Call of the Undertow

by Linda Cracknell

  The man had turned his wife in his arms so she was against him, his face hidden against her neck. Maggie glimpsed Nora’s face, screwed up and red. Sobs erupted from the joined heart of the couple as they receded into a single perpendicular against the grey line of the horizon. They rocked and heaved in a slow dance that ran with rain onto the mirrored beach, apparently oblivious to their soaking and their isolation.

  A gull cried out loud above Maggie. She clamped her hands over her ears as it wailed on and on. And she willed it not to blend with the rising note of a mother’s long haunting scream. She turned and ran.

  EIGHTEEN

  Starting down the lane for home a few days later, Maggie glanced in at the driveway of the bungalow and saw Sally’s face at a window. A frown flashed across it. Then Sally disappeared.

  Two cars were parked near Flotsam Cottage and as she approached them Maggie realised each one was occupied; a figure low in the seat as if they’d been there a long while, each bowing their head over a small slab of smart phone. The heads bobbed up and she saw the flicker of a hand rising to a door next to her, heard it swing open, gravel scraping under a boot. Her name was called from behind her in an educated Edinburgh voice.

  A second car door slamming.

  She pictured dictaphones with little red lights going on in their pockets as they strode towards her; Carol picking up a copy of the Daily Mail somewhere and recognising her sister’s back on page five – something in the set of her neck, the short but messily growing out hairstyle. She walked quickly into her drive and for the first time closed the wrought iron gates behind her. Looking quickly back up the lane, she glimpsed Sally hovering in her own gateway beyond the cars, looking towards her.

  Her hands shook so much on the key that it took a long while to unlock the door. From the window she saw two heads meeting behind the hedge where the lane ran, heard a smatter of conversation, then car doors slamming in turn. Maggie put down her bag of food. Even when she heard the cars rattling the stones on the lane as they left, she was unable to relax. She hovered like a moth behind closed curtains. She knew they’d be back.

  Bits of Maggie’s statement had already appeared in the press, and she’d been mentioned in headlines. She wasn’t sure which was worse; the ones that ignored her role in the boy’s life or the ones that implicated her in some way: ‘Missing Boy’s “Lady Friend” Questioned’; ‘Incomer Questioned Over Boy’s Disappearance’. No one except her had deserved a headline of their own just for being questioned.

  ‘You’re just going to have to stick it out, the paparazzi,’ Carol said. ‘They’ll get bored pretty soon if you ignore them.’

  She accepted the advice, but Carol could have no idea what it felt like to be cornered. Under siege, Maggie fingered the bruises on her arms, brooding confirmation of the accusations gathering against her.

  The proofs came back from Richard, leaving her a week to submit print-ready PDF files. She was shocked by the number of corrections needed, the careless slips she’d made. There was a lot to do. A week at the computer. Typos and more. The line of a river had risen above a place name text, and somehow the Osun-Osogbu Sacred Grove had uprooted itself and slipped over the border into Benin. She was embarrassed by her lack of professional care. But once again, the irony of her remote map-making struck her. If she’d actually walked through the shade of the Sacred Grove and breathed in its resiny scents, such an error never could have happened.

  She stayed indoors. Her only connection beyond the walls was through Carol’s persistent phone calls which now brought memories clamouring at the doors and windows.

  ‘Do you remember Dad’s library?’ Maggie said.

  There was a silence. ‘Of course. But why now?’

  ‘I was just thinking about it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘When we cleared the house. Afterwards.’

  Maggie felt again the precious heft of her father’s books as she took them off the shelves one by one and put them into boxes, fragmenting the unique arrangement of titles. The spines of his atlases, maps, novels, travel and geology books chimed and rhymed with each other: The World Atlas of Wine next to Grapes of Wrath next to Look Back in Anger next to a map of Angers. When she put them into boxes, his playful poetry was destroyed. It felt like dismantling a life brick by brick, stripping the family house of this piece of personal history which had characterised her father’s study; the curiosities he’d collected over a lifetime of geography teaching and an interest in literature.

  She wondered if Carol had even been aware how painful it had been for her to do this. She’d been tied up with young children, distracted by feeds and nappies and ‘getting the house done and dusted and onto the market’.

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything now, Maggie?’ Carol asked.

  It was obvious to Maggie that her current loss was hauling up others, hand-over-hand. Her father’s guttering breath as his head turned finally away from her; his books sent off to some sale or other. Maggie’s whole body seemed lead-weighted with the ache of it even though her father had been buried now for eight years.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Just remembering, I suppose.’

  The next morning she started to make the final corrections to the atlas, but then after an hour or so jumped up, made coffee, paced between the windows, the curtains drawn back again. The trees outside were heavy with leaf, parting with the wind to reveal the sea and snatches of reddish cliff on Dunnet Head. Despite her confinement, it was strange to think that waves would still be pounding onto the beach; the humid huff of the laundry breathing over the village.

  She turned away, persuading herself to settle to her work. She only had a few days left. She went to the kitchen instead.

  Turning on the oven, she started to cream together sun-softened butter and brown sugar, broke two eggs into it, flour and chocolate powder. She turned it into a tin and put it in the oven. The 30 minutes it took to bake would keep her here and the aroma would leach out of the house, seek out Trothan wherever he was, draw him in. She opened a window. Surely the scent would at least reach the woods. Then she took the cake from the oven and rested it on a cooling tray, knowing it would never be eaten.

  The boy had always had a spectral weightlessness about him, an insubstantiality. It wasn’t just that he didn’t have a contemporary child’s existence – no mobile phone, no clinging to a computer or even the handlebars of a stunt bike. His footing on the earth seemed invisible; the small nests he’d made of feathers, grasses, mussel shells were ephemeral. He would easily disappear.

  It sometimes seemed she had conjured him from her imagination. But she reminded herself of his pungent presence, how she’d brushed specks of sand from the top of his damp head. He especially seemed real when she examined her bruises. Those thumps were evidence. That hulk of a red-faced woman had been feeling something tangible. Even if it did seem to be too late.

  Another day came. She left the house cautiously, walked up and down the garden looking towards the bay. Then she went back inside, leaned over Trothan’s map, refocusing on each place to see if she’d overlooked something.

  ‘Are you missing Oxford?’ Carol asked her.

  ‘Yes,’ Maggie said automatically. She didn’t even know she had been, but her eyes smarted as she thought of her old, safe desk between Richard and the bay window looking out on the river; her evenings watching art house movies; going to talks and lectures; the narrow streets. The other ‘her’. An old familiarity seemed to tug her south, as if she would re-inhabit her life as it had once been. As if she could go back.

  ‘At least Dad’s not witnessing this,’ Carol said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’d have been distraught. To see you getting yourself into... To see you going through this.’

  Another day came and she succumbed to work, finally establishing a rhythm. Her application to it reminded her of the months after the accident when work had been a refuge of sorts. When a chasm of time had to be f
illed with something.

  She made bread in her breaks. It was a relief to do something physical; to pound the dough under her hands, to think, and in particular to consolidate her ideas about Lagos. She’d watched a series of short films made by young Lagosians and played back in her head some of the vox-pop voices: ‘You’re alive? You gotta be in Lagos.’; ‘You wake up running. No one’s chasing though.’ The enchantment was palpable in the look in their dreamy eyes and wide grins. ‘It turns you into a monster – won’t let you go!’

  The city came alive to her with breath and clamour, sucking in streams of people who were escaping something or had been lured to a honey-pot of possibilities, the promise of new life. It spread itself to embrace outlying villages and laid bare its transformational power, roaring out music, leading trends in art and fashion, flaunting big business for the world’s attention. She tried to think of a simple way of representing this, concentrating now on what Trothan would have done. How did you do that? A shrug: I just saw it in my head. If only she could have asked him.

  Other absences reared up in her memory. Frank getting into the driving seat of his car and disappearing towards Reading. He’d moved out comprehensively, but for days afterwards a half-used packet of Tesco’s ham lay in the fridge. She didn’t eat ham; it was his. She left it there, the top slice darkening and curling with time, the sell-by date a reminder of his day of leaving. He also left a ring of dark filaments around the bath, as if he’d shed a coat before he left for his new life. And there were the wedding presents, the crockery bought on their holidays, the gloves, ornaments and books that could never properly be severed from memories of him. They had gradually composted to the lower depths of drawers and cupboards until she harvested them for jumble sales.

  ‘Have you been to the police again?’ Carol asked.

  ‘They came to me.’ Kept coming.

  ‘And do you have any idea?’ Carol asked.

  ‘The parents seem convinced he’s not coming back.’

  ‘Oh Maggie, it’s all so odd. Do you think it’s them, then?’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘Who’re responsible.’

  Although Maggie was gratified by this idea, she knew it wasn’t credible. ‘Through neglect maybe,’ she said, then added: ‘They seem to blame me.’

  There was a long pause, and then Carol said, ‘Maggie, I think you’d better come home.’

  Carol still seemed to cling to the idea that Maggie was having a little holiday that she would return from when she was ready.

  ‘You know you’ve no reason to stay away, don’t you?’ Carol ventured, caution adding a strained note to her voice. ‘Your sacrifice won’t bring that little girl back. Or mend her parents’ marriage.’

  Maggie felt the old sting in her stomach. To be away from this place was unthinkable anyway. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  Carol, gently now: ‘Shall I come there? I could get away at the weekend?’

  Maggie wanted company, but did she want this?

  ‘I have to say, Maggie. I did think the set-up you had was pretty strange. Such an odd boy.’

  ‘No,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘No. Don’t come. I’m fine.’

  ‘But you’ve no one to talk to.’

  ‘Graham’s kind to me.’

  ‘Graham?’

  ‘Yes,’ Maggie said. ‘Remember. You met him at the bird centre.’

  ‘I know. Isn’t he married?’

  ‘So?’

  Carol hesitated. ‘You’re not getting yourself into more bother, are you?’

  Maggie put the phone down soon afterwards.

  No one called. Trothan had been her only visitor. And then the police. But now that nine days had passed since his disappearance, they seemed to have finished with her and no one was keeping her informed. The boy continued to suggest himself around the cottage; a scattering of sand and hair, hints of salt and pollen, a slight scent of woodsmoke. Sometimes she heard a voice rising, lilting in a far away corner of the house; but it always transformed into a bird calling from the rooftop. The always-present absence. Like a packet of ham left in the fridge.

  Frank had been the one to help her clear her father’s house. He’d salvaged a book of nursery rhymes that her father had himself once read to her.

  ‘Let’s keep it,’ Frank had said, holding it out to her. But when she took it, he didn’t let go of his end. With the book held between them they conceived in their minds the children they would console with stories and rhymes after their first losses – teeth, hamsters, grandparents. They had smiled at each other, making a contract without words.

  Maggie submitted all the final PDF files to Richard.

  ‘Time to celebrate soon,’ came back his email.

  Very funny, she snarled back in her thoughts.

  Hunger and an empty fridge now snapped her from her caged circling. She took a deep breath and strode from the house, locking the door behind her. Defiant. Leaping the barricades. No one was waiting for her in the lane.

  She went to the village. Walking along the main street, she anticipated mothers gathering their children against themselves, an elbow-clamp of safety around their necks. She felt they would do it unconsciously as they stood chatting on the pavements with other parents; the closing army of the righteous all touched by a threat to their own children. She could see why they might regard her with suspicion: a woman alone who deliberately chose to make her best friend a child.

  ‘Hormones,’ they’d be whispering behind her. What had she done with him?

  A big static caravan for the incident room had been deposited in the centre of the village next to the playpark, opposite the shop. The door was open and a policewoman was visible inside, standing with a clipboard, presumably in case anyone should remember anything. A roadside sign, visible in both directions to passing traffic, asked: ‘Have you seen this child?’ under a huge image of Trothan tamed by a camera flash in his blue school sweatshirt, hair brushed back unnaturally behind his ears.

  She was standing staring at it when Audrey appeared at her side, rustling shopping bags.

  ‘Maggie?’

  Audrey brought the school in her wake like a following fog; the awful memory of that evening two weeks before which was the last time they’d seen each other. What platitudes could they exchange now?

  ‘That’s just not him,’ Maggie muttered at Trothan’s photo.

  ‘Sorry?’ Audrey said.

  Maggie nodded at the photo and said, ‘school doesn’t suit him.’ Then mumbled an apology.

  Audrey laughed, didn’t take offence. ‘I’m not sure he suited us either.’

  Maggie bit her lip when she heard the past tense. Surely they hadn’t all given up on him quite so soon?

  There was a flurry at the incident room door.

  Audrey looked across. ‘Better go.’

  ‘More questions?’

  Audrey nodded. ‘You’ve seen them, I assume?’

  ‘Several grillings,’ Maggie said.

  Audrey walked away and then turned back mid-stride and cocked her head with an attempt at a smile. ‘I expect we all feel a little responsible.’

  Maggie looked at her feet. When she looked up, Audrey’s back was disappearing into the caravan.

  It was then that she noticed a headline on the hoarding outside the shop:

  ‘FISHERMAN HAD ILLEGAL GUN TO SHOOT SEALS’

  She hurried inside, bought a copy of the John O’Groats Journal, and read:

  ‘Quarrytown fisherman Jim Swanson has been charged with illegal ownership of a firearm discovered by missing schoolboy Trothan Gilbertson. It’s believed the boy found it in Quarrytown’s disused church, property of local builder Rab McNicholl. The fisherman is suspected of using the gun to shoot seals sometimes held responsible for decimating the fish population. Bail has been granted. The man is also under investigation for the sale of illegally landed fish.’

  ‘Open secret,’ Graham said about the fish sales when sh
e went to the Centre. ‘He didn’t worry too much about sticking to his quota. They were all in on it. No surprises there.’

  ‘Even me,’ she said. ‘Except I was too naïve to realise.’

  He studied her face as if looking for the tern scar on her forehead. ‘At this rate I’d better keep a bottle of whisky in my desk drawer for you,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘All these licks you seem to take on the beach.’

  ‘Nora,’ she said. ‘You saw?’

  Graham nodded. ‘I tried to catch you afterwards, but you ran the other way.’

  Maggie felt her breathing crank up a notch, wondered vaguely why he looked out for her like this, and whether she wanted him to. He delivered her a cup of plastic tea in his shaky hand, and led her outside so he could have a cigarette.

  ‘Why’s Nora got it in for you, anyway?’

  Maggie turned away slightly. ‘Jealous maybe?’

  ‘Because the lad was attached to Flotsam Cottage?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Kept turning up at the door, eh?’

  She stood up, walked a few steps towards the sea. Breathed the comment away. Concentrated on calm. She hadn’t wanted to contemplate that Trothan might only have been visiting her because of a failure to readjust back home.

  ‘Is there any news?’ Graham asked from behind her.

  She returned to the bench. ‘They seem to have given him up for lost.’

  ‘No sign, then?’ Graham asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Strange, how the parents gave him such a long leash, considering their troubles getting a bairn in the first place.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘My missus says if you’re fit, there’s a better chance of conceiving. As well as not smoking. Oops,’ he hid the hand holding his cigarette below the bench. ‘So maybe George was trying to lose weight. Every day for a year he walked the beach.’

  ‘A year?’

  ‘I always saw him at first light even on the coldest of days, even when the beach was white with snow. He’d get to the rocks at Dunnet and turn around.’