Call of the Undertow (13 page)

She dropped his arm. ‘Trothan, Trothan,’ she said gently, and moved to his side of the table, kneeling next to him, a hand to his arm. The small body was silently heaving, hands now
up to his eyes, covering them.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘It’s all right. I’m just crabby this morning, and I was surprised to see you.’

She recalled so well herself that dreadful agony of being wrong as a child, of being the brunt of anger, of being shaken out of her security and sense of love. Her pain now was knowing both
sides of it.

She felt an impulse to reach out with her body, to hug him. It seemed so natural, but she held back, looked up into his hair-tangled face and smiled. ‘I’m going to make you a lovely
mug of milky chocolate, just as you like it.’

She withdrew to the kitchen to let him recover his composure; to recover her own. He was vulnerable, just as she’d suspected.

When she returned with the chocolate, she was relieved to see that he was drawing again and she didn’t pursue her questioning.

He looked up at her, staring and silent for a moment. ‘Did something happen to your head?’

She nodded. ‘A bird happened.’

From a distance, over Trothan’s shoulder, she saw what he was sketching. A body in freefall. It looked as if it was twisting in the air. Its head was pointing down to the bottom of the
page, short arms flung outwards as it plummeted, legs apparently wrapped around each other in a swivel; a downward pirouette. She thought of angels falling to earth; the short arms their wings.

Then she saw flecks scattered across the page above it. She moved closer. Bubbles. She realised that the substance of the page wasn’t air, but water. The body was elegant in its flight,
controlled, and not falling at all, but swimming. Not even swimming, but almost dancing down through it. And it wasn’t human, but a seal.

She noticed then the second one swimming across the page below it, arching its back so that its stomach curved towards the bottom of the page, head and tail pointing upwards. And there was a
dark eye, a wide nostril and whiskers.

‘You’ve been to the Sea Life Centre, haven’t you?’ she said. ‘Seen seals swimming through the glass?’

He gave a small start, jolted from his concentration, and turned his head slightly. ‘No.’

‘TV, then.’

He shook his head.

‘So how do you know how they look?’

‘Just out of my head.’

What he always said.

‘Do you know,’ he said. ‘There’s a dead cow washed up on Peadie Sands, and no one’s supposed to go there.’

‘A dead cow?’

‘All smelly. Right here, it is,’ and he pointed with his finger on the map.

She suddenly recalled the dead seal and its raw, round wound. ‘Where did it come from?’

He shrugged. ‘Fell off a cliff, I suppose. Or swam from Orkney.’ He let out a squeaky laugh. ‘Do you think they do that? Swim all the way from Orkney?’

They both laughed. She put the hot chocolate down next to him, went to stand behind him, observing over his shoulder new details on his map. A ship sailed into the bay with sails billowing. It
wasn’t Viking in shape, more like a galley – a slave ship.

Their intimate little boat was re-stabilising after a storm, and she put a hand on each of his shoulders, felt the heat coming up into her palms, put her fingers like a comb to his hair,
straggling and damp at the back, sparkling with sand.

A movement through the window caught her eye. Something passed the first window; something substantial. She stiffened, took her hands off the boy, watched the second window. Trothan continued
working, head down.

Sure enough, at the second window, the sun caught on the bright back of Nora’s head. As if in slow motion, she turned towards the room, her eyes locking on to Maggie’s, taking in the
scene.

Maggie remained frozen as the woman tottered around the corner of the building, hands on the wall to steady her steps. Her intrusion was now inevitable. Maggie felt caught out somehow, but
caught doing what? What she was doing was entirely normal and within her rights with a child who needed attention and affection from her.

Nora’s bulky outline loomed at the glass door now, hands hanging by her sides. She made no attempt to knock or open the door, and Maggie stayed momentarily where she was, so that they
stood facing each other with Trothan oblivious between them.

Finally Maggie said very quietly, ‘Trothan, your mother’s come for you.’ And she gestured at Nora to come in.

He looked up, saw Nora and waved, and then was pushing his chair back into Maggie, packing up his things and heading for the door.

Nora took his bag. ‘You have said thank you, have you?’

Trothan turned and waved and Maggie’s gut twisted with disappointment at his eagerness. It was as if this was a normal ritual of childminder and parent. As if it had been arranged. But
Nora’s arrival felt like it had been engineered to force an unwelcome meeting of two worlds which should remain apart.

‘You haven’t left anything here?’ Nora said looking down with a slight frown to Trothan. He passed her and she looked at Maggie, seemed to appeal to her with the same question.
Maggie glanced along the table where he’d been sitting and shook her head.

Nora nodded but still hesitated, as if there was something more to say, searching the place with her eyes.

‘He’s got his map,’ Maggie said. ‘And the drawing things. I always let him borrow them.’ Maggie was struggling to understand what she was looking for.

‘We’ve got to get going,’ Nora said. ‘Off to my sister’s. Thought I might find him here.’

Then Trothan’s disappearing back seemed to catch Nora’s attention and she said goodbye, closed the door, pursued him around the corner of the cottage with her strange jerky gait.

Not long afterwards Maggie heard an engine start up in the lane.

Later that morning, sitting reading the paper in a break from her computer, she became aware of a draught trickling down her neck. She looked up and for the first time noticed
the loft hatch immediately above the table. It was a small square in the ceiling, and the lid was obviously just a simple board. It was propped at an angle, not seated properly, revealing a
triangle of darkness through which cold air was descending.

The ceiling was low and she realised she could easily reach it by standing on the robust table. She took off her shoes. The table felt gritty under her soles, and looking down, she saw that a
scattering of sand was catching the sunlight. Trothan’s pile.

It would have been a simple exercise just to re-seat the lid so that the loft was sealed again and draught-free, but curiosity sent her to get a head-torch.

In her previous house, Maggie had avoided the loft. It was Frank or the plumber or loft insulator who went up there. But an occasion had come when she was alone with a leaking pipe and it was
unavoidable. When she discovered some alien objects lurking in the dark, left there by previous occupants, she’d been shocked into a sudden sense that the house wasn’t quite her own and
never had been.

She put the stool onto the table top and when she stood on it, she had enough height to see inside. The torch batteries were failing and only illuminated things slightly; bare rafters slanting
away across one side of the roof and yellow fibreglass wool bubbling up between the joists. She checked the corners of the loft, straining till her eyes adjusted; the first, second, third were
empty. There were cobwebs, a musty odour, but no mysterious boxes, treasure chests, rocking horses. She was quite satisfied, ready to slide the lid back into place and descend again. But then she
saw into the fourth corner. In the faint light something bulky lay, its shape and form distinctly animal-like.

Pushing the lid to one side, she levered herself up on her arms until she was perched on the edge of the hatch. She swivelled onto hands and knees, facing the thing at a distance, and then she
stood up as much as the roof height allowed her to, feeling the crackly rub of cobweb and sun-dried flies in her hair as well as the bump of her skull on the roof. Bending from the waist, she
shuffled forwards, putting her hands onto the leaning rafters to steady herself. She tried to imagine the joists as planks rather than tight-ropes. Focussing on that, she inched clumsily towards
the corner, feeling the fragility of the surface beneath her as if she was completely exposed, as if she could see down to her dining table, the sofa, and her pile of magazines.

It wasn’t until she was practically on top of the beached thing that she even looked at it, so concerned was she with the placement of her feet. She stood still, centred herself with a
deep breath and directed the weak torch beam downwards. There was a sudden shock of fur, sleek-looking against loose skin. She had time to see that it was the size of a large dog. And then the
torch died.

Paralysed by darkness, her heart battering in her chest, she concentrated on stilling her breathing. The faint babble of Radio Four voices drifted up through the loft hatch. The smell of
something outdoorish was strong here. She dropped back down to hands and knees, finding the exact line of the joist, and inched her right hand forward; repulsion as strong as the wish to find it.
And then her hand butted up against something soft, firm, immobile.

Her finger traced one-way and then stuttered the other way against the grain of the fur. It was definitely fur, somehow simultaneously silky and coarse. She let her hand roam, finding the edges
of a skin which stretched for several feet across the joists. It was folded like a huge coat and cold to the touch.

She attempted to scoop the thing towards herself and reluctantly it came. She pulled it until it lay heavily across her knees and then began very slowly to move backwards, one hand holding it
and the other clinging tightly to the single joist. She knew when she’d reached the hatch by the increased light and the knock of her toe against the abandoned lid. She scooped up the skin in
one arm and twisting towards the hatch, threw it so that, dragged by its own weight, it trickled downwards. She heard a series of thuds and smacks and then it landed below, bringing a coffee mug
smashing onto the floor from the table. She lowered herself down after it.

It had ended up draped over a dining room chair, fur outwards, its form fluid and cat-like. It was grey and six-foot or so long, the shape of the long, tapering tail still distinct and the head
laid out like a two-dimensional plan with huge holes for eye sockets and puckers where whiskers had been.

She wished she didn’t have to face this alone. It brought to mind a horse’s head left in a bed in
The Godfather.

She phoned Richard. There were still outstanding graphics to discuss anyway. Once that was done, she asked: ‘What would you think if you found an animal skin in your loft?’

‘I’d think, “That’s where Kitty disappeared to five years ago”.’

‘A cat?’

‘Abandoned me, as all women like to, never saw hide nor hair of her again. At least, not until her hide turned up in your hypothetical loft.’

‘This still has fur though. It is, was, a seal.’

‘Might be worth something,’ he said. ‘Isn’t there a big illegal market in sealskins from Norway?’

‘Right. So someone’s hiding it there until the price is right?’

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘In a rented house, anyone could have left it there. You’d better find an expert.’

‘Graham,’ she said. ‘I’ll ask Graham.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘The local ranger.’

‘A Lone Ranger?’

Was he digging? ‘Shut up, Tonto.’

She heard him sigh.

She made coffee and sat opposite the skin, didn’t read or even look out of the window. She wondered what to do with it. Eventually she picked up the phone to Sally, who at least knew the
house.

‘I’m thinking of putting some boxes of stuff that I don’t really need in the loft,’ she said once pleasantries were over. ‘Would that be alright?’

‘Well, you might find it a bit hard because there’s no boards laid.’

‘Oh, really. Do you have anything stored up there yourselves?’

‘No, no.’

‘Or might a past tenant have left anything?’

‘Your predecessors were only in a few months while they had some work done on their own house. I doubt they used it. Well you’ll know that anyway, as you...’

Maggie interrupted: ‘So it’s empty?’

‘Yes, and to be honest, we’d prefer to keep it like that.’

She put the phone down and continued to stare at her new companion.

On the way back from the village where she’d been to collect her bicycle, she passed Debbie’s salon. All her aches and pains from the roughing up she’d taken
the previous day suddenly seemed to demand a massage.

‘You’ve been in the wars then,’ Debbie said when she saw the red weal across Maggie’s forehead.

Maggie put up her hand, touched the wound. ‘A bird,’ she said.

Debbie nodded but didn’t look like she believed it.

She was perfectly polite, but there was something brisker in Debbie’s manner this time, at odds with the busty, over ripe body. She clearly couldn’t hold in all her words though.
Questions started bubbling up as the massage began to loosen them both with its oily, aromatic spell.

‘So, have you made many friends?’

A hook dangling from the line of the question, a short pause, then: ‘I hear you’ve been giving the Gilbertson boy some extra tuition.’

Maggie muttered into the towel against her mouth and nothing more was said.

They went through the same ritual as before with the towels pulled up over her. She was left lying face down to recover, trying to empty her mind.

She heard a door open on the other side of the partition, a man’s voice accompanied by a frantic scrabbling, claws scratching on the hard floor. Debbie’s high surprised voice
remonstrating.

‘Sit, Brutus,’ she heard from the man.

Some more protesting noises from Debbie.

‘Meet Brutus. My new assistant.’ Gruff. Loud.

More scrabbles, Debbie murmuring now.

‘Steady,’ the man said, then louder, threatening: ‘Steady.’