Six months had passed since Aram came to declare his infestation. Euna had convinced herself the sea-lice were all over her. As keepsake. As relic of the afternoon she upended her simple life. She was certain that Aram had been sent back to Sketimini, or had been scared off permanently by Muireall. Either way she would never see him again, so their afternoon together had blurred into mythology. He had moved softly, soporific with feeling; he had cradled the back of her skull after they made love. He had burned frankincense and myrrh, transforming the hut into a holy place.
At Cala, it was the first day of fuil mhìosail, their communal period. Spring had started to green the heath again, though gradually, and without glory. Usually on this first morning, they congregated in the library to sit in a Tension Line, in which they would give one another neck massages. Euna tended to be on the end, so she rarely received a rub. Today she came downstairs to find the other three women lying on their backs on the bearskin rug, looking in silence at the exposed beams.
She did not say anything. She lay between Lili and Grace, her feet a fourth point in their natal star. Through the bear’s skin, she could still feel the cold floor on her back. In another world, the four of them would have been on warm grass instead, just like this, crowns and hands touching, cloud-gazing.
After some time, Muireall said, This is going to be a painful day for all of us.
Because Euna was already feeling the stomach cramps, the pale aura that preceded a migraine, she said, Amen.
She knew as soon as the word slipped that it had been a mistake. Muireall grabbed a handful of the bearskin and pulled its wire-hairs out by the roots. In the last few months, her conduct had grown more and more erratic. She swung from pole to pole, sometimes in a matter of minutes, and not in the charming way Lili sometimes did. If Lili were a goldfish, harmless and distracted, Muireall was a bull shark.
Euna is so special the Lord himself is cupping her blood, she said. She let go of the wire-hairs and ran her palm along the bare patch in the rug. After we’re done here, she said, she will come to the greenhouse with me.
Worse than when she gave Euna orders was when she spoke about her as if she were absent. It was hard for Euna to name her emotions lately, and harder still during fuil mhìosail, but she thought of this current one as ouch-ice-vein, or iomagain. I’m not feeling very well, she said. Could we go another time?
Muireall hastened to her knees so she was facing Euna. Her eyesight had got quite poor, but since they could not go to an optometrist, she tended to squint. Now she was narrowing her eyes at Euna in an inscrutable way, maybe because she was angry, maybe because that was the only way she could see her. I happen to know you love the greenhouse, Muireall said. So don’t be ungrateful when I try to take you there.
Euna was bound. She regretted telling Muireall how safe and content she felt in the greenhouse. Knowledge in the wrong hands was as risky as a billhook. I’m sorry, she said. Lately Muireall had taken to using low-tech means of surveillance, hiding in the broom cupboard or in the hollyhock beside the latrine, to catch Euna making a wrong – sovereign – decision. And when she did, as she often seemed to, Muireall would tickle the bottoms of Euna’s feet with an egg whisk, or braid milk thistles into her hair, or nibble gently, then painfully, on her fingernails until they were torn uneven and close to the flesh. That morning, Euna saw deference as preferable to those pains and indignities.
You must learn to be thankful, Muireall said. Then, Grace, darling, would you do some rearranging for me?
The crests of their heads touching, Euna could feel Grace nod. Yes, she said. What would you like me to do?
The library is getting too cluttered, Muireall said. Move the two wing chairs to the cowshed and all of the tables and magazines to the pantry. If they don’t fit there, try your chamber.
Grace asked, Do you want me to do that now?
Yes, dear, Muireall said. Lili, would you be a good girl and go get Euna’s riding boots ready?
Euna expected to hear Lili clopping off to the entryway, eagerly cracking open the boot locker. But instead, she stayed where she was. She made a sort of sucking sound with her lips, not a kiss, nor a tsk-tsk. I don’t want to, she said. Euna will do it on her way out the door.
Just yesterday, obedient Lili had stolen Grace’s rose lipstick, the source of her inmost vanity, and spread it across her younger pout. All the men in the village will bow down to me, she had said. I will stun them inarticulate. Grace now stood and lifted one of the wing chairs, in solidarity with Muireall. She lifted free weights every day, allergic to the notion of getting fat, so her muscles were lean and ready, strong enough to lift the old chair on her own.
Last chance, Lili, Muireall said. She spoke in an indifferent way, as if very tired, over living.
Lili said, If you want me to do you a favour, you have to do one for me. I need some willow bark for my cramps.
Muireall maintained her indifference. Okay, little tattie, she said. Grace will get you some once she is done with the cleaning. Euna, shall we go to the greenhouse now?
Lili’s nerve stunned Euna. Though it could have inspired the same sureness in her, it instead bent her to Muireall’s will. At Cala, as in any place, there was a tenuous balance. Each of the women had needs, but so too did the group; so too did the rooms they inhabited and the animals they tended to and the plants they turned into tinctures. Euna said, standing, I would like that.
Together they walked to the entry and pulled their riding boots from the locker, then stepped into them. Euna still had Aram’s cardigan, though the smell of myrrh had faded from it, and she gladly moved into its familiar warmth. She looked back before going through the door. Grace was rearranging the furniture as instructed, while Lili was lying face down, alone in her defiance.
Muireall took the long way to the greenhouse so they could peek into the outbuildings. Since Lili had given their animals the brew six months before, all of the females had become pregnant. The goats had already given birth, while the cows were a few months from doing so. The chickens had doubled in number. Everyone at Cala was too elated to question what was happening, so instead they ate their eggs and their rugged cheddar and patted their pretty, swollen cows.
Just a few steps into the goatshed, Muireall stopped suddenly. Lili hasn’t been mucking their beds, she said. They could get sick. They could get sucking lice.
She was quiet for a moment before starting to cry, which Euna had never seen her do.
Between the stink of shit and the sound of her crying, Euna felt a rare and deep affection for Muireall. Maybe this sadness had been percolating in her all these years, held below the surface by cultivated cruelty. But here, in the goatshed, surrounded by foul aolach? Neither could pretend to be above their nature.
Euna offered the sleeve of the cardigan to Muireall, whose nose had started to drip. She wiped all the wetness onto its knit. The two women were huddled very close together now. The tip of Muireall’s nose was pink, childlike, and Euna blew her hot breath onto it. Does that feel nice? she asked.
Muireall smiled in a tense way, unaccustomed to the question. It’s just that everything had finally started to go right, she said. We were all here and happy and the animals were giving birth and for once no one saw me as the bidse of the house.
One of the goats, a fine-boned Saanen, trotted over and started to circle their feet. The goats were sage, selective with their affections, and it seemed a compliment to Euna that this one had chosen to join them. There they were, a clan enclosed in the shed, sufficient. A fullness rose in her and dwelled for a long moment, something akin to a sacred experience.
Look at this beautiful doe, Muireall said, leaning down to stroke the animal’s muzzle. Look at her winking those pretty eyelashes at us.
The doe made a contented sound, then lifted her tail and started to pee on the ryegrass, soaking both women’s boots from tan to brunet. Some of the urine seeped in through Euna’s criss-cross laces.
Immediately Muireall struck the doe on the skull, her palm making a loud cracking noise against the bone. Euna cringed. The goat bleated. No blood showed through her fur, though she trotted back to her corner of the shed, where only her left eye shone in the darkness. Muireall seemed shocked by what she had done, as if some irrepressible inner energy had moved her hand. But I love those goats more than anything, she said. She looked at Euna. You know I love those goats, she said.
Euna heard a glass-crash somewhere outside the shed. She pinned it a kilometre away, though it was hard to tell precisely. Sound travelled pure and far in this part of the country, where there were few buildings to break its waves. Euna led Muireall, still crying, or crying again, onto the heath. On the way to the greenhouse, she whispered in the serenest voice she could find, having had few models, You’re fine, bana-churaidh.
The greenhouse had gone lush with fresh melons, Hami, Apollo, honeydew, beside vines of crisp English cucumbers. Against their bright spritz was the heavy musk of woodchips. Then Euna noticed that the musa ornata, her beloved flowering banana, was covered in shattered glass. Shards shone on its leaves and blushed petals. The fragments made a new beauty of the blooms, though only briefly, until Euna noticed the long rift in one of the greenhouse’s panes. All of their careful tending, their songs and hands and water – it would be undone by the cool air seeping inside.
Muireall called out, Who’s there?
Euna searched the ground for bricks, blown branches, but she could not even find a rock large enough to have caused the breach. She followed Muireall’s lead. Show yourself, she called out.
No one answered. Euna crawled on her hands and knees, searching for the item that had seamed her seamless greenhouse, her one refuge on an acreage of threats. At last, she found something unusual under a floss silk tree, a cold bird, long dead. In its breast was a bullet.
Come here, she said to Muireall.
Muireall obeyed. Is that a crossbill? she asked when she was close enough to see the rigid bird.
Euna spread his breast feathers apart, revealing the bullet with its corona of blood. He was already dead, so she carefully prised out the silver shell and held it close to her face. Steam was forming around her, as the air from outside began to meet the heat that had gathered, and stagnated, inside the sealed greenhouse for years. Euna knew little about guns, had never seen one in real life, but she knew this bullet had come from a rifle. She could hardly breathe. Her windpipe was a gainntir, a narrow place. We should go back to the house now, she managed to say to Muireall.
Through the fracture in the wall came sailing a navel orange, half peeled, then a tangerine and a finger lime. These fruits landed in a pail of garden tools, the lime impaled on a sharp set of pruning shears. Muireall had once mentioned that the minister’s wife kept a forcing house beside the church, an orangery.
From outside, someone started to patch the glass using cellophane and clear tape. Euna could see the hands plainly when they touched the window, though the figure, slightly farther away, was indistinct. The person took great care not to stand in front of the break, where they would have been visible. As it was, between the tricks of glass and light – shadows, shifting angles – this person could have had any number of bodies.
Euna was suddenly free from all sensation.
Everything was calm. The flowers. The steam. No one was talking. No one was making mistakes.
She fluttered her eyes and saw Muireall above her, looking flustered. She was straddling Euna so tightly her knees were digging into her high ribs. She was speaking, too, though the sounds had not yet sharpened into words. They were more like rain. But oh – above her friend’s face it really was raining, in a grey, unyielding way. The drops cuffing the roof were far louder than Muireall’s voice.
As a girl, she had been told faith invoked a sort of emotional stoicism. A devout person is the one who has learned to ask, What does God want from this situation? rather than, What do I want from it? And though she had agreed in her mind, and even, at times, managed dispassion, her gut always had its own loud language.
Euna remembered what had flooded her just before she fainted: void. Detachment. When the figure outside the glass had scared her, maybe she had accepted that she was to die. There wasn’t much sense in fussing about what was destined.
Muireall slapped her cheek, not violently, but not tenderly either. Please say something, mè bheag.
Euna tried to speak. She wanted to offer her friend this grace, of reassurance. But her mouth was less hers than it had been when kissing Aram. The muscles around it seemed to have been severed. She managed a cough, through loose, insensitive lips, and that seemed to be all Muireall needed. She shone with delight. The wind lifted, blowing the stony rain sideways, tearing the cellophane patch from the glass.
Around Euna, colours started to saturate, contours to become clear. It was a young woman in a plaid skirt, Muireall said, stroking Euna’s forehead with the back of her hand.
Muireall would certainly not have described the minister’s wife as young, but Euna happened to know the minister’s daughter had recently turned eighteen. The proselytizer had invited the Cala women to attend her coming-of-age ceremony, which he peddled as a garden party with parlour games and fruit juice. After that, he told them, the daughter would travel to the Middle East to do mission work, before returning to marry an older widower from the congregation and settle for good in Pullhair.
Euna said, It might have been the minister’s daughter.
What have I always said? They’re wicked. I bet she was trying to shoot us instead of the bird.
Euna’s cramps were agonizing. She needed to be lying under covers, curtains drawn, a hot water bottle between her legs. Her aura was an aureole around each bloom. Why did you bring me to the greenhouse? she asked Muireall. Were you going to punish me?
Muireall looked hurt. Of course not, she said. She stopped stroking Euna’s forehead, though she did not take her hand away entirely. I noticed the maidenhair ferns were dying, and I needed your help to save them.
The words came out in such a fond, sororal way. Was Euna a béist for always assuming the worst of her friend? With Muireall’s help, she gradually stood, then walked down the aisle to the maidenhair. She fingered the nearest fern with care, especially at the ends of its fronds, where the downy leaves had gone brittle. The plant was visibly dying, but Euna did not say that word to Muireall, nor did she despair of their mutual power to restore it to health.
It’s just dried out, she told Muireall. Go get the rain barrel and we’ll give it a nice, deep soak.
Muireall looked both ways before stepping outside and retrieving their large pail of water. She parted the fern’s fronds and poured, the soil absorbing the soak instantly. She poured and poured until the intake was more gradual. The finger lime, the fear lining Euna’s throat, the minister’s daughter in her plaid skirt – Euna’s sin was the dry root of it all. She could no longer stand for Muireall to be the one holding the pail, and she pulled it into her own hands. By then, of course, the plant was overwet, in danger of root rot. Such a fine balance, Euna thought, though she continued to pour.
*
Back at the house that evening, all of the women were suffering from fuil mhìosail pain, in their stiff-lipped, intermittently rude way. Muireall and Euna had not yet told the others what had happened in the greenhouse, in part because they knew it might sound strange, even suspect, and they needed to refine their story first. The four of them had gathered in the living room for their monthly Moog circle, in which Euna played the synthesizer and they performed old standards that Muireall remembered singing with her high school choir, tonight including ‘Contented wi’ Little and Cantie wi’ Mair’ and ‘Broom of the Cowdenknowes’. They called this kind of therapy ceòl-cluaise, or music for the ears, and it had the same effect hymns were meant to – it opened the women to a world beyond their suffering, or rather, opened them to a world that would not exist without their suffering.
Tonight’s session was slightly different. Lili had written an original song she was keen to perform, so Euna was scrambling to learn the chords between more comfortable refrains. It was both moving and unnerving that Lili had chosen to write her own music. Unnerving, perhaps, because Euna had not thought to do it first. And because she had not, for years, considered all the songs they had never heard, in their seclusion. Now this fact struck her as the only great injustice. Of course, so much of that music must be cac, patent and pointless trash, but surely there was also worthy, challenging, near-divine art, which she was worse for never hearing.
Lili stood in front of the women in her pink playclothes, her hair in large, calculated curls. She clasped her hands in front of her chest like a child at a recital and counted Euna in on the keys. Euna played the way she wanted to, and Lili sang the way she wanted to, and though each part was lavish and lovely on its own, together they were dissonant. What are you doing? Lili asked her.
Euna said, I’m just improvising on what’s written here.
Lili leaned back sharply, a caesura. Did I tell you to do that? she asked.
Muireall, who had been tolerating Lili’s change of character with a mysterious patience, rose to her feet. She whispered something inaudible to Lili, and then the girl said, Do what you need to do, as long as you remember to play my chords.
Grace pretended to twiddle her hair, but Euna could see that she was covering her left ear. She was especially sensitive to sound, as she was to light, and this disharmony clearly troubled her. They never had this issue when they played those songs from Muireall’s girlhood, which had prescribed parts, and which, anyway, were familiar to everyone by now. The Moog circle was usually one of their most affirmative activities. They always left feeling restored, tender, eager to warm their pillows and share more earworms.
Are you okay? Euna asked Grace.
Grace straightened her spine, evening her hair waves with both hands. Of course, she said. You sound wonderful.
They had a strange habit, Euna had noticed, of flattering one another when their instinct was to critique. Or on the other hand, of refusing to accept genuine compliments, either because they did not agree or because they did not know how to voice the agreement. If Euna praised Muireall for her precise, effective pruning of their rose bushes, or Grace for her proper seasoning of their pasturer’s stew, she often received an eye roll in return, if not an outright insult. She had been told on more than one occasion that her kindness was, in effect, overpowering.
We sounded like cats in heat, Lili said. You know that, Gracie. Why won’t you ever just speak your mind?
Grace got decidedly quiet. Euna did not think that Lili had raised her voice, or said anything untoward, but neither did she trust her own judgement. And she knew, if Lili had done either of these things, Grace was unlikely to mention it. She had entered a mood Euna referred to as loch reòite, frozen lake. It was as if Grace were trapped in a thick ice block, an impenetrable slab through which no language could pass. Euna could talk her tongue insensate and still Grace would be in that cold and separate world, no more available or open.
Leave her alone, Euna said. Let’s just try again, you and me.
Euna followed the sheet music as it was written, while Lili’s voice made waves in the song. Euna waited until after the second verse to improvise, having by then listened more closely to what the girl was singing. This was a loose retelling of ‘The Little Mermaid’, the dismal Danish fairy tale they used to read nightly when they first moved to Cala. Where the first verse was full of the youngest mermaid’s anger at having been left in the underwater kingdom while each of her older sisters explored the world, the second was marked by the mermaid’s anxiety at having her turn to see the water’s surface, to notice and fall in love with a prince. There, leading into the chorus, Euna let the synth go neon.
Now she understood why the build of sound had to be incremental, and why it had to start with the voice.
Back under water, Lili’s heroine was learning that humans live shorter lives than do mermaids, but they may endure after death in soul form, while mermaids turn to sea foam. A water witch offered the mermaid a potion that would let her walk on human legs, though it would also cause her excruciating pain. Lili made her mouth into a wide and unflawed O, and she tried to sing her highest, Yes.
The note she was reaching for was past her cords’ capacity, and quite suddenly they broke. So much of the story was still untold. The mermaid marrying the prince; the witch giving her a knife so she might kill him and recover her life under the sea; the mermaid throwing her body into the ocean and becoming foam, only to rise later into the air. But before any of this could happen, Lili sulked down into a wicker chair. She insisted she could not reach that Yes, and that the song could not continue without it.
She started to knead her throat, growling low as she did. We’ll finish it during our next circle, she said.
Euna was not so game to give up the song. Heading into that chorus, she had felt airy, immaterial, as if she did not have a body at all. She had been hunting for that feeling a long time without knowing it; the covers they usually played in the Moog circle were fun, occasionally pretty, but this had moved her in a way she had not forecast. For a moment she had been a flawless swimmer, no margin between sea and skin. That’s a whole month from now, she said. We’ll forget everything we’ve learned by then.
Grace, still in her loch reòite state, looked at Lili and Lili alone. She asked, Why did you write that?
Lili shook her head from side to side, making a scene of her curls. She seemed angry, on the edge of an outburst. Do you know you’ve never let me run a single errand? she asked Grace. Euna went twice last year.
This comment caught Euna under the chin. For months she had been behaving well in order to go unnoticed, to hold her name out of the other women’s mouths – this, to her, had become the guise of freedom. Now Lili was parading her life in front of their little public, as if it were an idol’s, as if it merited envy. She could not just let this happen. She said, You think you know everything.
Muireall came between them. Let’s not do this right now, she said, putting her hand on Euna’s shoulder.
Why do you act like I’m not even here? Lili asked Muireall.
Muireall had a habit of avoiding conflict unless she, personally, had reason to punish someone. Even those occasions could hardly be called conflicts. The ground between the watcher and the watched was never level. You’re imagining things, little tattie, she said.
Lili started to throw candlesticks and novels. She slashed a sack of ashes on a stray nail and smashed firewood against the mantel. At last she punched her hand through the glass face of the grandmother clock, a motion so violent that Grace ran over, ceding the safety of her loch reòite, and slapped the girl. Lili’s hand was backstitched with blood, a purl of pure crimson. She sat down in the middle of the bearskin rug, calmly, and drained into its neck fur. Euna went to the kitchen to get a rag, which she dampened in the storage cask. She came back and wrapped Lili’s hand tightly, holding the rag in place long enough to feel a peaceful force pass between the two of them.
Tea? Muireall asked.
Lili nodded. Grace straightened her dress and went to the kitchen to boil water.
After the day she had lived through, Euna only wanted to sleep. If one were inclined to believe in omens, which Euna no longer was, the Saanen and the minister’s daughter and the synth-induced disturbance might call for a deeper reading. I’m beat, she said to Muireall. Would it be all right with everyone if I went upstairs?
Muireall brightened. She liked when the other women asked for her permission. Go get some rest, she said.
Euna held Lili’s rag-wrapped hand to her heart and looked the girl in her eyes. They were soulless, all glass. Then Euna stood and took the stairs two at a time. This month she was sharing the double bed with Grace, and she glowed knowing she might fall asleep alone that night, with her choice of pillow and bed side. Silence other than the voices through the floorboards, the occasional wildcat on the hill.
She stripped naked. Instead of putting on her nightgown she crawled between the sheets as nature had intended her. What a day. She lay nude between the cotton sheets, cold but humming with a kind of stress-heat. Through the window, the moon was no bigger than a slice of finger lime. Or else, right now, she was gigantic. She could reach into the sky and pluck that slice, snack on its arc, let the citrus trickle down her throat. Maybe she would not die bored, after all.
*
A week passed peacefully. The women had started loving each other in a sort of charged, stepping-on-seaglass way, careful not to wake gloom or anxiety in any of the others. Each word was well chosen, each act observed first from at least two angles. And though it took work, and though what they achieved was undoubtedly fragile, they were able to hold Cala in a state of conscious harmony. They were as safe as they had ever been. Lili’s outburst had not broken them, as it might have. What that screaming and smashing had done, at least for the time being, was drain the resentment that had been building like a blister in the house.
Then at once, after that harmonious week had passed, the peace leached away from their home. So quickly and so absolutely did this happen that Euna questioned whether the harmony had ever existed. She understood that those moments had been real, just as in their decade here there had been many spells of comfort and happiness, none of which was erased by the inevitable swings toward fear, frustration, envy. But still, in want of a good witness, she had a quiet suspicion she had imagined all of it.
On that peace-leaching day, a brick came through the kitchen window, as the bird had come through the glasshouse pane.
And then, much worse, much more worrisome, through the brick-hole came a girl in a tartan skirt and pullover slightly too small for her, her lower belly bloated and bare. She flashed her underskirt as she climbed through the glass, scoring her legs. Euna was alone in the kitchen when this happened, burnishing the tiles with a wad of steel wool. She screamed. The girl knelt beside her and stifled the sound with her hand. I need help, she said.
Euna had a chance to look at her face. She had lovely, creamy skin, but each feature set in that base was foul, almost grotesque. Her eyes, far apart, were the colour of bruised apples. Wind had burned a pink ring around her lips, which were pale and faintly downturned, and flaked the broad tip of her nose. Who are you? Euna asked.
My name is Aileen, the girl said, hoarsely. I’m Minister Macbay’s daughter.
She lifted her pullover fully and lowered the waistline of her skirt, showing beyond a doubt that she was pregnant. Euna wondered who the father was. And then, though she tried not to, she pictured the finer points of that union, bed, orchid, hand. I want to help, she told the girl, in part to dull her imagination.
Muireall came into the kitchen, likely having heard Euna’s scream. And, seeing Aileen, she went stiff. Maybe this was a natural reaction. A stranger had broken the seal of their house, towing bindweed in on her boot treads. But it seemed excessive that Muireall should hold so rigid, and that she, for whom words had such a token weight, flowing with the ease and speed of other people’s tap water, could not think of a single thing to say.
I wasn’t going to do anything without asking you, Euna said to Muireall, after a long and mutual silence.
Still on her knees, Aileen reached for a rag by the soak basin and started to wipe her legs. She had been roughed not only by the shattered window but by the thorns of a rosebush. Euna had spent years singing to the Cala greens to earn their trust, and, to that end, now they never pricked her skin. But they had clearly been hostile to Aileen. In the webs between her fingers Euna saw burdock spikes and cockleburs. Euna felt a sort of affinity with this stranger, not sympathy, but I-know-how-much-the-brambles-hurt. May I help her? Euna asked Muireall.
Only when she was addressed directly did Muireall move. She walked right in front of Aileen and grabbed her by the chin. The force, again, seemed excessive. You’re not welcome here, she said. We’ve been better than ever lately, and we don’t need you walking on our peace. She was chewing and popping a mouthful of gum, a homemade mash of peppermint and beeswax, and with each spoken word flecks of spit flew through the air.
Near the beginning of the Life Grammar was a list of values. The women had put their initials beside each point as consent to follow them. VI. Benevolence. Every person is worthy of our love, attention, and open mind. If someone asks for our help, even if they have personally wronged us, we will hear them out in the spirit of goodwill. Euna had understood these values to be complete, not to change depending on who they were being applied to, or on which day. And yet, here was Muireall, tall and cruel above Aileen’s crawling.
I’m begging you, the girl said.
Get out of my house, Muireall said.
Euna was on the floor, too, still clutching the steel wool. She was closer to Aileen’s station than she was to Muireall’s.
Muireall put her fingers between Aileen’s lips and prised them apart, then hawked her gum into the girl’s mouth. Aileen coughed loudly, choking on the hunk, swallowing hard to make room for clean air. Euna was shocked. The poor girl had started to shake. That she would not leave, despite this humiliation, told Euna she truly had nowhere else to go.
And so Muireall had no choice but to switch her approach. Aileen, she asked, do you ever hunt for crossbills?
Aileen covered her face with her hands. These, too, had the same creamy skin, but with flaked red knuckles and patches of ash across their backs. She did not speak. Euna was so tense all of her senses flipped. If it had rained then, the fields would have burned; if the sun had come out, the world would have been obscured.
Mè bheag, Muireall said to Aileen, and her use of the endearment made Euna shiver. Do you ever use a rifle?
Muireall was no longer stiff. She was in the stance she used when she felt impregnable, in total power, one foot slightly in front of the other and both big toes turned outward. Her pelvis was tilted toward the ceiling, her knees with generous give.
I was starving, Aileen said. I left home three weeks ago. I was afraid my parents would notice I was starting to show.
Euna stood and poured a glass of drinking water for Aileen. The girl accepted it with one hand and covered her face with the other.
You’re sweet, Euna, but I wouldn’t be doing that, Muireall said. Not for her.
Aileen downed the water like a workhorse who has been forced to travel too far. She put the empty glass on the tile beside her and explained to Euna, I met Muireall the other night, after you went to bed.
The Moog circle. Euna had been so grateful to sleep alone, sheathed only by the sheets, at such an early hour. But her gratitude had clearly been misplaced. Nothing in life is free, her mother used to say, or else, Nothing in your life is free – she could not remember, though the distinction now seemed important.
Tell her, slag, Muireall said. Aileen hesitated. Her lips looked wet now, as if she had mostly avoided her sore mouth when slurping the glass of water. Muireall held the girl’s chin again, fingertips firm against the bone, forcing words to move through her.
We have something in common, Aileen said. When she then tried to retreat into silence, Muireall tightened her grip. I think we’ve been with the same man.
Euna started to laugh. Or rather, her body made the sound without her consent or input, the way a stomach sometimes rumbles. You must have the wrong person, she said. I’ve never been with any man. More laughter, now from Muireall, which startled Euna. They had not talked about the day Aram came to call, and for all she knew, she had been unseen behind the compost drum. Surely if Muireall had believed him she would at some point have exploded at Euna, unable to repress what she knew.
I shouldn’t be here, Aileen said, lumbering to her feet. She pulled up her skirt and down her sweater. I’m a damain mess.
Muireall pointed at Aileen and said, She was with your Aram.
Euna closed her eyes. What struck her about this leak was not how much it hurt and humiliated her, but the mundane wash it cast over their lives. They had spent years raising a castle, a stone fort in a forest of gorse, in order to make themselves feel exceptional, Other, even immortal, but it was clear now they were common women. Euna’s attraction to Aram was banal, was word-for-word in half the books that bloated the library.
And worse, her perfect pet, whose absence had tortured her, was as cunning and devious as Judas.
Euna opened her eyes and put a hesitant hand on Aileen’s abdomen. Is this his? she asked.
Of course, the girl said. Either she was telling the truth, or she would not admit to having had liaisons with two different men. In a house of non-conflict, in a town of confidences, there was no way to know.
She needs to leave right now, Muireall said. She seemed disarmed by Euna’s mild reaction to the news. Maybe she had expected, or even secretly wanted, a blowout. She looked at Euna now with a kind of fiery confusion, a face she sometimes made when vermin moved into the silo despite her attempts at perfect sanitation, or when draughts blew through the house despite her weatherproofing.
If she goes, the baby could die, Euna said. She was the same age as Lili, and Euna would not dream of sending that wee girl into the world without someone to buff and file her nails, make her barley pudding, listen to her pulse each morning. Euna realized a moment later she was the same age, too – though life had forced her to grow at a much swifter pace.
I’ll find my own way, Aileen said. Supposed to be catching the ferry first thing tomorrow. I’m flying out from Glasgow.
Euna had forgotten about the girl’s trip and now, reminded, she felt a heave of envy. She had no sense of Glasgow, how catholic it was, how crowded, whether the streets were full of stray mutts or magi or mermaids rambling on two legs. Do they have hospitals all over the country? she asked.
Muireall laughed at her again. Euna was starting to feel prickly, like a rosebush that has not been sung to in a very long time.
They do, Aileen said. Of course, I wasn’t expecting to need a doctor.
The cows in the shed were swelling, and in a few months they would be giving birth. Euna had been so surrounded by their fatty, arable vibes that she was sure she could deliver their calves with her bare hands. The moon had been full ten of the last twenty days, and no one could explain the phenomenon. They just knew some heavy energy was hovering. Maybe driven by this same energy, Euna offered to be Aileen’s handmaid.
I don’t understand why you’re being so nice, Aileen said to Euna. What do you want from me?
She did not know how to answer, mostly because kindness did not, to her, require an explanation. Muireall reached her hands into Euna’s hair, first combing it dotingly with her fingers, then pulling harder and harder, until her scalp began to burn white. What are you doing? Muireall asked in her ear.
No one had questioned Muireall when she grabbed Aileen’s chin, or when she tried to ensnare the other two women in this charged conversation. And yet Euna was being scolded for her compassion, a value they had all once agreed, in initial and principle, to maintain. I’m just doing what feels right, she said.
Aileen looked moved for a moment, as if ready to accept the offer. She made long eye contact with Muireall. Then her expression changed and she told them she had to leave. She took a handful of peanuts from a bowl on the counter and dropped them into the pocket of her pullover. This time, she didn’t climb through the glass. She unlocked the back door, attached to the kitchen, and stepped out onto the softening heath. Euna watched her leave. A wild light, gold, was casting its spirit on the knapweeds. Freckles of white buckwheat spread out across the moor. Here and there a puddle shone like milk.
Muireall whistled, calling the other women into the kitchen. Grace came running down the stairs in distressed, grass-marked moccasins and a velvet evening gown. The effect of the two together was peculiar. She looked stunning but loosely hinged, even more so because this was not a solstice day, and the women were supposed to be in their uniform linen shirts.
I heard sounds, she said, but I thought you might have wanted privacy. The straps of her dress were thin as the edges of peat spades. On either side, her flesh was lush despite the dry weather.
You should have come down, Euna said. We just did something terrible.
Muireall calmly opened the cupboard and took out some oatcakes. She chewed the biscuits in a way that disturbed Euna, letting them go sodden in her mouth, then mashing what was left with her lips. She had powerful, salt-and-soda teeth, and she was refusing to use them, though the sole pleasure of an oatcake was in its crunch. Meanwhile Grace was chewing her middle finger like a mutton bone. Gnawing and gnawing, as if hunting for marrow. What happened? she asked, hangnail in her fangs.
The minister’s daughter came here with child, Euna said. She needed help. And this sea monster… Euna noticed little globs of beige on either side of Muireall’s mouth from the mashed oatcake. Then she could see nothing else.
Grace said, Oh, that girl. Yeah, she came last week.
Euna’s face started to simmer. A hot froth was forming under her skin. Now it was glaring: the Life Grammar, which she had taken as gospel, and which she had only violated a few times – shame like a slip noose – meant very little to the other women. She had never read the Scottish constitution, and had, on Muireall’s command, forgotten the Holy Writ. In the void that had followed, she had embraced this one code with faith and piety, binding herself to the words.
Oh, that girl.
Piss off, Euna muttered.
Careful, Grace said.
Grace was happy if the raw weather did not give her dandruff. Or if she had a velvet gown to wear. Hers was a selfish existence, and that might have been well had she chosen a wolfier life, but here, where even small acts affected the wealth of flora, fine-tuned salt levels in the sea, it was entirely unjust. Even cruel.
The back door of the kitchen opened and in came Lili, a crow feather in her mouth. Camp and cold-blooded, the Cailleach, she pulled the feather from her teeth and licked its quill. Though windblown, she was in uniform, her hair wiring out from once-deliberate plaits. I was hungry, she said.
Euna stood looking at her world.
Were these women brutal? Worn to the bone? Haunted by devils? Had they simply, over time, turned antisocial?
The constant cold temperature. The years of peeling potatoes.
It was said about Cairstìne Bruce’s end that the residents of Pullhair had used spectral evidence against her. Those who suspected her of witchcraft claimed to feel the presence of wicked spirits when they were near her. Euna had pored over the book on witch hunts in the library; the striking part had been about waking the witch. Before seventeenth-century trials, suspects were deprived of sleep, so that when they were called to defend themselves, they had started to hallucinate. Even the most refined women would by then have turned feral, telling outlandish stories. They would confess to sins they’d not had the pleasure of committing.
Lili had started to retch into the soak basin, which Euna had spent half an hour filling with well water that morning. Grace went to the cupboard and chose a small bottle of calendula extract, which she made into a tonic for the ill girl. She poured the drink past Lili’s loamy teeth, humming a folk song they had once upon a time used to control her night terrors. Hush, sweet baby, she said. It’s going to be okay.
Now nothing was rational.
Everything was notional.
Certain things were felt.
Euna could not pinpoint the moment it had happened, but some feature inside her had been recarved. Mountains in the Highlands had been cut when the Cailleach dropped rocks from her wicker basket. So it was natural that over time Euna had lost some of her crags and earned others. She stood in that kitchen cold as a mirror, with the only women who had ever really known her, and felt the light and shade of their presence. In morning light, a mountain may look indestructible, a seat of the ecclesiastic. And in the shade? After years of driving rain, a thicking and riching of the soil, it would not be hard to imagine a landslip.