Two notes higher than regulation

Two notes higher than regulation. That's how mum's voice goes when she's loading the cannon. I could hear it from the first syllable — the lift, the breathiness, the performance. She's at a Lawnmarket café doing it into her phone like I'm a mark at a magic show and she's already picked my card.

Mary's hip has cancelled. Right. Mary's hip has been cancelling things since I was fourteen and it always conveniently lines up with mum needing something. Saturday I now have two women on the Royal Mile who will want tea and photos and to ask when I'm "properly on the telly." I said yes in a voice that was perfectly flat and perfectly adult. I didn't take the showcase swap. They asked. I told myself it was because of Mary. It wasn't entirely because of Mary.

The corridor handshake. Canadian booker. "You're the Pleasance lad, Debs told me about you." Pleasance lad. Not my name. My venue. My room. I'm a room with a body in it as far as this industry is concerned and somehow that felt like the best thing that's happened to me in three weeks. Debs texted me four words about it later and I screenshotted it into the Moleskine because that's who I am now. A man who archives four-word texts from his agent.

The 7:30 was good. Really good. I had a bit about my dad's shed I've been softening for ten days and it landed like a dropped piano and the front row did that exhale thing and I walked off and I didn't even feel the chest. Then the pint at the Pleasance bar I felt guilty for forty minutes and I still don't know what for. Maybe for being good. Maybe for the Soho thing I'm still not telling Yara while she's laughing on my borrowed sofa.

She spilled my Yorkshire Gold across the script I was pretending to read. I wasn't reading it. I was holding it so she'd think I've got somewhere to be. The teabag is in the bin. The sofa is hers tonight.

Saturday I'm building mum a Mary-proof weekend out of Edinburgh — Topping twice, the bus tour twice, the Witchery, anywhere that isn't my 7:30. She'll think the Fringe was just like that. Her boy finally doing well enough to take her places.

Rank: not a hold. A small yes.