by Ellen Datlow
Over breakfast, with the sun slanting hard against the new mosaic floor and the marble work tops from Murray & Murray, Brian’ll blame the weather, Scottish Power, the Bloody Tories. Mum will nod. And we’ll all go on knowing that it’s Gramps.
• • •
When it’s bad, the lights flicker, dim. Go black. Nothing to do but suffer it. Nothing to see but dark and the red small glows ae fags. Stink squatting over your head. Diesel and smoke and bad hydraulics, old cackleberries and jock roast, shit and sweat. The heat like a morass, sucking you down, drowning you dry. Thick hot air that’s somehow thin. So thin it feels like breathing through a metal tube clogged with so much shite it makes you want to stop trying. Sometimes I can stand it. Most times I cannae. The bunk is too small, the overhead pipes too near, the metal floor a long drop down. Bangs and rattles and coughs. The far off shouts ae those on last dog. The nearer shouts ae coffin dreams. Thuds and creaks and groans. And all the fucking worse outside, swimming through the space between metal skins to roar bad whispers into the air vents next to our ears. Dinnae listen to them. Tell yourself it’s whales or fucking shit dumps, or the planesman thinking about counterpane hurdling with Betty Grable. Lie there and lie. Dinnae think about outside or inside. About the sky or sweet air. About needing to sit, to move, to breathe, to scream. About the flooding valves of the Q Tank opening up loud and quick. About the whistle wind in your ear going quiet. About those whispers and shouts roaring louder. About how much worse bad can get. Dinnae think.
Dinnae think.
• • •
It’s not often I’m wrong about Brian and Mum—normally they’re as predictable as bad clammy dark or a terrible night’s sleep—but today I am.
“We’ve brewed some coffee,” Mum says, soon as I make it into the kitchen. She looks worse than I feel: purple-black shadows against baggy tired skin, but I won’t feel sorry for her for long, I know. She’ll ruin it.
“Thanks.” I pick up the mug. It’s still hot. I ignore Brian and he ignores me. There’s not much in this house that can’t be ignored. You could say it’s our forte.
“He’s out there,” Mum says, nodding her head towards the big kitchen window. And that’s when I realise I was wrong about them. Even before she leans over the table, puts her hand over Brian’s hairy knuckles. “You’ve got to make him stop, Sarah.”
Outside is sunny but cold. It’s always cold. We’re nearly two miles from the docks, but the wind never stops, always smells of salt. Gramps is sitting on the stone bench next to the back door. From there you can see the whole garden, past the big lawn and wild borders down to the greenhouse and high fence at its end. You can’t see the house. I wonder sometimes if he hates it as much as I do. He’s had to live in it far longer than I have, after all.
He smiles when he sees me, grinds his not quite finished rollie under his heel. Its smoke lingers, tickles my sore throat. He looks more knackered than all of us put together. “Hey, Pinky.”
“Hey. I brought you some coffee.”
“Irish?”
“Gramps.”
He keeps on smiling even though he’s struggling with it now, can’t hold my gaze at the same time. “Guess the sun’s no’ quite over the yardarm yet, eh?”
I sit down next to him, pass him the coffee, wrap my cardigan tighter. “It’s barely over the back fence.”
He drinks for a while, and I let him. But when he stops, I turn, make him look at me. “Why are you out here?” Even though I know.
He shrugs. “I like big, hen.” He runs a finger under his red nose. “I like open.”
He lived on the streets for a while. How long, I don’t know. Mum went out for afternoon tea in the Roxburgh, and she and her friends passed him begging outside Waverley Station. She got on her train, waited for all her pals to get off, and then she went back to get him. He never told me any of that, but Mum did, like it was something to be proud of. Her furtive rescue. She knew he had this place, of course. Maybe thought it was going begging, too. Turns out she was mostly right.
“It’s okay to not want to be in there,” I say. Sitting on this bench, you might not be able to see the house, but you can still feel it. Big, wide, high, and freezing bright—redbrick sandstone and Georgian bar windows. And small, narrow, low, clammy dark. It makes the hairs on my skin stand up straight and stay that way. “It’s okay to be scared of what you—”
“D’you ken in America, there’s such a thing as a breastaurant?”
“Gramps. Come on.”
He’s not really my grandfather. He’s the bachelor brother of Mum’s dad, so a great uncle, although he’s been Gramps to me just as long as I’ve been Pinky to him. The radio maintainer on a boat, he told me, is one of the most important jobs of them all. Before we moved in permanently—Mum, Brian, and me—I’d spend hours at the big table in the kitchen, helping Gramps fix up old wirelesses and CBs, while he taught me how to Jackspeak. I was the bait that they dangled; the grandchild he’d never imagined he could have. I think I probably knew that even then. I think Gramps probably did too.
He sets down his mug, leans forward, hangs his fists between his legs. “Crows make everything sound sinister, you ever notice that, hen? Bad creepy, like something’s about to take a big old hold ae you, and you cannae see whit.”
The crow is in our only tree: a big gnarly thing that grows big gnarly apples we never eat. The bird blinks at us, gives another scornful caw before taking off for next door in loud, vicious flaps. And I shiver, try not to care that Gramps is pretty much right, because he only said it—same as the breastaurant thing—to shut me up, to shove me left instead of right.
“On a boat, every fucking thing sounds like that,” he says, proving me wrong yet again. “Whales, skimmers. Pretty much anything upstairs. Sunshine pills.” He snorts at that. Takes one hand out of its fist to draw it loud against his stubble.
“Bombs,” I say, even though I know full well what they are. “Depth charges.”
He looks back at the empty tree. “Loud or quiet, that’s all it ever is. Hot or cold. Dull as watching paint dry or so fucking scary you forget your own name.”
Normally, it takes him a long time to get to this point. Normally, he tells me about being a fisherman in the fifties and sixties instead. Funny stories about being drunk on duty, or smuggling whisky and fags, or fishing illegal fish in illegal places. Sticking it to the Coast Guard and the Port Authority. But maybe he feels it too. All that clammy, rank dark creeping into the day, creeping into our skin. He isn’t fit enough to go down to the mission on Leith Docks every day anymore, and I know that’s made a difference, even though it’s a shit hole. Even though nearly every submariner he’s known is dead. Once a year at Christmas they’d present him with a bottle of Sailor Jerry rum, an old joke that stuck even though he only ever touches Old Navy, and his dad, a determined Irish Catholic, christened him Gerald. Nicknames are like long memories, hen, he told me once, every jack has one. He didn’t like the rum and he didn’t like the mission. He just didn’t ever want to be here, that was all.
“And you’re lying on your bunk—which isnae your bunk ’cause it smells ae the other dozen ratings whose bunk it is too when they’re no’ on tricks—boiling hot and stinking raw, listening to all them creaks, the whistle wind ae the wee vent next to your ear; praying it’ll no’ stop tormenting you ’cause that’ll be something bad, something worse; hearing the oppo next to you or above you or below you screaming that the donkshop is flooding or a steel fish is chasing him. ’Cause lying in them bunks is like lying in the ground with worse than six feet ae dirt above you, even afore you’re deep and diving, holding your breath on Silent Routine, while the pings ae fucking skimmers echo round and round, getting louder and closer, and you cannae speak, you cannae breathe, you cannae move, you cannae turn, so you put your hand against that cold whistle wind, and think ae the few metres of black, drowned space between it and the thin metal skin keeping everything else out, and you—”
“Gramps
,” I say, pressing my palm hard against the shake of his hands, squeezing his fingers. “Not like that. You know not like that. Not you I.” Because he uses that you to water down what happened to him. He uses it to hide, to distance himself. To pretend maybe that nothing ever happened to him at all. And that isn’t just a bad idea now, it’s a dangerous one.
He squeezes briefly back. Closes his eyes. He goes on shaking, and it’s like his whole body is vibrating. The bench too. He used to be so much more than this. Sometimes, I lie in bed, unable to sleep even on good nights, and wonder what it’s like to get older, smaller, less in this horrible house. Sometimes I feel horribly certain I’ll find out.
“Christ, I used to be able to spin a good dit,” he says, trying to smile. “No’ much else to do but play cards, listen to records, smell your own armpits, or spin a good story. The donkshop boys used to pay me in bum nuts and Nelson’s blood, and I’d wax wild about anything wet. Heligoland Bight, Nautilus, New Atlantis.” He smiles bigger. “Moby Dick if they’d a mind to listen to a story about topside swabbies.”
I try to smile too. “Donkshop is the engine room,” I say, making it sound like a question, even though he knows I know. “And you were an engine room artificer.”
“I ken whit I was, hen,” he says, but he says it gently. In amongst all of his old Nat Geo s are books about the Mediterranean U-boat Campaign; smudged and brittle papers and logs and blueprints jammed between their pages and dust jackets. Trying to interpret them is like trying to read Latin: some of it you can guess, and the rest is an exotic lexicon that’s really a brick wall. What I care about the most, what I’ve studied the most, are the pages of deck plans and cutaways, the frantic arrows and asterisks that Gramps has scrawled all around the dull, smudged margins. And one acronym that appears again and again, scribbled ugly and hard, sometimes all the way through the paper. DFG.
Gramps swallows. “HMS Torque was one ae the first T class diesel-electrics. Nearly three hundred feet and a thousand-long tons. Eight bow torpedo tubes, two amidships, forty-caliber deck gun. Maximum operational diving depth ae three hundred feet; estimated crush depth ae six hundred and twenty-six. Fifty-seven crew. She was my first station, first posting. Third ae May, 1939.”
He knows I’ve heard all of this before too, but this is just how he does it, how he gets around to doing it. Like he’s getting ready to lance an infected boil that will only recur again in a few days. In the worst kind of way, he is.
“War hadnae started yet, didnae look to us like it was going to and no one told us any different.” He shrugs. “She was a good boat, ken? Brand new. Course we were only in the Gare Loch then. Didnae quite appreciate whit sharing the same space with gear and food and mould and roaches and fifty-six other jacks who last had a shower or decent shit three months ago would be like. Or whit living under the sea and the worse on top does to you.” He swallows again. “Fear, ken? It’s like a virus. It’s in the stinking air you breathe, and you cannae escape it ’cause it’s the only fucking air you’ve got.”
“Gramps—”
“Aye, I ken,” he says, scowling, pissed off. Whether at himself or me I can’t tell. “Not you Me. I.” He takes back his hands, studies their palms. “I was a Back Afty. Back Afties always worked the most and shortest watches ’cause the heat in the fag end is like a bog. Thick and wet and it chokes you just about dead. We’d poke Charlie at the weapons guys, the Fore Endies, swaggering about like the fucking heroes ae the hour. Always having a weed on about something.” He glances at me and tries to smile again; this time it nearly works. “Ask me, there’s never been much skill in feeding steel fish into tubes. We were the ones kept us alive every single day. Bloody front cun—” He closes his mouth so fast, I hear the snap of his teeth.
“I’m twenty-two, Gramps,” I say, and my smile works better now too. The wind has picked up, bitter with the sea and the cold. It scours my lungs clean. “I’ve heard that word a few times before.”
“Aye, well. No’ from me you havnae.” He stops, breathes deep too. Behind us, the house has shrunk smaller, quieter. “I had a few good mates on the Torque. Even afore the sea trials started. Donkshop oppos got to ken each other pretty damn quick, whether we wanted to or no’. Chief Sto was a good steady guy from Lerwick; went by Scurs, on account ae his beard. Every boat wants a good steady Sto and a good steady Jimmy, ’cause they’re the ones calculate and set the trim afore diving. Get that wrong and it’s so long and thanks for the fish.
“The chief chief was an arsehole called Dogs. He was pusser-built, ken? Every fucking thing by the book. And a face like a seaboot—just this blank, black stare, like all he lived for was to give you a scrubbing. He’d hand out double watches and take your mess share like he was giving a black dog for a white monkey, and that was bad news for me all right, ’cause back then I had about as much respect for authority as I did for lassies or wars.”
He sounds breathless now, as if he thinks he’s running out of time. Or air.
“Hibee was one ae the electrical mechs. I shared a hot bunk in the starboard corner ae the third compartment with him and another ERA called Tug. Top rack under the aft ventilation pipes. Shittiest bloody bunk going. We all came from the same part ae town. Turned out we even went to the same school. We’d spend hours just talking, bleating, chewing the fat.” He finally stops, squeezes his hands back into fists, stares hard down the length of the garden. “Tug had a wife and two girls. Hibee was going to get married in the summer. Glasgow Fair. They were good mates to me. They were good. . . .”
When he lets go of his fists I see that the ends of his fingers have gone blue. I lean against him, bump his shoulder. “Come on, keep going. Talk to me.”
“For Christ’s sake, lassie. It doesnae help.”
“It does. You know it does.” I leave out the sometimes. Neither of us needs to hear that. “What is DFG?”
His intake of breath is sharp, loud. “Whit?”
“DFG. What does it mean?” I’ve never asked him this before. Don’t know if it’ll help or hurt. But needs must. I see the moment when he realises I must have seen his scribbles on those deck plans and cutaways, because his shoulders relax, his breath exhales in a frozen cloud.
“Deep, Fast, Green. It’s a watch handover.” He snorts. “Means ‘All Is Well.’ ”
“And?”
“And whit?”
“Why is it important?”
“It isnae.”
“Come on, you promised you’d try.” Even though he didn’t. “Why did you write it all over those plans? Why is it important?”
He shrugs again, but it turns into a shiver. “It’s just something I do. Something I did.”
It starts to rain. Not hard—soft slow smurry that’s nearly sleet. We should go in, I know. But right now, I’m still not sure which is the more dangerous: out here or in there.
“Every rack had a locker. One cubic foot. Second day I was on the Torque, I got a penknife and scratched DFG inside its metal door. That’s all. For good karma, good luck, whitever.” He gives me an unexpectedly wry smile. “Didnae work.”
“It’s really cold, Gramps. We should get you back inside.”
This time when he looks at me, his tired grey eyes are fierce. “You shouldnae have to be here, doing this. Looking after an old man like me.”
“Gramps.”
“You should be at that fancy law school on South Bridge.”
I avoid having to look at him by making a big production of our getting up off the bench, covering both of our heads with my cardigan as the rain turns heavier.
“I’m serious, hen,” he says, louder, snappier. “You shouldnae have—”
“There’s no money, you know that. That’s all.”
“I’ve got money,” he says, because we’ve had this conversation many times before too. There already is money—enough that I don’t qualify for either a bursary or crisis grant—but Mum and Brian are about as likely to take over the care of Gramps as loan any of it to
me.
“I don’t want your money. And I do want to look after you.”
He’s stiff after sitting so long in the cold. He winces and limps his way back to the door.
“This gives me time. To be sure it’s what I want. And until I am—or not—I can save just about all the money I’m earning in the King’s Arms, can’t I?”
He stops, smiles. “Backing and filling—that’s good, Pinky. You argue a convincing case.” His voice goes quieter. “You should be in school.”
“I’m fine, Gramps. I promise.”
He limps up the steps, pushes open the back door with only the slightest of hesitations. “I’m sorry, lassie.” He doesn’t sound sorry. He sounds mad. Maybe that’s how he’s able to keep on opening that back door. He’s always been grumpy, impatient, cantankerous. He keeps three bags of M&S sausage rolls in the freezer for his future wake: calls them his fancy horse doovers, with DO NOT TOUCH printed big on three bigger labels—and he checks on them every day to be sure. On his ninetieth birthday, he got drunk on rum and pink gin and squared up enough to Brian that we didn’t see him again for nearly a week. Fucking Big OD, Gramps calls him. Which I know is the very worst thing you can be christened on a submarine, even if he refuses to tell me what it means.
Inside the warmer scullery, he turns, takes hold of my hands and my gaze and keeps hold of them hard. “I’m sorry.”