The Undertow by Jo Baker

Author:Jo Baker [Baker, Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical
ISBN: 0307957098
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Denham Crescent, Mitcham

August 3, 1947

HE LIBERATED THE PIECES from the factory. Three short strips of light pine, tucked into a trouser pocket, then slipped into his bait box. Waste wood from the Houseproud frames. You have to go slowly, bit by bit. The screws too, and the glue—the glue scraped into an old fishpaste jar, glob after glob, every day for a fortnight, so they wouldn’t notice the difference in the gluepot.

He cut and shaped the pieces and screwed and glued them into a rough triangle. You’d almost think it was one solid block. Then he set to with a chisel, and then sandpaper—a scrap of wadded sandpaper that had gone soft as leather and kept filling up with wood dust and had to be thwacked against the worktop edge to clear it. Now he holds the wooden shape in his palms: a perfectly proportioned saddle, scaled down for the small bottom of his two-year-old son, to fit onto the crossbar of Billy’s bike.

He layers it with flannel, then gabardine, off-cuts from Ruby’s sewing box. He presses the wadded surface of the saddle. It has a little give in it. He holds it up to the light and turns it round. Sunlight catches on the surface of the gabardine, glints on the tacks. He runs his thumb over the nail-heads, checking for sharpnesses, snags. He thinks of what Alfie said, about a bike that looked like a bike but didn’t taste like one. This isn’t how you make saddles, not really, not with pine and glue and gabardine. But it looks like a saddle, at least: it’ll work like one, and that’s the best that you can hope for nowadays.

He’s magpied a few bits of plumbers’ fittings from a bomb site, uses them to fit the saddle to the crossbar of his Butler, judging the distance by eye. He tests it, twisting and leaning the small saddle in one direction, then another. He fits the screwdriver back into place and gives it another couple of turns, checks again, then leans the bike against the worktop and steps back.

The boy’s little feet will rest on the top of the forks, his small hands grip the centre of the handlebars. Billy will hold the warm, breathing compactness of the boy safe between his arms.

He’d never expected this. The keenness of his love. The urgency of it.

Billy wheels the bike out of the garage, and through into the back garden. The light is softening. The garden smells of tomato plants. He can hear her in the kitchen, clinking something as she stirs, talking to the boy.

“Rube,” he calls. “Ruby?”

She comes to the open back door, and the little boy pushes past her legs, and comes doddering down the path towards him, grinning wetly, dribble dripping from his chin. Billy smiles instinctively, immediately, then glances up and catches Ruby watching the child. He looks down at the boy, his delighted, staggering run. She worries too much. There is nothing wrong with him. Billy leans the bike against the fence and crouches down to pick up the little boy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.