Cala Read online

  Ur ye okay? he asked. Een a bit bloodshot. He pulled a flask from his jacket and offered it to her. He looked quite young and then quite old, first ten, then seventy-five, a schoolboy then a grandpa, then a schoolboy again.

  She shook her head. He took her hand. Can ah offer a warm nest tae sleep in? he asked.

  This grandpa child wanted to be sweet to her and that was a very, very welcome thing after two days and at least ten years of loneliness. She could not use her fur-tongue, so she let herself go limp and pleasant, hoping he took that as assent. It seemed to work. He helped her climb over a fence and then led her down a little stream a few feet, or maybe a few miles, to a blackhouse.

  He had a cot in one corner and a cat in another. A Bunsen burner and a few flannel shirts. He told her to rest in the cot while he boiled water for tea. The cat’s coat changed from pink to sparkling silver so fast Euna felt sick. The blackhouse reeked of rum and currants. She struggled to stay awake, to drink this warm offering, but she was so feverish she was going blind. Then her exhaustion pulled her down completely, like a weighted throw net.

  *

  Euna woke to the sound of a hatchet being whetted. The sun was just starting to set, its soft rose giving way to a stone shade. It must have been close to nine o’clock. Sleep had renewed her body, but more so her mind, which now felt sharp and percipient. She looked down the length of herself, and other than the abrasions on her feet, she had not been physically harmed since leaving the coven. This affirmed for her, temporarily, that she had made the right choice.

  She drew the curtain beside the cot and looked through the window at the man who had invited her in. He was pale and middle-aged, a wee bit scraggy, drenched in sweat. She watched him sharpen the blade for a few minutes before darkness, a drop cloth, obscured him. All she could see then were the sparks that flew as he ran a coarse file along the axe’s head. Maybe she should have found this threatening. But Euna had only been alive, truly alive, for two days, and so instead she watched him as an anthropologist might, with care and curiosity, taking inventory of his movements.

  Shit! he said.

  She was startled. She had not heard anyone curse in English for years, not since she was young and her mother would do something like burn the eggs, or catch her finger in the hand-loom. Though Muireall had allowed them to speak English most of the time, she had made sure that in their heated moments they switched to Gaelic, the home-soil language. She did not want their reflexes tied to the Church or to Britain. This man, oddly, seemed conditioned to do the opposite. Goddamn, he said.

  Then she heard him stomp across the crunchy, sundried grass and open the door to the blackhouse. It was completely dim inside, and he fumbled around until he found a torch, which he turned on and pointed toward the cot. Euna hauled the lambswool blanket over her body, then peeled it back far enough that she could see him. The fur no longer on her tongue, she managed to say, Evening.

  He bumbled to her, bumping a still life from the wall. Awright? he said, sweat in pellets on his brow and hairline. Ah hiner it’s okay ah took ye haur. Ah didne want ye tae gie burst by a motur. He spoke eagerly and with overwhelming speed.

  Everything is fine, she said, slowly, aware of her peculiar way of saying vowels. She had grown accustomed to being understood at Cala. Whatever else had partitioned the women, words had been their accord.

  Whaur ur ye frae? he asked.

  Her nightmare: a question. She could no longer simply nod and pretend to understand him. Pullhair, she said, cautiously.

  She had guessed right, or at least had avoided saying anything to embarrass either of them. Pullhair? Wa ur ye sae far frae haem?

  I’m sorry, she said. I don’t follow. It had never been this difficult to connect with Aram, though he had presumably learned to speak from his Sketiminian mother. If anything, Euna’s own speech had seemed tattered. Aram, on the other hand, had cut his words cleanly.

  The man knelt on the cement-and-dirt floor beside Euna. The upward glare of the torch made him look worn and whey-faced. Ah am wondering hoo ye got sae lost. And if ah can help ye.

  This she heard, but did not entirely understand. Were people kind? Her experiences were adding up to a sort of surreal earth-model, one that failed to prove their morals or their malice. Her childhood had been marked by cruelty and neglect, as had moments at Cala and in Aram’s hut – but then, there had been moments of just the opposite weave, of complete well-being, even splendour.

  Now he had his hand on her hand, in a paternal way.

  She softened. She had not realized how deeply she craved this contact, but now that she had it, she could feel the veins in her arm rafting pure, red light. I’m going to visit a true friend at the detention centre in Dungavel, she said.

  Then at once his face was full of hard edges. His lips, already thin, vanished inside his mouth. Euna could not imagine what she had done to upset him, but she did not have much confidence in her ability to read others. He stood and walked to the opposite corner of the blackhouse, where hours before he had been boiling the water for tea. He took the butt of the torch between his teeth and lit the gas flame. I’ll make ye some scran, he said.

  When he turned his back to her, the move had a forever feel. He would never put his hand on her hand again. And there was something dire about love being offered and then taken away. If she had not first known the effects of that affection, she would never have missed them.

  Thank you, she said. I’m quite hungry.

  She heard him muttering as he clanged a string of cast-iron pans. Criminals, he said. Takin’ aw uir jobs.

  He started to fry some kind of stink-fish. Its funk made her homesick, both for Cala and for Aram’s hut, and she felt then that she had made a great mistake in leaving. She nestled into the lambswool. Back at home, Lili would be turning down everyone’s sheets for sleep – one woman would be climbing into bed alone, which now seemed less like a pleasure than it did a punishment. How nice it would be to sleep beside someone now.

  Fesh is ready, the man said.

  Thank you, she said. She sat up cross-legged, causing the middle of the cot to sink as she accepted the plate. She heard something mewling below her. The cat. She had not imagined him. She pinched a hint of fish between her fingers and held it over the side of the bed. A rough tongue took the scrap.

  Sae, the man said. Ur ye trying tae gang marry some Ukrainian? Keep heem frae leaving ye?

  She did not know what this meant, but she had spent years tuning her ear to the fine turns in Muireall’s voice that suggested ease, angst, anger, pleasure, grief, and the hairs on the back of her neck went erect when she heard the way he said that particular word. Ukrainian. Prickles. She knew, too, that she had not walked two days in the danger domain of strangers and feral animals just to play the role of diffident, countrified girl. She would not let him push that character on her.

  I’m not trying to marry anyone, she said, between bites of fish. I told you, I’m going to see a true friend.

  The man blinked. He took the cat into his arms, snuggling the creature tightly. The cat watched her with auger eyes, licking his little teeth. Though his breath was pleasant and his nails had recently been trimmed, he looked starved, thus unloved. His coat was skinnish, his skull flyspeck. He was no goat or stallion, of course, but Euna now saw him in a more tender light, having known his hunger. Less so the man holding him, who may have been just as unloved, just as hungry.

  Euna scarfed the rest of the fish. When she was finished, the man said, Thaur is a blanket oan the green. He used the cat as a riot shield, clearing Euna from the cot with its taut body. Guid nicht.

  She stood. Her feet were swollen and scored, and as soon as she rested her weight on them she wanted to scream. But she was determined not to be seen as weak or needy, so she stood straight against that stooping pain. She walked to the threshold, where she found her boots, although she did not remember removing them earlier that day. Good night, she said, mostly to the cat. Both faces, stacked, one
stubbled and the other furred, watched her as she walked outside.

  She found the blanket in the hair-grass, rumpled and damp with humidity. Still she stretched out on the wet wool, her face aimed moonward.

  Slowly she was gumming together an image of the world.

  In this corner, here, a man in pain and his ratty cat, alone, spiteful, but outwardly sweet, in certain ways caring. If she hadn’t met the two of them, she would still have found a way to rest and recover, though she had been on the brink of blackout, and that link had at first done her good. Despite its stench, the fish had refreshed her, and the hours in that dry cot had been a mercy. In this corner, here, some complicated shading.

  *

  Euna was back on the road just past dawn, having eaten two strips of jerky and treated her feet with torn tormentil leaves. Briefly she had considered going into the blackhouse to thank the man and his cat for their help, but instead of taking a chance on his reaction, which could have been warm or murderous, she had headed back to the road. One fine point she had learned the day before: insecurity made a person unpredictable. Though she no longer wanted her life to be ruled by sure outcomes, she knew this was not the time to test her new-found nerve.

  And so she followed the road in one steady direction for hours, her pain a certainty, her thirst a certainty.

  The day was deceptively mild. Through a cloud canopy the sun looked pale, but by mid-afternoon the back of her neck was burning, the rim of her lips brambled. Every so often a chough would come low and track her for a kilometre, then skim the tree-line on its course back to the mountains. Or a truck would pass, casing her in its exhaust. The way was otherwise long and monotonous, and by dusk she had started to hallucinate again, assigning texture and colour where they did not belong – silk bark on silver birches, hot pink over painted road markings. All she had was her walking, so even this lick of brainsickness couldn’t slow her down. She carried on despite her blisters and her delusions. She carried on through the still summer evening and then, without lull, through the long, chilled night.

  Early the next morning, the rising sun cast diamonds on a stream ten metres from the road. It was marked by a plaque: Loch Tummel. The ache in Euna’s joints was so acute by then that, without stopping or stripping any clothes, she submerged herself in the water. Below the surface, she cooled. For a perfect moment, she lived in that complete, bodiless void, floating, freshening, until she ran out of breath. When she rose into the air again, though she could not see herself, she believed it was with mermaid grace. She drank from the stream and it seemed her skin did the same, absorbing the moisture through its scorched pores. Everywhere, a pale blue glimmer – in her hair, on her fingernails, in the folds of her now wet, now weighty tunic.

  She tried to sing the song Lili had written, but she could not remember the lyrics, and her attempts to do so were frustrating. Had it been about vanilla planifolia, or astral travel, or stovies and love apple soup? Euna could so viscerally remember what it had felt like to score the song, and yet she could not remember a single line from it. Splashing in the river, she sang any word and non-word that came to her, the way a child does, unafraid of slipping up, and for the first time since leaving Cala she felt a sensation she did not hesitate to call joy.

  After some time, a woman in a green tartan dress came to the riverside. She looked like a moving spread of moss, her hair downy and short and her movements so natural they were nearly impossible to detect. She seemed to be in her mid-thirties. When she reached the brim of the waterbody, she lay down on her stomach and, propping herself upright with her elbows, dreamed one hand through the river. As she parted the current, the pale blue glimmer moved onto her wrist, then downstream to a set of standing stones. I hope you didn’t loo, she said.

  Euna laughed. The moss woman pressed herself right down into the soil, and Euna wondered whether that hurt her breasts, or if she, too, had banded them. She did not know if that was a standard thing to do or a strange one, a world thing or a Euna thing.

  Do you live around here? Euna asked.

  The woman was now resting her cheek against the earth, ready to vegetate. Not really, she said. I drive my camper around until I find a place to stay the night. Bitch to park, I promise you that.

  Euna leaned back into the water. She was at ease with this odd, primordial woman, and she did not need to know why. She floated, her mind free of questions. They lived there together, in and by the river, until Euna pruned and the sun turned orange enough to announce noon. Then she clambered onto the bank, where the woman was still breast-pressed, and sat beside her. Where are you headed? Euna asked.

  The woman rolled onto her back and shaded her eyes with a flattened hand. Anywhere you want, she said. With her backhand visor she could not block the sun entirely, and a speck of it fell, sparkling, on the inside of her tear duct. The twinkle made the woman look punch-drunk, possibly wicked.

  After the bad juju in the blackhouse, Euna was too frightened to tell the woman where she was headed. She loved the verve they were now sharing, and she could not bear for another person to approach and then ditch her. To protect herself, she stayed vague. South, she said.

  The woman smiled. Several of her teeth were edged with gold and silver veins. Then we’ll head down south, she said, brightly. And my radio is broken, so you can make our soundtrack. You’re a good singer.

  Sounds like fun, Euna said. She flashed a rare smile. One of her own teeth had rotted while she was at Cala, and she had pulled it with a pair of slip-joint pliers. Unlike this woman, who had mended her tooth defects with delicate ore, she simply had a hole where the molar should have been. So she tended not to show it to anyone.

  The woman winked at her. See that you don’t burn, she said, pointing to the sky.

  Euna stood and moved into the shade of a hawthorn tree. The woman wandered here and there, foraging, mining the earth for roots and mushrooms. When she returned to Euna, it was with arms of sweet clover, Scots lovage, scarlet elf cup. She ironed her skirt across the grass and laid this lunch spread on top of the tartan. Let’s eat, she said.

  How do you know none of this is poisonous?

  I’ve gotten by on my own for a long time, the woman said.

  Euna, having walked a full day past her last meal, took from the spread a handful of fungus. Wind had hacked her lips, so she ran the soft caps across them. The stroke was of velvet shank. She remembered eating these many times when she was younger, as supplement to the one-item suppers she was given at home – a drumstick, a roll, a chunk of cheddar. And so, sidetracked by that memory, she ate all the mushrooms before the woman could try one herself. Euna looked down.

  Daing ort! The shame of her empty palm.

  The woman said, You must have been hungry, dear one.

  This moss woman had been so generous and, as she had with the stink-fish, Euna had gorged on that generosity without offering any in return. She belonged deep in the mud. The mushrooms should have eaten her instead.

  I’m so sorry, she said. I can’t believe I didn’t save any for you. She saw a hollow in the hawthorn, large enough for her to curl inside, and she thought how nice it would be to slide into that narrowed world, the narrowest one she had seen yet. At Cala, once, they had found a roaming lamb and had eased her into life on their farm, space by slightly larger space – first a coop, then a pen, then a cowshed, then the moor and all the commons. Euna craved a smaller cavity.

  Don’t worry about it, the woman said. There’s plenty more where that came from. Now, want to see my camper?

  Euna nodded. She could not believe her good fortune to have met a woman like this, one who could sense things and who, without being ordered to, treated others with tact. If this were its own kind of bewitchment, Euna would choose it over Muireall’s black magic any day.

  Euna followed the woman for a time across the meadow-grass. When they reached the vehicle, Euna was struck by its misplacement. Parked beneath a young elm it seemed colossal, if not aggressive. Beside the tr
ee’s fine foliage, its mural of beefy men and blazing cigarettes looked entirely urban, curious.

  The woman unlocked the camper door for Euna, and then helped her to mount the two steps by grasping her, firmly but not forcefully, by the waist. They entered together. The interior was warm and smelled of simmered cloves, here and there a note of nutmeg. At the rear was a full oven and stove outfit, and near the heart a breakfast nook and a well-worn pullout couch. Velvet curtains concealed the half dozen windows, and leopard-print shells covered the driver and passenger seats. Euna was surprised to see that this interior was larger and more comfortable than that of the blackhouse.

  Euna reclined on the couch and the woman knelt beside her, feeding her sprigs of sweet clover. This, even more than her songplay in the river, was a moment of supreme bliss. This camper may well have been the throne of God. Ready? the woman asked, when she had no more clover in her hands. Euna grinned broadly enough to reveal her missing molar.

  Yes, mè bheag, Euna said. The woman scrunched her nose as if that were a funny thing to call someone, though at Cala, of course, Euna had grown to think of it as a common term of endearment.

  Was that Gaelic?

  Euna was surprised and a little unsettled by the question. Of course, she said.

  How lovely, the woman said. Haven’t heard a word of it since my nana died. She kissed Euna on the forehead, lips soft as the velvet shanks, and then took her seat behind the wheel. The last time Euna had driven down the road was ten years prior, when she had run into the estate car Muireall had hired to take them to Pullhair. Once the adrenaline had worn off, she had grown timid – the whole time she had pretended to sleep in the back seat, too cowed to look through the window. Now she stood and drew the velvet curtains, diffusing the day’s gold around her.

  Onward, she said.

  She had promised the woman a soundtrack, so she sang and sang. The words came as they had in the river, as vibrations and not as thoughts, above and beyond appraisal. The woman stroked the ignition. In the sun that was now glinting through the windows, Euna caught the steel wink of a mattock, inclined against the kitchen counter. I’m Muireall, by the way, the woman said over her shoulder. She yanked the gear stick down and started to drive.