Redemption Road

by Lisa Ballantyne

  ‘My mum always reads me a story before I go to sleep.’

  ‘We don’t have any storybooks. I can get you some tomorrow.’

  ‘Just read anything to me, even the paper.’

  ‘I don’t have a paper.’

  ‘There’s one on the front seat.’

  It was true. George had bought it for the football scores.

  ‘Who reads the newspaper as a bedtime story?’

  ‘We have nothing else.’

  ‘I could tell you a story…’

  ‘OK.’

  George hugged her tighter. The closeness with her resolved something within him, but he was not sure where or why.

  ‘Once upon a time, there was a… little girl and she went to school one day…’

  ‘I don’t want to hear that story.’

  ‘What d’ya mean?’

  ‘That’s real, that’s me… I want a story.’

  ‘A story…’ George heaved a sigh. ‘Once upon a time, there were three bears. There was a little girl bear and she…’

  Moll sat back in his arms to look up into his face, so that he felt the weight of her.

  ‘You’re rubbish at stories. Just read the paper. I like being read to. It makes me go to sleep.’

  ‘I could sing to you.’

  ‘I like to be read to. Read the paper.’

  Holding her in his left arm, George reached into the front seat to pick up the paper. It was the Daily Record.

  He settled into the back again, with Moll cuddled into him. He chose an article on page six with a picture of a polar bear. He folded the paper over and began to read:

  ‘The polar bear at Glasgow zoo is very unhappy. The keepers have stopped giving him Irn Bru on the grounds that it is turning his fur orange, but now campaigners say the bear has a right to choose his own beverage…’

  Moll threw back her head and laughed and he rocked in the back seat with her. Her eyes were turning coins of mirth and her long limbs moved against his as she giggled. George saw again the sheer beauty of her: his own daughter.

  ‘Stop it,’ Moll said. ‘It doesn’t say that. Read the real thing.’

  ‘How do you know what it says?’ George asked her, tilting her downwards so he was looking right into her face.

  ‘Because I can read it,’ she said, still giggling at him.

  George took a deep breath.

  Years since he had ever admitted it to anyone. ‘I can’t,’ he said, tossing the newspaper on to the floor, then hugging her close.

  ‘What do you mean?’ She was looking up into his face.

  ‘I can’t read.’

  15

  Angus Campbell

  Monday 7 October, 1985

  It was still dark, but it was, finally, Monday morning.

  Angus slipped his bare feet into his wellington boots, feeling them like cold, hard porridge against his toes. He was in his pyjamas. He was planning on going back to bed after he had seen to Maisie.

  With the passing of the Sabbath, Angus now crept out to the barn where Maisie had calved, to check on her. His legs felt cold in his cotton pyjamas and his wellingtons stuck in the mud. The day was just opening its eyelid. The Sabbath had passed and now he could tend to her.

  After Angus returned from Glasgow, he had spent a sleepless night worrying about Maisie. He imagined he had heard her moaning deep into the early hours of the Sabbath, but he had to strain over the noises that Hazel was making. Eventually Hazel had locked herself in the bathroom, and Angus had been grateful.

  The Sabbath morning, Angus had been sick with worry for Maisie and the calf. The Campbells always fed and watered the animals on Saturdays, so that Sunday was reserved for God.

  Hazel was grunting as she put on her tights and attempted to zip up her dress. Angus assumed she was doing it just to spite him. She was pretending that he had hit her too hard, and her back pain was so severe that she could no longer reach the zip. She didn’t ask for his assistance but simply struggled, then left it gaping as she sat to put on her shoes.

  ‘Would you have the folk at church think you’re a strumpet?’ said Angus, marching across the room to pull up her zip. She threw up her hands in defence and the action both annoyed and saddened Angus. Sometimes his wife behaved as if he were a cruel and pernicious man, when he was merely a husband who was trying to educate his wife.

  ‘Calm yourself, woman,’ he said as he zipped her up. He noticed that the area between her shoulder blades was bruised. He knew it was his job to teach her, but sometimes he didn’t like to see the evidence.

  ‘I don’t think I’m able to go to church,’ she said, standing and turning in front of the mirror.

  Angus followed her gaze and noticed that, although she was wearing a long-sleeved dress that fell below the knee, her lower legs were bruised. He wondered how that could have happened. Had the shovel slipped? Had she knocked herself as she fell? She would need to wear trousers to cover the marks. Angus disapproved of trousers on a woman and forbade his wife and daughter to wear them, but in any case trousers were unsuitable for church.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Angus, looping his tie and scoffing. ‘You have to go. If you don’t, folk’ll be turning up at the door with currant cakes and sponges.’

  Hazel had nodded once and slipped her heels into her shoes.

  Straightening his tie in the mirror, Angus had glanced at her as she pulled her heavy camel coat from the back of the wardrobe.

  He had been unnecessarily severe, he admitted silently to his reflection, pursing his lips. But he had been concerned for Maisie and Hazel infuriated him because she never seemed to learn.

  Now, finally on his way to the barn, Angus noticed that the thistles were blooming. They glowed white instead of purple in the waning moonlight. He slowed his pace as he approached, his mouth dry and his eyes wide.

  Returning from Glasgow, Angus had been inside the barn at the very onset of the Sabbath – as Saturday turned into Sunday – and he still considered this sinful. He had witnessed Maisie’s plight but left and returned to bed, where he had barely slept a wink. It had been twenty-eight hours since he had last checked on her.

  Although he thought he had been awake, he remembered a dream from the Sabbath night and wondered if he had in fact slept, or if the dream had been a vision from God sent to comfort him. He had dreamed of the birth and the calf:

  The calf was male, large-eyed and watchful, sitting on the straw with the sheen of birth still on him. He stood and suckled within an hour. Maisie was tired, but Angus could tell from the reflection in her large eyes that she was happy; that she had not felt deserted by him, that she had been happy to give birth alone.

  Now, as he approached the barn, taking his time, he remembered the dream. He didn’t care about the calf, he realised. The most important thing to him was Maisie. He was well prepared for the calf to be dead.

  By the time he reached the barn door, his wellingtons were dirty to the ankles with mud. Heavy rain had fallen while he was in Glasgow, softening the ground.

  Everything about the slowly opening day was too clean, and made him nervous: the fresh tilth of the soil, the alertness of the thistles, the neat stack of feed by the barn door. Angus’s head hurt. There was the brain-harrowing chirp of songbirds against the death crash of the sea.

  His mother had been a fisherman’s daughter and had known the sea as if it were a relative. It was his mother who had talked to him about waves travelling for miles and then dying on the shore. He had never been able to look at the ocean since without thinking of death.

  Now, turning the latch and opening the door to the barn, Angus remembered his mother’s funeral. The coldness of the memory, bone clean, made him pause.

  Angus’s mother, Annabel, had been a devout woman, but someone who was pathologically claustrophobic. She had been terrified of small spaces since a young age, when she had been locked in a cupboard for stealing apples. Growing up, Angus had known never to close a door on a room, as his mother always liked to see
her potential escape. Their home had been cold, with open doors and open windows, which his father never condemned, no matter the weather or complaints from the children.

  His mother had been a worker: when Angus was a boy, she had gutted fish for six hours a day, hung the nets out to dry and looked after the family as well. Her palms had been coarse and she had been short and fat with bulging biceps that even now, at the age of forty-three, Angus could not equal. She had died suddenly after a virus, when he was only fourteen years old.

  Angus could only remember his mother criticising him. He couldn’t remember a single word of praise.

  When he had stood at her grave, in his black, itchy wool trousers and too-tight tie, he had imagined her fighting and struggling in the coffin that was lowered to the ground. Cremation would have been fairer for someone as claustrophobic as his mother, but his father had insisted on a burial. His father and two of his uncles tossed a handful of earth on to her coffin and Angus and his brothers each threw a carnation over the lip of the grave. But all the while, Angus imagined that she was alive inside that box. He knew this was the worst thing that could ever happen to her. He felt the horror of her panic deep inside him, in buried places: under his fingernails, in the roots of his hair, in his gums, in the strange-feeling skin of his navel. He had dreamed about her for months afterwards, fighting to get out of that coffin, under yards of tightly packed earth. Even now, in his forties, Angus would sometimes dream about her fervent quest to escape from underneath the earth.

  But at her funeral all he did was toss the pink carnation on to the box, wait for the words, and watch as the earth was thrown over her.

  The door of the barn creaked as Angus opened it. Before he entered, two fat flies flew in his face. He swatted them away. As he stepped inside, he inhaled the desperate smell of stagnation, of abortive hope.

  Maisie was spread across the rank, bloodied straw of the barn, her tongue hanging out, white beads of evaporated sweat on her flank, and a dead, unbirthed calf between her haunches. The rear end of the calf was visible: a slick black tumour, but Maisie looked as she always had: pink-nosed and smiling, save from the protuberance of her tongue, and the strange glaze of her eyes, like unset jam.

  Angus left the barn and walked straight back to the house, the back of his hand over his mouth. He vomited at the front steps, then almost immediately brushed it away with the yard brush and scoured it with bleach. Inside, he called the vet with the acid taste of vomit in his mouth, leaving an answer message asking that he come to remove animal corpses from the farm.

  Angus stepped back inside the barn. He put a hand to Maisie’s rear, as if preparing to do what he would have done: slid his hand inside and pushed the calf to turn it. He wanted to do it. He wanted to help her, but he knew that Maisie was dead and the calf was dead.

  Instead, Angus knelt, smoothed a hand over Maisie’s flank and took her tail in the other. He whispered words of prayer: ‘God of hope, we thank you that not even death can separate us from your love…’

  When his prayer was finished, Angus staggered outside, his eyes wet. Day had not yet broken but dew had formed on blades of grass, the skies were loud with birdsong, and an army of flies was now forming at the barn door.

  Angus went back inside the house, washed his hands and forearms with disinfectant, then went upstairs. Hazel was asleep: curled as a cashew nut. The children’s alarms were set for six.

  It was only four twenty-two in the morning when Angus entered his study. He felt no tiredness, only immense sorrow for Maisie. It seeped into him, like the cold on a wet night, right into his bones.

  ‘You have to get on with it,’ Angus said to himself, out loud.

  He rolled a fresh piece of paper into his typewriter.

  It was all he had been thinking of since he returned from Glasgow. He hadn’t wanted Maisie to die but she had, and now that she was dead Angus felt sharper, angrier, ready to write his story: the story of George McLaughlin stealing Molly Henderson from Kathleen, his former lover and the mother of his child. It was like no other story Angus had tried to write. But he saw it clearly and he was willing to report it truthfully, as he saw fit.

  Pushing the image of Maisie’s death-frozen muzzle out of his mind, he began to type. He typed angrily. Angus was often angry, and there were many targets for his anger, but today his anger was clearly focused on one person: George McLaughlin.

  George was a depraved criminal, who had kidnapped a young girl for God knows what perverse purpose. George was part of a Glasgow crime family who were familiar with torture, extortion and murder. George was the tallest in the family: six foot three and big-built and Angus could imagine that he used his size to intimidate others, to help him to carry out acts of violence. It was George McLaughlin who had caused Angus to take a trip to Glasgow to discover the sinister links to the Thurso abduction, coming home too late to save his heifer.

  It was therefore possible to consider that George McLaughlin had caused Maisie’s death, and Angus didn’t know how long it would be before he hurt the young girl who was now in his charge, if she was not already dead, as Angus well expected.

  He typed faster than he knew he was capable of typing: he could only type with his forefingers but he generated a sound worthy of a seasoned touch-typist. He referenced the court picture he had found in Glasgow, with the McLaughlins standing on the steps of the High Court after Peter’s acquittal, and also referenced Brendan and Peter’s criminal convictions. He had not found any note of George’s criminal convictions, but he was sure that George was sly and evasive of the law, and that his clean record belied the gravity of his crimes.

  Before the children’s alarms sounded and before Hazel got up to make their porridge, Angus left the house. He drove into Wick and placed his newly written article on his editor’s desk with a note: Exclusive from Angus Campbell. This HAS TO BE in tomorrow’s paper. The nationals will be all over it.

  Angus returned to the farm, just in time to meet the vet, who arrived in his Land Rover, wearing dungarees and long green boots. They shook hands and Angus led him out to the barn.

  The barn door was now swarming with flies, and inside, Maisie’s corpse had begun to smell. The barn was well ventilated, but the scent of rotting flesh was heavy in the air.

  When he saw the sight, the vet, Branx Conlan, a young man with an old man’s face, shook his head.

  ‘It’s been a while,’ said Branx, stepping forward to touch Maisie’s corpse. ‘I’d say she’s been dead thirty-odd hours or so – rigor mortis is starting to wear off. What happened? Were you all away? You were so anxious about being here for her…’

  ‘I know,’ said Angus, pinching the corners of his eyes, to stave off tears. ‘I was in Glasgow. I hoped to make it back in time. It was only my wife and she didn’t know what to do. She thought Maisie would be able to do it by herself, and just left her to it.’

  ‘Did she not think to call me?’

  ‘If Hazel thought of anything, it would be a miracle,’ said Angus, forgetting himself.

  Branx Conlan was a quiet man, and he was a heathen. When he had vaccinated Maisie he had told Angus, ‘I’ve been an atheist as long as I can remember, but some days I envy you believers. I envy your certainty.’

  Angus had said nothing, but had privately sneered at him. There was no need to envy, because he had it in his power to believe!

  Branx went back and forth to the van, getting animal body bags and laying out chemicals in the barn. He put on a plastic suit as he waited for his assistant.

  ‘Is Maisie that dangerous?’ Angus asked.

  ‘It’s just a precaution. She’s passing out of rigor mortis, so decomposition is setting in, and the added aspect of labour and the trauma of birth…’