Pig Island (7 page)

“You were born here?”

“Yeah, and this place is
so
not what I’m about. The day I turn eighteen I’m total
history
.” She made her hand into a plane and glided it out into the air, off towards the mainland. “Bye-bye, toot toot, train—you won’t see me for dust. Only four months now.”

“Who are your parents?”

“The Garricks. You met them. The ones with the sticks up their butts?”

“Yes. I met them.”

“I know what you’re thinking—like, geriatric ward, yeah?” She grinned, showing a missing canine in her left jaw. No medical treatment, my mind flashed. “They waited until they were thirty-eight before they had me, totally ancient. How gross is that? But that’s how it is round here. Bunch of retards.” She stopped smiling and took a few moments to look at me, jiggling her legs a bit, chewing her thumbnail. “You know, you don’t look anything
like
a journalist.” She took her thumb out of her mouth. “Anyone ever tell you that? I watch a lot of TV and I know what a journalist should look like and the first thing I thought when I saw you was, uh, like no
way
, he
rully
doesn’t look like a journalist.”

I glanced down at my battered shorts, my big stained hands and sandals all dirty and fucked from walking everywhere. I had to smile. She was right—in spite of the psychology degree, the cushy detached house and the job, somehow I never had got the Merseyside docker out of my bones. I only did it once over the summer, helping my old man out, but it was in my family and stuck inside me like DNA. “I know,” I said. “I look like a docker.”

“Yeah, you do. You look like a docker.”

I snapped on the lens cap and studied her carefully. “Sovereign,” I said, “what goes on here? What happens in the church? What rituals was it made for?”

She laughed. “I know what you’re thinking. I know about the video. I told you: we see TV.”

“Then what is it? The thing on the beach. Who is it?”

“That depends on who you ask. One person says one thing, someone else says something else.”

“What about you? What do you say?”

“I say we’re not Satanists. Nothing happens in the church except the usual shit. Prayer meetings, tambourines, Mum and Dad making total muppets of themselves. It’s, like, so boring it’s not true. And cold. Mum’s stopped making me go, except on Sundays.”

“What about the locks on the doors? Those are some serious locks. Makes it look like they want to stop someone getting out.”

Sovereign blinked, confused. Then her expression cleared and she gave a short laugh. “Duh, Joe!” She tapped her temple, as if to say, “How stupid are you?” ‘Not out!
In
. They’re not trying to stop anyone getting
out
. They’re trying to stop something getting
in
.“

“You’re not going to answer any of the questions I want answered. You don’t want to talk about your rituals or the rumours going round. Or about why everyone is so antsy about whatever’s at the top of that cliff. Instead you’re giving me a pretty good press release on how well the PHM is taking care of Cuagach Eilean.” I leaned across the table and helped myself to another shot of Blake’s gin. It was late—nearly midnight—and we’d come back to his cottage after the evening meal in the refectory. We sat at the kitchen table near the window that faced the cliff. It was dark outside, and all we could see in the glass were our reflections—our faces lit from underneath by the small table lamp. Sovereign had given me clues: I needed Blake to give me the truth.

“And you know what?” I said, pushing back the bottle and settling in my chair, nursing the drink. “It crosses my mind that this has only happened to me once before. Almost ten years ago. The Eigg revolution.”

Blake rested his head sideways on his thumb, a cigar burning between two outstretched fingers, and looked at me levelly. “Yeah. And?”

“I was one of the journalists who broke the story. Got them the publicity they needed.”

Blake nodded silently, waiting for me to continue. I smiled at him. “Malachi Dove’s money bought this island, right? You moved here with him, but he’s not here now—and no one wants to talk about him. So, I’m going to make a little leap of faith here,
Blake
, and call me forward, but I’m going to
suggest
you’ve got me out here on false pretences.” I pointed my finger at him, smiling slyly over the top of it. “See, I don’t think I’m going to hear much about Satanism. Or the video. What I think is that Malachi left you all here to go wherever it is he’s gone—and you’re insecure about that. You want to raise the money to buy Cuagach from him. You’re not going to make it from selling those crosses so you’ve got to appeal for donations. You want me to do for Cuagach what I did for Eigg.”

“You’re a sharp one, Joe.”

“Yes, Blake.” I downed the gin, put the glass neatly on the table in front of him and met his eyes. “I am.”

There was a long silence. I wanted him to squirm a bit. After a long time he cleared his throat and lowered his eyes, tapping his cigar in the ashtray and shifting uncomfortably in the seat. “We’re cold out of luck here, Joe. Things have not been good.”

“It’s OK.” I sighed. “It’s straightforward. You give me the story I want—that’s the Satanism one—and I’ll attach a sob message to it, get one of the nationals to run it as a feature and before you know it you’ll have the nation crying with you. Is Dove ready to sell?”

“No. But if we can raise the legal fees and prove he’s insane we can get him into something like the Court of Protection, here or in England. Get a judicial factor appointed, then we’ve got power of attorney and we can buy the island. We won’t cheat him—we’ll give him what he paid for it.”

“Insane?” I bent to light a cigarette, screwing up my eyes. “On what grounds?”

“On the grounds he’s practising Satanism on Cuagach Eilean.”

I paused. The lighter faltered and went out. I raised my eyes to Blake. He looked back at me steadily.

“I said on the grounds that he’s practising Satanism on our—‘

“I heard you.” I flicked on the lighter again, lit the cigarette and raised my head. “He’s still on Cuagach? Is that what you’re telling me? He hasn’t gone back to the States? London?”

Blake pushed back his chair with a loud, scraping noise. “You’d better come through, Joe.” He beckoned me with his cigar. “Come through here.”

We went into the corridor at the back of the house.

“I was one of Malachi’s first disciples,” he said. “Me and Benjamin Garrick and Susan, his wife. This cottage was the first place we built on Cuagach and this was our meeting room. I haven’t had the heart to change it.”

He unlocked a heavy, planked door, switched on the light and let me into a small annexe to the house. It was built in the same stone as the rest of the cottage, with a small mullioned window, but it was cold and unswept—unlived in, the carpet thin and patchy. The walls were decorated with 1970s Malachi Dove tour posters and I walked slowly round the room, studying them: Dove on stage, a spotlight creating a halo behind him, a studio portrait of him, his chin resting on hands, looking into the camera with a frank, intimate expression. Another showed him laid out on his back, eyes closed, hands on his chest, like he was in his coffin. I peered at the picture carefully. He was bloated and old without his glasses. Under the photo were printed the words: ‘When God calls me I will go to His side.“

“What’s he doing?” I said. “What is this?”

“He’s praying. This position, on his back, was the only way he could concentrate. Still does, for all I know.”

I squatted down to sort through a stack of framed photos leaning against the wall. More pictures of Malachi Dove, but this time they all seemed to have been taken on the island. One showed him with a young Blake and the Garricks, arms linked and smiling into the camera. Behind them the cottages were all freshly painted. Mrs Garrick was ringleted in a piecrust-collar Laura Ashley dress. Only Malachi seemed wrong. He looked tired and flabby, his eyes distant behind his glasses. He wore a kaftan to disguise his weight gain, and there was something tight and shiny about his face, like maybe he’d had a lift.

“He looks ill.”

“He was agitated. He was suing a journalist in London. He was very depressed by it.”

“A journalist?” I didn’t look up. Didn’t want him to read my mind. I closed the stack of photos. “When was this?”

“Nineteen eighty-six. But he never followed it up. Events stopped him.”

“These are the events you’re going to tell me about?”

Blake leaned over and pulled from the stack of photos a gilt-framed one showing Dove with his arm round a woman in a drawstring Greek-style blouse. “His wife,” said Blake, tapping the glass. “Asunción. A good Christian girl.”

Oh, Asunción, I thought. Light of my life. So you married her. A reward for all those old ladies’ arses she had to stick her hand up.

“They prayed for a child. But when it happened Malachi’s faith collapsed.”

I raised my eyebrows. Blake shrugged. “Yeah—I know. We didn’t expect it, but Malachi was weaker than any of us thought. When Asunción went into labour you could tell by the way she was breathing there was a problem. It was right here, in this room, it happened.” He pushed the frame back into the pile and straightened, brushing off his hands. “Malachi prayed that night. He prayed hard with the other disciples to find strength. We sat at that kitchen table, where you and I were sitting just now, the three of us talking to him, holding his hands … Holding his hands, but trying, in our own ways, Joe, to hold his heart. Even with God’s love we couldn’t persuade him to keep his vows. After twenty-four hours he put Asunción into the boat and took her to a hospital on the mainland.”

“Even though that was against what the Psychogenics stood for?”

“Even though that was against
everything
we stood for.” He gazed down at the floor, his arms out a bit at his sides, and then, like he was disappointed not to see Asunción and Malachi’s ghosts marked out on the carpet, he dropped his hands and looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes. “Believe me, Joe.” He touched his heart with his little finger. “It didn’t make me happy, what came next.”

“Why? What came next?”

“At first we didn’t see him. Not for weeks. When he did come back he was alone—torn apart. The boy was just torn apart. Came in and sat at that table and poured his heart out to me: how badly he felt to have broken his vow, how it had been too late anyway—the Lord had called the tiny baby to His side, stillborn it was, and Asunción was refusing to come back to the island. She didn’t want anything to do with the Positive Living Centre or the PHM, and after what happened maybe you couldn’t blame her.” He stopped then, his finger tapping his forehead and his eyes lowered, like he was too choked to continue.

“But he’s still here? In the village?”

Blake shook his head. “No,” he said, in a tight voice. “He couldn’t stay in the community, not after that. He was too—too ashamed of his weakness.” He took a deep breath. “But the island was his home, of course.”

“So he stayed?”

“He found himself an old miners’ barracks over by the slate mine. Three miles away. On the south tip of Cuagach. The side facing the sea. Sometimes a shop in Bellanoch does supply runs for him, but he doesn’t speak to them or even see them. He’s completely isolated.” Blake went to the curtain, drawing it back and opening the window. He leaned out, looking up at the cliff face, his breath clouding the air. It was silent and hollow out there, and mist was beginning to come down, shifting across the cold stars above. “We’ve carried on his teaching, but we haven’t seen him in the village for twenty years. Twenty years he’s been out there. Twenty years on his own.”

I came to stand next to him, opening the other window and ducking to stick my nose out, staring up to where the cliff rose hard into the night. I tried to picture the island stretching out between here and the south tip—miles of uninhabited land, poking into the sea like a finger. So, Malachi, you live with the pigs, I thought. And do you cut them up too?

“What’s he getting up to over there, then, Blake?” I murmured. “What did the tourist photograph that day?”

When Blake answered his voice was so low that I had to strain to hear. “Something has gone very wrong for Malachi. Things are happening at that end of Cuagach I try not to think about too hard.”

There was a full moon that night, and the air was so crystalline, so salty and cool that, lying in my bed in the cottage next to the firth, I could have been in my tomb. I stayed awake listening to the wind picking up outside, thinking of the trees on the slopes above, leaning and bending in the wind, about all the secret places their movements revealed. Malachi Dove, alive and only three miles away. I kept coming back in my mind to the path I’d been walking up when Blake had stopped me—
Where does that go, then, Blake? Where does that path go
? When at last I gave up trying to sleep and slid out of bed the display on my mobile phone read 02:47.

I hauled on my filthy old army shorts, grabbed my rucksack, and crept down the stairs. The house was silent. The smell of our drinking session still hung in the kitchen and the two half-empty glasses stood on the table. At the back door there was a heavy torch on the worktop, a Post-it taped above it—Blake reminding himself to check the batteries. I took the torch and stepped out into the starry night, closing the door carefully behind me.

Outside it was cold. The cottages were frosty and shuttered-looking in the moonlight. The only light was an old-fashioned harbour lamp on the jetty, twinkling through the trees, and beyond it, high in the sky above the silver-capped firth, clouds were gathering in a shape like sprawling seaweed, one tendril snaking out to the island, the other angling down above the Craignish Peninsula where the bungalow was, like they were trying to connect the two landmasses. I pictured Lexie, curled up on the bed, her yellow pyjama top bunched up a bit to show her long back, her face pleated against the pillow. Sorry, Lex, my love, I thought, pulling out my mobile, checking it for a signal. Nothing. When we first met it wouldn’t have mattered that I’d left her on her own—she’d have been out with her friends or in bed with a bottle of wine, watching all the shite TV I hated. But everything was different now. The way she talked about my job, these nights away were like me putting fingers into an open wound. Still, I thought, pushing the phone back into my pocket, someone has to do it. I hitched up the rucksack, and was about to set off along the path when a faint sound made me pause.