The Undertow Read Online Free PDF Page A

They’re going to take his head clean off. Of course they are. They have to. It’s their job. He steps closer, peering. Even through the blur of drink he can almost feel the resistance of the flesh to the knife, the hot blood on the dust, the slackening, trailing limbs. He feels the queasy wait of the maidservant, and the fascinated jeering horror of the other prisoners. He sees the way the blood trickles out from its pool to spell out a name. He peers closer. A capital F., and then what looks like
Michel
. And then the blood just trails away.
    This is not a holy picture, William thinks. This is not a holy place. There’s too much dirt and dark and blood: this is all too human.
    He thinks, there’s no God, no guidance, no forgiveness here.
    From where he sits, in the Barrakka Gardens, he can see the fleet riding low and grey in the Grand Harbour. The shallows are pop-bottle blue, the deep harbour water is as blue as medicine bottles where it’s shadowed by the ships. In the afternoon heat, boys are swimming naked in the harbour, basking on the rocks.
    His head bangs. His mouth tastes of wine and Parma Violets and acid. His fingers still smell of her.
    He looks at the picture postcard. A hand-tinted photograph of the Grand Harbour, with inked-in blue sky and yellow stone. The old Crimean hospital in the background. He’s already stamped it, addressed it. He just needs to write something now.
    He knows she’ll like it, though. It’s pretty.
    He licks the pencil’s lead.
    Thank you for your letter, which came in today’s bag. I am well, thank you, and
    Movement makes him glance up. A boy is splayed in the air, like a frog in mid-leap. He crashes into the blue water between the
Beagle
and the
Goliath
. The boy surfaces, shouts something in Maltese at his friends, hauls himself dripping out onto the rock and shakes the water from his hair. As though the ships are barely there. As though the fleet is just a drift of clouds, darkening the water for a time, and then gone.
    longing to see you, and the child
    I am glad to hear what you say of the offer of work
    The pencil leaves grey lines on the clean white. Acid rises up his throat.
    I thought you would like this picture. I am sitting now, looking out
    I promise you I will work six days a week with the hot wax and moulds and wicks and the stink, and on Sundays take a walk in the park, and watch the Thames roiling past on its way to the sea.
    over this particular spot. I think you would
    And once a week spend sixpence at the flicks, and maybe sometimes you’ll be persuaded to come too, and at night I’ll look up at the strip of sky above Knox Street, and you will lie still beside me, your face turned away.
    The world will be cold, narrow, will be shades of grey.
    find it quite beautiful
.
    Give all this up.
    Yours ever
    The wide blue distances, the scents and the cries of gulls and the new land on the horizon, and spindrift on the waves, and the cities peeling back from the blue harbours, full of everything, of possibility, of difference.
    William
    He tries to swallow it back, but his stomach heaves, and he stuffs the postcard into his pocket, staggers up from the bench, stumbles over to the low Barrakka wall, and vomits. Red wine and mashed pea-pastry and stomach acid wrench out of him, fall through the empty air, down a hundred feet and more, to crash onto the stones below.
    He wipes his mouth, wipes his eyes. He turns, and shambles away from the wall, and down the path, and out of the gardens, and back down towards the harbour, and his ship.

The Tows, off Y Beach, Gallipoli
April 25, 1915
    THE WATER PHOSPHORESCES as it ripples away from the keel. The sky is growing pale. He can see the dark lines of the other tows, the boats strung out behind the trawlers like beads. He can hear the trawlers’ muffled chug. He hopes the Turks can’t.
    He’s near the prow; there’s only Sully behind him. He can pick out the hunched figures of the other seamen, their oars tossed,