Booked & Boarded: Edinburgh — Closes, Wynds, and Borrowed Time

The rain arrives before I do, or it feels that way; the pavement already dark with it, the castle up on its rock half-swallowed by mist, more suggestion than stone. I came up from Waverley into a wind that seemed to be waiting specifically for me, funnelled between two buildings so old they’ve stopped pretending to be anything but grey. I pull my hood up, then give up on it almost immediately. Everyone else has too. Nobody here seems to expect the weather to behave.

The Royal Mile doesn’t so much begin as insist. Tartan in shop windows, a piper somewhere below me, the sound bouncing off stone until I can’t tell which close it’s coming from. I duck down one at random, a gap between buildings barely wide enough for two people, walls slick and close enough to touch both sides at once, and the noise drops away almost entirely. A cat watches me from a windowsill three floors up, entirely unbothered by the drop.

At Armchair Books on West Port, the shelves go up further than seems reasonable, ladders leaning at angles that suggest someone trusts gravity more than I would. The smell is the specific mustiness of old paper that’s been rained on and dried out more times than anyone’s counted. A handwritten sign warns that the sliding ladder has “a mind of its own.” Nobody’s manning the desk when I come in; a bell somewhere in the back announces me instead, and a voice calls out something I don’t quite catch, followed by the assumption that I’ll find my own way around, which I do. I find a cracked-spine copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the paper gone the colour of weak tea, and I read the first page standing between two stacks that lean into each other like they’re sharing a secret.

The rain has softened into something closer to mist by the time I’m outside again, the kind that doesn’t fall so much as simply exist in the air, settling on everything without seeming to move. I walk without a route toward Grassmarket, past a busker packing up a violin case that’s seen more weather than this, past a pub with its windows fogged from the inside, past a man walking a dog that keeps stopping to inspect things I can’t identify. The cobbles here are uneven in a way that makes conversation impossible without watching your feet, so everyone walks slightly bent, half-looking down, half-looking up at the castle looming over all of it.

I stop for coffee somewhere with steamed-up windows and a chalkboard menu half-rubbed-out by someone’s sleeve. A slice of tablet comes with it, unasked for, set down by someone who seems to think I ought to have it whether I ordered it or not. It’s sweeter than I expect, gone before I’ve properly noticed eating it. Two women at the next table are deep in an argument about a book neither of them will name directly — well, she should have known, that’s all I’m saying — and I find myself listening harder than I mean to, trying to work out which betrayal, which book, before I catch myself and look back out the window instead.

Victoria Street appears without my quite deciding to find it, the rain having stopped somewhere back along the way without my noticing when. The street curves uphill in that improbable, crayon-bright way it does — purple, then yellow, then a deep bottle green — shopfronts stacked close enough that the whole thing feels slightly unreal, a street built for a story rather than a city. I know the wizarding comparison everyone reaches for here, and I’d rather have found the street on its own terms first. A shop selling nothing but tartan umbrellas has its door propped open with one, as if it’s already given up believing they’ll be needed today.

The light is what pulls me on toward Greyfriars Kirkyard, doing something to the headstones I want to see up close — long shadows, moss softening every edge, the whole place gone quiet in a way the street below wasn’t. On the way, a narrow flight of steps drops down the Vennel, unremarkable except for a small plaque I nearly miss, naming them for Miss Jean Brodie — the film crew came through here once, apparently, and someone thought the steps deserved to keep her name. Spark herself grew up not so far from where I’m standing, a schoolgirl on these same steep streets long before she’d have had any reason to know a version of them would end up written down. It’s an odd, quiet comfort, standing on a landmark named for a sentence.

A gate creaks somewhere I can’t see once I’m through the Kirkyard proper. Names on the older stones have worn down to almost nothing, just the suggestion of letters, and I find myself trying to read them anyway, the way you keep pressing a bruise. Somewhere past the far wall, the Edinburgh skyline goes on without apparently noticing what’s on this side of it.

The sky has cleared into that pale, scrubbed-blue that Scottish weather does right after it’s finished proving a point, and it’s evening before I notice. I walk back down toward the Mile as the streetlamps start coming on, one after another, no clear order to it. A close I ducked into hours ago on impulse turns out to loop back exactly where I started, and I only realise it when I recognise the same cat, same windowsill, watching me with what might be recognition or might just be the general disdain of a cat that’s seen this before.

There’s still a smear of tablet in the wrapper in my pocket — the same one from that café, somehow, kept without meaning to — and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie under my arm, spine cracked further now from being carried against the rain, and the piper again, or maybe a different one, the sound folding back into the stone the way it did the first time. The city hadn’t cleared up so much as let me catch up to it. I stopped checking my hood somewhere around Victoria Street and never noticed when.