Call of the Undertow

by Linda Cracknell

  This question allowed him to point out some of the hidden features of the landscape that he’d made explicit. Each time she looked back, she became aware of more she hadn’t seen in his drawings before and words she had no time to read. She would look properly later. The map simply looked a gorgeous thing. Highly detailed, figurative, but also conveying a real sense of geography, not only of the land, but the seabed, and the connections between them. She’d never seen anything quite like it. It seemed to take the artistic merit of early maps and the later passion for accurate geography, but then to add a further layer of story and subjective interpretation of the landscape. The seals and guillemots had been depicted in their own abstracted square of sea, which was seen from a sort of Picasso-esque perspective. That the creatures were ‘flying’ underwater was made clear by water-slicked fur and feather, and by the bubbles that rose from them.

  Trothan gestured at Mrs Burt who went on to the next slide. The audience, looking over Maggie’s shoulder, had the advantage of foreknowledge. She saw that one or two people tipped towards each other and whispered. The Minister leaned forward in polite scrutiny towards the screen, then turned briefly to Audrey, opened his eyes wide and looked back. The audience became like the sea’s surface animated from beneath by a shoal of flickering fish.

  She turned to the map to see what was causing it. At the top of Dunnet’s church tower swung the huge bell, and it was being rung from below by a group of shackled black slaves. He had clearly drawn this from their brief conversation about the Oswalds. Her surprise at seeing this snippet of history revealed in a way which showed his distaste almost made her laugh out loud.

  But now she remembered the audience and sought something else to comment on.

  Near the harbour he’d drawn a circular building in stone, marked: ‘ice house, now fish store.’ She asked Trothan to talk about it.

  ‘That’s where they used to store the ice for the big house.’ He pumped a finger towards the impression left by the burnt-down house surrounded by woodland.

  ‘And it’s a fish store now?’ she asked, surprised to hear the murmur that this sent running through the hall.

  Trothan nodded. ‘And that’s the boat that brings the fish.’ He pointed at a drawing of a boat in the harbour. On its side the digits of its Scrabster port registration were clearly visible.

  The audience murmured.

  ‘It’s fish they’re not supposed to catch,’ Trothan continued. ‘Then someone takes it to people’s houses to sell. And the hotels.’

  The murmur rose again and reverberated around the hall. It was a collision of hilarity and embarrassment, she realised. Maggie had heard of ‘black landings’ of fish, and now she noticed weasel-faced Jim, arms folded, flushed but impassive, a few rows from the front. The congregation seemed complicit. Some of them would be customers themselves, she supposed, like herself. She saw Graham clap a hand across his eyes in mock-horror. She deliberately avoided looking at Audrey, who she imagined was clock-watching.

  Trothan’s grin was cracking his face now, and she decided to move things on. She pointed to a well on the shore near Murkle and asked about that.

  ‘It was a holy well but the farmer dug up the special trough, so you can’t see it any more,’ he said.

  A small disturbance turned heads. It was centred on a man with a red face and the woman beside him. They rattled against each other as if disturbed by a sudden gust.

  She began to see what Trothan was doing; perhaps what the eighth layer of his map had been about. It made her think of surveillance: Burghley’s use of a map to pinpoint Catholic-leaning households so they could be watched by the Elizabethan court; the Metropolitan Police reputedly tracking suspects and representing their movements as 3D graphics.

  Audrey, sitting close to Maggie, caught her eye and held up two fingers; two minutes left.

  ‘Would anyone else like to ask Trothan a question about his map?’ She hoped this would broaden the discussion out again, return it to safer ground.

  A hand went up a few rows back. One of the more boisterous pink girls she recognised from Trothan’s class asked, ‘Why are all the new bungalows built of bones?’

  A babble of voices erupted from the audience and a gull-laugh flew out of Trothan. Pretty well pushing Mrs Burt out of the way, he went to the laptop and with a flick of the mouse, he zoomed in on one of the constructions. Sure enough, rather than breeze blocks, the fabric of the building was constructed from interlocking human bones. The drawing reminded Maggie of the image she’d had in her mind ever since Trothan talked about the loom weighted with human skulls.

  Trothan started speaking without her prompt. ‘That’s because they’re using sand from the dunes, and it has a very old graveyard in it. Vikings are buried there. Those are their bones.’

  Maggie saw Graham stretch to upright in his seat. He turned to the person next to him, and said loudly enough that she could hear, ‘Well, that explains a thing or two.’

  She asked, for herself now, rather than on behalf of the audience. ‘Who’s digging the sand?’

  Maggie saw that Trothan had positioned the cursor to highlight a new area of the map – the old church. He’d drawn it in elevation, showing its enormous door wide open. A truck was outside it unloading some substance that formed into mounds: sand.

  There was a sudden scraping of chairs and Rab McNicholl was on his feet, pulling Debbie behind him; a bemused-looking daughter trailing them both. Graham turned to watch them go as the door slammed, muffling the curses.

  Audrey made a cut-throat gesture at Maggie.

  Maggie saw that Trothan was zooming in now on the pile of sand just inside the church door, the lines of his drawing getting ragged and blurred with magnification. Something long and slim was partially covered by the sand. Now they’d got the idea, people strained forward in their seats to see the detail of the drawing, a hum of speculation rising.

  Maggie heard the Minister appeal to Audrey. ‘Good grief, is that a...’ Then Audrey was looming towards Maggie and Trothan, her forehead carved with a frown. Trothan left the laptop and picked up the cardboard tube, still apparently heavy. Maggie raised a hand to tell him that their time was up, but with one eye on the audience he pushed his hand inside the tube, and began gradually drawing something out. She dropped her hand and watched as a chunky wooden butt appeared, followed by a tubular mounted eyesight and finally, slowly, a long black barrel. Instinctively she stepped back. He dropped the cardboard tube, and brandished the gun high in the air above his head, grinning broadly, reminding her of a terrifying Milky-Bar Kid.

  Chairs scraped. Trothan brought the eyepiece to his face and was pointing the long dark barrel directly at weasel-faced Jim.

  Most people were stunned into stillness, but Audrey strode up to Trothan, slapped his arm down and grappled the gun from him. Chairs tumbled as PC Small burst forward to fell Trothan with a lunge to his legs. Chaos followed. Maggie, separated from Trothan by these scuffles, just had time to see that he was still grinning through a flurry of hair and tumbling limbs. Even through the sound of furniture crashing, and the clamour of adult voices and girlish shrieks, she heard him laughing. Nora was on her feet and grim at the back, the broad shape of a man, a father perhaps, next to her.

  People were ushered out, calm gradually returning, chairs stacked by parent-helpers.

  ‘Want a lift home, Maggie?’ Graham was at her side.

  She tried to shrug him off, keen to see the evening to its conclusion. Audrey and PC Small were leading Trothan and his parents into a corner, and she wanted to hear what was said.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Graham insisted, taking her arm.

  ‘Little devil,’ she heard from one of the departing parents behind her.

  ‘We won’t be expecting him back for the remaining days of the term,’ Audrey said to Nora before spinning on her heel away from the huddle around Trothan to oversee the return of order to the hall.

  Maggie just had time to see, before she was steered out, t
hat Trothan’s head was bent now, a shiver in his shoulders suggesting tears, and she felt it as a blow fisted into her own guts. The undisplayed map dangled limply from his hand.

  FIFTEEN

  She woke the next morning with a sense that someone else was in the house. Sunlight was seeping through the thin lining of the curtains and at midsummer that could mean anything later than three a.m. She looked at her watch and saw that it was six. Had she locked the door when she came in the night before? She couldn’t be sure, her habits had become so muddled. She lay still, listening, but there was nothing more than that initial sense of intrusion.

  She eased herself from the edge of the bed, imagining what Carol would say: ‘Why didn’t you just phone 999? Surely you keep the phone by the bed?’ Next, she’d be suggesting a gun. Then the events of the previous night came rushing back.

  Despite the idiocy of Carol’s fears, Maggie was aware of her heart cantering, obscuring the sounds that might be beyond her bedroom door. Making a quick search of the room, she grabbed the bulky hardback, Blaeu’s Atlas Maior, the only thing of any weight in the room. Holding it ahead of her, she left the bedroom, bare feet whispering down the corridor towards the glass sitting room door.

  As she approached, a small figure in a bright blue sweatshirt became visible. He’d chosen her. He’d come to her in what she assumed to be his trauma from the previous night. She could see him standing completely still and facing the chair on which the sealskin hung, his kelp-wild hair strung over his shoulders. By edging a little to the side, she saw through the glass that both his hands rested on the pelt so he almost seemed in communion with it.

  She let the Atlas hang down and opened the door quietly, coming to stand beside Trothan without either of them turning to look at the other.

  ‘So,’ she said quietly, towards his hands. ‘You’ve met my visitor.’ There was something rumpled and salty about both.

  He murmured a word or two that she didn’t catch.

  ‘God knows where it came from. I found it in my loft.’

  Trothan’s face was still down-turned but she could see trouble there, a resemblance to the pale boy at school who stayed up all night with his games. The almond-shaped eyes squinting slightly, red-rimmed. His sweatshirt smeared with green; hair rough; face sand-speckled. Child, she enunciated to herself, longing to reach out and give him a hug.

  ‘Trothan,’ she said, remembering his hilarity as he grappled with the gun. ‘You gave a lot of people a fright last night. You do realise that?’

  He carried on looking straight ahead.

  ‘Where did it come from? What were you doing with it?’ she asked, knowing that this wouldn’t help, but despite herself. ‘You didn’t really mean to...?’

  The long cardboard tube lay across the table.

  ‘Have you been carrying that around all night?’ she asked gently.

  He looked at her then, eyes piercing the fringe, his hand staying on the skin, stroking to and fro down the centre of what had been the seal’s face.

  ‘You’ve not been expelled, have you?’ She pictured him imprisoned somewhere in a boarding school instead of his life off the leash here. She realised she must stop asking him questions. Let him be, she told herself. Let him be.

  ‘I’ll make some hot chocolate. Have a lie down on the sofa if you like.’

  When she returned, the child had drawn the seal pelt around his shoulders as if it was a coat. The low morning light through the window silvered it, creating an animal litheness out of the union. She gathered the tail of the pelt that trailed the floor behind him and tucked it under Trothan’s arm. He grinned down at it. Then he looked up at her, pursed his lips and nodded. He started to walk almost trance-like towards the door as if she had given him permission.

  ‘Trothan,’ she called after him.

  His hand was on the door handle.

  ‘Have your hot chocolate first.’

  He was opening the door.

  ‘Do your parents know where you are?’

  He paused with the door open and half turned back. She felt an urgency to detain him, the same tight panic as when he disappeared in Rab McNicholl’s church; that clouded face seen through thick green water. Trothan and yet not Trothan.

  ‘And don’t forget your map,’ she picked the tube up from the table. But he was already out of the door. She saw his face, its odd flat profile, pass first one window, then the next. Something stopped her from following him, some recognition of a private intent that she couldn’t understand. He glided past the third window, drawn by something. Where was he going? Home, she hoped. His parents would be able to deal with this; should know him well enough. She didn’t have enough experience with children.

  But a minute or so later she saw a couple of flashes amongst the trees below her garden. Like the deer she saw running through there, the shimmer of silky light between trunks suggested speed; he must be heading for the sea.

  She considered phoning his parents but it was still so early. On the dot of seven, she dialled. The mother’s groggy morning voice eventually responded.

  ‘Nora,’ Maggie said. ‘It’s Maggie. The map woman.’ She couldn’t bring herself to use the word ‘lady’ as everyone else did.

  ‘Yes?’ An edge of anxiety.

  ‘It’s Trothan.’

  ‘About last night?’ Nora huffed.

  ‘He’s been here.’

  Silence.

  ‘This morning,’ Maggie said.

  There were a series of mutters. She heard the mother say: ‘Is he not in his room?’ Presumably to the father.

  Nora’s voice came back, urgent, penetrating: ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘I don’t know. I couldn’t stop him.’ Pathetic. She was pathetic. But how did his parents have so little control over him? ‘It looked like he hadn’t slept.’

  A tussle with the phone; clunks.

  Now the father’s voice, rough and direct. ‘When did he leave?’

  She looked at her watch. ‘Thirty minutes ago.’ Guilt beginning its tug.

  ‘Thanks for letting us know.’ A dialling tone. When she tried to call back there was no answer.

  Her trouser legs were wet with dew when she reached the tussocks at the back of the dunes half an hour later. Through the nick between them she saw a ‘V’ of sea and a spray-wet beach appearing, waves rearing. The wind was strong. She descended, wading up to her shins in the sand’s cold depths. On one quick glance up, she thought she saw a misted figure on the flat of sand out towards Dunnet. The figure reorganised everything around it visually, all the horizontals. When she looked up again, it had disappeared amidst the spray. Damn, she thought, could that have been him?

  She reached the beach, paused and gazed in both directions. She was on the no-man’s-land between the two villages, two promontories. She walked towards Dunnet. The wave-pulse and her rhythmic footsteps began to beat a calm back into her; her breath steadying her heart. Trothan would probably be at home now, getting cleaned up; eating breakfast. Although, she recalled, he would not be going off to school as usual.

  Her feet stayed on the landward side of the shoreline frill, leading her on a meandering path. Two dark round heads bobbed up, rolling with the swell. When they turned their heads, she saw that they had the long, wise noses of the grey seals that came to these waters, not the smaller common seals. They stayed alongside her, visible every now and again as they rose and fell beyond the surf.

  Once again, a long way away, near to the rocks at Dunnet but partly obscured in spray, she thought she saw another human figure. Then gone. She continued to walk, watching her feet, so that when she looked up and saw the man, a little shock fizzed through her.

  Maggie prepared her face, smiling up at him as if from a reverie when they were a few feet from each other, and was confused by his manner, focussed almost rudely on her.

  ‘Good morning,’ she called out, making a defence of good manners.

  His steps slowed, and so did hers, as if this was an intentional me
eting. He was a shortish, wide man, and faintly familiar. His eyes were blue and the skin around them was folded and wrinkled with laugh lines. Not that he was laughing now.

  ‘Lovely morning,’ she said to cover her embarrassment.

  ‘A midsummer walk?’ He looked at her and shuffled slightly. His face was weighted into fleshy folds.

  ‘I thought I was alone,’ she said.

  He hesitated a moment before breaking the awkwardness. ‘We know each other, already, in a way,’ he said.

  Had she met him in the pub, forgotten him in her whisky haze?

  ‘I’m Trothan’s Dad.’

  ‘Is he back home?’ she demanded, politeness forgotten.

  He looked vaguely over the top of her head, jowly and serious. He could have been taken for the boy’s grandfather. But then, Maggie thought, he matched the mother, in the sense of his age and having no visible resemblance to Trothan. She wondered from where the boy got his petite beauty.

  ‘You’re not looking for him, are you?’ he asked.

  ‘I was hoping he was on his way home when he left my house.’

  The father seemed to survey the beach himself now. He passed a hand over his face.

  ‘But you’re looking for him?’ she asked.

  The father looked out to sea and scanned the horizon as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘Likely we’ll not be seeing the lad today,’ he said.

  ‘Oh?’

  The father raised a hand in a small wave and turned, legs tick-tocking him away from her. He occasionally looked out to sea or back in her direction. But mostly he stared straight ahead, apparently striking out towards his breakfast. He didn’t look like a man with a missing son.

  She stood still on the sand watching him diminish and eventually disappear from sight. With nothing else to do, she turned for home.

  SIXTEEN

  The phone rang as soon as she got in. She rushed at it, her high intonation demanding something. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Richard here,’ the voice said. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yes.’