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

your name again?’
    She hesitated at his directness, but then she had been direct in her questions to him. ‘I’m Maggie.’
    ‘The Map Lady,’ he said. His eyes were unblinking through his fringe.
    She stepped back. ‘See you,’ she said. ‘See you at the school.’ Then she turned and walked quickly away, wobbling slightly on the uneven cobbles.
    She remembered the dough as she approached the cottage, looking in through the window as she passed. A great dome of tea towel now stood proud of the bowl. She went straight to
it, admiring the bubbly appearance of the surface which sprang back into shape when she pressed it with a finger, almost like human flesh. Taking it back into the kitchen, she followed the
recipe’s next step, ‘knocking it back’, which dismally reduced its size, and then shaped it to fit two loaf tins which she put back onto the warm windowsill.
    She waited, excited by the rapid rise, the sense that something breathing was in the house with her. It reminded her of living with a cat that would shift to a new cushion when you weren’t
looking or walk without a backward glance towards an open door and disappear for a few days.
    And then as the warm dusk approached and the loaves baked, the cottage filled with heavenly scent, insolently redolent of home and contentment.
    ‘You’re not going all New Age on us, are you?’ Carol asked on the phone that night when Maggie tried to put into words the scent and then the buttery warm texture she’d
torn into, slice after slice, still standing next to the cooling rack, not worrying about upsetting her stomach.
    Although she welcomed the spring, once May came in Maggie missed the way April’s brilliant light had defined everything in skeletal bareness. Her view from the cottage to
the sea was obscured now by a canopy of leaves, and when she walked or cycled to the village, the boarded-up church hid behind a thick bank of green so that she almost forgot it was there.
    She didn’t sleep well now there was more light; her nights became fitful, sweaty, interrupted. And there were her dreams. They’d been infiltrated by the new land. Sea-frayed nylon
rope tangled with chips of shell and bone. A stranded puffin carcass washed in with its beak bashed flat and stomach split open to reveal an intricate web of coloured wiring like the innards of an
old TV set or radio.
    One night she flailed up through the membrane of sleep to find herself gasping and awake. The memory of a wave rolled towards her, over and over, refusing to stop. Each time it arrived on the
shore it was ridden by a small red shoe with white polkadots. The sea deposited it onto the sand at her feet. Again. Again. She rubbed at her eyes, swung her legs out of bed, reached for
indigestion tablets.
    At the window, curtain pulled aside, there was enough light from the moon and the last pinch of day to see by her watch it was just a bit after eleven. Voices seemed to echo out of somewhere
nearby, perhaps from the strip of woodland near the cottage, or from the derelict farm buildings, or they were simply carried by the clear air from further afield. They were muffled and remote but
then punctuated by loud laughter and shrieks. Youths. She pictured herself storming in amongst them, her middle-aged spinster-self kicking over bottles, sending the culprits scattering. She lay
back down for a while with the radio turned up loud.
    But sleep didn’t return so she got up and made for the beach. She took the usual path through the dunes wondering how long this particular cut through them had been here. They seemed solid
and yet under them somewhere was a Church, St Coombs. Graham had told her that the Minister and his wife had to escape out of the manse window during a sandstorm. She wondered how long it would be
before the towering monuments shuffled their positions again.
    She took off her shoes and slipped down the soft dunes. Grasses, silked by moonlight, prickled her calves. A white sheen