Call of the Undertow (11 page)

‘Ach, they might be a pair of villains,’ the Butcher said. ‘But you can at least trust them with the fishies. Fresh out the bay.’

She smiled despite feeling out of her depth and quite possibly a little tipsy from her G and T. When she took the drinks over, Carol said quietly, ‘So do you think that’s his
son?’

‘Who?’ Maggie asked.

‘The man in the wellies. Son of the bonkers scooter man?’

‘No idea,’ said Maggie.

Carol phoned her family as usual that night and Maggie could hear the excitement in her voice.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow night. Well, you’ll be in bed fast asleep, but I’ll see you, come and give you a kiss. The train takes forever.’

Afterwards, Carol turned the conversation towards what Maggie had left behind. Maggie’s palms sweated.

‘How’s that nice old lady managing without you?’ Carol asked. ‘You know, the one next door you used to take chocolate and gin into?’

Maggie laughed. ‘Mrs Henderson.’

For some time Mrs Henderson had been part of Maggie’s routine. She’d pop in at least once a week and they’d sit and drink dark brown tea together while Maggie listened to
stories of her glory days in the WRENS. She remembered once laughing so hard that she spilt tea over the white linen cover on the arm of the chair. But it hadn’t seemed to matter. The story
was more important.

‘You got her into all sorts of trouble with her family, didn’t you?’

‘They didn’t approve of the gin, apparently,’ Maggie said. ‘But Mrs H did.’

‘How will she get her fix now?’

‘I don’t know.’ Maggie didn’t want to admit that her visits had fizzled out, grown infrequent, in direct relation to the way the old lady had looked at her, the blue eyes
suggesting she was about to ask questions. The memory scorched now. ‘She’s got much better-qualified people to help than me, I’m sure,’ she said.

‘You only need to be human, don’t you?’

‘Quite,’ Maggie said, and stood up. ‘Cup of tea?’

She went to the kitchen and chewed through four indigestion tablets as she waited for the kettle to boil. She wondered how she was going to feel after Carol left, whether the guilt-hounds would
follow in her wake, hunting Maggie over the flat wet plains.

Trothan and Maggie were both working at the sitting-room table when a vehicle pulled into the drive. She stood up and looked through a window, saw a van with ‘Rental
Refrigerated Transport’ written down its side, and weasel-faced Jim of the yellow wellies approaching with a plastic tray.

She opened the door.

‘Fish.’ Jim’s eyes flicked up onto her. ‘You wanted some, eh?’

‘Sure. What’ve you got?’

He pointed into the open box. ‘Cod. Haddock. Coley.’

‘It’ll freeze okay, will it?’ she asked.

Jim looked up to answer her and his gaze jumped over her shoulder. ‘Hi-aye, wee mannie,’ he said.

Maggie looked around. Trothan was standing barely two paces behind her, still and silent. His wide-eyed stare was trained on Jim. He made no answer to Jim’s greeting.

‘Trothan?’ She prompted politeness as she imagined a mother would, but he remained there, unblinking. She turned back to Jim. ‘Two of each, please,’ she said.

After she’d shut the door on Jim, Trothan followed her to the kitchen, watched her stow the fish in the freezer compartment.

She went back to the table and the child lurked in the doorway, looking unhappy. He’d been playing on her laptop with some of her map-making software and using Google Earth to look at the
local area. She noticed he’d magnified the old boarded-up church. It sat obliquely to its surrounding square of woodland, contained and monumental.

What’s in the old church?’ she asked him. It was a missing tile in the mosaic of her local mental map, and therefore an irritant. ‘Trothan?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s in that old church?’

‘Nothing.’ He sat back down at the laptop.

‘Have you been in?’

He nodded, started making tiny flourishes with his mouse hand, corresponding to flickers of his fringe.

‘Well come on, what’s it like?’

‘Just space.’

‘Is there any furniture? Pews?’

‘Nothing.’

‘How many floors?’

‘None.’

‘None? You mean you can look right up into the roof?’

He nodded. ‘There’s a gallery thing. High up around the edges.’

She stood up, pushed away his hand and closed the lid of the laptop. ‘Come on.’

He looked at her.

‘Let’s go and see. You obviously know how to get in.’

‘Okay,’ he agreed easily, stood up. ‘We can go through the woods.’

‘Can we?’

‘It’s a shortcut.’

At least he looked happier now.

Once into the trees out of the bright afternoon light, he led the way, jigging down a steep, mossy bank towards the burn. She paused. He stood below her by the side of the burn, elfin-small
amidst a tangle of green foliage and the gurgle of water.

‘Come down on your bum,’ he grinned up at her. ‘It’s easier.’

She sat down on the moss and used her feet to ease herself down, laughter jerking out of her as she slipped, gathered speed, lost control. She felt her knickers getting damp through the back of
her jeans. This and the foxy smell of the earth and tree-mould brought back a memory of the soily bank in the garden that as kids she and Carol had slipped down, whooping, for hours one afternoon,
till their backsides were black and they’d worn shiny runnels in the earth. It turned out that their father had recently re-seeded the bank and his scolding had sent her shrinking away to a
sour corner to deal alone with her burden of wrong-doing. Meanwhile Carol just started a new game.

‘You’re just trying to humiliate an old woman,’ she said to Trothan when she struggled to her feet at the bottom. Her hands sank into the peaty soil and came up blackened and
stinking. She waved them, clawlike, in his face.

‘Which way?’ She looked around. There was no obvious route from here. The burn was ahead of them overlain with a mossy lattice of fallen trunks, which Trothan now pointed at.

‘This is the way I always come. It’s easy.’ As he said it he was jumping on and off a small trunk.

She shook her head. ‘For me?’

‘First you step onto this trunk,’ he skipped onto it. ‘Then you have to do a wee wriggle to get around this poking-out branch.’ And he was around it and in two straight
steps on the trunk the other side.

‘For goodness’ sake, Trothan.’

He was standing on the far bank, hands by his sides, face partially covered by his fringe. But when she said this, he scurried back across and stood on the trunk, hands out.

She put her right hand in his as he stepped expertly backwards, guiding and steadying her as if his route here was instinctively programmed. She moved forward two steps and now grasped the
branch that she was supposed to wriggle around. She looked down. The burn was three feet below her, flowing fiercely and rocky-bottomed.

‘Lean out. Put your weight on it,’ he said.

‘Lean out? You’re kidding!’ But she finally took his guidance and swung her body out around the protruding branch. Then she moved forward a few easy steps. By the time she
reached the far side, she was laughing again.

He led her next up a flight of crumbling steps mossed into the far bank, and then up onto even ground, crossing a field and skirting the council houses to a broken barbed-wire fence which they
stepped over. It brought them into the churchyard.

The grass was long and hazards poked up from just under the surface; car sumps, headlights, bits of seat. ‘God’s workshop,’ she thought. Trothan led them to the large door in
the stone wall of the church, festooned with heavy padlocks. At the bottom of this was a hole the size of a cat flap.

Eventually she looked at Trothan. ‘So? Where do we get in?’ She was curious to see inside now.

He pointed at the small hole.

‘There must be an easier way – perhaps through one of the windows?’ She was ten years old again, determined to press on with an adventure.

‘Someone boarded them all up,’ he said.

She looked at the hole. ‘I can’t get through that.’

He shrugged, and then was on hands and knees, twisting and wriggling until just his wellies writhed on the grass, and were finally drawn in. She chuckled at the sight of him apparently being
‘eaten’ by the church.

‘I can’t, Trothan. You’re on your own in there.’

There was a sudden, loud clapping above her head. She looked up to see a hand of pigeons burst out of a vent in the roof and clatter away into the trees. She stopped laughing, and put her ear to
the wooden door. Trothan’s feet were making an earth floor reverberate slightly as he walked. And then they stopped. She got on her hands and knees in the damp grass, put her head to the hole
and tried to look in. She could see a car seat and a couple of boxes, but it was too dark and she couldn’t twist around enough to look up.

‘Trothan?’ She called weakly through the hole, hearing the syllables echo inside, unanswered. She thought she heard some scuffles coming from higher up. She called again, louder.
‘What are you doing?’

She pulled herself back from the hole. A sudden shower began soaking her jumper and she was cold.

She put her head to the hole again and called in. ‘Trothan. It’s raining. I’m going back.’

No answer.

What had she done? Perhaps he’d found some ancient tunnel used by smugglers in darker days and was now crawling along it towards the harbour. She imagined the headline in the
John
O’Groats Journal
: ‘Parents in vigil as boy buried in mystery tunnel’, and her name connected with the tragedy. The weight of responsibility gnawed at her. It was so sudden,
this transition from childish adventure to adult concern. She didn’t even know where his parents lived, should she need to go and confess.

She heard creaking coming from higher up in the building. Her face felt cold. She bellowed his name again.

She moved around the outside wall. Hanging from some brambles she found a collar. The name ‘Tara’ hung from it on an engraved disc. A disappeared cat.

Picking up a plank of wood, she rested it between the ground and one of the windows that was still glazed and not boarded up, and then tried to crawl up it. But halfway up she lost her nerve. It
was too high. She was soaked now, her hair dripping.

Hands on hips, gazing up at the window strung with cobwebs, its surface occluded, she thought she saw a pale face staring from behind it, swaying slightly from side to side and then pirouetting.
It was as if seen through fathoms of green water; a drowned sailor with huge pitted eyes floating just beyond the window. Then suddenly with a flick it was gone.

‘Trothan!’

The face had been a good ten feet off the ground. What the hell was he doing?

Her knees trembled and she felt her groin tightening. She stumbled back round to the wooden door and kicked at the small hole. The timber gave slightly, and she knelt down and wrenched at it
with her hands, enlarging it enough to get her head through up to her shoulders.

Finally her eyes adjusted and she could see up to the wooden catwalk that clung precariously to three inner faces of the walls. An inverse vertigo swayed her. It was as if she was looking up
into a vast guano-reeking cavern. She called his name again, but her voice just dislodged pigeons who left a trail of pneumatic trills as they lifted to the roof and then clattered through the
fanlight. Then something large swung across her vision attached to the end of a rope, hair flying out behind it, ten or fifteen feet up. Trothan. The rope tick-tocked backwards and forwards,
slowing, and when the pendulum finally centred, he let go and plummeted into a pile of something at the back of the building. There was a soft scuffling noise, a pause.

‘Are you alright?’ she called.

And then she saw his flowery wellies running back towards her, towards the hole in the door.

She withdrew while he wriggled out. Concern turned to anger now. ‘This is a very dangerous building. You do realise that? Do your parents know you come here? A featherweight would rip that
catwalk down – you weren’t up there, were you?’

He was impassive. It occurred to her in the hiatus that followed that it had been her idea, she had incited him to do it. The adventure of getting here had been his, that was all.

‘And I’m soaked, look at me!’

She noticed that his hair and clothes and the hand that he was holding out towards her were dusted with sand.

‘Look what I found,’ he said. In his palm lay a small twig, peaty brown in colour, ancient-looking.

She put her fingers round it, felt its smoothness, looked up into his face with a shock. ‘Bone?’

‘A finger, I think.’ And he jabbed it at her as if in reprimand.

A few days later, Maggie was standing in a queue at the shop and realised that the woman two ahead of her, tipped squint by her loaded basket, was Nora. Maggie was surprised to
see the tiny shuffling steps she took as the queue moved forward. She wore flat shoes, round-toed like old-fashioned children’s sandals, making it look as if something was wrong with her
feet.

Nora didn’t appear to have noticed her, but when Maggie left the shop, she found Nora facing the door. Maggie smiled and greeted her, hesitated between going straight to her bicycle and
stopping to chat.

‘How’s it going?’ Nora asked.

Maggie wasn’t sure what she meant. ‘Fine, thanks,’ she said, suddenly fearing that Nora knew about the trip to the church and was about to challenge her.

‘He’s behaving, is he, the lad?’ Nora asked with a lip-sticked smile, sunlight flashing on her amber curls.

‘Oh, yes,’ Maggie said.

‘Not getting into places he shouldn’t be?’

Maggie thought of the possible danger he’d been in but bluffed, ‘Just, you know, drawing away.’

‘Aye, well, he’ll like that. Always has,’ Nora nodded.

‘Did he mention the competition?’ Maggie had been meaning to phone Nora to remind her about the form, but something had held her back.

Nora looked vague. ‘I think he mentioned one, aye.’

‘For young cartographers. What did you think? He’s got a great map to enter – the one he did for school.’