Cala Read online

  Muireall laughed. You think I’d part with this camper? she asked.

  Euna laughed, too, because it seemed like she was supposed to. Muireall pulled a large platter from the kitchen cabinet and opened all her wee wartime tins, then arranged brined gourds and oily fish on the platter, a limit of pear quarters around its rim. Bon appetit, she said, and they sat at the dinette together.

  Now Euna felt like the man out his nut, ready to vomit. Maybe Muireall had spoiled her so far, but this meal did not compare well to what she had been eating. Even the suppers at Cala, once the livestock had started to sicken, had kept to a higher standard. She wondered if she could tell Muireall that she—

  Hey there, hen, eat up, Muireall said. Someone gives you a meal, you down it. Don’t just sit there aff in dreamlain.

  Euna was embarrassed. She took some of the oily fish, so unlike the catches she had eaten in Pullhair, save the toy-sized eyes and scales. Muireall poured two tumblers of whisky, drank one down, and placed the other on the dinette in front of Euna. Euna thought of the man on the cobblestone, who had, mid-afternoon, pulled himself upright and stumbled into the sun, whistling ‘Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go’ as if nothing at all had happened. As if one could trundle on without repenting. She was nothing if not greater than him.

  Still, she drank the whisky down. It had a heavy bite, bitter and almost hostile, like that of horehound. Her throat burned.

  Muireall pulled a leather jacket similar to her own from the camper closet and pitched it at Euna. Put that on over your tunic, she said. Then we’ll go. Euna did as she was told. She was thrown by the whisky, a bit angry, a bit lusty, a lot ready to fight. She followed Muireall out of the camper and through the city, taking the flask from Muireall’s back pocket now and again, drinking a few mouthfuls as fuel. The walk was short and the night dark, and all she saw of Glasgow was its thick and central waterway, lights imaged in it as scrabbles and scrawls.

  Euna was crocked but still standing when they got to the venue, a warehouse with smashed windows and walls burned into skewbald. Out front dozens of kids in joggers and crop tops, or short plaid dresses and studded trainers, were smoking and cussing blue streaks. She mumbled to a girl with a septum ring, Bum one? With one last sip of the whisky, Euna was suddenly jaked, too tanked to stand or think sharp thoughts.

  Cigarette in hand, she smoked and coughed lung up and puked. Disgraced. Kid beside her hideous and trying to neck. Up the oil and tinned fish again. Muireall laughed so Euna laughed. But her mood was choppy loch. Muireall met friends, five or six of them. Suddenly she was speaking like the blackhouse man. Canty tae meet ye, she said. And then, Let’s hae some fin.

  Inside, the room was spinning. Each was in their body, flawless, swimming. Then came music, bigger than Moog, madder, all around her and in’er heart. Grime, Muireall called it. Faces like at Dungavel, all kinds of pale and melanin. Anyone from Sketimini? Euna screamed. The room was really rolling. That heavy beat. She felt nil. She felt all.

  Front row. Muireall’s friend had his hand on Euna’s péire. Too sluggish to struggle against him. So she huffed a bit in his blond hair. He ruffed it out. Whit is wrang wi’ ye? he asked.

  I wish I knew.

  He laughed. Weel, be cannie in haur, ye slag.

  Her skin was vibrating with the song. She saw other kids shoving so she shoved the guy who’d called her a slag. He shoved back. It was not like punishment, a cold shoulder or a ruler. Power moved between them. The man on stage said his name, Deliverance, and shouted out Aberdeen.

  Room spinning.

  Bodies swimming.

  A decade since anyone had mentioned her hometown.

  Then the punk band was playing, Deliverance on stage with them. Five of them jumping, wumping the whole warehouse. We’re Firth of Forth, the péire-toucher said.

  Next song was in Gaelic, Deliverance coming in with his Aberdeen slang. The sound meld. The hash of high and low, wild and slow, so grand. This was làn. Muireall held her hand all the way onto the stage, then, Sing. Little Gaelic ting. Sing. Euna did not know the wording. But she was grinning and eager and Yes I said yes I will Yes. She took a mic and blacked her brain out while her mouth worked. Crowd so loud her ears turned inward. A Gàidhealtachd, a kid called, elated. Muireall yelled, There’s yer pride!

  On the ground again, still full of làn. The world so damain beautiful. The room jammed with family, a fresh homeland. Her face would not stop smiling. Nothing would bring her down from this high, this shimmer, summit of glam and music. Then she puked by the subwoofer.

  From behind, someone held her red hair. Euna went unbent, wiped the spew from her lips, looked at the freckled hands. But no. But not possible. Aileen? And so pregnant. Her face different, fed in good fettle, full of light.

  How are you here?

  Aileen snorted. Had to back out of my mission work. I got scared. You know, it’s dangerous over there.

  Over there. Yes, it did sound distant and dangerous. Euna was thrilled the girl had stayed. Kept her face so golden, glowed by one growing inside. And nearer, the clear eyes, the queer way her lips curled, the sheer allure of her being there. She wore a fine necklace. Euna reined her in by its chain. Àillidh. Aileen. This was the first night of a life.

  IV

  By the middle of August, Aileen had left the boarding house in Possilpark where she had been renting a tiny, tick-ridden room. She had been sharing a low-income unit with a couple who would inject a drug Euna had not heard of, and then shriek at one another, make loud love, rake their hands over a guitar at four in the morning. All in the great, hanging heat of summer. All in the gloom and smother of Aileen’s new solitude. She described the place only as unspeakable. When she moved into the camper, which Muireall and Euna had parked semi-permanently in Castlemilk, it was only natural that Aileen and Euna would share a bed. After all, there was limited space, and necessity is the mother of affection.

  Castlemilk was not by any means a beautiful place, but Euna had learned that in the uniformly grey tenements and the uniformly grey faces there was a particular kind of comfort, if not actual kindness. She found the size of the district familiar, charming, and every time she passed the same dishevelled woman with her five kids in tow, or even the same ned in his red sportclothes, it would give her a kind of pleasure. Not to see them stuck, as some were, in poverty amber, but to know that in a world with such fogged edges there were sharp and constant points: red hoodie, child with snotty nose, grocery bag ripped at bottom, crappy old aerials on each building.

  She would have been rather happy, she thought, to stay within those frontiers entirely. She could have made quite a go of that. Mornings reading in the camper, afternoons buying groceries or doing the washing, evenings having a drink with her friends, every so often going to a concert. Only hitch was that Muireall frequently sent her and Aileen to do chores – walking all the way to the suburbs to pick up a particular kind of cake flour, or researching arcana at the library, despite how hard it was for Euna to read at a high level. One time Muireall even packed the two young women a picnic and rented them road bikes, although neither ban-Leòdhasach had learned to ride anything but a mare. Muireall never offered them a reason, nor a choice. On those near-daily occasions Euna felt that, for reasons obscure to her, she and Aileen were not welcome in the camper, and that did not sit well in her gut.

  It was a grey, faded day, and Muireall had just finished her crossword. Though she had been awake for several hours, Euna was pretending to sleep, so she could stay with Aileen in dreamlain. When they were awake together, Aileen was fitfully distant. Euna felt desperate each time she read aloud a paragraph about first love, almond blooms, linen canopies, hoping to receive affection and instead earning a laugh, or worse, radio silence. But when they were asleep, the small bed pressed their bodies together. All the warmth she had dreamed possible with Aram, or with any other person, moved over and through their two sleeping forms.

  Aileen bolted upright. Looks like mid-fecking-morning! she sai
d. Ye can wake me up next time, ye ken.

  Euna sat up then, too, and perched on the edge of the bed beside Aileen. Her back was stiff from lying for so long. Good morning.

  Morning, hens, Muireall said. She straightened up from the dinette and went to start her daily pot of stout, hard-wearing coffee. You’re in for a treat today. We’re going on a field trip to the library.

  The library – as far as Euna was concerned, one of Earth’s sacred scenes – was an hour and a half away by foot. A field trip meant a ride in the camper, and that was fine news. Euna started to sing a random soundtrack, hoping that by doing so she would subliminally move Muireall to start driving. Now that she knew they were going to the library, had selected its interior from her mind’s image archive, she could hardly stay still. When she was very young, this had been the trial of every Christmas morning: having pictured the roast in the oven, with its crest of thyme and moat of fat, she would feel as if a smaller version of herself were running around inside, in circles, restless, unable to unsee that one image. Each bided moment had felt then, as it did now, like a life sentence.

  I get your hint, Muireall said. She went to the driver’s seat and started the engine. Buckle up, loves, she said over her shoulder.

  On the drive, Euna watched the city through the fixed window. They followed the A730, a monotonous, single-veined road, its only grace a casing of wild cherry. Then as they came closer to the city centre, the road widened, leaving space for signs announcing barbers, pubs, surgeons, cemeteries. Muireall flew so swiftly past them that Euna, who wanted so badly to read every word, began to get aggravated. But then the steadiness of the non-colours, the sky and road and stoic buildings, pacified her.

  They turned onto Shawfield Road, bounded by a squat brick fence and immense streetlamps, all azoic and industrial – then, round the bend, the primitive river. It reached into the adolescent parts of her heart. The camper coasted over the river smoothly, on a bridge that was, though man-made, as mesmeric as the water. On the far side, again, grey bricks were only outnumbered by clouds, sandstone by wild drivers.

  She knew they were nearing the library when the business signs turned from cracked and peeling to freshly painted, revitalized. The city core was comelier than Castlemilk, where Euna had seen two menfolk running around with harpoon guns, and many others getting jumped and gashed and harassed, or else swigging from flagons in broad daylight. The only way she could understand the difference was this: thick of winter at Cala, her belly used to stay warm, while her hands and feet would go numb. When there was not enough blood to keep her whole body hot, it would pool in the centre.

  Muireall parked around the corner from the library and helped Aileen and Euna down the stairs. They reeled a bit, stepping onto solid ground after the feverish ride. Together they all turned the corner. Each time Euna saw among the many outdated buildings that single modern one, its face etched with the names of eminent novels, she brightened. For years she had believed herself to be the only reader on earth, the only creature strange or dissocial enough to need life support from lifeless things. And now a whole building had been raised to prove her wrong.

  Euna moved behind Aileen and put one hand on her love’s waist, the other on Aram’s child. Pretty magical, isn’t it? she asked.

  Waste ay fecking money, Aileen said.

  Hey there, quacking ducks, Muireall said with a laugh. Stop bickering. Play nice for the dead poets.

  Sorry, Aileen said, with an exaggerated curtsy. I’m going to blame my hormones. I’m glad you’ve finally found a welcoming place. You really went through hell back then.

  And what was that supposed to mean? Neck prickles. Sure, Aileen had seen Cala, on one of its most suffocating days. But she did not know the place at all, not the intimate way Euna knew it, not well enough to pass such casual judgement. They had been a family, and only someone on the inside of a family can salt and beat its laundry. So she entered the library feeling guarded, and miffed, and a bit homesick. But if she could weather this mood anywhere in the world, it was here, where in this massive archive there were bound to be a few books that spoke to her.

  The library’s smell calmed her. It was not musty, as she remembered, but sweet and lightly floral. She knew as soon as she came inside that she was safe. Muireall drifted to the poetry stacks – she lived for landscape verses, reading Li Po, Christina Rossetti to the younger women, which thrilled Euna no end – while Aileen grabbed a stack of comics and dumped herself, spread-legged, onto the middle of the hardwood. Euna knew a person was only allowed to read in a wing chair or else reclined on a daybed, but the librarian did not seem bothered by Aileen’s dumping. Euna stood in front of a random shelf and ran her finger along each spine, unable to read the words without also touching them. Her finger stopped suddenly on a paperback she must have overlooked on her previous outings.

  The Witches Speak. She had not seen it in its entirety since leaving the north, and now here was a worn copy, smudged by others’ thumbs. She stretched the belly of her tunic in front of her, making a hammock for the book, as she had for the prawns some months before. Farther down the shelf she found a volume called Malleus Maleficarum, subtitled The Hammer of Witches which destroyeth Witches and their heresy as with a two-edged sword. This one weighed down the tunic-hammock too much. Once it was in there, she barely had room for one more.

  She was attracted to a book with a title she could not understand, Le miroir des âmes simples. Were those words in a different language, or were they simply beyond her narrow English window? For once, the Bad Witch Muireall wasn’t there to help her read the big-girl parts. Still Euna was drawn to the book by a sort of magnetic pull, a heavy aura she could not ignore. So she took it into the hammock and then, having considered a wing chair, she splayed on the floor as she had seen Aileen do. The librarian looked at her longer than she had at Aileen, perhaps because her plopping down now seemed to be part of a trend, one of young people plopping, but she let Euna’s oddness breathe.

  Ploughing through The Witches Speak, she found that, in this new setting, the words she had once taken to be sacred were in fact fairly dull, full of holes. They failed to strike awe into her, and more importantly, they were not the divine truths they were masquerading as. They were just something a person had come up with and then written down. Anyone could have done it, even Euna, had she the assurance that people would read it.

  Before long she was on Malleus Maleficarum, which scared the cac out of her. Witches should be made extinct, it said, in essence. Over hundreds of pages he advocated for torture, for tying witches to pickets and burning them alive, in view of the public. Euna thought of Cairstìne, stalked and sunk to the bottom of the loch, and her cheeks started to bake. Near the back of the book she found an historical note. The treatise had been written by a German clergyman in the fifteenth century, after his sexual obsessions with an alleged witch caused him to be expelled from his home. A bit angry, a bit lusty, a lot ready to fight. Theologians called the work immoral, counter to demonology, but among the public at the time its sales were second only to the Bible.

  So it was written by a nutter, yes, but one who had appealed to, or at least intrigued, a whole nutter segment of the public. A significant one, it seemed.

  Hey, hen, Muireall said, snapping her fingers in front of Euna’s face. How’s the air in dreamlain?

  I’m sorry, Euna said, eyes still down. This book was taking me somewhere strange.

  Don’t read that shite, Muireall said. I mean, you’re an adult and you can read whatever you want and blah blah. But I’m telling you that book is torrid, blistering garbage, and a non-garbage person like you shouldn’t be wasting your time in the pish and tush.

  Now Euna looked up. You have a way of putting things…

  There was the twinkle in Muireall’s eye again, punch-drunk, wicked. Here lies Muireall, she said. She had a way of putting things.

  Euna laughed and snapped the book in her lap closed. Still she held its great leather weight t
here as a kind of mooring.

  Anyway, Muireall said, your girlfriend has somehow managed to fall asleep reading about mutant massacres. She pointed to Aileen, who was lying on the floor, an issue of X-Men tented over her. You should take her for a coffee or something, eh, pet?

  Come with us? Euna regretted asking as soon as she had done it. She knew the answer was going to be no; she had that unnerving and unnamed sense that Muireall was trying to get rid of her.

  I need to give the camper a bit of a tune-up, Muireall said. Take her for a cup at Papertrail and I’ll collect you both in a couple hours.

  Yes, ma’am. Should we pick up something sweet for you? I’ve seen how much you like black buns.

  Whoa, mistress of surveillance! Muireall said. It’s nice and weird that you know that. But nobody serves black buns outside of Hogmanay. I’d love some cranachan.

  Cranachan. The word ignited an ache in her. But Muireall was already trying to get rid of Euna, and she could not stand to push her friend farther away by telling that horrid truth. So she held the story of her childhood and the burning church. She held it like pee all night at Cala with Lili beside her, held it within her four walls, like Aram in the nearby castle. I’ll do what I can, she said.

  Muireall pulled a few banknotes from her jacket pocket and tucked them into Euna’s tight grip. Buy her a drink, okay? Something fancy with whipped cream. Gotta be nice to our loved ones so they don’t split.

  She winked and was off, leaving Euna on her own, anchored by the leather. She hesitated, then carefully moved it from her lap and onto the library floor, before going to kneel beside Aileen. She stroked the girl’s temples until she wiggled her nose in a charming and even tempting way, slowly waking up. What had made her seem grotesque in the pinched atmosphere of Cala, the far-apart eyes, the broad nose, now made her seem rare. And rareness, in this room, was something to be celebrated.