From the base of the stairs rising up to the street, I could smell the sleet falling before I could see it. Some tension in the nighttime air, some tang of grit and masonry, called to mind cement and stone awash in sloppy wetness. I peered up into the stairwell, squinted through its lowlit haze, but all I could see of the world above was perfect, immaculate black. I felt myself pinned to the platform by the pack that bore down on my shoulders. I felt a creeping sultriness where the straps gathered clothes in my armpits. I felt my socks, soaked with sweat, stick to the soles of my feet, and I felt the dry heat of overnight travel trapped between my thighs. I stood dazed, I remember, hollowed out by far too many sleepless hours, until the choke of an overhead engine pulled me back to where I was. I saw my surroundings as if seeing anew and I saw where I needed to be. One hand reached for the railing and felt the sting of icy steel. The knuckles of the other rubbed at bloodshot eyes. Pitching against the midwinter air as a fresh blast bombarded the station, I stepped up to see if the city outside remained as I remembered it.

Memory lapses with distance and time. I’d boarded the train convinced I could see things as clearly as if I’d been gone for just a day. All of a sudden, alone in the cold, I saw that I remembered details only vaguely. Street level brought me to a barren road and a view of terraces crammed together along the ridge of Castle Crag. Sleet that gushed through the beams of lights clouded the air with a tawny haze. From behind the bulk of the Balmoral, the North Bridge spanned the Waverley Valley to touch the easternmost edge of the Old Town. In the west, the floodlit facades of cathedral and castle soared into the sky. Buildings had not relocated, of course, and footpaths had not changed directions, but absence, I realised, had dulled my recall of the substance and textures of things. All I’d preserved in my mind’s eye were silhouettes of static structures, the contours of a cityscape bereft of anything sensuous. All I’d carried with me was a lifeless arrangement of outlines, a flat panorama of arcs and edges bolted into their positions. What returned to the city as I moved on foot was what my movement forced upon it.

Tenements slowly shifted with each onward step, jostling for space on the rise of rock like restless birds on a telegraph wire. Those lower down, close to the street, cleaved to the slope at the foot of the ridge while those above them dallied eastward down the spine. Bound for the hither edge of the gardens, headlong into the deluge of slush, I watched their striations, all straight lines and angles, bend and warp, ripple and sway. Windowsills and pediments that stood parallel to the street sliced into ducts and pipes that ran to rooftops and gutters. Scraps of sky spread out and shrank in gaps between gablets and chimneys. Sandstone façades stole spires from view, and wayward turrets set crowns upon buildings too dun, too squat, to justly wear them. A left hook onto Waverley Bridge. A swale of wind through the valley slapped me with a chill. I dipped down the decline alongside the gardens and watched the ridge ahead rise up, watched it gather the buildings together and drag them into the sky like a swell of sea dragging flotsam towards the crest of a wave. Another left hook at its pedestal routed me back to the station. A moment later, with a shuffle along the footbridge over the empty concourse, I found myself returning, returned, to the base of the stairs rising up to the street and the blackness of the world outside.

Memory lapses with distance and time. That was where and when those words spoke to me. I didn’t know where I might go to get warm and wait for daybreak. That was when and why a piece of the past came back to me. Partway up to the road again, partway down to the platform, the staircase extends to a mezzanine where glass doors give onto a food court. Despite the locks and the shadows beyond the glass, there was no holding back the pulsing visions of what I knew lay inside. The twinkle of gilded tabletops, the bent legs of cheap aluminium stools. The sickening sweetness of frying oil, the floor smeared and spattered with grunge, and all of it embalmed in grim and flickering fluorescence. Often enough, too often perhaps, that hole had been a haven of mine, a space to sit out the cold and gather my thoughts and pull myself together. Standing there, though, I remembered a day when a cleaner, herself unclean, ambled over to where I sat and grunted out an eviction. Time to move on, my lad, she said with a rasp that ripped me away from my words. I remember I gazed up at her not knowing at first what she wanted from me. I’d moved there from a seat on the concourse when the concourse became too cold. I couldn’t see why I’d have to move again, much less why I’d been approached and asked to. I watched her squint at the looseleaf pages scattered over my table. Sprouts of stubble spotted a chin that lolled about on folds of fat. Foul brown stains begrimed her trousers; moisture at her throat had blemished her collar with streaks of grey. Only paying customers can use the facilities here, she said. Buy something first. Then you can sit.

She refused to listen when I told her I’d thrown out my coffee not even a minute ago. She refused to argue and simply said I couldn’t stay seated unless I paid up. What made the encounter so galling for me, aside from having already bought myself the right to linger, was knowing she had no need to confront me to force me up and out. I’d been sitting there for hours, as I did so often then, and I’d just been preparing to leave when the cleaner chose to approach. What made the encounter so galling was the itch of its indignity, the grating fact of being forced to sit there, to sit beneath her, and to bear humiliation at the behest of a person so pathetic. As suddenly as I felt incensed by her presence beside me, I also felt certain that she’d been watching her prey from afar for a while. She’d begun plotting against me long before she spoke, but she’d bided her time and awaited a false move that would give her cause to strike. The very act of walking to me and ordering me to rise from my seat swelled our exchange about rules and procedures out of all proportion to the venue and the offence. My misdemeanour was breathtakingly petty. It didn’t warrant the energy she expended on resolving it, it didn’t deserve the consideration she compelled me to give it, and as thoughts of this sort besieged me in the heat of that eternal moment, I felt brewing in me a resentment no less outsized for the encounter. An inner blaze reddened my face as I rose from my seat to push past her, to wade through the ecstatic glory of her conqueror’s aura, but until I returned to those stairs in search of shelter from the sleet, I’m sure my thoughts hadn’t dwelt on her since the day we’d clashed. I stared at the lock on the doors, the chinks of chain coiled over the handles, and I wondered then, as I wonder still, if that clash did not birth the sense of pursuit that has dogged me for so long I can’t properly measure the time. All I want, all I hope I might find, is a place to sit still and stay quiet awhile, but more and more often these days I’m certain I’ll always be a hunted man.