The Cailleach

The Cailleach

Where I was born, the water that came through our taps was coloured by peat and so looked like whisky. Perhaps that is why the islanders drink so much whisky; nature has forced us to be confused. When I was younger, I would bathe in the soil-stained water and bemoan the way it coloured my skin. In such water, you always look dirty no matter how clean you are.

I would have been an oddity wherever I was born, but I was particularly odd amongst the unworldly denizens of my island. I was born hideously ugly, and as I ripened with age I became more and more repugnant. My mother, a plain but passable woman, used to tell me I was a changeling as I did not look like her, or like my father. I never knew my father, so I couldn’t tell you if somewhere on my seaweed face you can see the traces of him. I am sure I look like no human being, alive or dead.

A fifteen year old girl should be soft and fragrant. By fifteen, I was already hard and shrivelled. My mother smashed our only looking-glass on my twelfth birthday, telling me the greatest thing she could give me was ignorance. By fifteen, I had already last all hope that I would ever become that glorious thing, feminine. It’s not like our island was a hotbed of glamour, but my classmates, crofters’ daughters all, had all had experiences I never would. The tarantella of a first kiss. The flaming tango of monthly blood. The Viennese waltz of falling in love. At fifteen they still had hope, the promise of movement. The guarantees that came with their biology: the assurance of marriage and fertility. At fifteen, I was already static and wilted.

We lived in a rust-coloured house on the edge of the machair. The machair is lush and thick with hard grasses and hardy wild-flowers come springtime. I was not beautiful and never would be, but I could rejoice in the beauty around me. When the sun decided to shine, the sea around the curves of my island’s frame would glow in ebbing turquoise. The sand was startling white, and the effect could be gloriously tropical. In the distance, the rising land was crowned by Ben Mor, and everywhere in the periphery was the promise of water- not just the glory of the undulating, irresistible Atlantic but glimpses in ditches and yawns of loch. In the summer, I would swim alone every day and under the salt water my skin would look clean. As nature intended.

He told me I was an odd looking thing, and I was not hurt because he was right. I was. He looked odd to me too, being older, male and closer to me than any man had ever been. We were sitting in the Island Arms, the pub nearest my school. It had a relaxed attitude towards underage drinking; indeed, towards most things. I was wearing what passed for my school uniform: a grey synthetic skirt that had been ordered from a catalogue three years ago. The hem had been let down three times.

He was five years older than me and used to man the boats going to and from Eriskay. “You’re interesting though. Another shandy?”

My first compliment led to my second shandy. I tied his words around my neck like a necklace. He asked a lot of questions, including finally

“Do you like boats?”

I did like boats. I loved their buoyancy and their promise. So when he asked me to go down to Ludaig with him and see his boat, I allowed my driftwood fingers to be knotted through his own. I was fifteen years old and it was the last time I smiled.

We walked together, under the single track road until he pushed me over a cattle grid and down a turning. I told him this wasn’t the way, but we reached a peat bog and he threw me against the body of a tower of peat bricks. He tore at my school skirt.

Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. I don’t think I wept. He raped me as a rip-current, but I was never pulled beneath the surface. I gazed across the plain of my dark homeland and I recognised that this is what would be afforded to me. This was what God had given me when he made me into a gargoyle. Had I been born 500 years earlier, I might have been stolen and paraded around the jousting grounds of Europe. This seemed, in comparison, like kindness. I still bled though, as I lay in the bog where he left me. His parting gift was an exclamation in drowsy tones.

“Dhia, you really are just like an auld woman. The boys were right. Just like an old cailleach. Easier than I thought.”

When I got home, I tried to wash myself in the peaty water but no matter how I scrubbed my skin still looked dirty.

I don’t think of the years between then and now, not much. The name stuck, obviously shared at the Island Arms between drams and dramas. Soon everyone forgot my given name, even me. I grew older and uglier, and so did my reputation. My mother died and I lived alone in our scraggly gorse-brush cottage. I was the witch, the Cailleach and I began to live up to the reputation. Misery is a maggot that feasts upon the gangrenous remains of goodness living inside you, and loneliness is a leech. I cannot explain away my later deeds. I was as nature intended.

I was the machair-witch, and so as to fulfil their prophesies I became more and more interested in magic. I started small, making the fire fly or forcing the sea-pinks to bloom early. I moved on to turning tides, and bewitching the weather. My reading material grew darker. I found the spell one September evening: For Youth, and Beauty. Many potions and cantrips promise this but this particular spell demanded a real sacrifice. The book, warned that the practise of any of its spells would denigrate your soul to hell. But I was already in hell, and had been for centuries. I wanted youth, and beauty. I wanted soft skin and bright eyes. The spell demanded basic ingredients for the most part: red candles, clary sage, dried lovage flowers, rainwater- but also the blood of a virgin. Blood I was willing to spill.

I stole his four year old daughter from her bed. She was a lovely little thing, and had once smiled at me in the Co-Operative. He had told her

“Don’t go near the Cailleach, mo ghaol. She’s wicked. Keep away.”

She had looked confused. She smiled at me again as I carried her through the storm back to my home.

“Da says you are wicked,” she whispered to me through the rage of the winds.

“Your father is wrong,” I told her.

I was saving her. I was saving her from the truth that she would eventually discover- that her father’s soul was black and bruised. I was saving her from the eternal judgement and jealousy of her mother. I was saving myself from ever seeing fear eclipse her eyes when she looked at me. I slit her throat. She was only little, but her little corpse wept enough blood for me to wash in.

In the morning, the storm had ended and so had I. I buried her body on the machair, and then vanished into thin air. As if by magic.

*****

The first thing I did was buy a looking-glass. It was huge, brass and in the rococo style. I sat in my new home and gazed at myself. I would hunt for blemishes or wrinkles. They never appeared. I was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I would stroke at my skin and grin as I mapped out its supple peaks and troughs, carved in cream. London suited me, because everything suited me now. The rose in my cheeks complimented the flush of the pink damask curtains in my dressing room. The green of my eyes, for they were green now, would glimmer in the sunshine as I strolled through Regent’s Park.

I had my pick of many men, but I chose him. He was wealthy and handsome, and we made a beautiful couple. I chose him because he was a father and he had stayed. His ex-wife, a society bride who had been as thin and as loveable as a coat-rack, had abandoned him and his seven year old twins for a Danish count. He kept them close because he was their father and he loved them. He would never throw a girl against a peat-stack and tear her apart because he could. He filled me with admiration and sorrow, in equal measure.

(I confess, not everything was silk and cream. Sometimes, when I closed my eyes at night the four poster arms of my bed would strangle me. I would see her bluebell eyes widen when I produced the knife. Sometimes I would hear her scream- for she did scream, eventually- in the clinking of a champagne glass or the whistle of a kettle. My husband would hold me and reassure me repeatedly that I was safe. I swore to myself, wearing him like a winter coat, that I would kill a thousand more little girls as long as I could keep this.)

My husband’s girl, Flora, was not little. She was tall for fifteen, and ever so beautiful. She was as pretty as a tea-rose and as prickly as its stalk. Her brother, Henry, had been more accommodating to me, but then what adolescent boy would not welcome a comely new female arrival in his life? He communicated through mumbles and heavy glances which I sometimes encouraged with vague coquetry. Flora did not mumble. She did not glance. She stared and she spoke, and one morning I could hear her speak loudly.

“I don’t like her, Father.”

I was tying the ribbon of my peignoir around my waist when I heard her in the salon. I paused.

“That’s nonsense, Flora. You will grow to love her.”

“Love her? How could I? How can you have been taken in by her?” Her voice was rising, cut-glass and clear.

“Can’t you see the coldness in her eyes? Don’t you feel a chill when she enters the room?”

“Your imagination has quite run away with you,” he told her. He was getting angry. I leaned against the wall as I listened, my ears no longer straining to hear as they began to shout.

“No, Father! You were so foolish to marry her! She’s worse than mother. She frightens me. Haven’t you seen her with Henry? She is like a spider playing with a fly. The animals don’t go near her, Jasper quite runs out of the room if she tries to touch him. She is wicked. She…”

“Enough!” roared my husband. China clattered, and my step-daughter floated past me without a backwards glance. Inside the salon, my husband was crying.

“I’m so sorry, Una.”

“Don’t worry, darling,” I told him, licking away his tears. “I’ll make everything better.”

I had not practised magic in a long time. I had little need for it now, because now that I was young and feminine, my life was full of wonders. But Flora’s icy disdain was clouding my new heaven and the tumour of her hatred would be removed, by hook or by crook. I cast spells for friendship, and spells for blindness. I bewitched ice and melted it as though it was her heart. She was resolutely resistant to magic. She was as strong-willed as she was beautiful.

I decided to take her shopping. I wanted the home-ground advantage, and these days I spent a lot of time and money on clothes. In the hallway, I chirruped with enthusiasm as I pulled a creamy mink around me. Flora looked less enthused. My husband embraced us both, patting my bottom then pinching her cheek. He held me again, stroking the soft depths of the fur and the gentle curvature of my cheek. She scowled as the car came to take us from Belgravia to Harrods. Henry watched from an upper window. I wanted my cheer to infect her, to draw her to me, but she did not touch me, even when the car bumped over cobbled streets.

“Try for me today, Flora?”

She looked at me, her eyes torrents of unhappy blue.

“I will try,” she said, staring out of the car window.

We tried on everything. Nothing pleased her. I made her try on dresses so ornately beaded that they looked like the tears of a goddess. I shroud her in delicate lace of every colour, and she shone even when the colours clashed with the copper of her hair. I suggested lockets and Limoges porcelain, lipsticks in claret and crimson, every blessed scent available- but nothing pleased or placated her. She wanted nothing I could give her.

Half an hour before closing time approached, and we were stood together in a curtained fitting room, in front of a series of mirrors. Around us were many Floras and many Unas, casting across each other, our reflections touching though we did not. I was dressed in an evening gown that curved around me like a ruby artery, when finally I lost my patience.

“Why is none of this making you happy? You said you would try!”

“I have tried.”

“You haven’t! Not a smile, not a word of thanks…” My hands were flailing. She was hard, a wall of scorn.

“None of this is going to make me like you. You can paint my lips whatever colour you want, but I won’t say a word in praise of you.”

I growled, seeing myself curl with anger in the mirror.

“You are better with me than against me.”

She laughed. The bitch laughed- so young and pretty and superior! She was a girl and she would become a woman, and this was how God had made her. She had needed no trickery. She was whole and complete and innocent.

“With you? I don’t even know what you are.”

She said this and laughed again, but then her face was hit with surprise. This was followed by fear. A slim finger rose, shaking in accusation. I saw, refracted around me many times over, what she had seen.

My face. Not the face I wore these days, the face I had stolen, but my own. My wired, parchment, pasted face. My bladder-wrack face. She saw it too, and then vanished. When she was gone, I was once more smooth and beautiful. I bolted from the fitting room, the train of my dress bleeding behind me.

All was quiet for a few days. Flora would not speak to me, and I did not look at her for fear that exposure to her scorn would again cause my magical mask to slip. She must have said something to Henry, as he avoided me too. I lay on my husband’s lap early one evening, and sighed when I confessed that I was worried the children would never like me.

“Keep trying,” he urged, stroking my curls. “Children can be difficult. I’m sure somewhere inside you there is a natural mother.”

I told myself I would try again. I told myself that it didn’t matter if she hated me- I had known hatred all my life. I told myself that she would put it down to upset or a trick of the light. All would be well. I kissed him and went upstairs to her bedroom.

As I leant over the bed, her hair spilling out a russet lake, my lips tried to pucker. A goodnight kiss? She looked up at me with such scorn and then she whispered

“I know what you are. I know. Cailleach.”

She did know what I was. I flashed before her again, in all my boggy glory, and she before me. For a glorious moment, woman and girl see each other as we truly are, as nature intended. Then I realised I must destroy her.

*****

It was almost too easy. My husband had to go to Zurich for a month on business, leaving me free to plan and prepare. My sleeping draught was easily made; toad’s blood and crushed lavender may smell strange but it worked a treat. They would not wake for many hours. Yes, I would kill them both because I was sure she must have told him of my…deficiency. They were too close, and he no longer looked at me with the same, nervous desire.

When they awake, they will be lying on silvery sands. Cradling the shore beside them will be water in jewelled turquoise. It is May, when the island is at its most beautiful. They will walk until they find the first house that comes to them, an old cottage that has gone the colour of dark gingerbread due to rust and damp. Inside, they will find me waiting for them. Then, they will truly, resolutely, irrevocably know me for what I am. The Cailleach.

Afterwards, I will bathe in the whisky-coloured water but under its surface I will never look clean.