Call of the Undertow (14 page)

Debbie’s voice again. A question this time.

‘For up there, the church.’

Another question.

‘To scare off they snooping bastards, eh, Brutus.’

This time the scrabbling was accompanied by the sound of things scattering on the floor and then Debbie’s voice rising, her words now discernible: ‘Get him out of here, he’s
too big.’

The door opened and the male voice faded. ‘Fuck’s sake, Brutus. You’ll pull my arm out its socket.’

The door closed and peace resumed.

Maggie pictured a kind of thorny stockade going up around the church.

As soon as she got home she went to lie down on the bed but woke at a noise. She jumped up, barefoot and slightly shaky, and walked through to the main room. At the glass door,
she saw two figures in peaked caps and black combat jackets, a stripe of checked fluorescent across each chest. Police. They must’ve knocked.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked, flinging open the door.

‘Nothing to worry about. This is PC Anderson and I’m PC Small, Community Police’, the man said. ‘Sorry to disturb you.’

Maggie couldn’t help noticing how ridiculous they looked side-by-side as she waited, still breathing her dreams, to hear what they’d come for. He was tall, dark and thin, and had to
stoop to come through the door when Maggie invited them in – PC Small. Anderson was short, blonde and wide.

The presence of authority figures agitated in Maggie both a juvenile and a submissive streak; simultaneously giggly and guilty. She went to make coffee. It gave her a few minutes; the flood of
caffeine settling her back into daylight and adulthood.

They seemed reluctant to speak at first, as if waiting for her.

‘It was probably time to come and say hello anyway.’ PC Small – the tall one – was leaning against the sealskin draped over the back of his seat, but not apparently
noticing it.

‘Oh?’ She felt confused. What did that ‘anyway’ refer to? An innate sense of guilt gathered momentum.

‘You’ve not long moved to the area, is that right?’

‘Three or four months,’ she said.

Small nodded. Anderson, her hands cupped around one black-trousered knee, was leaning back, gazing around the room.

‘You’ll be finding your way around, getting to know a few folk? It’s a friendly wee place, I hope you’ve found.’

She nodded.

‘Takes a few years to get familiar with all its characters.’ Small turned to his accomplice and they both laughed. ‘Most people rub along fine. We just get the odd crime to
sort out – mostly untaxed cars, that kind of thing.’

So that was it. She glanced through the window to the Volvo with the lapsed tax disc. ‘I haven’t been using my car, not really, that’s why...’

‘I assume you know the Gilbertsons? They’re friends of yours?’ Anderson cut her short.

She looked up sharply. Had something happened? ‘Trothan, the boy, yes.’

They looked at her silently.

‘Would you mind describing your connection to Trothan?’

Maggie resisted the irritating memory this brought of Carol’s line of questioning. ‘Friend, I suppose.’

‘Friend?’ Both looked at her quizzically.

‘Well, I’ve been helping him. I’m a cartographer and he’s very interested in maps. I’m helping him.’

The man continued. ‘And where do you help him?’

‘He comes here.’

She felt rather than saw their raised eyebrows.

‘When does he come here? How often?’

‘Several times a week.’ She didn’t want to admit that it was daily.

‘An arrangement with his parents, I imagine?’ Small said. ‘Childminding?’

She struggled. ‘Well, not officially or anything. But you could describe it like that. Working parents and so on.’

She sweated and her hands were hot. She sat on them. It was as if the officers saw something slightly distasteful in her intent towards the boy.

‘It’s just that we’ve had a few comments about his wanderings.’

‘Oh?’

‘Not quite as strong as complaints, but almost.’

Maggie frowned. ‘He’s pretty harmless, isn’t he? A child?’

‘That’s not really the point. People sometimes see it as trespass.’

‘Who’s been complaining? About where?’ Maggie challenged.

‘I should make it clear,’ Small continued, ‘that this is an informal visit, advisory, there won’t be any records kept.’

‘Advising whom?’

‘Just to let you know,’ Anderson chipped in. ‘So you’re in the picture too.’

Maggie looked from one to the other. ‘So who’s been complaining?’

‘He’s been seen at various places, including the Gatehouse Lodge, and some building sites near the village. It’s been suggested to us that you might have been encouraging the
boy.’

‘I have indeed. He’s an excellent draughtsman.’

‘In his explorations,’ Anderson corrected.

She recalled something she’d said to Trothan just the week before about a gap on his map: ‘Do you think the early mapmakers would have left blank spaces on the map rather than march
on past every PRIVATE sign?’ She’d talked to him again about Timothy Pont walking the whole wild, roadless kingdom and having to deal with hostile people, being robbed and harassed but
never allowing himself to despair or to stop his sketching. Did that make her responsible? She thought then of Rab McNicholl’s words about ‘they snooping bastards’. Perhaps she
and Trothan had been seen at the church the other evening.

‘Quite apart from anything else, these are dangerous places,’ Small said.

‘Shouldn’t it be his parents you’re talking to, then?’

‘As long as you stick to public places, you’ll be fine.’

‘“You”?’

‘Sorry?’

‘You said “you”. I thought we were talking about Trothan.’

Small put down his coffee cup and got up, unfolding himself towards the ceiling. Anderson hastily slurped the rest of hers, and followed suit.

‘Thanks for the coffee,’ Small said, giving her a polite smile.

Maggie remained sitting for a moment. She wasn’t quite sure what she was being accused of or who was issuing the warning.

As they stood there, looking at her, she heard the dry crunch of tyres on the gravel. Through the window she saw Jim’s refrigerated van turn into the drive behind the police car, lurch to
a stop and reverse.

‘Expecting a delivery?’ Small asked, grinning.

Anderson’s radio started to crackle. She indicated the door and let herself out.

Small put his hat on, was looming, apparently leaving, when he turned in the doorway. ‘Do you mind me asking why you moved here?’

‘To live,’ her lips felt rigid against her teeth.

‘Wouldn’t have anything to do with Lizzy Ginner, would it?’

When she didn’t answer, he left.

Winded, she saw him shut the door, pass all the windows, and heard the car reverse out of the drive and rumble off along the lane. She sat still for a long time not quite able to remove herself
from the Oxford street he had evoked, lined with parked cars.

Maggie never knew what had transfixed the child; what she had seen on the far side of the road. Perhaps it had simply been a bird pecking at a rowan berry or a cat, resembling the girl’s
own fat ginger ‘Orlando’, caught by fear high in the branches of a tree.

The warning had started as a word; the girl’s name perhaps. The mother’s rebuke. A sharp cry that came clattering in through the open car window.

Maggie had turned the wheel to the right, an impulse to cut the child off, to squeeze between the gap. The brakes squealed. But the child was moving too fast. Maggie veered left and that was
when the car careered into a skid, the driver’s wing leading the direction of travel straight down the broken white line.

The mother’s word never finishes. Her cry rises on the second syllable. In volume. In pitch. It stretches on, hurtling towards the sound Maggie forever refuses to hear.

In the days after Nora came and took him away, Trothan didn’t turn up at Flotsam Cottage. Having picked away at her work for months, the first set of atlas proofs were
due with Richard in just over a week’s time. There was still quite a lot to do. It wasn’t that she hadn’t taken it seriously, but somehow working out of the office made the whole
project seem less real. It was approaching midsummer now, and the extensive daylight seemed to promise scope for long hours of work.

Her graphic to show the expansion of Lagos was only a small fraction of her outstanding work and yet it preoccupied her. The more she read about the city, the more complex the story seemed.
Contained by a seafront, comprised of sinking islands and a mainland divided by a many-headed lagoon, the city was said to draw 6,000 new people to live in it daily. She couldn’t think of a
way to represent its attraction. Despite some developments in water supply, electricity, transport and housing, the infrastructure surely couldn’t keep pace. The mesmerised immigrants settled
on its peripheries and on the margins of canals and railway lines; teetered on stilts above swamps. They might build homes from driftwood, tin and cardboard or inhabit high rises and work for
multinational companies.

She pictured these people vanishing into the fattening giant of the city. It conjured images of a cannibalistic beast from a medieval map; images that had been commonly reserved for the African
continent, instilling dark superstition and prejudice in European minds. One contemporary map she’d seen isolated the sixteen districts of the city, and their arrangement suggested a huge
animal head – the lagoon its great open mouth, Lagos island its lolling tongue. Agege was the eye; Ifako Ijaye its pricked ear; Eti Osa the long protruding lower jaw. It was tempting to see
the city as a devouring beast, cannibalising the rest of Nigeria.

She played God with Google Earth in her attempts to come up with an answer. The lagoon appeared slick grey as if running with oil; the aerial view partially obscured by smog. She wanted to get
down there, crackle her feet amongst garbage, feel the squeeze of heat amidst the honking lanes of stationary traffic. But it pixellated into obscurity when she tried to draw too close.

Any kind of opportunity was available there, it seemed from her reading; a chance to be any kind of person. Designer shoes and sunglasses were on offer to village folk, albeit fake ones. Taking
a leaf from Trothan’s book, she was tempted to depict the city’s lure as a Pied Piper, leading multitudes through a doorway in a hillside with a promise of transformation. But the Pied
Piper story would be meaningless to Nigerian High School students, as might Greek Sirens.

Richard encouraged her away from explanations of the city’s attraction.

‘Just find a nice clear way of showing the population growth since the oil boom of the 60s,’ he said.

But she knew ‘the population growth’ was more than facts and figures, even if there had been any sure ones, and she began to see that the accuracy of a map was more than geographic
– it needed to be accurate about hidden and psychological matters too. It needed to spark up imaginations. Lagos remained mysterious and elusive to her. A city that was its own mythical
country.

In the first day or two that she dedicated herself to her work, the sealskin’s watchful presence distracted her. She decided to put it in the garden out of her sight. Its fur seemed risen
and rough when she picked it up. She carried it to the door, but when she saw that it was raining, didn’t feel she could abandon it to the elements and so returned it to the chair. The sun
shone the next day, and when she put her fingers to the fur it had relaxed into silky softness. She sprang away from it; an animate, living barometer. Left it where it was.

Her work kept her indoors. The threatening visit from the police and all it had stirred up nagged at her. She waited for Trothan to reappear, and when he didn’t, she wondered if he was
ill. It even crossed her mind that he’d run away. Perhaps the police had given him a ticking off too. If she left the house, she locked the door against intruders, but was anxious that
Trothan might arrive when she was out. She left notes for him taped to the door, but they were still there when she got home. She was fairly sure it was simply that Nora was clawing him back.

When Audrey phoned it felt like a small victory. Trothan’s map had been randomly picked for the end of year showcase for parents. As Maggie had been helping him with it, would she be
willing to do a double act for his five minute presentation?

‘We really mean five minutes,’ Audrey warned. ‘You get your head cut off if it’s any longer. I’m sure I can rely on you to keep the lad straight.’

‘I’d be delighted,’ Maggie said.

‘I know they’re a bit tedious, these events, but if you could bear it we’d be very grateful.’

Maggie heard it as confirmation of her special place in Trothan’s life. ‘What about his parents?’ she asked.

There was a pause. ‘Well, they’ll be there, I’m quite sure,’ Audrey said.

As if they were proud of him, thought Maggie, but hesitated to put Audrey right.

She’d never had an opportunity for vicarious pride in a child before. Fran and Jamie had always been so protected by their parents that they had been distant to her. And anyway at the
particular time that she was with them every weekend, she’d been distant to everything.

Trothan’s absence made her anxious about how they’d prepare for the event. She worried about it enough that she fortified herself to phone his parents, but when she did, there was no
answer. She visualised his map; what she knew of it. As the process had gone on, he seemed to have become more secretive and she’d seen less and less of it. She longed to ask what yet another
sheet of film he’d requested was for; an eighth layer. When she’d last seen him, he hadn’t yet started on the composite version of the map. All these uncertainties seemed to add
to the more usual stress of a deadline looming for her own work, just the day after the school showcase.

Raising her head more than once at a sound from outside, she looked out of the window to anticipate his approach, and sat down frowning again when there was only an empty path. She wanted to
collude with him; to foresee how he would impress Audrey, the school, his parents; and to make sure he wasn’t being intimidated out of his explorations.