Call of the Undertow

by Linda Cracknell

  ‘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.

  Mrs Thompson summoned Maggie’s attention back to the room with its steaming urn and a table strewn with educational circulars. ‘We’re going to have a tiny exhibition for parents in a week or so’s time. Just to show them the maps children have been making themselves. Would you come?’

  ‘Of course. Delighted.’ It came out with automatic professionalism.

  Mrs Thompson smiled and stood up.

  Maggie was still wondering about the strange child and the question lurking unanswered in his raised hand. The round brown eyes. But she stood up herself, seeing that it was time to leave.

  FOUR

  By the middle of April she was working hard on the atlas for Nigerian schools. Richard had commissioned her to produce the bulk of its pages. Despite a place as illusory to her as Narnia or The Shire, she was starting to draw outlines of the land, filling statistics into pie charts, and translating river systems into diagrams. The main focus was the geography of the West Africa region but it also included reference maps and basic geographical information for the rest of the world, so there was a massive amount of visual data both in map form and statistics that she had to find a way of representing.

  She’d superimposed the principal road and rail routes onto a small-scale map of North America, forming a grid of red lines between cities. She noticed that the regularity was surrendered as the main highways approached the 50 degree North line, as if defeated by landscape features or a sparse population well short of the Arctic Circle. It made her feel oddly proud of where she was now, allied to that land mass at the edge of civilisation.

  The road networks linking principal cities on the equivalent map for West Africa looked unruly and inconsistent.

  ‘I’m not sure what to do about the population of Lagos,’ she said to Richard in one of their phone calls.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There seems to be no agreement on population figures. Ten million or twenty?’

  ‘Better stick with the UN data, as usual.’

  ‘It’s not just that. Shouldn’t I try and do a graphic for the pull of the City, why it keeps growing, what that means to infrastructure and so on? It seems so peculiar.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Any ideas how?’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll think of something,’ Richard said.

  ‘You’re a great inspiration, thanks Boss.’

  She sighed when she put the phone down, eased out her shoulders, the muscles stinging from too many hours spent at the computer. Her brain was dull, her eyes heavy despite all the coffee. She looked at her watch, knowing she needed a break, but decided to do another hour before she went out for an evening walk.

  She stared on at the map of Lagos. Her thoughts became dangerously unfocussed, scattering to where she would walk, whether she could be bothered to make lasagne later, a vague sense she should phone Carol. Solutions to the Lagos problem dodged her. She stared for too long. It was like sinking into thick water, her hair flapping like slabs of meat over her eyes. The weight of water pressed on her eyelids and yet it seemed she still saw the computer screen, transforming into a cinema of sorts. Shapes gathered in a slow reel. Something red and white appeared; a small figure. An erratic appearance between two parked cars on a roadside. A road she was travelling down. Then there was a close-up; the child’s face in profile, her chin lifted, lips parted, bewitched by something on the other side of the road.

  Maggie jerked back to her desk, to a lamp illuminating the crisp edges of pages, the grain of paper. She shoved back her chair and put on her boots.

  There was no one else on the beach as she was leaving it to return home. Her walks had stretched out with the lengthening days and now she frequently reached the far end of the beach, usually in the evening. An hour or two’s walk helped with ideas for work as well as keeping her body from seizing up and rescuing her mind from its shadows.

  This time the sea’s steady breath next to her had not only pulled her back into the light, but the right map tints for minerals in Sierra Leone had revealed themselves in the mosaic of colours in a rock pool.

  The cliffs of Dwarwick Head had been orangey-red in sunlight earlier but now were sullen brown, features blinded by failing light. A couple of black heads out beyond the surf and a car parked in the dunes indicated some surfers, but even the
birds were strangely quiet except when a V of geese flew overhead towards the Northwest, the creak of their wings audible. They travelled with such ease and speed Maggie could barely get her binoculars to them in time.

  She threaded through a gap in the dunes, crossing the road to a field where ewes guarded new lambs. Voices soared up through the clear air from some council houses marching across the skyline; children doing whatever children do on dry evenings.

  When she drifted into the channel of woods which would lead her home it was neither day nor night. The birds had stilled and the ground was dimly illuminated just in front of her feet, demanding sudden interpretation: the rosette burst of a yellowish tussock; bogs that she only discovered when her feet squelched into them. On the lower slopes she snapped against bleached grasses and dead stalks of meadowsweet, luminously pale in the sparse light. When she came to the dark corridor of silhouetted trees higher up, a thick dark carpet of celandine leaves cushioned her footfall.

  She knew the way by keeping the gurgle of the burn to her right, the dark rise towards the road and bridge ahead. She came under the arch of some of the largest, oldest trees, gnarled and thick-trunked, with limbs elbowing into the sky. When a noise startled her, she thought of the roe deer she’d seen here before. But this rustle was louder and closer than a deer would come. It carried behind it a murmur, as if from a stifled voice.

  A shock of sound above. A shrill cry. She dropped into a crouch. Then something large and dark swung an arc above her. A flutter of air brushed close to her head, and then the thing swung back to her other side. There was a thud in the undergrowth, and then footsteps drumming, tumbling away down towards the burn, an orange buoy left swinging from a rope above her.

  She wheeled around, scuffling her hands in dead leaves and moss, clutching at her heart. Leaping up, she strode after the trail of sound which resolved in her mind into children’s feet, fading as muffled snorts of laughter grew louder with distance. She stopped at the edge of the bank and peered into a pool of darkness in which one moving thing was just apparent, scampering across a fallen log over the burn and merging with the foliage beyond. She couldn’t tell if it was solitary or following others. But she was pretty sure it was human and small.

  ‘Little sods,’ she threw half-heartedly after them.

  The giggling trail hushed.

  She turned back towards the cottage, humiliation simmering in her, and shoved at the orange buoy, sent it back into its now benign arc across the path. She had to duck to avoid it hitting her on its return.

  She sometimes imagined a café at the Dunnet end of the beach serving slabs of wholesome cake and huge mugs of tea that you warmed your hands around. In Cornwall there would have been one. But despite the plunge of cliffs, the seals, seabirds and beaches here, Cornwall’s characteristic holiday-ness was missing. There were no ice-cream stands, car parks shiny with sun-scorched metal, or clamouring children and dogs. Of course it was out of season but there was more to it than that. She could see that the infrastructure itself was absent. There was just an occasional caravan park or hotel with its signs blown off. Her only port of call was the Sandpiper Centre.

  She and Graham stood at the big window, each with a pair of binoculars trained on a sparkling group of white gannets circling on wide black-tipped wings above the waves.

  ‘How was your school visit?’ Graham asked.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I think.’

  ‘I told you they were rascals.’

  ‘Did you? Well, they were alright in the classroom, but...’ The shriek in the woods she’d been trying to shake off since was still trailing her.

  ‘Being cheeky to you on the street, eh?’

  ‘No, not exactly.’ She told him then about the snowman intruder who’d welcomed her to the area.

  He roared with laughter. When she didn’t join in, he said, ‘That’s kids!’

  ‘They’re not mocking me then?’

  ‘Just being bairns.’

  So she didn’t mention the latest incident. Just kids using the woods as their playground. ‘You’re right.’ She managed a small laugh at her own fears and consciously tried to drop her stiff shoulders, looking out at the horizon; letting it steady her.

  The land here barely undulated, lay in stripes and lines in such dark contrast to what was above. The sky was what you looked at. White clouds galloped across wind-driven days; a purple mask formed above the sea at the end of a sunny one; occasional still days cast a milky haze. She looked up more than she ever did in Oxford where there were just snatches of sky between buildings. The anti-windfarm campaigners in Caithness didn’t complain about the land being taken away, but about the stealing of ‘our skies’.

  ‘Watch yourself now it’s gardening time,’ Graham said. ‘When I first moved up from Stirling, someone kept coming in and deadheading my dandelions when I was out.’

  ‘That’s a bit creepy,’ she said.

  ‘They didn’t want them re-seeding in their own gardens, I suppose. It all stopped when Mary moved in and we started taking the garden a bit more seriously.’

  Maggie wondered vaguely if he was telling her this to make clear his marital status. It came as a relief.

  ‘Aye, they’ve found their breakfast,’ Graham said of the gannets, binoculars poised. ‘Just deciding whether they want it on toast.’

  One of the birds then drew in its wings and arrowed into the sea, returning soon to a surface still frothing with its impact.

  ‘Can dive up to 60 miles per hour, these guys,’ Graham said. ‘They’re wearing crash helmets you know?’

  Maggie laughed.

  ‘Little air sacs under the skin of the head and neck that protect them. Eye guards as well. Like racing drivers.’ He grabbed his hands onto an imaginary steering wheel and growled the noise of an accelerating engine.

  Maggie took the binoculars from her eyes.

  ‘Bang!’ Graham said next to her. A gannet cracking onto the surface of water. Knifing through it into a different world.

  She felt slightly sick. She was off-kilter, still hearing the imagined car. A terrible skid with a bump at the end of it; a softish sound, not a crack or a bang. Followed by a dragging sensation. She shook her head, shivering it away.

  Then Graham was speaking, peering at her, waving. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘Lights are on but the house is empty, eh? You’re a bit vacant.’

  ‘You what?’ She clutched at her stomach.

  He laughed and turned back to the gannets.

  A knock came on her door on a Saturday morning a week or so later. She was taking the weekend off. A rest from the computer and relief for her creaky limbs. She left her study and saw straight away through the glass there was no one there. Surely not a knock-and-run game this far from the village? When she opened the door to look out she found a parcel lying on the decking outside the door and heard gravel crunch under tyres as the postie pulled away.

  A book, ‘Home Baking’, and a tiny note: ‘Hope your first weeks have gone well. Thought this might help pass the evenings now you’re away from city lights and missing out on your weekly cinnamon swirls at Joey’s. We thought of coming up to see you for the long May weekend, but when John looked it up on the AA site, he said we’d spend the whole weekend driving. So had to put this in the post instead. Sorry!’

  Helen. Still trying to be her friend. Most of them had drifted away from her even before Frank had. ‘They didn’t drift. You shooed them,’ Carol had said. Perhaps what she meant was that Maggie didn’t answer their questions. Not unless they were about cakes, singing, or work.

  She flicked through the pages. Why on earth would she want to bake? But when she came to photos of plump seeded loaves and salty focaccia with rosemary, her mouth watered slightly and she thought of the loss of her local bakeries and delis in Oxford. Delicious fresh bread was something she missed here where the village shop couldn’t do much better than sliced ‘Scottish Pride’.

  She w
as queuing for the till in the village shop later that morning with a bottle of wine in one hand, and a bag of ‘strong white bread flour’ and dried yeast in the other. A refrigerator unit by the door spelled out ‘healthy eating’ in faded lettering. Its shelves were practically bare, except for some out-of-date macaroni pies and ‘Dairylea Dippers’. She tutted inwardly.

  ‘Maggie?’

  She turned and looked down on a small, dark woman dressed in what seemed to be jogging gear. Recognition slowly dawned. ‘Mrs Thompson.’

  ‘Do call me Audrey.’ She smiled. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine, fine’. She noticed Audrey had children’s comics and sweets in her basket.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to write,’ Audrey said. ‘To thank you for coming in. The children loved your talk.’

  ‘Oh good.’

  ‘It was helpful for them to hear about it from a professional.’

  ‘Any career plans?’

  Audrey laughed. ‘That might be going a bit far, though there is one boy. But, well, it’s hard to tell with him.’

  ‘Not the one...?’

  ‘With the long hair? Yes.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Audrey looked round the shop, and said the name quietly: ‘Trothan Gilbertson.’

  ‘It was a bit hard to tell if he was attentive or on another planet,’ Maggie said. She imagined the type of parents who would come up with a name like ‘Trothan’; hippies probably, into Celtic mysticism. ‘Unusual boy,’ she said. ‘Is he... Does he have...?’ Maggie had no idea of the right term for children who had extra help in class.

  ‘Unusual. But he’s not been assessed or anything, though no one ever really knows where he’s coming from.’ Audrey said this quietly, head bent towards Maggie. ‘I saw him just now out with his sketch pad, on his own down at the harbour.’

  ‘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.’