The Undertow

by Jo Baker

  She smiles. Shrugs. “Well, there you go.”

  She watches Matty as he opens the case and scuffs out the cover-notes. She drinks her tea. The noise of the café is dense and white. He’s completely absorbed in his reading. She feels a new tenderness for him: his unfurrowed forehead, the clear lines of his features, the silky fuzz of his hair over an eggshell skull. She feels a flush of warmth for the little boy he was, now that he’s leaving it behind.

  “Thanks,” he says, after a while.

  “No problem. Seriously. You tell me if you like it and I’ll have a think about other stuff you might get into.”

  “Thanks, sis.” He lifts his bag back onto his lap and goes to stash the album away. She smiles.

  And then, for no reason in particular, she asks, “What’s with the hair?”

  “Eh?”

  “You’ve gone all, you know, minimalist.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” He rubs at his shorn skull. “It’s been a while now. I don’t notice it really any more. It’s for cadets.”

  “Cadets?”

  “Officer cadets.”

  “You mean like scouts?”

  “More like junior army.”

  “Woah. And what does Dad make of that?”

  He drinks, sets down his cup, pinches the wet away from his lips. “He hates it.”

  She laughs.

  “What?”

  “I dunno. I used to just let him catch me smoking.”

  “I’m not doing it to piss him off.”

  “Why, then?”

  “I’m serious. I’m joining up. When I’m old enough.”

  “What? The army?”

  He nods.

  All the laughter’s gone. “God.”

  The clink of china, the hiss of the espresso machine, the blur of voices. A woman at the next table is talking about perfume. Billie wants to say, you can’t do this. This isn’t fair. Not now. Don’t turn out lovely and then go and join the army.

  “I was banking on you,” he says. Clears his throat.

  “What?”

  “I thought you’d understand. You must know what it’s like.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “But it’s the same thing. Your painting, it’s the same as this. It’s what you have to do with your life.”

  She sits back, baffled. Is this how he sees her? She’s never even considered it till now. All these years, locked up in her own preoccupations. How distant has she seemed, how disconnected?

  “Art’s your thing,” he says. “This is mine.”

  “Matty,” she says. And then, “Matty, it’s not the same thing at all.”

  “I want it, though, the same way you want yours.” He gives her a small smile.

  “The worst I’m going to get is a paper cut.”

  “It happens. I know. People get hurt. I’m not stupid. But I’m not going into the infantry. I’m thinking engineers, maybe gunners. And it’s not like there’s even a war on.”

  But there will be. Give it time and there will be. There always is. She remembers what he is too young to remember: the grey southern islands and the men in fatigues going up the hill, and the men on stretchers coming back down, and her mum getting up to change the channel, and her dad saying, No, leave it on, she should see this. She doubts he was even aware of the wars of his lifetime. When Yugoslavia exploded into flame he was still a kid. And his parents would have kept it from him, the way Granddad had suffered, the way he’d carried the war around with him for a lifetime. Not just his sunny stories, his medals in a box. At the end, the truth of it had come leaching back. Those nightmares. All the darkness. All the things he’d left out, never said.

  “It matters to you then,” she says. “That much?”

  Matty nods, solemn. Matty is fourteen years old, and therefore still immortal. And there’s no arguing with that.

  “Okay, then,” she says. “Do you want me to, I don’t know, talk to them—to Dad, I mean, sometime?”

  He smiles. A big smile that makes his face brighten. “I was hoping you’d say that. Thanks.” Then he remembers: “Oh, yeah. Right.” He reaches into his bag, drags a giftwrapped parcel out and heaves it up onto the tabletop. “This is for you.”

  It’s a book. She can tell by the weight and shape of it that it’s one of the recently published art books she’s been selling in bucketloads in the run-up to Christmas. It’s wrapped in plain red wrapping paper. It’s been nicely done by whoever was on that day at the Oxford branch.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  “Dad usually says that it’s from both of us,” Matty says. “But that’s just because I’m usually so crap. It’s just from him.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Matty. I don’t expect anything.”

  “Well, anyway.” He scrambles out a roughly bundled package. “Here.”

  It’s last year’s paper, creased and white where the print is worn away. It’s clearly a mug.

  “Mum broke one of them,” he says. “So I thought you should have this.”

  He’s waiting for her to open it. But she knows already, by the heft of the package, what’s inside. She covers her mouth. Not sad. And not because of the thing itself. Simply, that he understands. He knows the weight of this.

  “Thank you.”

  “You haven’t opened it.”

  “Okay.” She peels off the Sellotape, unfurls the paper. Glossy brown aeroplanes skim across a cream sky. She nods, can’t speak.

  “Is that okay?”

  “Yes. Thank you. That’s—thank you.”

  “No worries.” He grins, then shunts his chair back, makes to stand up.

  “Are we off?” she’s wrong-footed. Overwhelmed.

  “I said I’d meet up with Josh and Sam.”

  “Okay,” Billie says. “Well.” She clears her throat.

  She slips the aeroplane mug into her bag, slides out from behind the table. She wants to say, Come down to London sometime soon, come and stay at the flat: Norah will make a pet of you. She wants to ask if their dad taught him to ride a bike. She wants to say sorry for not being ready for him all these years. She wants to tell him that when their father had put him in her arms, a raw and purblind baby, she’d been too furious to love him. Her world had peeled apart, fallen away, because of him. And that now she’s not furious, not any more. She wants to tell him that she loves him, and that she’s terrified.

  For a moment he’s just standing there, waiting as she gathers up her things. He’s so young, and, for that moment, sublimely unselfconscious, with his big coat hanging loose around him, his hands in his pockets, half a smile. She opens her arms. Without a thought he steps in closer, leans against her, and wraps his arms around her, bumping his bag against her back. They’re almost of a height. He gives her a bit of a squeeze. Then he lets her go. She manages not to say how much he’s grown.

  “You got to head on straightaway?” he asks.

  “No,” she says, and brushes her hair back from her face. “No rush.”

  He gives her a sideways, cheeky look. “Do me a favour then?”

  “Of course, yes. Whatever you need.”

  “Come down the offie with me; buy me some beers?”

  Cardigan Street, Oxford

  December 25, 1999

  “THE OLD CROWD and the hangers-on. Ciaran’s bringing this girl Petra, and Norah’s still seeing Daniel, and then Luke of course.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “We’re cooking dinner at ours, then the fireworks—that whole river-of-fire thing, then Luke and I are going on to his friends’ party.”

  “Petra. Wasn’t that one of the Blue Peter dogs?”

  “Dunno. Maybe.” Billie watches her mum’s hands as she lifts a Brussels sprout, slices off its base, peels the ragged outer leaves from off the shiny inner globe. “She’s posh, though. So. That kind of thing’s okay if you’re posh. He met her on an assignment.”

  Petra: the girl in an oyster-coloured gown, who did some modelling for pocket money; who’d taken his ca
mera off him and fired off some shots and, when she handed it back, asked for his phone number. Billie wishes that she had that kind of nerve.

  Billie shifts on her seat. “He just looks kind of stunned.”

  “Well, you know, maybe she’s stunning.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. I’ve just never seen it before.”

  The window is filmed with condensation. The oven glows and hums. The kitchen is warm and close and tiny, so that Billie perches in the doorway, on the solitary kitchen stool, at a slight forward tilt: its back legs sit on the carpet in the dining area.

  “How are things going then, with work?” her mum asks.

  Billie shifts her weight. The stool wobbles. She grabs the counter to steady herself.

  “Oh, you know how it is.”

  “I mean the painting.”

  “I know you mean the painting.”

  “Sending your slides out?”

  “Yes, Mum,” Billie laughs. “I even entered a couple of competitions last month.”

  “And the pictures, the ones you had up in the restaurant?”

  “I sold one.”

  Her mother turns to her, her face brilliant. “That’s wonderful.”

  Billie nods. It is. Of course it is. And it helps with things like Christmas presents, and she even had a new coat this year. She should be thrilled, and in some kind of abstracted way she is. But it wasn’t much of a thing—a pen-and-ink study of a nude—and she wasn’t satisfied with it. When she was a kid, when the millennium had first appeared on the horizon, she’d worked out that by then she’d be twenty-six. She’d be a grown-up, she’d thought. She’d be an artist. The two had seemed to mean almost the same thing, and be the answer to everything.

  “And Luke?”

  Billie laughs. “Oh God, Mum, what is this? Twenty questions?”

  “You’re my little girl.” Her mother shrugs. “I can’t help it.”

  Billie pulls her bottom lip in between her teeth. “Well …”

  He makes her stomach swoop. He picks her up from work and takes her out for what he calls supper but she still thinks of as dinner. His skin is perfect. His cologne, all woody notes and cinnamon, just does her head in: she notices it not so much when he embraces her, but once he’s turned and walked away.

  He’s thirty-five; she’s twenty-six. Sometimes she really notices.

  She feels shabby. Grubby. Workstained. That she smells of coins from working at the tills.

  She’s pretty sure that Norah doesn’t like him, but then Norah never likes any of her boyfriends. Ciaran has been away, and hasn’t met him yet.

  “It’s good. I think. It’s okay, yeah. Anyway, it’s early days.”

  She notices a patch of blue acrylic paint, dried into cracks on her right forefinger. She scrapes at it with her stubby thumbnail.

  “D’you have an emery board, Mum?”

  “In the mug.”

  Her mum nods to the chipped mug on top of the microwave. Billie pulls out a grey emery board from amongst the pens and pencils and stray screwdrivers. She starts to smooth the ragged edges of a nail.

  “He’s in Italy actually,” she says. “Skiing.”

  “Isn’t that nice.”

  “It’s a family thing. They do it every year.”

  “Ooh.”

  “I know.”

  Her mother’s expression shifts: she raises her eyebrows, purses her lips, doesn’t look up from the sink—paring knife in one hand, Brussels sprout in the other, heap of shed leaves growing on the counter.

  “And so, let me get this straight,” her mum says, “he’s currently in Italy, but he’s coming all the way back from there to spend the millennium night in a pokey little flat in Deptford?”

  “Norah’s flat is not pokey,” Billie says. “It’s compact and bijou.”

  “It is in Deptford, though.”

  Billie gives her mum a look. A smile. “He’d be coming back anyway.”

  “Yes, but still.” Her mother’s eyebrows go higher. “He’s spending the millennium with you.”

  “Mum,” Billie laughs. “Seriously.”

  Her mum waves a dripping hand in the air. “Okay, okay.”

  “It’s a bunch of us. Not just me and him. It’s not this great romantic thing.”

  “Okay, okay.” She rinses the peeled sprouts under the tap. “You be careful, though, love, while you’re out.”

  “Because of the planes falling out of the sky, and the nuclear missiles going off, and the Terminators stalking the streets?”

  “I was thinking more muggers, rapists, pickpockets. That kind of thing.”

  “You are so this century.”

  Her mother laughs.

  “Don’t worry,” Billie says. “I won’t be alone.”

  “Good.”

  There’s a silence. Billie feels her cheeks go hot. She recrosses her knees; her left leg presses against the cool fridge door. She watches as her mother lifts the colander from the sink and turns to set it down on the far countertop. Billie searches for something to say, some kind of explanation or apology, but she can’t quite put a sentence together. She thinks of the semi up in Summertown, stuffed full of people: Carole and her parents and her sister and the cousins, and Matty, and their dad, the heating on full blast and Carole grumpy and flustered and Dad opinionated with drink. Here, there is just the burr of the fan oven and Mum’s careful peeling of vegetables. Billie notices a swirl worn into one of the floor tiles from the press and spin of her Mum’s foot as she turns from one kitchen counter to the other, day after day.

  “Actually,” Billie says, “I’m hoping the cashpoints will go bananas and start spewing out twenty-pound notes.”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  Her mother turns the heat up under a saucepan, setting it to boil, then crouches to open the oven door. There’s a billow of steam: rosemary, garlic, olive oil. She shakes the potatoes round in the roasting tin; the oil spits and pops.

  “Look, can I do something?”

  “There’s not much more to do.” Her mum closes the oven, straightens up. Winces at the creak in her knees.

  “What are your plans then?” Billie asks, meaning for New Year’s Eve.

  “I was going to do a lemon glaze for the carrots. That sound okay?”

  “Lovely.”

  “Tell you what, open the bubbly, would you? It’s in the fridge.”

  Billie slips off the stool, sets it out of the way, and hunkers down to fish out the bottle of Cava. She stands the bottle on the counter and reaches into a cupboard for two of the green-stemmed hock glasses that serve for this kind of thing. They are older than she can remember; they’ve always been in cupboards, standing at the back, gathering dust. She rinses them, fills them with crackling wine.

  “What are you going to do, though, for the millennium?”

  “I’ve never really liked New Year’s.” Her mum lifts her glass. “Cheers.”

  “Cheers.”

  “All that pressure to have fun.”

  “I know.”

  “And this year it’s in spades.”

  “Do you remember when I was a kid? We’d just settle down on the sofa with cups of tea and chocolates, and watch stupid telly?”

  “We’d always say we’d stay up, but usually we’d be in bed by ten.”

  “But still, Mum. It’s the millennium.”

  “It’s just a number. There’s some people say it falls next year, really, mathematically speaking.”

  “Yeah but in all fairness, they’re tossers.”

  Her mother laughs.

  “You’ve got to do something,” Billie says.

  “I will. Tea, sofa, box of Thornton’s Continentals, early night.”

  Billie slides back up onto her stool, wine glass in her hand. She feels an urgent anxiety on her mother’s behalf, the need to make things right.

  “Come to the flat, come and see the fireworks.” Norah would be lovely and welcoming, she always is. But then there’s Luke, he has to be taken
into account. His expectations. He’s not expecting someone’s mum to come along.

  Her mum wafts an oven glove, dismissing the notion. “With all you young people? Playing gooseberry? I don’t think so.”

  “I’ll come back up here, then.”

  “Really, love, there’s no need. I do have friends; I could have arranged something if I’d wanted to.”

  “But, Mum—”

  Her mum raises her hand, shakes her head, brooking no argument: “Go. Have fun. Be happy.”

  Later, Billie lies in bed, looking up into the grey dark of her old bedroom. The bedside clock reads 01:47.

  She thinks of her room in Norah’s flat. The makeshift stop-gap of it; a bed, a wardrobe, sheaf upon sheaf of sketches, her clutter on someone else’s shelves.

  She thinks of her thin web of connections—friends, colleagues, and now Luke—a fragile crystalline structure built out into the dark. She is sure of none of it. If Billie put pressure on any part of this, it’d just fall away in a shower of salt.

  Norah won’t always be wanting a housemate, won’t always have a room to spare. Ciaran’s there and then gone, like a breeze. There’s no point wishing he were different, because then he wouldn’t be him.

  She had thought she’d be grown-up. She’d be an artist. It would mean something. The imagined and the real shift and slide across each other like layers of tracing paper, and can’t be made to fit together.

  She sits up, reaches for the bedside light. The room springs awake. The chimney breast is a soft slate colour. Bookshelves fill the alcoves on either side. Her mother’s blue ceramic cormorant sits on top of the cast-iron fireplace, its wings permanently outstretched between the photographs of godchildren, friends in fleeces on country paths, Billie’s graduation picture, and a snap of her suntanned mum on a Mediterranean summer’s evening with a dark-haired bearded man who has his arm around her shoulder. Terry; just a friend, her mother says.

  Billie gets up, crosses the room and pulls open the curtains, looks out on the back walls of other houses, at the narrow yard below. It’s dotted with planters. In the diffuse orange street light she can pick out the bare twigs of dwarf fruit trees.

  There used to be a damp patch on the wall here. She reaches down, lays a hand on the surface beneath the windowsill. The paper feels sound and dry.