Hexenhaus

by Nikki McWatters

  That same year, the Jacobite rising had left me and my kin nervous, despite our relative isolation. Open to marauding clansmen weeding out Jacobite dissenters, my mammie and granaidh had hauled Isabel and me indoors. Isabel and I had learned to read, against our da’s express wishes, but with the menfolk off warring, we women had to amuse ourselves somehow. It was in those days, with the stench of peat bog in my hair and by the dim light of my candle, that I fell in love with words. We read mostly Bible stories and the characters and wars and heartbreaks of the Old Testament salted my imagination. I quite foolishly thought I might like to write down all the stories from my own head.

  My granaidh kept a secret book that had the names of all the womenfolk of our bloodline etched into the calfskin parchment with iron gall ink. Names and the places of birth. My name was the last and some nights by candlelight my sister Isabel, my mammie and her old ma would sit by the fire and recite the names weaving backward through the years.

  We would look at the ancient markings in the book called runes, which looked like the footprints of birds. Then the book would be carefully wrapped in a hide of goatskin, tied with a leather strap and placed back in the underground chamber by the back door.

  ‘You were born in Franconia?’ I would marvel at the old woman with milky eyes and spider-web hair. ‘What was it like? Did you go to fine banquets with princes?’

  ‘Your seanair was my only prince and a right red fiery one he was,’ she would smile, her tongue still thick and harsh. ‘We lived a simple life until we came to Eire.’

  I often pressed Granaidh for more stories of the faraway land from whence she came, but her eyes would grow sad and tears would track the grooves of her face. She would shake her head and tell me that some things were best left unspoken.

  Some nights in my cramped cell at Bargarran I would pull out the book and read the names of my mothers and their mothers that wound by blood back to the earliest years in the frozen north, in a faraway world I could only wonder about. There were fragments of many different languages all woven together and it made me feel less lonely to look at the fading names and markings. On the worn leather-bound cover the old Norse words Systir Saga, Sister Story, were branded deeply and I was glad to be the last name between its pages. I often wondered where it would travel beyond me and where my blood might flow.

  Young Christian Shaw of Bargarran was equally well-read and could patter out a Latin passage from the Bible to resounding applause from her proud parents. I always made sure I smiled at the girl, noting how pretty she was and arrogant she looked as she tossed her fair curls about. Life was restrained at Bargarran and I felt it like a suffocating corset around me. Isabel had cautioned me never to smile or laugh and to always keep my head down and my wild red hair tucked out of sight. On my one day off a week I walked a six-hour return journey to find my greatest satisfaction in the city of Glasgow. Here I felt alive.

  It was like being in a circus. The wide and busy road through the markets was a festival of colour and as I walked the streets I marvelled at how people could live in such dense proximity to one another, each house pushed tightly against the next and some buildings many storeys high. The air in the city was a blend of aromas, from the perfumes of fine ladies to the damp stench wafting up from the Clyde River. I drank it all in: the whiff of heady incense spilling from the churches to the earthy scents of sage and ale from the breweries. After a full week of farm odours this shamble of city fragrances pleased and excited me. For a Highland girl the colour, noise and perfume of a big city was new to me and I found that I liked it.

  I would often stand by the well and watch the people with their different clothes: the pressed silks and brocades embroidered with colourful thread, the rich variety of Clan plaids in the kilts and cloaks. I would wander slowly through the fish markets where the heat lay leaden upon the stones and the sound of fish scaling scratched the still air. After passing other stalls where vendors fussed over baskets stuffed full of vegetables and eggs, or casks of wine and vinegar, the noise of haggling voices filling the air, I would climb to Fir Park Hill, the highest part of the city. It soon became my favourite place.

  Here I would take in the view. On a clear day, looking west, I could see the valley of Clyde bounded by the hills beyond and I felt the pang of homesickness while knowing with a sodden grief that there was nothing to return to but charred memories. It stung my eyes and my heart to think of it.

  One day, just as I was about to leave this peaceful palette to head homewards along the river path, I saw a man walking toward me, heading over the hill and down to the town square. He had sand-coloured hair and wore a white shirt with wide sleeves. He smiled at me and nodded as he passed. His gaze flittered onto me like a tiny insect, almost imperceptible. Something shifted within me.

  Aye, I had known boys, larrikins in the hills, even one or two who had turned my head but not enough to pursue with vigour. The truth was I wanted more than a small white cottage, thatched and cold, on a barren hill with naught but small-town gossip to entertain me and a never-ending crib of bairns. My mammie had always frowned at my hopes for a grander life above my station and my dreams of travel. But the Highland life of a country wife was not the life I wanted for myself. I wanted to see the world and learn about its wonders. I’d listened to traveller’s tales and, thrilled by their adventures, wanted some of my own. I yearned to visit the land of the northern lights where my earliest mothers had been born.

  But that day I had the breath knocked out of me. I backed up against a tree after the man had crested the hill, and I had to remind myself to breathe again.

  I became giddy. It was one of those ‘knowings’ that my granaidh had spoken of. Despite my better judgement, every market day I would go to the same place on the hill and wait. And every day at the same appointed time, he would walk by and smile at me – just a small upturn of his full lips and a mischievous glint in his eye. It went on for some weeks until one day I decided to follow him at a distance. The man walked back into the throng of the city with a jaunty gait and I once came so close, with only a few walkers between us, that I imagined I could hear him whistling and the sound made my belly leap. The mysterious man disappeared into the Tollbooth but not before throwing me a glance, a wink and a salute. He had known all along that I had been following him. After waiting a long time without another sighting of him, I turned and made for home, the image of that wink never leaving my head.

  That night, my tiny space seemed to me a palace and my straw cot a carved four-poster bed. Never before in my life had I known such happiness and I could not sleep for it. And during that same night, at first awake and then in my dreams, I inspected my vast rubble of memories. Good and bad, sadness and joy, the Highlands to the Lowlands. A young man without a name had been the start of a bud of happiness, bursting through a bloodstained snow. Already his features were fading, but it had not been his stride or face or shirtsleeves that I was preserving. It was the knowledge that something had changed and become new in my life. It was the ‘knowing’ that this man would be a catalyst for my own personal revolution. The Highlands and the bloodshed were my yesterday but the handsome man with the captivating smile would be my tomorrow and ever after.

  PAISLEY

  BUNDANOON, AUSTRALIA, PRESENT DAY

  The autumn trees look amazing, all cornflake and raspberry coloured as they flutter in the afternoon breeze. There is the beginning of an evening chill creeping up from the deep gorge behind Bundanoon and I walk home fast. I’ve forgotten my jumper and there are goosebumps on my arms.

  Locals congregate in clusters, gossiping and laughing, and all wave and ask me how my day was.

  ‘How was school, Paisley?’

  ‘Great, thanks, May,’ I smile back.

  I like it. The main street of this tiny town is lost in time with its quaint old shops and Pete’s Primula Diner, which still looks like horses should be tied up outside, drinking from wat
er troughs. It’s shy and unpretentious and daggy; a little bit like me.

  I turn at the laneway and push open the rusted gate. Mum’s herb pots are huddled by the back stairs and I can see that she hasn’t watered them for a while. The coriander looks shrivelled and even the usually hardy parsley looks dehydrated and unconscious. I fill the can from the leaky garden tap and give them a good drenching before pushing through the back screen door.

  The house is quiet; the breakfast dishes are still in the sink and the place smells like burned toast. I walk straight through the kitchen to the back room of the shop, which is attached to the house, and find Mum there. I can tell immediately that she has not had a good day.

  She looks up as I enter with my schoolbag slung over my shoulder. Her hair was pale blue when I left for school this morning. Now it is hot pink. I know what she’s going to say before she says it. The hair says it all.

  ‘Oh, Paise,’ she sighs. ‘Calvin dumped me! I should have seen it coming, darling. It’s right bang in the middle of Mercury Retrograde. And I never learn.’

  Only my mother could blame the break down of her latest flash-in-the-pan romance on a chunk of rock floating across the earth’s orbit, millions of miles away in space. Calvin had been ‘the one’. She was sure this time. But once again, she’d been wrong.

  ‘It’s not because of some planet, Mum,’ I sigh. ‘It’s because you told him you loved him and wanted to spend your life with him about five minutes after you’d met. You scared him off.’

  ‘It had been nearly two months and when you know, you know,’ she sulks. ‘He has thrown away an opportunity for the real thing. I was the best thing that ever happened to him and both our moons were in Leo.’

  My mother shakes her head and blinks at me through her blue-tinted glasses, in genuine disbelief at this turn of events. She is wearing a wafting silken technicoloured caftan over her long lean body. Mum is a very regal, beautiful woman. Her hands are shuffling a pack of tarot cards and I feel as if I’m the parent giving her daughter counselling about her messed up and chaotic love life.

  ‘You’ll be fine, Mum. When the time is right, the right one will turn up. Just wait for him to come to you.’

  Calvin. He hadn’t seemed overly special. Just another handsome face. She collects them like butterflies and they have about the same lifespan. But ever the optimist, Kirsten McLeod, my mother, is always on the lookout for her knight in shining armour.

  I take a sip of water and move a pen aimlessly around the table. I have other things on my mind because I think I might be in love. I have no model or framework on which to hang that possibility. My mother has been in love one hundred times but never really at all. She has been in love with the idea of love her whole life, and she lives by the philosophy that what goes around comes around and one good deed gives birth to another. She is the Fairy Godmother of good deeds but, as yet, she is still waiting for her Prince Charming to come riding into her life on the back of a white steed.

  But, yes. I think I might be in love. If it is a thing where you feel a little bit sick in the guts every time you clap eyes on a particular person and you have trouble remembering how to form sentences when you talk to them and it comes out sounding like a kindergarten kid’s ramble and you dream of holding their hand, resting your head on their shoulder as they tell you about their day and nothing much at all, then I have that thing. His name is Ben Digby. A senior like me. He’s in three of my classes and we’ve become bus buddies. There are quite a lot of us in Bundanoon who catch the bus to Moss Vale every weekday and back again in the afternoon. It’s a tight crowd of kids and we all look out for one another.

  He sits next to me on the bus while I fixate on his thigh, which presses up against my own, searing the flesh where his grey school trousers touch my skin. I remember that he did notice my new haircut but that is only because it was such a drastic change. I’d let the hairdresser take off my long blonde locks and swapped them for a short pixie cut, which I then dyed black. My mother had moaned and said it made me look like a middle-aged woman. To be honest, living with my mother, who is a female version of Peter Pan, has turned me into what my best friend Em calls a grandmother trapped inside a teenage girl’s body. I think that’s a bit harsh. I have a thing for retro music and I knit. So what? I don’t think my new haircut looks ‘old’. I think it looks kind of elfin.

  ‘Are you even listening to me?’ my mother whines, and I flicker back into the moment.

  ‘Sorry?’ I ask and look at her sitting at the other end of the table where she has spread out her cards.

  She is pointing animatedly at one. ‘It’s the Tower,’ she says shrilly, her eyes wildly blue behind the tinted lenses. ‘Total destruction. End-of-days sort of stuff. That’s the break-up with Calvin.’

  ‘In the grand scheme of things, Mother,’ I smile indulgently, speaking like I might to a child, ‘I don’t think Calvin what’s-his-name counts as a really big deal. You went out, what, ten times?’

  ‘But here’s the Fool and that denotes new beginnings,’ she muses, ignoring my remark.

  I don’t know why she keeps telling me about her various interpretations of the cards which seem to always, quite implausibly, reflect exactly what is going on in her life at that particular moment. I don’t believe that a pack of cards can offer any kind of advice or insight into a person’s life. She knows how I feel about them and yet she talks to me as if I’m somehow endorsing her fantasies just by being present. I’m not. Her cards hadn’t predicted the demise of her relationship with Calvin, but I had. I just used logic. My mother had gone after that poor man like a lioness after a gazelle. In the end he just ran faster than her.

  ‘New beginnings,’ she mutters to herself, deep in thought.

  Mum lives for new beginnings. She sees every day as an opportunity for some new surprise. I long for security and stability. Seven schools in twelve years will do that to a person. I love my mother very much. She is frustrating, annoying, childish and irrational, but she is also passionate and caring and funny and … well … I mean funny in every sense of the word. As it’s just Mum and me, we have a deep bond, but to be honest, as I get older, I find myself becoming more and more the voice of reason in the house as she becomes more and more obsessed with her potions and crystals. I am dreading the day she decides that she is over Bundanoon and packs us up like gypsies once again. But I’m eighteen next year and I like it here so I’m just going to have to be firm with her and say ‘no’.

  Ben Digby. Ben Digby. I drift back. How does one move a casual sort of friendship to the next level? He hasn’t given any direct sign that he feels the same way about me. To him I’m just good old Paisley Muller-McLeod, one of the gang, roaming the streets or hanging out at the skate park. But he does sit with me on the bus. I’ve decided I’ll read that as a sign that he’s interested. Am I just being as foolish as my mother? I can’t talk to her about it or she’ll demand to know when his birthday is, or possibly accost him in the street to find out, and that would ruin everything. My mother, with all the best intentions in the world, is a colossal success at messing up all things to do with romance.

  ‘I’m going out the back to do some study,’ I tell her as a tinkle of bells comes from the Hex and Heal shop door at the front of the house.

  ‘Someone’s here.’ She smiles and sweeps the cards back into a pack, putting them in the middle of the table before walking out. ‘Might be someone needing a chakra alignment.’

  I pick up my bag from the floor and sling it over my shoulder, peering out to see who her next victim might be. I am curiously surprised to see Amy, the local policewoman. She’s never been into the shop and she’s in uniform so she’s on duty. I rest my shoulder against the doorframe and watch through the beaded curtain hanging between the two rooms.

  ‘Sorry, but I need you to come down the road to the station, Kirsten,’ she tells my mother, ‘to make a statement. Someone’s
made a complaint about you.’

  ‘What?’ my mother stammers, confused. ‘Who? I don’t understand. What sort of complaint?’

  Constable Amy casts a look my way, seeing me through the strings of beads. She looks uncomfortable.

  ‘It might be best to talk about that down at the station.’

  My mother looks back at me over her round glasses. She blows a strand of pink hair from her face and smiles, but she looks slightly spooked.

  ‘Lock up the shop, hey, Paisley?’ She nods. ‘I’ll be straight back after I sort out this nonsense.’

  I’m not one for believing in hunches but I am feeling more than uneasy. I turn over the top card of Mum’s tarot pack, just to see, just to be foolish. It is the Hanged Man. I feel a chill blow through me as my mother and the constable leave, punctuated by the tinkle of the bells. I wonder for whom those little bells toll.

  VERONICA

  BAMBERG, FRANCONIA, 1628

  Many times in those first terrible days, I read the letter my dear father had left me. It was as if he was guiding me from beyond the grave. I could almost hear his voice instructing me to take what little money we had left and to disappear, telling people that my brother and I were heading on a pilgrimage to salve the death of our father and atone for his sins.

  Kristina had left us not long after my father’s death, seeking work with another family. Hans and I cried, as she was the last connection to our life before the terrible witch-hunts. All our possessions would be taken by the greedy statesmen, feeding on the lives of people destroyed by their murderous burnings. Confiscating witch-property was lucrative work.