The Undertow

by Jo Baker

  “I mean, it looks like a bike,” Alfie says, “and it feels like a bike, and it even sounds like a bike. And I’m thinking it’ll do its job okay, you know, work like a bike. But it isn’t what a bike used to be. It doesn’t smell like a bike, not like a real bike. Not like it should.”

  Alfie’s right. He’d not thought of it like that before, but Alfie’s right.

  Alfie ducks down, laps his tongue across the handlebar. “Don’t taste right either.”

  Billy laughs. “You’re daft in the head, mate.”

  “But it matters,” Alfie says, fixing him with a serious look. “You’ve got to notice these things. You’ve got to remember. You get used to the fakes and you forget what the real thing is, and you can’t tell the difference, and if you can’t tell the difference who’s to say that they’re not going to keep on dishing out the same fakery for ever and you’ll just keep on swallowing it down?”

  “You might be onto something there.”

  “Damn right.”

  Alfie slips in ahead to stow his bike; Billy hesitates, moves aside and rolls his over to the railing. He leans the bike and squats down beside it. He tweaks at the brake cables, and tugs at the pads: noisy bloody things, slow you right down if you get them out of alignment. He tries its weight again. It’s a heavy bastard.

  “Get that stowed, Hastings.”

  He wants to oil it, rub it down with a rag, check every joint and cable and tooth and link. It has to get him past sniper fire and gun placements and enemy patrols. They have a map, but the place names are blanked out; he knows the route though, knows their first target: they are to secure a crossroads. It’s sheer bloody madness, when you think about it: a bicycle against the Nazi war machine. But it’s not about going head to head, of course. It’s about the speed. It’s about getting free of the lumbering columns of tanks and half-tracks, about getting deep into enemy territory. It’s about being there and gone before the enemy have even noticed that you’re on the way.

  But he’s not convinced. This bike is a saccharin-and-parsnip thing. His Claud Butler track bike, now that would get him where he’s going in half the time. Though in fairness it might buckle under the weight of his pack.

  He shifts the bike away from the rail, and wheels it to join the other bikes, strapped down for the crossing.

  Below deck, the men fill the room like peas rattling into a jar. A navy boy, a midshipman, is yelling orders—one bunk to every three men; sleep in eight-hour shifts.

  Billy eases his pack off, and for a moment it feels like he’s going to rise straight into the air, like a barrage balloon that’s slipped its moorings. But he’s sweating already from being below decks; the ceiling is too low, the deck below too hollow, his skin creeps with the old fear. He steps up to the midshipman, a kid in his early twenties, peers at the clipboard.

  “Someone else can have my turn, if that’s all right by you.”

  “What’s that?” The boy is nervous, expecting grief.

  “I’d prefer not to sleep in the bunk.”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll stay on deck.”

  “The whole crossing? We’re expecting something of a time of it. Weather forecast’s bloody awful.”

  “Even so.”

  “You want tablets?” he asks, patting down his pockets. “I’ve been issued tablets for you lot.”

  “Not sickness. Just can’t stand to be below.”

  The midshipman’s got enough on his plate without arguing the toss on this. “Get along then. Stay out of the way though; don’t get under our feet.”

  Billy climbs back up into the daylight, slipping past the downward flow of men. However long it takes, however rough it gets, he’ll stay above decks. He’s done it before. When they were shipped out to Africa he’d slept in a lifeboat. Even then the old nightmare kept on coming back: swimming down through the dark water, the feel of the soft flesh of a dead man’s arm. He would wake up staring at the tarpaulin above his head, shivering and bathed in sweat. When he’d joined up it hadn’t occurred to him that being a soldier would mean being at sea.

  Alfie deals the cards. Billy stretches his legs out in front of him, leans back against the rail, sets his helmet down on his knees. It lies there, with its ragging of camouflage, like something old and drowned, something overgrown with weed.

  Two thirds of the troops are on deck; the other third are on their shift below, sleeping or trying to sleep. There are just so many men—talking, sweating, crowding close, smelling of tobacco smoke and leather and gun oil. And there’s still the tramp of boots along the quayside as the massed landing craft fill up with infantry, and the deck beneath Billy’s backside thrums with footfalls as the men move around and find places for the crossing, set up little camps for themselves.

  Things are all right for the moment. Things are, in fact, quite nice, he thinks, blinking up at the sky, pale with a high thin film of cloud. So don’t even think about what’s coming.

  Billy slides his cards towards him, lifts them, picks through. If this is the way his luck is going, he thinks, then fuck this for a game of soldiers. But he keeps his poker face.

  Gossum unbuckles his helmet, sets it down on the deck. Billy unwraps a pack of Allied francs from their waterproof covering. The first stakes flutter into Gossum’s helmet, which rocks gently on its back, like an upturned tortoise. The money is easy-come-easy-go, handed out to them in bundles earlier today. No-one even knows if the Frogs will take it.

  “Same old same old,” Alfie says, eyeing his cards, tweaking out one and placing it in a more appealing position.

  Billy shifts his service revolver out of the way, loosening the strap.

  “What’s that?”

  “ ‘Hurry up and wait.’ ”

  Billy lays down a card, takes another. “Well, there’s a lot of men to shift. A lot of stuff.”

  He feels again that strange sense of dislocation that comes with being made corporal, that he’s explaining and justifying stuff he’s had no say in, doesn’t agree with, that annoys him as much as everybody else.

  Barker watches them, doing a good impression of hearing what’s going on. He’s got good at lipreading. Never been quite right since Egypt, since that artillery barrage in the desert, the flares lighting up the pyramids.

  “I don’t mind waiting,” says Alfie.

  “Right,” Billy says.

  “I quite like it, in fact.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “Much prefer it to getting shot at.”

  Gossum grins. “You’re going to be a happy man then, my son.”

  “Eh?”

  Billy looks up. With his talent for logistics Gossum is wasted as a private soldier. He should be a quartermaster. He’s always gossum chocolate, gossum cigarettes, gossum of anything you might want but can’t lay your hands on. And he’s always got a handle on what’s going on.

  “As the man says,” Gossum continues, “there’s going to be plenty of it. The marshalling, that’s going to take a while: men, loading, getting out to sea, getting into convoy.”

  Gossum is right. There are minesweepers to clear the routes through, then destroyers and battleships and monitors and cruisers and troop ships and then the little craft, LCTs and LCAs with tanks and artillery and LCIs like the one that he is on, the little ships tagging along behind like a bunch of kid brothers. All of them trying to make their way through the same narrow channels of safe passage. And then gathering at the far end, where they will shuffle all the ships around and get into their groups, and each group head off to their stretch of coastline, their particular section of the beach. And everything will have to be held back to the speed of the slowest ships—a colossal, creeping fleet. There will be hours spent at sea, with the cold deeps beneath them.

  “He’s been to France before.” Alfie jerks his head to Billy.

  The men look at him. Billy glares at Alfie. Did he really have to bring this up?

  “Is that right?” Gos
sum asks.

  “When was this, Dunkirk?”

  “No. This was before the war.”

  It was ’thirty-five, it was Paris. It was a meet at the Vélodrome d’Hiver. He’d won a medal, but it’d meant nothing at all, because that summer he’d failed to make the Olympic team. He’d got drunk on the way there, and got drunk again on the way back, and had slept a couple of hours on a bench on deck, and woke up shivering at the misty sight of the white cliffs, the journey almost over.

  “We went through Dover, that time,” he says.

  Alfie’s watching him as they speak, watching to see what Billy says. Alfie wants him to talk about the old days. Billy looks right back at him. The innocent expression doesn’t shift. He is generally unshiftable, Alfie is. Acting as though the world hadn’t changed entirely and for ever on the day Billy had come out of his interview with Mr. Butler, and walked right past Alfie’s bench, and all the other lads, and had kept on going, out through the workshop and into the street, and away, leaving his coat, his tools, a half-finished wheel rim behind him. Because he couldn’t stay, not on those terms; he couldn’t live with it. But that same evening Alfie had been round the house with Billy’s overcoat and the last season’s track bike (“Gift of Mr. Butler, with his respects”) and the easy expectation of a welcome. They were friends: Alfie insisted on it wordlessly, made it habitual, kept it ticking along throughout Billy’s changing jobs and new addresses. And when the war came, they’d joined up together. But what Billy doesn’t know, always wonders, is whether Alfie is aware of Billy’s blistering sense of shame.

  “Dover’s the shortest crossing,” Billy says. “S’only a few hours.”

  “So how long’s this one?” Barker asks.

  “Seventeen hours,” Billy says, glad to shift the conversation sideways. “Maybe eighteen.”

  They explode, outraged.

  “Once we’re under way,” Billy finishes, and the protest kicks up a gear.

  “In this fucking tub?”

  “Stone me.”

  “We could swim it in less.”

  “I’ve fucking seen France. Seventeen hours? Fuck’s sake.”

  “You in some kind of a hurry then?” Billy asks.

  He doesn’t even want to think about this. He wants to play cards. He peels off another couple of notes, drops them into the helmet. Because when you think about it, that’s when it gets to you. Seventeen, eighteen hours of chugging out across the water, during which time all it would take is one lone U-boat, one single solitary patrol plane, or just a fucking kid in a lookout post with a telescope, and they’re spotted. And if they’re spotted then they’re done for. All Jerry needs to be is reasonably alert, and the fleet is in serious trouble. They’ll be picked off like geese on a pond. He can see it, in his mind’s eye, the foundering ships, the oil burning on the waves.

  They won’t even make it to the other side, he thinks. Their feet won’t touch dry land. He’ll die like his father died; at sea, at war. Lungs full of filthy water and the sea on fire. But whatever happens, he won’t let himself be trapped below.

  “You that keen to get stuck in?” he asks.

  A universal pause, shrug.

  “He’s got a point,” Barker admits.

  Billy watches as their attention returns to the game. He watches the fluttering of the Allied franc notes.

  The orders keep coming from a distance: the Mad Bastard yelling for them to get a move on, to shift along, to budge up, to make some bleedin’ room. Gossum makes a show of shuffling around on his arse without moving any distance at all. Barker shoves at his pack, pushing it upright, tighter against the side, but then letting it slide back again. Alfie slides his backside forward, but then leans back on extended hands. No quarter given, no territory surrendered. Not an inch. Billy feels a perverse kind of pride: they are cussed sods.

  “My lucky day,” he says, of his cards, and taps them into a neat block, lays them face down by his leg.

  Gossum snorts, shucks a cigarette out of his pack, tucks it in under his moustache: “Getting crowded here, init.”

  He wraps the pack up again in its waterproof cover, then taps open his matchbox.

  “And I’ll tell you something for nothing,” Gossum adds. “I’m not having some fucker sitting on my knee for seventeen hours.” He drags hard on his cigarette, making the paper blacken and peel back with a tiny rustling sound.

  A gull flaps down to land on the gunwale nearby. It strolls along on its yellow feet looking them over with an assessing beady eye. All it needs is a swagger stick tucked under its wing.

  “Fold,” Barker says, and drops his cards into the centre of their circle, making the helmet rock gently. He looks away. Billy follows his line of sight towards the prow, where the gunner and his mate are going over the gun with oil and rags. Getting it match fit.

  Ten yards. Don’t look beyond the next ten yards.

  “Raise you,” Gossum says, and drops down another pair of crisp never-before-used notes.

  Billy flips through his francs. He flings another three notes onto the pile.

  “See you,” he says. “Raise you ten.”

  • • •

  They play until Gossum has filled his helmet with cash and the rest of them are cleaned out. Gossum bends his head, tips the helmet on. The helmet stands proud by a good two inches. Paper notes hang out round his ears. He grins, shakes his head from side to side, like Dorothy’s Scarecrow.

  “Dimwit.”

  Gossum tips the helmet off again, starts to dig out the cash and divide it into piles. Billy watches his practised hands as he sorts the notes.

  “Where you going to stow all that?”

  “I can’t,” Gossum shrugs. “Not got a bleedin’ spare inch to stick it. Unless you’ve brought some Vaseline?” He rolls up a pile of notes, makes an upward thrusting gesture.

  Alfie snorts.

  “Don’t laugh,” Gossum says. “It’s a bloody tragedy. Bloody tragedy of war.” He hands a stack of notes back to each of the men. “Play again?”

  When Billy is cleaned out a second time, he leans his head back to rest against the gunwale. It’s noisy, and that’s good, because it will help him stay awake. He doesn’t want to fall asleep, not if he can help it. If he sleeps, chances are he’ll dream, and he doesn’t want the men to see that. See him shivering and sweating and afraid.

  The talk is onto France. He keeps his eyes shut so that they don’t ask him about it again. They’re telling their dads’ stories of the last war’s egg and chips in small-town cafés, pissy beer and rough French wine and brandy that’d strip your throat right out, and though their dads didn’t talk about the women there must have been women even back then, women that their dads got their legs over in some room above the egg-and-chips cafés. And who got, likely-as-not, once-in-a-while, up the spout, so that by the end of the last war there must have been dozens of half-breed little bastards running around these small towns in northern France, and as that’s more than twenty years ago now they’ll be grown up and some of them are bound to have been girls, and you know how these mixes are always better looking, like mulattos, gorgeous, so the worry is, isn’t it, when you get your leg over a sweet little French whore it could be she’s not so French as all that and is in fact your half-sister.

  Roars of horror and disgust.

  Gossum announces over the noise that he doesn’t give a monkey shit, half-sister or no half-sister. The first thing he’s going to do, once they’ve slogged their way through the German lines, before brewing up or getting drunk or getting a good feed or working out what deals there are to be done, he’s going to get himself a fuck, because he’s spent too many weeks around you stinking men, and what he really needs is a nice professional girl all smooth and powdered and smelling of French perfume not sour boots and farts and bad breath, a girl who’s ready to do anything for a few Allied francs—of which he’s going to have plenty once he’s won this game like all the others, because they’re such a bunch of useless gets—or she
’ll maybe even do it for nothing, given that he’ll be liberating her from the Nazi curse shortly before he fucks her.

  The men yell in protest, tell Gossum he’s a pig.

  Billy runs his tongue round his teeth, picking up the sour debris at the back, snagging on a sharp bit of a molar. Do you ever think, he wants to say, that this is really the same war as before? Because here they are again, all over again, fighting the same enemy, and with the same men in command. Mr. Churchill loves a good invasion. Gallipoli was his big idea too.

  Mr. Churchill killed my dad, Billy wants to say. And most likely he’ll do just the same for us too.

  Billy blinks his eyes open and reaches into his helmet and lifts out the photograph from the inner band. He unwraps the waxed-paper covering. In the picture her skin is white with powder, her lips dark; she’s smiling, lips slightly parted on pearly teeth, but her eyes look vague, unfocused, dreamy. Although it’s probably because she won’t wear her glasses, it looks like she’s gazing out beyond the camera. Like her eyes are on the photographer, not on the lens. Ruby. Ruby. That gentleman in pinstripes and bowler hat, his gaze catching hers as he passed, and she’d returned the look—or at least it had seemed like it. He’d see her smiling at the barman’s smile. The lads at Herne Hill, the way they’d stared. And she had known, and she had loved it, loved to be noticed—but she had loved him more. When they were courting, and he was still in the game, he’d get stopped in the street: people would want to shake his hand. And she would stand back, arm linked through his, half a step away, her beauty, for a moment, eclipsed by his fame. And she hadn’t minded at all; she had smiled and nodded hello at whoever it was, and waited. Somehow it’d seemed fair. They were both wanted, in their different ways. It seemed to even out.

  And then he remembers. The last night of his last leave. The blood swells in him. And he can’t help it, he’s grinning. He’s fighting it but it’s spreading across his face and he can’t help it any more than he can help that he’s stiffening. Remembering her in that small back room, her hand gripping his belt, her naughty smile, pulling him back towards the bed.