The Applecross Spell

by Wendy MacIntyre

  How the boy had managed to locate it, Murdo never knew. Callum had, on very rare occasion, demonstrated a remarkable sixth sense – nature’s compensation, perhaps, for his lack of verbal skills. The boy had plunged into the bush, extracted his toothbrush, and emerged with face, bare arms and legs all finely cross-hatched in bright red. He had not winced or whimpered, despite the stinging rash. But rather than admire the boy’s fortitude, Murdo found his son’s forbearance unsettling, even uncanny. Callum was how old then – six, eight? A normal child would at least have moaned a little. That incident, and many others to come, fed Murdo’s fancy that Callum was actually a changeling, some elves’ progeny left in place of his real child. Given Callum’s frequently bizarre behaviour, Murdo sometimes found this admittedly ridiculous notion profoundly comforting.

  Then too, from his first glimmerings of self-consciousness, Callum had cultivated a deliberately beguiling way with women. He would roll his huge blue eyes upwards and pull a kind of mooning face that Murdo found frankly disgusting. But for reasons Murdo could never fathom, women doted on the boy’s antics and fatuous facial expressions. Two of them had fussed over Callum that day he had dragged himself tight-lipped out of the nettles. Nanny Oliphant was it then? And dear old Cook, dabbing calamine lotion on his scratches, popping barley sugar into his greedy open mouth. And while they clucked and cosseted and hung about him in adoring postures, Callum rolled his eyes heavenward, reminding Murdo of those badly executed portraits of saints in ecstasy, who appear to have been very recently goosed.

  Yes, the child had had two functioning eyes then. Now, he was asymmetrical, in terms of his organs of vision. And with a nature like Callum’s, asymmetry must be the inevitable outcome. Murdo in no way blamed himself for the boy’s accident. Callum was a fool, and fools must come to grief. Besides, it was only an eye the boy had lost. Tissue, muscle, fluid. What was the loss of an eye compared with the bitterness of the failed Quest? It had all gone now, the animating vigour, the quickened pulse, the powerhouse behind the search that generated life’s meaning. The certainty that he would now never find the exquisite equation that underwrote the mysteries of the world, had rendered him not simply bitter, but pulped. At his most dejected, he did sometimes see himself as an aging piece of fruit, its inside scooped right out, its flesh spotted and withered. So, pulped. Or sometimes, like a piece of wood, riddled with (that word again) wormholes.

  Wormholes were of course, symptomatic of his problem, of his cumulative failure at, and in life. Ironically, these same wormholes were staples of the science fiction that had so fascinated the young Callum. And might still for all Murdo knew, if the drugs in which his son indulged had not by now destroyed what little brain he had. Could Callum still read? Could he even – by the most liberal definition – reason? With Callum this was impossible to judge, based on external evidence. For in Murdo’s presence at least, Callum persisted in his maddening babble, which was not quite baby-talk, but some language, or simply strings of sound, of his own invention.

  So it struck Murdo as a peculiar double irony that the ruination of his Quest lay in that absurd, fictitious world of Callum’s boyhood. Fifteen years ago, Murdo had jeered at Callum’s babble of wormholes, of tunnels through the fabric of time-space, and of a world in ten dimensions (it was simply that we did not have organs to perceive the other six). Now these concepts were standard for the whizz-bang boys of theoretical physics. Pumping out their tomes, with their requisite reams of equations, the superstrings that made a mockery of his own search for a unified field theory. He had been left behind. Or rather, he was grossly out of step in a world where, daily, theory propagated new theory, where there were now more than 200 types of subatomic particles (many of them artificially created). The latest, he read, were wimps (an acronym of sorts for weakly interacting subatomic particles). The very names themselves, like superstring for example, were detestable. So vulgar, so very American, so cunningly aimed at the popular market. As in superburger, supermodel. Super had been one of the few words Callum could actually articulate as a child, usually whilst he stood on his head, and in that dinning repetition children use to drive adults mad.

  Murdo did sometimes reflect on the unfairness of identifying his own life’s failure with Callum. He recognized that he had troubled relationships with all three of his children. Clara was the only one who sometimes showed him a meagre affection. He had come to dread their annual visits, regarding them as trials he must endure. The problem was not that they challenged him, or subjected him to a flailing criticism. Rather, they ignored him in so far as they could. Jeremy was smoothly supercilious, the exemplum of the cosmopolitan man who has forged his identity everywhere but at home. Clara habitually graced him with a close-lipped smile. Which was actually no comfort as her expression seemed a ghostly mirroring of the look he imagined her mother bravely put on in her last moments. And then there was Callum, who after a year away, would strike Murdo more forcibly than ever as an aberration, an abomination, a monster. Walking the ridgepole, swinging at the end of a rope he had looped round the tower top, babbling, polyvalent, turning up in disguise, never, never still. Or when still, having the appearance of one dead, and if you touched him on the shoulder, he would topple to the floor in a fit. Disgusting, maddening Callum, as unruly and unpredictable as this wilful universe now postulated by contemporary physics. Turbulent disorder, ever-thickening complexity, and the organizing principle emerging suddenly at the very edge of chaos. This all recalled for Murdo Callum’s inane gabbling, which would culminate abruptly in a word, or series of words, that seemed to have both sense and resonance. No doubt Callum, in his heedless drug taking, could glimpse those six other dimensions that lie perpendicular to our own, secreted inside the superstrings.

  I am too old for all this, thought Murdo. His own goal was now antiquated, forever outpaced by the proliferating theories of the whizz-bang boys. His quest was driven by the desire for an elegant simplicity, the perfect yoking of quantum mechanics and gravitational curvature of space, a final equation in which the paradoxes of Bohr, Dirac, and even Gödel were all subsumed. Like a pack of wolves, he used to think, lying peacefully down together. No wars, but a wondrous consonance. All quite gone now, he thought. No possibility of the unified field, that “theory of everything.” Not now that the whizz-bang boys had unlocked their numerous Pandora’s boxes at the very heart of the universe.

  Sometimes, he found himself wishing he had been born in the days of Newton, and able to luxuriate in the certainties of the clockwork universe, where bodies could indeed attract and repel each other over distance, and space was merely emptiness.

  How the young man he had been would have despised the failed old man he had become. Over the years, Murdo had lost the ability to weep. But if he had it still, he would have wept for that young man in his wooden coffin, his bright eyes, his firm flesh, his heart (yes, his heart) open to glories cosmic and sidereal. What an innocent he had been. When was that? The wooden coffin on the hill in Hampshire? He calculated rapidly. He must have been seventeen. Now forty-five years had passed. Forty-five years of incremental loss, confusion, doubt, and embitterment.

  Once, he had been as naive as Suzanne, something he would naturally never tell her. He found her dedication to her work endearing. She was so terribly certain that her scribblings would make a difference. Poring over her pictures, a pencil tucked behind one ear, its vector-like tip emerging like a pure sign from the curve of her ebony hair. When she studied her engravings and reproductions, her brow a little wrinkled, Suzanne seemed to him endearingly childlike, much like Clara when she had played at dressing her dolls. He knew Suzanne would be outraged by such comparisons (in fact, it amused and even aroused him, to think just how outraged.) But of course he would never reveal to her that he regarded her work as fatuous. No more than he would comment on her rather risible background. From his earliest school days, he had been trained in taciturnity and in keeping his own counsel. Earlier even than that, at the hands of his fat
her. Holding his tongue, silencing his real opinion, was as ingrained in him as the habits of cleanliness, regular evacuation of the bowels, the taking of air and exercise.

  He wanted to keep Suzanne. She had a natural intelligence, if somewhat woefully applied. She was not a chatterer, and she respected his privacy. Uppermost, her body inflamed his desire as no woman’s had since Kirstie. There was something in the combination of the long balletic legs, with the fullness of breasts and hips, that consistently aroused him. Even thinking of her, here in the train, he could feel his erection, so that he had to lay his newspaper open over his lap, and stare out the window as if deep in thought. Deep in her. Perhaps because of her North American upbringing, she was far less inhibited than most of the women he had known, except when he had paid for highly specialized services. Suzanne enjoyed, even encouraged, physical positions he had assumed a feminist would consider demeaning. And he had to admit that her politics, her highly charged notion of independence, gave an added fillip to their lovemaking.

  As the train sped past the glowering bulk of Durham Cathedral, Murdo reflected on the degree to which the bodies of women were his salvation. The virginal body of Miranda, too soon ruined by Jeremy’s birth. The muscular sturdiness (so excitingly androgynous) of Kirstie, and her balance and strength which he loved to see her test; alas, the last time, too far.

  He was sorry for women’s suffering, the fact that they must endure monthly cramps and mess; and he, their irritable temper at such times. He sympathized with the agonies they underwent in childbirth. And afterwards, if like Miranda, they had been badly ripped.

  He was bemused, as he reflected again on Suzanne’s lying to him about not being able to have children. The silly girl did not realize that she always gave herself away in a falsehood. A slight tic appeared at the outer rim of her left eyelid. Ah well... she must, he supposed, have the illusion of control.

  The train sped up, now it was well past Durham, nosing its way through the spreading darkness. He was impatient to be in London. The boy was a favourite student and he had indeed sounded desperate. Murdo had never forgotten that other one, a decade ago, a brilliantly promising mathematician who had noted his equations on lengths of rolled paper and then tacked them to the walls of his flat. And one day, having failed repeatedly to come up with the desired solution, he had taken down these reams and reams of paper, wrapped them about his body and set himself alight.

  As the boy’s family were in Peru, it was Murdo the police had called to identify the body. What he would never forget was how the inked fragments of the equations had burned themselves into the skin.

  8

  The Journal

  It was years since menstruation had hit Suzanne this severely – like having been kicked in the midriff by a particularly vicious horse. She would have willingly given a tooth for one of Adas tisanes for cramps. Shepherds Purse was one ingredient she remembered, and Lady’s Mantle.

  In the master bathroom, she rummaged in the scarred oak cabinet above the marble sink. Its double doors, each with a classic keyhole but no key, were a palimpsest of deeply scored initials and cryptic messages. Today, the carved letters swam together. Through her dizziness, she sought to disentangle them. There were many Callums, heavily scored, and oddly placed, whether upside-down, longitudinal, or with the allum tucked inside the bulbous C. What a handful he must have been, she thought, grimacing at the idea of generic rambunctious boy. The initials P. H. also predominated. She assumed these identified some old school friend or young love of Callum’s.

  In the cabinet’s jumble of old pill bottles, flattened tubes of shaving cream, and rock-hard bath salts (she must clear this lot out later), she seized on a box of Paracetamol and greedily gulped down two tablets with tap water. She sat on the old-fashioned toilet, whose frigid wooden seat set off a fresh set of contractions. She disliked this toilet, set up on a square tiled pedestal, against which she invariably stumbled when she got up during the night, eyes gluey with sleep. She detested its permanently discoloured bowl, the brown of nicotine-stained fingers, and its length of clanking chain looped from the ceiling like an empty manacle awaiting a prisoner.

  She wondered why Murdo had never had a modern bathroom installed. There was a toilet (Murdo always said “lavatory”) and wash-basin in a tiny, windowless cupboard on the ground floor, and a similar arrangement on the third floor of the house. How cramped and awkward it must have been for Kirstie and Miranda, when they changed diapers and toilet trained the children. Immediately, she regretted this thought. For a taunting image arose of a young, glossily pregnant Miranda standing naked before a full-length mirror, her arms folded protectively over her perfectly round, high belly. The pearly skin was so finely stretched, it verged on transparency. There was another human figure in this unwanted vision – a watcher or voyeur who studied the naked woman from the back, as well as her reflected front view in the mirror. Suzanne fought, and failed, being pulled inside this watcher so that she stared out through its eyes. What she sensed was not the hot stink of prurience she had feared, but a cooly clinical detachment. These eyes she unwillingly looked out of had the unflinching rigour of an exacto knife slicing through crisp paper. Suzanne felt that the observer’s eyes, and the mind behind them, desired nothing more than to snip Miranda out of the scene, so that she became a three-dimensional paper doll that could be dangled, rotated in the air, examined from every angle, measured. Measured?

  Suzanne groaned, leant forward, and using her hands to brace herself against the toilet seat, got unsteadily to her feet.

  She groped her way back to bed and curled on her side, a hot water bottle clutched to her midriff. She whispered the word into the depths of the pillow, wishing it buried; then winced at the mental image of the glistening cruel points of a geometric compass.

  She knew she must banish these thoughts. They were demons (doubt was a demon, as was jealousy) playing on her pain and vulnerability. You are inviting them in, she could hear Ada say. As a child she had pictured the demons with crab-like fingers, scrabbling through some chink in her mind. How to get rid of them? Visualize, Suzanne. Visualize.

  She concentrated, then pictured herself walking through a spiralling mist at the base of the Eildon Hills. Where she stopped, she found a hollow dense with moss, as warm and dry as cat’s fur. Here she lay down, feeling her pulse slow, and succumbed to a deep sleep, a drift downward into the innocent scent of the earth.

  She passed a dreamless night. Then, toward dawn, woke with a start. There was a malicious-faced black cat sitting on the end of the bed. The animal’s magnetic glare drew her, threatened to crush her very essence in the vise of its narrow skull. She shook herself properly awake, and became uncomfortably aware of the clammy rubber bag against her bare thigh and a dull ache in her pelvis. There was of course no actual cat. Not even a lingering hair. There were no pets of any kind in the house, which Suzanne thought a pity. Only the pair of peacocks that wandered the grounds outside, aloof and apparently secretive, until a flash of the male’s ludicrously overwrought tail announced its presence. Or they loosed one of their shrill cries, which always made her think of a cat being tortured.

  Her nightmare cat, she realized, was probably spawned by her reading about Marie Lamont, a young Scotswoman tried for witchcraft in 1662. Marie confessed that she and two other women came to the house of Allan Orr “in the likeness of kats, and followed his wyf into the chamber, where they took a herring out of a barrel and having taken a byte off it, they left it behind them... his wyf did eat, and one yaire after taking heavy disease, died.”

  Did Marie make her confession under the strictures of the witch’s bridle, Suzanne wondered, putting her hand tentatively to her own face as she ran the water for a bath. The bridle had prongs that bit into the accused’s cheeks. So that in her delirium, Marie might well have believed herself to be a cat, and the metal spikes digging into the flesh of her face, her whiskers. Or was Marie subjected to the water trial, stripped naked, her knees roped to her che
st, before she was tossed into the loch? If the accused sank, she was innocent and such innocent women often drowned. If she floated, she was deemed to be a witch and then sentenced to be burned. Either way, the water trial effectively reduced the female population.

  Bringing her knees to her chest, half-floating in the ancient clawed tub, Suzanne realized the full extent of these women’s humiliation. Bound in this way, their genitalia would be completely exposed, as much as on any gynaecologist’s table. The outer and the inner lips, the red gash of the vaginal opening, cruelly on display to the judges and sundry onlookers, curious or sadistic.

  The “witch craze,” some historians persisted in calling it. An oddly deficient phrase, she thought, for a phenomenon that had lasted nearly three hundred years and resulted in the deaths of several million women. The misogyny that had fuelled this phenomenon took on a particularly vile form in the Malleus Malificarum, the papal document that had codified procedures in the witchcraft trials. “Woman is a wheedling and secret enemy. When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil... they are feebler both in mind and body.” And this feebleness meant that women were far more open to the devil’s blandishments. Woman would willingly lay her smooth hand in the devil’s horny one; then rut with goats; murder babies and drink their blood; set a plague of warts upon a neighbour.