His home was in the west of the country, in the industrial heartland which was already failing, silting up with cheap fat, starved of energy, clogging and clotting and thickening and threatened. There he had lived, mum and dad and brothers and sisters and him, in a pebble-dashed house on an estate beneath the low hills, just within sight of the sihoke and steam-bannered chimneys above the railway workshops where his father worked.
His father kept pigeons in a loft on some waste ground. There were a dozern or more lofts on the piece of wasteland, all tall and misshapen and unplanned and made of corrugated iron painted matt black. In the summers, when he went there to help his father or to look at the softly cooing birds, the loft was very hot and its befeathered, dropping-spattered spaces seemed like a dark, rich-scented other world.
He did well at school, though of course they said he could do better. He came top in History, because he chose to; that was enough. He'd shift up a gear if and when he had to. Meanwhile he played and read and drew and watched television.
His father was injured at work and laid up for a year and half; his mother went to work in the cigarette factory (his sisters and brothers were old enough to look after the others). His father recovered, more or less the man he had been - maybe a little more quick to anger - and his mother went part-time until she was made redundant years later
He liked his dad, until he became a little ashamed of him, as he became a little ashamed of all his family. His father lived for football and pay day; he had old records by Harry Lauder and of several pipe bands, and he could recite about fifty of the best-known Burns poems by heart. He was a Labour man, of course, forever faithful but wary, always excepting the betrayal, the fudging, the lies. He maintained that he had never knowlingly drunk so much as a quarter-gill in the company of a Tory, with the possible exception of some publicans, who for the sake of the socialist cause's good name he rather hoped were Conservatives (or Liberals, whom he regarded as honourable, misguided, but relatively harmless). A man's man; a man who never walked away from a fight or a workmate who needed another pair of hands, a man who never left a goal uncheered or a foul unjeered or a pint unfinished.
His mum always seemed like a shadow compared to his dad. She was there when he needed her, to wash his clothes and comb his hair and buy him things and give him a cuddle when he'd skinned his knee, but he never really knew her as a person.
His sisters and brothers he got on with, but they were all older than he was (it was years before he discovered he was 'the mistake'), and they already seemed grown-up by the time he was of an age to become really interested in them. He was tolerated, spoiled and victimised by turns, according to how they felt; he considered himself hard done by, and envied those from smaller families, but slowly came to understand that in general he'd been more spoiled and indulged than tormented and made scapegoat. He was their child, too; special to them as well. They always looked delighted when he answered television quiz-show questions before the contestants, and were proud - and a little amazed - that he read two or three library books every week. They - like his mum and dad - would give a little smile and then a long frown when they saw his school report card, ignoring the Es and the VGs and tapping at the F (for RI - Religious Instruction; God the confusion he suffered for years because his father approved of atheism but not of doing badly at any school subject), and the PE (PE - he hated the gym teacher and it was mutual).
They went their various ways; the girls marrying, Sammy going into the army, Jimmy emigrating ... Morag did best, he supposed, marrying an office equipment sales manager from Bearsden. He gradually lost touch with them all, over the years, but he never forgot the sense of quiet, almost respectful pride which permeated their congratulations - mailed or phoned or delivered in person - when he was accepted for university, even if they were all surprised he wanted to do Geology rather than English or History.
But the great city, that year, was everything to him. The western hub, Glasgow and its heartlands, he would always be too close to, always have too many memories of, all jumbled up from childhood days out and visits to aunties and grannies; it was part of him, part of his past. The old capital, old Edwin's town, Edinburgh; that was another country to him, a new and wonderful place; Eden ascendant, Eden before the fall, Eden before his own long-desired escape from the technicalities of innocence.
The air was different, though he was only fifty miles from home; the days seemed to shine, on that first autumn at least, and even the winds and the fogs were like something he had always waited for, alternate scourings and coatings he underwent with a kind of happily pampered vanity, as though it was all for him: a priming and preparation, a grooming.
He explored the city whenever he could; walking, taking buses, climbing hills and descending steps, always watching and looking, surveying the stones and layout and architecture of the place with all the possessive glee of a new laird inspecting his lands. He stood on that stark volcanic remnant, eyes slitted against a North-Sea wind, and looked out over the swept spaces of the city; he forced his way through the thrown sheets of stinging rain walking the old docks and the coastal esplanade, he meandered through the jumbled erratics of the Old, he strode the clean geometry of the New, he wandered through the quiet fog under the Dean Bridge and discovered the village within the city in its not-yet-quaint decrepitude, and he strolled along the famous bustling street on sunlit shopping Saturdays, just grinning at the rock-rooted castle and its royal train of colleges and offices, an encrusted battlement of buildings along the basalt spine of the hill.
He took to writing poems and song lyrics, and in the university he would walk along the corridors whistling.
He got to know Stewart Mackie, a small, quiet-spoken, sallow-faced Aberdonian and fellow Geology student; they and their friends decided they were the Alternative Geologists, and called themselves the Rockers. They drank beer in the Union and the pubs in Rose Street and the Royal Mile, they smoked dope and some took acid. White Rabbit and Astronomy Dominé blared from stereos, and one night in Trinity he at last lost that technical ghost of innocence, to a young nurse from the Western General, whose name he forgot next day.
He met Andrea Cramond in the Union one night, while he was with Stewart Mackie and some of the Rockers. They went off without telling him to Danube Street, to a well-known brothel. Later, they claimed they only did so because they'd noticed this chick with granite-red hair giving him the eye.
She had a flat in Comely Bank, not far from the Queensferry Road. Andrea Cramond was an Edinburgh girl; her parents lived only half a mile away, in one of the tall, grand houses circling Moray Place. She wore psychedelic clothes; she had green eyes, remarkable cheekbones, a Lotus Elan, a four-roomed flat, two hundred record, and seemingly inexhaustible supplies of money, charm, Red Leb and sexual energy. He fell in love with her almost immediately.
When they first met at the Union they talked about Reality, mental illness (she had read her Laing), the importance of Geology (that was him), recent French cinema (her), the poetry of T.S. Eliot (her), literature in general (her, mostly), and Vietnam (both). She had to go back to her parents' house that night; it was her father's birthday the following day and it was family tradition to start the celebrations with a champagne breakfast.
A week later they literally bumped into each other at the top of the Waverley Steps; he was heading for the station to go home for the weekend, she was off to see friends after doing some Christmas shopping. They went for a drink, had several, and then she invited him back to her flat for a smoke. He rang a neighbour who would go round and tell his parents he was going to be late.