I was sitting at the kitchen table, one of those long summer evenings, and that song 'Lost Weekend' came up on the Ipod, the first time in a long time: and I thought, again for the first time in a long time, of Peter, let’s call him Vision-Peter. I thought of him at the top of his tower, up in the laboratory that you can’t get to unless you know the code for the door to the top stairs, because the normal elevator doesn’t go up that far: the work there is controversial.
Edinburgh, about 1993: an imaginary city, surely. We shared a flat on the edge of the Meadows: me, Vision-Peter, Andrew-who-never-does-his-washing-up, and Rosie. Every Friday, after a week of experiments with his animals in the top tower, Peter would come home, disappear into his front-corner room (the best one, the one with the bay window and the view over the park), and put on 'Rattlesnakes'. He’d hop around his front-corner room, singing along in that sort of educated tuneless voice, opening and closing the wardrobe trying to decide what to wear, deciding where to go, deciding who to call. Pausing now and then to gulp from a tall g-and-t—“Just an aperitif!” As was 'Rattlesnakes', an aperitif I mean, before the real business of the evening, and another attempt to lose another weekend.
Then he’d be gone: sometimes to join in the improv at the Bedlam up by Forrest Road, sometimes to a degree show at the School of Art, sometimes, maybe, with his vision-science compadres, talking ever more excitedly about optic nerves and rods and cones, as the drink flowed, rounds paid for by the high-earning Prof who held court in some unlovely pub off the Dalkeith road whose name I can’t now remember. Rosie and I went to watch him at the improv once, and while it was funny, and we both so wanted to somehow find something, still we came home early, and went to our separate rooms. Sometime after I’d moved out—to a more modern flat where there were no mice and the landlords didn’t constantly threaten us with eviction—Rosie sent me a note (this was 1993, remember, no email or text or any of that nonsense), asking why I’d disappeared, and saying there was leftover mail for me. I never did go back to collect my letters.
I wonder what happened to Vision-Peter, and to Rosie. And to Vision-Peter’s girlfriend, whose Bosnian-diplomat father was the subject of that assassination attempt, that time, in Kirkcaldy, by the old Yugoslav security services. I used to watch the late news about the war in the Balkans, and wonder how neighbours could turn on each other so easily, and wonder about religions and hate and the different flags they wanted to fly over this imaginary city too. Peter, they moved him to Oxford, when that high-earning Prof got head-hunted by one of the big biosciences companies that were starting up down there. I wonder what Oxford looked like that first Friday evening, late 1993, that first play of 'Rattlesnakes', that first lost weekend. Rosie must’ve gone back to Aberdeenshire, to her village where, she used to say, there were always deer on the roads, in all the gardens. I think of the deer we saw up on the hillside, camouflaging away into the heather on the skyline. I think of when we drove back down, coming into Edinburgh early autumn evening as the rain came down and the headlights gleamed off the wet tarmac, and saying to her, this city is entirely imaginary, you do realise that? And Rosie not really paying much attention.
They asked for a ‘true’ story and I thought, come on, there are no true stories. You come from the imaginary cities. These places, these moments, these sounds, this music—these people, Rosie, Vision Peter: they slip away from you, like dreams just as you open your eyes.