Cala Read online

  And so Muireall had no choice but to switch her approach. Aileen, she asked, do you ever hunt for crossbills?

  Aileen covered her face with her hands. These, too, had the same creamy skin, but with flaked red knuckles and patches of ash across their backs. She did not speak. Euna was so tense all of her senses flipped. If it had rained then, the fields would have burned; if the sun had come out, the world would have been obscured.

  Mè bheag, Muireall said to Aileen, and her use of the endearment made Euna shiver. Do you ever use a rifle?

  Muireall was no longer stiff. She was in the stance she used when she felt impregnable, in total power, one foot slightly in front of the other and both big toes turned outward. Her pelvis was tilted toward the ceiling, her knees with generous give.

  I was starving, Aileen said. I left home three weeks ago. I was afraid my parents would notice I was starting to show.

  Euna stood and poured a glass of drinking water for Aileen. The girl accepted it with one hand and covered her face with the other.

  You’re sweet, Euna, but I wouldn’t be doing that, Muireall said. Not for her.

  Aileen downed the water like a workhorse who has been forced to travel too far. She put the empty glass on the tile beside her and explained to Euna, I met Muireall the other night, after you went to bed.

  The Moog circle. Euna had been so grateful to sleep alone, sheathed only by the sheets, at such an early hour. But her gratitude had clearly been misplaced. Nothing in life is free, her mother used to say, or else, Nothing in your life is free – she could not remember, though the distinction now seemed important.

  Tell her, slag, Muireall said. Aileen hesitated. Her lips looked wet now, as if she had mostly avoided her sore mouth when slurping the glass of water. Muireall held the girl’s chin again, fingertips firm against the bone, forcing words to move through her.

  We have something in common, Aileen said. When she then tried to retreat into silence, Muireall tightened her grip. I think we’ve been with the same man.

  Euna started to laugh. Or rather, her body made the sound without her consent or input, the way a stomach sometimes rumbles. You must have the wrong person, she said. I’ve never been with any man. More laughter, now from Muireall, which startled Euna. They had not talked about the day Aram came to call, and for all she knew, she had been unseen behind the compost drum. Surely if Muireall had believed him she would at some point have exploded at Euna, unable to repress what she knew.

  I shouldn’t be here, Aileen said, lumbering to her feet. She pulled up her skirt and down her sweater. I’m a damain mess.

  Muireall pointed at Aileen and said, She was with your Aram.

  Euna closed her eyes. What struck her about this leak was not how much it hurt and humiliated her, but the mundane wash it cast over their lives. They had spent years raising a castle, a stone fort in a forest of gorse, in order to make themselves feel exceptional, Other, even immortal, but it was clear now they were common women. Euna’s attraction to Aram was banal, was word-for-word in half the books that bloated the library.

  And worse, her perfect pet, whose absence had tortured her, was as cunning and devious as Judas.

  Euna opened her eyes and put a hesitant hand on Aileen’s abdomen. Is this his? she asked.

  Of course, the girl said. Either she was telling the truth, or she would not admit to having had liaisons with two different men. In a house of non-conflict, in a town of confidences, there was no way to know.

  She needs to leave right now, Muireall said. She seemed disarmed by Euna’s mild reaction to the news. Maybe she had expected, or even secretly wanted, a blowout. She looked at Euna now with a kind of fiery confusion, a face she sometimes made when vermin moved into the silo despite her attempts at perfect sanitation, or when draughts blew through the house despite her weatherproofing.

  If she goes, the baby could die, Euna said. She was the same age as Lili, and Euna would not dream of sending that wee girl into the world without someone to buff and file her nails, make her barley pudding, listen to her pulse each morning. Euna realized a moment later she was the same age, too – though life had forced her to grow at a much swifter pace.

  I’ll find my own way, Aileen said. Supposed to be catching the ferry first thing tomorrow. I’m flying out from Glasgow.

  Euna had forgotten about the girl’s trip and now, reminded, she felt a heave of envy. She had no sense of Glasgow, how catholic it was, how crowded, whether the streets were full of stray mutts or magi or mermaids rambling on two legs. Do they have hospitals all over the country? she asked.

  Muireall laughed at her again. Euna was starting to feel prickly, like a rosebush that has not been sung to in a very long time.

  They do, Aileen said. Of course, I wasn’t expecting to need a doctor.

  The cows in the shed were swelling, and in a few months they would be giving birth. Euna had been so surrounded by their fatty, arable vibes that she was sure she could deliver their calves with her bare hands. The moon had been full ten of the last twenty days, and no one could explain the phenomenon. They just knew some heavy energy was hovering. Maybe driven by this same energy, Euna offered to be Aileen’s handmaid.

  I don’t understand why you’re being so nice, Aileen said to Euna. What do you want from me?

  She did not know how to answer, mostly because kindness did not, to her, require an explanation. Muireall reached her hands into Euna’s hair, first combing it dotingly with her fingers, then pulling harder and harder, until her scalp began to burn white. What are you doing? Muireall asked in her ear.

  No one had questioned Muireall when she grabbed Aileen’s chin, or when she tried to ensnare the other two women in this charged conversation. And yet Euna was being scolded for her compassion, a value they had all once agreed, in initial and principle, to maintain. I’m just doing what feels right, she said.

  Aileen looked moved for a moment, as if ready to accept the offer. She made long eye contact with Muireall. Then her expression changed and she told them she had to leave. She took a handful of peanuts from a bowl on the counter and dropped them into the pocket of her pullover. This time, she didn’t climb through the glass. She unlocked the back door, attached to the kitchen, and stepped out onto the softening heath. Euna watched her leave. A wild light, gold, was casting its spirit on the knapweeds. Freckles of white buckwheat spread out across the moor. Here and there a puddle shone like milk.

  Muireall whistled, calling the other women into the kitchen. Grace came running down the stairs in distressed, grass-marked moccasins and a velvet evening gown. The effect of the two together was peculiar. She looked stunning but loosely hinged, even more so because this was not a solstice day, and the women were supposed to be in their uniform linen shirts.

  I heard sounds, she said, but I thought you might have wanted privacy. The straps of her dress were thin as the edges of peat spades. On either side, her flesh was lush despite the dry weather.

  You should have come down, Euna said. We just did something terrible.

  Muireall calmly opened the cupboard and took out some oatcakes. She chewed the biscuits in a way that disturbed Euna, letting them go sodden in her mouth, then mashing what was left with her lips. She had powerful, salt-and-soda teeth, and she was refusing to use them, though the sole pleasure of an oatcake was in its crunch. Meanwhile Grace was chewing her middle finger like a mutton bone. Gnawing and gnawing, as if hunting for marrow. What happened? she asked, hangnail in her fangs.

  The minister’s daughter came here with child, Euna said. She needed help. And this sea monster… Euna noticed little globs of beige on either side of Muireall’s mouth from the mashed oatcake. Then she could see nothing else.

  Grace said, Oh, that girl. Yeah, she came last week.

  Euna’s face started to simmer. A hot froth was forming under her skin. Now it was glaring: the Life Grammar, which she had taken as gospel, and which she had only violated a few times – shame like a slip noose – meant very li
ttle to the other women. She had never read the Scottish constitution, and had, on Muireall’s command, forgotten the Holy Writ. In the void that had followed, she had embraced this one code with faith and piety, binding herself to the words.

  Oh, that girl.

  Piss off, Euna muttered.

  Careful, Grace said.

  Grace was happy if the raw weather did not give her dandruff. Or if she had a velvet gown to wear. Hers was a selfish existence, and that might have been well had she chosen a wolfier life, but here, where even small acts affected the wealth of flora, fine-tuned salt levels in the sea, it was entirely unjust. Even cruel.

  The back door of the kitchen opened and in came Lili, a crow feather in her mouth. Camp and cold-blooded, the Cailleach, she pulled the feather from her teeth and licked its quill. Though windblown, she was in uniform, her hair wiring out from once-deliberate plaits. I was hungry, she said.

  Euna stood looking at her world.

  Were these women brutal? Worn to the bone? Haunted by devils? Had they simply, over time, turned antisocial?

  The constant cold temperature. The years of peeling potatoes.

  It was said about Cairstìne Bruce’s end that the residents of Pullhair had used spectral evidence against her. Those who suspected her of witchcraft claimed to feel the presence of wicked spirits when they were near her. Euna had pored over the book on witch hunts in the library; the striking part had been about waking the witch. Before seventeenth-century trials, suspects were deprived of sleep, so that when they were called to defend themselves, they had started to hallucinate. Even the most refined women would by then have turned feral, telling outlandish stories. They would confess to sins they’d not had the pleasure of committing.

  Lili had started to retch into the soak basin, which Euna had spent half an hour filling with well water that morning. Grace went to the cupboard and chose a small bottle of calendula extract, which she made into a tonic for the ill girl. She poured the drink past Lili’s loamy teeth, humming a folk song they had once upon a time used to control her night terrors. Hush, sweet baby, she said. It’s going to be okay.

  Now nothing was rational.

  Everything was notional.

  Certain things were felt.

  Euna could not pinpoint the moment it had happened, but some feature inside her had been recarved. Mountains in the Highlands had been cut when the Cailleach dropped rocks from her wicker basket. So it was natural that over time Euna had lost some of her crags and earned others. She stood in that kitchen cold as a mirror, with the only women who had ever really known her, and felt the light and shade of their presence. In morning light, a mountain may look indestructible, a seat of the ecclesiastic. And in the shade? After years of driving rain, a thicking and riching of the soil, it would not be hard to imagine a landslip.

  III

  Late June, the mood of summer hung over Cala like a damp comforter. To move through the days took force and time. In the stone house, beside the sealoch, the air was a trial the body could barely stand.

  It was in this atmosphere that a postcard arrived, dank, nearly unreadable. The postman came when Euna was alone with the newborn calves, a luck-stroke in a life of only occasional breaks. She did not want to think what would have happened had he come to deliver this postcard when she was in the latrine, or in the cowshed with Muireall. She tucked the postcard into the silk band she had taken, recently, to tying around her breasts. She had spent enough time with the cows and their flooded udders to be bothered by the unused shapes stuck to her own chest. Breasts were for mams. By the end of the year, somewhere far away, Aileen would be free to go silkless.

  Euna sneaked into the greenhouse to take the postcard from her silk band. Though humidity had made the pen marks run, she could still fill in the faint words. Aram was being held at Dungavel Castle, a detention centre in South Lanarkshire that he described in the card only as unspeakable. She thought of their afternoon on the pier, when he said his life in Scotland was precarious. She had not known how immediate that truth was. On the postcard, there was a smear of brown below his signature, some human yield, cac or fuil. She slid the card back into her band before trimming the maidenhair fern and returning to the farmhouse for dinner.

  There she found the other women around a set dining table. She could feel the postcard above her breastbone, a charm, a talisman, as she took her seat beside Grace. Lili served supper, oatmeal potatoes and cold seaweed, and in silence they all began to slurp and chew. Euna could not concentrate. She was wondering what Aram was eating, if he was eating at all. She saw him dipping coarse, black bread into water, licking mushed soy from splits in his palate. She had never been to a prison, or any state building – save the one time, as a young child, she’d accompanied her mother to apply for a passport so she could look for a new life abroad. As soon as they’d stepped inside the government room her mother had started to sweat, to hold Euna’s forearm too firmly. Before long she’d declared the line too long and they had gone home to their television trays, never to try again.

  After dinner, Euna cleaned everyone’s plates, scrubbing until her knuckles were cracked and pale. As she disinfected the dishes, she felt no fear or excitement, only slow, abiding certainty. She could not live here any longer. Knowing that a man, even a duplicitous one, was expecting her; knowing that hundreds of songs, and ripe crops, and fit stock and fauna were living in the greater, greener country. Perhaps this quiet sense of yes, of cool sureness, was what she had heard referred to as faith.

  Her chore finished, she massaged Muireall’s shoulders and helped Grace into her nightclothes. She wanted her last moments with them to be kind, not for her conscience but for the future trim and humour of the house. To Lili, whose hair she brushed at length, she whispered, There’s more life out there. Maybe the girl would decipher the message, or maybe she wouldn’t. No one had spoon-fed Euna anything. And though Euna was a good woman, even a good woman could bend back far enough to make herself resentful.

  When the others were sleeping, she stepped out onto the heath. In a knapsack she carried the few things she had managed to gather in secret – a sweater, some smoked beef and trout, an extra pair of socks, a few pages from The Witches Speak that moved her – and, for safe measure, a letter-knife. Whatever else she needed in order to survive, she could find on her way. She imagined all the women of her lineage had done this, using stones and teeth and sex. She imagined Aram’s mother had crossed acres of ocean in a catamaran.

  Euna walked overnight to Stornoway, then, having no notes, sneaked on to the early-morning ferry to Ullapool. There, the world seemed huge already, with its fishmonger, its massive, white-painted hotel, its charming bookshop. But she did not have time to linger. She needed to get to Dungavel. Euna walked down the only road she saw, following the Loch Broom, jumping into the ditch each time a car came too close around a hairpin turn. One question roiled in her. Why had she spent a decade referring to herself only as a bana-bhuidseach, a sorceress, when the self she’d started to know was a redhead, a reader, a lover of goats and greenhouses, among fuller, richer things? Why had she been so willing to take Muireall’s word?

  The effect of those choices had not been neutral. Whenever she passed a house on her journey south, lit from the inside, she longed to knock on the door. She wanted so badly to talk to somebody that her throat burned, a blazing stake. But even with a body signal so hard to ignore, she could not bear to knock. She was not a witch any more. And not yet a fish. And not near to a real woman. And how could she speak if she did not have a single one of these voices?

  For hours, she followed the long arc of the lake. Back at Cala, using the map on the library wall and her rudimentary maths skills, she’d figured it would take her four days of nonstop walking to get to Dungavel. Accounting for sleep and slips from the straight line – she would need to hunt hares, most likely, and bandage her blistered feet – it would take her close to a week. So she would be there in early July, just a few weeks before Lughnasadh,
the glad beginning of harvest season. By then each holly tree branch would be clotted, heavily, with berries. By then the tramping and humidity would have made her ugly, too, but this no longer concerned her. She wanted something deeper than to be desired.

  *

  Two days later, Euna saw the sun rise over a sign for Etteridge. She had not taken a single break to sleep, and she had started to walk the fine edge of delirium. Her thoughts were grazing widely and wildly, her inner drone gone weird and non-linear. She wanted to stop by the side of the road for a few strips of jerky and a nap in the marram grass. Cloud for a pillow, cloud for a duvet. Having moved through two full summer days, she had already proved herself strong as the stock and fauna of Cala.

  Oh, then she started to miss them.

  She longed to see the two mares running toward her, their manes permed and blown, fresh from the beauty parlour.

  Or the cattle in their enclosure, udders swelling with milk, udders swelling with humbugs and Soor plooms.

  Or the sheep out on the heath, their bubble-coats so pretty and white, gathering sticks to play games of shinty.

  She welcomed these hallucinations. They were company, after all, and she was alone on the road. The morning was foggy and grey, though at the moment she did not trust her distinction between eye and air. Maybe the day was rainy, or maybe she had started to cry. Maybe she was a sheep with silver sad all down its face wool. Or a dark morning of some war size. Or all the longing in the world, long johns, long and longer eyelashes, long and longer and longest memories, maybe this had all poured in when her sleepless body opened.

  Well, she thought, I’ve woken the witch.

  A man passed her on the road, wearing glasses with drops of condensation on them. Euna was grateful for this sign that it was, after all, raining. She had passed many cars and few pedestrians, so she had not yet spoken to a soul. This man said, Guid morn.

  She tried to speak but could not. She was too uncomfortable to make a sound, as if her tongue were coated in a fur that she could not remove with her fingers.