Call of the Undertow (16 page)

Audrey stood up at the front on a level with her congregation, strolling from one side of the front row to the other as she spoke some words of welcome. She said tonight was their chance to
celebrate some of the achievements of the school year, both personal and shared. She explained it was about diversity, not competition; that a few children’s names had been pulled from a hat
to present their favourite piece of work for the year.

‘Pulled from a hat’ was emphasised. Maggie guessed this was an attempt to quell the rage of parents whose children hadn’t been picked, and to emphasise the fairness of the
process.

Proceedings began. Children came up to the front to read from prepared scripts, their words a breathless torrent. A group of Primary Ones sang a song; a Primary Two girl talked about the hamster
they had jointly looked after while Mrs Burt projected photos onto a big screen of the creature being carried to various homes for weekends and holidays by proud children. People clapped
mechanically, glassy-eyed, but each performance was also greeted with smiles, camera flashes, even whoops of applause from one fragment of the audience.

Maggie’s skin felt sticky in the heat of the hall, her nose and arm flaming with one-sided sunburn. She should have brought a bottle of water. She looked around, caught sight of another
familiar figure: a man, tall and dark, with a boy of about twelve next to him who had a similarly long head and body. She suddenly realised it was PC Small, and then the short blonde woman who
should have been beside him fell into place. Anderson in her red trousers. Of course, Maggie realised, each of them belonged to the community, each had their own family lives. She supposed herself
an oddity being here without a child at the school. If she’d been a man, this would have provoked discomfort, perhaps even direct hostility.

Maggie noticed the damp dripping down the outside of the windows, a reminder of the grey wall of fog surrounding them; haar mingling with laundry steam. Midsummer fever lived on within the room
in sunburnt faces, bared skin; the pre-holiday simmer of the whole community. She saw a gull swoop past the window. It made her feel as though the school was adrift, soaring and wheeling above its
earthly footprint like the birds.

Then Trothan was on his feet in the aisle, swinging his wellies towards the front. The long map tube swung by his side almost weightily. The sight of his grin and a dark round eye peeking at her
as he passed raised her from her seat to stride after him.

They both took a place beside Audrey at the front.

‘Now,’ Audrey said. ‘The children from Primary Five have been doing their local studies projects and making maps. Trothan Gilbertson has also been developing his skills in his
own time.’

A muffled cough came from the direction of Debbie’s husband.

‘He’s going to put his map of the bay on the wall so you can go and have a close look afterwards.’

Trothan nodded away his fringe and smiled.

‘But first. Maggie Thame, our local cartographer who’s been helping him, will interview Trothan. We’re in your hands then,’ she said, turning and taking her seat next to
the Minister.

The audience was silent.

Trothan was slowly unstoppering the cardboard tube. After pulling out a long roll of paper, he peered back inside and then closed it again, leaning it against the laptop console. Then he raised
his arms, stretching the map between them in front of his face.

‘Good evening everybody,’ Maggie said to the mass of faces. She imagined how Carol would react if she could see her sister standing confidently in front of a crowd, nerves evaporated
by pride. As if with a drum-roll she announced: ‘So this is Trothan’s map.’

She looked sideways, seeing the final map for the first time. Although the paper was intricately marked, the bold curve of the bay remained clearly defined. Trothan continued to hold it up,
almost hiding, as the audience began to titter at the oddness of the spectacle. Maggie turned to Mrs Burt, and at a nod she projected the first slide behind their heads.

‘You can put it down now,’ Maggie whispered to Trothan. ‘It’s on the screen.’

Trothan dropped the paper map theatrically to his waist, revealing his grinning face. He rolled it up slowly. Maggie saw that the audience were all now looking behind them at the screen and
glanced back herself, struck again by how the drawing and writing formed an intricate lace across it, even across the water of the bay itself.

She smiled some reassurance at Trothan and then asked the first question, partly in Trothan’s direction and partly to the back row of seats, projecting her voice as she’d once been
taught on a presentation skills course. ‘Trothan, how long has this marvellous map taken you?’

He shrugged. ‘Since you visited us, I suppose.’

‘April. That’s very quick. Can you tell us about your methods. What were your main tools?’

In the front row Audrey smiled and nodded encouragement. Getting to the script at last.

But Trothan became theatrical again. He pointed down at his legs, pulled a pencil out of his pocket, gestured at his eyes. ‘And paper,’ he said.

A titter scuttled about the audience.

‘Did you draw the map straight off?’

‘I did lots of sketches from different places.’

She drew from him where the places were and how he got to them. She expected him to explain how he’d built the drawings up in layers and finally made this composite. But when she glanced
behind at the screen, she began to think he’d abandoned the composite approach, and simply started again, jamming together all his observations of whatever type into one enormous sketch-map.
She could see the front elevations of buildings like the church, and how the shapes of copses, hills, cliffs were suggested pictorially.

She’d already spotted the submerged Spitfire in the bay, and St Coombs church under the sand dunes, and asked, as an aside to the scripted questions: ‘So was it just what you could
see that interested you?’

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, that 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.