Cala Read online

  Some animal scraped the door, trying to enter the hut. Its claw fitted into one of the small holes in the wood. Mink, maybe, or marten. The farmer’s instinct was to wrap his arm tightly around her neck, an act both protective and threatening – a defensive hold or a headlock, she could not tell. The animal clawed and clawed, desperately trying to enter, and then it conceded. Euna heard its footsteps on the frozen ground as it withdrew. The farmer did not ease his hold, even when the animal was gone.

  His teeth were on her trap muscle. She liked the way it felt, until the bright stir gave way to a sting, a pang. She touched her fingertips to the place he had been feeding and found blood. Was this what people did to one another? She had learned of intimacy from her poetry books. Maybe that cut of love, tender, well considered, did not exist in the real world. For a few minutes, they did the forbidden act. It hurt, in part. Still, she had come through many seasons of non-feeling, and even a sting, a pang, did not bother her as much as that numbness had.

  When they were finished, he whispered in her ear, You’re a very special girl. Then he drew back completely so he was not touching her anywhere.

  She could barely turn to face him, she felt so defenceless. She pulled up her scalloped underpants. By the time she noticed the red on her thighs, the cotton had already absorbed it. She would need to set fire to these drawers. Muireall would know it was not yet time for her period – by now, they all shared a cycle. Fuil mhìosail. For five days Cala turned into a place of disquiet and mystic power, all that iron in the air.

  The farmer helped her back into her turtleneck, then gripped her chin lightly. She needed to get out of the hut and back to the farmhouse. Can you give me some prawns? she asked. I can’t go home empty-handed.

  He kissed her on the cheek. His voice was gentle when he asked, Do you have a few more minutes to spare?

  She knew the longer she was gone, the stronger the retribution would be. But the electric cage was lighting up again and so she looked through his eyes at the soft affect behind them and said, Yes.

  He rummaged through a suitcase at the head of the bed, eventually retrieving a fawn cardigan. Its arms he held out straight as pegs, waiting for Euna to enter. Then she was warm, warmer than she had been before that first pain of being nude.

  Come with me, he said. He led her by the wrist out of the hut. The world was, by any measure, deeply grey. And yet, emerging from that dank and carnal hut, it seemed to flame with colour.

  *

  The farmer led her to the edge of the sealoch. He had brought a very fine throw net, and he wrapped her fingers around its sanded wooden handle. You could learn to survive here alone, he said. All you need to know is how to catch your own food.

  Thank you for your help, she said. But I have true friends, so I don’t need to survive alone.

  I would like to count myself in that number, he said. I’m Aram.

  Euna, she said.

  And where are you from, Euna?

  She felt hot-faced, blasted by his attention. She turned the question quickly around on him.

  My father was from Glenfinnan, he said. He died when I was a kid, and since my mother is from Sketimini and they were never married, she wasn’t allowed to stay. We lived on a boat in the Atlantic. This is a special secret for a special girl, but my contract finished today, and I’m no longer legally allowed here.

  Euna had never heard of Sketimini, but she would not consent to sounding ignorant, so she stayed quiet.

  If you’re a citizen, he said, consider yourself lucky.

  She had never thought of herself as a citizen of anywhere. Nor had she thought of herself as lucky. I suppose so, she said.

  On the water she saw a primitive dock and some sharp, impassive rocks. No ships were tethered nearby. The salmon farm, a half kilometre east, was more densely populated with people and their trappings. Two dozen fishermen and seasonal labourers, a supervisor, all manner of heavy machinery, flits of light and activity. Down the sealoch she could see the scene more clearly than she had from Cala. And yet, where she and Aram stood felt so sequestered, the farm could have been a mutual hallucination.

  He helped her to cock her arms back, preparing to cast the net. And then they let it fly, the nylon free in the moorland clouds. They found the rhythm that had been absent from their forbidden act. The net broke the water’s surface loudly, and Euna felt a slight tug as the weights around its hoop moved deeper into the sea. Aram stood behind her now, clutching her just above the waist, around the middle ribs. He ordered her to drag the net back toward them. He functioned as an anchor. He did not help her do the work, but he made sure she did not lose her footing.

  In the net was an algal garland. Wig wrack poked through the nylon; maerl, too, in great red snarls. But not a single fish or crustacean, even on closer inspection. Let’s try that again, Aram said.

  Euna did not wear a watch, and this drab time of year it was hard to read the sky. She suspected it was late afternoon. Muireall and even Grace would be sitting on the daybed with stingers on their tongues, waiting for her to come back. She did not want to test their mercy any more than she already had. I’m afraid I have to go home, she said to him. I don’t really have a choice.

  Aram looked surprised. Doesn’t sound like much of a home to me, he said. He took his hands back, leaving her alone with the load of the cast net. She stumbled forward before managing to steady herself.

  Euna lowered the net to the ground. Though this part of the coast looked less grey than did Cala, she felt guilty for having poached the algae. Surely, unlike Euna, they served a greater purpose. But she was too frazzled to stay and throw them back. And sure, too busy professing with her body not to want Aram. The Life Grammar stated that a woman must offer a blessing instead of a goodbye, so she said, Slàinte mhath! Good health! She started to walk in the direction of Cala.

  She heard the sound of the net entering the water one last time, then Aram’s voice calling her back. He held out to her a net of prawns. Trembling, not yet dead. She stretched the belly of her turtleneck in front of her, making a hammock for their small bodies, like a mother entrusted with their survival. She had to get them home. She forced herself to move from Aram, alone on the crushed-rock road they had first walked together.

  *

  Euna’s strategy for coming home was simple. Do not skulk, do not slink, do not try to pass as invisible. Own your badness. So she let the front door of Cala slam behind her and stamped right to the pantry with her boots on to find a jar for the prawns. It was only after she found one and placed them gingerly inside that she noticed they were dead. She had failed to keep them alive. Or worse, she had killed them. She twisted the lid on tightly, then carried the container with her to the library, pausing briefly in the entry to unlace her boots and remove her wool apparel. Cac a’ choin. She was still wearing the farmer’s cardigan.

  In the library, she found Lili reclined on the daybed with a string in her hands. No sign of Grace or Muireall. Oh, Euna, Lili said, sitting up. I was so worried about you. Will you come play Cat’s Cradle?

  Euna sometimes envied the girl. Her emotions had the depth and span of a crustacean’s, coming and going with a nonchalance Euna found incredible. In Euna, feelings took root and remained, sometimes for days, months. The soot of her encounter with Aram was settling in her thoughts and heart. She was replaying her memories from the afternoon, from the time he kissed her to the time she said her blessing, when she noticed that Lili was hanging the string in front of her face.

  Are you going to play or not? she asked.

  Euna’s cold fingers had no sense left in them. It was a wonder they were still gripping the jar, but they were, and she managed to offer it to Lili. A distraction. That’s all the girl needed. She took that cold smooth and turned it in her hands. On Cairstìne’s shelf was a picture book called Where Do I Find My Kind of Blue?, in which a bluebird whose home has been destroyed by a forest fire flies from continent to continent, searching for birds who look like her, so
she can join their avian family. Lili’s eyes were wide as that bird’s. They’re dead! she said.

  Euna reached her hand out to touch the small of Lili’s back. The movement was mechanical, at first meaningless. And then, the longer she maintained that contact, the more warmth radiated from it. Lili, too, seemed to temper. The shame that had numbed Euna when she saw the dead prawns started to lift. She at least could care for Lili, simple, sinless girl that she was.

  The front door opened. Above its rasp and scrape was a more hostile sound, of Grace yelling. If I have to wear dirty underwear tomorrow because of her, Christ help me.

  Grace and Muireall stamped into the library, both red as fescue. Grace cursed at Euna, undressing her for all the Cala hours she had missed, while Muireall stood in a silence that was by its rarity unnerving. Euna’s hand was still on Lili’s back, and Grace forcibly removed it. You need to do the washing, she said. My clothes smell like the cowshed.

  Lili started to cry. This was uncommon in their home, not because they never wanted to, but because the Life Grammar dictated that no one in the coven should be that kind of woman. The rigour of some of the rules prompted Euna to think of her father, wedded to the Kirk, welded tightly to hard work and prudence. Likewise, here, a person had to steel all feelings.

  At first Lili cried in a stylish way, a modest gloss on her eyes. Then the tip of her nose turned pink and Euna knew a great ugliness was coming, just seconds before it did come, in gasps and wails. Lili slid down the daybed and onto her knees, bare beneath her playclothes. She sobbed until Grace struck her, backhanded, on the cheek.

  Then came a long silence. A complete lack of action.

  After a few minutes, Muireall said, Would anyone like some tea?

  The jar had rolled to the edge of their bearskin rug, which lay, lifeless and conquered, in the centre of the library. Euna had been too tired to notice Lili drop the prawns. Harshness was a sort of sedative. After a day of killing beeves, or backbiting townsfolk they had never met, she wanted nothing but to light a fire and recline in front of it, holding broth. Or empty-handed, bound by a flannel pall. Today she had that same sense.

  Lili got to her feet, with a hand from Grace. I’ll have some tea, she said. Her pigtails were messy, but otherwise she looked unharmed.

  The air in the room was gummy. Euna felt the way she sometimes did when reading a text by candlelight – the tide of tiredness dragging her down. She compelled herself to stand and walk up the stairs to the laundry hamper. At least she could do the task she had been assigned, strike it from their list of stresses. She separated the delicate clothes from the hardy ones, making two distinct piles on the sorting table. Through the floorboards she could hear the harsh whistle of the kettle.

  She did not, at least, have the impression that anything was lingering. Grace had screamed, and the passion had passed through their home. Nothing was simmering, everything had boiled over, the kettle had shut up and the Earl Grey would be steeping. She put the separated clothes into two reed baskets and, though it was dusk now and she could barely see, carried those out to the washing creek.

  In its water, she worked the clothes with her salt and flat-edged stones. She thrashed one jumper so hard its right armpit tore. Everything needed to be immaculate, to look as if it had never been worn by a body. She remembered the blood stains in her underwear, and she yanked off her trousers to remove them. There she crouched on the bank of the creek, naked from the waist down, shaking. She beat and beat and beat the underwear, using most of her store of salt. A thread of red followed the movement of the creek.

  She was crying. She must have looked deranged. Or as if she were doing a ritual, skyclad. But no one was there to see it, no mink or marten, even. She cried so dry that her brow pounded, her sinuses seared hard from the inside. She wiped her eyes, forgetting she still had salt in her palm, and then that hurt crept across her corneas.

  She stood so the pain would have more room to diffuse. Here she was, as Lot’s wife had been after looking at Sodom, turned to a pillar of salt. She should not have peered at that other life – Do not look behind you, nor stop anywhere in the Plain – and for her blunder she was going to burn.

  After a few minutes, her tears flushed out the salt. She looked down at the underwear and saw that the stain, though it lingered, had faded significantly. And so she crouched back down. And so she resumed her chore. And so.

  *

  The next morning, Muireall proposed they make a potion together, since they had not had a chance to properly celebrate Samhain. In her early days in the coven, as a little, excitable, impressionable kid, Euna remembered performing all the rituals they believed good sorceresses should. Divining with incense ash, sacrificing roosters, handfasting. She had been young, but even then she had noticed in Muireall an arcane streak. She seemed to receive a much stronger charge from these rituals than did the other women.

  Now they all agreed to make the Samhain potion, because these occasions had become rare. Their herbs were kept in a breakfront cupboard under the stairs, and they watched as Muireall selected them one at a time. Blood leather, bat flower, holy rope. Shameface, snakeweed. These herbs purred to Euna. In her long list of burdens and chores, heaving weeds and peeing in the cold and sweeping stone floors, she had forgotten how deeply these rituals had once affected her. They had spread wide the edges of Cala. With that spreading had come fear, of course. But in response to the fear, she had always grown greater, not shut down.

  Lili, Muireall said, heat up the kettle. Bring me some dry smoke and the largest container you can find.

  The girl clopped off. What are we making? Euna asked.

  Grace was herself again today, or rather, she was the Grace who showed through most often. On her lips was a bright rose tint, and on her high cheeks was a clear mineral powder, most likely crushed quartz. She looked radiant, runic. We’ll just have to wait and see, she said to Euna.

  No, we won’t, Euna said, noticing a pulse in her throat. We used to tell each other everything.

  LI. No resident of Cala shall discuss the past. And here was Euna saying used to, that criminal phrase. Easy now, Muireall warned her. Lili returned with the dry smoke and an amphora they once kept the oil they pressed in, before their rapeseed crops had withered and died.

  Here you go, Lili said brightly, oblivious to the mood that had started to settle in under the stairs.

  Thank you, mè bheag, Muireall said. This was another of Euna’s favourite endearments, baa lamb, in a kind of baby talk.

  She placed the amphora on their dining-room table, removed its heavy lid, and started to pour the herbs liberally into it. Euna wondered why she had asked for such a massive vessel. She could not imagine a need for so much of this mix. In the kitchen, the kettle started to screech again, and Lili ran to silence it, then came back to pour all of its scalding water into the amphora. She offered Muireall a long-handled spoon.

  The blend smelled like a goat barn that had gone a long time without being mucked. Theirs, Lili cleaned daily, fluffing the hay beds and forking the cac into a stack by the rockery. Otherwise bacteria could spread, or lice, and a dirty animal was of no use to them. Muireall lowered her face close to the surface and inhaled deeply. Beautiful, she said. Euna wondered if in the years of making perfume Muireall had singed the hairs in her nose.

  Grace took four ceramic bowls from the buffet and put them on the table beside Muireall. Instead of getting a ladle, Muireall dipped each bowl into the liquid one at a time, slopping herbs and hot water onto the unstained teak. Lili ran for a rag and cleaned what she could, though part of the wood had already rinsed white.

  Shall we drink? Muireall asked. She was holding her bowl to her lips, which had an odd sheen and crack pattern, as if covered in fish scales.

  To cleanliness and godliness, Grace said.

  Muireall paused. Though she left the troubling words untouched.

  The four of them drank. The wet bite was repellent, and immediately Euna started to retch. She
held the bile inside. Her body often housed things it should have expelled, hiccoughs and sneezes, so this was not hard for her. The others seemed to be fine with the bitter taste. Lili wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and then took another long pull from the bowl. They had not yet eaten breakfast. Maybe the girl was just famished.

  Euna continued to dry heave a few times, her mouth sealed. Had she been alone with any one of them, she would have admitted to the nausea, but in the group she pretended to enjoy the potion.

  When they were done drinking, Muireall put the lid back on the amphora. The rest is for the livestock, she said. They had gone from eighty goats when Euna first arrived to twenty; twelve cows to seven; innumerable chickens to a dozen. The broods were not surviving, and no one could say for certain why. Their hogs were long gone, and the stores of fat in their icebox were diminishing, at this point more slice than slab. Muireall had explained that the Cala land was not particularly rich and that growing a sustainable crop would be burdensome, if not impossible, so they routinely ignored the necessity of doing so. Her choice to make this brew today for the benefit of the animals showed prudence. Euna was dubious about its actual effects on the livestock, but the value of the ritual, the intention, she did not question.

  Do you want me to take this out to the animals? Lili asked, gesturing to the amphora.

  Yes, Muireall said. Make sure each one gets a good, long drink. Okay, my little tattie?

  Lili nodded. She ran to put on her rain boots and came back to retrieve the heavy amphora, tracking dried mud into the dining room in the process. Muireall did not seem to notice, and if she did, she stayed quiet about it. Her spirit seemed light, while Grace’s was ungainly. Did they carry a set amount of shade between them, and now it was Grace’s turn to shoulder it? Lili grunted as she lugged the amphora out of the house. Euna stacked the empty bowls and took them to the kitchen. It was not her duty to wash them this week, so she left them in the soak basin.