The Undertow

by Jo Baker

  When he first gets on and tries to pedal, the bike doesn’t shift; the gearing is too high, and he’s too unfit, too old to make it move. It’s a track bike; it’s meant for athletes.

  He needs Rudd—the shove from behind sending him flying out into the drum of the racetrack. But there is no Rudd. Rudd is thirty years ago, a world away. Billy stands on the pedals, one hand on the back fence, in his duster coat and cap, and uses his whole weight on one pedal, pushing down, and the wheels begin to inch forward, and he lets go of the fence, and begins to roll, and heaves down on the other pedal, and he’s moving, reaching the end of the back lane and out onto the street, and for a moment the struggle to get moving is like the first morning at Cheeseman’s, the bulk of that Alldays & Onions, the way he’d had to drag it into motion, and then the discovery of speed.

  He turns into Bramcote Avenue, and then Cranmer Road by the cricket green, and then joins the traffic on the London Road.

  He just rides. He slips through traffic and out of the press of buildings and alongside ribbon strips of semis, then villas. He’s in as perfect synchrony with the bike as its gears are with the chain. He’d forgotten this, the feeling of the body fitting itself into the mechanism, the way space concertinas, the way time folds in upon itself. The way you disappear.

  Soon the road opens out straight and long, letting him pick up speed. He cuts through plain countryside—past wide, dull fields, hedges, through woods and villages; fewer and fewer cars. He stops in a market town and, still astride the bike, dips his head to drink from a municipal drinking fountain. He doesn’t feel tired, or hungry, or the burn of muscle use. He doesn’t even feel sad, not while the road is empty and open in front of him, and he can just ride.

  But as darkness falls he finds himself approaching a fork in the road, in exposed, open countryside. To his left, an expanse of muddy, ploughed field; to his right, a field of broken stubble and a copse. No signposts. He slows off, comes to a halt. Tilts the bike, one foot to the rough gravel.

  He wipes his face. Checks his watch. It’s getting on for six. Ruby will have expected him home hours ago. He thinks of that wintry street when he was little, standing at his mother’s side, the protecting squeeze of her arm. He was right, Billy was, to get rid of Sully. Whatever her regrets might have been, they’d have hurt her less than that poison. True or not true, it doesn’t matter now. Her peace of mind, at least, was left untainted. His father died a hero. Everyone knows that.

  Her lumpen knuckles, wrapped round with knitting wool. Her loneliness.

  But the children. She’d had that. The children were an uncomplicated blessing; she could take them for who they were and not wish them different. When the boy was first in callipers, three years old, clanking around like a wind-up toy, she’d lift him up onto her hip, carry him out to the garden, show him the berries swelling on the fruit canes, or the birds’ nest in the hedge.

  The fields stretch out and away and a faint rain begins to fall. The world is empty. Nothing stands between him and eternity.

  He has to try harder with Will, before it’s too late. If he could just explain. About that day in Normandy; the price he paid for this.

  Because already the boy is pulling further and further away; first A-levels and now off to college; he’s almost out of earshot. He’s doing well. He’s got pluck; he’s not daunted by anything. Soon as he was out of that calliper he was kicking a ball around all day long. From cripple to captain of the football team in three years. Making Billy feel, though he’d never say it in case it just made matters worse, that if the boy had only had two decent legs, they could have made a genuine athlete of him. He’s had choices though, the boy has. He’s had his books. His college grant.

  I must try, Billy thinks. Next time I see him, I will really try.

  Billy walks the bike round where he stands, and slips back onto the saddle, and wobbles off, slowly, back the way he’d come.

  When he gets home, it is three in the morning or thereabouts. His legs are uncertain and his backside sore. Ruby is dozing in the chair. He sits down in the other seat. He doesn’t want to wake her, but doesn’t want to leave her either. Her face is soft in sleep. There is loose skin under her jaw. She’s beautiful. After a while, she blinks, and stirs, and looks at him.

  “Billy,” she says.

  “Sorry.”

  “Oh God, love, Billy.”

  Ruby pushes her way out of the chair. A rug falls off her knees and she steps over it. She wraps her arms round him.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  Magdalen College, Oxford

  October 14, 1965

  FROST STILL LINGERS in the corners of the quad. Will makes his way down the path, past Grammar Hall, heading for Fellows’ Garden. He can feel the capital letters. Everything seems to be worth a capital here, and not to need an article. Not the grammar hall, but Grammar Hall. Not the fellows’ garden, but Fellows’ Garden. As if everything were the original, the only, the ur-thing.

  The air is still as a pond. It brushes his skin, teases up the hairs on his legs, makes his breath puff.

  He glances down at his leather football boots. They’re pretty good. Heavy, but that doesn’t bother him. Cost a week’s wages. His bad leg is lean still; it doesn’t match the good one in terms of bulk, but it’s muscular. He’s worked hard to make it so. He needs to keep it that way. And even then he still has to be careful; it doesn’t do to twist or tear anything.

  They have gathered in a loose huddle, puffing, jumping, keeping warm. A miscellany of football shirts. A big bloke with dark hair carries a net of balls, like onions in a bag; another has a cluster of sashes in his hand, hanging like a bunch of limp flowers. Will skips into a run to join them.

  Bare trees stand against the pale sky, and birds rise like flakes of burnt paper. He can feel the openness of this place, as if the cold emptiness of the countryside was slipping into the centre of the city.

  It’s only when he gets close to the crowd that it becomes obvious. These young men are built on a different scale from him. He slows to a jog, joins the edge of the group, and he feels like he has come up on the edge of a wood. They’re oblivious to him, talk in familiar loud tones, like they all know each other already. Will stands on his right leg, drops his hip and hooks his booted left toe back into the earth, tries to keep the wasted limb out of sight. He’s finding it hard to make out what’s being said. Even just on the basic level of the words: vowels seem somehow high up in the mouth. Eh dint neh, someone says, and that’s I don’t know, he thinks, but it’s a strange and ugly way of talking, and everyone seems to do it. He thought the students would have come from all over, but they sound like they’ve all come from the same place.

  “When are we starting?” Will asks the guy next to him, and the guy glances down at him.

  “When are we starting, Michael?” the guy asks.

  Michael is the big dark bloke with the bag of footballs. “We ready then? Everyone here?”

  There is a chorus of cheerful assent. Michael opens the bag and lets the footballs spill and bounce and scatter. Will scoops for a passing ball, but it’s gone, caught up by someone else’s booted foot. The boot is beautiful, lightly crafted, clean, barely worn. He catches the back view of a sandy-haired giant who thunders off down the pitch dribbling the football as if he owns it.

  They divide into teams. Will is handed a red sash. Michael tells him he’s playing fullback. Will hates defence; it does him no favours at all. But he takes his place, marks his man, because this is just try-outs, and he’ll get a chance to show off what he can do later, and show off his goodwill and sportsmanship now.

  He bounces on the spot to keep warm, watching the action down the far end of the pitch, bloody miles away, and the tall spreading fat trees at the end of it, and beyond that the river, and a pair of scholars walking along the riverbank, gowns flapping. The rooks settle in the high branches.

  He glances across to the other defender. Indian lad. Smaller than many o
f them, about his height. Skinny legs coffee brown against his white shorts. Must be feeling out of place.

  “Bloody cold, isn’t it?” Will grins.

  The Indian lad glances at him with his big clear eyes, then looks back to the action. “It is October.”

  The way he speaks is butter smooth. It makes Will see his own words, as if they’re buzzing around him like bluebottles; he says cowld not cold, he realises, and here that’s wrong. He jogs carefully on the spot again, looking back towards the game.

  “Which school did you go to?” the boy asks.

  Will looks back round at him. His school smelt of boys and boiled meat. The corridors were a greasy shade of yellow. The classrooms swam with dust and when you passed the staff-room door it reeked of tobacco and coffee and soup. Why would anyone want to know about his school?

  “Glastonbury Road,” Will says. “I was in the grammar stream.”

  The Indian boy’s eyes are really beautiful. Big and brown and glossy as conkers, and the whites as clear as milk. He blinks, and then nods, and then turns away, looking back up the pitch towards the game. Will’s eyes follow his. The scrabble and surge of play.

  “And you?” Will asks, to be polite.

  “Eton.”

  “Right,” Will says. Then, after a while, “Wish they’d let us have a go with the flippin’ ball.”

  The moments tick by, and he glances round at the Indian boy, whose name he didn’t even think to ask, who is watching the play, and Will feels stupid, and that he has somehow already failed.

  When he lies full length his feet don’t touch the end of the bath, because it has been built for the giants.

  The sky is dark through the high window. From somewhere far off he can hear a girl’s laugh, and music. He strains to catch it, but it’s a distant ghost. He gets a trickle here and there of piano, and it’s Mozart. And the girl will be someone over from St. Hilda’s, or down from Somerville. The graze hurts, but he’s not soft enough to let a graze put him off, not even the ancillary discomfort—the red burn in his hip from getting jolted. The yell and the break for it and Michael steaming down the pitch towards him, followed by an undisciplined brawl, sashes flapping, faces taut, thundering to catch him. Michael coming at him, and Will gathering himself up into a dodging obstructive run. Michael’s eyes wet and hard. Will nipping in to scoop the ball off him and away—to show off the skills that made him captain of Glastonbury Road Seniors soccer team.

  His right foot made contact with the ball, he’s pretty sure of that. He thinks he felt it. Before he felt himself land on his backside on the hard ground. He got to his feet. His hip hurt. His shin bled through the mud. Standing, he tried his weight on his bad leg, and the whole leg sang out in dismay. Michael came over, and put a hand to his back, and said something, and Will shook his head, no, okay, okay, I’m okay, old injury, and Michael said something more. Will shook his head again, and straightened up, and dragged in a big breath, and let it go. On the way back through Fellows’ Garden, he watched the birds rise in the sky. It hurt too much to feel embarrassed at the time. He feels embarrassed now.

  He feels slight. Not just in size. He had been captain, but here he won’t even make the team. He is just tiny.

  Even the steam can’t take the chill off the bathroom. The vast claw-footed bath sucks the heat from the water. He shifts himself up, wincing against the pain, and reaches over the edge for his trousers. He dabs his fingers on the cloth to dry them, then lifts his cigarettes out of his pocket. He lies back in the tepid water, looking at his toes—the wiry structure of tendon and bone—and lights up. He turns his Ronson lighter round in his hands, looks at his initials scored into it: WAH. Like a baby’s cry. It was a gift from the boys he’d taught, that year after A-levels, when Mr. Tate was coaching him for the Oxford exams. It had been something, to teach at his old school, to even sit the Oxford entrance papers; his mum had gone all tight-lipped with pride.

  There is a fire in his sitting room. There is Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader to get to grips with. He is not in the mood to be sociable, let alone face up to the football squad toasting the newcomers in the JCR. But he had promised Ollie, and Ollie had promised there would be girls. Literary Society girls, as if that itself is some kind of inducement. As if that makes them all liberated Lawrentian females. Ursulas and Gudruns and Lady Chatterleys, all brightly coloured stockings and heavy limbs and easy morals, keen on cocks and swoony sex in the outdoors. They will just be girls. Girls from Somerville and St. Hilda’s. The red-brick, buttoned-up colleges out on the edge of things.

  Top of the Pops is on tonight. Janet will be sitting on the pouffe, chin in hands, elbows on knees, staring at the screen, shushing everyone who dares walk in. Dad will be out in the garage, tinkering. Mum will be confined to the kitchen by Janet, who can’t stand her comments on pop music. Anne Graves will be holed up there with Mum, taking a breather from Mrs. Graves who’s something of a trial now Mr. Graves has died. She calls it a breather but they’ll smoke so many fags that the ashtray fills and overflows and looks like something out of Pompeii.

  What he really wants is to find a telly, and settle down in front of it and watch Top of the Pops, even though he doesn’t know who’ll be on. Wilson Pickett, Dusty Springfield, maybe; “Some of Your Lovin,” The Yardbirds. He misses Janet, who doesn’t sulk at him: they’d watch it together, know when it was okay to speak in a way his mum can never quite work out. But he hasn’t seen a telly since he got here. There probably isn’t one in the whole of Oxford.

  And he did say to Ollie. And Ollie shares these rooms. It wouldn’t do to annoy him. Fag tucked between his lips, he presses his hands down on the cold enamel edges of the bath, and lifts himself cautiously out.

  They are playing jazz.

  He bloody hates jazz.

  Ollie is barking into someone’s ear, almost directly above Will’s head. The room is noisy and hot and smells of damp wool and cigarettes. Will has a bottle of Watney’s ale in his hand. His suit is sharp. He likes this suit. Nice narrow tie. Ollie wears a cream cable-knit jumper, cords; doesn’t seem to think anything of it. Will glances round, trying to spot girls, but he can’t see any. He tries to pick up on the conversation, to grab a thread he can drag himself in on, but it is all about people that he doesn’t know but with whom Ollie and Geoff both seem to be easily familiar: Geoff’s cousin who’s standing for the Union presidency, and someone else who’s thinking about one of the minor posts coming up, worth standing for, because you can build on that, build on that profile. People get to know who you are, you see, and that’s the name of the game, isn’t it? Getting known. Geoff swigs his beer.

  “So how do you know each other?” Will tries.

  “Young Geoff here,” Ollie says, “was house captain year before me.”

  Will nods. He doesn’t know what this literally means, but it has a clear associative sense to it: they know each other because they all know each other because they just do. They’ve got the shared code, the friends of friends, a web of association.

  He doesn’t know the code. He doesn’t know his way around. He doesn’t know anybody. And it seems like he can’t even work out how to get to know anybody here.

  The music swings up overhead, then dips into a fiddly scrambling fall like a sparrow shot with an air rifle. Then a drum solo. Bloody drum solo. Jesus.

  “Sounds like a drum kit falling off a cliff.”

  Ollie barks a laugh. Geoff looks at him. Smiles thinly. Then turns back to Ollie. “So, I was thinking, treasurer this year—”

  And Ollie clicks back in, nods along.

  Will looks around the room. It is packed tight with cords and slacks, with saggy knitwear, floppy hair, duffel coats. And the footie team over in the corner all laugh at something Michael says.

  He swallows a mouthful of beer over the lump in his throat.

  It’s better than shunting a broom and unblocking toilets and fixing leaky gutters at the infants’ school, he tells himself. This is Oxford, and that’s
worth something. It’s like cauliflower, he decides. He doesn’t have to like it; he just has to get it down him. Find a way of making it tolerable.

  Sport is out, clearly. Social life: not so far. Study. He can study. He can always study. He is good at studying. He has a capacity for nine-hour reading stints, for essays that fly across the page. Mr. Tate used to rest his hand on Will’s shoulder when he gave the essays back. Will tips his bottle to his lips. His chest feels hollow and grey. Finish this, then back to his set, back to the unfamiliar Anglo-Saxon script, attempt translating those first sentences.

  He sets his bottle down on the bar.

  Anglo-Saxon, then.

  The music stops. There’s a click and swoop as the needle is lifted, and there is a sudden space in which voices crisscross like wires overhead, supported by nothing. Some drop away, others bray louder as if in protest at the silence. He cranes his neck to look over towards the record player. He can’t see what’s going on: too many people.

  Then the record player starts up again. The soft fumpfh of the needle set into place. He loves this moment. The moment before the thing happens, when there’s a possibility of something great. Even if it’s only going to be deadened in an instant by more loopy bloody jazz. The soft hssk, hssk, hssk as the needle traverses the smooth tuneless rim of the disk. Then his heart is lifted by the great raw yelp of Lennon’s voice. Help.

  “Scuse me.”

  He steps round, past Ollie. Elbows his way through the crowd. Above him, the music powers out like a train, uninterruptible, into the stone vaults of the JCR.

  The crowd thins a little, further from the bar. The coffee table, the record player. A girl slipping the previous record back into its sleeve.

  A girl with amazing legs. Her hair catches auburn under the nasty electric light.

  She turns to hand the jazz LP to her friend, who’s cross, and trying to pretend she’s not. The girl with the nice legs is trying to be friendly, You’ll like it, Claudia, but the other girl won’t listen, turns to rifle through her box of records to slot the rejected one back into place. She shakes her backcombed head dismissively, it doesn’t matter, of course Madeline should play her record if she wants to, it’s no trouble to her, but is she sure that pop music—the way she pronounces pop is so careful, strange, like she’s puzzled to find a marble dropping from her lips—is appropriate to the time and place, well, that is fine. The girl with the nice legs folds up her lips, turns away, and catches Will’s eye. She folds her lips in tighter, strangling a smile. But her eyes sparkle. Will’s stomach dips. Christ. She is amazing. Holy Christ.