The Undertow (25 page)

“M’sieur! M’sieur!”

He slows off, pulls over towards her, comes to a halt. Her cheeks are rosy with broken veins.

“Les Anglais! V’là les Anglais qui débarquent, dis donc!”

He slips off the saddle to stand astride the crossbar. His hands are shaking. There is blood across the back of the right one.

“J’me trompe pas! Z’êtes ben Anglais?”

He knows she’s asking if he’s English. There’s a phrasebook. He remembers bits.

“We,” he says.

“Merci,” and she reaches out and clasps his hand. Her eyes are blue and prominent. “Merci, mon p’tit!”

She smells of grain, of hen feed. He doesn’t quite know what to do.

“Mais il a peut-être soif, ce jeunot?” she says. “Un peu de lait, mon p’tit?”

She bends and dips a cup into the milk, and hands it to him. He takes the cup and drains the milk; it is still warm from the cow. He hands the cup back to her.

“Mercy.”

“A mon Dieu, mais il est blessé!” she says, and reaches up to his face, but he doesn’t understand. “Y a du sang là, sur vot’ visage!”

He doesn’t understand.

“Mercy.”

He takes her hand and squeezes it, and lets it go. He makes to shift back onto the saddle. He gestures down the road, into the distance.

“I’ve got to go.”

“Et ben allez, allez donc. Et encore merci, mon p’tit, merci!”

“Mercy, madam, mercy.”

He pushes on, bumping back up onto the road, and then heaving the bike back up to speed, past hedges and past fences and open fields. He is cycling through an orchard. Branches overhang the road, and their shadows skim across him as he passes underneath. The boughs are dotted with bright green fruit. The same fruit lie on the road, hard and small as ball bearings, and look no different from the fruit still on the trees. It makes no sense why some just drop, and others stay and swell upon the branch. He looks at the spattering of blood across the back of his hand. The beach. The ramps thumping down onto the sand. Alfie’s cheek glistening with spray, and the shells screaming overhead. And then—

His front wheel hits a fallen apple, and sends it skittering out towards the verge, and he nearly loses his balance. He rights the bike.

From far off he hears the thud of a detonation, and then nothing.

For the first time, he glances back. The road is straight and empty behind him, then there is a curve at the farmhouse, and you can’t see past it. That’s why none of his squad is in sight.

But they’ll catch up. He’ll wait for them at the outskirts of the village. They’ll regroup, follow orders, secure the crossroads.

He belts out of the orchard, and is racing along between high hedges; through the branches he glimpses a clutch of brown shaggy cows that stand motionless and stare at him. And a slope up, and he just kicks up the effort, shoving hard on the pedals, not even getting out of his seat; he’d forgotten this, the pleasure of it; or rather his head had forgotten it, because his body knows, and is simply, easily capable, and it soothes him, to just be living in his body and no longer in his head, to just live in the mechanical perfection of it all. There’s mortar fire behind him, and the faint clatter of a machine gun, but it seems so distant, unconnected.

There was noise. There was blood. And. He shoves the memory down.

At the gentle crest of the hill, he slows, and on the left side there is a horse nosing over the top bar of a gate, swishing her tail against the flies, and when he passes—he must make a strange bulky figure, field green, backpack, sweat and wheels—she shakes her mane, and whinnies, and turns to trot along her field beside him.

“Race you?” he says.

The horse is French and probably won’t understand English, but she gets the idea, tosses her head, breaks into a canter. He grins, and ducks down and pedals harder, but the gearing is too low and he can get no more out of the bike, and has to cruise downhill, his feet circling uselessly, as the horse canters off beyond and reaches the end of her field before him, and skitters round, and turns her head to watch him reach her, and pass, and be gone.

And there’s the village.

A roadside graveyard, and then an empty field, and then a waggoner’s yard, and then the first few houses of the settlement, church spire further off, right in the centre, at the crossroads, which they have to secure.

He glances back again, over his shoulder. The road is still completely clear. And the horse, now trotting back up the field, just dips her head to snatch at the grass; so there’s no-one within eyesight for her either.

He’s almost at the graveyard now; there’s cover there. He’ll wait for them.

A low wall encloses the site, topped with the linked spears of iron railings. He cruises in to the side of the road, bumping off the tarmac and onto the gravel overspill, and slows to a halt. He grabs the railing, sits on his bike to wait. His jerkin is drenched in sweat. It was nice of her to bring him milk. It was good milk. He can’t remember the last time he had milk that good.

He wipes his hand over his sweaty face. He looks at his palm. It has come away streaked with dark blood. He looks at it.

Then the first bullet zings past. He dives. The bike still between his legs, he crashes onto the gravel. Stones bang up into his leg and shoulder and arm. The crossbar of the bike whacks against his lower leg, and then the upper leg crunches into the crossbar. It hurts. His old shoulder injury crackles with pain. It doesn’t matter. What matters is not getting shot. What matters is where the shot came from.

He snakes out from under the bike, crawls round so that he’s half lying, propped on an elbow, his back against the low wall. On the far side of the wall is the graveyard. That’s where the sniper is; must be;
the road is clear, the field beyond it is empty but for a pair of crows that flap into the air, startled. There’s nowhere else that shot could have come from.

He lifts himself up a fraction, to peer out over the wall. Another zing and crunch, and a spume of dust lifts from the capstone just by his chin. He ducks back down. On the gravel the bike’s front wheel still spins slowly.

Perfect spot for a sniper: good cover, clear view of the road. Should have expected it. Should have seen it coming a fucking mile off.

The sniper’ll have a, what? A Mauser, Karabiner? Five rounds and then he’ll have to reload. And he’s had two already.

But Billy can’t work out why he’s still alive. Did he take him for a local, even with the kit? Does the bike work as some kind of distraction, a disguise, a kind of hiding in plain sight? Maybe they just don’t expect the enemy to arrive on a bike.

Lying low still, he twists himself out of his backpack. The movement tears at his shoulder, makes him wince. He unclips his revolver from its holster, breaks open the barrel, spins it, checking, even though he knows it’s fully loaded. Then he clicks it back together and darts up and fires one shot off across the graveyard. He flinches back down, but not quite low enough: he has to see. And he gets lucky; a second before the sniper returns fire, Billy spots him. Just a flicker of movement from behind a headstone, enough to locate him. Billy ducks back down and the shot whizzes overhead like a hornet. Three shots gone: two left. Billy makes a brisk assessment of the angles, the distances, how far he has to crawl, how long he’s got before the sniper susses him out. He drags the pack up against the wall, shunting it up so that a small hump of canvas shows over the top. From a distance, it could be taken for a bit of protruding uniform: a shoulder, bit of helmet, a foraging cap. At least, that’s what he’s hoping.

His revolver in his hand, his elbows in the grit, Billy snakes his way along, keeping to the cover of the wall, leaving his pack to take the shots.

A sharp twang as a bullet hits one of the railings behind him and sets the whole fence humming like a tuning fork. Four shots. And he’s fallen for the decoy; but soon enough he’ll hit it, or start to wonder why it’s not returning fire. Billy has to be quick.

He drags himself round the corner, and up the side of the graveyard. By his reckoning, twenty yards should do it, get him to a spot where
he can get a clear sightline on the enemy. Just as far as the shrub up ahead, lolling with pink flowers. There are flowers in the gravel too, tiny, flat-faced, soft red blooms that grow low and close to the ground, with delicate, neat leaves. He wonders if they are pimpernels. He hears a bird singing, and thinks it might be a blackbird, but he doesn’t know if they have blackbirds in France. Billy reaches the bush, its lower stems are reddish, flaking with bark. The bare soil underneath is clayey and hard. Then another shot rings out, yards away across the graveyard, aimed at the pack. And that’s it. Done. He’ll have to reload now.

Billy heaves himself up to squint over the wall. He sees, about thirty yards away, a dark figure crouched behind a headstone, rifle laid across his knees, ramming in a clip. Billy lifts his revolver, aims, and fires.

The revolver jumps in Billy’s hand, and the noise stuns his ears. The figure jolts back against the headstone, and then just stays there. It slumps slightly.

The day is muffled; there’s a high-pitched hum in Billy’s ears. Nothing happens. The body slips a little further over to one side. Grass, and headstones, and the blistered paint on the railings. Nothing happens. The bird starts to sing again. Billy straightens up, steps up onto the low wall and swings his leg over the iron railings. He jumps down onto the grass beyond, and makes his way between the headstones.

The sniper is quite small. His coat looks too big for him. His face is turned away. Billy comes up to the foot of the grave and looks the body over. He can’t see where he hit him. He moves round the kerbed edge of the grave, and crouches down, and reaches out and takes hold of the jaw to turn the face towards him. The skin is particularly smooth. It is still warm. It is a child. His greenish eyes are vague and dead.

Billy steps back. He shoves his hands in his pockets. He glances up and round, up at the empty road. He looks back down at the boy. He’s fourteen, maybe fifteen. His face is round and he has freckles across his nose. Blood spreads slowly through his coat.

He takes the boy under the arms, and shifts him, laying him down on the grave.

“Sorry,” he says.

He tucks the boy’s coat up round him.

“Sorry.”

Billy closes the boy’s eyes for him. His hands are shaking. He glances up at the road again, but the road is clear.

He straightens up, shoves his hands into his pockets again. He looks
back at the boy, at the way his boots point at odd angles to the sky. Then Billy turns, and picks his way out through the graves, towards the path, back to the road. The gravel crunches under his boots. He swings the gate open, and goes out, and picks up his bike, and tips it up so that it stands on its seat and handlebars. He checks that the chain’s in place, then the wheels for buckling, then the alignment of the brakepads. Never liked brakes. He tips the bike over again, and sets it back on its wheels. Then he crouches down with his back to the wall, and waits for his squad.

HE LIBERATED THE PIECES
from the factory. Three short strips of light pine, tucked into a trouser pocket, then slipped into his bait box. Waste wood from the Houseproud frames. You have to go slowly, bit by bit. The screws too, and the glue—the glue scraped into an old fishpaste jar, glob after glob, every day for a fortnight, so they wouldn’t notice the difference in the gluepot.

He cut and shaped the pieces and screwed and glued them into a rough triangle. You’d almost think it was one solid block. Then he set to with a chisel, and then sandpaper—a scrap of wadded sandpaper that had gone soft as leather and kept filling up with wood dust and had to be thwacked against the worktop edge to clear it. Now he holds the wooden shape in his palms: a perfectly proportioned saddle, scaled down for the small bottom of his two-year-old son, to fit onto the crossbar of Billy’s bike.

He layers it with flannel, then gabardine, off-cuts from Ruby’s sewing box. He presses the wadded surface of the saddle. It has a little give in it. He holds it up to the light and turns it round. Sunlight catches on the surface of the gabardine, glints on the tacks. He runs his thumb over the nail-heads, checking for sharpnesses, snags. He thinks of what Alfie said, about a bike that looked like a bike but didn’t taste like one. This isn’t how you make saddles, not really, not with pine and glue and gabardine. But it looks like a saddle, at least: it’ll work like one, and that’s the best that you can hope for nowadays.

He’s magpied a few bits of plumbers’ fittings from a bomb site, uses them to fit the saddle to the crossbar of his Butler, judging the distance by eye. He tests it, twisting and leaning the small saddle in one direction, then another. He fits the screwdriver back into place and gives it
another couple of turns, checks again, then leans the bike against the worktop and steps back.

The boy’s little feet will rest on the top of the forks, his small hands grip the centre of the handlebars. Billy will hold the warm, breathing compactness of the boy safe between his arms.

He’d never expected this. The keenness of his love. The urgency of it.

Billy wheels the bike out of the garage, and through into the back garden. The light is softening. The garden smells of tomato plants. He can hear her in the kitchen, clinking something as she stirs, talking to the boy.

“Rube,” he calls. “Ruby?”

She comes to the open back door, and the little boy pushes past her legs, and comes doddering down the path towards him, grinning wetly, dribble dripping from his chin. Billy smiles instinctively, immediately, then glances up and catches Ruby watching the child. He looks down at the boy, his delighted, staggering run. She worries too much. There is nothing wrong with him. Billy leans the bike against the fence and crouches down to pick up the little boy.

“Come on then, little man,” he says, and stands up with him. The boy sits on Billy’s strong forearm. He sticks a finger in his mouth and stares fixedly at Billy’s face. Ruby comes down the path towards them, wiping her hands on her apron, exposing the front of her washed-thin skirt.