The Undertow by Jo Baker Read Free Book Online

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.”
    “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