The Undertow (21 page)

“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.

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.

“Is that funny?”

She shakes her head. “It’s just, the day I’ve had.”

“Really?”

“Mm-hmm. Terrible.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“I lost my lipstick this morning.”

He pulls a sympathetic face.

“It’s tragic. I’m serious. They’re like hen’s teeth nowadays.”

“I’m very sorry for your loss.”

“I’m bearing up, though. You can see I’m bearing up.”

“You are really quite inspiring.”

She smiles. She notices the sweet smell of wet earth. And she can hear the city sounds now—the sticky sound of wet tyres peeling down Kensington High Street, and from somewhere, God knows where, a whiff of coffee. And then, walking out between the trees, there is a couple under an umbrella, and another, hurrying along under their own private canopies, veiled by the rain. Her arm tucked under his, they emerge from the woods, like something from a fairy tale, and join the flow of people, like the raindrops racing down the umbrella and dripping to the streaming ground.

“So,” he says, “maybe we could get a drink, or are you hungry? Fancy a bite?”

She just nods; if she tries to speak, she’ll only laugh again.

It’s just a neat little awning like a pram hood; underneath it, a glass door with a blackout panel fixed in place behind. No name or anything like that. The handsome man, whose name is Edmund Harrison, dips the umbrella to collapse it then shakes it out behind them, grinning at her.

“I love a good cloudburst, don’t you?”

The rain falls like a bead curtain behind them. The glass door reflects it all: his clipping the umbrella into its band, tucking it underneath an arm. Everything is different. She has stepped through the looking glass—or, rather, that punch sent her flying, spinning through it, into a different world. She steps sideways to get a glimpse of her reflection, to check what state she’s in. All she can see is a pale thin shape, herself, devoid of detail.

“Nice little place,” he says.

His reflection leans in towards him as he goes to open the door, then swings away as he pushes it open. He ushers her courteously, an arm
just hovering behind her waist, not touching. And they’re into a dim-lit entranceway, and then stairs descend, and she steps down into the hum of voices and the smell of seafood and cigarette smoke and drink, and a dim low room, all glossy surfaces and dark corners, like an underground pool.

It
is
nice. It’s the kind of place she should be used to.

She must look a wreck. She reaches up to touch her hair; it’s a tangled soaking mess.

“Half a tick—” he says.

He heads off towards the bar, into the bustle and hum. She looks around. The walls are teal blue, patched with the glow of table lamps. The tabletops are glossy in their pools of light; cut glass glints. And the people are lovely. Lovely clothes, lovely talk: high, clipped voices like at the flicks. This is how things should be: elegant, ordered; this is the difference money makes. An elderly white-coated waiter goes up to meet Mr. Harrison. She watches as they talk. He’s known here, and he knows how these things are done. A handshake, a gesture across the room, a nod—
satisfactory
, his expression says.

Mr. Harrison comes back across the room towards her, smiling, at his ease, in the company of the waiter, looking as though pleasure is a business and must be taken seriously. The feeling is like a first gin and ginger-beer on an empty stomach. Giddy. Lovely. Making her smile foolishly. Which makes her chin hurt where the old man hit her.

“If I could just—wash my hands,” she says, and feels herself blushing like a girl, as though only she, and no-one else, ever uses the lavatory.

The ladies’ room is an underground palace of white and green tiles. A bowl of pink roses and a pile of small, square-folded hand towels stand by the basin. She takes off her gloves, checking her reflection in the cool mirror. Smudges, smears, but nothing out of the ordinary for a soaking: her cheeks are rosy, her eyes bright. She lifts up her chin: there is already a faint blue bloom of a bruise, but it is mostly concealed underneath her jawline. There’s a slight bulge on the back of her head too, which hurts when she explores it with her fingertips. She opens her handbag, gets out her comb.

Her movement causes a displacement of the air, a fall of petals. They land softly on the marble counter, like scraps of washed silk. The roses smell of childhood, of summers visiting relatives in Salzburg.

Inside the bag lies the bloodied, crumpled handkerchief. She just looks at it a moment. Then she peels apart the folds. The thing inside is surprisingly small, about the size of an almond. The blood and flesh has congealed dark along the edge. Three wiry white hairs grow out of it. A wave of nausea, and a kind of delayed surprise at what she can do, if pushed to it.

Flush it?

But it’s the ear she told her secrets to. She told it about the baby. The blue boy.

She bundles up the handkerchief, the cleanest fabric on the outside. She presses it into the bottom of her bag, scoops out her compact and mascara and sets them on the marble counter.

Another petal falls from the roses, lands noiselessly, cupping one inside the other. She dips one of the small hand towels into the hot water, and soaks it, and wrings it out. She washes her face, wiping away the final smears of mascara, the smudged and clotted powder. The city seems to stretch out from here, from the steaming basin, from the soft drop of rose petals, from the dark tangle of her curls. The rain falling over London, on the grey streets, dampening the nearby Kensington stucco, and further off streaking mustard-yellow brick and soaking the parched ground of parks and making the trees soften and breathe. Here and there are pockets of light, points of connection—Mrs. sitting by the empty grate in Mitcham, the empty boarded socket where the old shop with their flat above had stood, the factory lying quiet and still, Billy out there somewhere in the dark countryside, wherever his camp is, listening to the rain hammering on the tin roof; and the old man walking on through the downpour, muttering curses, handkerchief pressed to his ear. The baby is out there too. They’ll have buried him quietly in the hospital grounds, or in some municipal plot, in the company of other babies who were born but never breathed: a tiny throng of blue humanity, unknowable as angels.

She rinses out the wet hand towel. The room is still quiet and empty: no sound of anyone on the stairs, so she reaches down and lifts up her hem, and rubs the damp cloth over her thighs, scrubbing away at the ghost of the old man’s hands. The soap smells good and expensive; she’s not sure if the pawn-shop, brownish smell lingers on her, or just in her mind. She rinses out and wrings the cloth again, then drops it into the linen basket. She lets the water go; she watches as it spirals down the plughole, and away.

Outside, the rain falls on and on, cool and benign and drenching.

A place like this, she’d want a month to plan an outfit, an afternoon to get ready. But instead she presses powder to her nose, her chin, her forehead and cheekbones, and touches it across the sore patch underneath her chin. She clicks open her mascara, spits on the blacking, rubs the brush into it, runs it through her lashes. Her hair is drying into its ragged curls. She rubs Vaseline between her hands and then runs her fingers through it, softening the curls out into waves. She combs it out and pins it up at the back.

She smears Vaseline onto her lips, and tries a smile.

Her wedding ring rolls slippery and loose round her finger. She eases it off to wipe away the Vaseline. She notices the empty space at the base of her left ring finger, where there is perhaps the slightest, faintest of indentations. The handsome man—Mr. Harrison—has only seen her wearing gloves.

Billy owes her. Life owes her. Tonight is hers.

She picks up her glove, drops the ring inside, then rolls up the cuff. She tucks the glove into the inside pocket of her bag.

When the ancient waiter shows her to the table, it is empty; she slides along the banquette; the sleek coolness of the leather brushes the bare skin at the back of her knees. The waiter hands her a menu. The card is good quality, silky to the touch. She holds it out of the way as he polishes imaginary marks from the tabletop, then lays it down unread.

A smile keeps pushing at her cheeks, making them bunch up, making her eyes crinkle at the edges, making her chin hurt. He comes back towards her through the blue mist of cigarette smoke. An easy, comfortable stride. And his suit is so good. The fabric with that silky matte finish that shows that money has been spent. He looks like Robert Donat, she thinks. Robert Donat in
The Thirty-Nine Steps
. Poised, unrufflable, unsmudged.

He slides in beside her. “Drink?”

She runs her fingers together casually. “Please.”

“What’ll you have?”

She doesn’t know what to order, in a place like this. “You choose.”

He orders, conferring with the waiter in hushed tones. Wine, and food too. The wine is a revelation: it makes the inside of her mouth expand.
She’s conscious of the line where her lips meet, the flesh of them tingling faintly.

He talks comfortably, used to being listened to.

The liquid sits above and below her tongue, behind her lips. She doesn’t want to swallow it. Doesn’t want it to be gone. Even though there’s a glassful still in front of her, a gorgeous purply red. She watches his mouth as he talks—his lips are narrow but nicely shaped, the upper lip a seagull’s wings—and she wants to kiss him. Just because the sensation needs sharing. A kiss that would tease at lips and tongue and feel the snag of teeth, a kiss to say
This is marvellous, have you noticed how marvellous this is?