I hurry into No. 10 Luckenbooth Close. Run up the stairwell. I tip my head back every time – look up at the cupola all the way above me. Imagine all the people who’ve walked these stone steps. For hundreds of years, people going round and round the stairwell like the cogs of a clock. Past and present and future passing each other by. The dead, the living, the barely living and the cowards and the ordinary and the brave, all winding round each other through time.

I love this stair.

Now I’m just a part of its history too.