A Cityscape, At Night

Originally published in "Stories for Homes" (2013), an anthology of fi

Originally published in "Stories for Homes" (2013), an anthology of fiction for Shelter, the housing and homelessness charity.

Where to start? With a cityscape, at night. Nicely cinematic. The camera rises from behind a building—ideally a Parisian apartment with those quintessential slanted slate roofs—and gives you the whole city smack in the face. You get the tower, Sacre Coeur, everything spread out with potential: the street, the building, the room, the window of the ex- or soon-to-be-ex-lover gazing forlornly out over the rooftops trying to see into the bedroom of The One.

Of course it doesn’t have to be Paris. Any city will do. Find me a city and I’ll find you an occupied window.

Let’s take Edinburgh. I know it better than Paris and happen to think the castle is much more impressive than the tower and, when this is made into the Hollywood-blockbusting-rom-com it’s destined to become, you will surely agree with me as…

The camera rises from behind a Georgian town house and suddenly you get the castle and the monument, the ridge of the Royal Mile, the hotel, Saints Andrew and Giles, all spread out with potential and we zoom in on a specific street, on number 14, top left, on the window where he stands gazing forlornly out onto the city trying to see… well, he doesn’t know yet. That’s the problem.

What shall we call him?

I’ve never been very good at naming characters. You know those conversations you have, the “what will you call your children” conversations? I could never think of anything. Names? My mind would go blank apart from boring names like Nigel, Norman, Kevin, Steven, Stuart, Claire, Jane, Anne, Diane and Margaret. You don’t get many young Margarets now do you? Old fashioned, I guess. Or I’d think of the most ridiculous names, the kind that would guarantee a playground kicking: Maxwell, Tarquin, Anastasia, Michelangelo. But nothing I would ever actually choose. It always worried me, still does, that when I finally hear the tiny patter of the little heart-attack that follows the words “I’m pregnant”, I will spend nine months unable to think of all but the most boring or ridiculous names and end up blurting out some nonsense at the registry office.

That’s not true.

Well, not strictly. I could think of some girl’s names. I liked Sylvia for a while. Around about the time I was angsty and obsessed with Sylvia Plath. You don’t get many Sylvia’s now either, do you? Maybe the conversation “Who was I named after?” “A woman who put her head in a gas oven” puts people off. I liked Eilidh for a while. I still have a thing for Gaelic spellings. Scandinavian as well. I liked Astrid until I met a complete twannock called Astrid. Boys names however. No chance.

So, after all that, what shall we call him?

I glance up from the computer looking for inspiration. The Complete Blackadder DVD set sits on the shelf to my right. Edmund and Baldrick I ignore but Rowan catches my fancy. Apparently Hemingway used to get titles by flicking through a book of poetry and stopping at random. Hence For Whom The Bell Tolls and A Farewell To Arms. Rowan it is.

Rowan is looking out of the window. Now, the flats on this street are nice but they aren’t massive, especially on the top floor, so the window isn’t the biggest. It’s not one of those huge tenement ones like in Glasgow. Nor is it a gorgeous bay window you can fit a sofa in, or an entire dining table like those flats in Aberdeen. It’s an average sized window jutting out from the sloping roof. I can’t remember what they’re called, that style of window, but his head is half an inch off the ceiling and if he were to stand on his tiptoe, as he does now, to see if anything is happening down below, his head would push into the faded white artex and cause him some pain.

They are sash windows, sliding up or down and, apparently, swivelling round so you can clean them without risking life and limb by climbing out onto the foot wide ledge outside. They’ve seen better days though—as has Rowan if we’re being honest—and could do with a good once over with a damp sand-blaster. They don’t quite close at the top and a draught constantly whistles through like an old kettle coming to the boil and being hit by Stevenson’s Rocket with the horn blasting. When there’s any heat in the flat—anything from the shower being on to a moth causing friction by flapping—condensation collects on the glass blocking the view and on the top of the frame where it builds into huge drops and then drips onto whatever is below. In this case, Rowan’s glass of cheap Bulgarian red bought on special from Asda earlier in the day. The condensation/temperature problem is also causing mould to grow on the walls around the window and for black gunk to collect in any available crevice. The only time any of this is ever cleaned is when he tries to balance his clapped-out laptop on the tiny window sill and steal WiFi from the neighbours and doesn’t want his pride-and-joy piece-of-junk dripped on.

Rowan’s looking out of the window because he has been dumped. He was dumped some time in the morning and now he’s standing at the window drinking special offer Bulgarian red from Asda. Can you guess what he’s listening to on his Cambridge Audio separates? Stevie Wonder’s, “I Believe When I Fall In Love With You (It’ll Be Forever)”. Why? Because it’s the saddest song from the High Fidelity soundtrack and yes, Rowan has that little imagination. Quite frankly he’s not that cut up, he’s just going through what he assumes to be the motions of a break up. He’s been dumped that many times that he has become a pastiche of a man-who-has-been-dumped. In fact, let’s dispense with this whole Rowan thing and call him Man Who Has Been Dumped. Reverse nominative determinism. If Dickens can get away with it, so can I. Atkinson can have his first name back.

Man Who Has Been Dumped is not very good at relationships. He’s too honest. Too naïve. It takes him too long to work out what people really mean, to understand the nuance, the subtext. This is sweet when you don’t know him; infuriating when you do.

Man-Who-Has-Been-Dumped has a dilemma. Stevie Wonder’s “I Believe When I Fall In Love (With You It’ll Be Forever)” is the last song on the High Fidelity soundtrack which means he’s finished listening to his Top Five Break-Up Original Movie Soundtracks Of All Time As Suggested By Nick Hornby In The Sunday Papers and therefore can’t think of what to play next. He’s heard that Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks is about a break up but every time he’s picked it up in Fopp he’s thought “do I really want to be the kind of person who buys a Dylan album?” and gone for some Belle and Sebastian instead, because this is Scotland and that’s what you do.

He looks at his CD rack: thirty-seven discs stacked vertically in alphabetical order from top to bottom. If he owns more than one disc by the same band then they are in chronological order of release, from top to bottom. He scans through them imagining that his life is a film and that he has to choose the perfect music for this scene. Eventually he lands on The Divine Comedy, A Short Album About Love and plays it.

Now that the soundtrack is sorted (although he did choose an album that only lasts thirty-one minutes and a handful of seconds so we’ll be back over to the stereo soon enough) he refills his glass and resumes his position at the window.

If you hadn’t guessed it already, Man Who Has Been Dumped is a student. Worse, he’s a philosophy student. Worse still, he’s a philosophy post-grad who is working under the delusion that he can change the world. The world, despite its best efforts using a variety of women and banking regulations, has yet to break him. It will, one day. In a few years Man Who Is Still Being Dumped Regularly will find himself sitting at his desk at 1:43PM with a recently emptied bottle of wine between him and his laptop and will suddenly realise, with piercing clarity, that nothing he does will ever matter. There will be no fanfare to greet this momentous moment. No fireworks, no applause. His shoulders will merely slump forward slightly as if making a vague attempt to protect his heart. His head will hang heavier and his eyeline will drop another notch towards the floor. His spirit will have been broken. He will see his dreams for what they are: cobwebs cluttering his mind, no use but to remind him that life once held promise but now holds only time. His bright potential future will be behind him.

But that is a few years away. Just now he still believes that the contents of his notebook and hard drive can, when combined and turned from scattered fragments into a coherent whole, change the world. Change it for the better. Make every one happier. Solve problems. Maybe all problems. War. Stop war. His notebook and hard drive contain the embryo of nothing less than World Peace.

He may be right. His ideas are good. Insightful. Sharp. Simple. What he lacks in personal relationships he more than makes up for in ideas. The problem is they will never become a coherent whole. The closest he will ever get to presenting World Peace to a grateful planet will be drunkenly expounding to a diminishing group of friends between rounds at the pub quiz on a Tuesday night.

Nothing is happening outside the window. Edinburgh has emptied itself in preparation for the onslaught of the hordes that descend every August for the annual celebration of ways of passing time. Man Who Has Been Dumped still goes to a few comedy shows, Fringe Sunday, the latest Eastern European Rep company’s sequel to Godot, but the whole month makes him feel sad and empty. He is always sad and empty. The crowds make him realise it.