The Undertow by Jo Baker Page A

not a bad sort. Not half-mad with nerves like Mr. Hilling, not mean like Mr. Roberts, and he doesn’t smell of drink. When he picks the cane up from his desk and runs his hand down its length, his face is frowny, as though he can’t quite remember what he’s supposed to be doing, or if he isn’t entirely sure that it’s a good idea. Although it’s already half past nine, the day, outside the headmaster’s window, is pale grey, dawnish, as though it will never quite get light.
    “Right then,” the headmaster says. “Assume the position.”
    Billy turns back his cuffs. They are clean. He holds out his hands. There is dirt in the creases from the bike. He feels guilty about that. Tim’s hands are grey and long and bony, no flesh on them, and Billy wonders, would it hurt more or less for that?
    Then the headmaster brings the cane down, swish, on Tim Proctor’s narrow palms—one, and then the other. The hands are whisked back, tucked away.
    The headmaster moves past Tim, and comes to Billy. Billy watches his own hands tremble. The cane whips past his face, hits his left palm. Then the cane flicks past again, and hits the right.
    For a moment there is a kind of silence before the pain is felt, when it seems like it’ll be all right. But Billy knows that it is just a trick of the nerves, and then the pain when it comes a second later is just astonishing—hot and bright and loud. He tucks his hands up under his armpits and squeezes hard. He wants the velvet of Rosie’s nose, the cool metal of the bike. He wants the morning’s washing water that slipped through his fingers almost unnoticed, the same temperature as skin. His eyes bud with wet. Like a cough or sneeze will make your eyes wet; it’s not the same as crying.
    Amelia steps off the pavement to let Jonnie Clements past. He’s having a bad day, shaking so hard it’s a struggle for him just to put one foot in front of the other. He takes up the whole width of the pavement, one arm outstretched for balance, the other running along the front walls of the houses to keep him going straight. She says hello; she’s friendly with his sister. He seems to catch a glimpse of her through the nightmare, but she doesn’t really know if he’s nodding back, because his head is moving all the time anyway. He’s not himself any more, his sister says so, but anyone can see it. He left himself behind somewhere in France.
    She turns down Knox Road. The streetlamps are like dandelion clocks in the foggy dark. A man is making his way down the street ahead of her, through the haze of a streetlamp’s pale glow, and then gone into shadow; but she doesn’t pay him much attention, because she’s not really there herself. She’s in the old Electric Theatre on York Road, under the flickering grey light. William draws her glove off her hand, and strokes her skin with his calloused fingertips. She’s watching the woman with the beautiful clothes and the jealous husband, and Max Linder charming one and then the other. That last, lovely night before William left.
    Max Linder is dead. It feels like she knew him. If feels like a personal loss.
    The newspaper is folded tight and wedged between the cake box and the parcelled-up potatoes. But when she’d bought it, she’d stood there reading it in the street, like a man.
    Because now they’re saying he killed himself. That Max Linder tookhis own life, and persuaded his young wife to take hers along with him.
    The paper’s calling it a suicide pact.
    The basket bumps against her hip. She remembers the cakes: they’ll spoil. She lifts the handle from the crook of her arm and though it’s chillier like this now she’s no longer holding her own warmth around herself, she clasps the basket firmly, arms wrapped around its girth instead. Three more streetlamps and she’ll be home.
    He’d died before, of course, Max Linder had, during the war. She’d read about it at the time. And when he’d turned up wounded in a shell-hole in no