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.
SIX
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 wa
s 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.
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 pl
ace, 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.’
Call of the Undertow Page 5