Call of the Undertow (3 page)

‘They fly underwater?’

‘Brilliant, eh?’ He laughed, still apparently thrilled by the sight despite its familiarity.

‘Can I watch it again please?’ she said.

She went back to the Centre a few days later, stood again at the window studying the view through binoculars, sipping a cup of metallic-tasting tea from the machine to warm up after the walk
along the beach.

The Ranger introduced himself as Graham. Embarrassed to be the only person there again, she galloped questions at him, garrulous almost, as if making up for a long silence. Although he
wasn’t from the area, he seemed to know it well.

‘Where is everyone?’ she asked.

Occasionally she saw men in boats putting out creels or salmon nets. She’d once seen a small group of surfers far out in the bay, black and seal-like, lying on their boards but never
apparently making any progress on the waves. The vast beach between the two villages was sometimes walked by people with dogs or crossed by a solitary horse rider, but they were widely spaced,
would never make eye contact. There was no sense here of the ‘promenade’; of people dressing up to be seen on the beach. It was a ritual reserved for the shop and, for men perhaps, the
pub.

‘You never see anyone much on the beach this time of year,’ said Graham.

‘Lovely,’ Maggie said. ‘The quiet, the emptiness.’

‘Try working here. And not going off your rocker. That’s why I stay in Helmsdale. Long way, but I’ve pals there.’

She wondered if Graham detected that she was an outcast and was talking to her out of kindness. She didn’t like to tell him that he needn’t bother.

‘The job’s different come high summer,’ he said. ‘When the caravan site’s full. There’s walks to lead; ground-nesting birds’ eggs to protect from dogs;
I might even have to defend the dunes one of these days’.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Some bastard’s thieving the sand,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Local people’ve probably been taking the odd sack for a couple of millennia.’ Graham shrugged. ‘But someone’s upped the scale recently. Just see the tyre marks in
the mornings. Not my job to enforce it, but still, if I lived nearer I’d get a wee vigilante group together.’

‘Who’re they nicking it from?’ she asked.

He looked at her without an answer. It was obvious that sand couldn’t really belong to anyone. Then he returned to his desk.

She was standing alone at the window with her eyes on the beach when she heard the door open. A great squabble of voices exploded in. She didn’t turn.

‘Primary Five,’ a female voice trumpeted.

The noise immediately subsided, leaving a moment of shuffling quiet.

‘That’s better.’

Sweat prickled in Maggie’s armpits. The room crowded in on her; suddenly airless. She heard the commanding woman greeting Graham.

‘Now we’ve all met Graham before,’ she said to her class. ‘When he’s been in school to help out with the wildlife garden. But not all of you have been
here.’

Graham introduced the Centre, pointing out a few things that they could explore, emphasising interactive exhibits with buttons to press.

‘See that fella?’ His voice now projected towards the window where Maggie was trapped. ‘What do you call that?’

Various children volunteered: ‘Seagull.’

Maggie gathered he was pointing at a passing gull.

‘If it’s crossing the sea we call it a seagull. But if it’s crossing the bay, we call it...’

‘A bagel!’ a single voice cried.

It became apparent from what he said that the class had also been visiting Dunnet Church. Without turning around Maggie waited for the school party to disperse around the room so she could make
a dive for the door.

‘Any questions?’ Graham asked.

As an answer there was a shuffling anticipation of movement. Maggie picked up her bag.

‘One minute.’ Graham detained them. ‘There’s someone here I should introduce you to. You’re very lucky in fact. This lady...’

Maggie prickled, stiff-necked. Was he referring to her?

‘...Maggie Thame is a modern day Timothy Pont.’

Blood drained from her face.

‘Maggie?’ Graham summoned.

She took a breath and turned, her hand pressing at the familiar sting in her stomach. Twenty bright blue sweatshirts; eyes trained on her. Callum was there, Sally’s youngest, and she
thought she saw him nudge the boy next to him and whisper something. Elsewhere giggling huddles suggested conspiracy and made her wonder whether the snowman-builder might be amongst them. She
turned her gaze away.

Graham now spoke to Maggie: ‘This is Mrs Thompson, head of your local primary school. And these rascals are Primary Five.’

Maggie nodded, tried to smile.

Mrs Thompson strode towards her with an outstretched hand. She was a surprisingly tiny woman with short dark hair and a business-like satchel over one shoulder. She wore narrow, rimless
glasses.

‘We heard a cartographer had moved to the area.’

Maggie reacted to the word ‘moved’, with its permanent, bricked-in sound. ‘Well it’s only...’

But Mrs Thompson boomed on over her: ‘Remember that word “cartographer”, children? What does it mean?’

Mumbled answers came back and then the teacher released a small explosion with, ‘Okay children, off you go,’ calling through the mayhem: ‘And quietly. You’ve only got
fifteen minutes’.

She turned to Maggie again. ‘Very pleased to meet you. The children are doing their own maps this term, just simple things. What is it you work on yourself?’

Maggie explained about her freelance status, her current project. ‘So you see, I can work from anywhere.’

‘Well, lucky us.’ Mrs Thompson was rummaging in her satchel.

Maggie pulled on her hat, ready for departure. Suddenly a diary was being spread in front of her.

‘Now,’ Mrs Thompson said. ‘Strike while the iron’s hot. How about Friday morning?’

‘Sorry?’ Maggie glanced at the door, the path to it now clear.

‘To come and talk to the class about your work. We’ll give you a jolly good school dinner.’

Graham was grinning at her as if he’d set this up. Her mouth dried as she pictured beetroot bleeding into salad cream, her palate clogging with sponge pudding and custard. She had no need
to look at a diary; her days were empty white sheets, lacking the old structure of departmental meetings, conferences, or evening classes. She grappled with an impulse to refuse and hurry away;
stood her ground a moment sensing Carol’s elbow nudging her ribs. Her old self ghosting in a doorway.

‘Shall we say eleven o’clock?’ Mrs Thompson said, smiling encouragingly, her grey eyes kindly.

Maggie bowed her head to Mrs Thompson’s authority, shrunk back inside her primary-school self, and agreed.

‘I’d prefer ten if that’s okay,’ she said.

At least that way she could avoid staying for lunch.

A few days later she approached the school entrance. Some attempts had been made to suggest youth and activity with giant plastic butterflies pinned to the brown harled walls
and a tiny garden that was now covered in dead weeds.

She’d smartened herself up with a buttoned blouse over her usual old jeans and boots. When Mrs Thompson introduced her again to the class, she saw her own hand trembling against her notes
despite the breathing exercises she’d practised on the school doorstep. She used to do this sort of event regularly, but had stopped school visits a while back, only managing to honour
commitments to one or two talks for the Women’s Institute.

‘Primary Five’ meant nothing until she’d asked their average age; eight or nine. It was clear that boys likely to cause trouble had been positioned on single tables close to
the front. One was slumped forward with his head between outstretched arms. A prod from Mrs Thompson lifted his face, revealing a shock of white flab, eyes half-mooned with dark skin.

‘Stays up all night playing on his Game Boy and watching zombie movies, that one,’ Mrs Thompson whispered to Maggie in passing. She closed a window against competing noise from a
cement mixer working on the school extension.

There were two tables full of girls sitting with straight backs and neatly arranged pens and pencils, smiling attentively in her direction. They were uniform in bright blue sweatshirts but still
betrayed self-conscious girliness in the highlighted hair which they preened for each other when they thought Mrs Thompson wasn’t looking.

On one of the tables a group of boys swaggered. Their necks were hung with gold chains and their hair shaved into intricate patterns. There was a boy wearing a ‘John Deere’ boiler
suit. All the local farmers wore them in larger sizes. It was like looking at a roomful of miniature adults. They all seemed to have turned up simply to show each other what they looked like
– their ‘promenade’.

At the back of the room, one table was an exception. There was a collection of girls who were either rather plain-looking or large. They were attentive but unsmiling, like cats disinterested in
pleasing anyone. In amongst them was a dark-skinned boy who looked of Indian origin. Callum from next door was there too. And there was another child with a head of long hair, the hint of a small
face just visible below a ridiculously long fringe.

Maggie was unsure whether this was a boy or a girl. As she began her introduction the child swept its fringe to one side. One brown, long-lashed eye fixed on her with an unnatural intensity and
she heard her speech falter.

She’d brought a PowerPoint presentation and was relieved to take the focus off herself and onto a screen. Standing at the front of the class she felt conscious of her height, almost
envying Mrs Thompson’s efficient-seeming shortness.

She showed the class some maps of the local area through time – Roy’s military map, Blaeu’s atlas; and of course they went back to Pont’s early maps and she pointed out
how he’d incorporated elevations of significant buildings, shapes of landscape features and writing, including his words about wildness and wolves. She contrasted his style with
representational aerial mapping that she was currently doing herself, and showed them educational books to which she had contributed visuals, some of which they knew from their own library.

‘What do you think my tools are?’ she asked, finally feeling she was into her stride. There was a small show of hands.

‘Computer.’

‘GPS.’

‘Google Earth.’

She gathered in the suggestions, accepting or rejecting, explaining. She was mid-sentence when two words shot out from the long-fringed child at the back.

‘Your eyes.’ The mouth twisted, suggesting suppressed laughter.

Maggie wanted to respond to the rather unusual contribution. Calculating eyes were exactly what was needed, at least they had been for the map-makers who preceded her. But Mrs Thompson swept
things in a new direction.

‘Remember not to call out, Primary Five. If you have something to say put your hand up,’ she said. ‘Now. What questions did we prepare in advance for Maggie? Perhaps
we’ll take the best one from each table.’

The final question came from the ‘misfits’ table: ‘We’re going to draw up our own maps this week. What advice can you give us?’

She swung her legs over the back of her favourite hobby horse.

‘Walk.’ She heard her voice sparking with a new charge. ‘The early mapmakers charted great areas with their own stride, a pencil and paper. It must have made them solitary
fellows, don’t you think? When I began my career in cartography, people still worked like that. That’s where my heart really lies – pens, paper and a feel for geography –
not sitting at a computer, eating biscuits and getting fat.’

If she’d had an adult audience, there would have been a murmur of laughter then. Instead there were some fidgeting noises. A couple of the cool boys seemed to be looking at something under
the table. The tired boy had resumed his slump. Maggie realised she had lost them and looked apologetically at Mrs Thompson. But then she noticed that at the back of the room, one round brown eye
was still firmly pinned to her. She looked back at it. The child stabbed at its fringe with a hand, and the other eye appeared, drawing her in, tipping her attention towards the back of the room.
One hand slowly rose into the air, propped on an elbow. She took a breath and opened her mouth.

‘Right Primary Five.’ Mrs Thompson took charge. ‘Hands down please. We’ll give Maggie coffee now, and you can have your run around outside a little early. But first, what
do we say?’

After the chorus, the scrape of chairs, the exodus, Maggie busied herself, head down, unplugging her laptop.

Mrs Thompson shooed the children out and came to hover near her. ‘Super, thank you.’

‘I hope I didn’t bore them,’ Maggie said.

‘They’ve the attention span of midgies.’ She obviously thought about this a moment. ‘But perhaps not so persistent.’

They had coffee and ginger nuts in the staff room which had a view of the playground so Mrs Thompson could keep a canny eye on behaviour. ‘Look at that Sinclair boy, out in his T-shirt in
this temperature,’ she said.

Maggie noted the girls huddled around a magazine, avoiding boys and football, also visibly shivering in too-thin clothes.

A group of boys including some of the primary fives were playing a team game with a ball. But as Maggie watched, the befringed creature walked through the game, intercepted the ball with a
subtle flick of the arm and walked on. The child had the slightly loping gait of a boy but the trousers were tucked into pale blue wellies decorated with large white daisies. When its fringe
flicked up, she saw the pointed, almost elfin-shaped face, the sudden flash of two over-large, Asiatic-looking eyes, and she was even less sure of the gender. The group of boys didn’t protest
at the child’s possession of the ball. They stood with their hands on their hips for a moment and then turned away and began running at the wall instead, striding up it, seeing who could
reach the highest point.

The child took the ball into a corner, balancing and then rolling it: head, shoulder, the sole of a raised foot behind, then back up to the other shoulder. Definitely a boy, she decided. His
uncanny dexterity transfixed her, and she laughed out loud. ‘Look at that!’ she said, but no one in the staff room seemed to share her interest.