Pig Island (25 page)

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.

Chapter 10

If Finn had been there he’d have listened to Angeline spilling all the details and he’d‘ve told me I was the meister. He’d say I’d finessed her, dolly-walked her into my trap. Funny that, I thought, as I sat, my chin resting on my hand, listening to her. Funny how I don’t feel better about it.

Almost the very moment Malachi comes back from the mainland the deliverances start. Once a month he takes Angeline out into the breeding shed. There’re always crucifixes and glasses of water waiting on the table and a pig in the rusting crate, squealing and hammering at the floor with its hoofs, making the crate rock and creak. Malachi uses the ritual he wrote for the PHM, muttering intercessory prayers and quoting the biblical rank of demons: thrones, dominions, principalities, powers and spirits. He makes her kneel on the concrete floor, bare knees, head bowed. She has to stay there for the ninety minutes it takes to complete.

Afterwards, when he lets her go, she runs straight back to the house and stands in the bath, the shower on full to drown the noises that are coming from the shed: the squeals, the boom of the pig colliding with the shed’s corrugated-iron walls. She never sees what happens to the pigs, but she can guess from the evidence left in the morning. He puts down food and while they’re eating he attacks them with the ball-pein hammer. Probably between the eyes because she remembers him saying that is the place a pig is most vulnerable. Then he slits them open and squats next to their opened ribs, inspecting their organs for black spots, for signs that the demons have been transferred. He usually waits a day or two to clear up after himself. Then he fills up buckets with gore and flesh, carries them to the cliffs and tips them into the sea. The heads he saves. She doesn’t know what plans he’s got for the heads. Maybe he doesn’t even know himself.

For the first time in her life she thinks about escape. The only world she’s ever known is the three square miles of forest on the south end of Cuagach. She’s been to the gorge enough times and stared at it baking under the sun with its barrels and rusty streaks of chemicals leaching into the land. Crossing it would be like crossing to hell, and it’s never entered her mind to break the boundaries her parents set. But now fear and desperation are pushing her to take unthinkable chances.

She crosses one afternoon in late August. She moves carefully between the chemical drums, stopping every now and then to check he isn’t watching from the escarpment behind. The baked brown rock of the north side gets larger and larger by the hour. When at last she comes to the village it’s so green she gets a fantasy she can drink the leaves. Dusk, and rooks are gathering in the trees above, dark clots of them, heads cocked on the side to peer beadily down at her. She moves trance-like along the path that leads to the community, and when she gets there she stops and stares down at it. It seems unreal, like a mirage in the desert, like something from the television—with its neat lawns and tidy, painted houses, a few lights coming on in the windows now that night is falling. Someone, a woman in a lavender headscarf, comes out of one of the houses and crosses the green. Angeline turns and drags herself clumsily up to the first branches of a tree, her heart beating hard. She wedges herself into the V of a branch, the bark digging into her feet, and watches.

The woman passes only a few feet below and enters a long, low building through sliding glass doors. A light comes on inside, and silence falls for a long time. Angeline’s pulse is racing in her ears. This is the first human being she’s seen who wasn’t on television or loading supplies on to the jetty in the distance. She’s thinking of slithering out of the tree and creeping to the building when the light goes off and the woman comes out of the building. She’s carrying a metal bowl on top of a pile of folded tea-towels and as she turns up the path she pauses and comes to a halt.

For a moment she seems to be looking at the bowl, as if there’s something in it she didn’t expect, because her eyes are turned down, her mouth closed tight. Then, with a sideways twitch of her jaw, she slowly, very slowly, raises her eyes to the tree. Angeline holds her breath. Their eyes haven’t met, but she knows she’s been seen. There’s a long, long pause, and although her heart is thudding she has a moment of hope. She pictures the woman putting down the bowl and holding out her hands. She pictures being led into the village, people coming out of their houses to greet her. She imagines a family kitchen, a fire, a meal on the table, and for the first time since Asunción left the island she can feel hope twitch in her chest.

But, of course, that’s not what happens. What happens instead is that Susan Garrick drops the bowl. There’s a pause as it rolls off the path and into the trees. It comes to a stop in the leaves and then Susan begins to cry. It’s a cry of pure fear—of terror. It goes into Angeline’s chest and stays there, winding into her heart as Susan swings round on the path. She hesitates as if she’s not quite sure how to do this, then stumbles forward towards the houses, crying and shouting. Angeline is frozen, just for a second, then she drops out of the tree, as quickly as possible, the bark ripping into her leg. She turns and melts into the trees, back the way she came. It’s the last time she’ll go to the village until the night she follows Malachi and sees him put the explosives in the chapel.

Back at the cottage Malachi is in his study, the light on, a bottle at his elbow. Angeline slips in silently through the back door and goes to the bathroom to drink water and wash the dried blood and dirt from her body. She’s finished bathing and is climbing, shivering, into bed when a commotion starts outside the house, sending her instinctively scuttling to the top of the staircase. Someone’s knocking on the door. Downstairs Malachi shoots out of the study in alarm.

“Go to your room,” he hisses. “Don’t move until I come for you.”

She scrambles back into her room, her heart thudding. Downstairs she hears him throw open the door. There’s a moment’s silence. Then, in such a strange voice she wonders if he’s going to cry, he says, “Benjamin. Benjamin—why are you here? I don’t want you here.”

‘Malachi?“

“Yes. I am Malachi. Why are you here?”

There’s a few moments’ silence. She knows who Benjamin is: Benjamin Garrick, she’s seen his picture, and now she imagines the men staring at each other, thinking of the years that have passed. When Benjamin speaks again it’s in an urgent whisper, as if he’s afraid of something. “Malachi? What has happened to you?”