The Applecross Spell

by Wendy MacIntyre

  Suzanne sat on the ground, her back supported by the solid breadth of the tablet. For the moment, the cacophony of insistent voices had subsided. She ate the sandwich and apple she had packed in her knapsack, and drank all of the tea in the thermos.

  She wanted to go on walking. Simply walk forever and avoid the mounting evidence of Murdo’s cruelty.

  Why have you done this stupid thing? She thought of Callum’s young white throat, of the straw in his hair, of his fingers stroking her bare foot. She thought of how she had so much wanted to put her arm around him.

  She tried not to think of Callum; not to picture his mismatched eyes: the peerless, lucent blue one and the dead, opaque one for which Murdo, her husband, was responsible.

  She hated that h word. Why had she entertained it at all? The careful management of husbandry. The mathematical controls of Murdo. The wife measured, weighed, and separated from her child.

  The wife caught up in a harness and cruel wings. The children drilled. The boy beaten. The boy blinded.

  The boy blinded. Why would they lie to her? Unless there were an inheritance they were loath to share with their father’s new wife. But this idea did strike her as totally absurd. They all three lived, apparently, stripped to the bone, and were, if anything, even less materialistic than either she or Gemma.

  And what money could there be, with the house mouldering and in disrepair? A sad, antiquated lumbering place whose every stone was steeped in pain.

  Sugar? Gemma had asked. Was the house purchased with the profits from slave labour? She must remember to ask the children.

  Sugar? The word was a hideous taste in her mouth. She had the sickening thought that this was somehow mixed with the taste of Murdo’s semen. She spat. She bent over with a spasm in her midriff, a jolt like a cattle prod. She felt suddenly horribly sick and quite irrationally afraid. She thought of Ada and the courage of women. There was a strange tingling at the back of her head. She no longer felt ill. Instead, she was oddly energized, consumed by a fierce, wild force that she struggled to bring to a focus. She began to walk more quickly, every footstep laid down with such purpose, its objective might be the preservation of her own life. She was an enviably strong woman, she told herself, a strong woman covering ground.

  Then she realized that the world around her had changed, the light no longer yielding and fluid but tinselly and artificial. She looked up at the sun and saw it smothered in a kind of white gauze. Then it disappeared altogether. Murdo is responsible, she thought. Murdo, the gobbling whale, has swallowed down the sun. Or he came in his lion form and took it in his mouth, as a lion will eat his children.

  She walked and was fearful in this alien place. She walked and thought of her mother. She was aware that something had gone terribly wrong with her perception. She wondered if she had eaten anything that was slightly off. The sandwich had been wholemeal bread and cheese. No mouldy rye. No argot. The tea only Earl Grey in a thermos she had found on a top shelf in the kitchen. The effects of the whisky she had shared with the children had surely long passed.

  Then these rational thoughts all evaporated because she was moving through a landscape consisting of great slabs of plate glass. These glass slabs were mammoth. The height of Egyptian pyramids, she thought wildly. The glass was gummed or smeared so that it was often difficult to make out the road ahead. This must be what it is like to look out of Callum’s dead eye, she thought. Or perhaps I am looking, now, out of Murdo’s heart.

  Murdo has eaten his children. He has swallowed down the sun.

  Her heart lightened a little to hear a child singing from somewhere high in the branches of a tree. She turned round and round, seeking the child out, and was shocked when she spied him. He was a bird-child, some Bosch-like hybrid, a child above the waist for the most part, but below he had flexing legs and the curled claws of a bird. And the mouth that shaped the song had no soft lips; only a hard, yellow, pointed beak. His was a sweet song, but disturbing, even maddening, because it too was hybrid, an uncomfortable fusion of two species.

  She feared she was going mad. She knew she must keep going, get back to the house, lie down and sleep. Then the familiar order of the visible world would be restored. I can do this, she told herself. It is only a question of going back the way I have come. Of reversing what I have done. Whatever I am undergoing is nothing to what millions of women have endured before me, and are enduring now.

  It was her feet, rather than her eyes, that recognized the gravelled surface of the circular driveway. With relief, she saw the house, its buff stone, the tower with its gleaming slate cap, all reassuringly substantial. There was a broad-backed black animal that stood guard by the front door, as if waiting patiently for her return. A mastiff? A small trained bear? Why had she never seen it before? The animal craned its neck toward her as she came up to it, obviously watching out for her. She stroked its shiny flanks as she went by and stumbled into the house.

  Once she was inside, a piercing wind circled the house, although only seconds before the air had been sullenly still. She heard the heavy rain hurling itself against the winds. She could not understand why her own cheeks stung with this wind and rain.

  I must find a book, she thought. The book I was reading yesterday evening. I will lie down on my bed and read, and in that familiar habit, I will find sleep. My arm will grow numb and my hand will drop and the open book will fold gently over my face.

  Thinking she had left the book there, she went into the dining room. She could not at first comprehend the shadowy shape on the floor. As she came closer, she saw that it was Murdo, lying face down, a dagger driven up to the hilt into his neck. She froze. Or time froze. She was uncertain which. She wished this terrible deed undone. She wondered if she might have committed the murder or if it was the children’s doing. She tried to move her feet, to go to the telephone. I must get an ambulance, she thought. He might still be alive.

  She found she could not move. She just stood staring at the handle of the dagger. It looked like some frightful excrescence he had grown overnight, like a beak or an antler. The knife handle did in fact appear to be made of horn, a substance darkly obdurate, and with a natural whorl, whose curves the maker had followed in shaping it for the hand’s grip. Embedded in the hilt was a cairngorm. The dagger was apparently a classical Scottish dirk, possibly centuries old. She wanted to take the blade out of Murdo’s neck, wipe off the blood, slit time apart, and then go back to where they had been.

  She got her wish. She actually heard the membrane of time being ripped apart. Then she realized this sound was in fact the red velvet curtain opening, swishing and swaying as someone tugged on the pulley. And there they stood. Jeremy in the middle as ever, flanked by Callum and Clara, all three with clean, prim faces, their hands clasped neatly in front. They looked at her. They looked at the dead body of Murdo. They nodded and smiled. And in unison, they began to clap.

  The room exploded then into shards of light. The red of blood. The yellow of egg yolk. The black of putrid water. The last thing Suzanne remembered was a splinter of blue light piercing her eye. And the flood of understanding that accompanied the pain.

  Now I am blinded too. Now I will forever be bound to Callum.

  14

  Callum

  Callum’s eye socket was throbbing. He was upset, “in a state,” Clara had said, before setting him the task of a hill run. They had always said “hill run” when they were children, and he had laughed when she used the phrase, felt briefly and fadingly exuberant, as if he could indeed launch himself back to innocence simply by jogging up the smooth flank of a Border hill.

  To please Clara, he had complied. And now he sat on a rocky outcrop of a sturdy enough hill, surveying the gently undulating vista beneath. Too gentle for his taste, but pleasing, of course, with its green humps set off by patches of yellow broom and rust-red bracken. The pull of this Borders country had subsided for him forever, once he had seen and tasted the wildness of the North. When he first saw the northwest
of Scotland, through the windows of the little steam train chugging its way from Glasgow to Oban, he had been awestruck, even a little frightened. He simply had not known that his country, so very small when you looked at it on a map, contained such rugged vastness. A godly vastness. The naked mountains had seemed to press in, threatening to engulf the tiny train on all sides. Yet the more he looked, the more he loved them. They called to something fiercely vital in his blood, that wild, impulsive part of himself that would not be quelled. Nor would he ever wish it so. For above all, it was his impulsiveness that distinguished him from Murdo.

  Murdo hated the North. “A raw, uncivilized place,” he used to say, whenever Kirstie wanted to go home to Mull. And so she had gone alone, taking him and Clara. That first time on the train, once his fear settled, he had wanted to pierce the glass of the window, yield himself up to the surging power of the place. Later, as a teenager, he had gone with a girlfriend to Glencoe. There he had trembled and wept. The girl was initially sympathetic. She thought he was overtired or had a cold. Then she had chided him and laughed at him. He had trouble with girls, and even now, with young women his own age. His most successful love affairs were always with older women. They had a breadth of wisdom that did not intrude. They did not think him either feckless or mad.

  He had intended by now to be well away from these Border hills. He had wanted to take the bike up the Applecross Peninsula, that tortuous ascent to a height from which you could see Skye, lying in the water like a dark blue beast. And where the barren ground was covered with cairns, lovingly laid by God knows how many thousands of hands. He thought of these cairns as revenants. They were all spirits who had loved that place and come back. You could hear them whispering when you stood there.

  Even in a car, the zigzag drive to the top was perilous. With each inch forward, you feared you would fall off the narrow, twisting road. On the bike it would be wondrous, his body and the Triumph pitching themselves forward against gravity. Against fear. Against the very edge of life. Or of death.

  But the “incident” as Jeremy termed it, had sent his plans haywire. Jeremy and Clara had tried to absolve him of blame. But when they found her and he spotted the thermos poking out of her knapsack, he knew right away what had happened. He was responsible, if only indirectly. He was dreadfully sorry if her experience had been frightful.

  Clara was with her now. They had carried her to bed, he and Jeremy and Clara, and laid cooling cloths on her forehead. Her pulse was good although she was a little drained looking and quite limp. Her head would probably ache when she woke. Her mouth would be dry. They could easily right that. But he wanted to be there when she woke up. He must explain what had happened and how it was his fault, really.

  So his trip to Applecross must be delayed another day. Time was tight, uncomfortably so. He sensed Murdo’s approach like a smothering shadow. Clara had taken the call. Two days, the pater announced. He would return in two days. Callum could not bear the idea of encountering him. The sight of that smug leonine countenance made him physically ill. And those thick shoulders encased in musty tweed. Retch.

  Through the distant treetops, he thought he could make out the dull gleam of the slate that topped the house’s round tower. He had swung from its conical peak at least twice he could remember. Looping the lasso over the roof tip had been the difficult part. He had had to crouch on a narrow, crumbling window ledge, over a drop that induced a rush of vertigo he could feel still in the soles of his feet. Once the loop was secure, he had swung out on the rope, making himself a human pendulum, working against the force of gravity that Murdo had made his particular intellectual province.

  They had all three done it in their own way, swung out against the horrendous sucking gravity that was Murdo. Jeremy took more real risks than he or Clara. They both worried about him constantly, as Jeremy deliberately put his body and mind under threat, reporting on ethnic wars, displaced persons’ camps, child prostitution rings, child slave labour. He admired Jeremy immensely, and it hurt him to see his brother contort himself in ethical knots, berating himself because, in a sense, he made a living from others’ pain. Jeremy subjected every word he wrote and spoke, his every action, to the most rigorous moral scrutiny. Whereas Murdo simply grabbed and ate and choked off and forced and beat and lay stinking in his own Slough of Despond.

  Clara had escaped the paternal force field by the very lightness of her feet and her shape-shifting on stage. She could make you laugh or cry in the same minute. She could change in a second from demure nun to imp to chimp to chicken to fairy. Clara was his solace, the one who had always understood his secret language.

  For himself, he had sometimes plunged too far in his effort to differentiate himself from the wretched pater. And the most terrible time was when he was obsessed about the genes he must have inherited from Murdo. The anxiety had clawed like a rat at his brain. What if – despite his own blessed waywardness and all he must have inherited from Kirstie – what if those genes of Murdo’s suddenly asserted themselves and he became what he most wished not to become. So for a time, he had given himself all too willingly to drugs. Coke, Ecstasy, even heroin for a while. Here was a risk-taking he did not care to repeat. That had been his most precipitous drop. For a time, his secret language was all he was able to speak, if he spoke at all. Like the boy who cried wolf, he had played with that strange language of his own making and it had taken him over.

  The people of the streets had saved him. Their compassion and dignity had borne him up, but of course he had been lucky in those he met. In a sense, he had always been lucky. He tried to give back what he had been given, volunteering with an organization that worked for the homeless. After a time he got paid; not a lot, but enough to live, and he still had some of the money he and Clara had inherited from Kirstie. Which was what had bought the bike.

  It was his idea that the organization solicit donations of fur coats to help the street people survive the winter. For many of the homeless hated the confinement of government-run shelters. They preferred the freedom, the integrity of their makeshift bedrooms set up on the pavement: a cardboard canopy, a treasure trove of polyethylene bags, an ancient blanket whose odours reassured them they were home. The fur coat owners were only too willing to liberate themselves of guilt garments. Who, after all, wants to be spat on in the street and called an animal murderer? But to satisfy all parties – particularly the anti-trapping brigade – the coats had to be defaced. Before leaving London, Callum had therefore put many hours into ripping seams and sleeves from capes and cloaks and full-length manteaus of seal and lynx and mink. Then he had taken a spray can of paint (guaranteed ozone-friendly) and played noughts and crosses on the glistening fur.

  There were times, he thought, when the indulgences of the well-off could be very profitably exploited.

  He had taken up photography for just that reason, building an archive of documentary evidence to prod the conscience of the rich. Rather than photograph the people of the streets themselves, he had focused on their pavement beds – “bashes” they called them. Always, he had asked, and generally been given, the owner’s permission. When he developed these photos, he was floored by their mute eloquence. A box, a block of Styrofoam, a Harrod’s shopping bag, a shredded red comforter. Juxtaposed, these objects pleaded more articulately than could words. No – “pleaded” was of course the wrong word, suggesting debasement, grovelling. Spoke, then. By some miracle, the photographs spoke, far more succinctly and lucidly than his own tongue could ever manage.

  He sometimes wondered if those early years of fractured babble, the nonsense language he had cultivated in part to evade and infuriate his father, had spoiled him for speech for life. Why else did he so often find himself struck dumb by what he saw? Sometimes with a terrible raw rage, sometimes in simple amazement at human tenacity, the sheer will required to make a home out of garbage, to trundle one’s belongings through the street in a hijacked shopping cart. The underclass (as the newspapers called the dispossessed) was
increasing all the time, and getting younger too. And unfortunately, the world seemed full of evil men, like his father, who had no compunction about preying on young bodies. This made him sick and afraid because he did not know how to help other than in doing what he did.

  Not even Jeremy had short-term answers. Jeremy had seen his photographs and arranged a meeting with the owner of a Cork Street gallery. In September, there was to be an exhibition of The Bashes by Callum Napier. While he was pleased, he was also uneasy. Any publicity of the plight of the homeless is good, said Jeremy. Yet it was also from Jeremy that he had learned the habit of self-scrutiny, that trawling of the heart to uncover motives suspicious or unworthy. It bothered him immensely that he might profit, even meagrely, from someone else’s pain.

  They all practised self-scrutiny, he and Jeremy and Clara. In this way, they ensured that they belonged to a totally different class of being than Murdo.

  Jeremy was the adept and unflinching self-examiner. Callum thought he would never be able to approximate his brother’s standards. There were aspects of himself so repulsive he could face them only with the greatest difficulty. His dreams of parricide, for example. They still at times shook him awake at night. He would be drenched in sweat, doubled over with vile stomach cramps, much as he had been when he came off heroin. Always the same dream. He stood over his father’s dead body, which lay face down, with a dagger driven in its back. And he, Callum, looked down with his fist still clenched, the muscles of his right arm taut as wire. When he woke from these dreams, the fingers of his right hand would be knotted and painful.

  It might so easily have actually happened, he realized. Were it not for Jeremy and Clara and old Nanny and a chain of fortunate circumstance he could only attribute to inexplicable luck. For God knows, he had wished Murdo dead often enough.