Call of the Undertow (12 page)

Nora passed her shopping bag from one hand to the other and Maggie noticed that her nails were perfectly manicured and painted brilliant red.

‘I don’t recall the details,’ Nora said.

‘But you’re happy for him to enter?’

‘If he wants to, aye.’

Maggie breathed more easily but Nora made no further offer. ‘The form needs your signature, that’s the only thing.’

‘Okay.’

‘Deadline’s any day now.’

‘Right you are.’

Maggie heard no conviction in the mother’s reply. ‘I’ll help him with the map of course, it’s just the actual entry form.’ Maggie paused. ‘If he’s going
to have a chance of a prize.’

Nora laughed then.

There seemed nothing more she could do or say. They said their goodbyes. She stared after Nora, transfixed by her wind-up toy motion. She looked ridiculous, and it seemed to prove her an
unsuitable mother for a light-footed boy who moved so effortlessly on any terrain; elf and fish and circus performer.

When Maggie got home, she went online and printed out the form again. The map had to be submitted as an A4 copy. Maggie didn’t tell Trothan what she was doing when he
came in that afternoon in case it got him into trouble at home.

She borrowed from his pile of papers the original map he’d drawn for the school Open Evening, made a high resolution scan of it and returned it before he could notice.

When she printed from the JPEG later, she was pleased with the way the child’s naïve drawing compressed into something neat and coherent.

Then she completed the form. ‘Trothan Gilbertson’, she wrote, and her own address. She toyed with ‘c/o’ and decided that it would be inconsistent, completing her own
name, signature and date, agreeing that this was ‘all the child’s own work and that he was under twelve years of age.’

Finally, next to the box for ‘Relationship to child’, she wrote: ‘MOTHER’. It was a necessary untruth; a made-up truth. A warm breeze quivered up from her stomach to
animate her hand as she wrote. She put both sheets in a rigid A4 envelope. The sight of the envelope neatly addressed and propped on her table ready for posting the next day made her feel she had
come of age.

It was mid-June when a spring tide inundated the beach, pushing Maggie almost into the grass of the dunes where the sand was soft and difficult to walk on. She laboured and
watched her feet. The sky was clear, the air warm, but the emptiness of the place was odd for a summer afternoon, as if human life had been deliberately excluded. It felt a little to Maggie as if
she were trespassing.

She reckoned that the tide must be at its peak now; at its point of stillness before retreat. The wind seemed to die and the waves subdue.

As she walked, whispery fragments, silent and white, seemed to be shepherding her from above, just out of her direct sight. She was sure that if she turned and looked at them, they would vanish.
She just walked slightly faster. They retained their distance from her, dancing between her arc of vision and her blind spot.

A burn poured out from the dunes about halfway along the beach. She was always curious to see how it engineered its course to the sea. Sometimes it had cut one deep, swaying channel with
squared-off, cliff-like edges, and sometimes it parted and re-parted, forming a wide area of shallow tributaries almost like a delta, meaning that you could keep your shoes on to cross it. But with
this high tide, it issued straight and deep from a cut in the dunes.

She took off her shoes to cross, looking down at where to place each foot in the rush of sea-seeking water. Somewhere above her head, shrieks floated. She took little notice of them, pressed on
with the suck and sink of her feet in the piranha-biting cold. But then she became aware of a change of tone, of frantic bird calls closing in on her. She glanced up. An angular white bird was
silhouetted directly above her against the blue sky, its tail fanned out. The wing-quiver that held it in this hover was so imperceptible it gave the bird a threatening power. It was too close, too
white, too much focussed on her – the only person on the beach. It dipped a wing, flicked back to level.

As she stepped out of the burn onto the warm dry sand, a mob converged to hang over her. A shriek pierced the air close to her head, and something carved arrow-fast past her with a shock of
sharp white feather. She ducked, but another came. She dropped to a crouch, flicked a glance upwards to the flotilla of white forms, thin and ghostlike against the blue sky, tails tightened into
angry points and wings like blades. Some were floating low and close to her, others backing them up from a height.

From the corner of her eye, she saw one driving towards her forehead, fan-tailed in its attack. She ducked again but felt the sting of contact, a raw tear on her forehead. Beak or claw. Her hand
came away bloody.

She rose slightly, transferring her shoes to one hand so that she could use the free hand as a defence and stepped forward. Immediately something assaulted her from behind, scuffling her hair. A
screech blasted in her ears.

As if under fire in a war-zone she ran bent at the waist, stumbling, hands protecting her head. Her feet scrabbled through sand which blasted up into her eyes and ears, scratching at her. She
nearly fell, aware of pursuit by a chorus of icy shrieks. She ran faster. When she finally fell, sprawled with one cheek against sand, she heard her own gasped breathing, but at least the sky had
quietened.

She stayed there in the body-shaped dent she’d made, still except for her hands, which pumped at palmfuls of sand. The sight of blood wiped from her face to her hand drove a memory through
her. The mother’s lips, forehead, cheeks bloodied from kissing the bundle of clothes draped in her lap as she sat in the middle of the road. Maggie had watched as the white dots on the
child’s red shoes had gradually been erased. Her life flooding out.

‘You should wear a hard hat or at least take an umbrella at this time of year,’ Graham said. He’d sat her down on the bench outside the Centre and was dabbing
at her forehead with moist cotton wool from the first aid kit. She’d seen in the mirror how the red scratch was raised and weeping.

‘Ouch.’ The antiseptic cream stung.

‘It’ll be the Arctic ones,’ Graham said. ‘Vicious buggers when they’re protecting their nests. Terns. You were lucky.’

‘Lucky?’

‘Haven’t nested on this beach for quite a few years. They’re our most distinguished summer visitors.’

It vaguely pleased her that they were not from here; that it was not the place attacking her, but its immigrants.

‘Okay.’ Graham looked into her face to assess his handiwork, then frowned slightly. ‘You’re not going to cry, are you?’

A slab in her throat suddenly told her she might.

‘You’ve had a tetanus jag?’ he sat down next to her.

She nodded.

‘Come on,’ Graham slapped her knee. ‘You’ll be needing a whisky, then.’

There was quite a crowd in the pub this time. Some of the men looked like they’d been here a while, red-faced, perhaps from the farm and other outdoor jobs. The Butcher
and Dounreay-man were in the same positions at the bar as if they’d not moved since Maggie had been there with Carol. The two men greeted her and Graham when they came in.

‘Still not on holiday?’ The Butcher nudged his drinking partner. ‘Remember the Map Lady?’

She inwardly squirmed at the title, but grinned back at them. ‘Still doesn’t feel quite like a holiday,’ she said.

He dabbed a finger at his forehead and her wound smarted in response.

‘Altercation with a bird,’ she said.

A voice piped up from the other end of the bar: ‘Archie’ll know all about that, eh?’ Approval shook around the smirking heads.

‘Take no notice,’ he said, swatting them away good-humouredly. ‘I’m Archie, by the way.’

They shook hands.

Graham drank orange juice. Maggie drank whisky. Three, maybe four, as they sat at a table in the corner. She breathed more easily now. When Graham went off to the loo before his long drive home,
she sat, pleasantly soporific, looking around the bar as if she were invisible.

Behind her a group of three men were speaking with heads drawn close over a table. When she glanced back, one of them appeared to be laying out a map amongst the pints and the beer mats, drawing
with great fat fingers dipped in beer. She wondered if they were making some kind of business deal. There were snatches of nonsensical conversation.

‘Found a metatarsal in the wall of his new ensuite.’

‘New kind of building material, eh?’

There were great gobby guffaws of laughter.

‘Got phalanges muddled up with his flanges, eh?’

‘Them bones, them bones, them dry bones.’

When Graham returned, she knew it was time to leave, but the seat seemed to tug her down into a sort of whisky-dulled paralysis. ‘Thanks, by the way,’ she said. ‘For rescuing
me from those sky-witches.’

‘All part of the service,’ he said. ‘Can’t leave distressed damsels in a heap on the beach. They might get disappeared along with the sand.’

She nodded, dazed and almost tearful again. His eyes seemed to remain fixed on her.

‘Ach, they’re just wee birdies,’ he said. ‘Nothing to get upset about. They’ll be leaving soon anyway, once their eggs are hatched. Off 11,000 miles to their next
summer.’

She swiped her nose against her sleeve.

‘It’s not just the terns, is it?’ he said.

She sniffed. Stared ahead. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘That’s getting to you?’

She chewed her lip. ‘Just, you know, other stuff.’ She heard the drunkenness in her own voice, batted away the conversation with a hand and moved to the front of her seat, ready to
stand up.

‘It’s like you’re haunted by something,’ he said.

‘Hunted?’

‘Well that too, maybe, but it’s my accent.’ He spelt it out then.

She knotted her hands together. Found nothing to say.

‘Come on, I’ll give you a lift home.’

When she opened her mouth to object, he said, ‘The bike’ll be fine here, round the back.’

There was sunlight, weak, very early morning sunlight, and there was pain. Something had woken her, a click as if someone had closed a door somewhere. The pain was a dull beat
in her head, was pulsing in an ankle sprained years before, was in her stiff shoulders as usual. She closed her eyes. Slept again.

There was flickering behind her eyelids. Birds outside and trees, the sky wheeling around. A memory of standing on the pavement in what seemed broad daylight despite the dark
bar, the whisky, with Graham saying, ‘And ten days yet to the solstice.’

She remembered that the bike was propped against the back wall of the hotel, or stolen by now, perhaps.

And she remembered lying on this bed, the fine long night stretching way after midnight. She remembered hearing the sea and the rumble of an engine somewhere going backwards and forwards in
short bursts. Just lying there, tolerating, listening, drifting towards a sort of sleep.

She rolled over in bed, put her hand to her forehead. The tern’s wound was smarting and crusty with blood. Her watch said nearly eight o’clock. It had already been light for five
hours. She pulled herself up to sitting. Her bedroom curtains were open. She’d slept with all that sunlight flooding onto her. Rooks were circling above the high green tops of the trees.

She got up, moving tentatively. She would make tea and work out things from there.

In the kitchen her head pulsed and thudded, sounds that almost seemed to pound in from the hall or the sitting room. She grabbed at the remains of yesterday’s loaf and sawed a great hunk
off, smeared it with peanut butter and tore at it with her teeth. When it reached her stomach it was sweet and instantly healing.

She carried a cup of tea towards the sitting room door and as she opened it shocked half the contents of her mug across the floor. Trothan was sitting at her table, drawing. He looked up through
the tangled fringe, coy and smiling. There was something about his posture that looked hastily arranged though, as if he’d been up to something else and was now posing with the map for her
benefit. A stool that was usually tucked in at the far end of the table had been moved and was standing close by him. When she didn’t speak, he resumed his drawing.

She put down her mug, rested her palms on the table, spread them, facing the boy and looking over his map. Irritation drew itself up to a monstrous height inside her. Why was he intruding on her
hang-over?

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘At this time on a Saturday morning?’

‘I’m doing the bit at Dwarwick harbour,’ he said, pointing at a sketch. His pencil continued its scratching.

She scanned the room to see if anything was out of place, to see what he might have been up to.

‘Do your parents know you’re here?’

He nodded unconvincingly.

‘Shall I just give them a call to check?’

No response.

‘And why’s there sand all over the table?’ She saw the grains glinting, a loose drift of them, that she brushed up with her hand into a small pyramid.

He shrugged.

‘Trothan. Look at me.’

He didn’t. She could hear his breath as he hatched lines across a building on his drawing. Flick, flick, flick, with the pencil.

She grabbed the pencil out of his hand, making a sweeping black mark across the bay from Dwarwick harbour as if it was the determined route of a pipeline.

‘Listen.’ She leant in, hating him now as much as she’d done when he terrorised her in the woods. Had it been him? Her voice was terse, trembling. ‘You’d better be
telling me the truth.’ She wheeled away and then flung back at him: ‘Was it you that built that snowman in my garden?’

His eyes were large, dark beads staring up at her with surprise.

‘Come on,’ she pressed back in on him, raising her voice. She grabbed across the table at his arm, gripped it hard, shook it, saying loudly now. ‘Come on.’

She saw a childish flicker in his eyes. Then a twitch beside his mouth dragged downwards in his strange, ugly, flat face. A single tear rose from his right eye, coursed down his cheek while his
mouth pursed in an attempt at control. The child was crying. She had made him cry. With it came a horrible reminder of Frank’s face as he told her he was leaving. She’d been unable to
reach out to him or to feel anything other than the certainty that she deserved it.