Jack couldn't find the cinema house, which his mom had maintained was "within a stone's throw of Persevere." But Rory remembered where the local cinema had been--it was now a bingo parlor called The Mecca.
Elsewhere on Leith Walk, there were convenience stores, which Rory called "corner shops." While Leith Walk appeared largely residential, there were pubs, and places serving carry-out food, and the ever-present video stores. Young people seemed to live here, many Asians among them.
Alice had once spoken of her excitement upon first seeing the Leith Central Station, when she was a child, but the former station was now the Central Bar, where Jack's sister played her wooden flute. Rory said that strippers had performed there as recently as the late seventies or early eighties. It was midafternoon when Jack looked inside the Central; there were no strippers. The jukebox was playing Frank Sinatra's "My Way." Smoke blurred the tiled walls and the long mirrors and half concealed the high Victorian ceiling, which was heavily patterned.
At the intersection of Constitution Street and Bernard Street, there was a ban
k on the corner and what looked like a shipping agency. Jack and Rory crossed a bridge over the Water of Leith and ran into Dock Place. Jack remembered the song his mom sang, if only when she was drunk or stoned--the song he'd first heard her sing in Amsterdam. It was his mom's mantra, he'd thought at the time--to never be a whore.
Oh, I'll never be a kittie
or a cookie
or a tail.
The one place worse than
Dock Place
is the Port o' Leith jail.
No, I'll never be a kittie,
of one true thing I'm sure--
I won't end up on Dock Place
and I'll never be a hure.
Jack's Scottish accent needed practice, but he sang the song to Rory, who said he'd never heard it before. As for Dock Place, it didn't look like such a bad place to end up--not to Jack, not anymore. (The "hures," if they'd ever been there, had moved on.)
Rory drove Jack back to the Balmoral, where he had a late-afternoon nap. He slept for only two or three hours, but it was enough to shake the jet lag. After dinner at the hotel, he walked out on Princes Street and asked the doorman to recommend a good pub in Leith. Jack didn't want to drink, but he felt like sipping a beer in the unnameable atmosphere of his mother's birthplace. (Maybe he was pretending to be his grandfather Aberdeen Bill.)
The doorman recommended two places; they were both on Constitution Street, very near each other. Jack took a taxi and asked the driver to wait--he was sure he wouldn't be long. The Port o' Leith, where he went first, was small and crowded; it was a very mixed bar. There were the obvious regulars--locals, old standbys--and sailors off the docks, and young students having their first glass. (The legal age was eighteen, which appeared to Jack to mean sixteen.)
The ceiling was a mosaic of flags; on the walls, there were ribbons from sailors' hats and life preservers from ships. There was a KEEP LEITH sign on the mirror. The barmaid explained to Jack that this was a political issue--in response to an unpopular plan to rename Leith "North Edinburgh."
Jack declined the offered bar snacks--something called "pork scratchings" among them--and sipped a Scottish oatmeal stout.
Farther down Constitution Street was a cavernous Victorian pub called Nobles Bar; it was as empty as The Port o' Leith had been crowded, but even with the mob from The Port o' Leith, Nobles would have seemed empty by comparison. There were no women in the bar, and fewer than half a dozen unfortunate-looking men--squinty eyes, pasty complexions, noses of all sorts. Jack deliberated between ordering a Newcastle Brown Ale and something called Black Douglas; it didn't really matter, since he knew he would finish neither. Jack Burns couldn't remember the last time he'd been in a bar and no one had recognized him; now, on the same night, he'd been in two.
Back at the Balmoral, Jack had a mineral water at the bar, where they were playing Bob Dylan's "Lay, Lady, Lay." The old song, which he'd once liked, took Jack by surprise. He'd been saying good-bye to his mother, never suspecting that nothing in Edinburgh, the city of her birth, would resurrect her--not the way Bob Dylan could bring her back to him every time.
"Are you here for the Festival, Mr. Burns?" the bartender asked.
"Actually, my mother was born here," he told the man. "I just spent a little time in her old neighborhood, in Leith. And my sister lives here. I'm meeting her tomorrow." Jack didn't say, "For the first time!"
He had arranged to meet Heather the next morning in a coffee shop called Elephants and Bagels on Nicolson Square. This was less than a ten-minute walk from his hotel, and very near her office at the university. The music department offices and practice rooms were in Alison House on Nicolson Square.
Jack walked along North Bridge, over the train yards for British Rail. He passed the big glass building on Nicolson Street, the Festival Theatre, and turned right into Nicolson Square. He was early, as usual. In Elephants and Bagels, Jack sat at a table near the door and ordered a mug of coffee. An advertisement for the coffee shop said: THE BEST HANGOVER CURE IN EDINBURGH.
The walls were painted a bright yellow. There were plants in the windows, and a glass case filled with elephant figurines--carved stone, painted wood, ceramic, and porcelain elephants. A large, round support column was covered with children's drawings--birds, trees, more elephants. The coffee shop had the educational yet whimsical atmosphere of a kindergarten classroom.
When Heather came in the shop, Jack didn't at first see how she resembled him. She had short blond hair, like her German mother, but her brown eyes and sharp facial features were Jack's, or William's, and she was both lean and compact--as small and fit as a jockey. Her tortoiseshell eyeglasses were almond-shaped; she was as nearsighted as her mother had been, she explained, but she refused to wear contacts. She hated the feeling of something in her eyes. She was waiting to be a little older before trying the new laser surgery. (She told Jack all this before she sat down.)
They had shaken hands, not kissed. She ordered tea, not coffee. "You look just like him," she said. "I mean you look less like Jack Burns than I thought you would, and more like our dad."
"I can't wait to see him," he told her.