The Undertow (16 page)

“Just clear off.”

Sully tips his hat onto his head. He tweaks the hat brim, and then turns away and shambles off down Burbage Road. From somewhere nearby a blackbird begins to sing. Billy thinks, he just knows how to play me. That’s all it is. He just knows the tender spots and prods right at them. Well, I was ready for him, after all. I was ready for him this time.

Billy becomes conscious of the voices around him—the spectators moving past him, staring, getting in between him and Sully’s retreating back, blocking the view of him.

That’s that fellow, that’s Hastings, that’s him. Did you see him in the pursuit? Did you see the way he—?

Then, through a gap in the crowds, Sully turns, calls back over his shoulder:

“Keep an eye on that girl of yours, my son.”

Then he grins, revealing the black gap in the side of his mouth, where the teeth should be. He blows a soft admiring whistle.

“Girl like that, shouldn’t take your eyes off her for a minute.”

THERE ARE THREE SQUADS
in front of him, Alfie to his right, and the rest of his squad following behind. The heavy bike ticks along at his side. And behind them there’s everybody else. The whole of Britain, it seems, pushing forward to decant itself into the sea

From way back a few of them are singing an old song:

But it’s just a couple of voices, and no-one else joins in. The song peters out and the sound is of boots thumping on the road. He looks down at his legs in their green serge, the way they’re swinging him along, like he has nothing to do with it. Like he’s a raindrop on a window, racing down the pane to disappear.

Then Alfie sings:

Billy catches Alfie’s eye, and Alfie flashes him a grin, and Billy blinks, looks away, and Alfie sings on:

They swing round past the harbour buildings and onto the quay. You can’t see the sea any more. The boats are packed so closely together
that they hide the water, and move with a loose unease against the quay. Some of the vessels ride low, weighted with tanks and half-tracks and artillery. The infantry craft, the LCIs, are still empty, and ride higher in the water, waiting for their freight of men.

His hand sweats on the rubber grip. He shifts it, takes the cool steel instead in his palm. His boots are landing on boards now; between the planks he gets glimpses of the surface of the water. It’s dark, glittering, lapping at the tarred wooden pillars that hold up the jetty. The craft rises up in front of him, sheer-sided, grey, with a gantry down to the pier.

The head of the column turns and slows; the men filter into single file, begin to clamber up onto the gantry. Alfie slips in ahead of him, Barker in behind. Billy’s mouth is full of spit. He swallows it down. His palms sweat and itch.

He looks up, at the gulls wheeling and crying above, bastard gulls, nasty dirty shitting gulls. He shuffles forward.

He bumps the bike up and steps onto the slope. The tilt shifts the weight of his pack and he’s off balance. His foot moves backwards to steady himself; his bike rolls back and the rear wheel knocks into the front wheel of Barker’s bike and there’s a stumble and Billy apologises and Barker says something matey and helpful. Billy grabs the handrail, because that’s what he has to do. He climbs. The walkway judders with the men’s footfalls. He bumps the bike down and onto the deck. Gulls stand in a row along the rail, moving their weight from one yellow leathery foot to the other, eyeballing him. He fumbles in a pocket for a cinema ticket, sweet wrapper, something—he picks out a fibrous yellow bus ticket and skims it across towards the birds. One flaps awkwardly into the air, scaring the next one along—the third staggers ungainly along the rail, squawking, flapping.

“Hate fucking gulls,” he explains sideways to Alfie.

“You should stop fucking them then.”

They cross the deck together, their wheels parallel.

Billy wants to ask him what he thinks of all this. He wonders if it’s as sore for Alfie as it is for him to be faced with this: the salt in the wound.

“How d’you rate these things?” Billy juts his chin towards the bike.

Alfie tips his cycle slightly, gives it a considering squint. “It looks like a bike.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, two wheels and frame and forks and even brakes.” Alfie squeezes one, making the back wheel judder on the deck.

“I can’t get used to having brakes,” Billy says. He can see the sea now, stretching out beyond the harbour wall. It seems to slope up towards the sky, grey, humped, somehow animal. “It just seems like overengineering. Clutter.”

The men in front are peeling off to stow their bikes, then they’re disappearing through an open doorway, heading below. Stepping down into the dark. Billy’s skin bristles with goosebumps. He takes a breath, blows it out again, steadying himself.

“Seems to me,” Alfie says, “it’s like so much nowadays. Like powdered egg. And saccharin instead of sugar. And Robinson’s rhubarb cordial instead of blackcurrant, and margarine not butter on your toast, and flippin parsnips in your cake.”

“What are you on about?”

“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?” Gossum 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.