The Undertow (26 page)

“All done?” she asks.

“All done.”

She comes in close to the bike, crouches to see the fittings.

“It’s safe,” Billy says.

“It’s a lovely job,” she says. “You won’t be long?”

“Just round the block.”

With the boy sitting on his forearm, he takes the bike in his free hand and pushes it out into the back lane. The boy regards him thoughtfully, still sucking on a finger. Ruby follows, watches.

“Hold him a minute.”

Ruby lifts the child away, and Billy swings aside the crossbar, and then just looks at them both a moment, his wife holding his son, the pair of them with their dark curls, their eyes like black coffee; so alike, so beautiful. Billy takes the boy back. He lifts him high above the newly made saddle, lowering him gently so that the boy gets the idea
and sticks out his two sandalled feet and sits astride it. Ruby winces, but Billy just leans forward and sets each foot in turn on the top of the front forks.

“All right, little man? Your feet go here, okay?”

Ruby twists the apron in her hands.

“He’s all right,” Billy says. “He’s fine. You can’t wrap him up in cotton wool.”

She nods. Tries a smile. He takes the boy’s hands in his and reaches them forward, curling them round the handlebars.

“There,” he says. “And there. Hold on tight.”

The dark head nods. Billy shifts himself back, into the saddle. The warm smallness of the child between his arms. The little concentratedness of him. He wraps an arm around the child and leans over to kiss Ruby. The warm press of her lips.

“Be careful.”

He knows she can’t help herself from saying it. “I will.”

“Be good for Daddy.”

“All right then,” Billy says. “Here we go.”

Billy pushes down on the pedals, and they ease forward, finding their balance, leaving Ruby looking after them, a pinch between her brows.

They circle round into Bramcote Avenue. Just round the block, though there can be longer rides once the boy gets a taste for it. The boy’s knuckles are dimpled and soft on the handlebars. He doesn’t make a sound. They skim under the waxy green-red leaves of the flowering cherries, pass the boarded-up crater of a bomb site. He wheels round unfilled potholes. He can smell the scent of the boy’s head. They bump up over the tarry join between one section of concrete and the next, and the boy crows with delight.

He’s enjoying it, so Billy turns the bike, and they wheel round out and cross the empty road and turn onto the lane across the Common. The sun is low and the grass is long and dry. He can hear a game of cricket, the clack of the bat and the clap of spectators, but the cricket green is out of sight, and he can hear traffic, one car, then, after a while, another. He is alone with his boy. Billy’s legs lift and sink and lift again, one after the other, on either side of the child. If he slips this way, I will catch him; if he slips that way, I will catch him too. The little head is
heavy, it nods, and Billy puts an arm around the warm, slack body, and cycles one-handed. I will always catch you. I will always keep you safe.

He starts to look out for a turn, an easy shallow loop that will take him round for home without disturbing the boy.

When they get back to the house, rooks are circling above the trees and Ruby is waiting in the twilight at the back door. He swings himself off the bike and scoops the child up onto his chest, and the boy nestles into his neck, making Billy’s heart stir. Ruby stands, watching, smiling at the husband and the sleeping child. She opens her arms to take the boy.

“Sorry,” Billy says. It is later than he thought.

She shakes her head. It doesn’t matter. He passes her the child, and she hefts him up in her arms, already too heavy for her to carry easily. She takes him upstairs. Billy sits down at the kitchen table, and flaps open the newspaper. His eye catches on news of the Darquier trial; stories are still emerging about what happened in Paris during the war. About the Vel d’Hiv round-up. He recalls the Vélodrome in broad sweeps: the interior curved like the inside of an egg, the way the crowd noise echoed like in a swimming bath. Ten years later, and they were holding the Parisian Jews there before shipping them off to die. And he reads now, here, this moment, that the Nazis asked for the men and women, but the French authorities handed over the children too. Imagine it. Huddling your kid close, knowing you can’t do anything to protect it. Whispering lies. Trying not to show how terrified you are. Lying for as long as you possibly can.

He has blown his nose and got the kettle on and folded the paper away by the time she comes back down. He knows she likes this, his getting on with things—he doesn’t wait, as some men wait, for his wife to make the tea. She reaches down the cups. She saved up her stamps for them. Aeroplanes on a creamy-coloured background. The boy loves to have his milk from an aeroplane cup, to run his fingers over their dark gloss.

“I’m going to get him a bike of his own,” Billy tells her.

“He’s two,” Ruby says.

“When he’s a bit older.”

“Right.”

He watches her. She’s thinking, what will that cost? How can they afford it? But she says nothing.

“I’ll ask around. Someone will have a kid’s bike that’s been outgrown.”

She nods, sets the teapot down. Her lips are pursed, she’s frowning.

She’s thinking, the boy will never ride a bike.

She’s wrong, he knows she is, and she’ll see it too, eventually. He’ll prove it. The boy will turn out fine, better than fine. Billy insists on it. Anything less than this is unacceptable. This is his second chance. He’s paid for it. That boy’s death in Normandy was the down payment. The drip drip drip of guilt, that’s just the interest.

The kettle’s hum grows to a whistle: they both start towards it, fearful of disturbing the child. Billy plucks the whistle from the spout with quick fingertips. Ruby leans against the table, rubs at her forehead, at the tension between her brows. She has to take him to the doctor. She knows she does. The way he kicks out that left leg when he runs, like it’s getting in the way. The way the creases in his chubby legs don’t match. It’s tiny, now; but the wrongness will grow with him, she knows it. It’s her fault.

Billy turns off the gas, lifts the kettle, fills the teapot.

“I’ll pick up something cheap, don’t worry. I’ll do it up,” Billy says.

He clinks the teapot lid into place, warm with the thought of cranks and chainwheels and candlewax. He comes round the side of the table and opens his arms; she steps into the space between them.

“He’ll love it,” Billy says.

She nods, her face pressed into his neck, where the boy had rested his sleeping head before.

“
SORRY,” HE SAYS
, because Dad’s already started, and Will had been supposed to help. He’d been reading
Eagle
. He’d lost track of the time.

Dad grunts something; he’s leaning out across the beetle top of the Ford Anglia, a soapy rag in hand, scrubbing off the dirt. Will heads into the garage for more rags. Sukie raises her head—her eyes catch the light but the rest of her is just a darker darkness in the garage, making Will come to a stuttering stop, almost overbalancing on his built-up boot. Sukie stands up so that Will can stroke her head. Her tail thumps against the workbench.

“Good girl,” Will says. “Good girl.”

He bends on his good leg, calliper stretched out to the side, to rifle in one of the rag boxes underneath the workbench. There are three boxes, containing three different categories of rag. Four, if you include the ones in use, left twisted up and oily or dried crisp on the workbench and shelves. You have to be careful you get the right ones.

The shelves are stacked with old tobacco tins and biscuit tins and sweetie jars full of bike bits, bolts, washers, drawer handles, keys, and bits of tiny engineering that he can’t name but could be sewing-machine parts, something like that. And hanging up on the ceiling, like an exhibit, is Dad’s Claud Butler.

Equipped now with an appropriate rag, Will reaches up, and if he puts his weight on his callipered leg, on the built-up boot, and stretches as tall as he can, he can just touch his fingertips to the bottom of the wheel, and make it shift, make it move along three, four, five ticks. He loves the way it ticks.

He’s just turning to go when he sees that there’s a bit of wood in the vice; his dad’s been working with a hacksaw. The outlines of a horse’s head drawn on in pencil, part of the mane already cut out. There is one
wide flaring nostril silvered in with graphite. She is getting a rocking horse. Or maybe just a hobby horse. Anyway.

It’s not his kind of thing, he supposes.

He clumps back out into the back lane to help his dad.

The grass droops with gritty water. The gravel is wet and grey and leaves a film on his boots like plaster. Dad soaps across the bonnet and roof where Will can’t reach. Will manages the doors, the side windows, the boot lid, wiping away the grey soapy streams of water. They work without speaking—just the little concentrating sounds his dad makes, sucking his teeth. Will dips his rag into the bucket, swishing it around; he slops it back onto the car. You don’t put your rag down on the ground, not even for a moment. It’ll pick up grit and that would scratch the paint. And then there’d be that slow explosion of him, like the H-bomb going off. It goes from something small, barely noticed, a tiny fracture in the material of things, and you just don’t see it, you blunder on oblivious, and then you’re right in the middle of it: a fury that plumes and boils a mile up into the air. Will rubs at the silvery back window rim, leans down to do the side panel. He dips down further to attempt the running board, but the calliper digs into his groin, and he yelps. He didn’t mean to. He looks up. His dad’s eyes are on him.

“All right?”

Will nods.

Billy juts his chin at the calliper. “Need sorting?”

Will shakes his head, wants to avoid an uncomfortable limp down to Macklin’s. Dad talking over his head to Mr. Macklin, and Will sitting on an upturned box, bad leg dangling like a puppet’s, and the hot firework of sparks from the welding, which he likes to watch; but he doesn’t like the way the men there fuss him, rub his hair, the way he has to sit there like a broken toy, leg useless. He doesn’t like going to get fixed.

“It’s fine,” he says. “I just pulled a muscle.”

He hesitates, expecting to be detected in the lie, since he doesn’t really have much in the way of muscle to pull. But Dad just nods, and picks up the bucket, and shunts it so that a wave of gritty soapy water flings out down the back lane. He goes in through the gate, to the garden tap, rinses out the bucket, and returns carrying a dark pool of clean water in it, ringed round with a faint circle of old foam.

They are on to the dry rags by the time Mum comes to the back gate and calls them in to supper. Sukie gets up and ambles in after her.

“Be in in a minute,” Dad says.

Will follows him into the garage, into the oil scent and wood dust. Dad flips out the rags, shaking out the wet, and Will does too, until his dad takes them off him and hangs them up on the nails hammered in along the edge of a shelf.

“Go on in,” his dad tells him.

Will does what he is told. He goes down the back garden between the flat rectangles of lawn and the narrow flowerbeds, and swings himself through the porch, and up the step into the kitchen. Sukie is already there, settled underneath Janet’s seat.

There is bread and butter and ham and tea and milk and sugar. There is Janet in the highchair Dad made for her, straining against the straps, reaching out for the bread which is just a quarter of an inch out of her reach, and yelling, “My want it, my want it.” When Will comes in she turns and gives him one of her big wet smiles, and he grins instinctively back. “My want it,” she says again, but this time asking him, and, as Mum’s back is turned and she’s doing something in one of the cupboards, Will picks up a piece of bread and butter and hands it to his little sister, who rewards him with a “Dankoo” and buries her face in the bread. She makes him smile. He watches her eat.

“Wash your hands,” his mother says over her shoulder. Oh yes, that. He goes over to the sink, and stretches up, and scrubs his hands with the green soap, and dries them on the towel, and then Dad comes in. Will watches as his father ambles straight over to Janet and crouches at her side, big smile on his face. He talks nonsense to her, tickling her, making her sputter crumbs. Will rubs the slimy soapy wet off his hands.

Janet shrugs her dad off with a “NO,” and he leans away with a laugh. The baby shoves the bread and butter into her mouth; Dad watches her eat, his eyes tender and fascinated. Sukie licks up the crumbs as they fall, her broad tongue leaving shiny wet patches on the lino. Will watches, drying his hands.

Mum turns round from whatever it is she’s doing and says, “Wash your hands, Billy.” And then, clocking her daughter’s food: “How did she get hold of that?”

“Dunno. Didn’t you give her it?” his dad asks.

“No.”

Will feels his cheeks burn. He can see his mum’s not particularly bothered, just puzzled. His dad though, still crouching, swivels round on his toes and looks at him. Will swallows, tries to gauge this. Is
this the moment before the explosion? His dad’s face is changing—the smile fading.

“Was she not supposed to have it?” Will asks.

“That’s not the question,” his dad says.

“Little monkey helped herself,” Will says.

His dad snorts. Mum’s face breaks into a smile. “Little monkey,” his dad agrees, and gets up to wash his hands.

His mum shifts the plate of bread and butter further across the table, out of the reach of little fingers. Will draws his chair out from the table, seats himself carefully, stretching out his leg and balancing his calliper on the lower rung of Janet’s chair. Janet stuffs the bread into her face, and munches, and gags, and chews again on what she’s just retched back up. Will waits, hands in his lap, for the bread to be offered him.

THE AIR IS SO BIG
—stretches miles and miles—a sweep of pebbles up along the coast; the air a woompfh and a slap, and the sea growling itself up onto the pebbles. Janet is shrieking in delight, leaning from her mother’s arms as if to grab hold of the whole day, Mum complaining at the pull on her back. Dad is lugging Grandma’s deckchair and bags and the new thermos. Grandma picks her way along in her black dress and tan coat, trailing blankets. And Sukie is just daft with excitement, skittering off across the pebbles, barking at seagulls.