The Undertow Read online

  William takes a cigarette, and lights both, shielding the match with a hand. The cigarettes flare quickly and crumble away: Sully always rolls them too loose. William drags the smoke deep into his lungs. They feel raw as butcher’s meat.

  “Could have been worse,” William says.

  “Fuck off.”

  “An inch to the right and it would have killed you straight.”

  Sully lets out a thread of smoke. “Six inches to the right and it would have hit you smack between the eyes.”

  William turns away. He watches the ratings struggle with Dwyer’s body. He feels sick. They’re just boys, the two of them, all raw bones and sunburn. He should help them.

  “Blame the sniper, eh. Not me.”

  Sully is silent.

  William gets up. His head spins, but he steps out of his bench and makes his way over to help with Dwyer, nudging the ratings aside, taking him under the arms. Dwyer is solid, weighty with death. His jerkin is soaked with sweat and blood. His head rolls back. Pale blue eyes stare up at the pale blue morning sky.

  He has dealt with the dead before. But never a friend.

  William lays him down on the boards. The boy has the ghost of the boiler room about him, the film of grey around the fingertips, around the nostrils and mouth. His head lolls over to one side. He lies where the soldiers had been sitting. It seems like days ago. Another world.

  That poor girl back in Cardiff. His poor mother.

  Some kind of shabby order is restored. Wounds are dressed, rum dished out. William returns to his place, sliding in so his back is to Sully again, and his face towards the shore. He takes up the oar. His hands hurt. He looks out at the beach, the rocky gully, the scrubby clifftop where the sniper must be hiding; all is now sharp and clear in the cool morning light. Then he spots movement. A clutch of men scrambling and jostling through the bushes. Then the knot untangles, and sunlight kicks off a bayonet, and one man is being held, and fighting against it, struggling, desperate: the sniper, they’ve got the sniper. There’s no sound, no scream to be heard, not from this distance. William doesn’t see the blade go in, but he does see the man jerk back, and then crumple forward as the steel sinks deep and twists up and through his guts. The man goes slack. His captors let him fall. They stand around him, looking down. Then bayonets flash again in the morning light as they dig them down into him.

  That is good, William thinks. It must be good. But he feels sicker now.

  The men lean down and lift the body. It hangs limp from their grip. They carry it to the edge of the cliff, and swing it out over the edge. For a moment it seems to sail out into the air, but then gravity catches it and it falls; the body glances on an outcrop, rolls and slides and falls again, then catches on a patch of scree and slithers down it, streaking blood on the golden stone, losing momentum, coming to a halt and lying still, at an angle, feet higher than the head, the waves lapping at the rocks a few feet below.

  Behind him, he hears Sully’s dry lips tack apart, but he doesn’t speak.

  William says nothing. After a moment, he nods.

  This is the end, he thinks: this is the end of everything. He closes his eyes and the colours swim and flare. How can there be anything after this?

  But the day goes on. It heaves itself forward in lurches.

  They crawl their way back to the trawler, returning with the wounded and the dead. The guns pound out from the battleships; the Goliath is hammering the Turks’ inland positions. Shells scream overhead, making the men in the cutter flinch and duck. Killed by the percussion, dead fish rise to the surface, form a slick upon the water. They make the work heavy. Flies buzz and settle on the fish, and on the dead and wounded men, and the spilled blood in the boat.

  When they reach the trawler, they hoist up Clelland, who’s barely clinging onto life, and Spooner pale with loss of blood, and then Dwyer slack and heavy and unmanageable, his body shunted onto the higher deck from their shoulders. The cutter rocks beneath them as they work. Then Sully elbows his way in, blood streaking all his left-hand side, and two able seamen lean down to grab his arms and help him up on board, and as he’s scrambling his way up William hears his voice:

  “Where’s the fucking rum?”

  The gaps in the crew are filled with what remains of another shattered crew. They are given rum, and coffee, and biscuits. They are given new orders. To head back for the shore, to retrieve the wounded, to begin the evacuation.

  The dead have been laid in a tideline across the beach.

  From inland come the whizz and thump of artillery, and the whistle of shrapnel. The barrage is constant and huge and it makes the air shudder.

  The boat approaches the jetty: a snaking raft of lashed-together pontoons, thick with wounded soldiers. They look like one great long straggling creature: a green-grey, bloodied, sullen thing, unsteady on its feet, hunched under the noise of battle. As William’s cutter comes alongside and moors up, the creature gathers itself together, presses forward. Then men spill out from its flank, like maggots bursting from a skin.

  Bloodied bandages, a sling, a man limping along with his arm around a fellow’s neck, another carried on a stretcher. They step down into the boat, settle in whatever space they find. A sergeant with half his head covered in field dressings picks his way between the bodies and takes his seat near the prow. William finds himself searching faces, wondering if he landed any of these men earlier. But all he has to go on are the pale ovals in the morning dark, the sound of their breathing. There’s no way of knowing.

  Stretcher-bearers set a lad down just near him. The boy lies there, his blue eyes open, his head bandaged. The dressings are dark and wet with blood. There’s a pimple on his chin. It’s this, an angry Vesuvius of a pimple, which makes William’s chest tighten so that he can hardly breathe. It could be the lad from Spiteri’s, who fancied that whore, that woman, and the memory is vague with drink and sharp in moments and makes him flinch inwardly. That postcard, written, addressed, stamped, unsent. It’s in his sea-chest, slipped into the gap between his folded clothes and its battered tin flank. There was the garden, he remembers, and before that, the cathedral. His thoughts loop back to the picture: the soldiers, the prisoners, the executioner, the blood in the dust, the woman standing, waiting, to carry the severed head away.

  The boy’s head rolls a little as the boat sways. William wants to say something, to offer some comfort, but can’t think of anything.

  They pull away, low and heavy in the water. The boy blinks every so often; he looks puzzled. He doesn’t make a sound. He doesn’t look like he’s in much pain: he just frowns up at the bright Mediterranean sky, as if he can’t quite remember something. William’s mouth is dry, and he’s short of breath.

  “Where you from?” William asks, but either the boy doesn’t hear him, or he can’t. William remembers, from the action at Ostend, that the shelling can blow out their eardrums. All they can hear is a muffled roar, the sound of their own blood.

  The boat heaves out into the clear water, heading back towards the grey shapes of the battleships. The sounds of gunfire fade over the distance. Close to, there’s the creak of the oars, the grunt of tired rowing, and the moans and whimpers and the hard breathing of the wounded.

  Then somebody laughs.

  William blinks up, looks round. Just catches other men looking round too, or men so deep in their own pain that they can’t register anything else. Then William spots him. A private, sitting near the stern, facing towards William. He’s shaking with laughter. His cap is hanging low over his eyes, his mouth is open, and his face in a spasm; the laughter is shaking him like a fever. His arm is wadded with field dressings, but he’s really laughing. William can’t make sense of it. Has he completely lost his marbles? And then he realises: it’s a Blighty wound. The lad knows he’s taken a lucky shot—been hit badly enough, but not too badly—and that he’ll be heading back. Shipped off to Malta, to the hospital like a temple on the golden cliffs. To be given tea and bread and milk and oranges.
To take the air on the clifftops, to sit in the cool whitewashed rooms, the sunlight through tall windows.

  One of the army officers snaps a command—Act the white man, son—and the laughter stops, but the quiet that follows is almost as bad.

  Down by William’s feet, the boy’s look has gone somehow blank. A long moment passes, but he does blink, slowly. William’s skin goes cold and numb, his face feels like a mask of wood. It’s like he could take his razor and cut deep into his cheeks and not feel a thing, not care a bit.

  They heave on through the water, all of the seamen moving in practised perfect unconscious rhythm, crawling back out towards the big ships, Goliath and her cruisers, some of the soldiers moaning, some quietly conferring, others sitting blank with shock, and others lying still and slowly slipping into darkness. William tries to just be his body; he tries not to think. He tries to live in just the movement of muscle and the effort and the rough surge and squeeze of air as he sucks in and heaves out breath, and not be in his head at all. He doesn’t notice the wounded boy’s last blink. When he looks back down again, the eyes have somehow silvered over.

  He mutters the old words, out of instinct.

  Our Father

  Who art in heaven

  But the words are faint and dry and carry no freight of love; they bring no comfort. They are alone, William thinks: they are insects crawling across the water’s skin. There is no afterwards. There’s just this.

  When they reach Goliath’s hulking keel, he wipes his wooden cheeks, and they are wet.

  HMS Goliath, off Cape Helles

  May 3, 1915

  WILLIAM LIES IN HIS HAMMOCK, his chest bare. He didn’t sleep last night; he can’t sleep today. They’ve sustained some damage, Goliath was hit by Turkish guns yesterday, and now it seems too risky to sleep. You don’t want to close your eyes in case you never open them again.

  He watches the bulge of Sully’s hammock writhe above him. Can’t get comfortable because of that ear. Sully’s on light duties for the time being, spared the heavy work of stoking; it’s left him itchy with unspent energy. From here and there around the mess comes the sound of low voices. Card games, conversations. The men are exhausted.

  William reaches round underneath his hammock, and into his sea-chest. He fumbles for his cigarettes. His fingertips catch instead on the corner of the unsent postcard. He pushes it further down inside the chest. But when he drags his cigarettes out, her letter comes too. He lifts it, turns the envelope round in his hands. Doesn’t need to open it or read it.

  when the war is over, and we have you home with us again.

  Even if he could somehow travel over all that space—sail all the way back out of the Med, along the coast of Spain, cross the Bay of Biscay and round into the Channel, plough up the Thames, moor up at Plantation Wharf, dodge down the alleyways between warehouses and walk the broad sweep of York Road, and off into the cobbled damp, and through the rows of narrow houses to Knox Road—he still wouldn’t have come home. It will never end, he knows: not while any of them are left alive. It will cling to them, like coal dust works its way into the clothes and hair and skin. When the war is over no longer seems to mean anything at all.

  Perhaps, he thinks, the child is born by now.

  He runs his fingertips over the tidy folds of the letter. He tries to think of the baby. Of what he will be like. But all he can bring to his imagination is one of those photographs of children who can’t sit still. Featureless, unfocused; a pale blur above a tiny sailor suit. He can’t make it come clear.

  Sully swings his head down over the side of the hammock. Winces as the blood floods into his wounded ear. He clocks the letter. William fumbles it guiltily into his pocket.

  “Smoke?” Sully asks.

  William nods.

  They sling on their rig, filch two cups of tea and find a nice spot behind a bulkhead where they can lurk unnoticed and unbothered for a while, protected from the breeze. They sit back, leaning against the warm grey steel. It’s sunny, and there is salt on the air, and a dusty, scrubby smell blows from the land, and there is the distant thump of artillery. Sully’s thin tongue flicks out and licks his lips, and William realises what Sully reminds him of. A lizard. Resting on a wall in Simonstown, the flicker of its tongue between dry lips, the only thing moving in the midday heat.

  Sully lets smoke drift from his lips and breathes it up into his nostril.

  William rests his palm on the deck. Below him, the ship hangs hollow in the deep water. He thinks of Amelia, waiting, back in Battersea, for a postcard to drop through the letterbox. The one he hasn’t sent, can’t send. Her letter, in his pocket, presses its edges into his skin.

  “You’ve been at sea a while, haven’t you?” William asks.

  “Ten years,” Sully says.

  “And you’ve seen the world?”

  “Pretty much.”

  William nods. The steam scrolls off his tea: the air is cool despite the sun. They both stare out across the water, to the shore.

  “Could you give it up?”

  “Give what up?”

  “After all this, after seeing what there is out there, could you settle down? Go home and just be there?”

  “I don’t know.” Sully bites at his lower lip. “No-one’s ever asked me to.”

  A moment passes. William studies the glowing tip of his cigarette.

  “She’s beautiful,” William says. “My wife is.”

  “Good for you.”

  “No, she is, really she is.”

  “Bloody hell, Hastings. Leave off, will you? We can’t all have your luck.”

  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.”

  “C
oming?”

  “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.

  HMS Goliath, Morto Bay

  May 12–13, 1915

  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.