The Applecross Spell

by Wendy MacIntyre

  Her voice was supple still, arcing like swift water. “Like a doe skin,” her grade school teacher on the island had told her mother. Who had radiated such pride at the telling, Gemma had felt the whole shape of her mother’s hand outlined in heat on her shoulders. An invisible shawl, Gemma thought in years afterwards, made of her mother’s blood, heat, and love. She could in times of dire stress and trouble, summon the sensation, the very imprint of her mother’s hands, the warmth worn lightly as a blessing, purifying as wood smoke. She had this in common with Suzanne, a rare continuance of the mother’s presence long after the woman herself had passed on. But passed on where? For she shared with Suzanne too, a perplexing mystery at the heart of their loss. Both their mothers had disappeared near water, leaving behind a bundle of possessions on shore. Suzanne’s mother had left a pair of silver earrings and an embroidered shawl tucked in a crevice on the rocky shore of Cape Breton. As well, there was a note to her daughter, which Suzanne kept with her always, its folds gone soft as linen.

  Gemma’s mother had, they supposed, swum or walked out into the Caribbean Sea. Gemma pictured her mother moving slowly, a stately swaying of hips and breasts through that quiet blue. Much as she had moved through her life, unhurried, dignified, bearing her responsibilities with such grace and lightness, it was as if she glided through water. She created her own element, radiated her own power, which could temper the pain of so many others, and not simply her own children.

  Rolled in a bundle on the white sands, she had left behind her “festival” skirt, trumpeting scarlet flowers against emerald green, and her pair of clacking bones. These were gazelle bones, or so Gemma had been led to believe, brought generations ago from Africa. Her mother had used the bones to make music when she sang. The bones played best under a full moon. They were more sprightly then, Gemma’s mother said. Her song was a low, throaty hum. The bones performed their bright staccato. Gemma’s sister Leah had those bones now, played them under the island moon.

  When Gemma last went back to the island, Leah told her the bones were always warm to the touch. They too, held her mother’s life heat. A heat that Gemma could will to spread about her shoulders, through sheer force of remembrance and desire.

  So often now she found she needed to summon the invisible shawl that was her mother’s presence. When she comforted a woman whose nostrils had been torn open by a man in a rage. When she stopped toddlers in the park from popping used condoms in their mouths, plucked from a ground that was more litter than grass. When paper bags of excrement and worms were pushed through the mail slot of the refuge. When a man in the first stages of AIDS, marked out by the fact he lived in special Council housing, was clubbed at a bus stop. The assailants had been swaddled in layers of clothing and wore thick rubber masks and gloves. When she herself received death threats, by letter or by telephone, from skinheads who aligned themselves with the National Front or the British National Party or the Movement for a Racially Pure Britain. Or from the deranged husband of one of the hundreds of women who each year sought safety at the shelter.

  She wanted her mother’s heat and love suffusing her skin when she looked at the city and saw Armageddon. When Gemma first arrived in London at the age of fourteen, the city seemed to her cold, dirty, and hostile. Twenty years later, she looked back on those initial impressions as though on a golden age. For in two decades, the small scattered pockets of prejudice, hatred, and greed had festered and spread, just as had the cardboard cities, diseases old and new, child prostitution, and violence. The most terrible irony was that a woman had set this poison in motion, although Gemma had so often found it difficult to grasp that the grocer’s daughter was a woman. Gone from power now and made a Baroness, but with the same static, moulded hair, the same narrow pinched mouth opening and closing like the rigid clasp of her omnipresent handbag. Greed had done it, had ultimately made this city something you might glimpse through the gates of hell.

  Recently, Gemma had dreamt of a great flood, the water rising steadily up the steps of the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, snaking its way through the chancel of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Everywhere the rising flood displaced the people who huddled and bedded down in doorways. This was no purifying flood, no washing away of pain and pestilence. In the dream, she saw the grey waters freeze, gritty peaked waves frozen all over the city, as though a new ice age had come.

  So in her worst moments, Gemma saw the city as through hell fire, flood, and grim, heart-locking ice. Some nights, she would sit on the edge of her bed and weep. This most often happened after ten straight hours of cradling hurt women and bruised children, trying to instil hope in those who believed they could bear life no longer, coping with dissension in the kitchen and final notices from the Electricity Board, of going cap in hand (Gemma did not in fact wear a cap, but a sleek black matador’s hat that was one of her few prized possessions) to the local grocers, charities, and to the Council, always the damned Council. Certain nights, it was all she could do not to sit and howl like an animal. The tales she heard were sometimes too much to bear. Just as were the most vile of the death threat letters with their recipes for dismembering “stunted black dykes.”

  Gemma was a short, black lesbian. As she saw it, this meant she was three-times blessed. She was not disadvantaged and certainly no victim. She rejoiced in the fact she had been born black, compact of form and, above all, female. It was women who redeemed the world from horror. She had been fully aware of this fact for at least twenty years; unconsciously, she thought she had probably absorbed it at her mother’s breast.

  For Gemma, there was quite simply nothing in the world like the laughter of women. In a room where their laughter spilled out (like silver, bubbling water, she thought) and was caught up and spun round, touching everyone in a sublime contagion, then it was heaven. This laughter of women was purest song, and here, Gemma was at home.

  She had not been at home on the island when she returned. She had first escaped (or so she saw it now; at fourteen she had seen herself as exiled) because of a scholarship won through her efforts and her mother’s indefatigable support. Her mother had wanted Gemma, the youngest of her daughters, to go free. For except by escape through an unfettered sailing of the spirit, the life of all women on the island was one of service – to men and to the children men put in them. Rum, bananas, cocoa, sugar. That was the island, with most men indulging copiously in the rum. They drank and preened, announced themselves to be macho men, and then strove to embody the image. When Gemma had gone back at age fifteen, her own father had been so drunk he had not recognized her. She went to speak with him, where he stood jawing with his cronies, and he did not recognize her. He put out his hand and pawed her breasts, and she was sickened and disgusted by him.

  Of course, he then no longer lived with Gemma’s mother; had not, in fact, since Gemma was four. And a very good thing too, Gemma thought, as she marched away from him forever. This she considered a very posh British expression, one she had learned at school. She had soon had the accent down to a t, effortlessly mimicking the upper-class girls, their swank and snootiness and pet phrases. While their attempts to take off her island lilt were all dismal. And a very good thing, too. You said this with the mouth a little pursed, nose in the air, and perhaps the tiniest flounce of the pleated skirt of your school uniform. The phrase and the nose in the air served her very well indeed the day she turned her back on her drunken lout of a father. That day too, she had turned her back on the idea of the island as home, although she had not fully realized it at the time.

  Home was the bosom of her mother, her mother’s laughter, and her mother’s songs. Home was the companionship of her sisters and of all the women on the island, a silky warm companionship, easy and unquestioning, where you are borne up on the spring of that rising laughter, that particular silvery laughter of women, only women, together.

  At her London school, Gemma found such companionship first with the black scholarship girls from Hackney and Brixton. They shar
ed Gemma’s quickness and her fire. As a group, they were admired for their daring. They were fearless in vaulting the school wall and breaking bounds without getting caught. Yet academically, few could touch them.

  By her third year, Gemma had made many firm friends, young women who were brown, pink, olive, and chalk-white. To this day, she detested phrases like “women of colour;” indeed, most of the jargon of the politically correct movement. She described herself as black because black was what she was. And inevitably she had fallen out with women who were angered at her refusal to align herself with “radical lesbians of colour.”

  Which would have meant repudiating women like her friend Suzanne, who admittedly had done a remarkably stupid thing by marrying. Unlike many of their acquaintances, Gemma did not see Suzanne’s marriage as a deliberate act of apostasy, but rather as heedless folly. She was certain Suzanne had been seduced by a false image. Gemma had seen Murdo Napier at a distance (she could not have borne any closer proximity) and had pegged him immediately. The ever-so-slight stoop, suggesting burdens disproportionate for a man of his stature and class. The furrowed brow, the enigmatic, melancholy mouth. Above all, the mournful eyes, where the pupil appears to have no depth at all because it has been flat tened by pain. Suffering, Tragic Man. In Murdo’s case, suffering, tragic widower. Such was the false image that had sucked in Suzanne. And how often had Gemma seen this story played out to its end, with its inevitable reversal of roles for the women taken in.

  Murdo had quite a massive head, Gemma recalled, and Suzanne had seemed much taken with his so-called brilliance. Well, she thought, clutching another fistful of feathers, men were good at games. There were instants (mere instants only) when she could feel quite sorry for them; their worlds were so highly ritualized, so shallow. She listened to them sometimes in pubs – the mates, the chums, the buds, the old boys – and heard them speak their lines as if they had learned them by rote from a book written centuries before. They joked around. They played tricks on one another.

  They liked one-upmanship. They liked to win. It seemed to Gemma that they were always engaged in some kind of war.

  By and large, she did not care for men. With few exceptions, she preferred that no male over the age often enter her home.

  She missed Suzanne terribly and hoped fervently her misalliance would meet with a speedy and relatively painless end. It was such a waste. Murdo would entice Suzanne up to suffer with him on his cross, and then, hey-presto, he’d slip down and leave her pinned there. Oh, come home, Suzanne.

  Gemma counted the naked plucked corpses. Eight down and still two to go. She must get them into the freezer tonight. They’re country-fresh, the local poulterer told her when offering the birds. Gemma hoped the poor bastards had been free-ranging; not nailed to a board and shot through with growth hormones.

  Brutality was pervasive. Last week she had taken to hospital a woman whose husband had inserted a wire coat-hanger through her cheek and dragged her across the kitchen. In front of the children. The week before that, she had counselled a woman who had had her face pushed down over a lit gas jet. And before that. And before that. Which was why Gemma maintained instruction in the art of self-defence should be mandatory for every schoolgirl in the country.

  Not to attack. Although she herself had sometimes to fight off the blind instinctual urge for vengeance. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” So said Audre Lorde. And so Gemma repeated to herself daily, to help quell her fury.

  Gemma was weary. She decided to seal each of the chickens in a plastic bag and store them in the fridge for the night. Tomorrow, she would tackle the gutting. She would ask Marcia and some of the others to help.

  She felt a stab of pity for the dead birds lying naked in their bags, even though she personally disliked the taste of chicken. This aversion dated back to her first British Airways flight when she left her island home. The stewardess had presented her with the plastic dinner tray, tidily divided into its little segments of main course, salad and desert. The main course was a particularly pallid piece of chicken dotted with peas. What most confused her was not the plastic presentation, but the cutlery rolled in a paper napkin. Until that day, she had always eaten with her hands, most often taking a bit of baked yam, and fish, wrapping them in a palm leaf, and then eating alone under the shade of a favourite tree. On the island, one ate with one’s hands. Metal implements did not come into it. None of her reading on the island – neither Sir Walter Scott, nor Virginia Woolf, nor even Iris Murdoch had prepared Gemma for the knife and spoon (both recognizable as cooking utensils) and the two (why two?) pronged devices she found nestled in the paper napkin.

  But she was always a quick study, and glancing across the aisle, she noted how the white tourist couple wielded their cutlery. Perhaps, she reflected, putting the last of chickens away, that incident had marked her real initiation to the culture of the Mother Country (what a misnomer!). It had all begun then with the lifting of the knife and the larger pronged tool, the spearing and the cutting and the lifting of food to the lips. Mastering this process of eating with the help of metal implements was the first of a series of adaptations at which Gemma was to prove herself superb.

  On the plane, she had hidden well just how thoroughly she was perplexed by the ways of her new homeland. She had had her first glimmerings then of how disjunct her past and future were. The island she had left behind, and the London in which she arrived, were as different one from the other as her island must have seemed to her African ancestors. History had spared her their degradation and pain. What they bequeathed her were courage and a persistence of spirit; and a warmth that still haunted the clacking bones.

  And so she had adapted to this city, so often shrouded in grey weather; to the blasts of hot, stale air in the underground; to climbing into damp, clammy sheets winter and summer; to the regulation school underpants (knickers, they called them) of cotton flannel so thick they would stand erect on a bed or dresser top if you balanced them carefully. And much later, as a young woman free of the strictures of boarding school, she had learned to adapt to the unsolicited attentiveness of the London constabulary. If you were black, you were stopped and questioned far more often than were the city’s paler citizens. Racism, Gemma came to understand, was part of the policeman’s armature.

  But London had its compensations. She loved the river. Tonight, when she got home, she would sit a while in the bay window of her second-floor bedroom, and watch the full moon shatter and reassemble again in the gentle friction of the water. The bones, she recalled, played best under a full moon.

  Gemma conjured up the heat of her mother’s hands, and the picture of the sprightly white bones. And she thought again, as she so often did, of the absurdity that was the source of women’s laughter. In time, every woman born came to this tacit recognition; that history had played on them a cruel joke of cosmic proportions, and implications. Somewhere along the line, a millennium ago, the balance had been thrown off and the humans with penises declared themselves the centre of creation. The consequences of this skewing of power were so wrong, so inept (to put the kindest face on it), that women had no choice but to laugh when they could. Laughter was the answer to this profound absurdity with which history presented them. And the beauty of the absurd was that it held the promise of its opposite. So that the laughter of women was also solace and a manifest hope. And I rise up on that bosom of laughter, thought Gemma. I am at home there.

  Oh, come home, Suzanne.

  7

  Murdo

  There were times Murdo feared his brain might burst, a possibility that greatly offended his innate fastidiousness. As a young man, he had been obsessed by his chosen discipline. But why not call his subject what it was? A ravening madness, a seductive, twisting Whore who shook him awake in the middle of the night, his stomach curdling, his head a hollow gourd in which She (the Whore) beat a gong in dinning repetition, the better, She told him, to sound out infinity. He would slide out of bed, try
to escape Her, place his throbbing forehead against the cold of the windowpane, his eyes shut fast against the mocking vastness of Night; and worse, those twinkling tormentors, the stars, each prick of light a needle through his already riddled brain.

  Once, he had come close to worshipping those stars in their majestic courses. The sovereign galaxies exalted him as he lay all night in his narrow astronomer’s coffin, separated from the damp and teeming terrestrial world, the hooting owls, the slinking ferrets and scrabbling foxes all left quite behind. He believed then (did he not?) that he experienced a sublime transportation (what the inane chatterers of today would call an out-of-body experience, or more fatuously still, an OBE). He had tasted the shimmering reaches of the Milky Way (licking silver from his lips), felt his blood beat at the same frequency as the pulsar, the “powerhouse,” at the centre of Crab Nebula. He had been drunk (yes, he must admit it) on the dream of unlocking the ultimate secret, the one seamless overarching theorem that explained every residual mystery, from gravitation to the very structure of matter, including his own flesh, and the flesh of his three wives. From the radiant dust of the farthest reaches of the universe to a single cell in his thumbnail, this “theory of everything” had been his Grail. He had seen himself as one of the outriders of the cosmos, in service of his Mistress, Mathematics, and her Consort, Physics.

  Simply recalling this sickly romanticized attempt at self-creation, this puerile folly, caused him considerable chagrin. And heartburn. Outrider of the cosmos, indeed. Bad enough even in the days of his youth, but now such images had been cheapened and trivialized by those film epics of “outer space,” populated by creatures with misshapen heads, and muscular men and nubile women cavorting in spandex pyjamas. Callum had been besotted with those nonsensical films for a time. Appallingly bad taste came naturally to the boy. Murdo could remember a toothbrush which Callum had set in pride of place in the bracket beneath the bathroom cabinet. Oversized, dull black, the words Darth Vader embossed on the handle, along with some obscene visage glowering out of the plastic. Confronting that object in the mornings had become more than he could stomach, and Murdo had eventually flung the wretched thing into the middle of a clump of stinging nettles.