The Undertow

by Jo Baker

  Mrs. Goldman gives him an Everton Mint. She leans out into the street in her red satin wrap and asks how Freddy’s getting on down at Price’s. Billy hasn’t got a bleeding clue, but he grins at her, sweet bulging in his cheek, and says he’s doing famously, thanks for asking. Freddy’s day is over and it’s Billy’s day now, and the world is his lobster.

  He pushes off, one foot on the pedal, one on the pavement. Inside his mouth, the taste changes from bed-sour and porridge and plum jam to cold mintiness. He pedals hard, building speed. There’s a satisfying rasp at the edges of his breath, his chest just ever-so-slightly raw, and his legs faintly trembly. He’ll get strong. He’ll get great strong legs, strong chest, strong as a horse’s.

  The clock chimes seven forty-five, and he’s due back at Cheeseman’s at eight. Job done and fifteen minutes to himself. He rides in great looping curves, his breath puffing out into the foggy air. He is a locomotive. He pounds up the hill, ploughs slowing onto the crest, and then creeps up the final yards, his heart hammering, breath catching. He’s almost stopped, wavering, a foot about to meet the ground, but then the slope catches him, the bike begins to roll, the weight of it and the pull of gravity and then it’s downhill, in a long wondrous swoop, the cobbles rattling him, eyes wet, eyes streaming, the mist whipping past. His legs and his chest and his belly clenched for each push and he is just body and machine and it is good. He lets the speed cruise itself away—rounding the bend into Orbel Street clean and perfect. Then he’s out onto the High Street and the fog is lighter here, and the new business of the day is unfolding—the joy and clatter of it, the speed—and Mr. Hartley is unfurling the awning on the butchers, the new girl at Palmer’s emptying a bucket into the gutter, Leibmann’s clerk taking down the blinds. At the greengrocer’s the boys are unloading sacks from the wholesalers’ wagon, and the horses stand blinkered and half asleep and Billy turns his head to halloo the lads, to show off, but just then a man steps out into the street in front of him. Billy swerves, brakes. The man steps back just in the nick of time.

  “Little fucker.”

  For a second, Billy’s eyes are snagged on the man’s. But then he shifts attention back to the bike, balance, the road ahead. He cycles on.

  He only had one ear, Billy realises.

  But he doesn’t matter: Billy’s past him now, rolling off through a heap of horse dung, riding out along the High Street, back towards Cheeseman’s, the day beginning.

  He walks to school unpeeling the spiral of a Chelsea bun. It’s one of yesterday’s buns and a little bit stale but no less the welcome for that. No time to stop for a cuppa; he’d rather skip the tea than give up even a moment on the bike. Tomorrow he will shave another minute off his round. Another minute to dash out and away from the neighbourhood—see how far he can get. He whoofles the soft currants off the yeasty inner flesh, breaks off squares and rectangles of sweet dough and chomps them down. Spice and the sweet pulp of currants overlay the mintiness, erase it.

  This is work. This is what work means. A bike. A currant bun. An Everton Mint.

  Little fucker.

  He flinches inwardly at the hard words. They don’t have words like that at home, but you hear that kind of thing sometimes, from the rougher men. Forget it, it doesn’t matter, over and gone now. He sucks the sugar off each finger, tasting both sweetness and the sourness and salt of skin. Could he borrow the bike on Sundays, or maybe in the afternoons? Would it be cheeky to ask? Maybe give it a week or two, settle in a bit first. He turns the corner into Cabul Road, sees the backs of Francie Clack and Mickey Peters and he dashes to catch them up. Hand in his pocket, cradling the toy car. The world is new today. He has a power, and it makes everything different from the day before. He can fold the world up into a concertina, roll it out into a ribbon, loop it into paperchains. He has a bike. He has speed. He can go anywhere.

  He comes alongside them.

  “All right?”

  He ducks his head down and scuffs his feet along, and tries to keep his grin under wraps.

  “Look at this.”

  He shows them the car. They walk along, heads bent to examine it. They round the corner and there are more boys here, heading for school, traipsing down the pavement and kicking along the gutter in twos and threes and singly, delaying the inevitable. They’re following the schoolyard wall now, the building looming rusty-black above them, with yelling and scuffling coming from the last-minute games on the far side—tig and football and British bulldogs—and the noise makes Billy pick up his feet, lift his head, hurry on, ready to run and shout with the rest of them, before school closes down around them for the day.

  And then he sees them. Tim Proctor and Charlie Grover. Billy slips the car back into his pocket. Long legs with scabs on and long wrists and jumpers worn out at the elbow. Just leaning there by the gate. Francie and Mickey go quiet. But the three of them keep on walking. They might get past without notice; there are plenty of other boys: Tim and Charlie might pick on someone else.

  There’s a boil on the side of Tim Proctor’s neck. It peeps up from underneath his collar. It looks sore. A nasty pinkish red, with a custardy crust on top. Billy blinks away, but it’s too late—Tim looks round, right at them. The movement must make the boil really hurt, brushing the crust against the collar and at the same time making it twist with the skin. There is no real colour to Tim’s face, Billy thinks: pale hair, pale eyebrows, pale eyes. The only colour is the rhubarb-and-custard of that boil.

  They have to keep walking towards him, because it’s the only way into school.

  Tim pushes himself up, away from the wall. He nudges Charlie with an elbow, shoves his hands into the pockets of his shorts. Billy and his friends falter, stop.

  “Aye aye, pipsqueaks,” Tim says. Charlie is moving into place with that uneven rickety gait of his, blocking their way.

  This is how it starts: something said, and something said back, and the two big bony bodies closing in. And it ends in getting hurt. They’ll just cut you off with a smack if you get clever and try to talk yourself out of it. You can’t even run, because Tim’s got legs like a lurcher’s and can outrun anyone; and anyway school is starting. You could try and make a dash for the classroom, but then it’s just waiting for you when you get out, and you’ve got a whole day ahead of you knowing what’s coming at the end of it. Billy knows, now, for the first time, why they choose him in particular to poke at, prod, provoke. The boil on Tim Proctor’s neck gives it away. It’s because Billy has a clean shirt for school, and jam on his porridge and the new toy car that cost more than she can really afford and must have made a hole in the housekeeping—a hole from which everything could unravel into hunger and cold and dirt if it wasn’t for her carefulness and watching and curbing and holding back, and stitching the hole back together for him, so that everything is safe.

  Next time he will keep the Chelsea bun for her.

  “Can we just come past?” Billy tries.

  “Can we just come past?” Charlie mocks.

  They are caught on the brink of it. Tim plus Charlie plus him and Francie and Mickey equals—getting hurt.

  “Aren’t we the proper little gent?”

  “Whatcher got there, Billy-boy?” Tim asks, nodding at Billy’s bunched hand.

  Billy’s hand tightens round the car. Rubbery wheels and silvery underbelly, cool as a stickleback. He can’t let Tim take it.

  He doesn’t think it any further. He launches himself at Tim’s middle. Skull into belly, the big boy crumples over him, and the smell of dirty wool and unwashed skin is like an old brown blanket round him. Billy flails, blurred, banging his fists into the skinny sides, the bony back, and for that stunned moment it all seems to be going pretty well. Then Tim hits Billy. Bang. On the cheekbone. Everything whacked out of line. One eye blurred. Head jangling. And then another, an up-cut to the chin. The taste of blood. Someone has him by the belt and is dragging at him, and he lets himself be pulled away. He can hear the shouts and chants of the other boys, but ever
ything is dizzy, swimming. Blood in his mouth. She will be disappointed. Blood on his shirt. She will cry. He wants to cry too. But he has his car. He still has his car. And he stood up to the bully; she should be proud of that. That’s what you’re supposed to do.

  His cheek still throbs, and is tender to the touch, but the skin is unbroken. His lip, however, is split open and tastes stingy. If he tucks his chin in and squints down, he can see the dark blood stain on his shirt, just below the collar. He glances sidelong at Tim Proctor. The big boy is upright, soldierish, stiffly staring at the sage-green wall, his skin grey in the indoors light. His kneecaps stick out like doorknobs. Tim’s dad died somewhere in the mud. Probably. They mostly did.

  Billy wants to say sorry, but he knows it’s better not to.

  The door opens, and the headmaster half leans out.

  “Ah, boys,” he says, as if he’d forgotten them. “You’d better come in.”

  The headmaster is not a bad sort. Not half-mad with nerves like Mr. Hilling, not mean like Mr. Roberts, and he doesn’t smell of drink. When he picks the cane up from his desk and runs his hand down its length, his face is frowny, as though he can’t quite remember what he’s supposed to be doing, or if he isn’t entirely sure that it’s a good idea. Although it’s already half past nine, the day, outside the headmaster’s window, is pale grey, dawnish, as though it will never quite get light.

  “Right then,” the headmaster says. “Assume the position.”

  Billy turns back his cuffs. They are clean. He holds out his hands. There is dirt in the creases from the bike. He feels guilty about that. Tim’s hands are grey and long and bony, no flesh on them, and Billy wonders, would it hurt more or less for that?

  Then the headmaster brings the cane down, swish, on Tim Proctor’s narrow palms—one, and then the other. The hands are whisked back, tucked away.

  The headmaster moves past Tim, and comes to Billy. Billy watches his own hands tremble. The cane whips past his face, hits his left palm. Then the cane flicks past again, and hits the right.

  For a moment there is a kind of silence before the pain is felt, when it seems like it’ll be all right. But Billy knows that it is just a trick of the nerves, and then the pain when it comes a second later is just astonishing—hot and bright and loud. He tucks his hands up under his armpits and squeezes hard. He wants the velvet of Rosie’s nose, the cool metal of the bike. He wants the morning’s washing water that slipped through his fingers almost unnoticed, the same temperature as skin. His eyes bud with wet. Like a cough or sneeze will make your eyes wet; it’s not the same as crying.

  Amelia steps off the pavement to let Jonnie Clements past. He’s having a bad day, shaking so hard it’s a struggle for him just to put one foot in front of the other. He takes up the whole width of the pavement, one arm outstretched for balance, the other running along the front walls of the houses to keep him going straight. She says hello; she’s friendly with his sister. He seems to catch a glimpse of her through the nightmare, but she doesn’t really know if he’s nodding back, because his head is moving all the time anyway. He’s not himself any more, his sister says so, but anyone can see it. He left himself behind somewhere in France.

  She turns down Knox Road. The streetlamps are like dandelion clocks in the foggy dark. A man is making his way down the street ahead of her, through the haze of a streetlamp’s pale glow, and then gone into shadow; but she doesn’t pay him much attention, because she’s not really there herself. She’s in the old Electric Theatre on York Road, under the flickering grey light. William draws her glove off her hand, and strokes her skin with his calloused fingertips. She’s watching the woman with the beautiful clothes and the jealous husband, and Max Linder charming one and then the other. That last, lovely night before William left.

  Max Linder is dead. It feels like she knew him. If feels like a personal loss.

  The newspaper is folded tight and wedged between the cake box and the parcelled-up potatoes. But when she’d bought it, she’d stood there reading it in the street, like a man.

  Because now they’re saying he killed himself. That Max Linder took his own life, and persuaded his young wife to take hers along with him.

  The paper’s calling it a suicide pact.

  The basket bumps against her hip. She remembers the cakes: they’ll spoil. She lifts the handle from the crook of her arm and though it’s chillier like this now she’s no longer holding her own warmth around herself, she clasps the basket firmly, arms wrapped around its girth instead. Three more streetlamps and she’ll be home.

  He’d died before, of course, Max Linder had, during the war. She’d read about it at the time. And when he’d turned up wounded in a shell-hole in no man’s land days later, it had seemed like rare good news. But all you had to do is look at a picture of him, a picture from afterwards, and you could see that he wasn’t well, he wasn’t the man he had been. He was shadowed, hollowed out inside.

  He was infected. Why did no-one notice? He’d caught death out there on no man’s land, as he lay out amongst the dead. They let him bring the contagion home with him, God help him. Let him, through no fault of his own, pass it on to his wife, like with the Spanish flu.

  Which leaves their daughter, a tiny daughter. And it makes her think of Billy: Billy bounding through to the kitchen, bringing the smell of fog and wool and school. Billy sitting at the tea table, scrubbed up and shining and solemn, and his pleasure when she brings out the cake box, and lets him choose between a vanilla slice, and a cherry bakewell, and a macaroon. To think of the dark hollow eatenness of that poor infected man, of death worming through his young wife’s heart, to think that they could find no solace at all, no joy that was worth the suffering for, even in their child.

  She used to say things like, when all this is over, and, afterwards. She would think that if you had your man back then you were lucky, that it was everything you’d need.

  Ahead, the stranger moves on down the street. Their twinned footfalls are muffled by the fog. He pauses under the second streetlamp. He wears a brownish coat and hat, she notices. He carries a small suitcase. He peers at a front door. The Clarys’ house, halfway up the street from hers. He moves on.

  There is tea to make, and the table to set, and the old man is going out later to his class, and she’ll have a quiet evening with her knitting. Billy’ll choose the vanilla slice, she knows. And the old man will have the macaroon, which leaves the tooth-jangling sweetness of the cherry bakewell for her.

  She passes through the white glow of the second streetlamp and out into the blur of fog on the other side. She slips the basket back onto her arm, and rifles in her pocket for her key. Up ahead, under the third streetlamp, the man is peering at the front doors, picking out house numbers. A new rent man, she thinks as she gets closer; a tallyman. Or door-to-door salesman perhaps, with that suitcase. Whatever he’s after, it’s nothing to do with her. She’s paid this week’s rent already, she’s not buying anything, and she doesn’t owe anyone anything beyond what she can settle on a Friday. She’s almost beside him now: he’s checking the Hollidges’ door, next door but one to home. She steps aside and off the kerb onto the cobbles to go past him, but he turns and follows her round, watching her. In the corner of her eye she sees his profile as she moves past him—a strange face, bony, taut.

  The key presses hard through her woollen gloves. She steps back up onto the pavement and approaches her own door. He moves too, coming round behind her, and she knows he’s checking the house number.

  “Ah.”

  She isn’t going to look round. She’s just going to go in and shut the door behind her and ignore him, and even lock the door behind her if she has to. She’s not got time or money to waste. These people: what do they think they’re doing, intruding like this? Hovering around a lone woman as she lets herself into an empty house. In the dark. Her skin blooms with perspiration.

  “Madam?”

  Despite herself, she glances at him. He stands almost directly unde
r the streetlamp. His face is shadowed by his hat brim; her gaze drops down the length of his brown coat and lands on his boots. They stand out stark in the gaslight. They’re old; the soles are scuffed thin at the toes. And the trouser cuffs above them are worn through at the edge. She sees what he probably thinks people won’t notice—that he’s snipped off the fraying threads of the hems in an attempt to neaten them. Her heart flushes through with unexpected sympathy: whoever he is, he has his struggles, she thinks; he has problems of his own.

  “Madam?” He steps closer. “May I trouble you a moment?”

  No, she thinks, please don’t trouble me. I’ve had trouble enough to last a lifetime.

  “I can’t help you,” she says.

  She turns back to the door, peels off her gloves and slips the key into the lock. She wants to be indoors; she wants Billy home, the old man home, she wants cakes and tea and knitting and the evening to revert to its normal path, its ordinary harmony.

  But he doesn’t move. “You are Mrs. William Hastings, aren’t you?”

  The name seems somehow different when he says it, as though it stirs and shifts, coming alive again after all these years of ordinary use. She lets the key go, leaves it sitting in the lock, and turns to him again. He pushes his hat back. In the foggy light his face is all skin and bone.

  “Do I know you?”

  “I’m George Sully,” he says.

  Her mouth is dry. She shakes her head.

  “Ah, well, there we are then.” A quick grin. “He didn’t make this easy, did he?”

  “What?” The word comes out thin as a fallen leaf. “Who didn’t?”

  “William.”

  In that moment, it is more than memory. She can feel William’s hands rest on her waist. His face press into her neck. His calloused fingertips snag on the palm of her hand. Her body is haunted by his touch. Her stays feel too tight. She can’t get her breath.

  “I served with him,” he says. “On the Goliath.”