Free Call of the Undertow by Linda Cracknell Page B

of movement as she approached.
    The skin was black parchment, drum-skin taut against the frame of the skeleton, sagging between the struts and rafters of the bones where the flesh had perished. There was a lifeless zone around
it, and the suggestion of a round raw wound on the side of its neck circled by ragged flesh.
    ‘Oh God.’ Carol came up behind her. ‘How gross. No wonder it’s smelly here.’
    And then Carol noticed the wound on its neck. ‘What would have made that?’ she said.
    Maggie shrugged.
    Carol clutched her stomach and turned away.
    ‘You’re not going to be sick are you?’ Maggie called after her, but Carol lumbered on, not stopping.
    Maggie looked back at the seal. So strong and foul was the smell of rotting flesh, she had to wrap a scarf over her face. The eyes had been pecked out and the skin had started to retreat from
the bone of its tail and on its flippers, revealing clusters of thin white parallel bones jointed in knuckles exactly like human hands.
    Despite the revulsion, she was attracted to the strange sight of it, almost as if it had been caught in transition between human and seal form. In the water they always seemed curious about
humans, swimming parallel with your route along the beach, watching you, as if there was an affinity. ‘Fallen angels’, she’d heard seals called.
    ‘Why is it dead?’ Carol asked when Maggie caught up with her. ‘Why did you bring me here to see dead things?’
    Maggie thought of all the dead and discarded things she saw regularly washed-up on the beach; a welly without a sole, a guillemot with its head bowed against its chest, a blue fisherman’s
plastic glove poking its fingers up through the sand as if someone was trying to prise their way out. She loved best the heart-shaped shells of ‘sea potatoes’. Porcelain white, they
always shattered if she tried to collect them. She’d never seen one when spiny and alive because they stayed burrowed beneath the sand.
    She had to acknowledge death didn’t hide itself here.
    They walked back into a breeze. An old man in a fluorescent jacket had parked his mobility scooter next to the bench and was staring out across the bay. Maggie recognised him. When out cycling
the lanes, she’d sometimes overtake him and had been surprised how far from the village the scooter took him. He always had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, Hell’s
Angel-style.
    He looked up and smiled at them when they got close. It seemed to be an invitation and they sat down on the bench next to him.
    ‘Fine evening, aye, fine evening,’ he said.
    They both mumbled agreement.
    ‘It’s a bad smell, that wee sealie, right enough.’
    ‘It’s disgusting,’ Carol said.
    ‘I saw you,’ he nodded at Maggie. ‘Right close to it. Brave lassie, I thought.’
    Maggie laughed.
    ‘Do you think it just died of natural causes?’ Carol asked.
    ‘Well. You never know,’ he said.
    ‘So?’ Carol had obviously heard the doubt in his voice, as had Maggie.
    ‘They take an awful lot of the fishies, you know.’
    They both waited.
    Maggie heard Carol’s intake of breath, sensed a speech coming and silenced her with a nudge.
    ‘My son’s a fisherman, you know. These are his nets up drying.’
    ‘Can he make a living at it?’ Maggie asked.
    ‘On top of his other jobs. I’d prefer it if he stayed on the land myself. Watched him growing up with the sea, of course. But it’s a funny thing.’
    He trailed off and Maggie wondered what was ‘funny’.
    ‘Do you have children?’ He looked directly at Maggie.
    Died without issue
; the words sprang incongruously into her head. ‘Carol does,’ she said, nodding at her sister.
    ‘Well. It’s a funny thing,’ the old man continued. ‘It’s no matter their age, you never stop watching, fearing.’
    Maggie looked at his profile. He seemed to bite on his lower lip, his Adam’s apple quivering slightly. She noticed some egg yolk stains on the front of his open-necked shirt,