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

him down on his feet when he was ten months old, a prodigy for standing and walking, never seen the like of it with such a tiny child. She’d set him down on the kitchen floor and turned her back to fetch his bread and milk, and when she turned round again she found him sitting on the tabletop, poking at the butter, having climbed up there from the seat of the chair: only ten months old, what a little marvel he was, just like his father, a busy, active man. Then she reminds herself of something, and takes her hands off his head, and goes to reach a little parcel down from the mantelshelf.
    “That’s for you, son.”
    She puts the small cardboard box down in front of him. He lifts it, tilts it. The thing inside rolls down the slope and hits the end of the box with a satisfying thunk. He knows what it is and a grin spreads across his face. He smiles up at her.
    “Thanks, Ma.”
    “Mother,” she says. “Go on.”
    He unpicks the end panel and lets the car slide out onto his palm. Racing green; a Jaguar, long-snouted as a lurcher; and with its little driver there, all gauntleted and goggled. The yellow-painted headlamps are tiny and perfect. Straight from Atkinsons’ window. He runs it across the tabletop. He picks it up and studies the ripples in the India rubber tyres, like the creases in tiny lips. The undercasing is unpainted lead.
    He reaches up to kiss her.
    “It’s smashing, Mother,” he says. “Thank you.”
    He traces it around the table one-handed as he finishes up his porridge, trying to swerve the car round his teacup as the soft grains and swirls of jam spread out between his tongue and the cave-roof of his mouth. The car’s axles are fixed, so it judders at the corners. He wonders if he could do anything about that. He picks at a screw with a thumbnail. He’ll have a bit of a tinker after school.
    The sound of the water hitting the enamel bowl makes him look up. He watches as she tops the bowl up with water from the kettle to take the chill off. She’s saying that he has to remember to stand up straight and say his please-and-thank-yous and she knows he’ll do all that, because he’s such a good boy, a wonderment.
    “Well,” she says. “Well. Come on then.”
    He scoops up his last spoonful of porridge, with its faint trace of sweetness. School dinner on Monday is liver and onions and potatoes and you can pick out the green bits and purple bits and black bits in the potatoes. And then plain cake for pudding. It’s good the way you feel full afterwards. He rolls his sleeves as he gets up from the table. Leaning over the bowl, he slaps the lukewarm water to his face, puffs and blows; she leans over him and scrubs at his neck with a wrung-out cloth.
    When he is washed and dried, she buttons up his jacket for him. She looks him over.
    “I’ll be good. I’ll do my best.”
    “I know you will,” she says. “My little man.” She does up his top button, tucks his canary muffler in around his neck, kisses him. He scoops the car up off the tabletop, slides it into his pocket.
    It is still dark. At the corner, under the lamp, Mr. Bell’s horse Rosie stands steaming between her shafts, the milk churns clustered cold and grey on the flatbed behind her.
    “Hello, my lovely.”
    Billy runs his hand along her flank as he comes up beside her, his knuckles bumping over her ribs, and she turns her head and looks round at him, blinks her great glossy eyes. The lovely warm smell of her huffing breath. He rubs at her jaw, and she blows with pleasure, great clouds of warm steam in the cold fog. He gives her a kiss and her nose is so soft and warm and alive, greyish-velvety, blotchy-pink, bristly.
    “Morning, Mr. Bell.”
    The dairyman clambers back up into the seat and offers him a lift, but Billy says no and thank you, that he’s off to Cheeseman’s, starting work today, and Mr. Bell asks after Freddy who used to do the deliveries, and Billy says he’s started work at Price’s, so—and Mr. Bell wishes