Call of the Undertow (20 page)

The tide was out. The sand a great shining apron from the base of the dunes. Near the Dunnet end a few people with dogs had spilled onto the beach from the caravan site. But, there. A single
figure standing ahead; a woman. Her arms were by her sides as she stood mid-beach and stared towards the horizon. She wore a red jacket. With a lurch, Maggie realised it was Nora. She beat away,
heading towards the tower of Dunnet church, where cloud was stacked in blocks high above the village.

The perpendicular figure in this field of endless horizontals remained in Maggie’s mind. Twice she looked back and saw that Nora was still there. A monument dividing the landscape.

At the far end of the bay, sand and water gave into rock that scrambled up to meet turf, grass, buildings. She wanted to stay longer at this meeting place of one slip against another. But
finally she turned and started to walk back. An almost wintry wind hurt her head and it began to rain.

Nora was no longer alone. Trothan’s father was there, wrapping his arms around her, resting his head for a moment on her shoulder. But she remained rigid. Maggie imagined he was nudging
her with words too. Then he parted from her, stood next to her, raised his fists and threw one forward as if trying to fight the sea or the sky. He folded at the waist, head down, arms wrapping
himself.

By the time she reached them, the pair were side-by-side staring at a sea prickling with rainfall. Maggie stopped. She could hear the man breathing next to her, drawing in and out, overlaying
the breathing of the sea. Her own lungs seemed to slow.

She watched the waves, the froth-flecked water and its characteristic red tide of algae. Alarm flashed through her. What if a body had been found? She turned and asked: ‘Is there any
news?’

‘No,’ the father turned slightly towards her and she looked into his wide, wrinkle-scarred face. He seemed to struggle for words, raised his hands slightly, dabbing at the air.

There was a murmur then from the woman behind him. Words that prickled with madness, rose in volume, turned a blade of blame towards Maggie. He cast back some quiet words, turning to his wife
with his hands outstretched.

Beyond the man, Maggie heard the crisp shift of Nora’s coat, saw a red shape flurrying past him. Nora hurtled two or three strides towards Maggie and two palms banged hard on her chest,
knocking breath out of her as she overbalanced and fell onto the wet sand, an elbow breaking her fall. She sat up quickly, crawled onto her knees. A swipe came across the side of her head, clumsy
and fleshy, but hard enough to topple and dizzy her. A flailing body was now above and around Maggie, blows pounding onto her shoulders and arms, each one accompanied by a grunt of effort.

‘Hey, hey,’ the Father’s voice was loud, close behind the red fury.

And then the blows receded.

Squinting round from her slump on the sand, Maggie saw he had caught Nora from behind in a bear-hug, trapping her arms between his own. He was crooning, ‘Nora, Nora.’

Maggie scrambled up and recovered her footing, but remained unbalanced. She began to walk backwards and away, unable to take her eyes off the mother and father, screwing up everything towards
understanding. All she had done was help the child with a map.

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.

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 filled 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.’