Call of the Undertow (5 page)

‘Doing a map?’ Maggie felt a tickle of pleasure at the idea.

‘Didn’t ask.’ Audrey laughed. ‘But they’ve all got their homework’. She nodded her head to show that the queue had moved forward in front of them. ‘You
haven’t forgotten next Wednesday. Nothing formal,’ Audrey said. ‘We’ll make sure you get a cup of tea and a bun.’

‘Looking forward to it,’ Maggie said, unsure whether she was lying.

Cycling home, she stopped outside the beauty salon housed in a funny kiosk-type building. It was near the boarded-up church, and even as she parked her bike against the salon
wall, she could hear the clapping wings of pigeons that rose through the roof of the church and plummeted back in. A massive square front door, big enough to drive a truck into, had been fitted
into the front of the building.

She looked at the price card in the window of the salon. There were various therapies available – tanning, pedicures – but also massage, as she’d hoped.

Warm air engulfed her as she went in and some kind of sweet oil hung in it – geranium or orange. There was a small desk partitioned off from the rest of the tiny building, the walls
painted a deep yellow.

A woman appeared from behind the partition. She had glossy brunette hair pulled back tightly from her face. Maggie judged her to be about her own age, but well preserved; her skin oily and
supple-looking but tango-tanned, her breasts straining against the white tunic.

‘Hello,’ she said in a London accent, smiling. ‘I’m Debbie. Can I help?’

Maggie began to negotiate a massage, wriggling her shoulders as if to illustrate their stiffness.

‘It’s all your cycling,’ Debbie said.

Maggie found this knowledge of her surprising. ‘And sitting at a computer,’ she muttered.

The massage hurt. About halfway across each shoulder, she felt Debbie’s hand play a habit-hardened muscle almost as a string on a musical instrument. She caught it in a lateral movement,
pulled it with her and then it twanged back, painfully tight.

Debbie chatted her way through the massage, asking questions. How was Maggie liking the area, what did she do in the evenings and weekends. ‘And how did you enjoy your visit to the
school?’

‘Well, you never know whether anything’s sunk in. One or two might make something of it.’

‘I heard you had the class of weirdos?’

‘Well. I suppose they were a little ...’

‘Couple of right strange kids there. All the way up they’ve made it difficult for the others.’

‘And the teachers I suppose,’ Maggie said.

‘That Lisa girl? Mother keeps the house full of terrapins. Then the boy who’s up all night watching horror movies. I mean what kind of psycho’s he going to be? If his
dad’s anything to go by anyway.’

Debbie appeared to be on a roll, and Maggie let her go with it.

‘My hubby Rab – he’s a builder – found a lad from that class on one of his sites quite late one night. Got quite a fright. He was hiding like some imp in a
corner.’

A strange image drifted into Maggie’s mind of a small child nestled in a dark corner surrounded by crusty-shelled terrapins.

‘One of the joys of being a builder, I guess,’ Debbie steam-rollered on.

‘Did he do up this building, your husband?’

‘He did,’ Debbie said. ‘It was part of the deal when he bought the church, so we thought we might as well do something with it.’

‘What’s the church used for now?’ Maggie asked.

There was a pause. ‘Oh, nothing, really, it’s just empty, mostly.’

‘Is he intending to convert it?’ Maggie heard that her voice was muffled by the towel at her mouth and by drowsiness.

‘That would be a big job. It’s in a bad state,’ and then Debbie picked up her story again. ‘Anyway, this lad had picked up something he shouldn’t have done,
can’t remember what it was now. Rab got into quite a ding-dong with the boy’s dad when he hauled him home. Told him he had a wild thing for a son. There was nearly a punch-up.’
Debbie laughed, taking her hands off Maggie’s back she was so rocked by it. ‘I’ve got three. Never had a problem, but then never would’ve let my kids out at that time of
night. And then there’s that Paki boy, excuse me but that’s what he is...’

Maggie let her go on, nudged the talk away from her so the volume dwindled, the words lost meaning. She focused on the easing of her taut muscles.

Debbie’s movements were getting slower, lighter on her back. The towel came up over her, warming Maggie from the neck downwards. She was cocooned. Softened. Pliable.

‘Now,’ Debbie said quietly, some distance away. ‘You’ll want to relax there for a few minutes. When you’re ready, put your clothes back on and come back through,
okay?’

Maggie barely nodded. Her limbs fusing with the couch, she was slipping down; surrendering to sleep.

She was driving. Dusk half-light, and she was driving into the tunnel of trees leading from the village towards the beach. Quite fast. A couple of low branches, like crooked arms, hung down and
cracked the roof of the car. She pressed harder on the accelerator. As she passed the Lodge Cottage, a large form dislodged itself from the trees above it, swooped across the road a few yards ahead
of her and landed somewhere in the trees on the other side. A huge bird. Before she could do anything, it started to swoop back again. It looked more animal now. Despite braking, the forward motion
of the car and the lowest point of the creature’s dive met with a harsh crack. It fell into the road, invisible in front of her bonnet. She stamped on the brake, propelling herself into that
terrible skid, a sickeningly familiar tide of momentum. There was a scuffing sound and she knew she was dragging something along the road ahead of her, under the bumper; feathers and bone, perhaps
fur.

It seemed to take forever to come to a halt.

The next morning was warm enough for Maggie to sit outside with her coffee; sun seeping through a milky sky, the wind soft. She found the bare branches of the trees comforting
in their way, rather like the sparse lines drawn on the roadmap. The trees were bubbling with birds’ twitter today and the rhythmic purr of the sea was just audible. A throaty engine hummed
in approach, a boy racer making his way along the road behind the dunes, she supposed.

She looked back to the window-sill where dough stood in a bowl, a small pot belly under a damp tea towel plumpening in the sunshine, supposedly until it doubled in size. The yeast, sugar and
warm water had fizzed up quickly, and then she was up to her elbows in fine flour, the dough sticking to her hands annoyingly at first and then becoming smooth and elastic as she worked in more
flour. She’d lifted it out of the bowl and pounded it on the worktop. The recipe said to knead for ten minutes so she put on the kitchen timer and didn’t stop folding and battering
rhythmically with the heels of her hands until the alarm went. By this time her wrists ached, her fingernails were cemented by dough, and she was ready to write back to Helen with an ironic
‘thanks!’

But now, as she drank coffee outside, she managed to write something kinder in her reply.

She put on her boots and crossed the field to the woodland, setting aside any irrational jitters. Burrowing down into the little celandine-carpeted glen, she was guided by the burn; a route made
her own by her repeated walking. Primroses were suddenly up, bright jewels amongst the green, and the further she went, the louder the sea sounded above the rustle of her feet.

She went first to the old harbour. It had been built to export flagstones and its walls were constructed from a mosaic of its own cargo, erected upright to withstand storms. It had obviously
been a peopled place once, an important place which paved the world, but now the harbour water was clogged with seaweed and only a couple of fishing boats remained.

A small figure stood on the pier. As she approached, she could see that the wellies toeing the wall’s edge, almost overhanging it, were flowery. She hesitated, thinking she might still
retreat, turn back for the open beach where she’d intended to go next anyway, where anonymity was guaranteed. But the head turned, and she saw that the child was holding a pad of paper and a
pencil.

She walked to the end of the pier, admiring the stretch of blue ahead of her and the starburst splashes of gannets diving. She turned, expecting to find a face buried in concentration, but
although his hand was still poised over the paper, an amused, quizzical look was turned directly on her.

‘Lovely day,’ she said. A ridiculous thing to say to a child.

‘Where’s your GPS?’

‘I don’t really need it here.’ She laughed.

‘You’re not making a map?’

‘Not today. It’s Sunday.’

‘I am.’

The child turned the face of his pad towards her, an invitation which drew her in to look over his shoulder. When she got close to him, she noticed his hair. It was almost damp looking, as if it
had dried with salt water in it. She remembered that feeling from her family holidays in Cornwall.

She stepped away slightly but could still see the page. It held a spider’s web of fine pencil line. Despite the markings and remarkings, she could see that it was a bird’s-eye
representation of the Quarrytown end of the bay.

‘Gosh,’ she said, stepping closer again despite her own resistance. ‘Have you done that just by standing here?’

‘I went up there too.’ He pointed behind them to the small rise of Olrig Hill with its masts.

‘Yes’, she said. ‘You get a great view.’ When she went up, she’d seen the butt head of Dunnet lying along the horizon and noticed how even the slight elevation
widened the bay into a shiny apron in front of it.

The boy looked up at her. ‘Did you hear any pipes?’

‘Pipes?’

‘Bagpipes.’

‘No.’

He went back to his drawing.

‘Why?’ she asked.

He giggled into his sketchbook. ‘There was a man called Peter Barker,’ he said. ‘He was up there with his cows and met a lady in a green dress.’

‘When?’ she asked. ‘I wasn’t wearing a green dress.’

The boy laughed, his fringe tossing out of his squinting eyes. ‘He’d fallen asleep for a moment amongst the flowers. She said he could have a Bible or the pipes.’

‘Ah, I see. And he chose..?’

‘The pipes. He didn’t know he could play them, but it turned out he could. His cows did a wee dance when he started to play.’

Maggie smiled. ‘A happy ending, then?’

‘Except he had to go back and meet her in the same place seven years later.’

‘Uh oh.’ She sensed the story was about to take a bad turn.

The boy looked up, didn’t continue immediately.

‘And, did he ever return home?’

‘No,’ said the boy.

‘That’s a very sad story then.’

The boy turned his head up to her, one eye piercing the gap in his straggling fringe. ‘Why?’

‘Well, for his family. His friends. Never to see him again.’

The boy shrugged. ‘She was very beautiful.’

She smiled to herself. As if that made his removal from their lives a small thing to accept.

He went on, pointing ahead towards a house that dominated the long flat sward leading out to Dunnet Head. ‘And I went up there too.’

‘You’ve been busy.’ She wondered if this had all been in response to her talk. Flattering as it might be, it seemed rather an extreme response.

‘That was how you said they did it?’ he said. ‘Taking sightings from the highest places around.’

‘Well, yes.’

She looked at his map again and pointed. ‘This here, that’s the old RAF airfield?’

‘Might not be quite right yet. I need to look from Inkstack. Then I’ll draw it in properly.’

‘With a pen?’

‘Aye.’

She grinned at the child. ‘Well done.’

He looked back at her as if unsurprised at his own abilities.

‘And your mum and dad, have they taken you to all these places to get your data?’

‘No.’

‘So...?’

No answer came.

She imagined the distances involved for a child of about nine. It seemed a serious endeavour.

‘Do you have a bicycle?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Oh?’

‘Well it’s my dad’s really, but he doesn’t often use it.’

She could see he wasn’t the sort of child who’d be mucking about jumping puddles on his bike with the other boys, or worrying about where he was going to get designer trainers
from.

‘You stay in Flotsam Cottage, don’t you?’ he said suddenly.

She didn’t reply. He was a child. There should be boundaries. And that word ‘stay’ niggled. She knew by now that its sense in Scotland was ‘live’ but after two
months she wasn’t sure which she was; tourist or resident. Or which she wanted to be.

‘It’s here.’ He pointed at the cottage on his map, tucked downhill from Sally’s bungalow, drawn on his map in partial elevation. Just north-east of it was the sprawl of
the derelict farm buildings. He looked up at her, the fringe swept aside to reveal his dark brown eyes. ‘Do you think it’s right?’ the boy asked.

‘What?’

‘The cottage. Should it be a bit more towards the main road here?’

‘Is it for school, this map? For your project?’

He looked at her as if surprised at the question and then just shrugged. ‘I can still move it.’ He took out a soft rubber to show her.

‘I’ll look forward to seeing it when you’re finished.’

‘I’ll bring it round.’

‘I meant at the school.’ Her voice whipped out quick and hard, a defence; driving him beyond her walls and fences.

She wished she understood kids better. Some, like her sister’s, seemed easy to be with and knew their place. She never got anything confusing from them. But then, they mostly ignored her,
and she them.

She tried to make up some softer ground. ‘Your parents must be proud of you. What do they do for jobs?’

He looked ahead at the sea and the sky before answering. She noticed his profile now, how the forehead almost ran straight into the nose without the normal dip at its bridge, and how the chin
jutted out, following the same, single line. It was an odd face, flat and almost ugly as well as beautiful. There seemed something of the Arctic about him; some resemblance to Sami people.