Call of the Undertow

by Linda Cracknell

  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.

  ‘Fine evening, aye, fine evening,’ he said.

  They both mumbled agreement.

  ‘It’s a bad smell, that wee sealie, right enough.’

  ‘It’s disgusting,’ Carol said.

  ‘I saw you,’ he nodded at Maggie. ‘Right close to it. Brave lassie, I thought.’

  Maggie laughed.

  ‘Do you think it just died of natural causes?’ Carol asked.

  ‘Well. You never know,’ he said.

  ‘So?’ Carol had obviously heard the doubt in his voice, as had Maggie.

  ‘They take an awful lot of the fishies, you know.’

  They both waited.

  Maggie heard Carol’s intake of breath, sensed a speech coming and silenced her with a nudge.

  ‘My son’s a fisherman, you know. These are his nets up drying.’

  ‘Can he make a living at it?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘On top of his other jobs. I’d prefer it if he stayed on the land myself. Watched him growing up with the sea, of course. But it’s a funny thing.’

  He trailed off and Maggie wondered what was ‘funny’.

  ‘Do you have children?’ He looked directly at Maggie.

  Died without issue; the words sprang incongruously into her head. ‘Carol does,’ she said, nodding at her sister.

  ‘Well. It’s a funny thing,’ the old man continued. ‘It’s no matter their age, you never stop watching, fearing.’

  Maggie looked at his profile. He seemed to bite on his lower lip, his Adam’s apple quivering slightly. She noticed some egg yolk stains on the front of his open-necked shirt, revealed inside his fluorescent jacket.

  ‘Especially since she went, you know,’ he added softly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Maggie said. When she looked down she noticed his ankles were bare between shoe and trouser hem.

  ‘Two months now. Still thinking of wee bitty things to tell her when I get home like I’ve done the last forty years. And then I find she’s not there.’ He laughed and then drew breath. ‘An empty house.’

  ‘Were you a fisherman yourself?’ Carol asked.

  ‘A wee bitty. More on the land. But some of these boys, the old boys, they carry around the seabed in their heads, the last valley and rock they know, same as I did with my own fields. They’ll take it with them when they go. A loss, that.’

  An image came into Maggie’s head of the men’s bodies lying on the pebbles like the seal’s was, their skin blackening, stretching and sagging, all their local knowledge seeping into the water with each rising and falling tide, so it resumed its proper place on the seabed.

  ‘Does your son have that geography in his head?’ Maggie asked. She knew that Carol would have heard the suggestion of the word ‘map’ and switched off.

  The man nodded. ‘But you know, there’s no one can teach it, nothing at all but time and the sea itself.’

  ‘Like cab drivers in London.’

  He looked at her, frowning slightly.

  ‘“The knowledge”, they call it.’

  ‘I’ve heard of that.’

  ‘They’re supposed to have larger brains as a result.’

  ‘That right? No wonder these fishermen are so bloody bigheaded.’ He turned to face her with a broad smile. ‘You’ll have met them? In the pub?’

  ‘There’s a pub?’ Carol suddenly re-entered the conversation. ‘Shall we have a quick one?’

  Maggie had never been to the hotel and didn’t find it inviting. Its face onto the street was white, large-windowed, grand almost. But she’d never seen anyone go into its ostentatious front door. The bar was obviously through a door around its side, almost like a lean-to between hotel and laundry, with a semi-permanent row of smokers propping up its outside wall. It wouldn’t be anything like Carol had in mind.

  ‘Perhaps another day. I’ve got a bottle of wine at home anyway.’

  They said goodbye to the man.

  He looked at Maggie and said, ‘Aye well, the sea’ll have its way, eh?’

  She nodded, confused.

  ‘He was a bit bonkers,’ Carol said when they were barely out of earshot. ‘Did he mean that the fishermen kill the seals?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The image of the round gash in its neck returned. ‘But I know someone who will.’

  The next day Maggie drove them inland a little way, up onto the plateau behind the beach. There were long straight lanes here, tight and parallel as guitar strings across the peninsula, empty of traffic. Between fields of coarse bog and occasional pasture were dotted a few cottages. Many seemed in a poor state of repair, lashed together with corrugated iron and patched with parts of old caravan. Strange flags flapped alongside them, declaring the eccentricity of their occupants. There was a sense of lawlessness, of people aware that they were living off the edge of the map. Maggie could see Carol’s jaw setting.

  They passed a woman walking along the road. She wore large green wellies under a full, patterned, almost flouncy skirt, a raincoat over the top. Her grey fringe bubbled out from under a headscarf. Her face spread into a smile when she saw them, revealing a row of gums where her front teeth should have been.

  Maggie turned back towards the bay and pulled into the car park of the Sandpiper Centre. She saw Graham straight away, hunched over a cigarette on the dunes. He turned as the car pulled in, and stretched a lanky arm in a wave.

  ‘Friend of yours?’ Carol asked.

  ‘That’s Graham.’

  He ambled over to them, smiling crookedly. ‘The car’s getting an outing for once, then?’

  ‘My sister wouldn’t take a backie,’ Maggie said, and then introduced them.

  They went into the Centre and browsed the exhibits. Maggie studied the bay through the binoculars and heard behind her Carol quizzing Graham about seals and guns.

  ‘The odd shooting does happen,’ he said. ‘It’s legal around fish-farms and if they get caught in the salmon nets, but it’s no
t supposed to be willy-nilly like. There’s been a prosecution of a fisherman.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ Carol said.

  ‘Aye, people get right upset about it, probably because they look so much like us.’

  Maggie turned to see him opening his eyes wide and then batting his eyelashes. ‘Not anthropomorphising, are you?’ she said.

  ‘What does a fisherman need who’s hard of hearing?’ Graham asked.

  Carol looked confused.

  ‘Don’t answer,’ said Maggie.

  ‘A herring aid,’ Graham said, and laughed on his own.

  ‘So, stop worrying about the seal,’ Maggie said to Carol.

  ‘Plenty selkie stories around here,’ Graham said.

  ‘What’s a selkie?’ Carol asked.

  ‘Seals that come ashore, assume a human form. They might marry, live with a human family and abandon their other life.’

  Carol laughed.

  ‘They never go back?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘Some stories have the family hiding the skin from them so they can’t just make their getaway back to the sea after every stooshie.’ Graham grinned. ‘Bit like how I hide the car keys from the missus now and then, I suppose.’

  ‘I thought this was a scientific centre,’ Carol said.

  ‘I guess it’s a metaphor,’ Maggie said.

  ‘A metaphor?’ said Carol.

  ‘People who feel pulled between two worlds, who’re not sure they fit in.’

  Carol pulled a face.

  Maggie persuaded her down onto the big beach, hoping Carol would enjoy it as she did. Nothing stayed the same between the tides here. A chain of footprints in the sand would be patterned by tide-drift into blurred tweed. Grasses tumbled by the waves got matted into shapes resembling a cat or a whale, or were formed into curiously solid balls. Tree roots took on the pale satin patina of bone, washed up after being picked clean by the sea. She was always doing a double-take. Thinking she’d seen something from the corner of her eye - a figure or a bird – and then making it vanish by turning her gaze on it directly.

  She wondered after his selkie stories if Graham appreciated the mysterious as well as the scientific. It was after all through him that she’d learnt about birds flying underwater, dunes shifting silently in the night to consume a church. One thing became another. Timber to bone. Shell to sand. Sky in a transfer with sea.

  Being with Carol returned her to a different perspective. She thought of the solid streets of Oxford, great canyons of rock that she’d cycled through. Edifices that were dependable and unchanging.

  They walked towards Quarrytown. The weather had got cooler and gustier again and the day snatched at her, quick and bright as the clouds sprang apart, racing through her blood faster than caffeine or wine.

  She tugged at Carol’s arm. ‘Come on.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Doesn’t it make you want to run?’

  ‘Feel free.’ Carol plodded on, hunched against the wind with her hands deep in her pockets.

  Maggie spun away from her, arms outstretched. She was airborne and flying, or at least spinning and spinning on the wet sand, and then swooping back, breathless, to Carol’s side.

  ‘What’s got into you?’ Carol asked as Maggie linked arms with her. But Maggie could tell from her half-smile that Carol was glad to see her like this. ‘You always could be a wild child,’ Carol said, indulgence in her voice and that implied, ‘before’.

  Maggie let go of Carol, her arms falling to her sides, dropping back down into steadiness, head bent. A flightless bird.

  Not long afterwards Carol said, ‘We’ve walked far enough now, haven’t we?’

  They turned back, watching at a distance as a small family group gathered around a young girl cradling something in her coat. The family peered in at whatever it was, and then the group looked towards the dunes and set off towards the Centre, the girl walking fast at the front, her upper body pitched slightly forwards.

  ‘Must have found an injured bird,’ Maggie said.

  When they got back to the cottage, Trothan was sitting at the table hunched over his map with a pen.

  He looked up when the door opened and Maggie smiled when she saw the full brown eye peeking up through the fringe. Trothan knew she’d stopped locking the cottage door, but he’d never just come in like that before.

  Carol jolted visibly when she saw him.

  Maggie went over, unable to resist looking at his latest creation. ‘Carol, this is Trothan, my mapmaking colleague.’

  Carol nodded slightly.

  ‘Come and see,’ she said, but Carol ignored her, carried on taking off her coat.

  Maggie noticed that Trothan was working on the seventh sheet of film again; the layer that seemed to be for his stories.

  He was drawing features onto the big scoop of the bay, into the large area that was, as far as she was concerned, empty; the water itself. She decided not to go into why this wasn’t a great idea, why the text usually tops everything; to leave it until Carol wasn’t there.

  She caught sight of something drawn into the bay at the north-west, beyond Dwarwick Head. She laughed. ‘What’s the story here?’ She didn’t want to break Trothan’s concentration, but she did want to know why, near a drawing of a mermaid, a cave had been suggested in the Cliff and within it a pile of coins and a man with a chain around his ankle.

  Trothan raised the pen and put the cap on it. ‘This man,’ he pointed at the shackled figure. ‘He said he loved the mermaid. But really he just wanted her treasure. So she took him down to her cave and kept him prisoner.’

  Maggie looked up smiling at Carol, but she was stone-faced, averting her eyes.

  ‘And is he still there?’ Maggie asked, smiling.

  Trothan nodded and stood up. Just before he began rolling his layers of film up, she caught sight of two drawings on Olrig Hill. A bagpiper was being led into a door in the hillside by a woman. She knew that one. But a small stone hut was also marked on the north side of the hill.

  ‘What’s that?’ she pointed at the hut.

  ‘That’s where they did the weaving,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The women. Twelve women.’

  ‘Right. So it was a woollen mill. Did they make blankets?’

  Trothan shrieked with laughter.

  ‘Tweed then?’

  There was relish in his voice when he said, ‘They wove with men’s intestines.’

  She saw then that there was also a strange structure hung with human skulls. A flock of large black birds were scattering from it. ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘And the loom was weighted down with human heads,’ he said. ‘And the thing that went across...?’

  ‘The shuttle?’ she suggested.

  ‘The shuttle was an arrow. Or maybe a sword,’ he said.

  ‘Who were these women?’

  ‘They told who would die in battle. It’s like a prediction. And when they’d finished they attached their horses to the cloth and galloped away. Six went north and six went south.’ He linked his fingers together then tore them apart, making a sucking sound for the tearing of the intestines. Then he looked up at her from the corner of his eye to gauge her reaction.

  ‘That’s a gory story,’ she said, flickering a glance to Carol, who was looking away.

  ‘It’s not a story.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘There was someone who saw it. A man called Dorrad.’

  ‘And how do you know this “not-story”?’ she asked.

  ‘My dad told me.’

  If she could create a beast from a tiny turbulence of water in a bucket, why shouldn’t Trothan imagine such things? He harnessed a chaotic world into line and shade, just as she herself did, but now he was including the occult, hidden things in the land. If Carol hadn’t been there, she’d surely have hugged him for his ingenuity, forgiving his diversion from mapping conventions. She might even enjoy a little pride in the sense that she’d helped initiate this originality. She just g
rinned and gave him a tiny pat on the shoulder as he turned away from her.

  He was heading for the door, passing Carol. She saw him turn briefly, raise a hand in goodbye, saw that his face was serious and noticed again its strangely flat profile. Then he was out of the door, skipping past the window, hair flying behind him above the little rucksack. She felt a whisper of worry that he might be upset or offended.

  Carol hadn’t moved.

  ‘So,’ Maggie said. ‘Glass of wine?’

  ‘Who the hell was that?’

  ‘I told you. Trothan.’

  ‘What was he doing here?’

  Maggie was heading for the kitchen. ‘Chardonnay or Rioja?’

  ‘Maggie, what was that creature doing here?’

  Maggie walked back in with two glasses. ‘He’s a gifted child with an interest in maps.’

  ‘He comes round here? Lets himself him?’

  ‘Seems to.’

  ‘Do his parents know?’

  ‘Yes.’ Maggie put the glasses down and held the bottle of white wine up to show Carol, questioning with a cock of her head. She poured out a glass and handed it to her.

  Carol prowled the room, frowning slightly. Maggie took a seat on the sofa, put some music on. ‘Want some nibbles? I’ve got pistachios.’

  ‘Maggie,’ Carol said carefully, sitting down. ‘What are you doing with a strange hippy child wandering in and out of your house?’

  Maggie laughed. ‘He’s not a hippy.’

  ‘And why did he take off like that when we came back?’

  ‘Because of you probably.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘He’s a sensitive boy. Runs off if things crowd him. He probably picked up on your hostility.’ Anyone would have, she thought.

  ‘Maggie, I’m serious. What’s he to do with you?’

  ‘You should have looked at his map.’

  ‘What about that gross story?’

  ‘All boys like stories like that, don’t they?’ Despite herself, Maggie shivered slightly at the thought of the intestines. ‘I’m just encouraging his talents.’

  ‘He goes to school, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘He has parents?’

  ‘Seems to.’

  ‘So why have you adopted him?’