Dalry Road breathes its damp grey gospel at 6 a.m., and the stones still murmur night-cries beneath my feet like some half-forgotten choir of the deadshift angels crooning their sooty lullabies, and I am shoulder-aching, head-throbbing, soul-dribbling out of that woman’s flat with her chipped black nails and her cat-eyed stare and her late-night comehere-goaway kissbite that left little love-tooth sigils on my shoulder-blade, and the whole world feels slick and sideways, a sloshing whirlpool of oilshine and neonblot, and the rain comes down in that sly seep, the one that doesn’t fall but simply envelops, a haar-born hush, creeping into my collar with the slyness of a whisper you didn’t mean to hear.

     The air smells of fryer-oil sanctity and bus-fume psalms, and the takeaways recite their neon rosaries, each flicker a little electric prayer for the drunk, the damned, the still-awake, and I wander past the shut-shutters with pockets jangling light and heart jangling heavy, thinking of her crooked laughter and her whiskeytongue, that strange girl of the mattress on the floor and the cat that glowered at me like some reincarnated priest of the holy order of get-the-fuck-out, and the fox that darts across my path is all sharpbone quicksilver, tail-lash and eye-glint, a gleeful sidhe-thing in a cheap urban coat that judges me with its foxy condemnation—ah, vulpes vulpes, mirror of my missteps, city-trickster, low-sky haunter of bins and secrets.

     A scrap of last night’s paper skitters by, flapping headlines of doomdoom and dreardeer in that way faery folk might hear if they were still shaking the dream out of their ears, and suddenly I’m thinking of the woman sweeping the pawnshop floor, and the broom-whish rises like a thin soft sean-nós chant to greet the grey morning, her hair tied up in that notyetawakened halo, and her eyes carry the bruisebreath of a life that has seen too many openings and too few miracles; she looks at me through the glass like she knows the whole backstory of my bones, like she’s read the dogeared little epic of my failings, and I almost knock on the door—knock knock, here comes the pilgrim of bad ideas, seeking refuge—but her broom keeps brushing and the moment fades back into the humdrum quiet of should-know-better.

     And the rain goes biblical in that abrupt Lothian fashion, heaven’s great leaking kettle turned full tilt, drops sharp as hailstones of judgement, and I duck under the awning while the bin lorry grumbles past like a hungover dragon with tired men clinging to its flanks, their laughter bold and belly-born, that workman’s cackle that slices through the drizzle like a good joke in a bad pub; one of them nods at me, wide-faced and weary, and I nod back because dawnfolk share a kinship older than currency, a nodhood of the sleepless, the shiftworn, the unmade men walking half-in and half-out of their own lives.

     My cigarette is the last in the crumpled pack, a loyal little soldier bent at the waist but still ready for duty, and when I light it the flame flickers sideways, a brief foxfire of memory-light, and the smoke swirls into headshapes—her, the mattresswoman, jaw tense in the half-dark, her laugh a broken fiddle-string; my father, maybe, though I haven’t thought of him in months; myself, reflected in some shard of rain-smeared shopglass, looking too young to be so tired and too tired to still be young. The wind whips a half-sentence into my ear, a whisper of language older than English and younger than regret, something like leaveme and something like findme, and for a moment the whole street feels alive with old-world murmurs, and the cobbles mumble their granite memories, and the lampposts zing low tunes of lives passed under them.

     I step back into the rain because movement is the only anchor I know, as the world moves in long slurs and quick staccatos, each step a little improvisation, each breath a wrong note that somehow fits, and the city blurs into a watery mosaic—buslights streaking into golden wound-lines, windows shining their warm-womb glimmers, the sky opening and closing like a giant indifferent eyelid, and I think how odd it is that a place can both hate you and hold you, spit at you and save you, how a street like this can be the cradle and the grave of every version of myself I’ve ever attempted to be.

     A bus sighs to a halt beside me, and the doors opens with that pneumatic exhalation like some mechanical beast offering absolution or at least transportation, and I climb aboard with my wet hair and my bruised heart and my stupid half-hope clinging to my ribs like a barnacle, and the seats are cracked vinyl, and the windows fogfast, and the engine whirrs a low-thrum lullaby that sounds like a half-chorus of goinggoinggone, and the city smears itself across the glass as we pull away, and Dalry Road slips into myth, into memory, into mutter.

     And in that long suspended moment I feel the pulse of life—muddy, messy, half-conscious, rainsoaked, ridiculous—and something in me whispers in a tongue I don’t quite know but fully understand: boy, you’re still breathing, boyo, keep on, keep on, keep on.