The Glasgow of my childhood was darker and grimier than it is today. The city council has been trying to pull it up to the standard of other European cities. They have dug the buildings out of their layers of industrial soot and uncovered some beautiful sandstone structures from centuries past that soar against the skyline. Once you get in from the horror of the council estates with their anonymous grey rows of houses, you find the Glasgow that was meant to be: museums and parks, rows of Edwardian houses on tree-lined streets. They have put up glass and modern architecture now, cleaned the river, and declared the city a center of art.
I park the car and sit for a while, because there is time, and because this is, after all, my city, the one that educated me and fascinated me all those years ago at Christmas with the lights around George Square and along the rows of shops. You caught the double-decker bus into the city center and sat upstairs at the front, feeling the lean of the bus around the corners, the crash of branches, and the giddiness that this was as close to a fairground as you’d get.
I wind the window down, because Glasgow has its own smell, a remnant of the days of coal dust, as though a fine black mist still sat in the air. I watch the Glasgow people, secure in their working-class look, in their dialect, safe in this city made rich from the days of slave trade. They are who they are, the Glaswegians, nothing more, and it makes me wonder why it was never enough for me, why I couldn’t be another head-scarfed woman with my husband and my shopping bag, leaning in against the wet wind that comes off the Atlantic up the River Clyde, where old shipyards lie silent and rusted now, a vestige of former British glory.
Oliver and I meet in the hallway outside the solicitor’s office and stand awkwardly, looking at the opaque glass of the door that bears the solicitor’s name. He looks different without me, not the way he did when we first met, but middle-aged different, trying to hang on to something that has nothing to do with me. He looks a bit balder, more fussed over.
Oliver looks at his watch, one that I gave him for his birthday a few years ago. I look at it and see it in its box. I even see the saleswoman who sold it to me. He sees only the face and the time and the conversation to be made in between.
He says. “I think we’re a bit early.”
I notice how his hair has receded past a mole on his forehead that I didn’t know he had.
He asks me how the thesis is going. I make it sound as though it’s coming together much more than it is. I make it sound as though counting the deaths of witches is much easier than it is. I mention nothing about my trips to old Dunadd.
He says, “Glad to hear it.”
He looks at his watch again. He asks me how life is at Dunadd, only he calls it Duntrune and I have to correct him.
He says, “Isn’t it a bit lonely all the way out there?”
“No. Well, it could be, if it weren’t for the cat. And for Jim Galvin.”
He shifts his feet. “Who’s he?”
“A local historian, quite an interesting man. Do you know the sea used to come up to Dunadd?”
He doesn’t answer, because there’s a pattern here we both recognize—me asking random questions, him seething over the waste of his time. I wonder why he doesn’t mention the operation, since he was always driving me to get it done. But I suppose it has no purchase for him anymore. I’m in this by myself.
We do the deed in the solicitor’s office, and afterwards we shake hands in a thoughtless act that ought to make me seethe. Why I have to wipe tears off my face with a half-dissolved tissue in my car later, I don’t know. It might be relief. But I do miss our house in Kelvin-grove. I miss that it was safe for a while. We sold it and split the profit. It’s what’s keeping me going at Dunadd these days; though probably like a cat I would be fine “courying” down between the bales of hay in the barn. Fergus’s people would have no argument with that.
One more stop before I leave Glasgow: Dr. Javed Shipshap, my neurologist. The name itself ought to make me laugh, but I have never been close to humor in the lift up to his floor of the medical building nor along the echoing corridor to his office.
He’s jovial. Indian. Always seems glad to see me. “And how have you been, Margaret?”
I expect he sneaks a look at my chart for the right name seconds before I enter. I remind him that I am recently divorced, as evidenced by my visit to the solicitor this morning; that I am no longer Margaret Griggs but Maggie Livingstone; that I have moved away altogether.
He nods. “Just as well under the circumstances.”
But what does he know? He probably had an arranged marriage. It makes me smile to think of him dancing in Indian dress under rainbow canopies. It makes him smile to see me smile.
“You’re looking well, Margaret.”
We run through the medicines, dosage, effects, all that. Everything a rerun of previous visits. He reminds me of the date of my operation. The third of January.
“You’ll barely have time to get over your New Year’s hangover,” he says happily.
I tell him I’ve been having unusual dreams.
He looks curious. “Oh?”
“I mean, I always have had. But these seem more vivid somehow.”
He nods. “Well, epilepsy is really the great unknown. Once the brain goes into overdrive, there’s no telling what it might throw up.”
This is new territory for us. “But what about things that the brain couldn’t possibly know?”
His laugh is a bit condescending. “Ah well, we never know what our brains pick up on a subliminal level—something we heard but didn’t quite register, things we’ve downright forgotten. A lot of clairvoyant claims by epileptics can be put down to this, I think.”
All right, he’s gone as far as he’s going to go. I back off.
“Are you sure everything is all right?” he asks.
I sigh. No, everything isn’t all right, but most of it is out of his expertise. “If living in a fog is all right.”
He places a hand on my shoulder. I can see the very line in his textbook where this is suggested. He says, “Margaret, after the lobectomy, life will be so different for you.”
I hate the word lobectomy. I wish he wouldn’t say it.
He bites the inside of his cheek. “You know they have refined the surgery.”
I have heard all this before. “There are no guarantees, though, are there?”
I shouldn’t corner him. He’s only a doctor. There are things he can say, and “no guarantees” isn’t one of them. But I have read the literature. I know this operation works 85 percent of the time. It is brain surgery, after all, and things can go very wrong. I could end up with no speech, for one. But what is almost certain is that I’ll lose my dreams.
He gathers up the leaflets and brochures as though I were about to take a holiday in Spain. “Here. Maybe these will help allay your fears.”
I glance at them over lunch, somewhere off the motorway between Glasgow and Edinburgh. I have to admit, the thought of never having another “episode” is compelling. But brain surgery isn’t. I don’t like the idea of my brain being tweezered out of my skull by some specialist in brain removal.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I hear Oliver say. “They only remove the diseased part, nothing that functions well now in any case.”
Edinburgh is a different city from Glasgow. The capital city smells of hops and breweries, for one thing, a sort of sour Edinburgh smell. It housed Scottish royalty after they moved from Dunadd, and the industrialization that left its scars on other British cities left Edinburgh unscathed. Whatever accommodations were made for workers have been well hidden, and so Edinburgh held on to its sense of grandeur and never had to dig itself out later from anything.
Graeme’s school is in the outskirts, among grassy playing fields and long leafy lanes of respectable stone houses. It looks more like a medieval castle itself, with a dome over its clock tower and little onion domes and turrets everywhere else. He comes running down a sweeping stone staircase, looking happy and wavin
g to me in the school’s car park. I watch him in the rearview mirror as I park, and I can hardly square this seventeen-year-old with the little boy who once fit so easily onto my lap. There’s a photograph in one of the many albums of him at about three years of age, looking backwards over my shoulder at the camera, holding on like he knew that’s where he belonged. Now he belongs here apparently. Holding him, slipping my hand onto his rough man’s cheek, I wait to feel the familiarity. I wasn’t good at balancing the love of the firstborn with the protection of the afflicted second. Perhaps it was an act of self-defense for Graeme to pull away into his own world, such a little world as it is, this life of the boarding school. It used to be an establishment designed for making men out of boys, but nowadays they are making men out of girls, too.
I’m obliged to hold conference with the headmaster, who in his high turreted study and flowing black robes so readily embraces the stereotype for masters of establishments such as these. In my convent school, flowing black habits held sway, thick black cloth that smelled of cupboards and things hidden away. The headmaster pats my shoulder as I’m leaving and tells me they are expecting great things of young Griggs. Such a sharp mind, such clear ambition. He will bring glory to his alma mater. I mutter that he is a clever boy, because Graeme is waiting for my comment, and I begrudge it only because of the masters in black urging him along their path.
Nobody urged me. The black habits wanted nothing but compliance. Chastity, humility, while in secret corners we sang the Beatles: “Oo you were a naughty girl, you let your knickers down.” Naughty, hot things snickered at behind the door of the school bathrooms. Or you could become the Bride of Christ and take all that stuff and lock it just behind thought until it leaked and drenched your habit, swishing down the corridors of nice girls and brides of the church. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.
I shake the nice man’s hand, but I refrain from thanking him. I take my son’s arm and walk myself back outside, where lines of stuffed blazers make their way to the cafeteria.
I look at the rumbling navy sky. “You’re doing well. I’m proud.”
He sends me a side glance. “But you wish it was Ellie, don’t you?”
I look at him and wonder what I’ve done. He has to look away because the truth of what he says is on my face: I would like to have swung into this car park and been greeted by my rusty-haired daughter at seventeen in her blazer and sensible shoes, watched her ponytail swing at her back as she walked. I would like to have shaken the hand of her headmistress and heard how bright she was and how far she would go.
I clear my throat. “If I do, it’s only because it can’t ever be again. You know that.”
He nods. We are on eggshell ground. He says, “I’m doing it for her, too, you know.”
I want to prostrate myself and sob into the concrete. He won’t look at me, can’t bear the catch in his voice, and tries to smile for the passing boys he is accountable to. Graeme never really cried when Ellie died.
I eat dinner with him in the school cafeteria. Such dreary food, nothing quite fresh but trying to be. It makes you wonder what you’re paying all this money for. Graeme says it’s better at the weekends. He says his dad came down last weekend. It’s news to me.
Graeme has never seen me in the grip of a seizure, so for all good purposes I am a normal mum, except that after Ellie died, nothing was ever normal, though it tried hard to be. It was for him, no one else, that I moved through those days after she died, washing dishes, cleaning toilets, unable ever again to pick up the book I had been reading the day it all happened. Oliver was moving through his own layers of oblivion that were different from mine, in some different corner of the universe. But I had to stay on for Graeme.
“Let’s go for an ice cream,” I say. “There’s something I want to show you.”
Graeme shakes his head. “I’d miss study hall.”
He’s taking on the wider vowels of Scotland’s upper classes, no Glaswegian scrubbers here. Not that we come from a family of scrubbers. My mother didn’t scrub. She managed a cake shop on Argyle Street, and not any old cake shop either, but one that had been in business since Victoria. It required that she leave home every morning in a smart dress suit and a Sunday hat, and me in the care of Mrs. Gillies from St. Kilda in her Gaelic world of fish and bannocks. Her flat always smelled of fish.
I smooth a loose strand of hair back from my son’s forehead over the little scar from the chicken pox he had when he was seven. “How about tomorrow?”
He agrees to take the period off before lunch, which will give us two hours. I hug him quickly and then drive away, feeling like a mother abandoning her newborn on the steps of an orphanage. He’s seventeen and thinks he has a right to live by himself like this. Perhaps he does, but I can’t see it in the waving figure that grows smaller in my rearview mirror, and then disappears altogether.
I am a woman alone in a hotel at the city center, nothing swanky, just the basics that a travel lodge will provide. A cup of tea with artificial milk in foil containers. I sit on the bed I did not make but hope the maid changed between the last occupant and myself. I suppose you would never know unless you came across a dried patch of something. For imagined reasons like this I sit on top of the bed, drinking my tea and watching a film on television that made me cry when I was Graeme’s age but now just seems silly. The dying girl says, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” I almost blush for having thought this profound, but I suppose at the time it stood in contrast to the nuns telling me I should be sorry for everything, especially myself. I watch the film to its end, for old time’s sake, but fall asleep without undressing and wake while it’s still dark outside my window and the river of city traffic has reduced itself to an intermittent stream.
Five o’clock. The red numerals of the bedside clock declare the time and the fact that the television has been humming pictureless for the past few hours. And six hours of sleep will have to count as a good night, which it is for me in a hotel room, with or without clean sheets. The brewing electric kettle in its small hum says I am not alone. I take my tea to the window and look out on the gathering traffic, which I suppose is no less living than my river at Dunadd. And what does any of this have to do with an eighth-century Fergus conjured out of my need for something warm to wrap myself around? All these cars and the wars about oil and the age of reason, which slaps your hand for even thinking of times before it held sway. Fergus seems more real than this nothing flow of life from beds to clock-in to cocktails to beds.
Eating in restaurants by yourself is uncomfortable, no matter that it is a hotel restaurant and many others are feeling the same in their own circle of solitude—men with their newspapers, women with their phones, all trying to be someone by themselves, which is not easy, for we are social animals no matter how you look at it, no matter that some of us don’t run so well with the pack.
You can’t help but like a city that has only half a main shopping street, one that is dedicated to gardens and castles and maroon-colored double-decker buses. Edinburgh just seems to have its priorities right. I wander around a wintry Princes Street Gardens, then warm myself with a proper cup of tea in a saucer on the third floor of Jenners, the posh department store. A bookshop on the way back to my car cannot furnish the English-Gaelic dictionary I have been after, but it does have (on sale) a Gaelic phrase book.
As I sit in the school car park waiting for Graeme, I flip through the book, trying the unlikely pronunciations. Whatever Gaelic I learned at Mrs. Gillies’s knee leaves me dumbfounded when I look at it written. Gaelic was an oral language until the nineteenth century, and it shows, because this mess of letters seems to bear no relation to the sounds it makes. On top of that, this is modern Gaelic, concerned with trains and shopping lists. There’s relatively little for nature in its rudeness as life was lived on St. Kilda, and certainly nothing for Dunadd in the Dark Ages. Instead of asking for the wine list, please, I could use an idiom to explain how I am battered and bruised from
my dealings with men, how that look of Fergus’s makes me feel that he has bruises of his own. Rather than knowing how to ask the whereabouts of the nearest launderette, it would be useful to find the words for how available this man might be. Just in case I need to know.
I barely recognize Is math ur faicinn, which means “It is good to see you.” I have to close my eyes and say it before it sounds like what Mrs. Gillies would say to me after the weekend.
Graeme knocks on the car window in his tie and blazer, pleated trousers, polished shoes. I would like to loosen that tie, let in a little air.
He gets into the car and says, “Did you not sleep?”
I laugh. “That bad, eh?”
He shrugs. “No, I just know you and hotels.”
I smile that he still knows me and anything. “It was fine. I fell asleep during Love Story. How about you? How do you sleep with all those other boys snoring around you?”
He bats my knee. “Two other boys, and only one snores. I’m used to it. What’s the book?”
I hold the little phrase book up to him.
He laughs. “Does no one speak English over there in Argyll?”
“Some of them don’t,” I say, and leave him to figure out what he can’t figure out. At any rate, these Gaelic phrases are not going to help me out much with eighth-century Scots from Ireland. I start up the car and hand the book to my son. He lodges it between his thigh and the seat.
We head back into the center of Edinburgh and park at the Holyrood end of the Royal Mile. The street is narrow, cobbled and ancient, and still gives a feel of the crammed quarters people used to live in, with its tiny dank allies and its Tudor-like top-heavy buildings. Most of it these days is given over to tourism, and with Scotland’s noble castle at the highest end, there is no helping that. The castle is built on a knobby hill, much like Dunadd, though this knob is bigger and the fort grander. It used to be called Dunedin, for good measure, but got turned around, as so many things did, under the influence of the English.
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