The Undertow (42 page)

“How are things going then, with work?” her mum asks.

Billie shifts her weight. The stool wobbles. She grabs the counter to steady herself.

“Oh, you know how it is.”

“I mean the painting.”

“I know you mean the painting.”

“Sending your slides out?”

“Yes, Mum,” Billie laughs. “I even entered a couple of competitions last month.”

“And the pictures, the ones you had up in the restaurant?”

“I sold one.”

Her mother turns to her, her face brilliant. “That’s wonderful.”

Billie nods. It is. Of course it is. And it helps with things like Christmas presents, and she even had a new coat this year. She should be thrilled, and in some kind of abstracted way she is. But it wasn’t much of a thing—a pen-and-ink study of a nude—and she wasn’t satisfied with it. When she was a kid, when the millennium had first appeared on the horizon, she’d worked out that by then she’d be twenty-six. She’d be a grown-up, she’d thought. She’d be an artist. The two had seemed to mean almost the same thing, and be the answer to everything.

“And Luke?”

Billie laughs. “Oh God, Mum, what is this? Twenty questions?”

“You’re my little girl.” Her mother shrugs. “I can’t help it.”

Billie pulls her bottom lip in between her teeth. “Well …”

He makes her stomach swoop. He picks her up from work and takes her out for what he calls supper but she still thinks of as dinner. His skin is perfect. His cologne, all woody notes and cinnamon, just does her head in: she notices it not so much when he embraces her, but once he’s turned and walked away.

He’s thirty-five; she’s twenty-six. Sometimes she really notices.

She feels shabby. Grubby. Workstained. That she smells of coins from working at the tills.

She’s pretty sure that Norah doesn’t like him, but then Norah never likes any of her boyfriends. Ciaran has been away, and hasn’t met him yet.

“It’s good. I think. It’s okay, yeah. Anyway, it’s early days.”

She notices a patch of blue acrylic paint, dried into cracks on her right forefinger. She scrapes at it with her stubby thumbnail.

“D’you have an emery board, Mum?”

“In the mug.”

Her mum nods to the chipped mug on top of the microwave. Billie pulls out a grey emery board from amongst the pens and pencils and stray screwdrivers. She starts to smooth the ragged edges of a nail.

“He’s in Italy actually,” she says. “Skiing.”

“Isn’t that nice.”

“It’s a family thing. They do it every year.”

“Ooh.”

“I know.”

Her mother’s expression shifts: she raises her eyebrows, purses her lips, doesn’t look up from the sink—paring knife in one hand, Brussels sprout in the other, heap of shed leaves growing on the counter.

“And so, let me get this straight,” her mum says, “he’s currently in Italy, but he’s coming all the way back from there to spend the millennium night in a pokey little flat in Deptford?”

“Norah’s flat is not pokey,” Billie says. “It’s compact and bijou.”

“It is in Deptford, though.”

Billie gives her mum a look. A smile. “He’d be coming back anyway.”

“Yes, but still.” Her mother’s eyebrows go higher. “He’s spending the millennium with you.”

“Mum,” Billie laughs. “Seriously.”

Her mum waves a dripping hand in the air. “Okay, okay.”

“It’s a bunch of us. Not just me and him. It’s not this great romantic thing.”

“Okay, okay.” She rinses the peeled sprouts under the tap. “You be careful, though, love, while you’re out.”

“Because of the planes falling out of the sky, and the nuclear missiles going off, and the Terminators stalking the streets?”

“I was thinking more muggers, rapists, pickpockets. That kind of thing.”

“You are
so
this century.”

Her mother laughs.

“Don’t worry,” Billie says. “I won’t be alone.”

“Good.”

There’s a silence. Billie feels her cheeks go hot. She recrosses her knees; her left leg presses against the cool fridge door. She watches as her mother lifts the colander from the sink and turns to set it down on the far countertop. Billie searches for something to say, some kind of explanation or apology, but she can’t quite put a sentence together. She thinks of the semi up in Summertown, stuffed full of people: Carole and her parents and her sister and the cousins, and Matty, and their dad, the heating on full blast and Carole grumpy and flustered and Dad opinionated with drink. Here, there is just the burr of the fan oven and
Mum’s careful peeling of vegetables. Billie notices a swirl worn into one of the floor tiles from the press and spin of her Mum’s foot as she turns from one kitchen counter to the other, day after day.

“Actually,” Billie says, “I’m hoping the cashpoints will go bananas and start spewing out twenty-pound notes.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice?”

Her mother turns the heat up under a saucepan, setting it to boil, then crouches to open the oven door. There’s a billow of steam: rosemary, garlic, olive oil. She shakes the potatoes round in the roasting tin; the oil spits and pops.

“Look, can I do something?”

“There’s not much more to do.” Her mum closes the oven, straightens up. Winces at the creak in her knees.

“What are your plans then?” Billie asks, meaning for New Year’s Eve.

“I was going to do a lemon glaze for the carrots. That sound okay?”

“Lovely.”

“Tell you what, open the bubbly, would you? It’s in the fridge.”

Billie slips off the stool, sets it out of the way, and hunkers down to fish out the bottle of Cava. She stands the bottle on the counter and reaches into a cupboard for two of the green-stemmed hock glasses that serve for this kind of thing. They are older than she can remember; they’ve always been in cupboards, standing at the back, gathering dust. She rinses them, fills them with crackling wine.

“What are you going to do, though, for the millennium?”

“I’ve never really liked New Year’s.” Her mum lifts her glass. “Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

“All that pressure to have fun.”

“I know.”

“And this year it’s in spades.”

“Do you remember when I was a kid? We’d just settle down on the sofa with cups of tea and chocolates, and watch stupid telly?”

“We’d always say we’d stay up, but usually we’d be in bed by ten.”

“But still, Mum. It’s the millennium.”

“It’s just a number. There’s some people say it falls next year, really, mathematically speaking.”

“Yeah but in all fairness, they’re tossers.”

Her mother laughs.

“You’ve got to do
something
,” Billie says.

“I will. Tea, sofa, box of Thornton’s Continentals, early night.”

Billie slides back up onto her stool, wine glass in her hand. She feels an urgent anxiety on her mother’s behalf, the need to make things right.

“Come to the flat, come and see the fireworks.” Norah would be lovely and welcoming, she always is. But then there’s Luke, he has to be taken into account. His expectations. He’s not expecting someone’s mum to come along.

Her mum wafts an oven glove, dismissing the notion. “With all you young people? Playing gooseberry? I don’t think so.”

“I’ll come back up here, then.”

“Really, love, there’s no need. I do have friends; I could have arranged something if I’d wanted to.”

“But, Mum—”

Her mum raises her hand, shakes her head, brooking no argument: “Go. Have fun. Be happy.”

Later, Billie lies in bed, looking up into the grey dark of her old bedroom. The bedside clock reads 01:47.

She thinks of her room in Norah’s flat. The makeshift stop-gap of it; a bed, a wardrobe, sheaf upon sheaf of sketches, her clutter on someone else’s shelves.

She thinks of her thin web of connections—friends, colleagues, and now Luke—a fragile crystalline structure built out into the dark. She is sure of none of it. If Billie put pressure on any part of this, it’d just fall away in a shower of salt.

Norah won’t always be wanting a housemate, won’t always have a room to spare. Ciaran’s there and then gone, like a breeze. There’s no point wishing he were different, because then he wouldn’t be him.

She had thought she’d be grown-up. She’d be an artist. It would mean something. The imagined and the real shift and slide across each other like layers of tracing paper, and can’t be made to fit together.

She sits up, reaches for the bedside light. The room springs awake. The chimney breast is a soft slate colour. Bookshelves fill the alcoves on either side. Her mother’s blue ceramic cormorant sits on top of the cast-iron fireplace, its wings permanently outstretched between the photographs of godchildren, friends in fleeces on country paths, Billie’s graduation picture, and a snap of her suntanned mum on a Mediterranean summer’s evening with a dark-haired bearded man who has his arm around her shoulder. Terry; just a friend, her mother says.

Billie gets up, crosses the room and pulls open the curtains, looks
out on the back walls of other houses, at the narrow yard below. It’s dotted with planters. In the diffuse orange street light she can pick out the bare twigs of dwarf fruit trees.

There used to be a damp patch on the wall here. She reaches down, lays a hand on the surface beneath the windowsill. The paper feels sound and dry.

She is miles away from sleep. She wraps her cardigan over her nightshirt, pulls on a pair of socks. She goes downstairs, through the quiet living room, with its slumped sofa and pale throw and tartan rug, and its potplants and its bookshelves and its unlit Christmas tree, past the bare dining table and into the kitchen. The clean dishes are stacked on the drainer. She clicks on the kettle, reaches down a mug. The tiles suck the warmth from her feet.

Billie takes her tea, and sinks into the sofa, and draws the rug up over her. Baubles glint on the tree. She picks up the book her dad gave her. It’s an illustrated edition of Blake’s
Songs of Innocence and Experience;
she’d underestimated him; this is thoughtful, not what she’d expected; at a tangent to his usual gifts. She opens the book, starts to study the prints. The fluid, dynamic shapes, the way the text seems to emerge organically, growing from the images. A car crawls past the end of the street, cautious in the fog. She’s aware of the house around her, its small, contained spaces. Her mother sleeping upstairs. Her distant, quiet breathing seems to fill the house like the hush and drift of waves.

Go. Have fun. Be happy
.

THE TRAFFIC LIGHTS
phase on and off, casting pools of red, gold and green, making nothing happen, because there are no cars, not this late, not tonight. Stragglers wander along the pavement, stumble off and back up the kerb. Billie, though, walks the custardy bulge of the white line down the middle of the street. Luke paces along the pavement, glancing her way from time to time, keeping pace.

The city spreads out away from here, from the slight give of the paint beneath her feet. She wants to call out to him, how wonderful is this that you can walk down the middle of the street? Never mind the millennium, a whole new century, a whole new thousand years; how wonderful is this, the night, the people; a city, for a moment at least, without cars? But then she looks round at Luke and thinks better of it. She feels responsible. He and Ciaran were like sandpaper: whatever one of them said it seemed to grate at the other.

She steps off the white line, and crosses the tarmac to him, and slips her gloved hand into his. He glances at her, smiles.

They pass the derelict pub, the windows patched with cardboard, and the Londis, shut but still spilling out a pool of white neon light. A girl in a pale puffa jacket with scraped-back hair leans slack against her boyfriend, her arms looped around his waist, her cheek pressed into his chest. He watches Billie and Luke as they pass; his face is thin.

They left Norah and Daniel after the fireworks. Norah with her too-high heels hooked over her fingers, her foot soles black with dirt, her arm looped through Daniel’s, the two of them chattering away and watching out for broken glass. Ciaran and Petra they’d lost hours before, in the crowds near the river. Or maybe, Billie thinks, Ciaran and Petra lost themselves. Ciaran had his camera and wanted to get some
shots in. But he was just being tactful. She’ll see him before he leaves for Mexico, she hopes. Wonders how long he’ll be gone this time.

Dinner hadn’t been easy.

Then the party at Luke’s friends’ house: a whole house, stairs and everything, for just the two of them. They had matte-black clothes and perfect skin. Billie trod their white carpet uneasily, spent most of the evening in the glass-and-timber extension, the garden beyond winking with fairy lights, trying to get a fingernail into the conversation: it was all so concrete, so full of things. Things that one might buy or had bought. A friend’s disappointment with his new car. Another’s satisfaction with exactly the same model. There must, she thought, be something I’m not getting here. Something I just haven’t grasped, that makes it all mean something.

The tug of Luke’s hand makes her look up: they’re near the turn for Norah’s. She follows his pull. The flat’s the top floor of a subdivided terrace down the end of the street. She’s conscious of the length of his expensive coat, the brush of his sleeve against hers. Above them the sky is a dirty orange, full of smoke and cloud and street light. He could be anywhere, she thinks, he could be with anyone, but he’s here with me.

“A nice night, wasn’t it?”

“Mmm?”

“Lovely party.”

“Mmm.”

“Did you have a good time?”

“Yes.”

They pass through the glow of a streetlamp, alongside the loose stitch of a chainlink fence. Someone cordoned off this patch of weeds and grit two years ago. They haven’t done anything with it since.

Norah will have gone back to Daniel’s. Ciaran will be at Petra’s by now. Which leaves them the flat to themselves, thankfully. The table, pulled out into the middle of the sitting room, will still be thick with the debris of the evening: dishes, smeared glasses, empty bottles, an ashtray, the coloured gossamer of streamers. She’d thought the party poppers were fun.