The Undertow Read Free Page A

houses stand shuttered, silent, and as they make their way deeper into the city the silence begins to prickle into William’s skin, and makes him rub at the cropped hair on the back of his neck, and he falls quiet too.
    Something lands hard on his shoulder, making him jump, and it’s only when he touches it and brings his hand away wet that he realises that it’s water fallen from the dripping linen high above.
    He watches his step then, moves round the wet patches on the pavement. He becomes mesmerised by the progression of his boots over the flagstones, the way they keep taking him on and on, even though he’s not himself certain where he’s going, or that he wants to go there. Then, sudden and familiar, birdsong bubbles from a shuttered window. He looks up, looks round for the source of it.
    “You hear that?” he asks.
    “Yes.”
    “Is that a nightingale?”
    “Think so,” Dwyer says.
    “At this time of day?”
    “They blind the birds, to make them sing all day.”
    Sully tosses this information back over his shoulder as if it’s nothing. William rubs again at the back of his neck, trying to rub away a shudder. When he was a boy, back in Kent, there’d been nightingales in the fields behind the house. He’d lie awake at night, crammed in between his sleeping brothers, and listen to the birds sing.
    They wheel round into a cross street and three women are coming down the far side. He feels it in himself, sees it instantly in the other men, the way they register the women’s presence. Go quieter, watchful. The women come towards them, wrapped in dark Maltese capes, the hoods arched high with ribs of whalebone, shadowing the face, concealing even the shape of the head. Passing the open door of a Roman church, William catches a glimpse of candlelight, hears the mutter of mass, catches the smell of incense smoke. Then the women turn silently and drop into the church, leaving behind a scent in the air, smoky and sharp, with a shade of roses. Their passing makes him acutely aware of himself. Of the hair bristling from his upper lip and the sweat gathering in his armpits. He pushes his hands into his pockets. The coal dust never quite washes from the skin.
    They turn a corner in shadow and climb a flight of stone steps. The streets are busier here. Market girls pass, barefoot, carrying baskets of scarlet tomatoes and sheaves of green herbs on their shoulders, heads in determined profile. On the pavement, men in blue workclothes crouch to play dice. They glance up as the seamen pass, but then look back to their game, barely noticing.
    “There,” Sully nods.
    There’s a bar right up at the top of the street. It’s painted green; its windows are dark. Spiteri’s.
    “C’mon,” Sully says.
    They march on up towards it. Their footfalls echo back from the quiet buildings. They reach the door. William slows his pace, lets the others filter in ahead.
    “Watcher waiting for, Hastings?”
    “I’m not …” William says. “I’m going to …” He gestures out along the street, up ahead. See the city. Buy a postcard. Write home to my wife.
    Sully jerks his head at the dark doorway. “They sell postcards in here.”
    Of course they don’t. And up along the street there is a flight of stone steps, and a carriage clattering along the street above, and an archway that opens onto darkness, and a whole city just aching to be seen. But William can’t afford to put Sully’s back up. He steps up to the doorway of the bar. Sully grins.
    “I’ll just have the one.”
    “Course, son. Course.”
    It’s dark; it smells of dungy foreign cigarettes and old wine and spice. William’s heart lifts at the strangeness of it. Mr. Spiteri waddles over, arms open, pretending to remember Sully, happy to be introduced to the new hands, calling them his boys, ushering them across to a huddle of chairs round a circular table at the back. His apron is long and stained and his belly is as big and round as a horse’s. They order the