The Undertow

by Jo Baker

  “Temple? No. You mean the hospital.”

  “Hospital?”

  “Military hospital. Left over from the Crimea. That’s what all them crates are for. Medical supplies.” He nods towards the cluster of men in their greyish-green uniforms; the pimpled pink faces of the soldier boys. “For them lot. Just in case Annie gets in a sneaky one.”

  A sneaky one? Just in case? William’s eyes blink shut. The bar noise flares hard and loud, the voices, the shouts and calls and laughs and curses and coughs of the men. He thinks, the trade in carnage that must pass through this tiny island, to make them need to build a hospital like that.

  He opens his eyes, watches Sully drink; expression bland, not a flicker. Sully does this: makes him laugh, makes him like him, then makes him shudder. He’s a dog. That’s how come he can do what he does and then just forget about it. A dog doesn’t think, it just does, it just is; sometimes good and sometimes bad, whatever suits it at the time. A man, a good man, doesn’t behave like that.

  He loves Amelia. Of course he loves her.

  But.

  The stream of dark-coated men, trailing through the candleworks’ doors, and him in his dark coat walking up to join them, and disappearing into the black and white and grey, into the dark.

  Hush, love, please.

  His eyes narrow, head heavy, the smoke twines around him. The scent somehow reminds him of the hooded women: they ghost past through his mind’s eye; and the market girls, their eyes skimming over him as if he wasn’t there. And the men in their blue workclothes, who played at dice; who looked up, and looked away, as if just a breeze had passed over them, a breath of air.

  We’re just shadows here, he thinks. Shadows. We come and go unnoticed as the gulls.

  He lifts his head and watches the whore. The pretty one. The one Sully had. The way she sits, elbow on the counter, cigarette lolling from her hand. She turns, catches someone’s eye. Smiles. William glances along her eyeline, to see who she’s looking at. It’s one of the Scots. A young lad: he stares back at her slack-jawed, hungry; hands in his pockets. There’s a rash of spots across his chin. The lad’s pasty fingers will be grubbing around in his pockets for money; in a minute he’ll be counting out the coins on his palm. William looks back to the woman. There are deep lines down from her nose towards the corners of her lips, and they deepen as she smiles.

  He wants her. He can’t help wanting her.

  But he can leave. Buy a postcard. See the city. Write.

  She tilts her head. Runs a finger down one edge of her wrap, where it lies over the curve of her collarbones and dips down between her breasts. He tries to think of Amelia, how he’d imagined her before they were married, when she was the girl that he was waiting for. But he just recalls the red lines pinched into her skin by stays. The way she turns her head away.

  There’s a grain of guilt; a gritty nub of it. That’s all. He stubs out his cigarette.

  “Give me a thing, Sul,” he says.

  Sully stills his glass, looks up at him. Gives him a slow grin. “Well I never.”

  “Just give me one, eh?”

  “Not brought your own?”

  William swallows dryly. “Please.”

  Sully raises his eyebrows, reaches into his pocket, draws out a chalky disk of rubber. Skims it across the table to William, who pockets it.

  “Wash it out after, eh.”

  William nods, drains his glass in one swallow. He feels the scrape of his chair as he pushes away from the table, and as he stands up his head swims. He turns and walks steadily towards her. She notices him. She turns towards him, and smiles. Not at the eyes.

  Upstairs it is bright. High windows with dusty white curtains. It seems strange that it is still day. She speaks in English, but her accent is strong and he is blurred with drink.

  “What you want?” she asks him.

  “You know.” He juts his chin at her, at her body.

  “You want the whole business.”

  He nods, swallows, takes out a handful of sterling, and she looks it over, scoops it into her dry little hand.

  “That’s good. We can fuck.”

  The word makes him harder, clears his head. He watches her backside as she crosses the room, clatters the money into a tin box on the dresser. Her feet are slim, beautiful, dirty on the bare boards.

  She comes back. Moves in close. She smells of Parma Violets and tobacco and other men. She unties her wrap. Underneath she wears a whitish slip. She takes his hand and leads him over to the bed. She sits him down and he sinks into the mattress and lies back and his head spins. She steps astride him, and the bedsprings jangle but she doesn’t seem to mind. Underneath the slip she is naked. She lets the straps slide down her shoulders and the slip crumples down and her breasts are small, her nipples dark. His calluses snag against her skin. It is a miracle, a simple perfect miracle, that money can buy him this. He heaves himself up and kisses her breasts. She lets him. He dips his fingers into the wet of her, and she doesn’t stiffen. She lets him.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  She is busy unbuttoning him.

  “I’ve got this,” he says, remembering, rifling in his pocket.

  “Okay good.”

  She takes the rubber from him, scrolls it down his cock. It’s as much as he can do to stop himself spilling in her hands.

  The cathedral is long and dim and smoky with incense and candles. He walks down the aisle, holding himself upright, attempting discipline, though his head reels with drink. Black-clothed women kneel at the front, heads covered; he can hear the mutter of their rosaries. He stumbles, grips the back of a pew. The noise is loud in the hollow of the nave. One of the women lifts her head but doesn’t turn to look. He shuffles into the pew, sits down.

  He ducks his head down, grips his hands together.

  God.

  Dear God.

  He really tries, articulating each word carefully in his mind.

  Forgive my sins. Forgive my weaknesses. Forgive me.

  His head spins worse with his eyes shut. His mouth is too full of spit. He’s going to spew. He swallows, opens his eyes. The air seethes with the dim flickering lights of the candles, and the women’s muttering and the smell of incense. Then his eyes shift into focus and he’s looking at the pillar just beside him: a stone skull grimaces at him above crossed bones. He tries to look away but his eyes snag on the empty sockets of another carved skull, and then another. A whole column of them, writhing and grinning and staring and rising up and up and up into an arch, high overhead, and his head whirls and reels and he closes his eyes, and he thinks, Amelia.

  He gets up from his seat, rushes for a side door, wanting openness, air. But he stumbles into a smaller room, empty, ringing out with his footsteps. Up ahead is a painting. Figures pooled in light. A struggle. He finds his balance, swallows down the greyness in him.

  Vast, dark, the picture fills a whole wall of this side chapel.

  His head swims to a standstill. He looks at the painting.

  He stares at the figures; at their positions, drapings, flesh. St. John the Baptist, the poor bleeder. His neck is slit wide open. They’re going to take his head clean off. Of course they are. They have to. It’s their job. He steps closer, peering. Even through the blur of drink he can almost feel the resistance of the flesh to the knife, the hot blood on the dust, the slackening, trailing limbs. He feels the queasy wait of the maidservant, and the fascinated jeering horror of the other prisoners. He sees the way the blood trickles out from its pool to spell out a name. He peers closer. A capital F., and then what looks like Michel. And then the blood just trails away.

  This is not a holy picture, William thinks. This is not a holy place. There’s too much dirt and dark and blood: this is all too human.

  He thinks, there’s no God, no guidance, no forgiveness here.

  From where he sits, in the Barrakka Gardens, he can see the fleet riding low and grey in the Grand Harbour. The shallows are pop-bottle blue, the deep harbour wa
ter is as blue as medicine bottles where it’s shadowed by the ships. In the afternoon heat, boys are swimming naked in the harbour, basking on the rocks.

  His head bangs. His mouth tastes of wine and Parma Violets and acid. His fingers still smell of her.

  He looks at the picture postcard. A hand-tinted photograph of the Grand Harbour, with inked-in blue sky and yellow stone. The old Crimean hospital in the background. He’s already stamped it, addressed it. He just needs to write something now.

  He knows she’ll like it, though. It’s pretty.

  He licks the pencil’s lead.

  Thank you for your letter, which came in today’s bag. I am well, thank you, and

  Movement makes him glance up. A boy is splayed in the air, like a frog in mid-leap. He crashes into the blue water between the Beagle and the Goliath. The boy surfaces, shouts something in Maltese at his friends, hauls himself dripping out onto the rock and shakes the water from his hair. As though the ships are barely there. As though the fleet is just a drift of clouds, darkening the water for a time, and then gone.

  longing to see you, and the child

  I am glad to hear what you say of the offer of work

  The pencil leaves grey lines on the clean white. Acid rises up his throat.

  I thought you would like this picture. I am sitting now, looking out

  I promise you I will work six days a week with the hot wax and moulds and wicks and the stink, and on Sundays take a walk in the park, and watch the Thames roiling past on its way to the sea.

  over this particular spot. I think you would

  And once a week spend sixpence at the flicks, and maybe sometimes you’ll be persuaded to come too, and at night I’ll look up at the strip of sky above Knox Street, and you will lie still beside me, your face turned away.

  The world will be cold, narrow, will be shades of grey.

  find it quite beautiful.

  Give all this up.

  Yours ever

  The wide blue distances, the scents and the cries of gulls and the new land on the horizon, and spindrift on the waves, and the cities peeling back from the blue harbours, full of everything, of possibility, of difference.

  William

  He tries to swallow it back, but his stomach heaves, and he stuffs the postcard into his pocket, staggers up from the bench, stumbles over to the low Barrakka wall, and vomits. Red wine and mashed pea-pastry and stomach acid wrench out of him, fall through the empty air, down a hundred feet and more, to crash onto the stones below.

  He wipes his mouth, wipes his eyes. He turns, and shambles away from the wall, and down the path, and out of the gardens, and back down towards the harbour, and his ship.

  The Tows, off Y Beach, Gallipoli

  April 25, 1915

  THE WATER PHOSPHORESCES as it ripples away from the keel. The sky is growing pale. He can see the dark lines of the other tows, the boats strung out behind the trawlers like beads. He can hear the trawlers’ muffled chug. He hopes the Turks can’t.

  He’s near the prow; there’s only Sully behind him. He can pick out the hunched figures of the other seamen, their oars tossed, waiting in their places; he can see the dark mass of soldiers sitting in the belly of the boat. Earlier, when the dark was perfect, he had felt he was entirely alone, passing in the night from one world to the next. But now it’s clear that he’s in company.

  There’s no joking, no ribbing, not even any complaining, the usual army–navy rivalry overridden. Everyone is chilled by the night. There is just the occasional creak or shuffle as a soldier eases the discomfort of sitting still for too long.

  Then the towlines go slack: the trawler’s stopped. It seems too far out from shore. He twists round to look, but then the order comes to unhitch; he feels the change in the cutter as it’s released, like a horse that’s slipped its harness; in the grainy half-light he watches as the trawler’s coxswain spools the rope into a coil, dragging it through the waves, a flickering snake. Beyond, he can make out dark cliffs, blue sand; where the waves lick up onto the shore, they glimmer. Still quite a way to go.

  They lower oars carefully so as to make no splash. They heave, and glide across water smooth as glass. William moves with the oar. His palms heat with its friction. He drops into the rhythm of it. He can see the soldiers clearly now, though leached of colour. They adjust chin stays, sling their rifles. He thinks, I am lucky, I am immeasurably lucky here.

  The cutter lurches, then grinds forward a little way. A shoal, or a reef; something underwater.

  An army officer on board gives the order. There is a moment’s hesitation—the soldiers just not shifting—and then the first stirrings as they get to their feet. The boat is beached and so barely rocks. William feels the warmth and breath of the men as they crowd past him. The boat lists as the first chap clambers over the gunwale, and drops into the water. There’s a splash, and then the catch of the breath as he hits the cold. It’s deep. And then another goes, and then another, each time the same caught breath: each body’s identical response to shock. He can feel the way the cutter lightens, and sits more cockily on the water. They should have no trouble shifting her once they’ve unloaded.

  William twists in his seat to get a good look at where the boys are going. It’s like an image on a bioscope screen, all shades of dawn grey. He gazes at the slope of sandy beach, the gully with its low rocky cliffs. The other boats are dotted out at a distance from the shore: they’ve all hit the same line of reefs. And from them columns of men push on through the water, towards the beach, and as William watches the first of the soldiers is into the shallows, dashing up through the spray, and onto the sand.

  It’s so quiet. An offshore breeze brings the scent of dust, and wild sage, and pine. They shove off from the reef, and begin to bring the cutter about to head back to the trawler, and as they’re turning, parallel to the shore, the sun clears the horizon and everything is suddenly brilliant and the drips from the oars are diamonds. Just the space, the joy of it—the milky white light and the new warmth and there, just yards away, the land: pale gold, hazed with scrub, plumed with dark green cypress—and if it wasn’t for the war, if it wasn’t for the dark trickle of soldiers onto the beach and up towards the gully, like trails of ants—if he could do what he wanted, William would leap in himself and wade to shore and climb up that gully and walk out into the empty spaces, towards the desert cities, in the wide space and the rising heat.

  And then the air rips itself apart. A shot crunches itself in a flower of splinters just by William’s arm. Then another bullet hisses past his shoulder, hits the water like a hot horseshoe.

  “Sniper!”

  “Fuck!”

  “Get moving!”

  There is a horrible slowness and fluster as they complete the turn. The bullets arrive almost silently, sometimes a soft huff, sometimes a buzz like an insect. The cutter turned, they heave through the water. William’s teeth throb. His head throbs. His eyes throb. He drags then lifts and pushes on his oar. He doesn’t think. He doesn’t consider Amelia. Or the baby. Or anyone else, or what will happen afterwards. He is just his body and it’s determined to live.

  He sees Dwyer jerk back, slump onto Silcock’s oar and Silcock shove at him to get him off. The bullets whine, hiss. They crump into wood, sear flesh. There’s a yell from right behind him—Sully’s hit—but he can’t turn round to look. Loosed oars skip over the water, clatter against the live ones. William, swinging through his stroke, sees the scrub on top of the gully in the pink-gold glow of dawn: sniper, up there, in the bushes. Sully’s cursing behind him, low, short of breath: Fucking bastard Annie, fucking evil bastard Turks. Someone else is screaming.

  But the gunfire’s stopped. William doesn’t know for how long. But no more insect whine, no more searing bullets. The screaming, though, continues.

  They slacken off the pace, but still row on, making distance, uncertain of their safety. The blood pounds through his head. No more bullets. Still there are no more bullets. William scans ro
und for the trawler, they should head back, get help, get orders; then he coughs, and is taken over by coughing, wracked with it. Sweat drips off him. But he is sound, still; unbroken. He spits over the side. He wipes his face with a hand, looks round, taking stock.

  Dwyer is slumped forward over his oar. The blade’s forced dripping up high into the air like a signal. His cap has fallen into the boat and his right arm is dangling as if he’s reaching down for it. There’s a dark red hole in the side of his head, and there’s dark blood dripping onto the boards. Skin like cream, he’d said, skin like the finest Welsh cream. Spooner’s pale, with a bloody right hand pressed to his left arm. It’s a lad called Clelland that’s screaming. Writhing on the boards at the stern. Two men crouching at his side, holding his arms; morphine ampoule, syringe. William turns round, feels sick. Checks on Sully.

  Sully’s face is a twist of fury, his hand clamped to the side of his head. There’s blood running between his fingers, blood down the side of his face and neck, soaking into his rig.

  “You all right?”

  Sully just narrows his eyes.

  “Let’s have a look.”

  Sully hesitates a moment, then he lifts his hand away. There’s just a raw weeping stump, blood.

  “Blimey.”

  “Bastard fucking bastard Annie.”

  Clelland stops screaming. The morphine taking effect. They’re shifting Dwyer now, taking him by the armpits, making the boat rock. Someone is leaning over Spooner, examining his wounded arm. William turns back, nods towards Sully’s ruined ear.

  “Dress that for you?”

  Sully shakes his head—then winces, stops. “No. Fuck off.”

  Sully reaches his unbloodied hand into a pocket. He takes out his cigarette case, clicks it open one-handed, but then can’t pick a fag out, not without getting the papers bloody.

  William reaches out for the case. “Give it here.”

  Sully hands it over with a grimace. William picks out one of the smokes and holds it up. Sully dips his head down, takes it between his lips. He juts his chin towards the case, offering William one. There’s gunfire from inland, and the sound of waves chopping against the hull.