Cala Read online

  CALA

  Laura Legge

  www.headofzeus.com

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part 1

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Part 2

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Acknowledgements

  A letter from the publisher

  First published in the UK in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Laura Legge 2019

  The moral right of Laura Legge to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (HB): 9781788547451

  ISBN (XTPB): 9781788547468

  ISBN (E): 9781788547482

  Typeset by e-type

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  We are working all the season, boat near to boat in the nights,

  And danger may come on us quick, no time to stand upon rights,

  When our hands are net-cut, and our eyes as sore from the spray,

  How can we think of our neighbours except in a neighbourly way?

  ‘The Alban Goes Out’, Naomi Mitchison

  One fisherman alongside the other

  one seagull alongside the other

  seagulls over the fishermen.

  ‘Congregations’, Omar Pérez

  Part 1

  I

  In Pullhair, a small village in the Outer Hebrides, there was a church, a school, and a fire station. The school and the fire station were seldom used.

  In Pullhair, also, was a stone farmhouse, known by the four women who lived there as Cala, haven, and by the villagers as Gainntir, place of confinement. It faced the sealoch and on the rare clear day, one could look toward the mainland and imagine herself connected to a larger body. If she were so inclined.

  The four women of Cala sat in its dining room on the autumn equinox, wearing garlands of ash and hazel, visible to one another only by candlelight. It was a few years into the twenty-first century, but their leader, Muireall, had banned all modern implements from the house, including electricity. On the walls hung cords of redcurrants, and on each plate sat a small finger puppet, knitted by Lili, holding a nametag. She, like Euna, had been exiled to Cala when she was eight, and it was as if the stone walls had preserved her exactly as she had been then, a child-fossil. After a decade together they did not need the nametags, but they indulged their sweet girl, or ossified her.

  Most days they wore grim and identical outfits – linen shirts, tweed trousers, an optional sweater for heat – but on each equinox, they were allowed to embellish. Today Muireall was in a leather jumpsuit, one that bound her skin tightly, and a gold chain at once necklace and body harness. Pass the food clockwise, she said.

  Euna, who had chosen to wear the linen and tweed, now submitted to Muireall. She passed bowls of foraged hedgehog fungus, sea lettuce boiled into stew, blaeberries blended into curd cheese. Everything they ate came from the Cala grounds, barren though they had been lately. Euna was used to these lean meals, but she still cleaved to her image of an equinox feast. She asked Grace, Is there a roast coming?

  Grace tinkered with her necklace, moving its moonstone pendant left to right, jerking the chain until it seemed to choke her. Euna knew the answer. Their most recent butchery had been of a cow, in early summer, which they had skinned and hung in the icebox. But like all of their meat stores, those bones had gone bare. Muireall, who assured them she was the only one with powers, oil-chumhachd, had been angry for months – ever since Euna had started to ask questions about the world outside of Cala, and worse, outside of Pullhair. The women now stopped passing bowls and held hands around the table, a custom when they sensed one of their coven was feeling ashamed, or lonely, or low. Through those points of touch, Euna felt a kind of unalloyed love move, and when they let go, she saw that Grace’s face had changed from dull to polished.

  I checked the icebox and the outbuildings, Grace said.

  Muireall said, Don’t worry, lamb. We always find a way.

  A few weeks before, Euna had noticed a new fish farm a kilometre down the coast. Just past the patch of wych elms she had seen lights, then heard men’s shouts and motor mowers across the water. And a strange thing had happened – one man had seen her staring, all those metres away, and he had waved. He had not turned away, or spat, or called bitch across the water. He had waved. Euna had not been allowed, nor had she wanted, to leave Cala in the last decade. But now the seed was in her, she was tending to it.

  Open Forum, she said. They conducted Open Fora when they wanted to do anything that required others’ consent, no matter where they all were, in the latrine or around the dining table. They would run to the sound of any woman’s whistle.

  I noticed a new fish farm down the seaboard, she went on. I could go there and see if they would give us any shellfish.

  Grace said, ruffling Euna’s long red hair, That sounds a bit frightening, doesn’t it, bana-churaidh? This had always been Euna’s favourite term of endearment – heroine, female champion – and Grace knew that.

  It does, Euna said. But we’re starving here.

  Muireall pronged potatoes into her mouth and chewed on them. She dug the tines of her fork into her forearm, just below the stiff leather cuff, though her face remained calm. What have I always told you? she asked. We’re not welcome there.

  Yes, Euna said, you have always told me that.

  Muireall had inherited this farm from her ancestor, Cairstìne Bruce, who had been drowned by neighbours for practising witchery in public. She had been skyclad, culling the sea for kelp for a ceremony. Some of those neighbours were still living, filling the eaglais pews each Sunday, or so Muireall had told her.

  After everything I’ve done for you, Muireall said, you call me a liar.

  I’m sorry, Euna said. I didn’t mean to insult you.

  Though Euna was being vinegary, unlovable, Grace was still stroking her hair. Euna teemed with shame. She had lost her appetite entirely. It’s okay, Grace said. But no more of that talk.

  Under the table, Euna could feel Muireall’s foot hook around her calf. Above it, her expression shifted from friendly to unfeeling. Go ahead, she said.

  But you’ve never let anyone leave, Lili said. Not even to go swimming. Not even that time you gave us henbane and Euna saw a kelpie down the loch.

  Muireall took a handful of fungus from Lili’s salver and put it into the girl’s mouth, pretending tenderness.

  Euna, you were always trouble, Muireall said. You have never deserved all I do for you. If you want to risk the good life you’ve been given, go ahead.

  The shame came chopping up Euna’s stomach now, waves in a wind storm. She did not say sorry for fear she would eject her meal, and that would seem ungrateful,
after Muireall had spent so much time at the farm edge, foraging.

  When they were all finished eating, Euna made a slow show of licking the plates clean.

  *

  That night, she had the nightmare that had been recurring to her since she was a child, since the day it really happened. She and Lili were seven years old, living in Bucksburn in bordering houses. Their fathers, who were brothers, were rigid and religious. Hard work, self-control, economy. At night, their mothers would get rat-faced and rubbered, for reasons then unclear to the girls. Never enough money for milk or meat, always enough for white cider.

  To go to the church that night? It had been Lili’s idea.

  They rode their bikes past the old stone houses, the dispensary. Lili had pink streamers on her handlebars and a clear pack full of pastel crayons. Under the world’s grey roof, she was the only bright furniture.

  They were going to eat the treats reserved for the after-service fellowship, some shortbread and cranachan. That was all. To warm them? It had been Lili’s idea. In the dream, lighting the gas flame, Lili’s face was sweet and juvenile, brave. But after they ran outside, and were watching the old church burn to the earth, her face looked as it did now, ten years older, still watching.

  Alarms, demonic. In the dream it was a farmer who came first, a warm man from down the road who said, It’s not your fault, you’re only children. In truth it had been the police who came first, then Euna’s and Lili’s bewildered families, and over time the neighbours, the other folks of Bucksburn, who egged their houses, broke the windows, set fire to effigies of the girls.

  Her father’s shame in the dream was so heavy that Euna now felt flattened, as if a body were sleeping directly on hers. And the body, passive and impossible to lift, was steadily stifling her breath.

  Euna woke to find herself gnawing deeply on her down pillow, her mouth overfed with feathers. In the same bed, too close beside her, Lili was sleeping untouched. For the rest of the night Euna lay awake, sifting through memories of the past. Muireall and her then girlfriend, Grace, had read the news story and come to rescue the two girls; Euna’s and Lili’s fathers had been willing, if not thrilled, to let this happen. Muireall had called it her mission. Mission. Mission. Euna said the word in her head so many times now that it completely lost meaning, the way a problem held too close or too long can be leached of perspective.

  Cala was the down pillow, deep in her mouth, and she needed air. By the time the sun made pink streamers of the clouds, she had decided to go out, just for a few hours.

  She slipped from the house while the others were sleeping, as she often did when she felt the urge to do something illicit, like carve distress signals into her skin, or kneel to pray. She followed the lochside, a straight route to the fish farm, clear of Pullhair. Each time she started to shake or turn back, she thought of the man waving. He had not said anything so lavish as Welcome or You are forgiven. But he had shown she was not grisly or worse, invisible. He had proved to her she still existed.

  *

  Inside the Scottish Salmon Company hut she found a man, maybe forty, in a torn and tawny sweater. A prawn caught in his belt buckle, a langoustine clinging to his longest finger. She held herself at the threshold.

  What a day for Euna to look ugly. Roseate from the wind across the heath, still dressed in tweed, hair a nest not fit for sparrows. Though the farmer was covered in dirt, she was mortified to be so grimy in front of him. She licked her palm and smoothed the nest as best she could, then pinched her lips to bring the blood nearer to the surface. At Cala, only Grace was allowed makeup, so Euna had learned the body’s own beauty tricks.

  May I help you? Beautiful ban-Leòdhasach, are you lost? He flung the sea creatures away from his fingers as she took a step inside the hut.

  I’m sorry, she said. She was aware of how strangely she spoke, as did the other women in the coven. Over time they had settled into a common accent, fish hooks at random places in their sentences, highs where they did not belong. She thought she heard a brogue when he spoke, too, but she was not confident enough in her standard to mention it. I was hoping to buy some salmon, she said.

  He laughed and clapped his hand between her shoulder-blades as if they were old friends. We don’t sell fish here, he said. They do sell it at the guest house in town. Your best bet is to ask one of the kind women there.

  She was stunned. Surely everyone in Pullhair knew her, she-spirit, young hag, a badhbh who needed to be sealed in her stone house so everyone could sleep at night. But here he was, chapped and compassionate, telling her to ask the women in town. She wondered if maybe he was new to the Hebrides, shipped in for a few months to fish. She was roused by a sudden energy she had not expected to feel – he did not know her from Eve, so in front of him she had the remarkable power to rewrite herself.

  Thank you so much, she said. I’ll try that.

  If you’re stuck, he said, come back. This land is fertile. No pretty girl should go without. He winked.

  Strange. Cala’s acreage had been bleak for so long that the women were starving. And he was saying the land here was lush?

  She left the hut with a wave of her empty hands. On the long walk back to Cala, she gathered what she could, hawthorn for their hearts and juniper for their gin cylinder. She was exact with the trees. With her penknife she severed the branches, separated the berries from the wood. She would be saddled with two kinds of guilt if she came back with nothing, for failing at her task and for trying to earn a stranger’s attention. One of which was shameful, the other of which was forbidden.

  Euna noticed she had nicked her finger while pruning, leaving a crescent of blood above her nail. She had thought herself precise, adept, in perfect control. Yet somehow the knife had slipped.

  *

  Inside the farmhouse, Euna struggled to read The Witches Speak by candlelight. This was one of the many peculiar books Cairstìne had collected in her lifetime, which, together, formed Euna’s exposure to the broader world. She squinted. She thought her eyes had grown used to the house’s mood after all these years. But now she could not discern goddess from goodness, ritual from rightful. And the harder she worked to focus, the wetter the word-edges got. In much the same way, she strained to forget the fish farmer, and in so straining, the farther he bled into her.

  Lili lowered her hand by the candlelight, casting a cat shadow onto the stone wall. She ran the animal across that grey span, then forced it to heel and beg for scraps. Euna did not laugh. This was a very old game. All of their games were. This one, sgàilich, was especially stale. Only Lili liked it, and so she was forever acting out shadowplays, recreating the one or two harmless experiences she remembered from her life before the coven. Euna felt an urge to burn her friend’s hand on the open flame, not to punish her, but to give her a new story to tell.

  You don’t want to play? Lili asked. She was dressed in her pink playclothes, which she kept in a chest by the firebox.

  Most days Euna would have joined in on this round of sgàilich. She hated to hurt Lili by saying no. Now she said, Leave me alone.

  She saw herself in the door of the hut, hair loose.

  Want had washed her feral.

  Piss off, Lili said. The cat shadow curled into a circle, and then disappeared from the stone. Euna could not look at her friend directly.

  The farmhouse had a kitchen, dining room, library, and pantry on the main floor, and two bedrooms upstairs, a canopy bed and a fanlight in each. So they would not grow overly attached to any particular friend, the four women had agreed to rotate beds on a monthly basis. For the month of October, Euna and Lili were to lie, tightly, in a single. And though Euna was desperate now to go upstairs and think about the fish farmer, she knew that bed could hold no secrets. Instead she took her turtleneck from the wool basket and went outside, so distracted she forgot to wear boots. Her feet unfelt the heath.

  The women held ten acres. Euna walked across their plot, past a gorse copse and a range of rusting farm tools. She
was headed for one of several outbuildings – the others being the latrine, sheds for their cows and goats, and a silo, all rundown past the point of even rustic beauty. She was going instead to the greenhouse, an architectural anomaly in this town of stone and timber, an all-glass address. There life bloomed well beyond its backcloth. Colour endured. Seasons burnished and then bleached; with that building, she had a living relationship.

  It had been foolish of her to step outside barefoot. Her toes, death-cold, no longer seemed attached to her feet, and her soles stung. Then she came to the greenhouse and forgot quickly about her body. The flowers and ferns were her only focus. She pushed open the steam-sealed door.

  Who goes? a voice asked.

  Oich. Damataidh. Even in the dark, Euna could see Muireall’s shape, tall, all torso.

  Euna said her name out loud. It sounded odd, as if she were trying to get her own attention. But then, perhaps she had been. Muireall came ruffling through the toad rush. She was wearing her slippers and her half-slip.

  In the Life Grammar, a book Cairstìne had conceived and then bound in a flesh of leather, were two hundred rules for a coven she had always wanted to run, but had never been able to, in want of converts.

  Euna had learned to read in Sunday School until she was seven, and then she had studied the books at Cala on her own. For some of the more difficult language in the Life Grammar, she relied on Muireall’s explanations. For instance, CXX. No resident of Cala is to be out gallivanting after nightfall. This is to protect all women from feelings of jealousy and abandonment. And moreover to protect them from the prying eyes of the villagers.

  Euna, it’s dark, Muireall said. You should be back at home reading.

  I got sick of that, Euna said.

  So you came here to pick some peonies? Muireall asked. Or nibble on a head of cabbage?

  Suddenly Euna felt very naked, though Muireall was the one in the half-slip. She hid her bare feet under a mandevilla bush.