The Undertow

by Jo Baker

  She pushes at him with her free hand, but he’s too strong; he crushes her arm up against her body, her back against the bole of the tree. The rain pounds down on them. The smell of him is terrible. His eyes, close up, are strangely pale and dry. This can’t be happening.

  “Just let me go,” she says. “If you let me go now, I won’t tell anyone—”

  “No you see,” he says. “That’s the point, I want you to tell.”

  He reaches down, pulls his coat open.

  Never tell.

  She remembers. What her mother said. Whatever you do, don’t tell him anything about the birth. He hears what it’s really like, he’ll never want to come near you again. And so when the baby came, there was the pain, and the blood and mess, and then there was just the absence, where the baby should have been, and there were no words to fill it.

  She pushes at him again, but it’s useless. His body pins her against the trunk. He fumbles with his belt. The rain runs down her face, stings her eyes.

  “I had a baby,” Ruby says.

  The look on the nurse’s face. Blood on the woman’s hands and down her apron. She remembers the doctor still rumpled from his bed, rubbing his hands with a towel and frowning up between her legs.

  Her head is fixed by his, pushed aside, her cheek pressed against his mottled cheek. Her mouth is by his good ear.

  “He was blue,” Ruby says into the dark curl of his ear, the flakes of dead skin and bristling white hair. A droplet gathers on the tip of his earlobe, catching green from the trees. “He was born blue. He never took a breath.”

  Six years since the baby. It must have damaged her inside; they said it might. There’s been nothing since.

  He eases the pressure off. She blinks the wet from her eyes. For a moment she thinks he’s going to let her go, that this has done what her mother promised it would do, but it’s something else. It happens quicker than she can make sense of it. He stretches back an arm and then her head flings back, cracking into the wood. He hit her. The back of her head and her chin flare with pain. He presses hard against her again, pinning her into place. He hitches up her skirt, exposes bare legs—nothing but a pair of washed-thin French knickers between him and her. Hands on her thighs.

  Her chest is a knot of fury: he’s bigger and stronger than her, and so he can do this, and she can’t stop him. She wants Billy here, now, to save her; it’s his job to save her. She wants the baby, the boy who never breathed; she wants to be racing for shelter with her son. She wants her mother desperately. Nothing is as it should be. Nothing.

  His cheek feels greasy with rain, stubbly against hers. His good ear is just there. A pendulous lobe of yellowish flesh, bristling hair, the glistening drop of water.

  And then there’s a shift and click, like finding the solution to a crossword clue. She sinks her teeth into his ear.

  He roars. A great angry bellow and yanks away; but her teeth press through old skin and into rubbery cartilage. He shoves at her, but she just bites harder. It’s thrilling. Disgusting, but thrilling. She’s hanging, like some kind of bizarre circus act, from an old man’s ear.

  “Get off!” He paws at her. She’s too close for him to get a decent swing. “Get off.”

  He tries to grab her throat, but she twists away, bites harder.

  He scrabbles at her. “Jesus Christ, get off me!”

  Her teeth meet in the warm flesh. It’s oddly satisfying.

  “Fuck!”

  He lunges away, stumbling, bent over, hand to the side of his head. He leaves his earlobe between her teeth, blood pooling behind her lips. The earlobe feels warm and faintly bristly on her tongue, like a strange fruit. She rips off a glove, spits the thing out into her hand. Blood spools from her mouth. She clamps her hand shut round the scrap of flesh and wipes the blood away with the back of her hand.

  “Bitch!”

  He hunches under the rain, hand cupped over his ear, blood dripping.

  She wipes her mouth again with the heel of her hand. With her other hand she hooks off her shoes, one and then the other.

  “Fucking bitch!” He looks smaller now.

  “You didn’t leave me with much choice,” she says.

  “That was my fucking ear.”

  He comes for her.

  She darts away, runs. Barefoot through the long grass; it clings round her ankles and the earth feels cool and sound. She dodges under low branches, hair streaming, jacket flapping open. She has cleared fifty yards when she realises she can’t hear any sound of him following. She glances back through the rain and tossing branches: she can just make him out—a dark shape, standing looking after her, hand clamped to the side of his head. Then he turns and walks away.

  She turns too, and walks now through the pelting rain, out through the trees, putting as much distance between him and her as possible. She feels strangely alert, alive to the water hitting her skin, warming with her flesh, trickling down her. She can taste the freshness of the air, and feel the wet grass beneath her feet. Her headscarf is lost: her scalp tickles with raindrops. She slips her shoes back on, and her feet feel lovely, cool inside them. She fishes for her compact. The mauve lining of her bag darkens with raindrops. She peers into the small circular mirror; not as bad as might be expected: wet, makeup smudged, but fresh-cheeked and bright. She licks a corner of her handkerchief and rubs at her lips, wiping away the smear of blood, along with rain and streaked powder. She can still feel the give and crunch of flesh between her teeth. She rubs at her teeth with her handkerchief, wipes the inside of her lips, her tongue. The movement makes her more conscious of the thing still in her palm: she opens her hand and looks at the scrap of flesh nestling there. It is small, tacky with blood; it sticks to her skin. She’s just going to shake it off like a slug, when:

  “Oh hello there.”

  Ruby looks round. Clamps her hand shut. Rain clatters off a big sturdy umbrella. The handsome man smiles. He looks comfortable and dry. He lifts the umbrella, tilts it. “Can I offer you a lift?”

  She clasps the handkerchief back onto her palm, bundles the earlobe up inside its folds, and drops the lot inside her bag.

  “Thank you, yes,” she says. “That would be divine.”

  Portsmouth Docks

  June 4, 1944, 5:47 p.m.

  ALFIE PISSES OVER the side of the boat. The hot, musky hiss of it as it fountains out of the man and through the air and down into the water. Gossum is snoozing in the sun. The man seems to have an infinite capacity for sleep.

  Billy blinks up at the clearing sky. A pale blue, but a blue you can believe in, scudding with clouds, making him narrow his eyes. He tries at the mental arithmetic of tides and daylight and crossing times, but he’s too tired to make head or tail of it by now.

  Barker’s asleep too, his head nodding forward on his chest, and Alfie slides down beside Billy, buttoning up, then rubbing at his eyes. Of course sleep. Sleep is what you do. Once you have eaten and shat, then you do your best to sleep. Billy takes in a deep slow breath and closes his eyes. His thoughts swoop up to the threshold of sleep, and he dips out of consciousness. His head lolls. Dark corridors, water. And then he blinks awake. Straightens, eases out the crick in his neck.

  “What did you make of that fella?” Alfie speaks low, so as not to disturb the others’ sleep.

  “Mmm?”

  “In the canteen? Your greatest admirer?”

  Billy shrugs.

  “Dull is it? A dreadful bore, being adored like that?”

  There’s a beat. Alfie’s gazing up at the pale sky, hands folded on his chest, looking perfectly innocent.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Alfie says. “But do you think he was quite right in the head?”

  Billy laughs softly.

  “No, I’m serious. He seemed, you know, a bit off.”

  “We’re all a bit off.”

  Alfie nods. “Yeah.” There’s silence, and then, “He was right, though.”

  Billy squints round at him. “What?”


  “You were something special.”

  Billy rolls his head back round, eyes closed, the light making his eyelids scarlet. “You weren’t there, at the trials.”

  “The Olympics weren’t everything.”

  They were. The trials showed him the truth: that he might be a sharp little cross-breed whippet, and do well against other whippets, but the university boys, they were a different species. Beautiful, glossy with health and generations of good feeding. He couldn’t compete. And he couldn’t live—at least, couldn’t go on racing against the other whippets—with that knowledge.

  “I ever tell you,” Billy says, “my dad died at Gallipoli?”

  “No.”

  “That was one of Churchill’s little adventures too. Fucking insane gamble, that was.”

  Alfie looks sidelong at him. “My dad died at home. Coughing up his lungs.” His face twists up.

  “D’you ever think how it might have been, if it hadn’t been for that war?” Billy asks. “If all those men who died were alive instead? All the little brothers and sisters that never got born.”

  “Place’d be getting crowded.”

  “We’d have twice the army, though.”

  “So would the Germans.” Alfie tilts his head. “Course, your dad and mine, they might have just gone and died of something else.”

  Billy considers the possible intersections between him, his dad, Churchill and death. Barker stirs, mutters. Billy and Alfie watch him for a moment.

  “Even if you weren’t going to race, you could have still stayed on at Butler’s,” Alfie says.

  “Oh, fuck off.”

  “Well, you could have. You could still have done good work. Coaching, like old Rudd, or even design. You always had a way with that kind of thing. That whole one less ball bearing in the cranks thing: less weight, less friction. Made a difference.”

  “Give over.” But for a moment Billy can smell the workshop: bamboo, rubber, solder. The low light through the windows, catching on the dust.

  “Cut off your nose to spite your face.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “I stayed on.”

  “I know that.”

  “Building bikes. Working. Till all this kicked off—till we signed up.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “It was easier for me. That’s what you think, isn’t it? I was never going to be anybody anyway, so it was easier for me to just, you know. Fail.”

  “Yeah. I had to work really hard at it.”

  Alfie huffs a quiet laugh. They sit in silence a moment, the two of them aware of the bristling fleet around them, the breathing, sweating men.

  Then Alfie says, “You know Ruby?”

  Billy rolls his head round to look at him. His broad brown face, the desert lines. “My wife?”

  Alfie nods.

  Billy shifts on his backside, sitting up, stiff, uneasy. “Yeah, I know her.”

  “They have this thing, don’t they?”

  “They?”

  “The Jews. They have this thing where they kill a lamb.”

  Billy presses his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “Not in Mitcham they don’t.”

  “But they do, don’t they? The Yids. They kill a lamb, for the blood, to paint on their doors.”

  Passover; that’s what he’s getting at. Not that Ruby does anything like that; she hasn’t practised for years. His ma wouldn’t stand for it anyway. He doesn’t know, now he thinks of it, what Ruby believes, or if she believes anything. If she had a faith, and lost it. What with one thing and another. The disappointments. The baby. And everything.

  “I don’t think they do that any more. With actual blood,” Billy says.

  “But they used to, didn’t they? Slaughter a lamb.”

  And serve it up with mint sauce and new potatoes. Is that where this is going?

  “Lambs are always getting slaughtered,” Billy says. “It’s in the nature of lambs. They bring it on themselves, the little woolly bastards.”

  “Yeah, but so that—what? So the people, they get left alone? The lamb dies so they don’t have to?”

  “I think it’s the first-born sons they’re protecting,” Billy says, struggling for details from Sunday school. “I think that was the idea.”

  “You’re a first-born son,” Alfie says.

  “First and only. Thanks to Winston.”

  “Me too.”

  The baby. He never saw the baby. Remembers Ruby’s white and devastated face. Didn’t know how even to begin to comfort her.

  “So what I’m thinking is, we should do that.”

  Billy blinks. “What?”

  “We should have a sacrifice.”

  He leans forward. “Kill a lamb?”

  “Don’t be daft.”

  Billy sinks back.

  “Where’d you think we’d get a lamb round here?” Alfie says. “I was thinking, though, we could catch a gull, one of them big fuckers. Creep up on one from behind, Bob’s your uncle. Burn it up on a Tommy stove.”

  Alfie’s expression is entirely serious.

  “You’re mad.”

  “No, no, all we need is a couple of handfuls of sand for the stove, and a drop of petrol; burn it up nicely.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, why not? Them gulls, cocky wee shites. Got it coming. Snap its greasy neck.”

  Billy leans back, laughs quietly.

  “What?” Alfie asks. “What’s funny?”

  “You are. You’re mad. Mad as a brush.”

  “Mad? Why? What’s mad about that? Just want to even out the odds, get a little traction—”

  Billy sputters, shakes his head.

  “What?”

  Then the air explodes. A hole ripped into the day. Billy flinches; Alfie ducks. The sleepers jerk awake. It was a gunshot. Billy’s ears ring. There’s no second shot.

  Billy knows.

  He heaves himself up and heads across the deck, pushing past the men who stumble to their feet and look around.

  When he reaches the boy, the skin-chewer, the greatest admirer, there’s a smell of meat and scorching and hot metal and the tang of gunfire is bitter and strong. The boy slumps, his back against the rail. He is dazed: the noise, the shock, the pain. He’s holding his left wrist with his right hand. There is a bullet hole through his left hand, between the base of his thumb and the rest of his palm. Billy sees the white of bone or cartilage; a cable of pink tendon. Either by good luck or design, he’s done a decent enough job: he’s missed the delicate bones, and, by the looks of it, the major blood vessels. He’ll probably have some use of it again.

  “Looks like your piano-playing days are over, son.” Billy is down on his knees in front of him. “Hold it up high.”

  Blood wells from the red of the hole and runs over the supporting hand, and drips onto the deck. The boy doesn’t move, does nothing. Billy grabs the wrist of the undamaged hand, and drags it upward, bringing the broken hand with it. Blood drips down in front of the boy’s white face. Someone else kneels in to help.

  “Hold it there. Lifted. Above his heart.” He registers the stripes on the man’s shoulder. “Sir,” Billy adds.

  The wounded man’s helmet is lying by him; Billy reaches for it, fumbles inside for a field dressing. His jaw is tight. His eyes are unaccountably wet. It’s just the unfairness of it all. It’s this waiting. If it wasn’t for this waiting. No wonder the kid lost his nerve. This is an accident of war, Billy thinks, as much as if the boy had been shot on the beach, as much as if he’d stepped on a mine. But that’s not how it will be seen.

  There are officers yelling, whistles blowing, footfalls thundering on the steel deck, making it vibrate beneath them. He speaks clearly, loud, so that people have to hear.

  “Nasty accident, me old mucker, but we’ll patch you up, don’t you worry.”

  The boy blinks, but doesn’t answer. It must hurt like all hell. Billy tears the field dressing open with his teeth.

  “Look out,” the lieutenant says. �
�He’s going.”

  The boy slumps sideways into a faint. The two of them support him, lay him down on his side.

  Billy speaks the words over his shoulder. To the lieutenant, the men gathering, to the other officers looking on.

  “Accidental discharge of his weapon. Lucky no-one else was hurt.”

  The lieutenant keeps the hand elevated above the slumped body. Billy wads the wound with lint. Between them they strap the hand back together.

  Kensington Gardens

  June 4, 1944, 6:15 p.m.

  SHE’S WALKING THROUGH the park, under an umbrella. She’s conscious of her whole body as it moves—the brush of bare thigh against bare thigh, the cool weight of damp blouse against her collarbone, the press and release of skirt hem around her knees. Her body feels her own again, properly hers, for the first time in years.

  The two of them walk on, down through the trees. He presses her arm, squeezing it with his. He smells of good leather and shaving soap. They wade through the long grass; it brushes Ruby’s legs coldly, darkens his trouser cuffs. Her shoes are too wet to get any wetter now. He talks about the weather, about the importance of a decent umbrella, concerns for her comfort—normal things—and she chatters back, giddy with the evening, with a sense of freedom, with having effected her own escape. He offers her his coat, but she won’t accept it—she’s fine, really, she’s fine. Anyway, she’d soak it through from the inside out.

  The only thing she wants right now is the hush of a ladies’ room, a mirror, water, towels.

  She has her handbag clamped under an arm, and the thing is bundled inside it. She’ll deal with it later. The rain is cleansing. They’re heading for Kensington High Street. They reach a path, and turn to follow it. Water rolls down it in shallow terraces. She touches the tender spot on her jaw.

  “What were you doing?” she asks him. “When you found me?”

  “Nothing much. Bit of a stroll.” The start of a smile. “Might have been keeping half an eye out for you.”

  “Oh.” She follows the course of a raindrop through the skin of the umbrella, watches it drop from the rim. A smile breaks across her face, and she covers it with a hand. She laughs.