The Undertow (40 page)

“Hold on, it won’t be long. Hold on, Dad.”

The old man grasps his son’s hand, and breathes, tries to breathe, tries to breathe. Blue lights flash through the nets, fling around the room. Underwater light.

Billy is swimming through dark water. The hulk lies beneath him dark and creaking. He kicks out towards it.

He has to get back to the surface. He has to get a breath.

The hatchway is dark. He pulls down through it, and down a ladder, into the body of the ship.

His chest hurts. He needs air. He pulls himself through a flooded corridor. A door stands open into a cavern.

He must go back. He must get back to the surface, to the people. The girl with the green eyes. The limping man. The blond boy.

There is no air.

The cavern is a boiler room. He swims into the dark. There is no breath. There is no air. He must go back.

But then he understands, and everything clicks beautifully into place: he was wrong, he has always been wrong—he doesn’t need air; he can breathe the water. He breathes it deep, fills his lungs: his head fizzes, sparkles. It is wonderful to breathe.

He doesn’t need to go back now: he never did. There was never anything to fear. Just breathe the water, and go on. He can swim down
here for ever. He can find his father now. He can go as far as he needs to go, now that he accepts the water into him, and belongs here.

And then, up ahead, a darker shape in the darkness. He pulls himself towards it, as he always did in his dream; but this time, the figure does not just hang still, it turns, and comes towards him too; it strides through the water as though it were air. His eyes are clear and familiar. They look like the girl’s.

The young man smiles at Billy. He holds out a hand. Billy breathes deep, and smiles back, and takes his hand.

THEY ARE CLEARING
the house. It just needs doing.

He opens his dad’s side of the wardrobe. It creaks on its cheap hinges. Downstairs he can hear Billie and her aunt Janet moving around in the kitchen, emptying the cupboards. They’re talking. He can’t hear the words, just the shape the words make in the air below him.

The clothes inside are all shades of cream and fawn and dusty blue, apart from the old man’s one good black suit, bought in 1965 for his mother’s funeral, which also did for Will’s graduation and wedding, and then Ruby’s funeral too. The wardrobe smells sour. He must have started to put worn clothes away unwashed. The charity shop can deal with it.

Will hooks out an armful of clothes, dumps them down on the bed. He takes out another armful, and that’s it. Two pairs of comfy grey-beige shoes, a pair of unworn slippers that Will gave him one Christmas, still with their connecting tag intact, and a pair of black dress shoes to go with the suit.

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.