and pull the trolleys back and forth across the car park like a robot, until the lights dimmed, the sun set and then it was time to go home. When he left, the lights in the store were still on, customers dribbled in and out. It was a twenty-four hour store, tills always ringing, never resting. He took the 12 on Meadow Place Road and watched cherry blossom swaying in the wind, carpeting the pavements with rich pink petals. It took him on to Bankhead Drive, where he dropped off just opposite Powerleague. He walked through Sighthill, with the towering block of Stevenson College to his left. It was empty, the lights left on. He went past the Lloyds offices and the sprawling buildings of HMRC, where he imagined goblins totting up cash destined for secret vaults. I’ve been watching too much Harry Potter, he thought. There was a spring in his step, the post-work endorphin surge working its way through his body. A few minutes later he was in the lift in Medwin South, one of the three high rises that brutalised the skyline in this part of the city. The doors opened and he walked through the screen door, which was broken, unlocked his front door, got in and closed it. The chirpy expression on his face dropped off like a mask falling from an actor’s face. His shoulders slumped. He was offstage now. The strain of the heavy work caught up with him inside with a ferocious vengeance. He took off his shoes and stretched out his toes to sooth his aching feet. The Maestro moved to the bathroom and ran himself a warm bath, sprinkling Radox in it, churning it until it had a layer of bubbles. The foam clinging on to his arm crackled and popped. He stripped off and lowered himself, sinking down until the water touched his chin. It smelled divine, of sage and other herbs. Immersed in the water, there was nothing else for it but to close his eyes and relax, feeling like he was floating in the sea, somewhere warm, beyond the confines of his cramped flat. The day dissolved into the water, sinking away until nothing was left except the sound of his breath. He let more hot water in, not wanting to get out, lost in the wonderful, fragrant feeling in which he was cocooned. From outside he could hear two dogs barking, the sound travelling eight floors up to his flat. He let himself sink lower, raising his knees to create more space in the bath for his head to slip below the waterline, holding his breath as he drowned, the water entering his nostrils and ears. Everything was silent down below except the subtle noise of shifting water whenever he moved. He held on for as long as he could, emerged and took a deep breath of air. Afterwards, the Maestro dried himself and wrapped the towel round his waist. A few minutes later he was in the kitchen where he made himself a ham and cheese sandwich for tea. There seemed to be no incentive to bring out his pots and pans to cook just for one. The labour required, for today at least, was something he could not muster. Outside his window, he could see Dunsyre and Cobbinshaw, the two other twelve-storey blocks identical to his own, the only difference being the red and blue strips at the top of the respective buildings. Medwin had a yellow strip. He ate standing up, looking out into the night, his reflection in the double glazed window mirroring him. It was his lonely companion. A crescent moon hung somewhere in the sky, above the airport, in the distant west. The clouds had lifted and he could see it, an orange C sat above the horizon. There were no stars in the sky. He seldom saw them, blocked out as they were by the brilliance of the street lights. The city never knew night. He missed seeing the Milky Way stretching out, millions of stars, the vastness of creation. He finished his sandwich and washed it down with tap water. There was a brown envelope on the mantelpiece above an electric heater fashioned into something like a fireplace, a cheap imitation that was broken and which he had not bothered to replace. He took the envelope, ran his finger along the edge and replaced it. Books lay piled on the floor, against all four walls of the room, rising up to window level. The walls were white, bumpy where old bits of wallpaper had been painted over. Two unopened Amazon packages sat at the bottom of the fireplace, more books to add to the collection. He reached out for the Consolation of Philosophy, which he was reading, and had been, slowly, contemplatively for a week. This book, Boethius’ masterpiece written when he was in prison, was one of those favourite texts he returned to time and again, hoping with each reading to unlearn the last and discover it anew. Each time he read the poetry of the words, he felt a kinship, as though he too was in bondage, searching for a higher meaning to life through reason. The pages were dog-eared from when he’d lent the book to Tatyana. While he was careful and used a bookmark, she folded the pages as though forcing her presence onto them. He opened the window, swinging it wide, placed the book on the ledge, pulled himself up and twisted round so he sat on it, looking into his flat, his back to the world. He could read easily with all the light coming from the streetlights below. Pg 38: Love governs lands and seas alike/ Love orders too the heavens above. Boethius thoughts captured, sealed in this vessel, the book, transmitted over the centuries to him. That was a mystical thing, he thought, as he read on. He arched his back, slowly controlling his movements like a ballerina until he found the exact point where his lower body and upper body were balanced, with the ledge acting as a pivot. He relaxed his muscles, feeling the cool breeze rush by. It was a precarious position; one that he found improved his concentration. After midnight there was stillness in the air, as if the city sighed and held its breath. There was no sound to be heard anywhere. It was the briefest of moments; so fleeting, so fragile that if you breathed you missed it. The Maestro had discovered this magical moment while reading a book by Jon McGregor. McGregor, that chronicler of ordinary life, finding little snapshots of beauty in the mundane and capturing them in amber, poetic prose. Every night, especially on nights he couldn’t sleep, the Maestro looked for this one moment, and took pleasure in finding it, in the thought that he might be the only one experiencing it in the entire city. He flicked to the next page; the sound of the paper turning shattered the moment and the city started up again. In the distance he could hear a big lorry going along the bypass, the sound of a loud television coming from one of the flats, his own breath, the whole world turning in that familiar way, a confluence of old and new events, organisms that lived for a few minutes died next to those that lived for hundreds of years, instants piled upon moments becoming the fletching in the unidirectional arrow of time. He felt the familiar craving for a fag. He could hear the cranking of the cogs in his mind, a thought forming. Let there be light! Did this moment exist before he’d read McGregor, or had it always been there? And if it had, then why hadn’t he noticed it before? Perhaps, he thought, it did not exist and only came to be after I read the book. If that was the case then he had to accept the terrifying notion that fiction had created a real moment in the real world from nothing but word. He recalled a trick by a writer who embedded the word – yawn – in his text and the readers who read this word found themselves yawning automatically once they had passed over it. A cheap trick or a small indication of the power of the word? Pg41: Mortal creatures have one overall concern. This they work at by toiling over a whole range of pursuits, advancing on different paths, but striving to attain the one goal of happiness. The Maestro felt lightheaded, the effect of blood rushing to his brain. In that moment he pondered if he were to let go, to cast himself down from this ledge (it was another of those intrusive thoughts, one so familiarly woven into the fabric of his mind that not a day went by without him thinking it), if he let go, would He send one of His angels so that not a hair on his body would be harmed. It was an appealing concept, the idea that once every so often the Divine intervenes in the workings of the cosmos, Joshua stops the Sun, Moses parts the Red Sea, so as to make His presence known, yet, in all likelihood, and the Maestro always came to the same conclusion, he would hurtle into the void, accelerating at nine point eight metres per second squared, simple physics, the predictable effects of gravity on an eleven stone, twenty-seven year old male body falling through the atmosphere, leaving only the hope that through the panicking, firing neurons there would be a moment of clarity in which everything is illuminated, a split second in which life itself was explained, the meaning of it all, past, present and future laid out, all making sense so that when, when he hit the ground, then at least it would have been worth something more than the aching emptiness he felt every day with each sunrise and sunset. The image of the falling man from 9/11 flashed into his mind. What had the man thought on the way down, was he just thinking, oh fuck, oh fuck, or was there some fundamental insight on the journey, plummeting to earth, the concrete-scarred ground rising to meet him? The scary thing, the Maestro realised, was not the falling, but what happened after the fall, Nothing, not even the nothing of the darkness of night or the nothing of emptiness; those were something at least, those were nothings that could be measured by the absence of a particular thing, and so they had an essence to them, a core beyond the event horizon. Not this, this was an incomprehensible Nothing, the nothingness of non-existence, beyond consciousness, a Nothingness that was not something, and so far beyond
