The Undertow

by Jo Baker

  She has no idea of time.

  She rests her forearm on the wallpaper, rests her head on her arm. Closes her eyes. The pain builds. She braces herself, stiffening. Behind her Mrs. Clack and Mrs. Bradley talk, too quiet for her to hear. Mrs. Bradley costs money. The pain screams, roars, and then it softens, aches and fades. She pushes away from the wall. Four steps back to the bedstead.

  “What is it?” Amelia demands. “What are you saying?”

  Their faces turn to her. But then the next pain hits, and she grabs the bedstead with both hands, and cries out. When she opens her eyes again, there is blood on the floor.

  “Sorry,” she says to the doctor. The doctor costs more money. His shining things are laid out on a cloth on the bedside table.

  He shakes his head, dismisses this with a tut. Mrs. Clack has gone. Mrs. Bradley stands ready, arms and hands bare and scrubbed. The doctor wets a wad of lint with chloroform.

  She wants to ask him, Am I worse at this than other women? Do I make more fuss, have I made more mess than everybody else? Are there other women who don’t work properly too? Do other women fail so miserably at the first hurdle?

  He screws the lid back onto the chloroform bottle, drops the lint into the apparatus. He slides a hand under her neck, steadying her. His hands are clean and cold.

  “Now,” he says, “breathe deep.”

  The apparatus over her mouth and nose, she heaves in a spirituous, strange breath. And the world collapses into darkness.

  When she surfaces again, she can’t think what has happened.

  A light has been left burning. There’s an oily, mineral taste in her mouth. She thinks for a moment that she has had some kind of accident—that she’s been hit by a bus—she feels sore all over. But then it returns to her—the hours compacted down to an eternity of pain, the failure, and then nothing.

  She turns her head and sees the baby in the crib.

  For a long time she just looks at the baby. Its skin is a reddish-pink colour, and there’s a sticky tuft of dark hair on its scalp. It looks raw, underdone. Its head is squashed into a strange shape, like it’s wearing a skullcap made of its own skin. It’s not pretty. It is very far from pretty. But it is there, and it is real, and it lives. It sleeps there with a kind of quiet prepossession, as if entirely sure of its place in the world.

  She reaches out to touch it, to smoothe down its sticky hair. The movement makes the bedsprings creak, stabs her belly, sends a flicker of pain down between her legs. She sucks in a breath. Breathes it out. The pain fades. She reaches out again. Her back and shoulders ache.

  She touches the child. It is warm. Its skin is dry.

  I have to love you, Amelia thinks. Whatever else happens, it is my job to love you now.

  The old man must have been listening out for her, because she hears him come into the room now, tentatively, but without knocking. She doesn’t look round.

  “Are you all right?”

  She nods; the movement hurts. Even her neck is sore.

  He comes round the bed, and sits down beside her. He reaches out and touches the clean new cheek with his blackened hand.

  “What’ll we call him?” His voice is choked.

  She didn’t know that it was a boy.

  “Don’t bother him. Let him sleep.”

  The old man hesitates, lifts his hand away.

  “He’ll be William,” she says. “After his father. William Arthur Hastings. His son.”

  Knox Road, Battersea

  November 15, 1925

  A LADDER DESCENDS into the dark. He pulls himself down, hand over hand, deep into the water. He flips round into a flooded corridor. The corridor leads on and on, sloping downwards. He swims deeper and deeper. He reaches a door, and heaves it open. Beyond, the space opens out into a cavern. In his dreams he is not afraid of water. In his dreams he can swim.

  He sees him, where he always is. A dark shape hanging in the water, the water clouded with soot.

  And this is the moment when it could all happen. This is the moment when change is possible. He could just grab him and swim hard. The two of them. If he can get him back to the surface, he will have a father, and his mother will be happy. And he will have saved him, the man who matters most in the whole world.

  He reaches out to take the arm—in his dream he can see his own hand reach out, pale in the darkness, and he knows what is coming next. He sees his fingers sink into the flesh as it gives like moss, cold and sodden. The corpse turns slowly in the water, turns to face him. Its eyes are black, empty sockets.

  Billy

  And then he can’t swim. The skill’s gone. Legs twisted in the water and then the thing reaches out for him. Its hand is white and spongy. Its touch will kill him. The hand lays itself on his chest, over his heart.

  Son

  He jumps awake, tangled in the sheets. She’s there, looking down at him, her hand resting on his chest. Mother. Billy struggles up from under her hand. She sits on the edge of his bed, her hair tied up in soft rags. He rubs the dream out of his eyes. He knows better than to mention it to her. His father is a hero, that’s what she says. He died protecting them from bullies. Billy’s dreams of him should not be like this.

  “Good morning, Billy,” she says.

  “Morning.” The word comes out gluey with sleep.

  “Come on then, time to get up. Special day.”

  When she’s gone, he dresses in the dark, shivering, pulling on his drawers, shorts and shirt, and his sweater. Yesterday’s socks hold a glossy imprint of his toes. His boots are waiting downstairs in the scullery.

  In the kitchen it is stuffy-hot. The range is glossy with black-lead; she has stirred the fire up and boiled the kettle and made porridge. Sometimes there is sugar, sometimes salt. Today, because it is a special day, there is jam. A dark blob of it sinking into the centre of the bowl as he sits down at the table.

  “Thanks, Ma,” he says.

  “Mother,” she says.

  She leans down and offers her lips for a kiss. He stretches up and touches their soft coolness with the dry scratch of his own. Then she puts her arms around his neck and holds him and he waits until she’s finished, smelling her clean cool smell. When she lets go, he starts to pull the blob of jam apart with his spoon, teasing out the scrolls of plum skin that look like little quills.

  “Eat up,” she says. “I’ve had mine.”

  She gives him a pat, and then a rub of the hair, and then tidies it for him with her fingers as she watches him eat. She murmurs the kind of thing she always says, but with the added emphasis of the day: such a big boy now, starting his morning job, his very own delivery round before school, and who’d’ve thought it, all grown up, and how proud of him his father would have been. All that kind of thing. He concentrates on the spoon, on the careful portioning of jam to each mouthful.

  He doesn’t mind the hair-fussing, though from the way she pauses from time to time he knows she’s considering whether a bit of scurf might be a nit, and he hopes to God she won’t find any because that means a day stuck at home with his head wrapped up in paraffin and cloth, and his hair raked through a million times with that scratchy little comb because she won’t buy the powder from the chemist’s because then everyone will know that he’s got a dirty head. She’s telling him about when he was tiny, and he loves to hear about when he was tiny, it gives him that little bright coal in his chest, the sense of his own story weaving around other stories in the world. She tells him about the time she set him down on his feet when he was ten months old, a prodigy for standing and walking, never seen the like of it with such a tiny child. She’d set him down on the kitchen floor and turned her back to fetch his bread and milk, and when she turned round again she found him sitting on the tabletop, poking at the butter, having climbed up there from the seat of the chair: only ten months old, what a little marvel he was, just like his father, a busy, active man. Then she reminds herself of something, and takes her hands off his head, and goes to reach a little parcel down
from the mantelshelf.

  “That’s for you, son.”

  She puts the small cardboard box down in front of him. He lifts it, tilts it. The thing inside rolls down the slope and hits the end of the box with a satisfying thunk. He knows what it is and a grin spreads across his face. He smiles up at her.

  “Thanks, Ma.”

  “Mother,” she says. “Go on.”

  He unpicks the end panel and lets the car slide out onto his palm. Racing green; a Jaguar, long-snouted as a lurcher; and with its little driver there, all gauntleted and goggled. The yellow-painted headlamps are tiny and perfect. Straight from Atkinsons’ window. He runs it across the tabletop. He picks it up and studies the ripples in the India rubber tyres, like the creases in tiny lips. The undercasing is unpainted lead.

  He reaches up to kiss her.

  “It’s smashing, Mother,” he says. “Thank you.”

  He traces it around the table one-handed as he finishes up his porridge, trying to swerve the car round his teacup as the soft grains and swirls of jam spread out between his tongue and the cave-roof of his mouth. The car’s axles are fixed, so it judders at the corners. He wonders if he could do anything about that. He picks at a screw with a thumbnail. He’ll have a bit of a tinker after school.

  The sound of the water hitting the enamel bowl makes him look up. He watches as she tops the bowl up with water from the kettle to take the chill off. She’s saying that he has to remember to stand up straight and say his please-and-thank-yous and she knows he’ll do all that, because he’s such a good boy, a wonderment.

  “Well,” she says. “Well. Come on then.”

  He scoops up his last spoonful of porridge, with its faint trace of sweetness. School dinner on Monday is liver and onions and potatoes and you can pick out the green bits and purple bits and black bits in the potatoes. And then plain cake for pudding. It’s good the way you feel full afterwards. He rolls his sleeves as he gets up from the table. Leaning over the bowl, he slaps the lukewarm water to his face, puffs and blows; she leans over him and scrubs at his neck with a wrung-out cloth.

  When he is washed and dried, she buttons up his jacket for him. She looks him over.

  “I’ll be good. I’ll do my best.”

  “I know you will,” she says. “My little man.” She does up his top button, tucks his canary muffler in around his neck, kisses him. He scoops the car up off the tabletop, slides it into his pocket.

  It is still dark. At the corner, under the lamp, Mr. Bell’s horse Rosie stands steaming between her shafts, the milk churns clustered cold and grey on the flatbed behind her.

  “Hello, my lovely.”

  Billy runs his hand along her flank as he comes up beside her, his knuckles bumping over her ribs, and she turns her head and looks round at him, blinks her great glossy eyes. The lovely warm smell of her huffing breath. He rubs at her jaw, and she blows with pleasure, great clouds of warm steam in the cold fog. He gives her a kiss and her nose is so soft and warm and alive, greyish-velvety, blotchy-pink, bristly.

  “Morning, Mr. Bell.”

  The dairyman clambers back up into the seat and offers him a lift, but Billy says no and thank you, that he’s off to Cheeseman’s, starting work today, and Mr. Bell asks after Freddy who used to do the deliveries, and Billy says he’s started work at Price’s, so—and Mr. Bell wishes Billy good luck, and Billy says thanks, and he’s near the end of the street now, keeping pace with Mr. Bell and Rosie, and then waving goodbye as they turn into Battersea High Street and he ducks down the back alleyway, boots clattering along the cobbles, his arms wrapped round him and his horse-scented hands tucked under his armpits and his lips faintly tingly. He bumps his way in through the back gate into Mr. Cheeseman’s yard.

  Mr. Cheeseman is at the back door of his shop. He has a box of parcelled groceries held out from his hip. There’s an oil lamp hung from the wall. It casts a warm orange glow, filled with grainy fog.

  “Ah, Billy,” he says. He sets down the box by the back step.

  Billy stands up straight. “Good morning, Mr. Cheeseman.”

  Mr. Cheeseman brushes his hands. “Your mother well?”

  Billy nods. “Yesser.”

  “Good good. Well then. So. You can ride a bike, then?”

  “Yesser.”

  In fact, he’s only had a couple of goes, standing up on the pedals, on this very bike, Freddy having marked him out some months ago as his successor. Freddy himself had set him going with a hand under the saddle, then a final push and laughing when he let go and Billy looped round in the street and found he couldn’t make the turn and couldn’t stop and yelled and wove about, and then banged the front wheel on the kerb and came off sideways and took the skin off his knee, which made Freddy dash over all concerned and examine the solid tyre and go phew with relief when he found it was undamaged. Billy’d also had a ride from time to time in the grocery box when he was small, but you’re not supposed to lark about with Mr. Cheeseman’s bike.

  “Well this ol’ girl won’t give you any trouble.”

  Mr. Cheeseman heads over to the lean-to shed and drags open a door that needs its hinges redoing; the bottom is scraping itself away against the flagstones.

  “Let’s see you give it a try.”

  He reaches into the dark space and half lifts, half pulls out the bike. Billy feels a fierce delight.

  It’s an Alldays & Onions. There’s a wooden box fitted above the front wheel; and down the side of the box the words Cheeseman’s Quality Grocer’s and Established 1873 picked out in gold and white lettering against the black. That’s where Billy’d sat, knees buckled up, backside numb, rattling over the cobbles with Freddy cruising along and singing behind him.

  Billy crouches down, admires the mantrap pedals, thumbs at the solid rubber tyres. He rests a hand on the sprung leather saddle. His face breaks into a grin.

  Mr. Cheeseman shifts in his nice boots, he has to be getting on. Billy stands up. He brushes the dirt off his hands, rubs the oil away.

  “Give her a go, then?” Mr. Cheeseman says.

  The smile spreads further, making Billy’s cheeks bunch up, ache. This is a job. This is work. Mr. Cheeseman’s going to pay him to do this.

  “She weighs a fair bit herself,” Mr. Cheeseman says. “So we’ll try it first without a load.”

  Mr. Cheeseman holds the saddle while Billy punts along with one foot, and then hops it up onto the pedal and Mr. Cheeseman lets go. Billy dips back and forth through the frame like a wind-up toy.

  “Watch it,” Mr. Cheeseman calls. “Try and stay upright. If you had a load on that, you’d topple right over.”

  A few more yards, passing the backyard gates of the houses, and he’s picking up speed, whipping through the cold cobwebs of fog. The pedals taking him up and over and down, up and over and down, his back up straight and the cold needling in through the weave of his jacket. The sheer breathless joy of it. Then the alley ends—opens out onto Simpson Street, a pool of lamplight—and he careens out, swings the bike round. He’s taking it too wide and is going to hit the kerb—he tightens the turn, slows off, but he’s lost it, balance almost gone, and he’s going to fall, crunch the bike onto the cobbles and wreck it, splintered wood and bent spokes and scored paintwork. He can’t let that happen. Billy drops a foot off the pedal, and clatters his boot toe over the cobbles, slowing, dragging the bike round, finds his balance, and he’s got away with it. He’s back between the backyard walls, into the alleyway, all the world is good. The wet fog whips past him and whistles through his teeth, gritty and wet and sour, and he is happy.

  Mr. Cheeseman stands by his back gate, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his duster coat, his muffler pulled up over his chin. Billy slows down. He drops a foot and drags it bump bump bump over the cobbles, bringing him to a stop at Mr. Cheeseman’s side, in the edge of the backyard lamplight. He slips down off the pedals, stands astride the frame, not ready to get off yet. His face glows. His fingers throb with cold. He doesn’t want ever to get
off.

  “Good chap,” Mr. Cheeseman says. “But watch those boots. Your ma will have both our hides.”

  Billy steps off and wheels the bike, following Mr. Cheeseman into the yard. He leans the bike up against the wall, and cranes to look at the slip of paper Mr. Cheeseman’s taken from his pocket. It’s an old Lifebuoy soap wrapper, still smelling of soap, with a list of addresses pencilled on the inner side. Billy knows the addresses—they are the streets that crisscross between Westbridge Road and the railway. Mrs. Goldman is the lady that his ma doesn’t say hello to, though she always smiles at Billy. She has a blue overcoat. Mr. Clovis rides a Marston Sunbeam to work.

  “This all make sense to you?” Mr. Cheeseman asks.

  Billy nods.

  Mr. Cheeseman pockets the list and lifts the first package from the crate by the back door. He dips the package so that Billy can read the pencilled name and address.

  “Right,” Billy says.

  “Last one on your list,” Mr. Cheeseman says, brandishing Mrs. Goldman’s package of rolls, butter and cheese. “So it goes in first.”

  He places it carefully in the bottom of the box. Billy bends to help.

  “Next time you can load it up yourself,” Mr. Cheeseman says. “And Mrs. Cheeseman will give you a cup of tea and a bun when you get back.”

  Billy stops. Mr. Cheeseman continues loading. There is stubble on his chin, and his neck hangs loose above his collar. Mr. Cheeseman looks up from his work. Billy offers his hand to be shaken. Mr. Cheeseman’s hand is thick and warm around his.

  “Good chap,” Mr. Cheeseman says, bumping his hand up and down.

  Good chap. Billy likes this. He feels entirely happy. He doesn’t like being called son.