The ‘Deliverance Ministry’ is the evangelical church’s answer to the Catholic exorcist’s Rituale Romanum. The darkest, most secretive of rituals. Around the same time I was in London trying hard to seduce Lexie, hundreds of miles north on Pig Island Malachi Dove had disintegrated to his lowest point. The only way he could see out of his problems was to exorcize the demon he’d convinced himself possessed his disabled daughter.
‘He was insane,’ I told Angeline, that evening back at the rape suite, ‘but you know that, don’t you?’
We were both sunburnt, our hearing dull from the constant roar of wind on the boat journey back. My sweater was torn, covered with rust from the drum I’d wedged into the shaft, but Lex wasn’t around to complain. She’d left the light on in the kitchen and a note on the table:
Absolutely exhausted.
Thanks for the phone call.
Ha ha! Just joking.
Lex
I crumpled it and threw it into the bin. I took off my jacket and placed my MP3 recorder in the centre of the table, the mic facing Angeline. Then I got a fresh bottle of JD from the kitchen and filled two beakers.
‘There,’ I said, pushing one towards her. ‘You need it.’
She sat down, picking up the JD and drinking it in one, seriously, like she was taking medicine. She handed the beaker back to me. I filled it again and she drank. On the fourth refill she sat back, shoved her hands into her coat pockets and studied me. The booze had made her flushed.
‘You know who my mum was?’
I leaned over and pressed record on the MP3. ‘Yeah. Asunción. I met her once. Twenty years ago.’
‘She was pretty, wasn’t she?’
‘She was beautiful. I mean, really. Really beautiful.’
There was a pause. She looked at the winking red light on the recorder. ‘I loved her, you know. She was the only thing I cared about ever. As long as she was alive I was safe.’
It’s early evening in May, the honeysuckle is rambling across the little house near the mine and the sun is just finishing its long climb down the sky when Malachi, drunk, stumbles clumsily into the bathroom to find his teenage daughter standing in front of the window, naked except for the pink towel she’s rubbing her face with. She freezes, the towel over her mouth, too shocked to cover herself. The two of them stand and stare at each other for over a minute. Waves of blood crawl up Malachi’s face and Angeline’s sure he’s going to shout at her. But he doesn’t. Instead, without a word, he turns and leaves unsteadily, closing the door behind him. Angeline is motionless for a long time, staring at the door, then at last she lowers the towel and wraps it round her body. Much later, when she looks back at this evening, she’ll recognize it as the moment the trouble began.
At first it seems like nothing. Her father spends longer periods in his study, printing off page after page of biblical texts, and sometimes he lapses into silence at the dinner table. Both she and Asunción notice how much he’s eating and how much weight he’s gaining. His neck bulges above his collars, his corduroy trousers are too tight and he has to leave the waist unbuttoned. But it takes them a long time to find out what’s at the root of all this. Almost four months. In the end it’s Asunción who discovers what’s really going on in her husband’s mind.
‘Start wearing something in the house.’ One autumn night she calls Angeline into the study. Malachi is out, collecting generator oil from the jetty, and her mother is sitting at his desk, her serious face illuminated by the little Anglepoise. She is leaning forward. Her elbows are covering a pile of papers. ‘I’m going to ask the shop to send some clothes, mija, we’ll make you something proper to wear. I don’t want your daddy to look at you no more.’
Angeline peers at the papers squashed under her mother’s elbows. She can see Bible verses and a ripped-out bookplate: a medieval etching of a creature like a dragon standing up, straight as a man, wings sprouting from its shoulders. A woman is on her knees behind it, lifting its tail to kiss its buttocks. Before Angeline can look closer Asunción pulls the papers away and switches off the light. She doesn’t want her daughter to see too much.
‘Your daddy is losing his brains, mija.’ She always elides the two words, mi hija, her pet name for Angeline. She stands, putting her hands on her daughter’s shoulders and guiding her out of the study. ‘He drinks too much. You keep your clothes on when he’s around.’
For the next year Malachi’s mental health declines rapidly. His drinking accelerates and he’ll spend hours lying on the sofa as if he’s ill, eating and drinking, swelling like a giant marrow rooted there, and coughing long, dry coughs that sound almost intestinal. His face is patchy with broken veins and occasional bumps where he’s fallen in the night, and at dinner he sits in silence, watching Angeline with bloodshot eyes. Sometimes in the living room the two women will go silent and watch his hands trembling as he turns the pages of the Bible.
Angeline has learned to be scared of him. It’s never been said but she knows something has changed and she knows from instinct that it’s only her mother who stands between them. Asunción makes sure Angeline is dressed when she’s in the house – she allows her to take off the long uncomfortable skirts she’s made only when they’re away from it, on the days they wander the south of the island, making treehouses and teaching each other the names of flowers. Sometimes they sit for hours on the beaches, staring out at the sea, hoping to see a passing minke or a flock of cormorants, and if that doesn’t happen they dare each other to go as far as the gorge and examine the chemical drums. On cold days they stay in Angeline’s bedroom and read books or watch soap reruns on daytime TV. Angeline’s room is lined with bookshelves.
Asunción was born in Mexico, but she thinks of Cuagach as her home, the place she was destined to be. She hasn’t known much else in her life: she’s been with Malachi since she was sixteen, on the island since she was eighteen, and she loves the place more than she loves anything. The island is in her bones. In her blood. But maybe she’s wondering about what’s on the mainland because Angeline notices her sentences have changed. There are a lot of We-coulds and If-wes, and Angeline knows she doesn’t mean the three of them, but just the two. One day she finds a letter from a women’s shelter in Glasgow addressed to Asunción thanking her for the ‘enquiry’. This letter makes Angeline worry more about Malachi. If Asunción wants to escape, then maybe there really is something to fear.
But then, just as she’s wondering how to ask her mother, something happens that changes everything.
‘Dios tiene sus motivos, dios tiene sus motivos…’
It starts with pinprick moles all over Asunción’s skin, as if she’s walked through a shower of pepper. Then come the warts, pale brown things that dangle from her chin like berries. She plays with them all the time, twisting them in her fingers as if she’d like to snap them off. One on her temple gets bigger and bigger, spreading like a wine stain under her skin until it’s covering half of her eye and, before anyone knows it, lumps rise on her spine, like on a lizard – Angeline can see them even through her mother’s embroidered blouses when she’s in the kitchen opening cans of chopped tomato and chillies for casseroles. At night she hears Asunción praying. She takes out the notebooks with the Psychogenic Healing Ministry’s manifestos on death and healing from the study, and in her bed at night Angeline can hear her mother muttering like a witch, long liturgical sentences coiling out in the moonlight. In the daytime she stares at her mother’s hands, covered with flour and chopped meat, the way she wipes her brow with the back of her wrists so it doesn’t get into her hair. Nobody’s said it, but she knows these are things she won’t see much more of.
The day Malachi takes her to the mainland is in late summer. The wild fuchsia that carpets the forests is at its best today – hot and vivid beneath the trees – and Asunción is already awake when Angeline comes downstairs, sitting on the floor in the open doorway wrapped in a blanket, the blue day blazing away outside. When she sees her daughter she smiles. ‘Come to me, mija.’
Angeline creeps nearer, putting a hand on her mother’s arm and gazing up into her face. Asunción pulls a crucifix out of the blanket and holds it out, dangling it on her fingers. ‘I always thought I’d have more to give a child,’ she says. ‘Don’t let your father see it.’
She puts her arm round her daughter and they sit, looking down at their feet in their open-toed sandals. Angeline’s are healthy and pink, Asunción’s are greyish. A tear lands in the dust; no one mentions it. Her mother’s body smells strange, Angeline thinks: sweetish and foul, like dead flowers in a vase. They sit like this for almost an hour, Asunción weeping quietly, until Malachi comes downstairs carrying a bag. He looks at them neutrally. ‘It’s time.’
When Angeline realizes where they’re going she panics. He has to drag her away, peeling her fingers off her mother’s arms. All the time she’s screaming and begging him not to take her. ‘No. Please no!’ She hobbles along next to them, trying to head him off, all the way to the jetty, where his boat has been readied, the motor unlocked and mounted on the stern.
At the shore he takes her by the shoulders and turns her to face him. He puts his finger under her chin to lift it, trying to make her look at him. She resists, twitching her shoulders away and trying to get a glimpse of her mother waiting on the boat. ‘We’ll be back by tonight.’ He shakes her, makes her look at him. His face is smooth and shiny and he smells of drink. There are two black sweat stains spreading across his shirt and some broken blond hairs at the temples. ‘Now go up there, to the top of the beach, and wait for us.’
And so, at last, she’s persuaded. She goes and stands obediently in the trees above the beach, staying for hours after they’ve gone, when the little dot of the boat has disappeared at last, leaving smooth water, with only the occasional cruiser from Ardfern crossing in the distance. When the sun goes down and they haven’t come back she stays, standing straight and patient, waiting for permission to leave. It’s only when dawn breaks that she understands she’s been tricked. She goes back to the cottage. Her father’s whisky bottles are piled in a crate next to the back door. She sits down next to them, staring at them.
From now on it’s just her and Malachi.