Call of the Undertow (6 page)

‘Dad’s a truck driver. He’s away sometimes. Mum’s in the reception at the doctor’s.’

‘And you’ve brothers and sisters?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I was their only gift.’

Laughter jerked out of her. ‘Is that what they call you? Sorry.’ It was such an odd way for a child to explain his own existence, and yet there seemed not a touch of irony in it.

He half shrugged.

‘You’ve an unusual name,’ she said.

‘How do you know?’ he asked.

When she failed to answer, he asked: ‘What’s 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 of light reflected from the hardened runway of sand. Her arrival on the
beach lifted a flock of birds from the shore, only their relative sizes distinguishing oystercatchers from the gulls roosting there. There was a great chorus of peeps, a sense of a single gauzy
curtain rising and flurrying in the half light and settling again, further along.

Dwarwick Head soared up to her right and below it the white croft cottages and bungalows of Dunnet village gleamed. To her left the woodland tumbling down to the shore around Quarrytown village
was rounded into fairytale shapes by moonlight. She was surprised to see torchlight flickering amongst the harbour walls. Then she heard a vehicle door slamming. Headlights burst the dark open,
pointing straight at her. An engine revved and then the lights turned away towards the tunnel-road back to the village.

Two notes launched the rumble of a different engine. She saw a boat move slowly out of the harbour and into the bay. It wasn’t until it was well out, pointing towards the horizon that the
throttle was opened and the engines whined, fading towards Thurso.

The quiet and dark resumed, but she felt confused. If she’d seen a light jerking in an Oxford alley, she’d have known it as a student fitting a bicycle light. Here, the map-maker was
lost.

A few evenings later, she strolled across the field from the bottom of her lane to reach the neighbouring farm buildings that she hadn’t yet explored. She stood in the
grass courtyard amidst the low steadings built from local honey-coloured stone. All the slate roofs had caved in and the timbers were sparring up through them. She felt a strange bond with these
sad, tipped-up shipwrecks, something similar to watching geese on their angular journeys; a vague feeling of yearning and nostalgia.

She walked through the door of one of the cottages. It obviously hadn’t been abandoned for that long. A transistor radio and work tools still lay on a table as if their use might be
resumed. The rafters leant against a wall, the tooth ends of them poking up in a row towards the blue sky.

She explored each building in turn, relieved to find no beer cans or bottles, signs of the youthful partying she thought she’d heard. Finally she went into a tall barn that was still
partially roofed. Clambering over boards, roofing-felt, timbers and slates, she reached the far corner where a collection of objects made her pause: shells, pebbles and salt-white twists of
driftwood. It was as if a tide had run up here, licked this far place, and deposited its sea treasures with a layer of silt and salt. She picked up a curious bit of bone shaped like the fin of a
dolphin or porpoise and turned it over in her hands. She couldn’t think what creature it could have come from. When she placed it back down she realised that there was a coil of blankets
underneath the strange collection. It suggested a small nest, a place where a cat might curl up; a lair, a hide-out. Perhaps even a place for an itinerant to return to, a man with a beard and holes
in his boots who’d forgotten how to speak to people.

She looked over her shoulder; an uneasy trespasser in a place she’d thought abandoned. Perhaps she had a neighbour she didn’t know about.

Her retreat was only slowed by the threat of rusty nails, but halfway to the door a board lurched and her right foot plunged through it, clutching her leg in its interleaving timbers. She had to
drop onto her hands in order to release it and ended up crawling towards the doorway and the safety of the grass courtyard. She hoped no one had been watching. Children were warned against entering
unsafe buildings or climbing on their roofs. She’d been foolish.

The smell of school dinners lurked in the echoey hall. There were small huddles of parents sipping at cups of tea and circulating the tables, each of which was laid out with a
group of small sketch maps. They’d been pasted onto sugar paper with the pupil’s name below in black type.

‘Maggie!’ Audrey Thompson was suddenly at her side. ‘I’m so pleased you could come. We hadn’t heard from you, so we weren’t sure.’

Maggie hadn’t been sure herself. There had been a pull towards it; something like curiosity, a desire for connection. But a habit of standing apart. In the end the children’s maps
won; in some far-away corner of herself she wanted to see if she’d made a difference.

‘The children will be delighted to show you what they’ve done.’ The small woman grabbed Maggie’s elbow and led her to a table where one of the older girls poured her a
cup of tea. Maggie noticed Trothan Gilbertson standing with his hair fallen in a great mop over his face, apparently the only exhibitor at his particular table.

When Mrs Thompson clapped her hands everyone in the room miraculously quietened and turned to her.

‘Welcome, everyone. We’re very happy to present the work of the P5s on their maps.’ She went on to introduce Maggie who saw some of the children in the class eyeing her and
smiling shyly. She looked into her tea.

Afterwards, left alone, she ambled between the tables, mustering polite comments and encouragement for the children stationed next to each one. In return they were sweet and polite, and she
relaxed. Some of them had mapped back gardens, some the main street of the village, but most had stayed within the confines of the school and its playground, which could probably have been done
through a window.

Maggie felt herself half repelled from and half propelled towards Trothan’s solitary table. It was almost as strong as a prickling on her skin, the strange restlessness she felt when she
looked at the boy. It was clear the other children avoided him. They didn’t taunt him like they would if he was fat or black-skinned. It was as if his difference to them was so fundamental
that he didn’t even cross their radar.

Standing beside him was a large bespectacled woman in her late 40s with amber-blonde curly hair. Her chin and neck funnelled into a large breast and she was overweight, but something in her
upright posture also suggested a pride in her body. Maggie wondered if this was the boy’s grandmother.

Maggie plucked up courage and went over. It was the woman who greeted her rather than Trothan.

At the same time Audrey bustled over. ‘Oh good, you’ve met each other – Nora, Trothan’s Mum – Maggie, our friendly cartographer.’

Maggie covered her surprise. Nora seemed like the ageing descendant of a Viking Princess, and fleetingly Maggie pictured her wearing a bronze bra, horns curving from the sides of her head. They
exchanged a few pleasantries, but Maggie had caught sight of Trothan’s map and she turned to it while Audrey and Nora chatted on.

His page was scrappy and marked with childish doodles, juice stained, the corners bent and dirtied. But on it was the map she’d seen beginning at the harbour. It still revealed its thin,
preliminary lines, the adjustments made by looking at the same portion of land from several different angles. It was sketchy, but he’d taken a much larger area of land than any of the other
children, from the harbour right back inland towards Olrig Hill. It included the school, a corner of the beach, and the woody gill leading up to her cottage. The village was there with its neat
grids of workers’ cottages. He’d drawn in the laundry buildings hovering over the quarry and even marked the site of the Broch down on the coast to the west of the harbour which
he’d rebuilt in his imagination into a circular dry-stone construction.

She glanced around the room, curious why everyone wasn’t crowding around this particular example.

Trothan shuffled close by and she looked up at him. ‘Did you consult the Explorer?’

‘Who’s the Explorer?’

She took the Ordnance Survey Explorer map from her bag where it always lived and opened it to show the equivalent area. ‘Your methods have been very different to the makers of this map,
but let’s compare them,’ she said.

They stood together, looking at the maps side-by-side. The basic land shapes were fairly similar. Trothan had made the sandy part of the beach slightly shorter and narrower than the OS map
showed it to be. Significant buildings were pictured as elevations rather than showing their aerial footprint, and hilly ground was revealed in profile rather than through contours.

‘I like the fact that your map’s pretty accurate,’ she said. ‘But because of the way you’ve drawn pictures too, it says a bit more.’ She pointed on his map to
an area to the south-west of the village where lanes criss-crossed around a stately house; over a bridge; past an ancient burial site.

The child twirled a strand of his long dull hair and looked sheepishly downwards. She remembered his confident stance on the end of the pier. In the school he had the look of a fox in a city
slinking along with a low belly, swivelling its head to watch for traffic. His limbs were too long, interests too strange, eyes watchful and curious when he should be detached. He had a sort of
unworldliness, and she saw that the best shield for him was his lack of communion and interaction with those around him.

The boy had barely said a word but now he raised a finger over the Explorer map and brought it down decisively. She followed his finger to where it indicated a twist in one of the lanes near
Olrig Hill amidst a small knot of woodland. She leant closer. In italicised script were the words
, ‘St Trothan’s Church (remains of).’

How had she not noticed before? She supposed it was because she was always drawn to the edges of sea and land, hadn’t yet explored so much in that direction.

‘You’ve got a saint named after you!’ she said, and she smiled into his face as he turned his up towards hers, half hair, half grin. Beyond them, the room clamoured with
laughter and footsteps, and the smell of over-cooked cabbage.