‘I’ve not adopted him. We just have a professional interest in common.’
Carol burst out laughing. ‘He’s a child.’
‘Obviously.’
‘Children get into all sorts of things. They live in the moment. They don’t have projects or professional interests. Bloody peculiar child if you ask me, to be so driven.’ The nursery nurse lecturer at her work.
There was a pause in the discussion while they drank some wine. Maggie would have liked to start a new topic of conversation, but although Carol’s demeanour was gentler and her voice softer when she looked up, she was still on the same tack.
‘Maggie,’ she fiddled with her glass. ‘Is it that you think he can heal something?’
This new idiocy shot Maggie to her feet, making her slop wine onto the floor. She stood up and strode out of the room to get a cloth from the kitchen.
NINE
The next day they went to John O’Groats, visited tat shops, as if in pretence that they were in the cream-tea comfort of Land’s End. They had to wrap up in several layers and ate their ice creams in the car to keep it free from their wind-lashed hair. The simple pleasure of sitting on a wall in balmy sunshine and watching other tourists wasn’t going to be replicable here.
A few bedraggled, wind-scorched cyclists and walkers doing the ‘end-to-end’ arrived or departed, were greeted with hugs and champagne, but soon retreated to shelter.
‘If this is summer, I’d hate to be here in winter,’ Carol said.
‘It’s not always like this.’
‘And will you be?’
‘What?’
‘Here in winter.’
‘I live here.’ The realisation arrived in the moment of saying it; a sense that she could stay, that the place might allow her longer than six months.
A couple of sunny days followed. They visited Peadie Sands, walking over Dwarwick Head from Dunnet to reach the small white-sanded cove where the sea was turquoise and geology laid bare. The mermaid on Trothan’s map had disturbed Maggie’s idea of the place. Now she felt she might put her bag down on a rock and find it displaced to another one. The waves here might sing a story.
‘People swim here,’ Maggie said.
‘Swim!’ Carol looked horrified.
‘Not me.’ She hadn’t swum for years, and even then it had been in a warm swimming pool with her neck erect and hair dry. The North Sea was hardly a temptation. They walked on.
Maggie found it hard to enjoy the place with the sense that Carol was so at odds with it. She seemed to be happiest indoors in front of the TV when she was absorbed into programmes that were equally familiar at home.
‘It’s like being abroad,’ she said once, and looked out of the window. ‘Without the heat.’
Maggie didn’t want to show Carol that anything had changed since their conversation, but as they tended to be out at the times Trothan would normally visit, she locked the door after them. Perhaps the boy shouldn’t be coming in and making himself at home. She missed the ritual of his visits on those days. She almost wished Carol away so she could open the door up and have him back instead.
As much as anything she missed seeing his map materialise. It was a mysterious process; she just watched and tried not to interfere, as if she might somehow put off his ‘sight’. She half expected the prehistoric fish that had swum between the strata of rock here to appear as scaly decorations along the shore on his map. Or perhaps the shadow caused by a large flock of birds, known as an ‘angel’ by radar controllers, would appear sweeping a course around Dunnet Head. She hoped he was still working on it, wherever he was; that he could work at home.
Having Carol there forced her to get used to driving again. Perhaps that was part of her intention. Frank’s tactics to get her back behind a wheel had been gentle, but transparent. He’d circled second-hand cars in the small ads of the local newspaper and left them lying on the kitchen table. She put them straight in the recycling bin. She noticed, but looked away, when frustration curled his shoulders.
Back then he’d helped keep her in suspended animation; the exchange of news at the end of a work day, someone to go to a film with or walk with at weekends. Other people helped with that too. There was still night and day; eating and sleeping; work and play. She learnt to do what was necessary, the bare essentials that kept those around her from saying, ‘it’s not like you,’ or advising, ‘you need to...’ or worst of all, asking how she felt. She acted out the numb normality of wine-sipping in front of the TV on a Friday night, the phone calls to Carol and occasional evenings with friends. No one knew about her dreams or the images that insisted themselves onto a blank computer screen. They didn’t see the red shoes, the white polkadots. She kept everyone at bay.
‘Time,’ they’d all said, even though she hadn’t asked them.
Eventually Frank gave up circling cars for her. Presumably he’d circled a job advert for himself instead. After a year he put his head in his hands and told her he’d taken a new job in another city. And he’d rented a flat on his own.
‘I feel terrible,’ he said, his mouth twitching in an odd way at one corner.
Maggie had nodded, accepted, forgiven. How could she blame him?
After Frank left, Carol phoned with a new regularity. Most weekends Maggie would make the trip to stay with Carol’s family, eat shreddies with Fran and Jamie on Sunday mornings before the orchestration of family life swallowed the day with lifts to parties, football, pony-riding. She usually took the train there. Once or twice she caused consternation by arriving on her bicycle.
‘Stop punishing yourself,’ Carol had said. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’
Carol wasn’t the only one to say it. Her GP had said something similar when she went in for ‘something to help her sleep’. Friends said it too. The police pressed no charges. Even the formal inquest seemed to absolve her in less personal terms. And it came in the silence of the girl’s family.
Then Carol had calmly told her that the girl’s parents had split up. It was what happened, Carol said, with all the stress. And Maggie had started the small ads search herself, for a new house and a car.
‘Don’t you want a bit more company?’ Carol asked her on their penultimate evening.
‘I’m a company of one.’ Maggie looked up at her. ‘You have your husband and children to anchor you.’
‘When the children are young, they expect me to be an anchor, of course they do.’
‘But they anchor you too. It doesn’t matter where you are,’ Maggie said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your location is your family unit. I’ve got this place instead. The beach. The bay.’ Maggie gestured out of the window.
‘But what about a normal life?’
‘This is normal life. I can work here as well as anywhere. I’ve got food and washing facilities. I’ve not gone to join a cult, starve myself to death, if that’s what you think. I’ve always loved the sea.’
‘Yes, at Exmouth or Budleigh Salterton.’
‘I can buy Devon clotted cream in Tesco’s if I want it.’
‘And what about friends?’
‘I haven’t seen them in Tesco’s, no.’
‘Ha ha. Do you have any?’
‘I’ve only been here three months,’ Maggie said. ‘And I know Graham. He’s alright. He likes birds and he likes bad jokes. Which is fine with me.’
‘But you’ve not even tried to join a club, you don’t go to the pub, restaurants. Why are you being so odd?’
‘Odd?’
‘Yes.’
Maggie’s face flushed. ‘Come on now, haven’t I always been “odd”.’
Carol went quiet then. Maggie had never had a carefree attitude as a child like Carol had. Her mother was always reassuring her, ‘It’s all right. You’re not in any trouble.’ Meanwhile Carol had seemed to breeze on through life.
Maggie felt a need to lighten things. ‘You’re just afraid I’m going to turn into that woman we saw yesterday,’ she said, imitating the g
ummy smile.
‘Yeah, or one of the weirdos living in the falling-down houses,’ Carol said. ‘And what about love?’
Maggie saw that her diversion had failed. ‘Love?’
‘Yes, finding love. You haven’t given up on it, have you?’
‘Carol. My head is bursting.’
‘I mean there was that nice chap you worked with. Didn’t you want to pursue that?’
Maggie thought hard. ‘Richard? You mean Richard? He’s my boss now, for God’s sake.’ ‘So?’
‘He’s 600 miles away’
‘No,’ Carol said. ‘You are.’
Maggie gave in and they went to the pub on Carol’s last night.
‘I can’t believe you’ve not been to your local before,’ Carol said as they reached the door.
‘I’d rather spend my evenings out in this light.’ The sky gleamed over and around them, swirling with birds.
The door slammed shut, temporarily blinding them as if in illustration of Maggie’s point, and they fumbled down a corridor towards another door. It gave onto a small bar with formica tables and woodchip walls, a fruit machine and a pool table. A couple of men sat at the bar; one bald and bulky, the other dark-haired and wearing a check shirt. Otherwise it was empty and there was no one serving.
The two men looked over their shoulders as the door opened, muttered greetings, and then turned back to each other. Carol took the initiative, stalking to the bar and pronouncing in her south-eastern vowels, ‘What do you have to do to get a drink here?’
The men indicated a bell.
‘I’m having a G and T,’ said Carol.
‘Okay. Me too.’
The bartender, a young man with a ponytail and a sniff, eventually came and delivered the drinks. They settled themselves at one of the tables on red velvet stools.
‘Thanks for my holiday.’ Carol held up the glass.
‘Come again,’ said Maggie.
The door opened and more people came in. Two young lads who looked barely 18, and an older man with a dog and a stick. A gradual filling and warming of the bar. All of them greeted the original two men, nodded vaguely at Carol and Maggie. When Maggie went to the bar for refills, the bald man turned and half smiled. ‘On holiday?’
‘My sister is.’
‘And you?’
‘I live here.’
‘Oh.’ He looked surprised, questioning. ‘Been here long?’
She explained, and when he asked if she liked the area, she clearly gave the right answer. The slight whine and chittering rhythm to his speech marked him as a local. When he asked where she stayed she was vague, fluttering her hand in the general direction. ‘A cottage, up that way, a bit out of the village.’
‘You’re not the Map Lady, are you?’
‘I’m a cartographer, yes.’ She smiled.
‘We’ve heard of you of course, from the weans.’
Despite herself, a breeze of pleasure tickled her. ‘What about yourselves, what do you do?’ she asked.
‘Dounreay, me,’ said the check-shirted man. ‘Till they finish decommissioning or I retire.’
‘And I’ve the butchers,’ the bald man said. ‘Not seen you in yet.’ He picked up one of her slim wrists, inspected it, laid it down again. ‘Not vegetarian are you?’
She laughed. ‘Not deliberately.’
‘We’re just across from the chippy, any day except Sunday. We’ll feed you up a bitty.’ He said it as if he could smell steaks sizzling.
‘Does anyone sell fish locally?’ she asked.
The men shifted on their seats, exchanged glances.
‘There’s Tesco’s,’ Archie said.
‘I’ve this romantic notion of going down to the harbour and buying it straight from the fishermen. I suppose it doesn’t work like that.’
She laughed at herself, but the two men stared back, smiling glassily.
‘Let’s ask Jim.’
She realised they were looking over her shoulder at a younger man with a weaselly face standing at the bar in yellow wellies. He nodded at her, ordered his beer, and remained there. He had a sidekick – a scruffy-looking man wearing a cloth cap that he didn’t take off. His otherwise rather boyish face looked leathery, as if you might find it stitched and scuffed like a saddle. He was perched on a bar stool, knees wide apart, sou’westers pulled down around his waist, advertising that he’d come straight off a boat.
‘Lady’d like a wee fishy, Jim,’ the Butcher called over to Yellow Wellies. ‘Can you help?’
‘Aye,’ he nodded into his beer.
‘You’ll oblige, eh?’
He raised his eyes then. ‘Flotsam Cottage, is it?’ Crooked eyes on her, a slight grin.
‘Yes,’ she said uneasily.
‘We’ll bring ‘em up.’
‘That’s how it works?’ Maggie asked.
The grin widened and the shoulders of the sou’wester man next to him shook in silent laughter. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. Maggie wasn’t sure if she was the butt of the joke or if she could share it.
‘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.
TEN
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 he
r 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.
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