Call of the Undertow (10 page)

‘Maggie, what was that creature doing here?’

Maggie walked back in with two glasses. ‘He’s a gifted child with an interest in maps.’

‘He comes round here? Lets himself him?’

‘Seems to.’

‘Do his parents know?’

‘Yes.’ Maggie put the glasses down and held the bottle of white wine up to show Carol, questioning with a cock of her head. She poured out a glass and handed it to her.

Carol prowled the room, frowning slightly. Maggie took a seat on the sofa, put some music on. ‘Want some nibbles? I’ve got pistachios.’

‘Maggie,’ Carol said carefully, sitting down. ‘What are you doing with a strange hippy child wandering in and out of your house?’

Maggie laughed. ‘He’s not a hippy.’

‘And why did he take off like that when we came back?’

‘Because of you probably.’

‘Me?’

‘He’s a sensitive boy. Runs off if things crowd him. He probably picked up on your hostility.’ Anyone would have, she thought.

‘Maggie, I’m serious. What’s he to do with you?’

‘You should have looked at his map.’

‘What about that gross story?’

‘All boys like stories like that, don’t they?’ Despite herself, Maggie shivered slightly at the thought of the intestines. ‘I’m just encouraging his
talents.’

‘He goes to school, doesn’t he?’

‘Of course.’

‘He has parents?’

‘Seems to.’

‘So why have you adopted him?’

‘I’ve not adopted him. We just have a professional interest in common.’

Carol burst out laughing. ‘He’s a child.’

‘Obviously.’

‘Children get into all sorts of things. They live in the moment. They don’t have projects or professional interests. Bloody peculiar child if you ask me, to be so driven.’ The
nursery nurse lecturer at her work.

There was a pause in the discussion while they drank some wine. Maggie would have liked to start a new topic of conversation, but although Carol’s demeanour was gentler and her voice
softer when she looked up, she was still on the same tack.

‘Maggie,’ she fiddled with her glass. ‘Is it that you think he can heal something?’

This new idiocy shot Maggie to her feet, making her slop wine onto the floor. She stood up and strode out of the room to get a cloth from the kitchen.

The next day they went to John O’Groats, visited tat shops, as if in pretence that they were in the cream-tea comfort of Land’s End. They had to wrap up in several
layers and ate their ice creams in the car to keep it free from their wind-lashed hair. The simple pleasure of sitting on a wall in balmy sunshine and watching other tourists wasn’t going to
be replicable here.

A few bedraggled, wind-scorched cyclists and walkers doing the ‘end-to-end’ arrived or departed, were greeted with hugs and champagne, but soon retreated to shelter.

‘If this is summer, I’d hate to be here in winter,’ Carol said.

‘It’s not always like this.’

‘And will you be?’

‘What?’

‘Here in winter.’

‘I live here.’ The realisation arrived in the moment of saying it; a sense that she
could
stay, that the place might allow her longer than six months.

A couple of sunny days followed. They visited Peadie Sands, walking over Dwarwick Head from Dunnet to reach the small white-sanded cove where the sea was turquoise and geology laid bare. The
mermaid on Trothan’s map had disturbed Maggie’s idea of the place. Now she felt she might put her bag down on a rock and find it displaced to another one. The waves here might sing a
story.

‘People swim here,’ Maggie said.

‘Swim!’ Carol looked horrified.

‘Not me.’ She hadn’t swum for years, and even then it had been in a warm swimming pool with her neck erect and hair dry. The North Sea was hardly a temptation. They walked
on.

Maggie found it hard to enjoy the place with the sense that Carol was so at odds with it. She seemed to be happiest indoors in front of the TV when she was absorbed into programmes that were
equally familiar at home.

‘It’s like being abroad,’ she said once, and looked out of the window. ‘Without the heat.’

Maggie didn’t want to show Carol that anything had changed since their conversation, but as they tended to be out at the times Trothan would normally visit, she locked the door after them.
Perhaps the boy shouldn’t be coming in and making himself at home. She missed the ritual of his visits on those days. She almost wished Carol away so she could open the door up and have him
back instead.

As much as anything she missed seeing his map materialise. It was a mysterious process; she just watched and tried not to interfere, as if she might somehow put off his ‘sight’. She
half expected the prehistoric fish that had swum between the strata of rock here to appear as scaly decorations along the shore on his map. Or perhaps the shadow caused by a large flock of birds,
known as an ‘angel’ by radar controllers, would appear sweeping a course around Dunnet Head. She hoped he was still working on it, wherever he was; that he
could
work at
home.

Having Carol there forced her to get used to driving again. Perhaps that was part of her intention. Frank’s tactics to get her back behind a wheel had been gentle, but transparent.
He’d circled second-hand cars in the small ads of the local newspaper and left them lying on the kitchen table. She put them straight in the recycling bin. She noticed, but looked away, when
frustration curled his shoulders.

Back then he’d helped keep her in suspended animation; the exchange of news at the end of a work day, someone to go to a film with or walk with at weekends. Other people helped with that
too. There was still night and day; eating and sleeping; work and play. She learnt to do what was necessary, the bare essentials that kept those around her from saying, ‘it’s not like
you,’ or advising, ‘you need to...’ or worst of all, asking how she felt. She acted out the numb normality of wine-sipping in front of the TV on a Friday night, the phone calls to
Carol and occasional evenings with friends. No one knew about her dreams or the images that insisted themselves onto a blank computer screen. They didn’t see the red shoes, the white
polkadots. She kept everyone at bay.

‘Time,’ they’d all said, even though she hadn’t asked them.

Eventually Frank gave up circling cars for her. Presumably he’d circled a job advert for himself instead. After a year he put his head in his hands and told her he’d taken a new job
in another city. And he’d rented a flat on his own.

‘I feel terrible,’ he said, his mouth twitching in an odd way at one corner.

Maggie had nodded, accepted, forgiven. How could she blame him?

After Frank left, Carol phoned with a new regularity. Most weekends Maggie would make the trip to stay with Carol’s family, eat shreddies with Fran and Jamie on Sunday mornings before the
orchestration of family life swallowed the day with lifts to parties, football, pony-riding. She usually took the train there. Once or twice she caused consternation by arriving on her bicycle.

‘Stop punishing yourself,’ Carol had said. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

Carol wasn’t the only one to say it. Her GP had said something similar when she went in for ‘something to help her sleep’. Friends said it too. The police pressed no charges.
Even the formal inquest seemed to absolve her in less personal terms. And it came in the silence of the girl’s family.

Then Carol had calmly told her that the girl’s parents had split up. It was what happened, Carol said, with all the stress. And Maggie had started the small ads search herself, for a new
house and a car.

‘Don’t you want a bit more company?’ Carol asked her on their penultimate evening.

‘I’m a company of one.’ Maggie looked up at her. ‘You have your husband and children to anchor you.’

‘When the children are young, they expect me to be an anchor, of course they do.’

‘But they anchor you too. It doesn’t matter where you are,’ Maggie said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your location is your family unit. I’ve got this place instead. The beach. The bay.’ Maggie gestured out of the window.

‘But what about a normal life?’

‘This is normal life. I can work here as well as anywhere. I’ve got food and washing facilities. I’ve not gone to join a cult, starve myself to death, if that’s what you
think. I’ve always loved the sea.’

‘Yes, at Exmouth or Budleigh Salterton.’

‘I can buy Devon clotted cream in Tesco’s if I want it.’

‘And what about friends?’

‘I haven’t seen them in Tesco’s, no.’

‘Ha ha. Do you have any?’

‘I’ve only been here three months,’ Maggie said. ‘And I know Graham. He’s alright. He likes birds and he likes bad jokes. Which is fine with me.’

‘But you’ve not even tried to join a club, you don’t go to the pub, restaurants. Why are you being so odd?’

‘Odd?’

‘Yes.’

Maggie’s face flushed. ‘Come on now, haven’t I always been “odd”.’

Carol went quiet then. Maggie had never had a carefree attitude as a child like Carol had. Her mother was always reassuring her, ‘It’s all right. You’re not in any
trouble.’ Meanwhile Carol had seemed to breeze on through life.

Maggie felt a need to lighten things. ‘You’re just afraid I’m going to turn into that woman we saw yesterday,’ she said, imitating the gummy smile.

‘Yeah, or one of the weirdos living in the falling-down houses,’ Carol said. ‘And what about love?’

Maggie saw that her diversion had failed. ‘Love?’

‘Yes, finding love. You haven’t given up on it, have you?’

‘Carol. My head is bursting.’

‘I mean there was that nice chap you worked with. Didn’t you want to pursue that?’

Maggie thought hard. ‘Richard? You mean Richard? He’s my boss now, for God’s sake.’ ‘So?’

‘He’s 600 miles away’

‘No,’ Carol said. ‘You are.’

Maggie gave in and they went to the pub on Carol’s last night.

‘I can’t believe you’ve not been to your local before,’ Carol said as they reached the door.

‘I’d rather spend my evenings out in this light.’ The sky gleamed over and around them, swirling with birds.

The door slammed shut, temporarily blinding them as if in illustration of Maggie’s point, and they fumbled down a corridor towards another door. It gave onto a small bar with formica
tables and woodchip walls, a fruit machine and a pool table. A couple of men sat at the bar; one bald and bulky, the other dark-haired and wearing a check shirt. Otherwise it was empty and there
was no one serving.

The two men looked over their shoulders as the door opened, muttered greetings, and then turned back to each other. Carol took the initiative, stalking to the bar and pronouncing in her
south-eastern vowels, ‘What do you have to do to get a drink here?’

The men indicated a bell.

‘I’m having a G and T,’ said Carol.

‘Okay. Me too.’

The bartender, a young man with a ponytail and a sniff, eventually came and delivered the drinks. They settled themselves at one of the tables on red velvet stools.

‘Thanks for my holiday.’ Carol held up the glass.

‘Come again,’ said Maggie.

The door opened and more people came in. Two young lads who looked barely 18, and an older man with a dog and a stick. A gradual filling and warming of the bar. All of them greeted the original
two men, nodded vaguely at Carol and Maggie. When Maggie went to the bar for refills, the bald man turned and half smiled. ‘On holiday?’

‘My sister is.’

‘And you?’

‘I live here.’

‘Oh.’ He looked surprised, questioning. ‘Been here long?’

She explained, and when he asked if she liked the area, she clearly gave the right answer. The slight whine and chittering rhythm to his speech marked him as a local. When he asked where she
stayed she was vague, fluttering her hand in the general direction. ‘A cottage, up that way, a bit out of the village.’

‘You’re not the Map Lady, are you?’

‘I’m a cartographer, yes.’ She smiled.

‘We’ve heard of you of course, from the weans.’

Despite herself, a breeze of pleasure tickled her. ‘What about yourselves, what do you do?’ she asked.

‘Dounreay, me,’ said the check-shirted man. ‘Till they finish decommissioning or I retire.’

‘And I’ve the butchers,’ the bald man said. ‘Not seen you in yet.’ He picked up one of her slim wrists, inspected it, laid it down again. ‘Not vegetarian are
you?’

She laughed. ‘Not deliberately.’

‘We’re just across from the chippy, any day except Sunday. We’ll feed you up a bitty.’ He said it as if he could smell steaks sizzling.

‘Does anyone sell fish locally?’ she asked.

The men shifted on their seats, exchanged glances.

‘There’s Tesco’s,’ Archie said.

‘I’ve this romantic notion of going down to the harbour and buying it straight from the fishermen. I suppose it doesn’t work like that.’

She laughed at herself, but the two men stared back, smiling glassily.

‘Let’s ask Jim.’

She realised they were looking over her shoulder at a younger man with a weaselly face standing at the bar in yellow wellies. He nodded at her, ordered his beer, and remained there. He had a
sidekick – a scruffy-looking man wearing a cloth cap that he didn’t take off. His otherwise rather boyish face looked leathery, as if you might find it stitched and scuffed like a
saddle. He was perched on a bar stool, knees wide apart, sou’westers pulled down around his waist, advertising that he’d come straight off a boat.

‘Lady’d like a wee fishy, Jim,’ the Butcher called over to Yellow Wellies. ‘Can you help?’

‘Aye,’ he nodded into his beer.

‘You’ll oblige, eh?’

He raised his eyes then. ‘Flotsam Cottage, is it?’ Crooked eyes on her, a slight grin.

‘Yes,’ she said uneasily.

‘We’ll bring ‘em up.’

‘That’s how it works?’ Maggie asked.

The grin widened and the shoulders of the sou’wester man next to him shook in silent laughter. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. Maggie wasn’t sure if she was the butt
of the joke or if she could share it.