Call of the Undertow
Read Call of the Undertow Online
Authors: Linda Cracknell
First published October 2013
Freight Books
49-53 Virginia Street
Glasgow, G1 1TS
www.freightbooks.co.uk
Copyright © Linda Cracknell 2013
The moral right of Linda Cracknell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any
information storage or retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or by licence, permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued
by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP.
All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental
A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-908754-30-1
eISBN 978-1-908754-31-8
Typeset by Freight in Garamond
Printed and bound by Bell and Bain, Glasgow
For Phil
Linda Cracknell has published two collections of short stories, Life Drawing (Neil Wilson Publishing, 2000) and The Searching Glance (Salt, 2008). She writes drama for BBC
Radio Four and edited the non-fiction anthology A Wilder Vein (Two Ravens, 2009). She received a Creative Scotland Award in 2007 for a collection of non-fiction essays in response to journeys on
foot, Doubling Back (Freight, 2014). She teaches creative writing in workshops across Scotland and internationally and lives in Highland Perthshire.
ONE
When Maggie saw through the window that a snowman had appeared in her garden she put on wellies and strode out to face it, fist clenched against an impulse to punch its head
off.
She prowled the garden, searching for clues in the blanket of snow that stretched the land even flatter on this bleak March day. From the trails, she could see that the intruders had rolled snow
across the garden from her front gate. But she found no footsteps. She walked to the gateway and peered down the silenced lane, rutted with a single pair of tyre tracks. A newcomer still teetering
on the edges of her own territory, she had no idea why anyone would sneak up on her like this.
She crept back inside and stood at one of three large windows in the sitting room, looking north to Dunnet Bay. She’d arrived two weeks ago to this place that seemed to scratch at her. Raw
winds streamed past the windows carrying grains of ice or sand or both. The newspapers told of trucks lifted from harbour-sides by winter storms and smashed against walls. There was no shelter in
the low-lying fields. Cattle, fenced in by flagstones processing like linear graveyards, hoisted their rumps into north-easterlies and sunk their heads. The strange abrasiveness had put her at
ease; it suited her. It wasn’t an unfriendly place. No one passed her on the street without a greeting, but none of them had imposed further.
She glanced at the snowman. For what was supposed to be an empty place, there was now a sense that there could be people watching her.
From the window she looked through a lattice of bare branches outlining chinks of colour beyond. The effect was like leaded stained glass. She could just make out the jagged rise and fall of the
dunes and beyond them a snippet of sea darkened by the nearby snow; the surf a yellowy-pink. No one lived between her and the sea. There was just a cluster of derelict farm buildings and birds that
crashed their wings about in the gaunt trees; rooks’ nests perched in the dark filigree of topmost twigs.
She left the window, made coffee, and retreated to her study to settle to work. The phone jangled and she leapt to her feet.
‘How is it?’ she heard when she picked up the phone.
‘Good grief, Richard,’ she said, her breath ragged. ‘Isn’t it two months before you have to start harassing me about the atlas deadline?’
During the fortnight in which she’d been freelance and Richard had become her commissioning editor, he seemed to respond to her emails with phone calls, despite their habit of emailing
when they’d been colleagues working at adjacent desks.
‘I meant life in wolf territory,’ he said.
She knew he was referring to Timothy Pont, an early mapmaker they both admired who’d been Minister of Dunnet Church, not far from her new home. In the late 16
th
century Pont had
drawn sketch maps of the whole of Scotland which informed the earliest map of the country in Joan Blaeu’s monumental world atlas. Pont’s maps of the north coast showed vast white spaces
into which only the capillary ends of rivers dared to penetrate; where no people seemed to be. ‘
Extreem wildernes’
he had written across the white, and ‘
verie great
plenty of wolves doo haunt in this desert places’.
Even now the road atlas didn’t make it look so different and had seemed to summon her here. To the white spaces on the map.
‘I’m surrounded by snow,’ she said.
‘Yikes.’
‘Don’t worry, there are daffodils coming up through it. Wolf territory is perfect,’ she said, trying not to think about the snowman.
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
Backing off as he usually did when pushed, he updated her on office politics, upcoming conferences, his most recent trips to theatres, concerts and restaurants in Oxford.
‘They’re paying you too much for this job, aren’t they?’ she said, teasing him for his promotion.
‘Jealous, are we?’
That evening she locked the doors and checked the catches on windows thoroughly before going to bed. She slept like a sheepdog with one ear cocked. Her dreams were infiltrated by the still
unfamiliar slips and shudders of the fridge, a rattle in a pipe, twigs cracking against a window. A wind rose up and howled around the edges of the house.
She got up early and went straight to one of the sitting room windows. The snowman had grown a luxuriant mop of dark hair. She went out, shoulders braced against an Arctic blast that grappled
with her coat collar, and found the hair was fashioned from straggling lines of kelp. The snowman had grown a face too – a limpet shell for each eye, a razor shell for a long straight nose,
and a curved gull feather for a smile. She stood scowling at it and then shuffled around her garden as she had the day before, head bent, hunting for tracks. She found none except her own.
She stood in her gateway to listen. Despite the cold, the birds were rioting in the trees nearby as if it was spring. Trills, cheeps, something that sounded like a mechanical clock being wound
up, and a long sucking sound like a toothless great-aunt with a humbug. She had no idea which noises came from which birds. A tiny one had become familiar in recent days, calling her attention with
its ‘chick-chack’ only to bob out of sight over the garden wall, flashing a white rear end.
Maggie’s landlady, Sally, appeared walking towards her up the snow-filled lane with her two boys, heading for their large bungalow a short distance beyond Flotsam Cottage.
‘Settling in okay?’ Sally smiled against the wind which carved away the flesh of her face and aged her by twenty years.
‘Surprised by this.’ Maggie indicated the snow.
‘Winter’s last snarl,’ Sally said. ‘This time of year, just takes a puff of westerly and it’s away.’
Sally wore sheepskin mitts and in each one she held the hand of one of her two boys, hats pulled down over their ears. The children remained silent, kicking at the snow, and Maggie ignored them
while she exchanged a few words with Sally about the cottage.
‘The boys like your snowman. Don’t you?’ Sally jiggled their hands.
They nodded, carried on kicking.
‘I didn’t... It wasn’t me,’ Maggie said, embarrassed at the implication that she would waste time on something so childish. She wondered briefly if it could have been
these two who built it, but they seemed too disinterested somehow. ‘I don’t know where it came from.’
‘Really?’ Sally laughed. ‘A welcome from a well-wisher, perhaps.’
‘Perhaps,’ Maggie said.
‘And how’s the work going?’ Sally asked. ‘I’ve really no idea what a cartographer does.’
Maggie suspected Sally didn’t believe there was any work. No visitors arrived with briefcases; Maggie never went out dressed in a suit.
‘I mean are you off with gadgets and all that when you go out walking?’
Maggie laughed, explaining how the places she mapped were usually the other side of the world and she never even had to visit them. ‘I just like walking,’ she said.
‘That’s not work.’
Her walks so far had taken her half a mile to the village shop, from where she’d been making ever-increasing loops back home to get to know the area, charting it with her feet in her usual
way. She observed oddities: roads that seemed fiercely silent were periodically tyrannised by boy-racer exhausts; a brown-harled beauty salon stood alone by the roadside; and on still days columns
of steam plumed from the centre of the village. She noticed these things and then set them aside.
Sally looked thoughtful. ‘Callum’s doing a map-making project at school, aren’t you, love?’
The smaller of the two boys nodded.
Sally cocked her head down at Callum. ‘You might get some tips from Maggie, eh?’ The mother smiling at her child, cupping her hand on his head, pulling him into her side.
‘Maybe I’ll send you round.’ Sally looked up at Maggie and winked.
‘No, don’t,’ Maggie said, caught off-balance, her armpits flashing with heat. The child, Callum, poked a hole in the snow with his toe. But she’d also heard her own
rudeness. ‘I mean, I’ve a lot of work on. I’m not sure I can help. Not at the moment.’
Sally tossed her head, her expression flickered briefly and then she smiled. ‘Don’t worry, I was only joking.’ She gathered the children up. ‘Well, boys, shall we go and
get warm?’
They said their goodbyes. Maggie paused and turned to watch the three backs moving away from her along the lane towards their own door, half wanting to call them back and say something more
friendly.
Back indoors she stood at a window glaring out at the snowman who’d ruffled her calm. She felt as if a handful of dark birds had been thrown up within her, thrashing beaks and wings
against confining walls. Then they dropped to accept their earthbound trap, motionless except for the occasional blink of an eye.
Maggie had rented ‘Flotsam Cottage’, a single-storey steading conversion on the outskirts of the village, without viewing it. On a peninsula, practically an island,
at a latitude of 58° 37’ 21”N, as far north as places with ice-names like Anchorage and Stavanger, the cottage had seemed right when she found it online and she’d signed a
six-month lease – a long enough horizon for her to aim for.
