Pig Island (24 page)

“Christ.” I closed my hand over the camera, steadying it against my chest. My heart was racing. “Don’t do that again.”

She stood for a moment, half turned away, trembling, her hands crabbed up in front of her chest.

“What’s up?”

“The pig.”

I wiped my forehead and looked over at the dead animal. “What about it?”

A long shiver went up her body, something visible that travelled from her stomach to her shoulders, then kind of shook itself off into the air. She closed her eyes and put her hands over her mouth.

“It’s dead,” I said. “It won’t hurt you.”

‘
It looks like it’s watching me
.“ Her voice was quick and whispered, like she thought the pig might hear her. ’
I know you’ll think that sounds stupid but I mean it. It’s watching me
.”

“Then walk away.”

‘It’ll watch me.“

I sighed, and clicked the lens cap in place. “What do you want me to do?”

She shook her head, her hand over her mouth, her throat muscles working. “7
don’t know. Just stop it watching me
.”

Pigs. Turns out to be pigs that had marked Angeline’s life for the last six years. By the end of the day I’d understand why she thought they were watching her, why she wanted me to cover this one. I wasn’t going to bury the fucking thing, not in the state it was in, so I hauled a rusting fertilizer drum out of the pile and wedged it across the hole to cover its face, kicking and punching the drum to seal the hole. It stank, the pig, worse than I remembered from two days ago, and while I was doing it I had to keep forcing saliva into my mouth—rubbing my tongue against the hard palate.

Angeline watched from the trees about a hundred yards away. She lowered herself awkwardly to a sitting position, using a branch to hold her weight, and was sitting there, half in the shadows, staring. When I’d finished I went and sat next to her. Her knees were pulled up, her dusty trainers tucked in tightly. The folds of the coat spread out behind her, concealing the deformity. She was still shaking.

“So,” I said, “not a pig person, then?”

She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers into them, like she was trying to get rid of a picture in her head. There were beads of sweat on her forehead.

“Going to tell me about it?”

She shook her head, drawing in a long breath. I brushed the rust off my hands, rested my elbows on my knees, and looked up at the sky, watching the clouds. My head was racing, thinking, how the fuck was I going to get her to talk? I needed her—she was all I had. The instinct that has in the past, I admit, allowed me to put my arm round the mother of a hit-and-run victim and say, “I feel your pain. If you give me that photo of your lovely little boy, the one on the mantelpiece, the reader will feel it too,”—my journalistic instinct—was failing me.

“Look,” I started, but when I turned to her she was looking at me. Her whole head was twisted on her long neck. Her eyes were bloodshot, the whites round the black irises spidered with red.

“He tried to pull me apart,” she said, “the moment I was born.”

I stared at her, my head buzzing, kind of knocked off-centre by this. “What? What did you say?”

“He thought he could pull it off me. My—‘ She shivered and looked out at the clouds, at the way they were gathering in a long train above the headland. ”My thing—my
tail
. He thought I would come apart if he pulled hard enough.“

Chapter 8

There was a narrow, tree-crowded path that went from the cottage due west to the cliff edge. Angeline led me down it, going fast, determinedly, her arms swinging, sometimes steadying herself against the branches and tree-trunks as she went. Soaking bracken and rhododendron roots tugged at my calves and I had to struggle to keep up. Somehow, without me knowing exactly how or when, I’d come through the eye of the needle. Suddenly she wanted someone to talk to: she wanted me to know everything about the shitty life she’d lived out here on Pig Island. Maybe it was the way I’d hidden that pig. Stopped it staring.

She came to a halt and put out her hand to hold me back. The path had come out at the top of a cliff, hundreds of feet above the waves. We stood in silence peering out from the trees at the open sky. We were eye-level with clouds bouncing along the distant horizon.

“Nice drop,” I said.

She squatted down in the dust and fumbled a stick from the undergrowth. Streaks of colour from the exertion reached up her neck along the sides of her face like flames, and her eyes were bright. Not watery any more but hard and polished like wood. She poked the stick at the edge of the precipice where hummocks of grass splayed out like fingers. “See?” She lifted the stick and showed me a clump of grass stuck to the end. It was clotted with something tarry. “See this?”

“Yeah. Smell it too.”

I wrapped my arm round a hawthorn trunk and leaned out cautiously over the drop. A hundred feet below, the waves crashed on a scrap of pebbled beach. From where I stood a wide, blackish smear extended down the screed to the beach; the one or two blighted bushes that clung to the cliff were sticky with matter. A warm decaying air rose and mixed with the stinging cold sea-smell of salt and fishing-net, making me think for some reason of kitchens. I tipped away from the edge, back into the trees.

“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.

Chapter 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, too 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.