Page 9 of Only One Tour Bus

Good that she’s leaving, anyway. I want to be alone. The bus will pick us up too soon and we’ll have to get back to work, but for now, there’s always something to see, admire, or learn about in Edinburgh. Even after living here for five years.

If I feel a bit off as Asha walks away, it’s only because I don’t like having to share my job with another person.

There’s no other explanation.

And since I wasn’t thick enough to give the group my number, I have a completely free afternoon, and I’m not gonna spend it worrying about Asha or the unexpected way she hasn’t been as bad as I thought she would be.

It’s still early days. I shouldn’t throw the woman a party for not being terrible before we get through another city. Or at least through tomorrow’s whisky tasting.

Since I haven’t been to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in a while, I walk to that building.

I enter the hall, and almost completely relax. It would be better for my state of mind if I wasn’t on tour, but this building and the history it contains does its part to smooth my annoyance. For a time, at least.

The brick hall with its pointy gothic arches leads to a medieval-style gilt fresco frieze above me. I always love seeing this piece, with famous Scots through history painted on the medieval style background. Romans like Hadrian, medieval figures like Robert the Bruce to Victorians like Thomas Carlyle. Togas, robes, suits of armor, whatever the Jacobeans wore with their puffy shorts, suits, and all variety of dresses from different time periods line the wall.

“Dr. Livingston, I presume?” an American accent behind me asks, and then giggles to herself like she thinks she’s Dylan Moran. And yes, Livingston, the missionary who got himself lost and then found, leading to that famous question, is on the mural above us. So I guess she thinks she’s right clever.

“Are you following me?” I ask as she moves into my view.

“Excuse me?” That stops the laughter, and now her hands have moved to her hips. She’s settling in for a scold. “Do you think I have nothing better to do in my limited rest and free time than to follow a grumpy grump to a museum? Just to what? Bask in the not-so-rejuvenating properties of your effervescent scowl?”

Oh, grand. It’s gonna be a long one.

I roll my eyes and send up a thanks that I’m at a museum and she can’t yell at me. But she is still talking louder than is socially acceptable inside such a space.

“Shhh.” I try to enforce the rules for the poor tourists, who were smart enough to pick a museum to go to in their limited time, and don’t deserve this disruption in their day.

“Did you just shush me?” Her voice is so incredulous you’d think I said the Earth was flat.

“We’re at a museum. Have you no sense, woman?”

She gasps, and reels back. “Did you just ‘woman’ me?”

“Are you gonna keep asking if I’ve said the things I’ve clearly just said?”

“Maybe. I haven’t 100 percent decided, to be honest.” Then she shakes her head like a dog shaking water from its fur. Apparently, it also shakes away her irritation with me, and she’s back to looking at me with a smile. Quite the change in demeanor. Kind of fascinating.

Kind of scary.

But now I’m suspicious, and I have half a mind to ask her what it is she’s bloody doing, smiling at me like that. All suspicious-like.

“No,” she says, then looks at me like that’s supposed to make sense.

“‘No’ what?”

“No, I am not following you. I happen to like history, as I have to keep reminding you because your opinion of me is insultingly low. And they do a good tea, in the interests of full disclosure.”

“Well, enjoy your trip to the museum.”

“Yeah. You, too,” she says awkwardly. But she’s not leaving. Why isn’t she moving?

Right. Because we’re at a museum and the hall is one of the most well-known parts of said museum.

I walk up the stairs, all the way to the second level where the older art is, because I much prefer it to modern and contemporary art.

As I walk toward the Jacobean rooms, I hear a ding and the elevator doors next to me open, showing Asha.

“Jaysus, again?” I throw my hands up.