Read Online The Undertow by Jo Baker - Free Book Online Page A

corridor. The corridor leads on and on, sloping downwards. He swims deeper and deeper. He reaches a door, and heaves it open. Beyond, the space opens out into a cavern. In his dreams he is not afraid of water. In his dreams he can swim.
    He sees him, where he always is. A dark shape hanging in the water, the water clouded with soot.
    And this is the moment when it could all happen. This is the moment when change is possible. He could just grab him and swim hard. The two of them. If he can get him back to the surface, he will have a father, and his mother will be happy. And he will have saved him, the man who matters most in the whole world.
    He reaches out to take the arm—in his dream he can see his own hand reach out, pale in the darkness, and he knows what is coming next. He sees his fingers sink into the flesh as it gives like moss, cold and sodden. The corpse turns slowly in the water, turns to face him. Its eyes are black, empty sockets.
    Billy
    And then he can’t swim. The skill’s gone. Legs twisted in the water and then the thing reaches out for him. Its hand is white and spongy. Its touch will kill him. The hand lays itself on his chest, over his heart.
    Son
    He jumps awake, tangled in the sheets. She’s there, looking down at him, her hand resting on his chest. Mother. Billy struggles up from under her hand. She sits on the edge of his bed, her hair tied up in soft rags. He rubs the dream out of his eyes. He knows better than to mentionit to her. His father is a hero, that’s what she says. He died protecting them from bullies. Billy’s dreams of him should not be like this.
    “Good morning, Billy,” she says.
    “Morning.” The word comes out gluey with sleep.
    “Come on then, time to get up. Special day.”
    When she’s gone, he dresses in the dark, shivering, pulling on his drawers, shorts and shirt, and his sweater. Yesterday’s socks hold a glossy imprint of his toes. His boots are waiting downstairs in the scullery.
    In the kitchen it is stuffy-hot. The range is glossy with black-lead; she has stirred the fire up and boiled the kettle and made porridge. Sometimes there is sugar, sometimes salt. Today, because it is a special day, there is jam. A dark blob of it sinking into the centre of the bowl as he sits down at the table.
    “Thanks, Ma,” he says.
    “Mother,” she says.
    She leans down and offers her lips for a kiss. He stretches up and touches their soft coolness with the dry scratch of his own. Then she puts her arms around his neck and holds him and he waits until she’s finished, smelling her clean cool smell. When she lets go, he starts to pull the blob of jam apart with his spoon, teasing out the scrolls of plum skin that look like little quills.
    “Eat up,” she says. “I’ve had mine.”
    She gives him a pat, and then a rub of the hair, and then tidies it for him with her fingers as she watches him eat. She murmurs the kind of thing she always says, but with the added emphasis of the day: such a big boy now, starting his morning job, his very own delivery round before school, and who’d’ve thought it, all grown up, and how proud of him his father would have been. All that kind of thing. He concentrates on the spoon, on the careful portioning of jam to each mouthful.
    He doesn’t mind the hair-fussing, though from the way she pauses from time to time he knows she’s considering whether a bit of scurf might be a nit, and he hopes to God she won’t find any because that means a day stuck at home with his head wrapped up in paraffin and cloth, and his hair raked through a million times with that scratchy little comb because she won’t buy the powder from the chemist’s because then everyone will know that he’s got a dirty head. She’s telling him about when he was tiny, and he loves to hear about when he was tiny,it gives him that little bright coal in his chest, the sense of his own story weaving around other stories in the world. She tells him about the time she set