Pig Island

  'Pigs?' I said, pulling the lens cap off the camera and fiddling with the turret. 'His dead pigs?'

  'He used to bring them here in buckets. What was left of them when he'd finished.'

  'When he'd finished?'

  'Butchering them.'

  'For meat?'

  'Meat?' She gave a half laugh. 'No. Not for meat.'

  'For the heads? To put on the fence?'

  'For that. But most of all...' She paused. 'Most of all for what he did with me. After Mum died.'

  I stopped clicking through F-stops and raised my head. 'What he did with you?'

  Her eyes dodged sideways, avoiding mine. She chewed the side of her thumbnail anxiously, pulling off tiny dry flakes of skin with her sharp little teeth.

  'Well? What? What did he do with you?'

  She held her sleeve up to her forehead like she was checking her temperature. The sea crashed and turned on the rocks below. After a while she used a branch to pull herself to her feet. She straightened her skirt and pushed her hands into her pockets, shrugging gloomily. 'Come on. I'll have to show you.'

  About a hundred yards from the cottage there was a breeding shed where some of the equipment left over from the pig farm had been abandoned. It was down an overgrown path and so neglected it had shrunk back into the trees so you'd have walked right past it if you hadn't been looking. Its roof was crooked, the masonry was held together by ivy. 'Here,' she said, pushing the door open. 'This is where he did it.'

  I stepped forward and peered into the gloom. It was cold and dark inside, a smell coming up from the floor. I leaned back out into the sunshine and looked at her.

  'Well?' I said. 'Not coming with me?'

  'No.'

  'You sure?'

  'What's the matter?' she muttered, looking at the floor, digging her toe into the earth. 'Don't you believe me?'

  I studied her for a bit, her sullen mouth, the pale lids and big, serious forehead. I sighed and pushed the door open. As soon as I stepped into the freezing dark I knew why Angeline wouldn't come with me.

  I flicked the switch but the overhead fluorescent strips were dead and the only illumination was the greenish daylight from a crumbling cobwebbed window about forty feet to my right, so I stood still and waited for my eyes to get used to the dark. Bad shit had happened in here. You could just tell. Slowly, shapes began to emerge. The roof was corrugated-iron, the floor cracked concrete, crisscrossed with gullies and holes where farrowing partitions had been ripped out. In the centre of the floor there was a livestock weighing crate, its paint chipped, the old-fashioned gauge rusty and worn. I went to the opposite wall where a tool rack was bolted at eye-level. Lined up neatly on the top shelf were axes, saws and chisels, a pair of orange salopettes hanging from a hook underneath – limp but weighty, like a half-stuffed bonfire guy. On the floor below was a bucket with a well-washed cloth draped over the side. Something made me stop and look at that bucket, then back at the tools, the salopettes. There was a smell coming from these things. It was like the smell of a sticking-plaster when you peel it off an infected wound.

  I turned. Behind me, next to the door, was a low pine desk, sheets of A4 pasted on the wall above it. Arranged on it were a crucifix, a Bible, a small glass phial. The A4 sheets had inkjet words printed on them.

  'There met him out of the tombs a man with unclean spirit. And he cried with a loud voice and said: What have I to do with thee, Jesus?'

  I read the words twice, trying to place them. New Testament, one of the gospels.

  'What have I to do with thee, Jesus?'

  Something started to twitch at the back of my mind. I turned and looked across the shed. The livestock crate. A dark stain radiated out for several yards round it. One or two flies moved languidly on the floor, like it was sticky.

  'And there met him out of the tombs ... a man with unclean spirit.'

  Overhead a bird or a squirrel scuttled noisily across the corrugated-iron. I went closer and peered at the other pieces of paper. The font was smaller and I had to squint to read it.

  'All wicked legions, assemblies and sects. Thou art an offence unto me, thou demoniac of Cuagach, for thou savourest not the things that be of God ...'

  The hairs on my neck stood up. In the freezing air of this corrugated-iron shed sweat squeezed out under my arms. I thought of the cliff, the dead pigs. I thought of swine ...

  'Beast, you beast. You fleeing piglet of Satan. Prepare now, for your deliverance ...'

  My skin was cold. It was coming to me what had been happening in this freezing concrete shed, what Dove had been doing to his teenage daughter, why she didn't want to be in here ever again. I could see it: a flickering light, his giant deformed shadow swaying on the ceiling overhead, a ball-pein hammer in his hands. Blood and the ghostly squeals of half-butchered animals echoing off the bare walls. Something I hadn't encountered for years. Not since the bad old days in Albuquerque. 'My name is Legion ... all wicked legions, assemblies and sects ...'

  'Joe?'

  I jumped, like Malachi's shadow had run across my shoulders. The scene was gone and I was back in the farrowing shed, cold sweat pricking at my scalp, Angeline at the door, whispering, 'Joe? Did you say something?'

  I opened the door and stepped outside, going past her without a word. A few feet up the path I stopped in a patch of sun, closed my eyes and put my head back, opening my collar and rolling up my sleeves to get some heat into my skin. I was so tired. So weary with this insane wormcast of a human being, Malachi Dove. I knew where the words on the wall came from. 'My name is Legion ...' It was New Testament. It was the moment Jesus cast out the demoniacs of Gadarene. The moment he cast them out of a human and sent them into a herd of pigs. It was an exorcism.

  9

  The 'Deliverance Ministry' is the evangelical church's answer to the Catholic exorcist's Rituale Romanum. The darkest, most secretive of rituals. Around the same time I was in London trying hard to seduce Lexie, hundreds of miles north on Pig Island Malachi Dove had disintegrated to his lowest point. The only way he could see out of his problems was to exorcize the demon he'd convinced himself possessed his disabled daughter.

  'He was insane,' I told Angeline, that evening back at the rape suite, 'but you know that, don't you?'

  We were both sunburnt, our hearing dull from the constant roar of wind on the boat journey back. My sweater was torn, covered with rust from the drum I'd wedged into the shaft, but Lex wasn't around to complain. She'd left the light on in the kitchen and a note on the table:

  Gone to bed.

  Absolutely exhausted.

  Thanks for the phone call.

  Ha ha! Just joking.

  Lex

  I crumpled it and threw it into the bin. I took off my jacket and placed my MP3 recorder in the centre of the table, the mic facing Angeline. Then I got a fresh bottle of JD from the kitchen and filled two beakers.

  'There,' I said, pushing one towards her. 'You need it.'

  She sat down, picking up the JD and drinking it in one, seriously, like she was taking medicine. She handed the beaker back to me. I filled it again and she drank. On the fourth refill she sat back, shoved her hands into her coat pockets and studied me. The booze had made her flushed.

  'You know who my mum was?'

  I leaned over and pressed record on the MP3. 'Yeah. Asunción. I met her once. Twenty years ago.'

  'She was pretty, wasn't she?'

  'She was beautiful. I mean, really. Really beautiful.'

  There was a pause. She looked at the winking red light on the recorder. 'I loved her, you know. She was the only thing I cared about ever. As long as she was alive I was safe.'

  It's early evening in May, the honeysuckle is rambling across the little house near the mine and the sun is just finishing its long climb down the sky when Malachi, drunk, stumbles clumsily into the bathroom to find his teenage daughter standing in front of the window, naked except for the pink towel she's rubbing her face with. She freezes, the towel over her mouth, to
o shocked to cover herself. The two of them stand and stare at each other for over a minute. Waves of blood crawl up Malachi's face and Angeline's sure he's going to shout at her. But he doesn't. Instead, without a word, he turns and leaves unsteadily, closing the door behind him. Angeline is motionless for a long time, staring at the door, then at last she lowers the towel and wraps it round her body. Much later, when she looks back at this evening, she'll recognize it as the moment the trouble began.

  At first it seems like nothing. Her father spends longer periods in his study, printing off page after page of biblical texts, and sometimes he lapses into silence at the dinner table. Both she and Asunción notice how much he's eating and how much weight he's gaining. His neck bulges above his collars, his corduroy trousers are too tight and he has to leave the waist unbuttoned. But it takes them a long time to find out what's at the root of all this. Almost four months. In the end it's Asunción who discovers what's really going on in her husband's mind.

  'Start wearing something in the house.' One autumn night she calls Angeline into the study. Malachi is out, collecting generator oil from the jetty, and her mother is sitting at his desk, her serious face illuminated by the little Anglepoise. She is leaning forward. Her elbows are covering a pile of papers. 'I'm going to ask the shop to send some clothes, mija, we'll make you something proper to wear. I don't want your daddy to look at you no more.'

  Angeline peers at the papers squashed under her mother's elbows. She can see Bible verses and a ripped-out bookplate: a medieval etching of a creature like a dragon standing up, straight as a man, wings sprouting from its shoulders. A woman is on her knees behind it, lifting its tail to kiss its buttocks. Before Angeline can look closer Asunción pulls the papers away and switches off the light. She doesn't want her daughter to see too much.

  'Your daddy is losing his brains, mija.' She always elides the two words, mi hija, her pet name for Angeline. She stands, putting her hands on her daughter's shoulders and guiding her out of the study. 'He drinks too much. You keep your clothes on when he's around.'

  For the next year Malachi's mental health declines rapidly. His drinking accelerates and he'll spend hours lying on the sofa as if he's ill, eating and drinking, swelling like a giant marrow rooted there, and coughing long, dry coughs that sound almost intestinal. His face is patchy with broken veins and occasional bumps where he's fallen in the night, and at dinner he sits in silence, watching Angeline with bloodshot eyes. Sometimes in the living room the two women will go silent and watch his hands trembling as he turns the pages of the Bible.

  Angeline has learned to be scared of him. It's never been said but she knows something has changed and she knows from instinct that it's only her mother who stands between them. Asunción makes sure Angeline is dressed when she's in the house – she allows her to take off the long uncomfortable skirts she's made only when they're away from it, on the days they wander the south of the island, making treehouses and teaching each other the names of flowers. Sometimes they sit for hours on the beaches, staring out at the sea, hoping to see a passing minke or a flock of cormorants, and if that doesn't happen they dare each other to go as far as the gorge and examine the chemical drums. On cold days they stay in Angeline's bedroom and read books or watch soap reruns on daytime TV. Angeline's room is lined with bookshelves.

  Asunción was born in Mexico, but she thinks of Cuagach as her home, the place she was destined to be. She hasn't known much else in her life: she's been with Malachi since she was sixteen, on the island since she was eighteen, and she loves the place more than she loves anything. The island is in her bones. In her blood. But maybe she's wondering about what's on the mainland because Angeline notices her sentences have changed. There are a lot of We-coulds and If-wes, and Angeline knows she doesn't mean the three of them, but just the two. One day she finds a letter from a women's shelter in Glasgow addressed to Asunción thanking her for the 'enquiry'. This letter makes Angeline worry more about Malachi. If Asunción wants to escape, then maybe there really is something to fear.

  But then, just as she's wondering how to ask her mother, something happens that changes everything.

  'Dios tiene sus motivos, dios tiene sus motivos ...'

  It starts with pinprick moles all over Asunción's skin, as if she's walked through a shower of pepper. Then come the warts, pale brown things that dangle from her chin like berries. She plays with them all the time, twisting them in her fingers as if she'd like to snap them off. One on her temple gets bigger and bigger, spreading like a wine stain under her skin until it's covering half of her eye and, before anyone knows it, lumps rise on her spine, like on a lizard – Angeline can see them even through her mother's embroidered blouses when she's in the kitchen opening cans of chopped tomato and chillies for casseroles. At night she hears Asunción praying. She takes out the notebooks with the Psychogenic Healing Ministry's manifestos on death and healing from the study, and in her bed at night Angeline can hear her mother muttering like a witch, long liturgical sentences coiling out in the moonlight. In the daytime she stares at her mother's hands, covered with flour and chopped meat, the way she wipes her brow with the back of her wrists so it doesn't get into her hair. Nobody's said it, but she knows these are things she won't see much more of.

  The day Malachi takes her to the mainland is in late summer. The wild fuchsia that carpets the forests is at its best today – hot and vivid beneath the trees – and Asunción is already awake when Angeline comes downstairs, sitting on the floor in the open doorway wrapped in a blanket, the blue day blazing away outside. When she sees her daughter she smiles. 'Come to me, mija.'

  Angeline creeps nearer, putting a hand on her mother's arm and gazing up into her face. Asunción pulls a crucifix out of the blanket and holds it out, dangling it on her fingers. 'I always thought I'd have more to give a child,' she says. 'Don't let your father see it.'

  She puts her arm round her daughter and they sit, looking down at their feet in their open-toed sandals. Angeline's are healthy and pink, Asunción's are greyish. A tear lands in the dust; no one mentions it. Her mother's body smells strange, Angeline thinks: sweetish and foul, like dead flowers in a vase. They sit like this for almost an hour, Asunción weeping quietly, until Malachi comes downstairs carrying a bag. He looks at them neutrally. 'It's time.'

  When Angeline realizes where they're going she panics. He has to drag her away, peeling her fingers off her mother's arms. All the time she's screaming and begging him not to take her. 'No. Please no!' She hobbles along next to them, trying to head him off, all the way to the jetty, where his boat has been readied, the motor unlocked and mounted on the stern.

  At the shore he takes her by the shoulders and turns her to face him. He puts his finger under her chin to lift it, trying to make her look at him. She resists, twitching her shoulders away and trying to get a glimpse of her mother waiting on the boat. 'We'll be back by tonight.' He shakes her, makes her look at him. His face is smooth and shiny and he smells of drink. There are two black sweat stains spreading across his shirt and some broken blond hairs at the temples. 'Now go up there, to the top of the beach, and wait for us.'

  And so, at last, she's persuaded. She goes and stands obediently in the trees above the beach, staying for hours after they've gone, when the little dot of the boat has disappeared at last, leaving smooth water, with only the occasional cruiser from Ardfern crossing in the distance. When the sun goes down and they haven't come back she stays, standing straight and patient, waiting for permission to leave. It's only when dawn breaks that she understands she's been tricked. She goes back to the cottage. Her father's whisky bottles are piled in a crate next to the back door. She sits down next to them, staring at them.

  From now on it's just her and Malachi.

  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 restin
g 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.