The Undertow (39 page)

“He’ll sort it all out,” she says. He has to.

“Sort what out?”

“Whatever needs to be done. Dad’s good at this kind of thing. Good with professional people. They’ve just got to work out what you need.”

He nods, acquiescent. She bites at the inside of her cheek. She sounds so posh, so pompous, so bloody fucking articulate.
Come on, Dad. Hurry up, you bastard
.

Then a cloud shifts somewhere high above, and the sun floods in through the window, pooling this far corner of the ward with light. And in the sunshine, the old man is blue. His cheeks, his nose and his fingertips are all turning a beautiful shade of lavender, as if he’s freezing slowly, from inside.

“Are you cold, Granddad?”

He rolls his head against the pillows. No.

“Can I get you anything? Cup of tea?”

“Tea’s at half three.”

“There’s the machine.”

He considers this a moment. “That’d be nice. You fancy one, sweetheart?”

The gold glints at the side of his teeth. He leans round towards his locker to scoop up change, but the movement makes him wince, makes the leashes of tubing snake.

“S’all right, Granddad, I’ve got money.”

Out in the corridor, Matty scrapes one trainered toe back and forth under the chair. He glances at her sullenly. He looks powerfully bored. Like he’s the centre of everything. Like making sure he’s happy is all that anyone should bother with.

“You want a hot chocolate?” she tries.

He looks up at her. He smiles, seems grateful for the distraction. She shouldn’t be so hard on him; he’s only nine. Who knows what goes on inside their heads?

He has Carole’s fairness, but his hair spirals into curls just like Grandma Ruby’s used to do.

“Gimme a hand then.”

She holds out a palmful of coins, and he picks through them, looks up at the machine. His fingernails are rimmed with little-boy dirt.

The room has been portioned out of some bigger space in ersatz wood and ceiling tiles and plasterboard walls. A rubber plant droops on the desk. The registrar, who is about fifteen, stands by the illuminated light box. Will stands beside him, his hand to the back of a chair, taking some of the weight off his hip. He has good days and bad days. This is
a bad day. He is on a waiting list now. He’ll be having his own X-rays to look at soon.

When the light clicks on behind the images, Will’s stomach swoops. The two men look on in silence. Dr. Nurbhai draws in a breath, but then doesn’t speak.

“So what do we do?” Will asks.

He looks round at Dr. Nurbhai. The registrar does a thoughtful, professional face: inclination to one side, slight frown, twist of the lips. Will has an expression of his own just like it, used mostly when pretending to consider predictable comments from undergraduates. He grits his teeth, turns back to the light box, to the X-ray of his father’s lungs. The glow escaping round the sides gives the image a kind of square halo. He tells himself that he’s misinterpreting what he’s seeing. It’s some different, new technique; this is not a standard X-ray. This is something else. How else could the two sides come out so differently, in such stark contrast?

“First thing to say is, the X-rays are just confirming my initial diagnosis. The treatment your father has already undergone will have dealt with some of this. This is a snapshot, really, from when he was admitted. Of the untreated condition.”

Will shifts, uncomfortable. He should have brought his stick. He doesn’t like to use his stick. He thinks people will think it is an affectation, and therefore that he’s the kind of man who would affect a stick. He tangles himself up in other people’s imagined imaginings of him, feels cross at what he thinks they might be thinking.

“Do you want to sit down?” the doctor asks.

“I’m fine,” Will says. He clears his throat. “So, what now?”

The professional face again—a more extreme version this time. Mouth pulled down at the corners, chin pulled in a touch, head tilted to one side, eyes half shut. Oh he’d just love to punch him. Nice neat little jab to the nose. Make him bleed onto his lovely white collar. Will notices his free hand is clenched tight into a fist. He looks down at it, the tendons standing proud, the veins snaking across. Just like his father’s hand, his father’s fist. He loosens it, flexes his fingers: all men turn into their fathers, eventually.

So what’s his father turning into then? A drowned man?

“Well the point is really,” Dr. Nurbhai says, “what we’ve got here is a symptom.”

“Right,” Will says. Because of course there’s nothing different or
new about the X-ray technique here, he knows that. He’s not a fool. You don’t need a medical degree to interpret this image: one lung is black and therefore clear, the rays passing cleanly through it. The other lung is entirely white, X-rays bouncing back off something denser than tissue. That’s what they’re draining out of him at the moment, the liquid that’s been filling up his lung.

This is it. It is coming. He is going to have to deal with it.

“What it comes down to really is his heart.”

Will nods.

Dr. Nurbhai talks about the condition and its treatment. Monitoring. Drug regimes—ongoing care. Will just nods, says yes. He finds himself looking at the spider plant on top of a filing cabinet. It is drying up from the tips—they’ve gone brown and papery, crumpling up on themselves. He should have watered his, back in his college room, he thinks. It was dying too.

“Do you mind,” Will asks, “if I sit down?”

Dr. Nurbhai takes his arm. Will feels old. He sinks down into the chair.

“Are you all right?” the doctor asks. “Can I get you a glass of water?”

Will shakes his head. “It’s just, it’s quite—”

“Of course. Just take your time.”

She hands the flexing plastic up to Matty.

“Careful.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s scalding,” she says. “Leave it a minute.”

He winces, adjusts his grip. They walk back down the corridor to the row of empty chairs. He sets his drink down on a spare seat, shunts himself back up onto his. His feet dangle. He watches the steam rise from his cup.

“Don’t you want to come and see Granddad?” she says.

He looks at her. His wide hazel eyes, his soft face. He has a sprinkling of freckles across his nose.

“Dad said to wait here,” he says. He sounds apprehensive.

“It’s just up there,” she nods sidelong up the ward. “We won’t even be out of sight.”

He follows her gaze, between the rows of beds, towards their granddad.
She sees it, for a second, through his nine-year-old’s eyes: the starkness and the sickness and the hush, and in the middle of it all the inexplicably difficult old man. Matty’s afraid. Not prepared to admit it, but he is afraid.

And this is how he will remember their granddad: sickness, fear, and boredom. Her memories from his age are all fresh air, safety, uncomplicated love.

“Okay,” she says. She wants to say something to reassure him, wants to ruffle his hair or hug him or something.

“Wait here,” she says. “He won’t be long.”

Halfway along the ward, one of the occupied beds has been left uncurtained. The woman’s arms lie over the white fold of the sheet. They look like the kind of sticks you find on a woodland floor, blotched and dark, that would fall away into fragments if touched. Billie looks away, but when she blinks she can still see the white sheet, the lines of dark flesh, the crumbling frailty.

Her Converse make creaky sounds on the lino; her jeans brush together at the rolled turnup. When she gets back to the bed, her granddad is sleeping. His eyes are shut, his mouth has fallen open. She can see the neat gold hooks of his bridgework.

She glances back down the length of the ward; in the corridor at the far end, Matty is hunched like a comma round his drink, still waiting. He is too young for this.

She puts the tea down on the tray table, and sits down on the black vinyl-cushioned chair. She lays her hand over her granddad’s hand again. She waits. Because it is, after all, only a matter of time.

They sit side by side on the Tube. Dad’s leg in washed-out denim; her shoulder creaking into his leather blouson jacket whenever the train sways them; Matty on the far side of their dad. She can see his reflection—all their reflections—duplicated in the double panes of the window opposite, underneath which sits a tiny Chinese woman wearing a belted mac and beautiful gold earrings.

The train swings again, and pushes her into her dad’s side, and their reflections sway closer to each other. Seen at an angle like this, there is a striking asymmetry to what is still, even at his age, a handsome face.
His reflection, for just this moment, looks like it has had a stroke: the lips dipping at one side, the left eye at a different angle to the right. As if his face too has a limp, one side dragged along by the other.

He looks old, in his reflection.

His father is dying.

She glances round at the real him. He catches her eye, then peels off his specs, presses his thumb and fingers to the bridge of his nose, where the flesh is bruised by their weight. The glasses—a metallic stick insect—rest on his knee.

She rubs his arm. The leather sleeve is smooth and cool. “Okay?”

He puts his glasses back on. Nods.

He thinks of the conference he won’t be able to attend. There would have been sun and wine and late-night bars and talk till the small hours and Pavla was going to be arriving on the second day, a paper on Italo Calvino, her lunatic black hair bouncing round her as she made her points. He thinks of six thirty when all the department lights were out, and he’d chewed gum to cover his coffee breath, and his spider plant was looking parched, and Samantha had come up from the college bar, smelling of cider and Anais Anais, and had buried her face in his neck and made a sound like a puppy. He thinks of Carole who, he’s pretty sure, has been going through his pockets; who has never really trusted him, because she knew all too well that he couldn’t really be trusted.

“How’s Mum?” he asks.

Billie, caught off guard, says, “Okay.”

The smell of diesel making him gag. The smell of vomit might be his. There’s the churning rumble of the craft and its lurch and dip beneath him. And the smell of men. Body-stink. Billy’s stomach twists and heaves. He grips onto the bike, onto the side of the craft. Every instinct is to pull away. His body tears against itself, away from the cold shore, away from what’s coming, away from what it’s being pushed into. Glimpsed through smoke. Shells scream overhead. The landing craft hits an underwater obstacle, judders, grinds on. Lurches free. The shake rises up through his feet and legs and the bike and he is rattling like a skeleton. He must make a decent show, for the sake of the squad. He tries to look round at Alfie, but for some reason he can’t turn his head. He’s worried about Alfie. The landing craft bumps up onto a sandbank; they stagger at the jolt, and the ramp swings down. And Billy, unable to turn his head and take a last look at his friend before
they leap out into the surf and race towards the guns with the shells screaming towards them, rolls his whole body round in bed, and Alfie, fifty years ago, white with terror, looks back at him.

Which is when the shell hits.

And Alfie’s head is gone. The body hits the deck, splashes into the wash of vomit and bilge. Blood stings Billy’s eyes, is spattered across his hands. Blood heaves out of the body. Billy searches round desperately for Alfie’s head. As though finding it would help. As if he could slap it back into place, set the body back on its feet, set it going again. But there is no head. No head rolling around the deck. It is gone. Atomized.

Alfie. Alfie.
Alfie
.

“Dad—”

Billy’s cold. His vest is drenched against him. The bed is wet. He struggles up against the pillows.

“It’s all right—”

The movement makes him cough. The coughing hurts. His wound tears and puckers, his chest feels tight and raw. Underwater light: cool and blue and grey through the thick nets. Street light outside. Chest a heaving pain.

“Dream—” he manages.

“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s over now.”

He tries to heave in a breath. Tries again. Can’t get it, not enough air.

The son says something, and he nods. Then the son goes; over the rasp and rattle of Billy’s breath, the painful thud of his heart, he hears the boy’s uneven skip down the stairs. The phone lifted. The rattle of the dial. Billy coughs hard, hard, and brings fluid up into his mouth. He spits it out into his hand, rubs it onto the sheet. A nasty brownish smear. The wet tangle of his sheets. Oh God, no. He’s pissed the bed. He scrabbles at the covers, pulling them off. He swings his legs out of the wet bed. His heart is pounding; he hasn’t got enough breath. He heaves at the air, desperate to gulp it down. From downstairs he hears “Ambulance, yes, please, quick as you can.”

Little sips. Little sips. He can feel the rattle deep in his chest, threatening. He tries to breathe shallowly, over it.

“It’s on its way.”

The son is back. He takes his hand. Billy looks up at him. The boy’s face is lined. His hair is thin. He is important. People listen to him. He is good with professional people, that’s what she said. He will sort it out. He’ll fix this.

“Son,” Billy says to him.

The bed crumples as Will sits down on the edge; he takes the old man’s hand. Billy wants to tell him about Alfie. About the landing craft and the ramp thumping down and the guns and the shell that turned Alfie’s head to a spray of blood and bone and matter. How Billy’d raced away from that and pushed the memory down into a box and locked it tight. How the box has started leaking now, and he is terrified. I killed a child, he wants to say. I didn’t have to kill the child. I could have found another way. I could have died. His life paid for mine—it paid for all of this.

“Son …”

And the bed is wet. He wants to tell him about the piss.

“Don’t talk,” Will tells him. “I mean, breathe, just breathe.”

Billy nods, and it hurts to nod. He should get up, get clean, get changed before the ambulance comes. He can’t talk. He’s not allowed to talk. He hasn’t got the breath.