The Undertow

by Jo Baker

  He goes over to the seaward side. The air is clammy, thick with smuts and smoke. He leans out over the rail. He can make out the flank of the Cornwallis, and if he peers along into the dark, a glimpse of a destroyer, one of Goliath’s bodyguards—either Beagle or Bulldog—as the searchlight brushes across her. But he can’t see a thing beyond.

  His breath makes the fog tumble away in little eddies. This is just perfect cover for an attack. They have been hammering all hell out of the place for weeks; the Turks’ll be just itching for a chance to give them a taste of it right back. And the ship is lit up like a West End show. You’d have to be an idiot not to give it a go. And whatever else you say about Annie and Fritz, they’re not idiots.

  “We’re sitting ducks,” he says out loud, into the deadening fog.

  The engines turn over. The power of them throbs up through the deck. One revolution, two, then stopped: they’re in readiness to go, at immediate notice for steam.

  So maybe they’ll be off. He’s got to swallow the fear. Get through it. Once they’re under way, they won’t be such an easy target.

  But the fear comes anyway, getting him in the back of his neck, in the back of his knees. The unease of this aged ship, her fated name. She is too old, dragged out of retirement for this last fight. Her joints ache; a little pressure and the rivets would just come adrift, her panels peel apart in segments. There’s just light Krupp armour between them and the dark water. Six hundred and some men. All those lungs sucking and squeezing the tired air. He becomes aware of the rail beneath his hand, the old weather-greyed wood. He digs his nails in, and the wood gives. She’s just too old, Goliath. An old giant, just waiting for the boy to fling a stone.

  The engines turn over again. But the ship lies still. It’s too much: he can’t wait, can’t do nothing. He pushes away from the railing, turns back towards the deck—if he can speak to someone—then the officer of the watch comes down from the boat deck through the dirty fog.

  “Get below, there.”

  “Are we under notice, sir?” William calls.

  The officer halts, and looks back. “What’s that?”

  “Will we be shifting soon?”

  “We’re staying put.”

  “Sir, we’re sitting ducks.”

  “Those are the orders.”

  “But does Command know about the fog?”

  The officer just gives him a look. “Those are the orders.”

  Then William’s eye is caught by a movement: down by his side, the officer’s hand is twitching. His thumbnail presses into the cuticle of his index finger. It scrapes at the skin. The flesh is raw and oozes blood.

  There is nothing to be done, William realises. There is no getting out of this.

  But he can’t die here, not yet. He wants more. He wants spindrift off the Atlantic swell; he wants to know what ice is like when it stretches for thousands of miles. He wants to step off the ship and be in South America, Japan, Russia, Nova Scotia. He wants a lifetime of this.

  “On your way now, Hastings. Get below.” And the officer walks off into the fog. And William has no choice. He heads back down below.

  Down in the mess, Sully’s hammock is swinging slightly, though the others all hang still. His eyes are closed and he’s breathing heavily. William looks at him with a mixture of guilt and sympathy: maybe he’s asleep at last, maybe he’s just braced against the pain. He doesn’t think of disturbing him, warning him: what good would there be in that? And sleep is so hard to come by nowadays, you don’t want to waste a drop.

  William strips off his jerkin, getting ready for his stint in the boiler room’s swelter. He ducks down to stow it in his sea-chest. But something’s wrong. He peers closer at the lock. It’s broken.

  “What the hell—” William heaves the lid up and back. The sudden noise makes Sully stir.

  “Sorry,” William says.

  “What’s up?”

  “Someone’s been at this …”

  Sully leans up on an elbow, peering sleepily down over the edge of his hammock. “Oh balls.”

  William leafs through the contents: spare rig, underwear, shaving gear, cigarette box, matches, playing cards. The postcard’s not there. The last, unsent postcard. He peers into the chest; it’s too dark to see properly. He shoves a hand down between the folded clothes and the side, and runs it up and down. The bell starts to chime. He feels hot. He glances round the crowded, fuggy room. No-one’s even stirring.

  “What happened? Who was it?”

  Sully shrugs. “I was asleep.”

  The bell chimes. William straightens up. “That right?”

  “Yeah.” He rubs at his eyes. “I was sleeping like the dead. What did they get?”

  “Not much.” William’s jaw tightens. “Nothing.” Just that last postcard, with his wife’s address.

  “I’ll sort it for you, if you want. Fix the lock.”

  The bell chimes. Six bells.

  William looks him over. The wiry muscle of him, the thin flicker of his eyes. We can’t all have your luck, he’d said. Would he take the card?

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s not like I’m good for much else at the moment.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “You go on,” Sully says. “If it can be fixed, I’ll fix it.”

  Eight bells.

  William has to go. There’s no choice. “Right,” he says. “Thanks.”

  He has to descend into the belly of the ship, to where the boilers gape and the air is thick with heat and the dark water swells just inches away. The shovel will be damp from the last man’s hands. The coal dust hanging in the air, sticking to sweating skin, working into the pores, blackening the nostrils and making that catch in his breath that makes him see the dust glittering like crystals in the hollows of his lungs. Just keeping the boilers fed, keeping the engines turning over. He’ll swallow water from a shared tin cup, and if he’s lucky, if they’re all lucky, he’ll do his shift and lean his shovel up with the others, and climb back up towards the mess, and wash, and eat, and sleep again, and then wake to do it all again, the day after, and the day after that. And that is the best that he can hope for, and now it seems impossibly wonderful: that time will still keep ticking by for him, and will not stop.

  He wishes that she had got the postcard. That he’d promised her everything she wanted. That he had lied.

  When the first torpedo hits, a few minutes shy of 1 a.m., William is stripped to the waist, sweat darkening the waistband of his trousers and forming a V shape down his backside, hair pushed back in a dark, sweat-soaked slick. Coal leaps from the blade of his shovel; flames flicker up to devour them. His back and shoulders are knotted with muscle. His arms are like twisted rope. He is all body, all movement, lost in the mechanism of his work.

  The impact of the first torpedo makes him stagger. The explosion bursts his eardrums. He hears just the rush of his blood.

  He rights himself, looks to the next man, Paveley, red-lit from the boilers’ glow; his mouth is moving, he’s shouting something. William can’t hear.

  When the second torpedo hits six seconds later, he doesn’t hear it either, he just feels the thump of impact, the shudder through the body of the ship. The deck beneath him bucks, and it’s too late now to think about anything because the ship is tilting, and William’s slithering, trying to get purchase; he yells, Head for the stairs, but can’t hear himself either, and the heaped coal is slithering too, rolling out underneath his feet and the ship tilts further, and then there’s nothing but the horror of burning coals pouring from the boilers’ open mouths, falling around him like a punishment from God; his hair burnt through to his head, the scalp seared, his hand burning as he scrabbles the coal away; his shoulder burnt and as he whisks round to brush the burning embers off, his cheek kissed by a glowing orange coal and there’s water round his feet, coals hissing as they land, and Paveley is there, he didn’t make it to the stairs, and they are thrashing and scrabbling through the fire and the water with the ot
hers, trying to get to the stairs, and the water’s round his knees, up to his waist, his chest. A third impact. A crunch and then a massive jolt as the torpedo finds the ammunition store and explodes. Water up to his shoulders, and now he’s struggling to keep his face above the water, and the hissing falling coals and the smoke and steam, and the water rises to his mouth, his nose, and it’s bubbling, sooty and harsh, in his nostrils, and he can’t keep his head above the water.

  Knox Road, Battersea

  May 14, 1915

  THE OLD MAN OPENS THE DOOR. She hadn’t even reached the handle. He must have been looking out for her. She doesn’t need him to say anything. His face, and his presence there, a strong, squat shape in the door when he should be at the factory, say everything. He brings with him the smell of that place, the hot waxy reek.

  She drops her basket. It spills onto the flags. Lengths of lemon and mauve ribbon ripple along the pavement. A cotton reel bumps down into the gutter.

  He holds out a stained hand to her. He takes her by the elbow and helps her into the dark parlour. He sits her down in the best chair.

  “I’ll get the—”

  He leaves the front door open and gathers up the spilt things, rolling up the sprawling ribbon, chasing down the cotton, placing them thick-fingered back into their paper wrappings. He brings in her basket, sets it down on her lap, in front of the hard bulge of her belly. She takes the basket handle in her hands.

  “I’m sorry, love,” he says.

  She nods. Thumbs at the weave of the basket handle. She looks up at him, at the pitted skin.

  “Is it certain? Is it absolutely certain?”

  He nods.

  Her mouth is dry, and the words come out dry as husks: “All hands?”

  “Five hundred lives lost.”

  “So there are survivors?”

  “They’ve fished out a couple of hundred, that’s what they’re saying.”

  “Then it’s not certain—he could be—”

  He takes her hand, squeezes it. “He was on duty.”

  She knows what this means. That he was below, trapped in the boiler room. In the heat and dark and water.

  “I’ll make you tea.”

  She sits in the good chair in the cold parlour, holding onto the basket balanced on her knees. He goes into the kitchen. She listens to him clattering clumsily with the range, stoking up the fire. And then quiet, as he stops, as he muffles his sobs.

  She rests her forehead on the arch of the basket’s handle, looks down at the clumsily rolled ribbon, the cotton reel with its thread wound untidily on. The tiny things, tinged grey from the street and the old man’s handling.

  It is her fault.

  She should never have asked Mr. Travis about the job, never have spoken or thought or planned for afterwards. She jinxed him: she has jinxed them all.

  She picks out the thin yellow ribbon, scallop-edged, and unrolls it carefully, then twists the end round her fingertips, and begins to roll again. Then she does the same for the mauve. The basket tidied, she sets it on the floor. Then she lifts her picture book off the green baize of the card table. She turns the pages, touches the glazed surfaces of the postcards. These past months the cards have fallen through the letterbox like waymarkers, like pebbles dropped in the woods, marking off distance and time. A confirmation of his continuation in the world. A reminder of his love.

  The track stops here. The final pages are empty. There is no way forward.

  She has no photograph of him. This comes with a flash of sudden utter panic. It is too late now ever to have a photograph.

  What if she forgets what he looks like?

  Hand shaking, she turns back through the pages: blue-washed sky and mountains and women in native dress, a foreign street with camels clopping down it, a rowing boat drifting in a blue grotto. Trying somehow to put him together in her mind. She remembers the flash of his green eyes in the bioscope, the touch of his hands on her waist. The brush of his arm against hers as he leant across and opened the empty book, showed her the blank pages they would fill between them.

  She could have had anyone, her mother always said. So why on God’s good earth did it have to be him?

  Because he was everything. He was necessary. He always will be.

  She won’t forget. She won’t let herself, ever. She insists on remembering.

  Knox Road, Battersea

  May 27, 1915

  SHE LEANS DOWN IN HER CHAIR to button her boot, and there is a sudden hot trickle of liquid between her legs. Oh Lord. She stands up and twists round to look at the seat of her blue shift-dress, and there is a dark wet blot there. Oh goodness. She flushes. Is this something that happens? Do women in her condition just wet themselves sometimes? She doesn’t know, but it always seems that other women manage the whole thing so much better than she does.

  At least she is alone. At least there is no-one to see.

  Flustered, she steps back out of her boots, and goes to climb the stairs. Her thighs chafe in the wet. She tries to hold it back, but can’t: the water oozes out of her in a steady seep.

  She doesn’t know what’s happening. Has she damaged herself somehow? Has she harmed the baby?

  She is halfway up the stairs when the first contraction hits, making her gasp, stop, and grab the banister; and with it a burst of wet that runs down the inside of her thighs.

  Shaken, she climbs on up, and in the bedroom pulls off her dress, and her shift, which is wet through at the back. The smell is not ammonia, but warm and brackish. Not urine. Hands shaking, she pulls aside underwear to find the long-unused rags at the bottom of her drawer. Sort herself out, then she’ll go next door, and speak to Mrs. Clack, and try and bring herself to ask her if this is normal, if this is what is supposed to happen—and what she is supposed to do about it.

  As she stands at the dresser lifting out her clothes, the child shifts itself around inside her. She feels the sudden urge to make water, and tugs the pot out from under the bed, and squats, naked, to urinate. The other water still seeps out of her too. She watches as the taut skin of her belly shifts, a small angular bulge pressing out, riding along inside the skin, and then softening away.

  And then another contraction hits. It knocks the breath out of her. Makes her grab the edge of the bed and hold there, squatted on the pot, looking down, so that she can see the way her belly squeezes tighter with the pain, and the way the steam from the urine rises from the pot, and then a sudden gush of liquid from her.

  The peak of pain is gone, but it leaves a dull ache behind, like a monthly pain, like a warning.

  She drags herself up, clinging to the side of the bed. It hurts more. She can’t quite stand upright. She crawls into her dress, wads her drawers with rags. With her foot she pushes the pot under the bed. She makes her slow way down the stairs.

  The pain comes again in the street. She crumples in on herself, a hand on the gritty downpipe of the guttering. It takes her a couple of minutes just standing there, breathing, assuring herself that it is safe to move, and that she won’t just fall into a heap, before she can take the three more steps to the Clacks’ front door.

  Mrs. Clack answers with little Francie on her hip.

  Amelia can feel how strange she must look—hunched, sweating, shivering, her walk a painful waddle.

  “I think something’s wrong,” Amelia says. “I don’t feel quite well.”

  Mrs. Clack just looks at her. “You’re all right, ducky,” she says.

  “You’re going to have the baby.”

  Then Mrs. Clack reaches out for Amelia’s hand, and helps her up into the house.

  Mrs. Clack has four children of her own. She explains what’s happening carefully, not wanting to scare the girl. Still, Amelia blanches and shivers.

  “I would have told you sooner,” Mrs. Clack says. “Only, I thought your ma would’ve said something.”

  Amelia nods. When she’d first got her monthlies, her mother had told her she must have injured herself playing out with her
friends. So she wasn’t allowed to play out any more. It’s not the kind of thing she could speak about to her mother, even when her mother was still speaking to her.

  “Don’t worry,” Mrs. Clack says. “It’s just like shelling peas.”

  They drink tea, and then more tea. Amelia makes her painful waddling way to the lavatory at the end of the yard. When she sits there, nothing will come but the slow seep of water—the water, Mrs. Clack said, that the baby has been sleeping in all this time. She looks down at the tight aching drum of her belly. It must be like a frog, cold and slippery, to have lived in water all this time: she hadn’t known. She thinks of what Mrs. Clack said, about it being just like shelling peas. The baby is the pea, and she is the pod, and the pod gets split in half and thrown on the midden. The pea is what it’s all about: you don’t care what happens to the pod.

  When the Clack boys get home Amelia goes back to her own house, which will be empty till the old man gets back from work. She doesn’t want to see anyone. Her unsettled, leaking, waddling state seems shameful. She climbs up to her room, and tries to lie down, but the pains make her heave herself back up from her bed, and lean over it, clenched, gasping.

  At six, the old man taps softly at the door. Mrs. Clack must have waylaid him in the street, because he already knows.

  “Do you need anything?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “Shall I go for Mrs. Bradley?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mrs. Clack comes by at nine, after the children are in bed. By this time, the pains have subsided, and the midwife is not fetched, and Amelia sleeps.

  She presses her forehead down onto the top rail of the bedstead. The iron is cool and hard. Mrs. Bradley tells her to breathe. Mrs. Clack rubs her back and says keep breathing through it, honey, keep breathing. Amelia wants to punch her. All she can do is clamp down with the pain, squeeze her eyes shut, feel and think about only the pain. The pain is everything. While it happens, there is nothing else. When it fades, she flings herself up and away from the bed, and crosses to the wall. Four steps between the bedstead and the wall. She is in just her shift. She is sweating. The fire is lit. She comes to the wall and stops. Four steps between the bedstead and the wall. Four steps between the pains.