The Undertow (46 page)

A gift to the deeps and distances. An offering to the Fates. For Matty’s safe return.

It is still very early—the street is quiet. She has bought bread and ground coffee and bottled water from a corner shop. She makes coffee with bottled water, the drip and hiss of its percolation familiar and soothing. Sunlight shreds through the blinds. She tears off fragments of bread. The bread tastes of salt.

The first channel is Maltese, and is showing a news feature on a yacht race. She flicks over, and picks up an Italian channel.

Her Italian is basic, but she doesn’t really need to understand the words. The pictures are enough because she knows what’s been happening, just like everybody else already knows. An establishing shot: the desert, and the twisted carcass of a car, blood in the dust. Then there’s an interior caught on a grainy digital camera. Each time it is slightly, horribly worse. The shot is framed so that the captors themselves seem headless—you can only see their torsos, the longbladed knives, like machetes, held diagonally across their chests. The man sits, hands tied behind his back. He speaks. They’ve overdubbed him into Italian. His lips move but she can’t understand the words.

She fumbles for the remote. Her hand shakes. She switches the television off.

The sun has not yet penetrated the depths of the street. She climbs the cobbles in sandals, her arms bristling in the chill. It’s still early. She’s not sure when the Arts Centre opens. She turns a corner and she’s facing the cathedral; a wide sweep of golden stone. The Caravaggios are housed here.

She presses up against the door, listens: silence. She pushes cautiously in.

The interior is dark and quiet. Candles flicker in raked banks. Death’s heads grin from the arches. She follows the signs for the side chapel.

She is alone at first, and just stands dead centre of the dark floor, and looks up at the painting. As the room fills, she moves into the empty spaces, finds new lines of sight. Her toes grow numb. The small of her back aches. Her neck is stiff. It doesn’t matter. From the left side of the room, she can study the expression of the handmaid, the glint of gold off the platter that she carries, the deep shadow of the folds in her skirt. From the right, Billie can better see the prisoners peering out through their cell window, straining to get a view of the drama in the inner courtyard. From right up close against the security barrier, she can see the victim’s pallid face, the wound, the blood.

She has been playing, she realises. Like a child she has been playing with her inks and her paint and her pencils and her paper and her pens. With her skulls and her bones and her shells and her scrap of human leather. You do learn through play. You try things out.

It is time to stop playing.

The picture is
The Beheading of St. John the Baptist
. The beheading is performed in the Arabic fashion: a long-bladed knife is sliced back through the throat, severing artery and vein, trachea and oesophagus, splitting the links of the spine. The handmaid waits, platter ready, to carry the severed head away to Salome and Herod. We don’t see them. We don’t need to see them, with their veils and cushions and dishes of figs. The powerful are not what matters here. What matters is the blood and flesh and bone.

The victim is already dead. His wound gapes like a second mouth. The blood pools scarlet on the floor, and then trickles out to scrawl, as
if by its own volition,
F. Michel
. Michelangelo da Caravaggio. It’s the only piece he signed.

The gallery fills with Americans and English and Scots and Irish and Australians, becomes dense with noise and trainers and bodies and rucksacks. She’s kept here, kept looking by the sense of something connective, expansive about this picture. She can see it in every figure, in all the absences, in the way that primary focus is given to neither the executioner nor the victim, so that the gaze shifts uneasily between the other prisoners, the guards, the handmaid with the platter who only stands and waits. That’s what matters here: everybody shares the searching light; they share the act, the state of being. Everyone’s complicit in this death.

You can’t switch off. You can’t walk away. You have to look.

IT HAS RAINED ALL DAY
. It has rained for weeks. There are pools of water between the gravel. The lawn looks like a swamp. The lights are on upstairs, which means the Canadian couple are in. Will rattles his key into the door. He has a bottle of wine tucked under his arm. His mouth tastes of old sherry.

He dodges through the front door, then through the hall and into his flat. It is cold. He takes off his wet overcoat and hangs it up. He goes into the kitchen and opens his wine. He will drink half the bottle. Half a bottle is a reasonable amount. Up fresh tomorrow morning, because he’s promised Billie he’ll pick her up from the airport.

God knows she needed the break, as in time off, as in bit of luck. After the year that it was. Mads. That utter shit Luke. All surface gloss, no substance. Leaving her when he did, at the very worst time; but at least they didn’t have kids. He shrugs the thought off. Doesn’t do to pursue it.

In fact, he goes on to drink the whole bottle, finishing it off over
News at Ten
, stumbling through to his bedroom and climbing into bed in his pants and shirt. He wakes, stark awake, at three. He doesn’t know what wakes him, but he gets up and limps to the toilet for a piss.

His right hip is hurting him now, which seems like a final bloody betrayal. But then with all the years of favouring the bad leg it’s done far more than its fair share. He can tell it’s not far off complete breakdown: the loose grind, the sudden shocks of pain. He’ll go private this time. But what will he do about the convalescence? Could Billie be persuaded to camp out with him for a few weeks? They could go through those boxes properly then.

Outside the bathroom window the rain still hammers down. The
guttering is blocked: water spilling from its edge in an uneven waterfall. He’ll have to talk to the couple upstairs about getting that fixed.

He wanders through to the kitchen, fills a glass at the tap. Stands there in his underwear and shirt and drinks.

He misses Madeline. Suddenly, viscerally. He clutches the edge of the sink, and sobs hard, until he’s retching, and then brings up a flood of water, acid, and wine into the sink. When he can heave up nothing more, he turns on the tap, and rinses away the mess, and raises his hand to touch the wet away from his eyes.

He always knew that she was beautiful, he always knew that she was clever, but he never really noticed, when he was young, that Madeline was kind. Or, rather, he didn’t see how necessary kindness was.

Outside, the water cascades down from the blocked guttering, pools under the gravel, oozes through the seam where the coalhole has been imperfectly sealed, and drips down into the dark. The remaining dusty coal, which has lingered there since 1957 when the gas fires were put in, softens into a treacly morass, and oozes out from its dark corner.

Water also soaks through the brickwork of the cellar walls, growing mould on the wooden shelves, easing into the concrete floor and making it bead with damp. From the brick itself grows a white crystalline material, delicate and beautiful and unseen in the dark. Unseen, because Will hasn’t been down there since he carried down the unopened boxes of stuff that Carole had tumbled together on his behalf four years ago now. They’re mostly old notes and manuscripts and outmoded office supplies, and bits of drafts of books long published and gone. And whilst he can’t be bothered to check through them, he also can’t be sure there isn’t something worthwhile in one of them, and so leaves them down there, unopened, to rot. Though, in fairness, he doesn’t know they’re rotting.

The blue suitcase lies on the cellar floor. The cardboard wicks up the water from the concrete. It still looks solid enough, but it is weighed down by its own damp, and fragile. Inside, the vinyl album on the top holds some photos safe, though water seeps in and blots others, making the inks separate into the constituent colours, blurring the outlines of a young woman’s face, a toddler’s sundress, a graduation gown. The earlier albums—paper pages stuck with black and white photos—are drenched. A boy in his hospital bed. A rug on the beach. Different Sukies. A man on a bike.

• • •

Billie flicks on the light, heads down the stairs. Cobwebs droop from the light fitting. Will follows her down awkwardly, sideways.

“You okay?” she asks.

“Fine.”

“Is your hip hurting?”

“Is it a day?”

“You need to go and see a doctor. Get it checked.”

On the cement floor, a glistering of water.

“Shit.” He starts forward, past her, then stops. The walls are streaked with dark. They hear the drip of water coming from the disused coalhole cover. They see the boxes damp and softening, bulging out like bellies.

“What’s in them?” Billie asks.

“Nothing. Just crap. Office stuff.”

He goes over to the wall and touches the white bloom on the brick. The crystal crumples back on itself.

“So where’s the suitcase?” Billie asks.

He scans round; spots it, lying on its side, on the floor. He gestures to it. Billie darts over, as if her swift action would make any difference now. It looks, for a moment, all right. But when she kneels down and touches it the cardboard dips away, leaving the impression of her fingertips.

“It’s sodden.”

The wooden strips have bulged too, he sees now: they are bloated with water and splitting round the screws.

“Shall I lift it?” she asks.

“Go on.”

“It might just come apart.”

“Well, we can’t really leave it.”

He leans his weight on the top of the nearest box, watches as she slips her hands in underneath, lifting the suitcase like a sleeping child.

“It’s cold,” she says.

“Can you manage?” he asks.

“Yup.”

She eases it up, clutched in her arms, and makes her way between the boxes, back towards the stairs.

• • •

They sit on the living room floor, in the weak November light from the French windows. The case lies open on a folded throw, to keep its must and wet off the new green carpet. Billie lifts out the contents.

The stripy vinyl album is first. There are dewdrops inside the plastic sleeves. She slips the pictures out of their casings, and lays them out in the sunlight.

“Mum,” Billie says, of a girl in a green dress.

“Yes.”

Billie holds the photograph a moment longer, then lays it on the carpet. “Can I keep it?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks.”

“S’okay.”

There’s a moment when neither of them can speak.

“That’ll be me,” Billie says, fingertip suspended over the pink bundle of a child in Grandma Ruby’s arms.

“Yes,” he says. Her tininess. He remembers the washing-up bowl in front of the gas fire, her belly round and taut.

The older albums are buckled and softened and let their pictures loose. A boy in a hospital bed, holding a bow and arrow.

“That’s me,” Will says.

She looks at it. “You look like Matty. A fat Matty.”

“Fat! I was bedridden! I was in traction for a year.”

“Yep. Fatso.”

There are loose photographs too, and these she eases apart with minute care. A studio shot of Grandma Ruby, smooth-skinned, dark-lipped, beautiful and young. The photo is creased and battered and soft. And there’s another studio pose of Granddad Billy, a young man on his bike—
To Mother, with love
washed into an inky blur.

At the bottom of the case, drenched, is the postcard album, his grandma’s picture book. The wet has sealed its paperiness around itself. When Billie eases the pages apart, they peel into strips, fall into fragments like tinned fish. The postcards themselves are wet and soft, but more robust than the paper. One comes away in her hands.

“Shit. Sorry.”

“I think the album’s done for, love; don’t worry.”

She turns the postcard round to look at it. The picture is of the Grand Harbour in Malta. Her skin fizzes. “Whose was this?”

“My grandma’s. Granddad sent the pictures, during the war.”

“The one who died? Gallipoli? Granddad’s dad?”

Her dad nods.

“I was just there. I mean, I was just looking at this view; like, yesterday. This is Malta. Fuck.”

She tilts the card, dips her head to read the underside, as though afraid of turning it over fully in case the picture might drip off onto the floor. The writing is in pencil; sloping, even, very careful.

“Amelia?”

“My grandma.”

Billie lays the card down on the carpet, touches it again, straightens it, dazed by a new sense of privilege, of unaccountably good fortune.

“He was in Malta, and it was wartime,” she says.

“Yes. That’s about as much as I know. He used to take Grandma to the cinema. She’d talk about that.”

Billie sits back on her heels. He is
well
, he is
longing
, he is
glad
. This is what you write if you’re writing home from war. If you’re writing on a postcard, that anyone could read. This is what is expected.

“What?” he asks.

There are things you can’t say, of course there are. Things you wouldn’t even consider saying. About fear, and its deferral. About what you’d do to stop yourself from looking too far ahead. She feels choked with it. With what must have been felt, and may have been done, and could not be said.

“It’s sad,” she says.

She peels apart another page. He watches the care, the precision of her movements. She has become something, this past little while, while
he wasn’t looking. Out of all the misery, she has pulled herself into focus.