Cala

by Laura Legge

  He dreamed that night of Euna. He was in a boneyard with her, boiling over with great and unutterable anger. He knew why he was mad, though he couldn’t make his mouth say it: Euna and Aileen had named the kid Lachlan Iain, set him up to be more Scottish than the Scottish. The child was all them and only partly Aram. It was clear now in the dream that his mother had died – Euna was putting myrtle on her grave, reading a eulogy. He still couldn’t find his voice so he kicked Euna in the throat to stop hers from coming out. In the dream it was all he could do.

  When he woke up in the morning, he felt terrible about being so violent with his love, even if it had only been a dream. He’d kicked her just like those kids in the corner shop had kicked him. He lay on the sofa and let himself suffer from the guilt for a while. He tried to shift the fault to Aileen, for getting pregnant, trapping him, but he could not. So he bottled the feeling up and sent it to sea, like any good fisherman.

  *

  He made a crock of oatmeal for the old man, flecked it with the only dried fruit he could find in the cupboards, redcurrants. He had become a decent cook while living with Fenella, and that was a good thing. It increased the value of his stock, made him welcome in more places. Better, food offered him another source of physical pleasure, helpful for a man with such strong appetites.

  The old man was still in his room with the door closed when Aram left the house. Either he was sleeping or he was avoiding idle chatter. This suited Aram just fine. He took a spoonful of oatmeal from the crock and left the rest for the old man to enjoy whenever he chose to wake up.

  Back on the road he felt invigorated. The rest had been lovely, even vital, but he was energized now in a way he hadn’t been then. The biting air. The scenes of crimson leaves and common oaks with their necks gone stark. He pedalled out the bad spell that had controlled him the night before. He pedalled, in fact, for a full day, until suddenly the muscles in his legs cramped. They got hot and tight so fast he had to pull over, stretch in a patch of marram grass.

  He had almost resisted visiting any of his womenfolk, as a way of proving to himself his devotion to Euna. That had been fairly easy, since most of them had sounded pretty pissed off with him, and he had never been one to beg. But need had a way of warping one’s character. Now Aram was in pain on the roadside grass, in front of a sign for Inverness, where Effie the Embalmer lived.

  She had never been his favourite woman. He had met her at a pub in town, where he had gone on a weekend trip. They had got sloshed and messed around in the bathroom, then her flat. She had caked on makeup, foundation, false lashes – even drunk, this had embarrassed him, to see how hard she was trying. But he was dog-tired in front of that divine sign for Inverness, and crisps weren’t going to make for much of a supper, not now that he was in touch with his deeper appetite. He had worked to put his weight back on, to get his clothes to fit him nicely, and he refused to sacrifice those gains so gamely.

  He punched his quads to get the blood pumping again and forced himself back into the saddle. Before long he was in town. He had been to Effie’s flat just that once, though they had since spoken on the phone, and now he strained to remember where it was. He knew the name of the street, Douglas Row, and the colour of the door, emerald. Her place was right beside the river, and he remembered her walking to the window after they’d slept together. Thank ye, she had said, with too much breath, to the water. Then she’d turned to him and said, Isn’t it enchanted?

  Well, no, he did not think water was romantic. Actually, it was a murderer and a lunatic. If he could drink milk and whisky alone for the rest of his life, he gladly would. To Effie he had said, It pales beside you.

  He found Douglas Row without much trouble, and on the street there was only one emerald door, so he knocked on it. Bless her, Effie stomped down the stairs in a terry bathrobe, and when she saw him she yelled, You bassa!

  Forgive me, he said.

  She looked furious. But her flat smelled of meatballs and masala, and he knew already she was going to invite him in. He waited while she unleashed a tirade of insults, knowing she would tire herself. It did not take long. When she stopped cursing, he told her she looked pretty, which she did, probably because she hadn’t known he was coming.

  My face is naked, she said. You don’t give me any warning, and you expect me to be beautiful?

  I just said you were.

  She slammed the door. She opened it. Is that a tricycle?

  He nodded. I’ll let you ride on the handlebars.

  She rolled her eyes. Still, she moved aside so he could enter the small, vaguely familiar foyer. You look like horse testicles, she said.

  They ate curry and rice while they watched the water through her one window, rain-streaked and marked by dead insects. He asked insignificant questions and she offered brief and guarded answers. After dinner, he rinsed the dishes and thanked her for sharing her food. She cast a slanted look at him. Trying to be a hero now? she asked.

  He began to knead her shoulders while he whispered sweetnesses into her ear, more of habit than desire. As he massaged her, she stiffened. After a moment she breathed out and her shoulders, rigid buds, went loose as blooms.

  You can’t do this to me, she said.

  Do what? he asked. He was not playing innocent. He said what he meant.

  Pretend to care about me. I cried over you, you tit. You can’t come back and erase all that.

  He turned her so she was facing him and then let go of her shoulders. He had been thinking of himself as a found man, but it was plain she was blind to the change. Either he had deluded himself into believing a person of flesh could become one of spirit, or, likely, she had been licking her wounds all these years to keep them moist. It was such a brief encounter, he said. I didn’t know you were still raw about it.

  So now it’s my fault, innit. You’re an animal. You must have kids all over the goddamn country.

  Effie had stumbled on the one put-down that actually had power over him. He was filled with a bitter ire he held tightly behind his teeth. He felt the sudden and strong need to be alone. He went into the other room and lay face down on the couch, muttering his mood into a tweed cushion. When Effie came into the room a while later, he was punching that same cushion with two precise fists. In between, he was not sure what had happened. He had sort of lost focus.

  The hell is going on in here? That’s an heirloom pillow.

  Aram calmed, came back into his charm. He sat upright on the couch. Nothing at all, my treasure, he said.

  Something wrong with ye, she said, snatching the cushion from beside him and cocooning it as if it were an infant. It’s time ye went home.

  I will, he said. But I need to sleep here for one night. I promise I’ll be good. He knew this would work. If he could rely on anything in the world, it was that lonesome women lived for promises.

  She tapped a finger on her cheek, as if thinking. But she proved that to be fake when she soured her expression suddenly and said, Get the hell out.

  Aram saw that she was serious. He had no choice but to limp down the stairs, his legs even tauter than before, and lace his boots. He looked up with his eyes wide and childlike in a last effort to convert Effie. She stepped over him and opened the door, revealing the river, silent and snakeblack. For a second, she seemed to reconsider the send-off. Then she took him by the neck of his cable-knit sweater and hauled him into the street. Good luck with yourself, she said, and locked the emerald door.

  *

  Aram slept on a bench beside the river that night, too tired to ride his tricycle any farther and too stunned by Effie’s tantrum to think of another plan. For the first time in his life he, having tried in earnest, had failed to seduce a woman. Whatever charm, whatever – to quote one of Fenella’s esoteric books – furor poeticus had led to his perfect track record seemed now to be gone. He suspected he had wanted to fail, and only in part to please the Almighty.

  He woke to rain barraging a bare part of his body, near the notch of his colla
rbone. Effie had torn the neck of his sweater when she had thrown him into the street, leaving this small place exposed. But one person’s spite did not undo another’s kindness. The old man had still given Aram a sweater. Just then he saw Effie leaving her house in her embalming uniform, clutching a large cosmetics bag. She saw him, too, and started to hurry down the road without looking first, narrowly missing the grille of an oncoming car. Once she had disappeared, he wanted her as he had not before. She was the fish just past the hook. Though he wanted to, wanted her, Aram resisted following Effie down the street to her funeral home.

  1 John 2:16. For all that is in the world – the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions – is not from the Father but is from the world.

  He was single-minded about forgetting her. And then, after a few minutes focused on the badness of his lust, his body distracted him: his lower back hurt from sleeping on the hard bench all night. So he stood and stretched, and when he was looser, found the groove in his tricycle seat.

  If he rode hard, he would make it to the Ullapool ferry by mid-afternoon, and depending on the boat schedule, he could be in Pullhair by night-time. He pedalled off into a sudden downpour. From the dirty striker, Aram had learned the word baisteadh, both rain and baptism. With this term in mind, the rain went from a discomfort to a kind of ceremony. What had been odourless before now smelled floral, like a spray of daylilies, or like Euna, nude, in his fishing hut.

  By noon, the baisteadh did not seem all that benign. It came down to this: he did not know much about Sketimini, except that its official language, according to his mother, was Assyrian Neo-Aramaic. And, though he could have surely found a way to explore that obscure tongue, he had chosen Gaelic. Had he wanted to impress Euna? to cross out his mother and the thorny feelings he fastened to her? to disappear in a country that sometimes needed, and other times shunned, imprisoned, him?

  Yes he had yes he had Yes.

  In Fenella’s shack he had noticed a heavy university text, Neo-Aramaic Grammar. He had picked the book up and set it down immediately, as if it were made of white flame – he found it both compelling and repellant, in a way he could not begin to explain. Now he remembered that Fenella had left a feedbag of books in the tricycle basket, which he had covered with the clothes those boys had savaged. He pulled onto the side of the road and scrambled in the bag to find the book that would spark when he held it in his hands. Fenella, who noticed everything, must have seen his unusual connection to the text, because there was her frayed copy.

  He knew what the disciple John had said. The book was not from the Father but from the world. And yet, when Aram held it, something eternal firmed in him.

  He made the ferry with minutes to spare, which was fortunate. In autumn the boat only crossed the water once a day, and it was now the end of October, five weeks past the equinox. As he used his last pounds to pay his fare, he imagined what might be waiting for him in town. He hoped there would be fishing work and a hut with room enough for him, so he could stay to raise his boy. He hoped that Euna still lived there, and that she would agree to see him despite the way their visit at Dungavel had gone. Mostly he expected to find the same place he had left, a conservative town of eighty well-meaning people, deeply enmeshed in one another’s lives.

  The wind on the ferry deck was harder than it had been on land, and it nipped through his cable knit. Aram crossed his arms tightly over his chest. The warmth he had earned on his long trip north – he would not let it leach out so easily.

  *

  All through Pullhair the land looked burned. Beauty bushes were bowed, barberry trees short and scarred. Each yard Aram passed was clogged, the post office’s with creeping thistle, the guest house’s with selfheal. He did not hear or see a single animal. He had stayed in Stornoway overnight so he would first see Pullhair in morning sun. Truth was it would have been finer in full shade.

  While in Stornoway, at a folk museum, he had read a plaque about the history of Pullhair. A century before, its population had been close to a thousand. After the First World War, the herring fishing industry lost certain European markets, so many of Pullhair’s residents found themselves stripped of their livelihood. They lived in overcrowded crofts, or they had no land at all, and over time the population dissolved as folks left to find work farther south. Having read this, Aram rode through Pullhair with a feeling of grief, latent sorrow. It was curious he had never heard anyone talk about that culling. The town had a history they held in grieving silence, and so it lived under the moors and blunted every grass blade.

  He rode down the one paved road looking for abandoned houses or farms, fragments of that time long gone. When he lived here five years before, he had never seen crosses marking sea graves, or tablets paying tribute to the people who had settled then left the town. Books had been written of lesser exoduses. He found it hard to believe that so many people could suddenly migrate, with no one to tell their stories.

  During his time inside, he had craved the quiet of this island. And now that he was here, it did not seem quiet at all; rather, it emitted a strange white noise. At least in the castle pain had not been held in confidence. Wrath had been rewarded, just as aggression had been aired. Here the earth hummed with a kind of tacit sadness, a note pitched so only dogs could hear it, if there were any dogs left.

  Aram went first to what had been his fishing hut. He wanted to root himself there before going to the church or to Gainntir. He wanted to know if he would have work and a home before he presented himself to his family, so he could be precise in what he promised them. From the outside, the hut looked the same as it had then. Built of stone on a concrete foundation, not even a gale storm could stir it.

  Rucksack in hand, he opened the front door and found an animal had taken over the space. A small, furred marten, with one lost eye. Aram remembered something clawing at the door when he and Euna were in there together. Though they’d shielded themselves from it then, the creimeach had since got in. Aram caught it by the tail, and it snarled at him, clearly alarmed. He opened the hut door and threw the creature as far as he could, into a spread of charred heather. Only after he had done this did he remember wild animals, increasingly rare here, held a new place in the order of things. Anyway, this one was a living tie to his day with Euna. He squinted into the heather, trying to recoup what he had lost, but the lapse had cost him – the bush was flush with the ground, free of any creimeach.

  With his old broom, Aram swept up the dung and prey bones the animal had left behind. Then he stopped to look at his digs. Whitish light fell through holes in the door, revealing a few familiar details. Aram’s cot was still there, and even his thin blanket, though now it was in utter tatters.

  He took the postcard of Lachlan Iain from his sack and ironed its edges. He had no pillow to slip the card under, so he put it directly onto the cot, facing down. From the tricycle basket outside he gathered his other effects, his books and snacks and syrup, and established in the hut a library, a pantry. It had been simple before for him to live here without trim or ornament. He had never felt the need to mark out rooms, to establish that particular level of comfort. But since then the world had tugged at his red nerves and caused a swerve in him. He could no longer live as a simple organism, surrounded by plain stone walls.

  *

  An hour later, Aram walked to the edge of the sealoch. He was thrilled to see, down the shore, equipment still standing where the farm had been: automatic feeders, mechanical filters, scareherons. A half dozen men were in the loch, wet as high as their thighs, casting fly lines. Whatever had spoiled the earth had mostly spared the water, and to Aram this was a miracle. He did not care if the bog cotton rotted, the harebells turned amber and fell from their stems, as long as nothing harmed his beloved salmon.

  He walked to the farm. He did not recognize any of the fishermen, but that was not a surprise to him, since they were presumably only there for the season. Most were in the loch, but there was one younger man
standing on land, with his line cast into the water from that dry distance. He was wearing a cap with a white eagle. In the castle, Aram had learned this was Poland’s coat of arms. He asked the man where his supervisor was.

  She’s at home today, he said.

  She?

  Yes, he said. Why, you some kind of chauvinist?

  This town really had been turned over. He thought of all the things he used to say to his friends about women, right here, on the bank of this lake, while they smoked and took their brief lunch breaks. No one had tried to shame him for speaking freely. Not in the slightest, he said.

  You looking for work?

  That I am.

  Bad timing, the man said. Season’s already over. Most people have gone home already. We’re just here catching some of the escaped fish for our families.

  Shite, Aram said. How had he forgotten such an obvious detail? His life for so many years had submitted to these seasons – hard work until Samhain, hibernation, then, till Earrach – that they had once been ingrained in him. Now he had fallen out of touch with all nature, and that, for a man who had come of age at sea, was a deeply disorienting thought. Of course, he said.

  Grab a few fish for yourself, if you want.

  The water would be bitter, and Aram’s boots were not weatherproof. But crisps and brined gourds would not carry him through the winter. He walked into the loch, already starting to clot with frost. He did not have a net any more, and he knew better than to draw attention to himself by asking to borrow one, so he looked in the cold, clear water for a smudge of orange. Seeing colour, he reached under the surface. He was out of the habit, his impulses dimmer now than they had ever been, and he came up empty.

  From some distance away, he heard a fisherman call, Trying to bare-hand your dinner?