Call of the Undertow (7 page)

A couple of evenings later she regretted being so friendly and encouraging. Walking back towards the cottage, she became aware of something strange about the rail that edged the decking outside.
A figure was standing on the top balustrade, a small rucksack bulging on its back. It was Trothan in his flowery wellies. As she watched, he started to skip along it, his arms outstretched like
wings, hair flapping at each step. When he reached the corner, he simply skipped around on the spot and continued in the other direction. Absorbed in this promenade, he seemed unaware of her
approach.

‘Get down,’ she said, and saw the balance shocked from him. His knees bent and he pitched forward slightly. Shifting into a jump, he launched himself into the air and came down in a
squat in the garden in front of her.

She gazed at him with hands on hips. ‘A gymnast as well, then?’

He grinned through the hair which was streaming in a scarf across his face. ‘As well as what?’

‘An idiot,’ she muttered to herself, walking away from him. Then she stopped and turned. ‘Where do you live?’ she asked.

‘Don’t you ever drive your car?’ he gestured behind.

Cheeky little bastard, she thought. ‘Shouldn’t you be indoors playing computer games on a lovely night like this?’ she asked.

He unzipped his jacket and started to pull something out of it. He looked at her, head on one side, then held out the drawing pad. ‘I brought this to show you.’

She hesitated between her wish to get rid of him and her curiosity. ‘I saw it on Wednesday.’

He opened the sketch book and almost against her will she was drawn in, so that they stood side by side peering down at it. She could hear his breath, feral and unselfconscious. A smell rose
from him, something like leaf mould, saltiness.

It was a fresh version of the same map and he’d added quite a few features since the one she’d seen in the school. ‘You’re doing it again?’

‘This one’s better.’

She looked at him. He twisted a lock of hair between his fingers and was sucking it.

‘It
is
better,’ she said, nodding.

He’d captured the same section of land as the sketch she’d already seen. This time it was more definite and more detailed and it was drawn on a larger piece of paper. The style
wasn’t contemporary. A suggestion of wolves and sea monsters lurked amongst the lines and shading.

She searched the map for her cottage and found it; a small box next to the big bungalow. It had been perfectly observed, this time as an aerial view.

‘How did you do that? Have you got a flying machine I don’t know about?’

He sniggered.

‘Come on Trothan, tell me. How did you see the shape of the roof as if from above? It’s not like there are mountains to climb up.’

He shrugged. ‘I just see it in my head.’

A tiny flurry of raindrops sprayed onto the paper. She quickly covered the pad; looked up at the passing cloud.

‘You’d better get home then,’ she said, handing him back the pad.

He zipped it back into his jacket and waited.

‘Where do your parents think you are?’ she asked.

He shrugged and then went to the cottage window, and shading it with an arm, looked in. ‘Do you work here – making maps?’

‘Oy,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do, but it’s also a private house.’

He turned and grinned at her, strangely familiar, and making no effort to move. She had no idea what he wanted.

‘Do you draw them like I do?’ he indicated his closed jacket.

‘You want to see how I work?’ she said. ‘Is that it?’

He nodded enthusiastically.

Something inside her took a skip. She smiled.

‘Do you have a mobile? To keep in touch with your parents?’ she asked.

‘No.’

His head seemed to hang a little as he shook it. She looked down at him, saw the long eyelashes, a smear of something greenish down one cheek. An ache opened up in her for the lonely child
always outside the circle. She pictured him collecting treasured pebbles, imaginary friends, magical stories invented to take place on green hills.

Child.
She heard the word spoken as an elderly Irish relative used to say it, spilling in its single syllable the weariness of the adult and their acknowledgment that this slight,
bright, hurtable creature has the same fortune to come.

Trothan looked up coyly, questioningly through his fringe; blinked.

‘Well, I would invite you in,’ she said. ‘But you’ll have to check with them it’s okay, let them know where you are.’ She took out her own mobile phone.
‘What’s your home number?’

‘No one’s home just now,’ he said.

A latch-key kid. She paused before deciding what to do. At that moment his stomach made a loud growl and they both laughed. ‘Want some milk?’ she asked.

He looked up at her blankly, not understanding.

She couldn’t think what else she had in the house that a child might drink.

‘Come in,’ she said.

She unlocked the door and let him go in first. He loped confidently across the room in his strange wellies, throwing his rucksack onto a chair, then sat at the long table, back to the wall,
surveying the room. It was almost as if he was waiting for something – a meal to be put in front of him or a task to do. She gave him a glass of milk.

‘So you want to see how I work?’ she said.

He nodded.

‘Come through.’

She took him to her Mac in the study and opened up the reference map of West Africa.

‘Watch this,’ she said. And with clicks of the mouse down the right-hand menu, she peeled away successive layers. She engineered it so that first the text labels disappeared, then
the main towns and villages, followed by the railways, roads and boundaries.

‘See, all that’s left is the shape of the coast, the courses of the rivers and tributaries and the outlines of the islands. That’s what mapmakers always start with. We build
the rest up in layers. These colours underneath,’ she pointed to the land and sea shadings. ‘These show relative heights and depths of land and sea.’

He was watching, apparently mesmerised, his breathing audible. ‘What’s that?’ He pointed at a small island, blue-lined, just off the coast of Senegal.

She enlarged it till the island filled the screen. ‘Gorèe,’ she said.

She dropped the layers back, one on top of the other so that the fort on the island’s north end fell into place, the castle at its southern tip, and the label ‘House of Slaves’
appeared on its eastern bulge.

Trothan pointed at the label. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It was an important trading post for slaves.’

‘Slaves?’

‘They rounded up Africans on the mainland, held them in that building till they were taken away on ships by their new owners.’

‘Owners?’

‘I’m afraid people bought them. They had to work for nothing in places like Jamaica.’ She told him then about the Oswalds of Dunnet who must have owned many slaves.

Trothan fell quiet.

She swung her seat around to look at him. ‘You could do your own map in layers too. That’s how all cartographers work.’

‘Have you been there?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘So how do you know?’

‘Just part of my research.’

‘Will you show the slaves on the map?’

‘Not exactly. This is mostly for a book of geography about now. A reference map. An Atlas.’

His eyes were fixed on the screen as if willing it to represent more.

She stood up. ‘Come on, let’s look at yours again.’

They went back through to the sitting room table and leant over his sketch pad. ‘Have you walked all these burns?’ she asked, noting the intricacy of their routes and
tributaries.

‘Yes.’ He seemed surprised that she would doubt it.

‘A proper professional,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you set up for doing your own layers. Do you fancy that?’

He nodded.

‘You’ll have to draw them onto film though. I need the computer myself.’

She dug out several A2 sheets of film and filled her long-unused set of Rotring pens with ink. He settled down at the table with the equipment.

‘I’d suggest five layers,’ she said. ‘Like I’ve just shown you, except we’ll miss out the height and depth shadings. You can start with the shoreline and
rivers.’

She could see his project was going to be original and ambitious; that his flamboyant instincts might need some taming. Sensing that she should leave him to it, she stood back a little,
anticipating.

He hesitated for a moment with the pen poised over the first film, and then he began to draw.

Trothan came to Flotsam Cottage regularly after that, slipping into a pattern without discussion or agreement. He washed up in the hours after school and always seemed to be
starving. She started buying in crisps and baking extra bread. She’d continued to enjoy making bread: the sense of the dough rising, transforming, as she worked on the computer or went out
and walked. But she always baked the loaves in the afternoons, so that the homely smell greeted Trothan. She even leafed further into the baking book and found a recipe for butterscotch cake. She
remembered having it herself as a kid. He wolfed it as hungrily as she did.

‘We never have cakes at home,’ he said.

It warmed her afternoon.

Once he appeared with a feather caught in his hair and she often had to resist the impulse to get all his clothes off him and give them a wash and tumble before allowing him to leave. There was
too much dignity about the child to treat him like this, she began to realise. But she wondered at the negligence of his parents and whether they knew he was here.

She sent a note back home with him:
‘Dear Nora, Trothan has shown a great deal of interest in map-making. I’m happy for him to come and learn bits and pieces from me here after
school. I assume you’re happy with that, unless I hear otherwise.’
And she wrote at the bottom her phone number.

There was no response.

He used his recent sketches to draw the coastal edges and the burns that led down to it. To this template, he added each subsequent layer. Once he’d got the basic idea, he didn’t
need that much help. But then onto the fifth layer, which she’d expected to be for text, he plotted the details of the broch remains, World War II bunkers and burial chambers he’d found
on his walks. He drew them in confident black lines with the Rotring pen, transferring information from his sketchbooks. A sort of archaeological layer.

In the bay, halfway between the flagstone harbour and Dwarwick Head he drew a cross-shape.

‘Is that the Spitfire that went down in the war?’ she asked him.

The back of his head assented.

She sometimes worked away in the next room, continuing with her own mapmaking. She’d look through the door and see his bent head and hair fallen forward, the black pen end to his lip as he
decided on the position of his next feature. It reminded her of days when she’d worked in the office at a desk near Richard and enjoyed the silent camaraderie of two absorbed brains dealing
with space, transferring the world into two dimensions.

But she found herself almost envying Trothan the ‘felt’ nature of his mapping that drew on evidence from his feet and eyes. All she was doing was using second-hand information; bare
statistics. She would never be shoulder to shoulder with other sweaty dancers at Fela Kuti’s Shrine, hear the hippos wallowing in Kainji Lake, or weave in a canoe between Makoko’s
stilted houses in their stinking Lagos lagoon. It struck her that he was more like a geographer, an explorer, to her plain old cartographer.

After each visit, he carefully placed the trace films exactly one above the other, and then rolled them neatly into the cardboard tube that he carried away. She let him take the pens away too,
and the set of curved rulers. It was as if he was going to go and do the work somewhere else, but it never seemed that he made progress in-between visits.

The last time she’d seen him he’d been on the sixth, the text layer, conventionally the final one. His annotations included directions like ‘
the quickest way to get to the
cave’
; or place names he’d made up, like ‘
headland of the shout’ because
of a story about a stranded fisherman who’d had to shout to the seals for help;
or ‘
cows’ dancing place’
. His long messy scrawls slightly niggled at her own habit of neatness. She considered suggesting a stencil. But then she thought of Pont’s
maps; his scribbles had been equally undisciplined.

Trothan’s next step should be to draw everything onto one sheet of good cartridge paper, ensuring that the features didn’t clutter up against each other, that they could breathe.

But then she noticed, but didn’t ask why, he cut another sheet of film: a seventh. He reminded her of the story of Peter Barker and the fairy queen.

‘Can you put that on a map?’ he asked.

‘Do you mean the story?’

‘Sort of. The place Peter Barker went to. With her. Under the Hill.’

‘Well...’ Maggie was out of her depth here. Her maps represented what was there, not illusions or hidden places. ‘We don’t map things like that.’

‘Who?’ Trothan stared at her.

She shuffled in her seat. ‘Map-makers. Not these days anyway.’

‘But I can,’ he said.

Was it a question or a statement? ‘It depends,’ she said.

He carried on drawing. The doorway in Olrig Hill materialised.

‘It depends,’ she continued. ‘Whether you want your map to represent what’s really there.’ He was bent over the page, still drawing, his loose hair brushing it. As
she often did, she longed now to tie the hair back, wash it, even cut it all off.

‘Maps usually just show real things,’ she tried again. ‘That’s how we usually do it. That’s what makes people trust a map.’ She was irritated by the
self-importance in her own voice.

A brown eye appeared through the hair and gazed at her. ‘It is important,’ he 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.