Call of the Undertow (17 page)

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 meeting. 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.

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.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘I was just phoning to check we’re still on course for the end of the day.’

‘Yes,’ she said mechanically. ‘The proof pages will be with you by five o’clock. They’re not ready yet, but they will be.’ It seemed irrelevant now but
efficiency was a habit.

‘Great. I’ll get back to you with the edits within a week, then you’ve still got a week before you submit. You’ve got enough time today?’

‘I’ve got the whole day.’ She seemed to be reassuring herself that it was still possible to turn things around within it.

‘The longest day,’ he said. ‘And a lovely one.’

‘Lovely?’

‘Lovely here,’ he said, ‘is it raining there?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s sunny. Hot day. Wild sea.’

‘Odd,’ he said.

After she put the phone down she turned on the computer, stared at its illuminating face for a while, made a few notes. But it wasn’t long before she was standing at the window,
wondering.

She set out on her bicycle not really knowing where she was going. She just had to be looking. She kept reminding herself that he could just be hiding; lying low. She repeated it to herself like
a mantra. Across the fields, inland, were numerous wartime look-outs and bunkers, underground hide-outs into which a boy could disappear. But there were also many hazards. Images jostled in her
head: Trothan lying as still as the rubble below him after falling through a roof or floating face down in the harbour.

Her own memories were simultaneously raised to swing on a gantry, slicked grey with salt-mud, like the debris in tidal rivers near towns. Supermarket trolleys, discarded dolls, bicycle wheels
dredged up so their lines clarified as they dripped.

She remembered how once, as a child, she’d felt excluded by Carol and her friends who’d come to play. Maggie had climbed into the coal bunker and earthed herself into its darkest
corner, waiting for the family to notice her absence. She finally started to hear her name being called, footsteps passing. Utterly miserable, coal-dusted and tear-smeared, she’d emerged
voluntarily, expecting a rapturous welcome, only to be shouted at by her mother, and have her face roughly scrubbed with a flannel. She was then sent to her room.

She understood the reaction better now and recalled how an hour or so later her mother had come in with a glass of warm milk and a chocolate biscuit.

When she reached the harbour, she left her bike and took the path through the old flagstone works, wandering between stone linings and walls which surfaced craggily through grass; relics from a
prosperous past. The whole place was on the creep. There were concealed shafts and tunnels and signs warning you to stick to the paths. Three cats were skulking, round-backed, on top of a wall.
Sinister and thuggish even in broad daylight, they guarded their territory as if gatekeepers of some kind of underworld.

‘Where is he?’ She wanted to say to them. ‘And where’s everyone else?’ It was well after nine now, when the morning should have been in full swing, and yet
everywhere seemed deserted.

But at the harbour Mobility Man was parked up – a fluorescent flare next to the bench where she and Carol had met him before. He sat gripping the scooter’s handlebars, cigarette
dangling at the corner of his mouth. When she approached, he gestured at her to sit down.

She shook her head, the wind batting at her bicycle as she held it up. ‘I’m looking for someone.’

He nodded.

‘A boy,’ she added.

His nod this time was barely discernible.

‘You haven’t seen him, have you?’

A slight jerk in his neck indicated a question.

‘Trothan,’ she said. ‘Trothan Gilbertson. You haven’t seen him, have you?’

He shook his head quite clearly now. She got back on her bicycle.

‘It’s that time of year,’ he said just as she was about to push off. His hands came off the handlebars and parted wide, as if demonstrating expansion.

‘Sorry?’

He nodded towards the heaving sea, then looked up towards the sky. ‘All that light,’ he said slowly.

She thought perhaps he was right, that any child would avoid school on such a day as this. But perhaps he hadn’t heard yet what had happened last night. Trothan was in disgrace, excluded
from school for pointing a gun at the fisherman who might be Mobility Man’s son.