The Undertow (6 page)

Sully’s cigarette is pinched between his lips; his jaw is set, his eyes are just dark lines in the sun. William wonders, for the first time, what it must be like to be him.

“She’s having a baby.”

“Congratulations.”

William nods. For a moment he just teeters on the brink of saying it, and then with a kind of horrified relief, he says, “I can’t go back.”

“What?”

“Not after this.”

“This?”

“This.” William flicks his hand out to include the water, the coastline, the distance, the sun.

“This.” Sully tucks his chin in, raises his eyebrows. “This fucking wasteland, this bit of camel-shitty desert?”

“There’s so much more to see. It’s beautiful.”

“All them postcards and then, what? Nothing?”

William bites at his lip.

“You’ll stay on then, in the navy? If you make it through the war?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Just I can’t go back.”

“Well, if she’s beautiful like you say she won’t be alone for long.”

Sully takes a last long pull on his cigarette, and the smoke puffs past William’s face. “Someone else’ll have her.”

Sully flicks the cigarette butt out through the railings. They both watch its trajectory, watch it drop out of sight.

“Don’t you ever think about jumping ship?” William says.

“Jesus.”

The bell chimes. They lift their heads like a pair of whistled dogs.

“We take another shot like yesterday,” William says, “if Annie gets lucky, chances are we’re going to die here.”

Sully heaves himself to his feet. He shakes his mug out over the water, flicking out the last drops of tea.

“You’d be fucked, though, mate, if you did jump ship. It’s war, that’d be desertion.”

The bell chimes again. William takes a couple of quick, final drags on his cigarette.

“And anyway, where’d you go?”

“Anywhere.”

“But it’s all war, everywhere.”

William flicks his cigarette out after Sully’s, overboard.

“We’d better shift,” Sully says. “Unless you’re planning to—” He swoops his hand through the air with a diving gesture, after the cigarette.

“No.”

“Coming?”

“Be down shortly.”

Sully turns and goes, heading round the bulkhead, out of sight. William gets to his feet and leans over the railing. He shouldn’t have spoken. He shouldn’t even have said it out loud to anyone, let alone Sully, because it’s made it real. At least Sully is not the kind of fellow to hold a thing like that against you. He looks out across the sea, to the yellow-grey line of land, the sky spreading above, deep and blue and cloudless. He twines the letter between his fingers. Then he looks down and down the grey hull of the ship, to the deep shadowed water below.

He lets the letter fall.

It twirls down towards the water and slips onto the surface. It drifts a moment, and then begins to sink.

He pushes back from the railing.

It is not good, he knows. It is not good. But if he is to live through this, if there is going to be an afterwards, then he really has to live.

THE GUN FIRES
. The ship heaves with the recoil. As he pulls himself up the steps, the air smells strange, but it’s only when he’s on deck and a searchlight’s beam swings overhead that he is really puzzled. A kind of white glow. No moon, no stars. The light skims round again, searching out the Turkish trenches ashore, but its beam is clouded, dense.

Fog.

Fog, in the Mediterranean, in May. He stands for a moment, looking up and out through the night as the searchlights wheel and turn, blank, cutting across the dark tracery of the rigging, skimming the superstructure. The searchlight is from the
Cornwallis
, stationed on the seaward side of the
Goliath
. Visibility is two hundred yards, maybe three. Another of the
Goliath’
s guns pounds out a shell. The ship heaves beneath his feet. His ears buzz. His skin fizzes with unease.

They have to be here. The straits—the Dardanelles—must be kept clear. The supply lines must stay open for men and materiel. For the boys from England and Australia and New Zealand and France. The boys who troop out along the pontoons, across the beach and up into the hills, and are gone. What they carry back from the beaches are not boys. What they carry back are rinds and husks. They have become grocers of men. They deliver them ashore full and whole, then come back for the empties.

He goes over to the seaward side. The air is clammy, thick with smuts and smoke. He leans out over the rail. He can make out the flank of the
Cornwallis
, and if he peers along into the dark, a glimpse of a destroyer, one of
Goliath’
s bodyguards—either
Beagle
or
Bulldog
—as the searchlight brushes across her. But he can’t see a thing beyond.

His breath makes the fog tumble away in little eddies. This is just
perfect cover for an attack. They have been hammering all hell out of the place for weeks; the Turks’ll be just itching for a chance to give them a taste of it right back. And the ship is lit up like a West End show. You’d have to be an idiot not to give it a go. And whatever else you say about Annie and Fritz, they’re not idiots.

“We’re sitting ducks,” he says out loud, into the deadening fog.

The engines turn over. The power of them throbs up through the deck. One revolution, two, then stopped: they’re in readiness to go, at immediate notice for steam.

So maybe they’ll be off. He’s got to swallow the fear. Get through it. Once they’re under way, they won’t be such an easy target.

But the fear comes anyway, getting him in the back of his neck, in the back of his knees. The unease of this aged ship, her fated name. She is too old, dragged out of retirement for this last fight. Her joints ache; a little pressure and the rivets would just come adrift, her panels peel apart in segments. There’s just light Krupp armour between them and the dark water. Six hundred and some men. All those lungs sucking and squeezing the tired air. He becomes aware of the rail beneath his hand, the old weather-greyed wood. He digs his nails in, and the wood gives. She’s just too old,
Goliath
. An old giant, just waiting for the boy to fling a stone.

The engines turn over again. But the ship lies still. It’s too much: he can’t wait, can’t do nothing. He pushes away from the railing, turns back towards the deck—if he can speak to someone—then the officer of the watch comes down from the boat deck through the dirty fog.

“Get below, there.”

“Are we under notice, sir?” William calls.

The officer halts, and looks back. “What’s that?”

“Will we be shifting soon?”

“We’re staying put.”

“Sir, we’re sitting ducks.”

“Those are the orders.”

“But does Command know about the fog?”

The officer just gives him a look. “Those are the orders.”

Then William’s eye is caught by a movement: down by his side, the officer’s hand is twitching. His thumbnail presses into the cuticle of his index finger. It scrapes at the skin. The flesh is raw and oozes blood.

There is nothing to be done, William realises. There is no getting out of this.

But he can’t die here, not yet. He wants more. He wants spindrift off the Atlantic swell; he wants to know what ice is like when it stretches for thousands of miles. He wants to step off the ship and be in South America, Japan, Russia, Nova Scotia. He wants a lifetime of this.

“On your way now, Hastings. Get below.” And the officer walks off into the fog. And William has no choice. He heads back down below.

Down in the mess, Sully’s hammock is swinging slightly, though the others all hang still. His eyes are closed and he’s breathing heavily. William looks at him with a mixture of guilt and sympathy: maybe he’s asleep at last, maybe he’s just braced against the pain. He doesn’t think of disturbing him, warning him: what good would there be in that? And sleep is so hard to come by nowadays, you don’t want to waste a drop.

William strips off his jerkin, getting ready for his stint in the boiler room’s swelter. He ducks down to stow it in his sea-chest. But something’s wrong. He peers closer at the lock. It’s broken.

“What the hell—” William heaves the lid up and back. The sudden noise makes Sully stir.

“Sorry,” William says.

“What’s up?”

“Someone’s been at this …”

Sully leans up on an elbow, peering sleepily down over the edge of his hammock. “Oh balls.”

William leafs through the contents: spare rig, underwear, shaving gear, cigarette box, matches, playing cards. The postcard’s not there. The last, unsent postcard. He peers into the chest; it’s too dark to see properly. He shoves a hand down between the folded clothes and the side, and runs it up and down. The bell starts to chime. He feels hot. He glances round the crowded, fuggy room. No-one’s even stirring.

“What happened? Who was it?”

Sully shrugs. “I was asleep.”

The bell chimes. William straightens up. “That right?”

“Yeah.” He rubs at his eyes. “I was sleeping like the dead. What did they get?”

“Not much.” William’s jaw tightens. “Nothing.” Just that last postcard, with his wife’s address.

“I’ll sort it for you, if you want. Fix the lock.”

The bell chimes. Six bells.

William looks him over. The wiry muscle of him, the thin flicker of his eyes. We can’t all have your luck, he’d said. Would he take the card?

“Thanks.”

“It’s not like I’m good for much else at the moment.”

“I suppose not.”

“You go on,” Sully says. “If it can be fixed, I’ll fix it.”

Eight bells.

William has to go. There’s no choice. “Right,” he says. “Thanks.”

He has to descend into the belly of the ship, to where the boilers gape and the air is thick with heat and the dark water swells just inches away. The shovel will be damp from the last man’s hands. The coal dust hanging in the air, sticking to sweating skin, working into the pores, blackening the nostrils and making that catch in his breath that makes him see the dust glittering like crystals in the hollows of his lungs. Just keeping the boilers fed, keeping the engines turning over. He’ll swallow water from a shared tin cup, and if he’s lucky, if they’re all lucky, he’ll do his shift and lean his shovel up with the others, and climb back up towards the mess, and wash, and eat, and sleep again, and then wake to do it all again, the day after, and the day after that. And that is the best that he can hope for, and now it seems impossibly wonderful: that time will still keep ticking by for him, and will not stop.

He wishes that she had got the postcard. That he’d promised her everything she wanted. That he had lied.

When the first torpedo hits, a few minutes shy of 1 a.m., William is stripped to the waist, sweat darkening the waistband of his trousers and forming a V shape down his backside, hair pushed back in a dark, sweat-soaked slick. Coal leaps from the blade of his shovel; flames flicker up to devour them. His back and shoulders are knotted with muscle. His arms are like twisted rope. He is all body, all movement, lost in the mechanism of his work.

The impact of the first torpedo makes him stagger. The explosion bursts his eardrums. He hears just the rush of his blood.

He rights himself, looks to the next man, Paveley, red-lit from the boilers’ glow; his mouth is moving, he’s shouting something. William can’t hear.

When the second torpedo hits six seconds later, he doesn’t hear it
either, he just feels the thump of impact, the shudder through the body of the ship. The deck beneath him bucks, and it’s too late now to think about anything because the ship is tilting, and William’s slithering, trying to get purchase; he yells,
Head for the stairs
, but can’t hear himself either, and the heaped coal is slithering too, rolling out underneath his feet and the ship tilts further, and then there’s nothing but the horror of burning coals pouring from the boilers’ open mouths, falling around him like a punishment from God; his hair burnt through to his head, the scalp seared, his hand burning as he scrabbles the coal away; his shoulder burnt and as he whisks round to brush the burning embers off, his cheek kissed by a glowing orange coal and there’s water round his feet, coals hissing as they land, and Paveley is there, he didn’t make it to the stairs, and they are thrashing and scrabbling through the fire and the water with the others, trying to get to the stairs, and the water’s round his knees, up to his waist, his chest. A third impact. A crunch and then a massive jolt as the torpedo finds the ammunition store and explodes. Water up to his shoulders, and now he’s struggling to keep his face above the water, and the hissing falling coals and the smoke and steam, and the water rises to his mouth, his nose, and it’s bubbling, sooty and harsh, in his nostrils, and he can’t keep his head above the water.

THE OLD MAN OPENS THE DOOR
. She hadn’t even reached the handle. He must have been looking out for her. She doesn’t need him to say anything. His face, and his presence there, a strong, squat shape in the door when he should be at the factory, say everything. He brings with him the smell of that place, the hot waxy reek.

She drops her basket. It spills onto the flags. Lengths of lemon and mauve ribbon ripple along the pavement. A cotton reel bumps down into the gutter.

He holds out a stained hand to her. He takes her by the elbow and helps her into the dark parlour. He sits her down in the best chair.

“I’ll get the—”

He leaves the front door open and gathers up the spilt things, rolling up the sprawling ribbon, chasing down the cotton, placing them thick-fingered back into their paper wrappings. He brings in her basket, sets it down on her lap, in front of the hard bulge of her belly. She takes the basket handle in her hands.

“I’m sorry, love,” he says.

She nods. Thumbs at the weave of the basket handle. She looks up at him, at the pitted skin.

“Is it certain? Is it absolutely certain?”

He nods.