Call of the Undertow (2 page)

In the days and weeks before moving she’d kept a road atlas open on the kitchen table and looked at it while eating breakfast. A road atlas, usually castigated by people like her for
reducing landscape to a driver’s myopia, had been exactly right for her needs. She toured her eye around the profile of the peninsula, saw it as an animal head, perhaps a cat, with the nose
raised at the north-east corner – Duncansby Head. To the south of Duncansby was the great yawning mouth of Sinclair Bay, toothless but opened wide as if in a scream, lined with a thin slice
of yellow sand.

West of Duncansby was a round bear-like ear, before the back levelled away into smaller lumps and bumps towards Dunnet Bay, a soft and vulnerable indent with its wide strip of sand, a chink in
the armour of what she took to be a rocky exterior.

The place names were enjoyable to say aloud; unfamiliar and sibilant. Sibster, Staxigoe, Slickly, Sordale. They sounded foreign – Skirza, Ulbster, Ackergill – left there by the
Vikings probably, though from what she’d read, the Norse history of Caithness was forgotten now, only occasionally uncovered when sands shifted from a Viking burial site. The place names
marched a set of characters fit for a children’s storybook into her head: Aukengill the herring; Murkle the mink; Rattar spoke for itself. The roads on the map, the blue branches of the
rivers and tributaries, made lines along which characters might be drawn to each other and meet.

‘You’re mad,’ her sister Carol said when Maggie showed her the final page of the road atlas, the expanses of blank white paper, the few wiry roads and the tiny shaded areas
indicating settlements. ‘Even I can read a map enough to see there’s nothing there. It’s not like you to be so remote.’

Instead of answering she randomly re-opened the atlas near the front; the South. Reading, Newbury, Basingstoke, Didcot, Southampton. The pages were a crazed circuit board of crossing wires -
green or red for A roads, blue for motorways. Large shaded areas spoke of dense populations. Carol frowned at the atlas and Maggie closed it with a small thump; a strained line of understanding
between them as usual. Carol, older by only two years at 42, even physically contradicted her sister: fair and curvy to Maggie’s darkness, height, crane-like angularity.

Maggie’s friend Helen was more polite. ‘I’ve never heard of it. Apart from that place of course.’ She poked a finger at John O’Groats, known as the most northerly
point, even though the map clearly gave this role to Dunnet Head further to the west.

She bought a car, a second-hand Volvo.

‘You’re going to drive again?’ Carol’s tone now sweetened, sniffing her own agenda for Maggie of ‘getting back’ to something.

‘Easiest way to get there with my things,’ Maggie had said.

No one tried to stop her, but she sensed the whispered conversations, the concern. Helen offered her help with packing up. Even after Maggie had stopped attending the ‘Joining In’
community choir they’d both sung in, Helen and Maggie maintained their ritual of meeting for a coffee and bun at their favourite deli afterwards, the chat safely confined to weather, singing,
buns. She also tried to put Maggie in touch with friends she said lived in the far north. She wasn’t the only one. They handed her pieces of paper with scribbled addresses and phone numbers.
But the friends were usually in Inverness, a hundred miles away, or even Perth, two hundred. They were hardly going to be neighbours.

‘Does Frank know?’ Carol asked.

‘We’re not married anymore.’

‘I know,’ Carol said. ‘But.’

‘He knows.’

She packed essentials into the car and pointed it towards that far corner of the country, teeth gritted, radio up loud, crunching indigestion tablets; the first time she’d driven in two
and a half years. Pulled north and north, with her left-behind self snapping at her heels but eventually dropping back and back, out-paced and shrinking as she passed Glasgow, the junctions
thinning out, the land between settlements spreading. She stopped for a break in Pitlochry in the darkening afternoon, saw a hairdresser lolling and idle in her window, went in and had her dark
hair cut short there and then. She barely looked at its effect on her face in the mirror, thought of it as a point of no return. Then beyond Inverness fewer and fewer villages with chains of orange
street lights glowing out of the black and her breathing steadying. A road that rolled; a dark chasm now falling away to her right and one or two solitary ships’ lights out there in parallel
journeys to her own.

And finally the car had brought her to rest in these flat, open lands of the peninsula where there was nothing to hide behind. You could see so far; see your enemies coming. It was a relief to
be so certain of her safety. That was, until the snowman had arrived in her garden.

Just as Sally promised, salt-laden winds turned the snow to slush, disappearing the snowman overnight except for a snowball left seeping into the grass. When the clocks changed
at the end of the month, it seemed no warmer but the searing skies suddenly arced into long days, awaking a sort of hum in her and calling her beyond her established circuits.

‘You’ve been there a month and haven’t made a pilgrimage to Dunnet Church yet?’ Richard said at the end of a phone call one morning.

‘I’ve walked along the beach loads,’ she said. ‘But it’s really long. Dunnet’s the very far end of it. I’ve got work to do for some horrible boss,
remember?’

Putting down the phone, she looked out of the window and saw the cold brightness of the day. Her deadline was still weeks away. She stood up and closed the laptop, pushed her bicycle past the
car where it sat abandoned at its first resting place on the gravel driveway.

She pedalled towards the village passing the sentry-box beauty salon and a now familiar copse of tall, leafless trees amidst which shimmered a boarded-up church. A bit further along was a
primary school. Then the village with its grey, squat cottages laid out on a grid of streets by a man who’d invented it from a quarry in the flagstone era – hence its name, Quarrytown.
She had no notion of who might live in the cottages now. There appeared to be no source of employment other than the small commercial laundry behind the hotel that gushed out steam scented with a
faint memory of Maggie’s grandmother. The streets often seemed empty except for tangles of boys and bicycles outside the chip shop or smokers leaning on the side wall of the hotel. Her visits
to the shop had been an impersonal relief. Its window was chequered with notices for community events: a double glazing exhibition, a pipe band, some sort of crafts competition. Nothing of interest
to her.

It was as if time had forgotten this place, abandoned it to the nuclear facility along the coast. And yet a new ‘goldrush’ of wave and tidal energy developments was promised in the
Pentland Firth. Swarms of prospectors might arrive to civilise the derelict properties that punctuated the land at half-mile intervals. Perhaps it was already happening. She’d heard the
relentless churning of cement-mixers as she walked around the village, seaming together the breeze-block walls of new bungalows.

She freewheeled through the trees leading from the village towards the beach, the dark tunnel briefly opening out at a derelict Lodge Cottage marking the entrance to a long-gone grand house.
Then she was out into light and onto the road running parallel to the bay, walled off from it by a high line of dunes prickling with marram grass.

At the tall white church at the heart of the cottages in Dunnet a creaky woman with finger-tips almost L-shaped with arthritis was putting flowers into vases. The two of them fell into a small,
echoey exchange.

‘The congregation’s dropped to under ten,’ the woman said, peering at Maggie after she’d admired the plaque commemorating Pont’s stay as Minister here. ‘All
aged over sixty. The structure of the building needs attention too.’

It was as if she thought Maggie could mobilise a congregation as well as a cement mixer to shore up the church. The skin around the woman’s eyes was fragile, crumbling. She then enticed
Maggie to climb a steep rickety ladder to the belfry where a magnificent bell hung on a wooden gantry.

‘A gift from the estate of Mary Oswald after she died in 1788,’ the woman called up croakily from the bottom of the ladder.

‘Who was Mary Oswald?’ Maggie asked.

‘Owned half of Jamaica. Father-in-law was another minister here.’

Maggie descended the unstable ladder.

As if released from some sort of hibernation, from something that had been constraining her explorations, she pedalled on. After another four miles, at Dunnet Head, she walked a short way from
the lighthouse and paused on the cliff top, lay down on her stomach above a great white-stained slot into which spume flowed far below.

Years before, when they’d been married, Frank had taken her several times to the west coast, near to the isles of Skye and Mull, to walk the hills. Arms of land tumbled by birch or oak
woodlands sloped into the sea, and islands always gave the eye something to cling to, making the sea seem benign. This end-of-the-world suddenness wasn’t what she expected from Scotland.
Nevertheless the heaving swell against rocks thrilled her.

Dark birds with white bibs stood shoulder to shoulder on the ledges below her, the smell of their guano brewing a cauldron of ammonia. It was like a steeply-tiered theatre, but not a sedate one;
more like the most raucous Elizabethan playhouse echoing with catcalls and drunken laughter. The birds stepped from their ledge into the abyss, a black and white swoop joining them to a web of
flight paths between the cliff and the sea’s surface. Then they swept up again to alight with uncanny precision, perching back amidst the crowd.

Pairs chattered into each other’s ears, preening each other’s heads, their necks oily and eel-like. She thought she recognised something like tenderness in their behaviour. With its
long slender beak one bird nibbled at its partner’s neck and under its chin. The recipient shuffled, twitching its wings impatiently like a child having its school tie straightened before
it’s allowed to leave the house. They prickled up a sense of her own isolation. It was almost as if these birds were more human than herself.

She heard voices. Two men with binoculars and moss green jackets came into sight. Perhaps she should get binoculars, buy a bird book, be able to give them names as she could roughly do with
flowers. She recalled boring friends of her ex-husband who carried dictaphones into which they whispered the names of conquests.

Getting to her feet, she left the vantage point to the men.

She cycled back down through the village of Dunnet, headed onto the Dunes road and stopped at the ‘Sandpiper Centre’, a place overlooking the beach that was dedicated to birds.

‘Aye, they’re “oakies”,’ the Ranger said when she described the birds. ‘That’s what they get called up here.’

His accent was Scottish, but didn’t sound like the voices she heard in the shop. She imagined he’d come from somewhere to the south, somewhere she’d driven through blindly.

‘“Guillemots” to the rest of us,’ he said, pushing square spectacles up his nose. He’d stood up eagerly from his desk when she came in, a pale-faced man with
sandy-coloured hair. The air he displaced gushed with the scent of cigarette-smoke.

‘Very handsome,’ Maggie said.

‘Ach, thanks,’ he grinned at her.

‘The birds,’ she said. ‘The guillemots.’

‘Oh aye,’ he said. ‘And fantastic divers. They can stay down for a couple of minutes or more. One or two get deeper than a hundred feet.’

‘Are they rare?’

‘No, but in serious decline. Could have heard them a mile away from that cliff ten years ago.’

‘Oh?’ Maggie shook her head slightly.

‘Seem to be starving. Lack of sand eels.’

She started to edge away from the desk towards a huge picture-window that revealed horizontal stripes of sea, sky, and sand. Shoals of birds swooped diagonally, plaiting and separating above a
sea-horizon that spread between two arms of land. The Quarrytown side was dark with its tight, singular pocket of winter-bare trees. Dunnet Head wasn’t visible from here but Dwarwick Head,
closer to the beach on the same peninsula, soared up golden to her right. But then as she watched the opposing headlands alternated – one darkening whilst the other illuminated, as if in some
coded dialogue with each other.

‘Kittiwakes are back,’ the Ranger said from behind her, and then pointed to a flock of glittering white birds tumbling together from one spot to another above the waves. ‘Come
and see this.’

Tiredness ambushed her out of nowhere; she was sorry she’d begun the conversation. She seemed to be the only visitor to the Centre despite it being the start of April, which she thought of
as springtime.

He took her to a screen, offered her a seat and leant over her to press a button. Even his shirt sleeves smelt of cigarette smoke, although she could smell mint on his breath now too, and he
seemed to be chewing.

‘You’ll like this,’ he said as the screen came to life.

She watched the sleek silhouette of a dark brown bird; a fluid line from beak to its tightly pointed tail. It seemed to be propelled by one flap of a wing, its speed apparently disproportionate
to the effort.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘They’re good at flying.’ Managing not to say, ‘surprising for birds’.

A slight chuckling sound came from behind her, but he continued to watch the screen over her shoulder, keeping her pinned there herself. It was a little like the flights she’d watched from
the cliffs, but now the birds’ wings seemed to beat in slow motion. The camera panned out, took in more. The air thickened and clouded. The sounds, she realised, were more washy, not filled
with the cliff-clamour she’d heard. She was drawn in, puzzled.

Then a whole flock of the birds started rushing past each other, rising and falling. They rolled or turned to avoid each other with minute flaps of their wings or twitches of their tails. They
looked in profile almost like tiny turtles, and when she saw a trail of bubbles, she realised that the blue that held them was water.