Read Online Call of the Undertow by Linda Cracknell - Free Book Online Page B

said. ‘Without a door, how could she have taken him down there?’
    Maggie laughed. ‘Quite.’
    But Trothan didn’t laugh. He was serious.
Here be dragons,
she thought. And for all she knew, there were.
    After he left, she picked up his mug and plate from the table. As she was pushing his chair back under it she noticed marks on the black plastic of the upholstered seat. Two long dull lines
remained where his legs had been. She put a finger to one of them and it felt almost as though it were damp.
    Graham phoned out of the blue. She’d given him her phone number in case he was leading any walks for the public she might join.
    ‘Haven’t seen you in a while,’ he said.
    She explained that she’d been starting to take her deadline in a month or so’s time more seriously. Doing longer hours at her desk had made her body – shoulders, neck, back
– feel as creaky as the angle-poise lamp that hovered above her desk.
    ‘Cabin fever, eh? I’ve just the thing. They’re on their eggs,’ he announced. ‘Thought you might like to come and visit them.’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘The sea-cockies’.
    ‘Is this a game?’
    ‘Puffins,’ he said. ‘We get a few on the Head there. Not the quantity further along the coast, but.’
    And so she lay on her stomach on a grassy cliff and watched through binoculars as the black and white clowns entertained with their whirligig flights around a sea-stack. Graham filled her in on
scientific facts, but she let most of it wash over her. It was their round-featured comedy that captivated her, and their parrot-looks.
    ‘You just want to take one home,’ she said to Graham.
    ‘You’re not anthropomorphising by any chance?’
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am.’
    As the days stretched into late May and Trothan came and went, some of Maggie’s childhood memories erupted suddenly, thrillingly, through the strata of burial and loss.
Her mother, who was long dead, reappeared raking the garden, wearing brilliant red lipstick as always, with soil smeared on one cheek. Amidst the fruit bushes and neat rows of vegetables,
she’d once called Maggie over to look at something in the tilted aluminium bucket, something she had apparently caught in there; a frog perhaps.
    Looking over the edge, Maggie had seen the grey sheen of water. But her mother pointed to a rounded, wriggling form catching the light in the shallowest water of the bucket.
    ‘A worm?’ she’d asked.
    Her mother stayed silent, waited. Not a worm, then. Something strange that stayed tucked against the seam of the bucket’s base, but never stopped wrinkling its skin. She had a feeling that
any moment her mother might scoop it out and place the jellied thing in her hands, grey and still wriggling. She put her hands behind her back, felt a tight sense of excitement mixed with anxiety
in her stomach.
    But her mother had instead lifted the bucket so that its base was level with Maggie’s eyes, pointed triumphantly to a thin stream of water running to the ground.
    ‘Can you see what it is now?’ she asked Maggie. ‘It’s a leak.’
    Maggie was still intimidated by the translucent worm as if it had taken on monstrous proportions.
    ‘But how did the thing make a hole in the bucket?’ she finally dared to ask.
    Her mother laughed. ‘It
is
the leak, silly. The water’s making a pattern where it leaves the bucket.’
    ‘It’s not a creature at all?’
    Her mother shook her head, laughed more. After a moment Maggie laughed too, with relief, and astonishment at the illusion.
    Maggie had never been defiant as a child. Her lapses into storm, lightning, sunburst seemed to be associated with being with her more reckless sister. She was too eager to please, or perhaps
more precisely, eager not to be in the wrong. She’d been neat and tidy, tried to bring things under control when she was only Trothan’s age, tugging ineffectually at weeds in the
wildest parts of the garden that her mother didn’t reach. She drew precise