Call of the Undertow (8 page)

After he left, she picked up his mug and plate from the table. As she was pushing his chair back under it she noticed marks on the black plastic of the upholstered seat. Two long dull lines
remained where his legs had been. She put a finger to one of them and it felt almost as though it were damp.

Graham phoned out of the blue. She’d given him her phone number in case he was leading any walks for the public she might join.

‘Haven’t seen you in a while,’ he said.

She explained that she’d been starting to take her deadline in a month or so’s time more seriously. Doing longer hours at her desk had made her body – shoulders, neck, back
– feel as creaky as the angle-poise lamp that hovered above her desk.

‘Cabin fever, eh? I’ve just the thing. They’re on their eggs,’ he announced. ‘Thought you might like to come and visit them.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The sea-cockies’.

‘Is this a game?’

‘Puffins,’ he said. ‘We get a few on the Head there. Not the quantity further along the coast, but.’

And so she lay on her stomach on a grassy cliff and watched through binoculars as the black and white clowns entertained with their whirligig flights around a sea-stack. Graham filled her in on
scientific facts, but she let most of it wash over her. It was their round-featured comedy that captivated her, and their parrot-looks.

‘You just want to take one home,’ she said to Graham.

‘You’re not anthropomorphising by any chance?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am.’

As the days stretched into late May and Trothan came and went, some of Maggie’s childhood memories erupted suddenly, thrillingly, through the strata of burial and loss.
Her mother, who was long dead, reappeared raking the garden, wearing brilliant red lipstick as always, with soil smeared on one cheek. Amidst the fruit bushes and neat rows of vegetables,
she’d once called Maggie over to look at something in the tilted aluminium bucket, something she had apparently caught in there; a frog perhaps.

Looking over the edge, Maggie had seen the grey sheen of water. But her mother pointed to a rounded, wriggling form catching the light in the shallowest water of the bucket.

‘A worm?’ she’d asked.

Her mother stayed silent, waited. Not a worm, then. Something strange that stayed tucked against the seam of the bucket’s base, but never stopped wrinkling its skin. She had a feeling that
any moment her mother might scoop it out and place the jellied thing in her hands, grey and still wriggling. She put her hands behind her back, felt a tight sense of excitement mixed with anxiety
in her stomach.

But her mother had instead lifted the bucket so that its base was level with Maggie’s eyes, pointed triumphantly to a thin stream of water running to the ground.

‘Can you see what it is now?’ she asked Maggie. ‘It’s a leak.’

Maggie was still intimidated by the translucent worm as if it had taken on monstrous proportions.

‘But how did the thing make a hole in the bucket?’ she finally dared to ask.

Her mother laughed. ‘It
is
the leak, silly. The water’s making a pattern where it leaves the bucket.’

‘It’s not a creature at all?’

Her mother shook her head, laughed more. After a moment Maggie laughed too, with relief, and astonishment at the illusion.

Maggie had never been defiant as a child. Her lapses into storm, lightning, sunburst seemed to be associated with being with her more reckless sister. She was too eager to please, or perhaps
more precisely, eager not to be in the wrong. She’d been neat and tidy, tried to bring things under control when she was only Trothan’s age, tugging ineffectually at weeds in the
wildest parts of the garden that her mother didn’t reach. She drew precise diagrams in Biology and Geography that harnessed the wild world into two tame dimensions; line and shade. They had
been praised.

Now she saw herself as some kind of indulgent aunt to Trothan. The more nonchalance his drawings elicited from others, the harder she encouraged him. When an email newsletter came round with
details of a ‘Young Cartographer’ competition, her cheerleading became more focused. She printed out the form and took it into the school.

Audrey thanked her, but looked at it doubtfully. ‘I suppose there might be one or two good enough to send in.’

‘I was thinking of Trothan specifically.’

‘Oh?’

As if he wasn’t obviously special, Maggie thought. ‘I’ve seen his map; I’ve been helping him.’

Audrey looked up at her over her rimless glasses.

‘He’s extraordinarily good at it,’ Maggie said.

Audrey handed the form back to her. ‘Looks like a family rather than a school kind of thing,’ she said, pointing to the final line on the form. ‘It needs a parent’s
signature. Talk to Nora; she’s the one makes the decisions, I think.’

Maggie looked around her to make sure she wasn’t being indiscreet. ‘Do you really think she’d be, you know, bothered?’

‘Oh they usually are,’ Audrey laughed. ‘About their wee darlings.’

‘Yes, but Nora, she seems a bit...’ Maggie struggled, realised she should have thought in advance about how to put this.

Audrey’s look now suggested impatience.

Maggie kept trying. ‘He’s doing more work on the map, the one he did as his school project. But I don’t know if Nora even realises.’

‘His map. Yes. It’s a credit to you that he’s taken that up. We’ll put it in the draw for the school showcase in June.’ Mrs Thompson now started walking her
expertly towards the door. ‘One child from each class gives a little talk about a project to all the parents. It gives an idea what’s going on right across the school. Why don’t
you come along?’

And then Maggie was outside, the door clicking shut behind her.

She always tried to be at home at four o’clock which seemed to have become Trothan’s regular calling time. One day she was late because she’d taken the bus to
Thurso on a mission for speciality flour that couldn’t be bought in the village shop. She wanted to try granary, maybe even rye.

She found him sitting on the deck outside the cottage, knees balled up to his chest, forehead touching them.

‘Why do you lock your door?’ he asked.

‘Security’

He nodded, but looked unconvinced.

‘I don’t want anyone walking in. I’ve got computers; they cost a lot.’

‘But they could just break a window if they wanted to come in,’ he said.

‘Don’t your parents lock their door?’

He shrugged. ‘Not really’.

‘Did you talk to your Mum and Dad about the competition?’ she asked. On his previous visit she’d told him about it and asked him to discuss it with his parents.

‘Dad’s away.’

‘You showed the form to your Mum?’

Trothan nodded.

‘And?’

He shrugged.

‘Did she understand that we need her signature?’

‘Is there any cake?’ he asked.

So. She’s not feeding you either, Maggie thought.

If she’d been this child’s mother she wouldn’t have stood back and let him be ignored and ostracised; working alone, playing alone; tolerated rather than encouraged. Carol had
once told Maggie that the first place of a child was supposed to be his mother. If this essential geography isn’t established, there can be problems. On the other hand, it seemed sometimes to
Maggie that Trothan’s primary place could never be another person. It had to be the bay itself, its hills and headlands, buildings and buried things. Perhaps that was just as well.

A text arrived from Carol.

‘I’m coming to visit. Arrive Thurso 2035 Friday. Can you collect?’

Maggie was stunned; there had been no discussion of any such visit.

‘Why are you coming?’ she replied.

‘To visit.’

Maggie’s work deadline approaching in three weeks tugged at her insides as she went about the preparations – making up a bed in what was established as her study, scrubbing at the
toilet she normally wouldn’t have to share. Then, after making sure the car would still start after three months’ grounding, she gave it a run – a cautious one that had locals
revving impatiently behind her – to Thurso for a Tesco’s shop. What was on offer at the local shop wouldn’t be good enough for Carol. On her return home she sat drinking coffee
with a slightly trembling hand and looked around at her refuge. The rhythms marched out by tides, the rising of dough, and Trothan’s visits now all seemed slightly threatened. Her sister had
been the only one she hadn’t been quite able to fence out.

Amidst her fear, however, glimmered a faint excitement: A visitor. She made two loaves.

Maggie saw Carol appear from the far end of the train trailing a small case on wheels. She looked out of place in the cool evening wearing a thin summer dress and flip-flops. Maggie walked
towards her, observing her sister’s frown, her eyes searching the platform. They were nearly on top of each other before Carol’s face livened into recognition.

‘Good grief,’ she said, holding Maggie at arm’s length. ‘What happened to your hair?’

Carol continued to stare strangely at her. Maggie felt as if she was in some sort of disguise to her sister: the Medieval Queen or the Lion from their childhood dressing-up chest.

‘It was irritating,’ Maggie said. ‘Around my face. It was too long for my age anyway.’

‘You’re only forty, for God’s sake. It makes your face look so thin.’

‘Give us a hug, then,’ Maggie said. ‘The rest of me’s the same.’

Carol drew her in tight then, the familiar smell of perfume or talc about her, the flesh of her bare arms smooth and cool.

‘Christ it’s cold up here,’ she said, pulling away suddenly and turning to walk up the platform.

‘I hope you brought walking boots?’ Maggie said.

‘I came for a holiday, not a boot camp.’

Maggie imagined Carol’s bags full of sun cream, shades, trashy beach reading. When they went to Greece together, back in their 20s, Maggie had taken shorts and a T-shirt and stomped off up
the hills in rock-cracking heat each day, tutting at the inaccuracy of local maps. Meanwhile Carol languished on the beach and got chatted up by local fishermen.

‘I don’t often get away without Mike and the kids,’ Carol said, as they drove the coast road back to the cottage. Dunnet Head was crisp and proud on the skyline beyond the
water of the bay.

‘I’m flattered.’

Carol looked around. ‘Not much here, is there? Why are there so many abandoned houses?’

Maggie shrugged. ‘Not enough people to live in them, I suppose.’

Carol shivered and turned up the car heater.

She gazed around when they arrived at Flotsam Cottage and said, ‘You should have reminded me you had so little; I could have brought some of your trinkets up.’

Maggie’s paintings, maps, ceramics had been packed up in boxes, a life’s memorabilia on hold in Carol’s garage.

‘I’m enjoying being a minimalist,’ she said.

Maggie persuaded Carol into jeans, a fleece and solid shoes the next day, and they did walk a bit. In the evening they picked up fish and chips in the village, stepping their way across a
forecourt strewn with prone bicycles in bright oranges and greens. Then they went down to the water’s edge and sat on a bench on the grass near the harbour where salmon nets were stretched to
dry between tall poles. They looked across the bay to Dunnet Head.

‘Funny smell here,’ said Carol, sniffing.

After eating, they walked onto the pebbly shore for a while near where flagstones used to be prepared. Maggie noticed a large lumpish form stranded halfway up the beach at the high tide mark.
She thought at first it was a live seal, but there was no flicker of movement as she approached.

The skin was black parchment, drum-skin taut against the frame of the skeleton, sagging between the struts and rafters of the bones where the flesh had perished. There was a lifeless zone around
it, and the suggestion of a round raw wound on the side of its neck circled by ragged flesh.

‘Oh God.’ Carol came up behind her. ‘How gross. No wonder it’s smelly here.’

And then Carol noticed the wound on its neck. ‘What would have made that?’ she said.

Maggie shrugged.

Carol clutched her stomach and turned away.

‘You’re not going to be sick are you?’ Maggie called after her, but Carol lumbered on, not stopping.

Maggie looked back at the seal. So strong and foul was the smell of rotting flesh, she had to wrap a scarf over her face. The eyes had been pecked out and the skin had started to retreat from
the bone of its tail and on its flippers, revealing clusters of thin white parallel bones jointed in knuckles exactly like human hands.

Despite the revulsion, she was attracted to the strange sight of it, almost as if it had been caught in transition between human and seal form. In the water they always seemed curious about
humans, swimming parallel with your route along the beach, watching you, as if there was an affinity. ‘Fallen angels’, she’d heard seals called.

‘Why is it dead?’ Carol asked when Maggie caught up with her. ‘Why did you bring me here to see dead things?’

Maggie thought of all the dead and discarded things she saw regularly washed-up on the beach; a welly without a sole, a guillemot with its head bowed against its chest, a blue fisherman’s
plastic glove poking its fingers up through the sand as if someone was trying to prise their way out. She loved best the heart-shaped shells of ‘sea potatoes’. Porcelain white, they
always shattered if she tried to collect them. She’d never seen one when spiny and alive because they stayed burrowed beneath the sand.

She had to acknowledge death didn’t hide itself here.

They walked back into a breeze. An old man in a fluorescent jacket had parked his mobility scooter next to the bench and was staring out across the bay. Maggie recognised him. When out cycling
the lanes, she’d sometimes overtake him and had been surprised how far from the village the scooter took him. He always had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, Hell’s
Angel-style.

He looked up and smiled at them when they got close. It seemed to be an invitation and they sat down on the bench next to him.