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that follows is almost as bad.
    Down by William’s feet, the boy’s look has gone somehow blank. Along moment passes, but he does blink, slowly. William’s skin goes cold and numb, his face feels like a mask of wood. It’s like he could take his razor and cut deep into his cheeks and not feel a thing, not care a bit.
    They heave on through the water, all of the seamen moving in practised perfect unconscious rhythm, crawling back out towards the big ships,
Goliath
and her cruisers, some of the soldiers moaning, some quietly conferring, others sitting blank with shock, and others lying still and slowly slipping into darkness. William tries to just be his body; he tries not to think. He tries to live in just the movement of muscle and the effort and the rough surge and squeeze of air as he sucks in and heaves out breath, and not be in his head at all. He doesn’t notice the wounded boy’s last blink. When he looks back down again, the eyes have somehow silvered over.
    He mutters the old words, out of instinct.
    Our Father
    Who art in heaven
    But the words are faint and dry and carry no freight of love; they bring no comfort. They are alone, William thinks: they are insects crawling across the water’s skin. There is no afterwards. There’s just this.
    When they reach
Goliath’
s hulking keel, he wipes his wooden cheeks, and they are wet.

HMS
Goliath
, off Cape Helles
May 3, 1915
    WILLIAM LIES IN HIS HAMMOCK , his chest bare. He didn’t sleep last night; he can’t sleep today. They’ve sustained some damage,
Goliath
was hit by Turkish guns yesterday, and now it seems too risky to sleep. You don’t want to close your eyes in case you never open them again.
    He watches the bulge of Sully’s hammock writhe above him. Can’t get comfortable because of that ear. Sully’s on light duties for the time being, spared the heavy work of stoking; it’s left him itchy with unspent energy. From here and there around the mess comes the sound of low voices. Card games, conversations. The men are exhausted.
    William reaches round underneath his hammock, and into his sea-chest. He fumbles for his cigarettes. His fingertips catch instead on the corner of the unsent postcard. He pushes it further down inside the chest. But when he drags his cigarettes out, her letter comes too. He lifts it, turns the envelope round in his hands. Doesn’t need to open it or read it.
    when the war is over, and we have you home with us again
.
    Even if he could somehow travel over all that space—sail all the way back out of the Med, along the coast of Spain, cross the Bay of Biscay and round into the Channel, plough up the Thames, moor up at Plantation Wharf, dodge down the alleyways between warehouses and walk the broad sweep of York Road, and off into the cobbled damp, and through the rows of narrow houses to Knox Road—he still wouldn’t have come home. It will never end, he knows: not while any of them are left alive. It will cling to them, like coal dust works its way into the clothes and hair and skin.
When the war is over
no longer seems to mean anything at all.
    Perhaps, he thinks, the child is born by now.
    He runs his fingertips over the tidy folds of the letter. He tries to think of the baby. Of what he will be like. But all he can bring to his imagination is one of those photographs of children who can’t sit still. Featureless, unfocused; a pale blur above a tiny sailor suit. He can’t make it come clear.
    Sully swings his head down over the side of the hammock. Winces as the blood floods into his wounded ear. He clocks the letter. William fumbles it guiltily into his pocket.
    “Smoke?” Sully asks.
    William nods.
    They sling on their rig, filch two cups of tea and find a nice spot behind a bulkhead where they can lurk unnoticed and unbothered for a while, protected from the breeze. They sit back, leaning against the warm grey steel. It’s sunny, and there is salt on the air, and a dusty, scrubby smell blows from the land, and