"Edinburgh in August runs on flyers, bagpipes, haar, and nobody getting any sleep"
Callum McLeod, 27, from Inverness, has spent £4,200 he doesn't have to bring his shouty stand-up hour Loch Mess to the Edinburgh Fringe. He plays at 11:05 a.m. in the Cupboard, a former keg store in the Cowgate with twenty-two plastic chairs and a boiler that clunks on every punchline. Yesterday four people came. He sleeps, or tries to, in the Tolbooth, a twenty-bed Quiet Dorm up a 340-year-old turnpike stair off the Royal Mile. The Wi-Fi password is HaudYerWheesht. Then Barry Fenwick falls asleep in his front row and snores on every punchline, and for eleven minutes Callum is brilliant.
Barry is a Doncaster bus driver on his nineteenth Fringe, with a lanyard of tickets like armour and a laminated four-colour spreadsheet. He sees seven shows a day, sleeps in all the best ones, and is the kindest man in the building. He is also the source of the noise that has kept nineteen strangers sitting up in the dark every night, lit by their phones like a jury. Naledi, Callum's WhatsApp writing partner, arrives from Cape Town, recognises the white disc on the ceiling, and gets the only free bed: bunk two, directly above Barry. A dorm-mate's video of the snore, The Doncaster Chainsaw, goes viral overnight. The dorm votes to ask him, very kindly, to find somewhere else, just as Barry walks in carrying nineteen teas. A ghost guide tells them about the Snoring Souter of 1788, smothered in the same attic, with all eight of his lodgers found Not Proven. One night Barry wakes up gasping and swears a giant robin sat on his face.
Then a leaflet of twelve snoring remedies appears on every pillow, and everyone in the Tolbooth quietly picks a number. Senga, the manager, finds that the Hub has booked a farewell ceilidh she can't cancel, and it's locked her out of her own event. Callum's show is finally turning into what it was always supposed to be about. On Friday night the Tattie Bogles strike up Strip the Willow in the basement bar, and the free drams keep coming. Twenty people climb the turnpike stair to the Quiet Dorm, and not one of them expects to sleep.
Age: 27
Type: Inverness stand-up with an audience of four
Fatal Flaw: Performs rage for an hour when he's actually just sad
Role: Protagonist
Age: 52
Type: Doncaster bus driver and Fringe superfan
Fatal Flaw: Snores at 118 decibels and takes it as a compliment
Role: Victim
Age: 28
Type: Cape Town comedy writer turned co-writer
Fatal Flaw: Can flyer a stranger in four seconds, but can't sleep above a chainsaw
Role: Ally
Age: 64
Type: Day manager, accordionist and Leith institution
Fatal Flaw: Can reduce a stag party to tears using only the word wee
Role: Keeper of the building
Age: 34
Type: Night-desk man and former back half of a pantomime horse
Fatal Flaw: Takes the complaints at 2:14 a.m. and a Caramel Wafer at three
Role: Night manager
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Haud Yer Wheesht"
At 2:14 in the morning, on the second Thursday of the Fringe, the phone on the front desk of the Royal Mile Rest Hostel rang. Duncan Rennie knew before he picked it up that it would be Mrs Lumsden.
"Royal Mile Rest, Duncan speaking, how can I—"
"There is a man," said Mrs Lumsden, "sawing through your building."
Dunc put down the Tunnock's Caramel Wafer he'd been saving for three o'clock. He was thirty-four. He had trained at Queen Margaret University for three years and done eight Fringes. In one of them he had played the back half of a pantomime horse in a Kafka adaptation. He had worked the night desk here for two years, and he knew what a Mrs Lumsden call sounded like. The complaints were about hen parties singing "Loch Lomond" in the close. About a Hamlet rehearsing in the bins. About an American who had once stood under her window at four in the morning and shouted, with his whole heart, "I LOVE YOU, SCOTLAND," and then been sick into her window box.
This did not sound like one of those. And he'd been off all week, for his cousin's wedding in Kirkcaldy and the four days of recovery a Kirkcaldy wedding requires. This was his first night back.
"Sawing," he said.
"Sawing, Duncan. I've been listening to it since one. It's coming through the wall. It's coming through my wall. My wall is two feet of Craigleith sandstone and it went up in sixteen-eighty-four, and I can hear it in my teeth." She paused. "It's not a saw, is it."
"I'll go up and have a look, Mrs Lumsden."
"You do that, son. Take a torch. And a priest."
She hung up. Dunc looked at the phone for a moment. Then he looked up.
Up there on the dark oak beam above reception sat a small white disc about the size of a hockey puck. It had a thin ring of soft blue light around its edge. It had come in March with the new owners, a London company called Kip & Co. Hospitality. The lady from Kip & Co. said the words guest-journey optimisation four times in one sentence and got the name of the building wrong twice. The disc ran the door codes, the heating, the lights, the booking system, the telly in the lounge and the till in the bar. It was the FreeToWander Partner Hub. It had been installed, the lady had said, for guest convenience.
Senga, the day manager, had taken one look at it and called it Nessie. "Because every tourist in this city swears blind it's watching them," she'd said, "and naebody can ever prove it."
Nessie glowed down at him, blue and calm and pleased with itself.
Fictional reviews of the fictional Royal Mile Rest Hostel, quoted from the book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Great location! Walls are SO thick. Senga is a legend." — FreeToWander guest
☠ "118 dB. exposure: high. thank you for wandering." — @HostelReaper
☠ "quiet hours are 23:00–07:00. some guests observe them. variable noted. the fringe is fully booked. nobody is going anywhere. risk accepted. ☠" — @HostelReaper