Cala Read online

  *

  A few hours later, they reached Drumclog, a town in screaming distance of the detention centre. Having carefully studied the map on the Cala library wall, Euna had committed this name to her memory, impressed by its primitive, cramped sound. When they arrived, Euna saw that Drumclog did not align at all with the image she had invented in her mind – the panorama was huge and damp, a long, boggy mire with rampant scum. She had expected something smaller, drier, maybe something more like a prison cell.

  Muireall parked the camper with its front wheels in the swamp and its back on a level plot of grass. She turned around and announced, in a kind of ancient twang, Ye have got the theory, now for the practice.

  Euna felt like the camper: partly immersed in mulch, partly parked on firm ground. I’m not sure what you mean, she said.

  The Reverend Thomas Douglas, Muireall said. We all learned about him in school. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of the Covenanters. The word sounded vaguely familiar to Euna, as an ancestral surname sometimes can, or for that matter, anything inherited: in a floaty, feathery way, untethered to any real meaning. Muireall asked, Little Gaelic-speaking, loch-bathing lady, what stone have you been living under?

  The day-gold was at once too vivid, and Euna closed her eyes. Even so, she could hear Muireall climbing to the middle of the vehicle and kneeling again beside the couch, menace around her like musk. Where are you going? she asked, wedging a hand into the bend of Euna’s elbow. Of all the places to touch her, this one was odd, her hand lodged there so snugly. And yet her voice was airy and spacious, reassuring. Half mulch, half firm ground.

  Euna wondered if the name Muireall and the mattock inclined against the counter had been flukes, not grounds for fear. In the years since childhood, she had only met a few people, and just because a central one had been called Muireall did not mean she owned the name. Euna had no way to know what was true. And even if she did know, beyond a shadow, she would still struggle to accept it. The original Muireall’s authority had, quietly and completely, erased that capacity of hers. I’m going – she was slow with this, soft with this, step-by-step with all of this – to Dungavel.

  Muireall asked, Do you know someone there? Euna could not see her face, but her voice, at least, had remained steady.

  Yes, Euna said. A fish farmer I met up north.

  He must be special, Muireall said, a little lift in her pitch. No one goes to visit that place on a whim.

  When Aileen had come to Cala, breasts and belly swollen, Euna’s tenderness had not been an act. She really had felt that charitable toward the girl, had wanted to house her even, or especially, in her heifer condition. Hearing Muireall call Aram special, though, she felt newly possessive. All her blood pooled in her legs. The triangle between them, where thigh met private arch, began to tingle.

  But she was not spiteful like the man in the blackhouse. When Aileen had come to Cala, breasts and belly swollen, Euna’s tenderness had not been an act. When the crops at Cala had mysteriously started to fail, she had always been eager to share what could be salvaged of the harvest.

  What she wanted: to tell Muireall to stay parked for a day, so Euna could explore, sieve her sensitivities, and then appear as saviour to Aram, all the while knowing a good and guarded world was waiting for her inside the camper.

  Euna opened her eyes. She asked, though her body told her not to, Will you come with me?

  Of course, Muireall said, without pausing to think. It would be my pleasure.

  Cac, Euna thought. A chaca. A yes.

  Well, that’s wonderful, she said.

  Sure, no one was holding a gun to her head or a mattock to her throat. But if she always did what she wanted to do, she would be no better than Grace, with her senseless vanity and her lens of self-interest. If Euna could not be a good Euna yet, she at least could be an impeccable Grace.

  Is he expecting us at any particular time? Muireall asked.

  No, Euna said, he’s not expecting us.

  We can spend the night here and go to Dungavel tomorrow, then, Muireall said. You rest up, darling. Meanwhile I’ll get us some dinner.

  Need any help scavenging?

  Muireall smiled. She stroked Euna’s hair in a way that milked all the tension from her body. We’re not in the barrens any more, weirdo, she said. There’s a commercial farm nearby.

  You have money? Euna asked. Muireall nodded, and this fixed in Euna a funny kind of reverence. How do you make it?

  Muireall flattened her lips. She remained pleasant and natural, soft as moss, but she said, That is not a polite question. No woman should have to justify her capital.

  I’m sorry, Euna said. My manners are sickening. Do you have a ruler?

  Muireall looked confused. I don’t see why you would need a ruler, she said. Are you hiding some maths homework somewhere?

  To have your péire slapped with a ruler was perhaps peculiar here, especially by a stranger, and at your own request. Was this true in all of Scotland, every suburb and borough? And in England, and Wales, and in Aram’s home country of Sketimini, wherever in the world that was?

  Just wanted to scratch my back with it, Euna said.

  Muireall smiled. Let me find us some food, she said. You deserve a quiet moment.

  Euna sat up and faced Muireall. Thank you, she said.

  My pleasure, Muireall said. Be back in a shake. She walked to a pair of boots left salt-stained and rigid by the door.

  Once Muireall was outside, Euna felt stoned by her sudden freedom. All she had was time. All she had was permission. She unbuttoned her trousers, which she had wanted to do for hours but had not, for fear of being seen as too coarse and country. It was a treat to finally let go of that tension. And for once she was in charge of meting out that treat. Now, waistband loose, she wanted to pray, so she knelt on the laminate and knitted her fingers together. She addressed the prayer to God, and then to Aram, and then to the original Muireall. None felt right. Dear Euna, she tried.

  *

  Early the next morning, still full of the turnips and red pudding that Muireall had made on her return, Euna set off on foot. Muireall was snoring, having finished a few drams of Dalwhinnie, post-neeps, pre-sleep. Sneaking out before the folks around her were awake: this was exactly what Euna had done at Cala, and at the blackhouse. She was not proud to find herself again on this path of no resistance. She wanted to be calm and mettlesome, even when in conflict, even when being untrue to her given word. But for now, here she was.

  She had left her belongings in the camper, sure she would be barred from bringing them into Dungavel, and hopeful that Muireall would wait for her if she had all her effects. Free of her property, this was the most pleasant walk she had taken since leaving Pullhair. It was also the briefest, and in under an hour she found herself on the Dungavel grounds. Around an imperious, turreted castle had been erected a barbed-wire fence, and in front of the fence stood a half dozen guards in bright orange jackets, carrying billy clubs and massive guns Euna could not identify. Each guard seemed to live in his own province, surrounded by an invisible border. No one exchanged a word or a look. Could she have made a wrong turn? This place seemed suited to the dangerous and deranged. As far as she knew, Aram was a migrant, not a murderer.

  Though she sensed the guards’ intent was to scare her, she had no direct experience with them, scary or otherwise. So she walked up to one, a young, turbaned man with a finely flecked grey beard. She stood seventeen hands high, and he could not have been any taller than that, because she looked him in the eye. She asked, Can I go in to see my husband?

  The guard looked back at her. Visits start at seven in the evening, he said. No entry until then.

  Glancing sidelong at his watch, Euna saw it was only eight in the morning. Her throat tightened. She had hiked so far, scraping the skin from her ankles, flaking the burned rind from the back of her neck, and after all that she was no closer to the man she thought she needed. She was as alone here as she had been on her worst days at
Cala, when Muireall had tongue-lashed her but refused to use the school ruler. She did not deserve that release, Muireall would say, or she was too filthy to touch.

  Thank you, master, she said to the guard. He gave her a strange look.

  She crouched on the tarmac, hands graceless by her crotch. She missed Muireall’s sternness, which at least she had come to understand. These guards had never saved her from the humiliation of an egged house or a burned effigy, nor had they, for that matter, offered her neeps and a pullout. And worse, they had in all likelihood hurt Aram.

  Crouched on the tarmac, confused and nostalgic, she knew only one thing. She could not leave now without seeing him, her incongruous love, two-faced and tender-hearted, grating and enchanting. She needed to reach him in this quiet, tortured place. No one had ever made her feel that worthy. Leaving without seeing her brightness reflected in his eyes might have dimmed her for good.

  *

  Midway through the day, men and women came in a tour bus to rally on the free side of the fence. They all carried signs, written in marker on hand-cut cardboard. These could well have been a craft of Lili’s, had the words been less charged: No one is illegal. We stand with the dirty strikers. Together, they read out a long list of names. Near the end of the list, they lowered their heads together for a moment of silence, then, eyes skyward, said one final name. It was not Aram’s, and Euna felt a flare of relief, though she knew her response was self-centred, Gracelike. An older woman in a veil – not quite a nun’s habit, but one as long, as black – started to howl.

  The guards moved all of the protestors into a precise formation, much like a bell, bottom-heavy. This they did not resist. Their bodies were being ordered, but their voices were no less heard. They did not stop chanting their practised mantras.

  After an hour or so, they put down their signs, and each took a candle from their rucksack. A woman flicked a flame onto each wick, and though bright sun subdued the effect, the pack watched the smoke with awe, as if in pitch dark. Euna knew instinctively that someone had died. She had never seen a gathering like this one, but she felt the blood inside of her turn ice cold, holding her erect from the inside. The woman began an aiste-mholaidh, like the ones Muireall used to deliver before butchering a cow at Cala. As the woman spoke, the reason for the vigil became clear: a man, routinely denied access to a doctor, had hanged himself with a rope of braided hair.

  Couldn’t someone in another cell have played medic, made a little clinic for the man? Euna had filled and pulled Grace’s teeth, had snapped Lili’s shoulder back into place when she fell off a galloping stallion and dislocated the bone. She could not imagine pain that would merit a slow hanging.

  The woman Euna had seen earlier was on her knees, wailing. The guards had by now forced the crowd into such a small area that her face was pressed into a man’s overcoat, which deadened the sound. She was speaking a language Euna did not understand. It could well have been English, given Euna’s clear ignorance of its ins and outs.

  Euna stayed crouched by the fence, a riskless distance from the guards and the crowd. Her waistband was too tight again, but here she was not in a position to unbutton it. She watched as one of the guards used his club on the woman’s back, three times, with great precision.

  In her little patch of hogweed, Euna sat cross-legged and closed her eyes. She wanted to conduct an Open Forum to see if they could all, for a while, just sit quietly together, but she sensed it would be high-handed to ask this woman to stop howling. Or rather, it would make of Euna a tyrant, dictating how this woman was allowed to express pain. So she focused on two hums under the woman’s words – a pair of horseflies and the electric gate. Into her nose came sea-blue light, a rinse right through her heart and chest.

  My son, the woman was now saying to the guard, who had for the moment stopped striking her.

  Relax, the guard said.

  Take it easy, another said.

  Euna thought about her mam in Bucksburn, blind eye to all manner of evil. And still. It was unbearable that even a slipshod mother should create a life and have no power over its ending.

  She felt a strong pull toward the crowd. Hadn’t she loved it when her true friends called her bana-churaidh, heroine? A woman needed to be brave to deserve that name. As she stood to join them, one of the guards noticed her. In her silence she had enjoyed a kind of invisibility. Now, seen, she could no longer be a bloom of hogweed. He stood with feet spread and fingered his baton.

  Euna thought about running back down the road to the camper, begging for safety and forgiveness from Moss Muireall. But there was a fullness here she rarely felt. Despite the guards’ pressure. Despite the group’s distress. This was bigger than mucking the goat stalls and cooking mutton and killing wild buckwheat with white vinegar. In the standing, or in the intent behind it – there was a vital, holy swell she had long been searching for. Silently, she named this feeling làn. And as she continued to stand, that beautiful làn filled her whole, unsheltered body.

  *

  Shortly past seven, after the tour buses had taken the protestors back to the place, if anywhere, they belonged, a guard directed Euna into the visits room. There she found a range of wing chairs, their white leather flawless, and a pair of well-polished drinking fountains. She was astonished. From Aram’s postcard, she had expected excrement on the walls, an amphora of urine in each corner. But here she was in a rather open room, recently painted, or repainted, a muted blond. She would invite her own guests here for pekoe and oatcakes, had she anyone to entertain.

  There were three other visitors waiting to talk to their loved ones, but Euna won the draw – Aram was the first to come. He looked strained, his bones made plain by his time inside. She remembered him having thick, black eyebrows and curls streaked with silver, but now he was uniformly grey, from his own hair to the jumper and trousers he had been assigned. The odd adornment he had worn before, the block of driftwood, was still around his neck. But he had since whittled it into a kind of crucifix.

  When he saw Euna his eyes shone in the same boyish way they had when she’d first entered his hut, wind blown, dressed in her loose tweed. My happiness, he said, shuffling on worn sandals toward her, I’m so glad you found me. His boy-shine turned swiftly to a stony kind of absence. He embraced her with stiff and flexed arms, pressing her against his ribs with excessive force. Euna was relieved when, a moment later, the guard came to shunt his baton between them. No touching, he said.

  Sorry, guv, Aram said.

  Euna walked a few steps to the fountains and filled a paper cone with water, then offered it to Aram. His lips were marred by dryness and filth, a broth, a red sauce. His was the face of someone who had gone a long time without being noticed. He gulped the water, but it did nothing to wash his mouth clean. Clear beads clung to his bushy beard.

  They sat down in two opposing chairs, about a metre apart. You’ve got a spot of… he said to her. He gestured toward her nose, but with a side glance to the guard stopped short of actual contact.

  Of what?

  A spot of green, he said.

  Euna touched her nostril and felt a hard wad, which she hauled away, ashamed. The last time she’d seen her reflection was in the river, and then she had been afloat, washed fresh. Now she was a worse form of herself, both snotty and on land. He looked worse, too, of course, but she was fixed on her own failings. How long do we have for this visit? she asked him.

  I’m not sure, he said. Truth be told, no one else has come to see me.

  Not even Aileen? Euna asked.

  Aram avoided her eyes, as a child does when caught in the act of doing harm. He was in no way the person she remembered, the irrepressible, robust man who had made her feel like a neach air leth, an exception to every strict rule. How did you get here, my beauty? he asked quietly, making her feel exceptional again.

  By ferry, she said. On foot. Near the end I got a ride from a stranger.

  Aram leaned in, focusing on the tip of her left ear. From his lips
came a reek, the kind of dank breath all the Cala women had when their crops failed and for months they had to eat slop and scrapings. A stranger? he asked, clearly shaken. But you’re mine.

  Euna absently braided her hair.

  An emaciated silence. My happiness, I’m so glad you’re safe, Aram said at last. Did anyone follow you?

  At times on her trip, slipping through Slochd and Sluggan, breaking by Kincraig, Euna had felt hunted in a way she could not voice or reason. But she would not admit this to her man, for whom she was the only porter of the outside. Despite his duplicity, she wanted to be his little champion, to give him at least one reason to feel safe. Of course not, she said. I was very careful.

  Good girl, he said. This is why I sent for you.

  Euna walked back to the fountain and this time filled a paper cone for herself. Having sipped the cone halfway empty, she filled it again, watching him over the rigid rim. He was watching her, too, his knuckles locked tightly in his lap. From this distance, her body remembered it: the drama and cabala that had circled him in the hut. This is why I sent for you. His words disturbed her. But his look wakened something else, the flickering current. The sort of pop and snap.

  When she sat back down, Euna said, Well, you’re a bit of a mess. But underneath that you’re the same good farmer.

  He smiled for the first time since she’d arrived, or maybe much longer. He looked in her eyes now, as if her flirtation had erased all prior offence. And, he said, you’re the same bad ban-Leòdhasach.

  At this, the guard dragged a metal stool across the room, the sound so loud and aluminous it stopped their conversation entirely. He placed the seat between Euna’s and Aram’s chairs and perched on it, not turning to either of them, not speaking. Where Muireall’s surveillance had relied on the element of surprise, on her hiding in the broom closet and the hollyhock, this relied only on the guard’s conviction that he had the power to do what he wanted, with little consequence.