The Undertow (12 page)

He nods. A pause.

“I tried to write,” he says. “But—”

“There wasn’t really time,” she says.

“No.”

“And it’s not easy, to write that kind of letter.”

“Yes.”

“Even though you had years and years and years.”

The kettle rattles, shrills.

“Tea,” she says brightly, and turns to lift the kettle from the heat. He tucks his chair back in under the table. Sets the newspaper to one side. And when she brings over the heavy teapot, he smiles up at her—a quick, narrow little smile.

Billy sits on his bed and listens. He can’t hear the words, but he can tell that the patterns of their conversation have changed. A series of dodging runs from him, like a striker dribbling a football up a pitch; and slight, brief comments from her, landing like a dropped cloth; soft, dampening things down. He listens till they come out into the hall. A lot earlier than before: his grandpa isn’t even back yet. And they don’t linger. She says a brief goodnight, and the One-Eared Man returns the farewell more fully, but indistinctly. And then he leaves.

His ma’s footsteps come up the stairs. His bedroom door opens and she stands there, in the dim light from the streetlamp outside his window. She draws the curtains.

“D’you want some cocoa?” she asks.

Billy gets to his feet and wraps his arms around her waist and she squeezes him close.

The next time they see the One-Eared Man is on Sunday and he is heading down the far side of the street towards their house, carrying his suitcase, his collar up and his hat pulled low. So he hasn’t given up yet, Billy thinks—but then it is a savagely cold day, he’d be tempted to try his luck again just to get out of this wind. Billy digs his chin down into his muffler, links his arm in through his mother’s arm. He tries to drag her along past the One-Eared Man before they notice each other. But he feels her flinch: she’s seen him. And then the One-Eared Man raises his free hand and crosses the road to them.

“It’s arctic, isn’t it?” he says.

Billy’s ma murmurs something in agreement. The One-Eared Man says something more about the weather, but nobody is really listening, not even himself. He hasn’t got any gloves on, Billy notices. His knuckles, standing proud as he grips the suitcase, are white against the livid pink skin. For a moment no-one speaks, and Billy tugs discreetly at his ma’s arm, thinking he should just get her to scarper before someone says something, and the other says something else, and before you know it the two of them will have slipped back into being all warm and cosy together.

“I shouldn’t keep you standing in this cold,” Billy’s ma says, eventually.

Billy looks up at her. Her face is pale and tight.

“Oh,” the One-Eared Man says. “Are you off out?”

He glances up the street, the grey sky low overhead, the wind blustering. Of course they are, Billy thinks; that’s why they were walking down the street. He feels ever so slightly sorry for him. But mostly he feels pleased.

His ma says, “We’d best be getting on.”

The One-Eared Man stands there. Billy looks down at his ratty trouser cuffs, his broken boots. He does try really hard not to smile.

“I’ll call by later then,” the One-Eared Man says.

Billy’s mother takes in a sharp little breath. “I’m afraid we won’t—”

Her arm squeezes tighter against Billy’s arm. He squeezes back.

“That won’t be convenient,” she says.

Her voice sounds odd. She tucks Billy in closer to her, and he lets himself be held tight against her side, his cheek on the thin roughness of her coat.

“Right-o then,” the One-Eared Man says.

Billy looks up from where he stands, leaning into his mother’s protecting flank. The One-Eared Man is looking up the street, nodding slightly, as if working out what to do next. Then he shifts his case from one hand to the other, and looks down at Billy.

“I see how it is,” he says.

He knows. He knows that Billy made this happen. That Billy cracked open the happy, cosy little cocoon that the One-Eared Man had spun around Billy’s ma. That it is Billy’s fault that he is out in the cold again.

Billy shivers.

“Good afternoon, then,” his mother says. She pulls away, drawing Billy with her.

But the One-Eared Man just holds Billy’s gaze. “Be seeing you, son.”

Billy blinks up at him. He hopes not. But if it happens, Billy thinks, he’ll be ready for him.

Then the One-Eared Man turns, swinging his suitcase out in an arc, and walks away, his coat flapping in the bitter wind. Billy’s ma looks down at him, and he gives her a smile. She smiles slightly back, but her face looks kind of puffy and swollen. Billy gets the sudden feeling that he has been luckier here than he realised: that this is a skin-of-the-teeth escape.

In the park, the trees are bare and it is cold. He and his ma march along the paths, huddling against each other, her arm around his shoulder, holding him close to share their warmth. He feels giddy with success and with the blustering wind—he wants to run and shout and clamber up the skeletal, clattering trees. But instead he walks with her, soberly: he is all she has. He will be her man now. He will always be her man.

And the One-Eared Man: he can’t worry about that. He’s gone. Over time, he’ll disappear from their thoughts completely, Billy tells himself, like a bloodstain left in the scullery sink to soak.

They pass the pond, where a few ducks sit looking cold and miserable. They sit down in a shelter, huddling into a corner of the bench. Her arm round his shoulder, the smell of soap and powder off her skin, and the faint trace of cooking and the candleworks off her clothes.

Billy feels, at this moment, quite content.

BILLY SITS UP
. The water heaves away, crashes into the sides and end of the bath. He reaches for the shaving bowl.

As he stirs the soap into bubbles with his brush, his privates move in the tepid water; his cock is half-hard from thinking of her, but he ignores it: the feeling will fade away if unattended to, and right now he can’t afford to waste anything. He lifts his left knee and presses his foot against the cold metal. His toes fan out like a fin.

From ankle to mid-thigh he brushes curves and spirals, sucking on his back teeth as he paints, reaching round to the hanging ham of his calf muscle, and up into the underside of his knee. Where the water meets it, his skin is puffed and pink; above the water line, it’s hard with goosepimples. He reaches out over the chilly enamel edge of the bath, dripping soapy water, and sets his soap bowl down on the rush seat of a kitchen chair. He lifts his razor.

He loves the feel of it, its weight in his hand. Closed, the cutting edge is kept safe inside the bone handle. Tease it open and the handle fits snug in the crook of his palm, the blade gripped neatly between his thumb and forefinger. There’s a perfect unity of form and function here, the kind of beauty you get with a good bike. He angles the steel against his skin and scrapes away a drift of foam and hair.

He has to keep his attention on the ritual, the routine. He can’t think too much ahead, can’t let himself. If he lets himself stop to consider possibilities, rather than do what needs to be done, he’ll get lost in speculation, and not be properly prepared. But things are good, he thinks. Things are definitely good.

He can hear his ma moving around next door, in the kitchen, putting his silk sweater out to air. He hears the creak as she sits down. Then
there’s the sound of a bottle being unstoppered, and the rustling as she unfolds the newspaper across her lap. She’ll be rubbing down his shoes for him, the soft chamois almost as flexible as glove leather. She’ll do a good job of it, he knows; she always does.

He inches the blade up over the ribbed skin of his knee. There’s a big shiny scar there, and smaller ones, hard dots and pits, down the side of his leg. He’d misjudged a sprint trying to take a jump on Seaton last year. Gone flying off the cycle track onto the centre, lost traction on the cinders, and come down hard. Even in the fall he’d heard the crowd’s massed intake of breath. And that transformed everything. He didn’t care about the pain, the damage done. The crowd had gasped for him.

God, but the ache in his shoulders and neck as he’d cycled home on his own roadster: he could barely look up to see where he was going. The impact shunted everything sideways: upper arm, collar bone, spine. Tore at ligaments. Took the skin off his knee. He stank of liniment, and was black and blue and yellow all down the inside of his right leg where it’d whacked against the frame. But he didn’t care. It didn’t matter. What mattered were those breaths suddenly caught. For him.

He’d been in the game for four years then, building bikes for Butler’s during the week, racing them at weekends and bank holidays, and that alone was enough to leave him dazed with gratitude and a sense of his good fortune. Perhaps the pay wasn’t that wonderful, but then it hadn’t really felt like work to him, so he didn’t mind. But after he took a jump on Seaton, even though he failed, even though he wrecked himself for the rest of the season in the attempt, things changed. He already knew Mr. Butler to nod to and say good morning, but that was the first time that, when Mr. Butler had come through the workshop, he had stopped at Billy’s bench to have a word. And when Billy had stammered out his idea about the new cranks, about how they could take out one of the bearings and lose a little weight and a little friction too, Mr. Butler, Mr. Claud Butler himself, had patted Billy on the shoulder and said that was smart thinking: a little thing like that could make all the difference in the world. Could be the difference between winning and losing. And when Mr. Butler had gone on, and Billy had blinked up, flushed and proud, he’d caught Alfie’s eye, and Alfie had grinned at him and raised his eyebrows.
Good for you
, he’d said.

The injury had put him off form for the tail end of that season, when he should have been at his peak. He’d trailed; he knew he had. But he didn’t care. Butler’s didn’t care. Because.

Tomorrow. Good Friday. First meet of the season. Billy’s chest tightens at the thought.

The first leg is bald as India rubber. He unsticks his foot from the end of the bath, lets the leg sink down, only registering now the remaining warmth in the water. He heaves up his right leg, crooking it against the end of the bath. He soaps up again, shaves again.

In other sculleries, in bathrooms and in front of kitchen fires, other men will be shaving their legs. In Hoxton, for example, Vittorio Cinelli will be slathering his shaved legs in olive oil: he swears by it. In Canning Town, Patrick Hooley will be in his sister’s bath, nieces crowded at the door, listening in on the splashes and shifts of their famous uncle, the track cyclist, over all the way from Dublin for the Good Friday meet. These are the men Billy has to measure himself against. He got close to Cinelli last Whit, but that was before he crashed out and messed up his shoulder. He rode against them both in the final meet last year, when his neck was cricked and his elbow still weeping and the scab on his knee cracked open. He held on well in the Miss and Out, but not conspicuously well, not noticeably well. Didn’t make himself a threat. If they remember him at all, it’ll be as nothing to worry about. They’ll be matching themselves against each other, not him.

So.

So.

So.

He mustn’t jinx it.

But he
knows
it’s different now. He’s changed. In training he just loosens his jaw and drops his head and breathes himself through the pain, breathes into the rhythm of the bike, breathes himself into the beauty of its perfect union; bike and body; muscle and metal; the peel of the rubber on the track, the swell and squeeze of his chest; the perfect circle of the pedal’s orbit, the contraction and release of the calf and thigh. The other lads fall back, drop away. Head low, elbows in tight, eyes wet with speed, he is not Billy Hastings any more. He is out beyond himself.

He’s got the new bike tomorrow. Mr. Butler said he should have it. So he must stand a chance, a good chance. Mr. Butler must think that he will make the gear look good.

He can’t let himself imagine what it will mean if he does win tomorrow, what opportunities will begin to open out for him. Trials for the Olympic squad that summer. Then next year, Berlin. Berlin. But he mustn’t start to think like that.

He dips the blade into the bath, moves it underwater and casts adrift clots of hair-speckled foam. The water is cool, grey with soap, filmed with his body’s oils.

Berlin.

You’re not supposed to blame the Germans. It was the Kaiser, that’s who you’re to blame. A mad bully.

And afterwards. Turn professional. Frank Southall got eighty pounds for appearing at that Coventry meet last year.
Eighty pounds
.

He rinses the razor for the final time and reaches out over the side of the bath, dripping water, leaving a trail of wet across the cold scullery tiles. He lays it down damp on the chair. When he rubs himself dry with the small stripy towel from the nail, he finds a stray hair curving back against the skin of his right ankle. He pinches it hard between his fingernail and thumb, and plucks it out.

He tucks the towel around his waist. “Ma!”

The door knob turns almost instantly; she’d been listening out for him. She pushes against the door just enough to let a wedge of firelight and a gust of hot, fire-dried air into the scullery, making its cold blue seem even deeper. She reaches round; his warmed pyjamas are draped over her arm, his slippers hooked onto her long fingers. He takes them off her.

“All right, my lovely boy?” she asks, as he knew she would.

“Yes,” he says. “Thanks, Ma.”

The hand falls away, the firelight giving a flash to the gold wire on her finger. He drops his slippers on the floor, shakes out his night-clothes.

Tomorrow is the start of everything.

He steps into his pyjama bottoms, treads his feet into his slippers, lifts each foot in turn to hook the leather up over the heel. The prize tomorrow, it’s a clock. No cash prizes in the amateur game, but the clock’s worth ten pounds, Mr. Butler said. Mr. Butler had had them stop work yesterday to tell them about it, standing there in the workshop in his dark suit and his coat thick and tan-coloured, looking sharp and every inch the success he is. Billy’d been finishing a wheel, smoothing the edges of the bamboo veneers. He’d had the dust from that in his nose, making his throat dry, and the smooth feel of the sanded bamboo in his hands, listening to the boss talking about the rose-and-cream marble clock. The sound of it had started to make him feel hungry, and he was thinking he’d ask his ma to make a custard or a shape that
night, and he was thinking of taking that clock down to Leibmann’s, the bell dingling as he went in, and the warm yellow light through the bow windows, and the smell of leather, dust and polish. Mr. Leibmann would unwrap it, eye the clock through his pince-nez, and realise its quality and worth. And then he’d look up and eye Billy, and he’d realise he was someone to be reckoned with. He’d unlock the cash box, and count out ten pound notes, and put them in Billy’s hand.