The Undertow

by Jo Baker

“I don’t have time for this.” He grabs her arm, tugs her out of her chair. It hurts.

  “Dad—”

  “We’re going.”

  Grandma turns away—does something busy on the counter. Granddad’s chair scrapes back, and he grabs Dad’s arm, and stops him dead. Dad looks at the old hand on his arm, and then looks at his hand on Billie’s. “Don’t,” Dad says.

  There’s a moment, then Granddad’s hand drops away. And Dad lets her go.

  “Sorry, petal,” her dad says to her.

  It’s worse, his apology: it’s more upsetting than him pulling her out of the chair. “S’all right.”

  “I was worried,” he says. “Terrified. Jesus. Anything could have happened.”

  But it didn’t, Billie wants to say. I’m here and nothing happened and everything was fine until you came. She sits back down. Dad shifts uneasily, takes hold of the back of Grandma’s chair. His leg is hurting him.

  “And why d’you think she’d go and do a thing like that?” Granddad says.

  “Jesus. Do we have to?”

  “But why do you think? Smart girl like that, doing something so daft.”

  “Her mother and I are sorting things out.”

  “Sorting things out? Ha! How exactly? Maybe to your convenience, but bugger everyone else, hey?”

  Billie’s head drops down onto folded arms. For a while there are just voices, and Grandma’s arm around her shoulders. Billie nods to the soothing noises that she makes, dabs her eyes with her sleeve. Sniffs.

  “The thing about you, son,” her granddad says. “The thing I don’t understand—”

  “Billy,” Grandma warns.

  Billie glances up at her. She looks trapped, somehow, alert and anxious. Billie’s dad stands back from things—back against the counter, as if he’s restrained, held in place by something. The room is full of unseen cables, linking, pulling, tense.

  “Your mother and me—we thought we’d brought you up better than that.”

  “Jesus Christ—”

  Her granddad just talks over him: “A good home, a stable home, all these years. And this is what you do.”

  “Keep it vague, why don’t you? You’re not going to want to go into too much detail.”

  “You know your problem, boy?”

  “I’d be fascinated to hear.”

  “You never had a war to go to. That’s your problem.”

  “You reckon? You reckon that’s it, do you—?”

  “When is the baby due?” Billie asks.

  Attention spins and fixes on her. They didn’t know she knew.

  “I mean, it’ll be my half-brother or sister. I think I should be told.”

  Her dad lets out a slow thin breath. “It’s early days yet. We don’t know—Carole has to …”

  Billie nods, looks down at her hands. Moves her fingers so the glitter in her nail varnish catches the light. This is what the family will be now, this is what it will be shuffled out and sorted into: a new neat unit. Dad, Carole, new baby. If it’s a boy, will they call it William too, as though she’d never been? And all the mess will be sorted out and cleared off and got rid of. Billie has an image of herself, on a lilo drifting out to sea, and everyone she’s ever known is crowded on the beach, all talking and far too busy and preoccupied to look out after her, and watch her disappear.

  The museum’s dome is off to their right. The air is dirty with fumes: it tastes like pennies. They cross at the lights, walk along beside the railings.

  They have agreed that she can have this: these few days here in London before she has to go back. She needed to calm down, her dad told her, to have a break from home and all that disruption: he knew things were difficult right now. And Granddad and Grandma were glad to have her there, he’d said. And she’d wanted to say she knew that, and that was why she’d come. But instead she’d just said thank you.

  Granddad’s hand swings along beside her. She catches it. He squeezes her hand, and that makes her smile. The railings flicker by, her reaching slightly up, him reaching slightly down, and it feels at once strange and awkward and really nice. She remembers the green gloss of the pedal-aeroplane he made for her, the bulls-eye markings on the wings.

  “There we are,” he says.

  They head through the gates. The vast naval guns rear up overhead, silvery, cold, incongruous.

  “They’re from the Roberts,” he says. “At least, one of them is, I think.”

  “Go over,” she says. “I’ll take your photo.”

  He walks away from her. His trousers hang loose around his legs. His backside is flat underneath the polyester. He stands between the guns for a moment. His right hand almost lifts away from his side, as if he’s going to reach out and try and touch the gun’s flank. But instead he dips it into his pocket. He turns round and squints at her. Smiles. Jerks his head towards the doors: Come on then.

  She lifts her camera from her pocket, snaps his photograph. Winds it on.

  She sits on the spare bed, making a dent in the powder-blue candlewick, and waits for him to finish in the bathroom. The walls are thin. She can hear the slow, strained dribble of his pee onto ceramic, the volcanic toilet flush, the scrub and spit into the sink. He comes out onto the landing, passes her door. She catches a glimpse of striped pyjama bottoms, vest, the softened skin of his chest and arm, the fuzz of white chest hair, and the vague smudge of his tattoo. Ruby.

  She steps out onto the landing. Bare feet on patterned carpet. Through the half-open door, she can see her grandparents’ twin beds. Grandma is already in hers, a hump under the purple nylon counterpane. Her breathing is loud and ragged.

  “Granddad,” Billie breathes, not wanting them to hear. “Grandma.”

  It feels like she’s sticking a pin into a map, saying these words. Then she can twist a thread around it, and wherever she goes and however far away, she can reel the thread off behind her; then, whenever she needs to, she can follow it back again to where she started from.

  She gets into bed. The bed is soft; it creaks when she turns. She is going to come back. She can follow the thread back here whenever she wants. Whenever her mum and school can spare her.

  She can hear the city noises. Layers of traffic, a dog’s straining hysterical bark.

  Dad slept here as a boy. Ran down those stairs, good leg bad leg, out that front door and off into the streets, and then off to Oxford.

  She rolls round onto her side, eyes level with the bedside cabinet. In the next room her grandma wheezes uneasily. Granddad softly snores. The sounds weave together into waves, spilling onto sand.

  Tomorrow is the train home. Walkman on. Trying to look like she knows how to be in the world, how to fill up the ticking minutes. Mum at the station, with her too-bright smile and her hair needing a cut. They are going to see the new house again. The paved back yard. The damp patch under the back bedroom window. The neighbours two doors down shout at each other in the middle of the day. She and her mum are going to measure up her new room for curtains.

  Later, there will be Mum’s work piled on the dining table, her glass of wine, her elbow on the tabletop and her hand raked into her hair. Billie will go to bed and listen to the emptiness upstairs and down. This, at least, will go with the move: the noticeable absence, the sense of too much space.

  She blinks at the bedside cabinet. Her sketchpad lies askew on top of it. She’d better pack it.

  She shuffles upright in bed, flicks on the bedside light and lifts the spiral-bound pad from the top of the cabinet. She flicks through. A sketch of Grandma catches her attention. She’s not quite got the line of the nose right—it needs to be a bit more … She reaches for her pencil, fumbles it; it goes skittering off the surface, down between the cabinet and the wall. Damn it. She twists round, drags the cabinet away from the wall: there it is. She lies flat again to stretch down for it, reaching blindly, her cheek against the edge of the bed. The dust is thick like mouse fur: her fingertips brush the pencil, she goes to grab it, but her knuckles knock
against something hard and hollow. Metal. She closes her hand round it, lifts it out—a sweetie tin, she thinks at first.

  A tobacco tin in fact, all white and blue and gold. It’s old. It’s been there a while. It’s thick with dust. Maybe it’s Granddad’s. Or Grandma’s, rather, since she’s the smoker. But Granddad’s always got tins of screws and hinges and bits of bike: maybe he’s lost it. She shakes it. It’s light, doesn’t rattle.

  Probably empty then. Billie has a go at opening it, but it’s stuck, rusted hard. She tries again, pulling and then twisting. Can’t shift it. She casts around for something to wrap it in for a better grip, something that won’t stain. A sock. A black one. She scrambles out of bed, scrabbles one out from the bottom of her bag. Wraps it round the tin and twists.

  This time it grates open. Lid in one hand, tin in the other. There’s a handkerchief stuffed inside the tin: that’s why it didn’t make a noise when she shook it. She sets the handkerchief aside; there are a few things in the tin after all. Grandma things. She lifts out a crystal drop earring and it catches the light and scatters it with gorgeous softness; a single pearl stud is creamy between the fingertips, cool and waxy on the lips. Then there’s a brooch set with glittering metallic black stones, but the catch is broken.

  She’ll give the tin to Grandma tomorrow. She’s lost it, maybe even forgotten she ever had it. These are all broken things; easily forgotten. But when Grandma has them in her hands again, she will remember. She’ll tell her where they’ve come from, what they mean. Things have this power: one look, one touch; memories come back like that.

  She goes to put the handkerchief back, but it unfolds itself in sharp creases, reveals a dark patch, a stain, which sticks the cloth together. Is it blood? Inside, there’s something loose. A bit of leather—she places it in her palm. It’s the colour of a penny. She holds it up to the light and there are three white hairs bristling out of it. They glisten in the light, entirely human.

  It’s an earlobe. Someone’s earlobe. She’s certain of it. Though whose, and how it came to be here, with these lost treasures, she can’t imagine. Something nasty happened, that’s clear. The blood on the handkerchief, and this thing wrapped up for safekeeping. A messy accident. Something to do with the war.

  And then it’s been kept hidden here, for years, long enough for it to turn to leather.

  A shiver gathers in the back of her neck. This is a secret. She can’t ask her grandma about any of this.

  And she wants it. With the same certainty that she wanted the hare’s skull, the newt, the fleshless leaf. But this, for all it’s tiny, this is more than all of that put together. This is human.

  If she just puts everything else back as she found it—she sets the scrap of leather down on the bedside table, then tucks the handkerchief back into a bundle and grinds the lid back into place; leaning right over the side of the bed, she tips the tin in and lets it roll back underneath, minus that one little thing—no-one will ever know.

  She picks up the little scrap of flesh again and presses it. It gives slightly between her fingernails, making her shiver delightfully. It’s hers. She’ll have to keep it hidden. Billie tweaks a tissue from the box on the bedside cabinet. She wraps up the ancient severed earlobe, pushes it into her bag.

  Billy’s taking their granddaughter to the train station. Ruby’s tidying up. She strips Billie’s bed, flings back the blanket and grabs the bottom sheet, and the bed creaks out from the wall, but the sheet doesn’t come untucked.

  “Bother.”

  She moves round the far side of the bed and pushes up the sleeves of her caramel-coloured sweater and leans in down between the bedhead and the wall to tackle the problem. And then, in the dusty gap between the bedhead and the wall, she sees the tin.

  For a second she’s caught between the moment and the memory and just stands there, her dry hands full of crumpled pink polycotton. Then she tugs the bed further out, gets down carefully on creaking knees, and reaches into the dusty shadows.

  She sits down on the half-unmade bed. The house is empty. The tin is in her hands, gritty with rust. She can’t even put it down in case the rust marks something.

  Ruby tries at the lid. It grinds uneasily. She doesn’t open it.

  She feels the sense of it in her mouth. The bite of it. The blood behind her teeth.

  The inside of the car and the smell of leather and the creak and sweep of the windscreen wipers. The rich smell of him.

  Her belly pushes out against her waistband as she breathes. She saw him, at Will’s graduation, feet planted on that lovely lawn like he owned the place, and her tiptoeing, hushed, like she was in a church. And for the briefest of moments, before she’d even registered the shock of it, or the backwash of worry about Billy noticing something, she’d wanted to go up to him and say, well fancy that, you and I meeting again, after all these years. But then she felt it—the crackling nylon of her C&A suit round her calves, and the pinch of her hat, and Billy there beside her, stiff in his black suit, and instead she’d lit a cigarette and looked the other way, and asked Will which one of the men in their flappy black gowns was his tutor. So they didn’t meet again, not really. As far as she knows, the handsome man hadn’t noticed her at all, he’d been so busy talking with other, substantial men. Anyway, he wasn’t so handsome any more: he’d gone to seed. And his boy was a great blond fleshy lump, and nothing like her Will.

  And if Billy suspects, if he thinks, if he even for a moment imagines that there’d been a cuckoo in the nest, then it’s clear as day now that he’s wrong. He’s so like his dad, Will is. He might look a bit like her, but his ongoing bloody-minded battle through the pain, that’s pure Billy.

  She pushes down onto the bed with her free hand, and gets to her feet. A strange tingling sensation prickles out from her chest and down her arm.

  She goes into the bathroom, sets the tin down between the taps. She stands at the mirror. Her bones are good. Her eyes are good. She tries a smile. Her skin folds into creases at her eyes; there are deep lines etched from nose to lips, and her lipstick feathers round the edges. Mrs. had always said the cigarettes’d give her wrinkles.

  It was gradual, the fade-out from beauty. It wasn’t any particular thing, no hard line, no threshold from one state to the next. But gradually the men stopped staring; and they stopped being angry at her, because they’d stopped wanting her. And she finds that she prefers it like this. To go unnoticed, unremarked upon. She’s enjoying her anonymity.

  She makes her way down the stairs and through the house. In the back porch she lifts a trowel from the shelf. Her heart feels fluttery, uneasy. She pads along the garden path in her house slippers.

  She goes right to the end of the path, just before the garage, where Amelia used to grow tomatoes. She kneels carefully at the border, easing herself onto her knees. She thwacks the trowel into the soil, lifts out a clump of sweet william, and digs out the earth underneath. The flower garden is hers. He’s not going to be digging here.

  She digs a hole a foot deep, eight inches wide.

  She never did find out where he was buried, the blue baby. If he’d lived, then everything would have been different. That Sunday before D-Day would have been different, she’d have been chasing after her little boy. But if he had lived, there would have been no Will, no Janet. Other children perhaps, but not them. There would have been no Billie, no Madeline; and Ruby can’t conceive of a life without these threads, the tug of them.

  She lays the tin down in the dark soil. Pain licks out across her chest. She tries to catch her breath. She scrapes the soil over the box: lay it all to rest. She tucks the plant’s roots back into place. The flower stands to attention, its petals rimmed and blotched with purple.

  St. George’s Hospital, Tooting

  May 15, 1995

  “THERE YOU GO, LOVE.”

  The nurse sticks on the wad of lint, pressing lightly along the adhesive strips. Then she tugs his pyjama top down and lifts him up against the pillows. The wound twists a
nd pulls and he winces. She bobs down to empty the bags. He watches the white seam down the centre of her head, where her mousey roots are parted. Brisk, she is, this young woman. Already she’s back on her feet, peeling off her gloves, whisking back the curtains. Doesn’t stop to chat.

  Billy peers down the ward, between the beds. Will is supposed to be coming today. He said that he’d bring the children. That means Billie, which is sunshine and spring air; but it also means Matthew. Billy will be nice to him. He always is. It’s not the lad’s fault, how he came to be.

  There will be tea in half an hour. A mug of milky tea and two digestives, because that’s what the doctor says he should have, because they are good for the digestion, and a chat with the nice lady who brings the trolley. And then dinner at five. Cold cuts and salad. Which he likes too. It’s not bad in here. He feels looked after.

  And then he spots her, hair shining, coming down the ward towards him bright and smiling. She ducks down and gives him a kiss. Slides into the chair, takes his hand.

  “How you feeling, Granddad?”

  Where did she get those green eyes? Is that from Madeline’s side, or his own?

  “Not too bad, love.” Even to him his voice sounds weak. “Where’s your dad?”

  She jerks her head, gesturing down the ward, towards the corridor beyond. “Talking to the doctor.”

  He peers, eyes rheumy. “Is Matthew there?”

  “He’s just waiting for Dad.”

  “He’ll be bored.”

  She shrugs. “He’ll live.”

  “What are they saying?”

  “Who?”

  “The doctors.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  She knows something. He can tell by her tone. He looks at her with sudden clarity. She’s grown up: she’s included in grown-up information and discussion and decisions. And he isn’t. Not any more.

  “Dad’ll sort it out,” Billie says. “Really, don’t you worry. We’ll have you home in no time.”

  She’s making such a fucking hash of it. Her cheeks burn. She glances back round at her father—who’s just disappearing through the door that the registrar, Dr. Nurbhai, holds open for him—leaving her nine-year-old half-brother, Matthew, slumped on a plastic chair in the corridor for her to keep an eye on.