Call of the Undertow

by Linda Cracknell

  ‘And then Trothan came along?’

  Graham nodded. ‘No one ever seemed to know that Nora was pregnant. But I suppose there’s room for a bit of a disguise, eh?’

  They both stared out to the gun-metal horizon.

  ‘The police have been, then?’ she asked.

  ‘They’ve interviewed everyone, haven’t they? The school, neighbours, bus drivers, ferry ports.’

  ‘Did they ask about me?’

  He nodded.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘Did I know you.’ He paused.

  ‘And?’

  ‘What did I know about your relationship with Trothan.’

  ‘And you said?’

  Graham shrugged. ‘Just that you took an interest in him and his talents.’ He took a drag on his cigarette. ‘I seem to be the only witness.’

  ‘To my “relationship” with him?’

  ‘I mean the only person to see the lad that morning.’

  Maggie swung around to look at him. ‘When?’

  ‘Apart from you, I mean.’

  ‘You saw him on the beach? Are you sure it was him?’

  ‘From up there, aye.’ Graham indicated the upstairs look-out. ‘I was in stupidly early that day before heading out to Bettyhill.’

  ‘What was he doing?’

  ‘He was ploutering about on the edge of the surf. Way down there. But I could see it was him because of the long hair flapping about. Didn’t think much of it till the news went up.’

  She stared at him.

  He turned and met her gaze. ‘I’m not going to feel bad about it, Maggie. He was aye wandering about on his own at odd times.’

  Maggie was wrestling for explanations, and arrived now at one for George and Nora’s confrontation with the sea when she’d last seen them.

  ‘He had something wrapped about him,’ Graham said. ‘Against the wind, I suppose.’

  ‘What sort of something?’

  Graham shrugged. ‘Too far away to see. A big coat, maybe.’

  ‘You think he’ll turn up again?’

  Graham shrugged. ‘It’s only a few days, eh?’

  ‘Two weeks now,’ Maggie said. ‘And by the way it was the sealskin I found in the loft.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘That he had draped around him. I gave it to him that morning.’

  ‘Good move. That’ll keep him cosy, wherever he is. He’s maybe using some of his bushcraft skills to lay low a while.’

  ‘You don’t think he went into the sea, then?’

  ‘It was a high surf. It’s not in a child’s nature to be suicidal, is it?’

  ‘Where would a body end up?’

  ‘That’s a morbid question, isn’t it?’ Graham said, taking a puff on his cigarette. ‘If it hopped aboard the North Atlantic Current from here, might end up in the Arctic Circle somewhere.’ He gestured to his right, northwards.

  Maggie didn’t reply.

  He lowered the binoculars. ‘You’ll need to stop beating yourself up, you know.’

  She nodded vaguely, keeping her eyes out to sea.

  ‘Look at it like this. He’s as likely got in a car with someone or fallen in a hole, or...’

  ‘Stop,’ she said. ‘That’s... too cruel.’

  He patted her knee. ‘Let’s face it, it’s likely no one’ll ever really know.’

  She thought for a moment, wondered how to try something out on him. ‘But what if it wasn’t like that?’

  Graham stubbed his cigarette out, turned to her, frowning. ‘What do you mean?’

  She was thinking of the day she’d brought Carol here, the stories he’d talked about. ‘What if he was “going back”?’ she said tentatively. ‘Escaping human hurts.’

  He chuckled, and when she didn’t join in he looked at her and his face sank. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘It happened on the solstice, the longest day.’

  ‘So?’ He scratched his ear in an irritable way, then slapped his thighs and stood up.

  ‘A coincidence, don’t you think?’ she insisted.

  Graham didn’t react, looked vaguely in the direction of the door to the Centre as if checking for visitors.

  ‘It’s when things happen, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘Things?’ he looked back at her now.

  Maggie nodded, unwilling to spell it out any further.

  His pale eyes held hers then, unblinking. He seemed to be trying to retrieve something. ‘Well, I mind him coming in and reading about those selkie stories we’ve got on the wall, right enough. But he surely knew they were just stories? Any child that age has grown out of Santa and all that.’

  She continued to look at him, and he began to frown.

  ‘Who’d put an idea like that into the child’s head?’ he asked eventually. ‘That he could swim away; turn himself into a seal?’

  She pictured then Trothan’s drawing of the seals, noses down, pirouetting into free, wide waters. Finding space. Escape.

  After a long silence, Graham said kindly, ‘I’m taking a wee group to Duncansby Stacks later if you want to come along?’

  NINETEEN

  Returning to the cottage from the shop a week or so later, she saw that someone was hovering near her door, hand outstretched as if knocking at it. She didn’t recognise Sally at first in a smart green coat, belted at the waist, formal, as if she was going somewhere important.

  Maggie smiled as she approached, genuinely pleased to see a friendly face, and stretched past Sally to open the door wide. ‘Come in.’

  But Sally didn’t move, stayed put on the decking, so that Maggie ended up half-in and half-out of the door.

  ‘I won’t stop, thanks,’ Sally said. ‘I just wanted to give you this.’

  An envelope was in Maggie’s hand; her name on it but no address. Hand-delivered.

  ‘I didn’t want to just put it through your door without saying anything.’ There was a pinkish flush to Sally’s face, a hand tugging some stray hair behind her ear.

  Maggie stared at the envelope.

  ‘We have to do it like this, just keeping things straight legally when a lease is about to expire.’

  Maggie nodded, suddenly understanding. A formality. She ripped open the envelope, expecting to see a contract; the next six months’ lease with a dotted line for her signature.

  ‘Are you sure you won’t have a coffee?’ she asked as she unfolded the page.

  But then she engaged properly, frowned down on a letter; a reminder that the lease would expire on the last day of August, six months after it had started, and in only six weeks’ time. She turned the paper over but it was blank.

  ‘It is renewable, isn’t it?’ Maggie remembered discussing this in the phone calls before she’d signed up and moved in: ‘All being well, on both sides,’ Sally had volunteered. At the time Maggie hadn’t been able to think beyond six months; she’d expected to be searching out the next white space on the map by then.

  But now Sally hesitated. ‘Not this time, I’m afraid.’ She offered no further explanation. No family members in need of a home; no essential repairs that required the cottage to be empty.

  Maggie looked at Sally, conjuring up behind her the McNicholls hauled there by Brutus; Black Fish Jim in his yellow wellies somehow in less disgrace than her; Small and Anderson; George; and of course Nora who was triumphant and red-clawed. The village gathering in sullen rows. They paused in a moment of still regard for her before starting to ebb, dissipate, break away into factions.

  Out of nowhere a yearning swooped inside her. A yearning for a winter here, for an exchange of birds, some shoaling south and others arriving from the north. She would have welcomed the change. Long shadows. The scent of ice just to the north. The wood-burning stove would have roared through long nights. Fragments of stone, bone, shell would gather with

  feathers on the hearth. She’d hang pictures on the wall. It would be a growing life, weighted to anchor her properly here. Quite a different kind of weight to the one sh
e’d been dragging around like a ball and chain.

  Her focus came back onto Sally, the sole representative of the village in her official green coat, who then apologised, turned, and drifted away from Maggie’s still-open door.

  Maggie walked to the beach with her head down. In the days since last seeing Graham she stayed at the Quarrytown end and didn’t go as far as the Centre. He seemed to have joined everyone in consigning Trothan to the deep; the search apparently scaled down. Their ‘deep’ might have been abduction or drowning or a plummeting mine shaft. But it amounted to the same thing. It was nothing like the deep she pictured for him in which he remained living and might still return.

  Today the sea had retreated further than she’d ever seen it. Spring tides again. Extreme rising; extreme falling. She’d been staring at the sea’s surface in the last weeks, trying to imagine, to see as the child had done, what lay beneath; the old fishermen’s dying maps. But all she got back was reflected light, the fleet shadows of seabirds skimming the mirror and then dissolving beneath. She wondered what they charted. Wrecks, fish-traps, engagement rings and contraband; soft coral fingers pointing upwards from the deepest rocks.

  But now the vast surface was peeled back, the ‘beneath’ revealed: sand wrinkled by small currents, heaped with kelp and dotted with the lugworms’ curled castles of sculpted mud; a landscape new and unfamiliar to her. It seemed like the foreboding of a tsunami, the lurch of sea back towards the horizon. Birds were grounded by the event, stalking the mud, flightless and silenced.

  Her shoes were off, her bare feet soon numbed by wading the pools caught between grey strands. The flat, bright no man’s land stretched around her and the dunes fell back as she moved beyond the cartographer’s ‘blue line’ showing what was un-mappable beyond the tide. She was traversing both water and land. If she went further she might come across the downed spitfire and find herself sharing the territory of seals.

  As if sucked out by the moon’s lure; as if called towards a distant singing heard through folding valleys, she continued. Under her feet strange crevasses gaped, oozing grey residues. She wandered on, feet slick, back turned on what she knew, towards the horizon.

  TWENTY

  Trothan’s map was already on the wall of the cottage. She’d been surprised that no-one had asked for it back, but she certainly wasn’t going to offer it. At least the details exposed on it would surely now be acted upon. How could the archaeologists ignore the desecrated Viking grave, or the police not investigate the illegal removal of sand and shooting of seals?

  She tore out the local page from the Road Atlas with its few lines for roads, its occasional settlements, its exaggerated white spaces within the cat’s-head outline of the coast. She found a smaller frame for it so it could hang next to Trothan’s for her remaining days; the map that had called her here. She hammered a nail directly into Sally’s pristine white wall, each bang a small, fierce thrill.

  The rest of the Road Atlas now stayed on her table. She flicked through it as she ate breakfast, turning west to Ullapool which looked remote and was far enough away that her story might not pursue her there. She turned over another wad of pages. Manchester. A scream of colour and line. The other end of the atlas; North Devon, perhaps. If the car could get that far.

  She couldn’t yet settle to work on the new project. There was always a period after a deadline when relief and sadness mingled; the accelerating activity followed by a hiatus. But this wasn’t just inertia.

  One afternoon about six weeks after Trothan’s disappearance Graham came to the cottage to find her. He’d been at the pier at Dwarwick when the boat came in; the men had been putting out creels for lobsters.

  She gasped when he told her and sank onto the sofa, head in her hands. Graham came and sat next to her, his body heat reaching her even through the crackle of his waterproof. He said nothing at first, then: ‘Breathe, Maggie. Breathe.’

  ‘You said he’d probably fallen down a hole,’ she finally said.

  ‘Aye, well. Looks like I was wrong.’

  It was one of his wellies. Just one. Faded blue. The white daisies dancing across it. They’d found it washed up under the cliffs on Dunnet Head. She bit back all her ‘buts’; realised it wasn’t worth questioning what it meant. Graham had come specifically to tell her. And now the Fairy Godmother’s spell had been comprehensively broken; the coach horses returned to rats. And she was being drummed out of the place which connected her to the child.

  Graham made her a cup of tea; searched the cottage unsuccessfully for whisky. She stayed on the sofa. Graham tried to get her to speak but her head was a deep murmuring pit. Eventually he had to leave for the long drive home.

  ‘Are Sally and Nora friends?’ She asked him just as he was going out of the door.

  He shrugged, frowned. ‘They’ll know each other of course. Boys in the same class; both oddballs in a way.’

  ‘So Sally was doing Nora a favour when she let her move in here?’

  Graham laughed, clearly keen to leave now. ‘I’ve no idea. Why does it matter?’

  ‘Just wondering.’ The collusion seemed obvious to Maggie. Sally had been a placid, welcoming woman and was now evicting her under Nora’s dark charm.

  After Graham left, Maggie didn’t move from the sofa, numbed by a dead-weight. The ticks from her watch told her of time passing, but measured it in sickening distortions. Twenty minutes, according to its face, occupied what felt like a whole day.

  She moved in the early evening to lie fully-clothed on the bed. Dusk brought the cackles of crows to the high trees outside. Nora’s face bore down on her; wings, horns, a tail tucked back behind her.

  At ten, in an attempt to disentangle herself, she phoned Carol.

  ‘She attacked me,’ Maggie finally blurted. ‘On the beach, the last time I saw her.’

  There was a silence then: ‘Physically?’

  ‘Yes. I had bruises for weeks.’

  Carol’s voice came slowly, words carefully manoeuvred, ‘And I assume you reported it to the police?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  It had never occurred to Maggie to do so. Perhaps she’d believed herself in some way deserving of it. Not now though. Not now, as she surged upright in bed. ‘I’d hit back. Now. If I could.’ The image came of her hands on Nora’s face; her fingers plunging into bloody places. Then she was on her feet, pacing the room, breathing erratically into the phone.

  ‘Maggie,’ Carol crooned, reducing her to a hurt child.

  Maggie took a deep breath. ‘If she’d been a proper mother in the first place...’

  ‘Maggie,’ Carol came again. ‘It might be hard for you to understand, because...’

  Maggie waited.

  ‘It’s primeval. That mother’s defence.’

  ‘The attack?’

  ‘I’d probably do the same. Probably capable of it. If...’

  ‘If what?’ screeched Maggie. ‘If someone tried to help your child? When you couldn’t be bothered?’

  ‘Calm down.’ Words curt now, less patient. ‘I know why you’re taking it so personally, obviously, but I assume others there won’t know why.’

  Maggie was speechless.

  ‘Just keep away from her, eh? She’s grieving.’

  ‘And I’m not?’

  ‘She’ll always be grieving now. And she could be a danger to you.’

  Maggie’s hands were shaking so much the phone rattled as she put it back into its stand. Her stomach was a raw wound, and all Carol had done was salt it. She returned to bed, jittered through the dark, ambushed by dreams which she escaped from into a half-waking state. She heard the ghastly grinding of her own teeth.

  By the time dawn came, Maggie at least knew one thing. She wasn’t going to leave without facing Nora. Sleeplessness had made a blade of her.

  The phone rang just as she was about to leave the house. She hovered over it for three rings and then grabbed it to her ear;

  listened.

 
‘Maggie?’

  ‘Yes, Richard,’ she said.

  ‘That was strange.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I didn’t hear you speak.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  Richard paused for a moment. ‘You okay?’

  Maggie took a breath, trying to pull herself back a little from the path she was already striding. ‘Just a little distracted,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I hadn’t heard from you in such a long time, thought I’d just see if there’s anything you need from me.’

  ‘Right’.

  ‘I guess you’ll be in the thick of your summer visitors, all lured up to the seaside?’

  She puffed out a breath of amusement at this idea. ‘Something like that.’

  There was a pause. Maggie glimpsed waves through the trees below the cottage churning towards the dunes.

  ‘Must be lovely at this time of year,’ Richard said. ‘I’ve always meant to get up to John O’Groats myself. Been to Land’s End enough times.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten,’ Maggie said, trying to collect herself. ‘About the new project. Despite the distractions.’

  ‘No problem,’ Richard said. ‘Just touching base, as I say. West Africa’ll be rolling off the press soon. We’ll have to celebrate. Need to get you down for the next editorial meeting anyway.’

  ‘Sorry Richard. But I’d better go.’ And then searching for an excuse, ‘Doctor’s appointment.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘You’re okay?’

  ‘I’m okay,’ she said, and was quickly on her way.

  This time she knocked when she reached their door, didn’t walk in as she had before. Her heart chattered in her chest and her mouth felt dry. She half-hoped that no one would be in.

  She was about to turn away when the door opened a crack. The darkness inside against August’s brilliance gave nothing away, and she entertained a fantasy that it was Trothan opening the door; that he’d returned and no one had told her. But when the door opened a little more, she saw that it was George, wearing a fisherman’s-style jumper with a frayed neck. She was glad it wasn’t Nora.