The Undertow (17 page)

“Dover’s the shortest crossing,” Billy says. “S’only a few hours.”

“So how long’s this one?” Barker asks.

“Seventeen hours,” Billy says, glad to shift the conversation sideways. “Maybe eighteen.”

They explode, outraged.

“Once we’re under way,” Billy finishes, and the protest kicks up a gear.

“In this fucking tub?”

“Stone me.”

“We could swim it in less.”

“I’ve fucking
seen
France. Seventeen hours? Fuck’s sake.”

“You in some kind of a hurry then?” Billy asks.

He doesn’t even want to think about this. He wants to play cards. He peels off another couple of notes, drops them into the helmet. Because when you think about it, that’s when it gets to you. Seventeen, eighteen hours of chugging out across the water, during which time all it would take is one lone U-boat, one single solitary patrol plane, or just a fucking kid in a lookout post with a telescope, and they’re spotted. And if they’re spotted then they’re done for. All Jerry needs to be is reasonably alert, and the fleet is in serious trouble. They’ll be picked off like geese on a pond. He can see it, in his mind’s eye, the foundering ships, the oil burning on the waves.

They won’t even make it to the other side, he thinks. Their feet won’t
touch dry land. He’ll die like his father died; at sea, at war. Lungs full of filthy water and the sea on fire. But whatever happens, he won’t let himself be trapped below.

“You that keen to get stuck in?” he asks.

A universal pause, shrug.

“He’s got a point,” Barker admits.

Billy watches as their attention returns to the game. He watches the fluttering of the Allied franc notes.

The orders keep coming from a distance: the Mad Bastard yelling for them to get a move on, to shift along, to budge up, to make some bleedin’ room. Gossum makes a show of shuffling around on his arse without moving any distance at all. Barker shoves at his pack, pushing it upright, tighter against the side, but then letting it slide back again. Alfie slides his backside forward, but then leans back on extended hands. No quarter given, no territory surrendered. Not an inch. Billy feels a perverse kind of pride: they are cussed sods.

“My lucky day,” he says, of his cards, and taps them into a neat block, lays them face down by his leg.

Gossum snorts, shucks a cigarette out of his pack, tucks it in under his moustache: “Getting crowded here, init.”

He wraps the pack up again in its waterproof cover, then taps open his matchbox.

“And I’ll tell you something for nothing,” Gossum adds. “I’m not having some fucker sitting on my knee for seventeen hours.” He drags hard on his cigarette, making the paper blacken and peel back with a tiny rustling sound.

A gull flaps down to land on the gunwale nearby. It strolls along on its yellow feet looking them over with an assessing beady eye. All it needs is a swagger stick tucked under its wing.

“Fold,” Barker says, and drops his cards into the centre of their circle, making the helmet rock gently. He looks away. Billy follows his line of sight towards the prow, where the gunner and his mate are going over the gun with oil and rags. Getting it match fit.

Ten yards. Don’t look beyond the next ten yards
.

“Raise you,” Gossum says, and drops down another pair of crisp never-before-used notes.

Billy flips through his francs. He flings another three notes onto the pile.

“See you,” he says. “Raise you ten.”

• • •

They play until Gossum has filled his helmet with cash and the rest of them are cleaned out. Gossum bends his head, tips the helmet on. The helmet stands proud by a good two inches. Paper notes hang out round his ears. He grins, shakes his head from side to side, like Dorothy’s Scarecrow.

“Dimwit.”

Gossum tips the helmet off again, starts to dig out the cash and divide it into piles. Billy watches his practised hands as he sorts the notes.

“Where you going to stow all that?”

“I can’t,” Gossum shrugs. “Not got a bleedin’ spare inch to stick it. Unless you’ve brought some Vaseline?” He rolls up a pile of notes, makes an upward thrusting gesture.

Alfie snorts.

“Don’t laugh,” Gossum says. “It’s a bloody tragedy. Bloody tragedy of war.” He hands a stack of notes back to each of the men. “Play again?”

When Billy is cleaned out a second time, he leans his head back to rest against the gunwale. It’s noisy, and that’s good, because it will help him stay awake. He doesn’t want to fall asleep, not if he can help it. If he sleeps, chances are he’ll dream, and he doesn’t want the men to see that. See him shivering and sweating and afraid.

The talk is onto France. He keeps his eyes shut so that they don’t ask him about it again. They’re telling their dads’ stories of the last war’s egg and chips in small-town cafés, pissy beer and rough French wine and brandy that’d strip your throat right out, and though their dads didn’t talk about the women there must have been women even back then, women that their dads got their legs over in some room above the egg-and-chips cafés. And who got, likely-as-not, once-in-a-while, up the spout, so that by the end of the last war there must have been dozens of half-breed little bastards running around these small towns in northern France, and as that’s more than twenty years ago now they’ll be grown up and some of them are bound to have been girls, and you know how these mixes are always better looking, like mulattos, gorgeous, so the worry is, isn’t it, when you get your leg over a sweet little
French whore it could be she’s not so French as all that and is in fact your half-sister.

Roars of horror and disgust.

Gossum announces over the noise that he doesn’t give a monkey shit, half-sister or no half-sister. The first thing he’s going to do, once they’ve slogged their way through the German lines, before brewing up or getting drunk or getting a good feed or working out what deals there are to be done, he’s going to get himself a fuck, because he’s spent too many weeks around you stinking men, and what he really needs is a nice professional girl all smooth and powdered and smelling of French perfume not sour boots and farts and bad breath, a girl who’s ready to do anything for a few Allied francs—of which he’s going to have plenty once he’s won this game like all the others, because they’re such a bunch of useless gets—or she’ll maybe even do it for nothing, given that he’ll be liberating her from the Nazi curse shortly before he fucks her.

The men yell in protest, tell Gossum he’s a pig.

Billy runs his tongue round his teeth, picking up the sour debris at the back, snagging on a sharp bit of a molar. Do you ever think, he wants to say, that this is really the same war as before? Because here they are again, all over again, fighting the same enemy, and with the same men in command. Mr. Churchill loves a good invasion. Gallipoli was his big idea too.

Mr. Churchill killed my dad, Billy wants to say. And most likely he’ll do just the same for us too.

Billy blinks his eyes open and reaches into his helmet and lifts out the photograph from the inner band. He unwraps the waxed-paper covering. In the picture her skin is white with powder, her lips dark; she’s smiling, lips slightly parted on pearly teeth, but her eyes look vague, unfocused, dreamy. Although it’s probably because she won’t wear her glasses, it looks like she’s gazing out beyond the camera. Like her eyes are on the photographer, not on the lens. Ruby. Ruby. That gentleman in pinstripes and bowler hat, his gaze catching hers as he passed, and she’d returned the look—or at least it had seemed like it. He’d see her smiling at the barman’s smile. The lads at Herne Hill, the way they’d stared. And she had known, and she had loved it, loved to be noticed—but she had loved him more. When they were courting, and he was still in the game, he’d get stopped in the street: people would want to shake his hand. And she would stand back, arm linked through his, half a step away, her beauty, for a moment, eclipsed by his fame. And she hadn’t minded at all; she had smiled and nodded hello at
whoever it was, and waited. Somehow it’d seemed fair. They were both wanted, in their different ways. It seemed to even out.

And then he remembers. The last night of his last leave. The blood swells in him. And he can’t help it, he’s grinning. He’s fighting it but it’s spreading across his face and he can’t help it any more than he can help that he’s stiffening. Remembering her in that small back room, her hand gripping his belt, her naughty smile, pulling him back towards the bed.

He lifts his helmet and turns it over so that it’s domed on his lap. He blinks, rubs his face, still smiling.

“What’s that great shit-eating grin for now, boss?”

Billy shakes his head, still smiling, trying hard not to, and laughing now too, and shaking away the thoughts of Ruby for some other time, not now, for a moment of peace and solitude, though God only knows when that will come. And through a brief new alignment of gaps and spaces between backs and shoulders, packs and helmets, his sight catches on someone on the far side of the deck. He’s thin, dark-haired, a boy of maybe twenty; he’s chewing on the side of his finger, right by the fingernail. Really gnawing at it, tearing with his eye teeth at the flesh along the side of his nail.

“Thinking about his bird—” Gossum says, of Billy’s far-off look.

“That’s his wife you’re talking about,” Alfie says.

“Still a bird.”

The boy tears a strip of skin off his finger, then glances at the finger, registering the cut, while he chews the slip of skin. His face is all bone and shadows. Then he looks up. He looks at Billy. He just gazes a moment, then the gaze clicks into focus, and he stares. Frowns. Peers at him.

Billy doesn’t recognise him; he’s pretty sure he’s never seen him before. The narrow intensity of the stare makes him look away, and when he glances back, the sightline is cut off: a couple of squaddies come up to join their friends, standing between Billy and the staring man, and all Billy can now see is the green-grey of their uniforms.

He catches Alfie’s eye. Alfie squints at him through tobacco smoke, his brow creased.

“You all right, Boss?” Alfie asks.

Billy flashes him a smile.

“Peachy,” Billy says. “Just peachy.”

• • •

Wind blusters through the darkness, whips round the deck, whistles through the stowed bikes, snaps the tarp he’s slung from the rail to keep off the worst of the weather. Rain clatters onto it, just above his ear. There’s a steady drip somewhere nearby that’s driving him quietly mad. It’s supposed to be June. Billy rubs at his gritty eyes. The deck is hard beneath his groundsheet, and his pack makes an awkward, lumpy pillow. He’s afraid that his shoulder—still vulnerable with the old cycling injury—will be completely buggered up by morning.

He knows what the weather means. There is no way that they are setting off any time soon. They need calm seas if the smaller landing craft are not to be swamped. And they need high tide to clear the beach obstacles at the other end. And they need that high tide to happen early in the morning, so that for most of the crossing they are under cover of darkness. These are the necessary conditions; all three of them have to be in place at the same time.

It will be at least twenty-four hours before the next chance to land. That’s if the gales die down soon. Twenty-four more hours on ship, twenty-four hours in which the Germans might just happen to spot something, to notice what’s going on.

His hip creaks against the deck. He rolls onto his back. The tarp droops low over his face. He closes his eyes. He remembers, from the train journey to and from Paris, ten years ago, the way the countryside had spun past his gaze. A wide green landscape, with woods and spinneys, clustered villages, church spires pushing up towards the sky. He thinks, there is all this to come, on the other side: a whole continent, dim with woodland, green with flashes of silver water, patched with cities. Utterly unknown. It seems somehow comforting, strangely welcoming, to think of this, these distances.

After a while, he sleeps.

Time ticks by. Two hours, two and a half, three. He wakes to cold grey light and the shrieking of the gulls.

RUBY UNCLIPS HER HANDBAG
, digs its contents out onto the kitchen table. A crack as her compact lands—damn. She tips the bag, shakes it: a slide of bus and Tube tickets; the soft tumble of her handkerchief, then a scattering of grit and dust and fluff. No lipstick.

She opens the compact, squints into the mirror; at least it’s not cracked—seven years’ bad luck would just be the marzipan on this. Her one day off, her chance to do something a bit special, and she’s lost her bloody lipstick. Yesterday was Saturday; early shift, tea and sawdust cake at a Lyons Corner House with Evelyn moaning about some man, then the flicks. Lipstick slicked on in the work lavs beforehand, reapplied after the tea and cake. Then she dropped it back in the bag: she can see herself doing it, clipping the bag shut. She hasn’t used the lipstick since. And now it’s gone. And it’s that feeling again, that her life is just a conveyor belt of days, stuff just keeps on coming for her to deal with, and she has no control, not even over the tiniest of things.

Mrs. walks in, clocks the mess on the table, gives her a look, then heads straight for the sink: Ruby watches her narrow, neat, disapproving back.

“Lost something?” Mrs. asks over her shoulder, twisting open that little brass sprayer, which looks, to Ruby, more like a perfume bottle than anything else: it’s like she goes out there every day to spray the bloody flowers with scent.

“Doesn’t matter,” Ruby says, separating out the tickets, scooping the rest of the things into her bag.

“What was it?”

Mrs. twists on the tap, watches the water pummel into the brass container. Ruby brushes the tickets together and herds them to the edge of the table, easing them over the brink into the cup of her hand.

“Lipstick,” Ruby says.

“Oh no, what a shame.”

Mrs. turns round, but her gaze is on the flower-spray—she’s fitting it together, dipping the pump mechanism into the barrel, twisting the cap back into place. She can’t waste anything, can’t Mrs. Not even half a moment doing one thing when she could be doing two. Ruby can see what she’s thinking as clear as if it were scrolling in tickertape above her head:
Better off without all that paint, ruins your skin, and it’s just to get the men’s attention, what she’s thinking, tarting herself up like that, with Billy away, asking for trouble
.