Free Veil of Time by Claire R. McDougall Page B

say, “I have to go down to Glasgow. Would you look out for Winnie for me?”
    He shakes his head. “Look out for a cat? If the entire human race were to vanish tomorrow, there’d still be cats scrounging off any cow in the field with a leaky teat. She’ll be just fine courying down between the bales in the barn.”
    I’ve had enough of him now, and take his empty mug back. “I’ll be gone for a week to sign the decree absolute on my divorce and visit my son at school in Edinburgh. There’s some cat food in the cupboard under the sink. The door’s unlocked.”
    After he’s gone, I shake myself and do what I’msupposed to do with the correct number of pills to get myself back on course for that drive to Glasgow. I don’t want to see Oliver, but for this last time I have no choice. All he has to do is sign I Do , then I sign I Do, and then the marriage is finished in the way it was started.
    The signature in any case seems perfunctory—it’s not the way marriages really end. The end is something more like a slide from no determinate point that leaves you wondering if you ever loved, if you ever knew what love was. I don’t know now if we ever loved, Oliver and I. Everything was aflutter for a while in the beginning, and the children brought a sort of bond. The rest seemed like a long process of finding out who each of us really was, and I suppose we didn’t like what we found. In the end, losing Ellie was too much for either of us, and it all became just a bog, a numbness, a nothing.
    As I step up to second gear just after that stone bridge, something makes me look back over my shoulder, maybe hoping for a glimpse of Fergus? But all I see is a straggle of tourists taking the hike up to the fort in single file, going up to the footprint where the kings were crowned, though not the king of Scotland in my dream. I think the Scotland of my dream is before Scottish kings, before Christians, or else Sula would not be giving counsel to men in fine clothes. The Sulas of that day could not have guessed what was waiting around that historical corner.
    After an hour on the road, after stopping at the supermarketfor crisps and Ribena and jelly babies, after a little contact with people at large, I begin to worry about myself. I have never played around with dosages before and certainly never tried to induce a seizure. By the time I hit the traffic along the cement walls and the garages outside Dunbarton, I am beginning to wonder if I should go back to Dunadd. Before I reach Glasgow, I pull off the motorway at a café and sip a latte by means of preparation for the ordeal ahead. May it be quick and easy. May Oliver not engage me in social niceties. May he not say I am looking well.
    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-deckerbus 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