The Undertow by Jo Baker Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    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 justperfect 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