Call of the Undertow Read Online Free PDF Page A

surrendered
as the main highways approached the 50 degree North line, as if defeated by landscape features or a sparse population well short of the Arctic Circle. It made her feel oddly proud of where she was
now, allied to that land mass at the edge of civilisation.
    The road networks linking principal cities on the equivalent map for West Africa looked unruly and inconsistent.
    ‘I’m not sure what to do about the population of Lagos,’ she said to Richard in one of their phone calls.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘There seems to be no agreement on population figures. Ten million or twenty?’
    ‘Better stick with the UN data, as usual.’
    ‘It’s not just that. Shouldn’t I try and do a graphic for the pull of the City, why it keeps growing, what that means to infrastructure and so on? It seems so
peculiar.’
    ‘Maybe.’
    ‘Any ideas how?’
    ‘I’m sure you’ll think of something,’ Richard said.
    ‘You’re a great inspiration, thanks Boss.’
    She sighed when she put the phone down, eased out her shoulders, the muscles stinging from too many hours spent at the computer. Her brain was dull, her eyes heavy despite all the coffee. She
looked at her watch, knowing she needed a break, but decided to do another hour before she went out for an evening walk.
    She stared on at the map of Lagos. Her thoughts became dangerously unfocussed, scattering to where she would walk, whether she could be bothered to make lasagne later, a vague sense she should
phone Carol. Solutions to the Lagos problem dodged her. She stared for too long. It was like sinking into thick water, her hair flapping like slabs of meat over her eyes. The weight of water
pressed on her eyelids and yet it seemed she still saw the computer screen, transforming into a cinema of sorts. Shapes gathered in a slow reel. Something red and white appeared; a small figure. An
erratic appearance between two parked cars on a roadside. A road she was travelling down. Then there was a close-up; the child’s face in profile, her chin lifted, lips parted, bewitched by
something on the other side of the road.
    Maggie jerked back to her desk, to a lamp illuminating the crisp edges of pages, the grain of paper. She shoved back her chair and put on her boots.
    There was no one else on the beach as she was leaving it to return home. Her walks had stretched out with the lengthening days and now she frequently reached the far end of the
beach, usually in the evening. An hour or two’s walk helped with ideas for work as well as keeping her body from seizing up and rescuing her mind from its shadows.
    This time the sea’s steady breath next to her had not only pulled her back into the light, but the right map tints for minerals in Sierra Leone had revealed themselves in the mosaic of
colours in a rock pool.
    The cliffs of Dwarwick Head had been orangey-red in sunlight earlier but now were sullen brown, features blinded by failing light. A couple of black heads out beyond the surf and a car parked in
the dunes indicated some surfers, but even the birds were strangely quiet except when a V of geese flew overhead towards the Northwest, the creak of their wings audible. They travelled with such
ease and speed Maggie could barely get her binoculars to them in time.
    She threaded through a gap in the dunes, crossing the road to a field where ewes guarded new lambs. Voices soared up through the clear air from some council houses marching across the skyline;
children doing whatever children do on dry evenings.
    When she drifted into the channel of woods which would lead her home it was neither day nor night. The birds had stilled and the ground was dimly illuminated just in front of her feet, demanding
sudden interpretation: the rosette burst of a yellowish tussock; bogs that she only discovered when her feet squelched into them. On the lower slopes she snapped against bleached grasses and dead
stalks of meadowsweet, luminously pale in the sparse light. When she