Soft, warm blackened bread things and sometimes it is eaten with flat sausage. The poet does not eat often. Simplicity in food appeals. The other revelation is a white pudding supper from Brattisani’s seasoned with salt and sauce. Local chippie sauce is particular to Edinburgh – he has discovered it this time around. A brown sauce drowned in vinegar. That meal is enough to keep an addict going for some time. It is good, at intermittent occasions, to refuel. Of course, he has not gone to the baker’s for rolls or milk. The milk cart and horse trundled by some time ago. It was the money exchange he was after. No.10 Luckenbooth Close hovers over him. An old spindly stone giant. The poet counts out four notes. Places the rest in his back pocket. He pushes a scuffed front door open. His favourite graffiti is still there. It’s a pictograph of a devil child. Bill takes out a knife. Adds a cigarette to her slender fingertips. He is bereft without a decent gun at his side. At least he can still carry good hunting knives here. The lock on the front door does not click closed behind him. A skylight at the top of the stair is cracked. Leaves cling sodden to the glass. It looks like a child’s dolly pram is on its side up there too. The weather – mercurial as it is – had one of her hissy fits a few days ago. Rearranged the detritus of this city on a whim. She has been known to rip stone masonry from buildings. A waitress died from such a thing. Quite a temper the weather has here. Once a year there are winds so strong a lamp post will be hauled down, or the Forth Road Bridge on the Firth of Forth closes itself to lorries.

Bill is most at home in a storm.

He stands on the bottom landing, torn.

Go up or down?

Sobriety is less illuminating than supposedly educated people insist.

He pushes the basement door gently.

He’s not hiding this from John, per se.

Just best to do his own business in private.

It’s his way.

They met last year. After the International Writers’ Conference. Bill always smiles remembering that one. Writers leaping up like jack-in-the-boxes declaring themselves homosexual. Demanding one cut his long, long hair off. Someone asked Trocchi (onstage) (in a rammed room) what his inspiration for literature was.

– Sodomy!

– Trocchi, you beautiful creature…

MacDiarmid nearly spat all his teeth out when that was said and Bill fell a bit in love with Trocchi there and then. Afterwards on his way home – through streets with puke and takeaway wrappers and empty bottles (excessive people here) (he likes that) that would be cleaned before the tourists woke (there had even been a pair of man’s pants covered in shit) – he walked to Mary Queen of Scots’ bathhouse.

He considered moving right into it and writing a book.