‘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 m
oved 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.’
Nora passed her shopping bag from one hand to the other and Maggie noticed that her nails were perfectly manicured and painted brilliant red.
‘I don’t recall the details,’ Nora said.
‘But you’re happy for him to enter?’
‘If he wants to, aye.’
Maggie breathed more easily but Nora made no further offer. ‘The form needs your signature, that’s the only thing.’
‘Okay.’
‘Deadline’s any day now.’
‘Right you are.’
Maggie heard no conviction in the mother’s reply. ‘I’ll help him with the map of course, it’s just the actual entry form.’ Maggie paused. ‘If he’s going to have a chance of a prize.’
Nora laughed then.
There seemed nothing more she could do or say. They said their goodbyes. She stared after Nora, transfixed by her wind-up toy motion. She looked ridiculous, and it seemed to prove her an unsuitable mother for a light-footed boy who moved so effortlessly on any terrain; elf and fish and circus performer.
When Maggie got home, she went online and printed out the form again. The map had to be submitted as an A4 copy. Maggie didn’t tell Trothan what she was doing when he came in that afternoon in case it got him into trouble at home.
She borrowed from his pile of papers the original map he’d drawn for the school Open Evening, made a high resolution scan of it and returned it before he could notice.
When she printed from the JPEG later, she was pleased with the way the child’s naïve drawing compressed into something neat and coherent.
Then she completed the form. ‘Trothan Gilbertson’, she wrote, and her own address. She toyed with ‘c/o’ and decided that it would be inconsistent, completing her own name, signature and date, agreeing that this was ‘all the child’s own work and that he was under twelve years of age.’
Finally, next to the box for ‘Relationship to child’, she wrote: ‘MOTHER’. It was a necessary untruth; a made-up truth. A warm breeze quivered up from her stomach to animate her hand as she wrote. She put both sheets in a rigid A4 envelope. The sight of the envelope neatly addressed and propped on her table ready for posting the next day made her feel she had come of age.
ELEVEN
It was mid-June when a spring tide inundated the beach, pushing Maggie almost into the grass of the dunes where the sand was soft and difficult to walk on. She laboured and watched her feet. The sky was clear, the air warm, but the emptiness of the place was odd for a summer afternoon, as if human life had been deliberately excluded. It felt a little to Maggie as if she were trespassing.
She reckoned that the tide must be at its peak now; at its point of stillness before retreat. The wind seemed to die and the waves subdue.
As she walked, whispery fragments, silent and white, seemed to be shepherding her from above, just out of her direct sight. She was sure that if she turned and looked at them, they would vanish. She just walked slightly faster. They retained their distance from her, dancing between her arc of vision and her blind spot.
A burn poured out from the dunes about halfway along the beach. She was always curious to see how it engineered its course to the sea. Sometimes it had cut one deep, swaying channel with squared-off, cliff-like edges, and sometimes it parted and re-parted, forming a wide area of shallow tributaries almost like a delta, meaning that you could keep your shoes on to cross it. But with this high tide, it issued straight and deep from a cut in the dunes.
She took off her shoes to cross, looking down at where to place each foot in the rush of sea-seeking water. Somewhere above her head, shrieks floated. She took little notice of them, pressed on with the suck and sink of her feet in the piranha-biting cold. But then she became aware of a change of tone, of frantic bird calls closing in on her. She glanced up. An angular white bird was silhouetted directly above her against the blue sky, its tail fanned out. The wing-quiver that held it in this hover was so imperceptible it gave the bird a threatening power. It was too close, too white, too much focussed on her – the only person on the beach. It dipped a wing, flicked back to level.
As she stepped out of the burn onto the warm dry sand, a mob converged to hang over her. A shriek pierced the air close to her head, and something carved arrow-fast past her with a shock of sharp white feather. She ducked, but another came. She dropped to a crouch, flicked a glance upwards to the flotilla of white forms, thin and ghostlike against the blue sky, tails tightened into angry points and wings like blades. Some were floating low and close to her, others backing them up from a height.
From the corner of her eye, she saw one driving towards her forehead, fan-tailed in its attack. She ducked again but felt the sting of contact, a raw tear on her forehead. Beak or claw. Her hand came away bloody.
She rose slightly, transferring her shoes to one hand so that she could use the free hand as a defence and stepped forward. Immediately something assaulted her from behind, scuffling her hair. A screech blasted in her ears.
As if under fire in a war-zone she ran bent at the waist, stumbling, hands protecting her head. Her feet scrabbled through sand which blasted up into her eyes and ears, scratching at her. She nearly fell, aware of pursuit by a chorus of icy shrieks. She ran faster. When she finally fell, sprawled with one cheek against sand, she heard her own gasped breathing, but at least the sky had quietened.
She stayed there in the body-shaped dent she’d made, still except for her hands, which pumped at palmfuls of sand. The sight of blood wiped from her face to her hand drove a memory through her. The mother’s lips, forehead, cheeks bloodied from kissing the bundle of clothes draped in her lap as she sat in the middle of the road. Maggie had watched as the white dots on the child’s red shoes had gradually been erased. Her life flooding out.
‘You should wear a hard hat or at least take an umbrella at this time of year,’ Graham said. He’d sat her down on the bench outside the Centre and was dabbing at her forehead with moist cotton wool from the first aid kit. She’d seen in the mirror how the red scratch was raised and weeping.
‘Ouch.’ The antiseptic cream stung.
‘It’ll be the Arctic ones,’ Graham said. ‘Vicious buggers when they’re protecting their nests. Terns. You were lucky.’
‘Lucky?’
‘Haven’t nested on this beach for quite a few years. They’re our most distinguished summer visitors.’
It vaguely pleased her that they were not from here; that it was not the place attacking her, but its immigrants.
‘Okay.’ Graham looked into her face to assess his handiwork, then frowned slightly. ‘You’re not going to cry, are you?’
A slab in her throat suddenly told her she might.
‘You’ve had a tetanus jag
?’ he sat down next to her.
She nodded.
‘Come on,’ Graham slapped her knee. ‘You’ll be needing a whisky, then.’
There was quite a crowd in the pub this time. Some of the men looked like they’d been here a while, red-faced, perhaps from the farm and other outdoor jobs. The Butcher and Dounreay-man were in the same positions at the bar as if they’d not moved since Maggie had been there with Carol. The two men greeted her and Graham when they came in.
‘Still not on holiday?’ The Butcher nudged his drinking partner. ‘Remember the Map Lady?’
She inwardly squirmed at the title, but grinned back at them. ‘Still doesn’t feel quite like a holiday,’ she said.
He dabbed a finger at his forehead and her wound smarted in response.
‘Altercation with a bird,’ she said.
A voice piped up from the other end of the bar: ‘Archie’ll know all about that, eh?’ Approval shook around the smirking heads.
‘Take no notice,’ he said, swatting them away good-humouredly. ‘I’m Archie, by the way.’
They shook hands.
Graham drank orange juice. Maggie drank whisky. Three, maybe four, as they sat at a table in the corner. She breathed more easily now. When Graham went off to the loo before his long drive home, she sat, pleasantly soporific, looking around the bar as if she were invisible.
Behind her a group of three men were speaking with heads drawn close over a table. When she glanced back, one of them appeared to be laying out a map amongst the pints and the beer mats, drawing with great fat fingers dipped in beer. She wondered if they were making some kind of business deal. There were snatches of nonsensical conversation.
‘Found a metatarsal in the wall of his new ensuite.’
‘New kind of building material, eh?’
There were great gobby guffaws of laughter.
‘Got phalanges muddled up with his flanges, eh?’
‘Them bones, them bones, them dry bones.’
When Graham returned, she knew it was time to leave, but the seat seemed to tug her down into a sort of whisky-dulled paralysis. ‘Thanks, by the way,’ she said. ‘For rescuing me from those sky-witches.’
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