The Undertow

by Jo Baker

  Vintage, they will be, by now.

  He lays them out along his mother’s empty bed. Still made up, after all this time. Still with the same old purple nylon counterpane. Outside, a car passes; and there are voices—kids circling the crescent on their BMXs.

  He goes back to fish out the blue suitcase from the top shelf.

  He swings it down and jolts his arm with the weight of it. It’s an old suitcase, cardboard, bound with strips of dark, close-grained wood. Used to be his grandma’s, he thinks.

  He hoists the suitcase up onto the bed. It bounces; the springs jingle. He flips the catches.

  It is full of photograph albums. Three, four, five stocky A4 books, and smaller, A5 size ones here and there, and heaps, drifts of slithering loose photographs. He lifts one of the albums out. It is vinyl-covered, stripes of aquamarine, purple, blue. Madeline bought it for his mum, a birthday, he remembers. There are still, after all these years, these ambushes. Underneath, a black papery one that used to be his, hospital photos. And for some reason he thinks he can smell lemons, but that might just be the soap his mother hoarded and which still lingered in its paper wrappings until he and Janet and Billie divided it between them. Coal Tar and Imperial Leather and Lux and Zest. He shifts things aside to look down at the earlier, older things at the bottom of the case. Loose photos: his dad on a bike, his mum lipsticked and smooth-skinned in black and white. The blue postcard album that had been his grandmother’s. The picture book, she called it. From before cameras were a common thing.

  Footsteps on the stairs. The brisk thumpy tread of his daughter’s feet. He flips the suitcase shut. Wipes the wet from his eyes.

  Billie has that worn, parched look about her that she’s had ever since the old man died. She holds up a mug for him to take. It’s powdered coffee, clots of whitener swimming on the surface. It’s all the old man ever kept in the house.

  “Thanks,” he says, taking it off her.

  She takes in the room, the heaped clothes, the open suitcase.

  “You okay?” she asks, and stuffs her hands in her pockets. Her voice sounds sore.

  He nods, scans round for somewhere to put the coffee, considers ducking down to put it on the floor, but that would hurt.

  “Here,” she says, realising his predicament. She takes the mug back off him, and sets it down on the bedside cabinet. “What’s in the suitcase?”

  He looks at it. Back at her. “Photos.”

  She nods.

  “We’ll go through them together if you like,” he says.

  “Not today.”

  “No. Not today.”

  “I’ll come up to Oxford sometime.”

  He nods.

  She turns to go, then stops, and speaks back over her shoulder. “I think I want something. I mean. You know. Something permanent, not just the soap.”

  “That’s all right,” he says. “Plenty of time.”

  She nods, still looking away.

  He listens to her go down the stairs. She goes slowly. He sits down on the end of his father’s bed, crumpling the hem of the laid-out beige trousers, dimpling the fabric of a blue nylon jacket. He can hear her back in the kitchen now, the dialogue starting up again—Janet, Billie, Janet, Billie, Janet, Janet, Janet, silence. He puts his face in his hands. One palm hot from the coffee mug, the other cold from the chill of an empty house. He sobs. Hard. Silent. So that downstairs they don’t hear.

  Billie clears photographs from the sideboard. Places them in the box. Grandma’s Spanish dancing dolls and china figurines. The photograph of the three of them in the boat. Mum with her long hair and her clear skin, and Dad so young, not much older than she is now. And she, a little girl with a blunt fringe and a belly. She opens the drawer and lifts out her granddad’s cardboard box, where he keeps—kept—his medals. She doesn’t open it.

  “Billie?” Janet calls from the kitchen.

  “Mmm.”

  From in the kitchen comes the clockwork tinkling of “The Blue Danube.”

  “Shall we do this?”

  “Yes.”

  Billie leaves her box on the dresser and steps down into the kitchen. The jewellery box lid is thrown back, and the dancer twirls in her faded skirt, arm stretched up in the air above her. Billie sits at the table. Auntie Janet picks through the jewellery. The room smells of Vim and bleach. She has the whole kitchen, bar tea-and-coffee-making things, packed up and put away; the cooker and sink and work surfaces are shiny-clean.

  “This place hasn’t been this clean since Grandma died,” Billie says.

  “You want to leave things nice.”

  Outside, the garden softens into evening. A black cat springs into existence on the lip of the fence, gathers itself, spills down. Billie watches it cross the grass and climb into the flowerbed between the splodgy purple flowers. Janet works at the muddle of jewellery, unhooking wires, pairing earrings.

  “Just bits and bobs,” Janet says. “She didn’t have that much.”

  Janet’s raspberry-pink sweater is spotless. Billie feels grubby. She rubs her arms, remembering the odd earrings, the broken brooch, the folded bloody handkerchief. She still has the earlobe; even if she’d dared to, there was never a chance to ask Grandma about it. And that in itself, its unknowability, is part of its charge. She keeps it, wrapped in tissue paper, in an old toffee tin. Along with a desiccated starfish, extracted molars, and the cartilaginous picked-clean skeleton of a fish found on the meadow after floods. She gets them out, again and again, to draw them. There is a fascination to their alien, interrupted structures.

  “Did you find a tobacco tin when you were cleaning up?”

  “The workshop’s full of them, if you want one.”

  Billie nods. Janet’s boys have got the bike. She can have a tobacco tin.

  “So,” Janet puts together a pair of gold-plate studs with a click of satisfaction. “What’s the plan?”

  Janet means, now you’ve got your Fine Art degree, now you’re out in the big bad world, now that you are overqualified and underexperienced and without a single practical, sellable skill.

  Janet’s boys are doing well. Steven’s just finished his business degree. Andy’s studying medicine.

  “I’ve got a job. You know that.”

  “Mmm,” Janet says, unconvinced. “The bookshop.”

  “It’s fine. I like it. I do okay. I’ve got time to paint.”

  Janet looks up at her, suddenly smiles, the skin fanning at her eyes. “You might want to think about a Plan B. Keep your options open.”

  Billie sits back. Chews her lip. There is no Plan B. There are no options. This isn’t even really a choice. It’s not what she does, it’s what she is. She has to paint.

  “Boyfriend at the moment?” Janet asks.

  Billie leans back in her seat. God, this now.

  “There was that, who was it, Tom? That not work out?”

  “Auntie Janet. Leave it.”

  Janet tilts her head, accepting. She pulls at a knot of chain with her pink pearlescent nails. She’s doing this—picking away at Billie, and at the jewellery—to distract herself, Billie realises. The chain frees, and she lifts it up with a smile. “There!” She lets it pool down onto the red Formica, smiling with the satisfaction of this small achievement.

  “ ’Course, they’ll rip everything out,” Janet says, after a while. “The new people.”

  “That’s what new people do,” Billie says.

  Something catches Janet’s eye: “Oh.”

  “What is it?”

  Janet lifts a slender gold ring out of the box.

  “Grandma’s?” Billie asks.

  “Yes.”

  There’s a silence.

  “It’s so fine,” Billie says. “Wartime wedding, I suppose.”

  “They were married before the war. They just didn’t have much money.”

  They both consider the ring a moment. It catches the light, glints. It’s buckled, oval, scraped. A soft coppery colour.

  “Looks big enough
to have been Granddad’s.”

  “She had it enlarged, I remember. Because of her arthritis. Couldn’t see Granddad Billy wearing a ring.”

  Billie smiles. No.

  “Get in the way, wouldn’t it? When he was tinkering, making things. D’you know he even made my highchair when I was a baby? Out of off-cuts. People just don’t do that kind of thing any more. It lasted for donkey’s years. Did both the boys.”

  That is who Billie’s granddad was; not the failing bundle of bones and desperate eyes. He was the man who could make anything out of nothing. The aeroplane that she flew off the garden steps: that was her granddad. Between the teeter on the brink, and the crash into the paving slab, she was, for just a moment, she is still and always certain of it, really flying. She reaches up and slides her fingertips back and forth across the scar on her forehead. There’s a line in the bone there, not just the skin.

  “Go on,” Janet juts the ring closer. “You take it.”

  Billie looks at it a long moment, then looks at Janet, wondering what is implied. Her aunt’s expression is innocent, but if she takes the ring, Billie wonders, does she somehow take on the future Janet sees for her: failure, loneliness? Plan B? But the ring was Grandma’s, and she loved Grandma, and Granddad gave it to her, and she loved him too: now that he is gone, there’s a hole left in the world.

  She takes the ring. It is too loose for her middle finger, so she slips it onto her thumb.

  “Thank you.”

  • • •

  Will carries the suitcase. Billie carries the cardboard box of figurines and medals. She has tucked the old man’s dress shoes in her bag—his feet were tiny for a man, the same size as hers—and it dangles bulky from her back. There is no room to turn round in the hallway: she steps out over the threshold, to give her father space to move. He follows, locks up. Pockets the key.

  “He …” Will says. He pauses, tries again. “When I was growing up …”

  He looks past her at the overgrown laburnum, the privet hedge. He’s very conscious of himself—the grey bristle of his chest hair against his shirt, his toenails pressing out against his shoes, his left leg still hooked back, still thinner than the other. The still shameful weakness of it. He puts the suitcase down, flexes his hand. The palm is red from the grip.

  “You and him, though,” he says. “That was different.”

  “He was always kind to me.”

  “He liked you. I mean, he loved you but he liked you too. He never liked me.”

  “No, Dad.”

  He picks up the suitcase. “I don’t blame him. The calliper, the disability. It must’ve been worse for him than it was for me.”

  She steps forward, hugs him, lets him go.

  “What’ll you do with it all?” she asks.

  They both know Carole won’t stand for china figurines, for Spanish dancers, for photographs of people who are not to do with her.

  “I’d take it to mine,” Billie says, “But, you know.”

  Billie shares a small flat in Deptford with her friend Norah, who is half-Iranian and beautiful and generous. But Billie’s shelves are already stacked two books deep, and dotted with driftwood, photographs, animal skulls, paper-thin fragments of found wild birds’ eggshells. She has to pick her way round piles of books and cardboard boxes and stacked canvases to get from the door to her bed.

  Will wants to ask her about her life, the life lived there in the flat and in the city, about what it is like to be twenty-one nowadays. Her college friends; Norah, and that Irish boy she knocks around with, the photographer Ciaran. He feels an uneasy kind of admiration. He’d have liked a life like that, he thinks. Arty friends, of both sexes, the freedom of it: a job she isn’t particularly invested in, a passion that doesn’t earn her a living; perfect, really, in its possibilities, its openness.

  He’d like to have something of her in the house. He’d like to have one of her pictures. Even a tiny sketch. He could get it framed. One of those inked life studies. A fat, wrinkled nude. Carole might even like it, so long as it didn’t clash with anything.

  He’s never mentioned it to Billie, but her work sometimes reminds him of Blake. Her pen-and-ink stuff does. She’d love Blake’s work, he thinks. This is something they could have in common.

  “I’ll put them in the attic,” Will says. “Till we get the chance.”

  Brown’s Café, the Covered Market, Oxford

  December 24, 1999

  IT’S BRIGHT INSIDE the café, loud with conversation and the hiss of the espresso machine. The room is shabby and ramshackle, paperedover plywood and mismatched chairs. She sips her tea, which is getting cold. She glances at her watch. She’ll give it three more minutes and then she’s leaving.

  Outside, the crowds thin for a moment and she catches sight again of the butcher’s stall across the way. Three deer and half a dozen hares hang by their back legs, tendons stretched as if running at full tilt. Their heads have been cut off; white plastic bags have been tied round the stumps to catch the dripping blood. It keeps catching her eye: the row of carcasses, the translucent whiteness of the butchers’ bags, the blood darkening and stretching them with its weight. That’s what’s obscene about it, she thinks. Not the bloodshed, but those bags.

  She’s wasting her time, really. Dad phoned last night; he can’t make it this time, has to pick up Carole’s parents in Reading. She’d wanted to say, actually, Dad, I do mind. But instead, she’d been nice, been accommodating, and now she’s here, waiting for Matty, and Matty’s late, and he probably won’t turn up at all, not without Dad to drag him along, and it’s for the best, really, because if she does find something to say to him he’ll only answer in grunts and refuse to make eye contact.

  She digs her fist into the small of her back. Double shift at the bookshop: Christmas rush. Her feet throb in her boots. And her arms are sore too, the muscles rigid from lugging books: ferrying deliveries out of the stock room, shunting stacks of paperbacks into display bins and onto tables, slipping purchases into black plastic bags. She should just give up on this. Go back to Mum’s, have a bath, try and ease some of the aches out of her body. She watches her second hand tick round. He’ll be coming down from home; if she dodges out the other side of the market, chances are she’ll miss him. Put the parcels in the post.

  She lifts her cup to drain it.

  Over the thick ceramic edge, she notices him. He stands at the counter profiled, sifting through the change in his palm. Matty. With his curls all cut off. He looks so different.

  She chinks the teacup down into the saucer.

  He speaks to the stout woman behind the counter, and she smiles and nods, arranges things on his tray: the little metal teapot, strainer, milk jug. Billie watches as he turns towards the room and scans it, looking for her. When he spots her, his expression shifts into a grin of recognition. It’s unexpected and sweet. He nudges past a pair of teenage girls, all nail polish and hair, who stop talking and watch him as he passes. He’s got that knack, it seems, like his dad, of making women interested, though he doesn’t seem to have noticed it yet.

  He’s at her table now, and sets down the tray.

  “Hey,” he says.

  Last time she saw him he was a surly thirteen-year-old. Six months on and he’s smiling, looking her right in the eye.

  “Hey.”

  “Sorry it’s just me.”

  “That’s all right.”

  She pushes the seat opposite out for him with a foot, watches as he drops his bag in under the table, sits down, then shuffles the bag around so that it lies between his feet. He straightens up and sits back in his chair. His jaw has strengthened and squared off: his face has planes and angles now. She watches his hand, the broad back of it, as it lifts the teapot lid, picks up a spoon, stirs his tea. She can’t get used to him.

  “I like this place,” he says.

  “I’ve always liked it too. It’s got a kind of cobbled-together feel.”

  “Like little kids playing at cafés.”
>
  “Like an allotment shed.”

  He stabs his teaspoon into the crusted sugar bowl. It makes a sound like snow. He shovels two, three spoonfuls of sugar into his tea, stirs. She wants to say, You’ll rot your teeth, but stops herself in time. He sets his spoon down in the saucer. Even these tiny moves are confident, poised: he’s hit his stride, somehow.

  “How is he then?” she says, after a moment.

  “Dad? You know. Working hard. Spends a lot of time up at College.”

  Will’s in one of those phases then, when you lose track of him for months. It must have been hard on her mum, Billie realises, because she’d never really know. Could be work, could be women; she’d only find out afterwards.

  “And your mum? How is she?”

  He tucks his lips in, shakes his head. “Mental.”

  “You’ve got a houseful for Christmas, then?”

  “She loves it really. But she always does her nut.”

  This is fine, Billie thinks. This is actually really nice. If there hadn’t been all those years between them, if there hadn’t been all that mess, perhaps it would always have been like this.

  “Hang on a tick.”

  She ducks down and lifts up the silvery gift bag from where she’d stowed it underneath the table. She passes it across the tabletop.

  Matty peers into the gift bag. “You get me a CD?”

  “Dad said you were into your tunes now, so I …”

  He fishes out the silver-wrapped square, looks up. “Can I open it?”

  “Go on then.”

  He rips off the paper. It’s a Gram Parsons album. Grievous Angel. He turns the CD round to look at the back, frowns at the tiny print.

  “I took a punt,” she says. “You can always change it, if you want.”

  He shakes his head, still reading.

  “I mean, you’d be mad to. There are songs on there, the duets with Emmylou Harris, they’re just amazing. ‘Hickory Wind.’ God, that song’ll haunt you.”

  He glances up, grins. “You’re a total muso. I didn’t know that.”