The Salt Marsh

by Clare Carson

  ‘No.’ Don’t be ridiculous, she wanted to say, but didn’t because she didn’t want to sound rude.

  ‘You’ve not been hanging out with any dubious people then?’

  ‘No. Only my sisters.’

  ‘They don’t count. Nobody else?’

  She wrestled around in her mind, was about to tell Harry about Luke’s disappearance, decided it was better not to. She didn’t want to confuse the issue by talking about the planned Dungeness protest, the contact at the power station. Didn’t want him to think there was any possibility she might have done anything to warrant a file. Harry interrupted her internal dialogue.

  ‘Does the name Dave Daley mean anything to you?’

  She jumped. ‘Dave?’

  ‘Yes, Dave Daley.’

  ‘He’s my housemate. Or he was. He’s gone to Skell for six months. Why?’

  ‘It’s probably nothing. Somebody mentioned his name, that’s all. He’s not a loony leftie like you then?’

  ‘Dave? God no. The only time he ever protests about anything is when the ref gives a yellow card to an Aston Villa player. He’s an environmental researcher. He knows people in Greenpeace but, to be honest, he tends to be a bit sniffy about campaigners. Amateurs, as far as he’s concerned, unless they have a PhD from Imperial.’

  ‘Well, as I said, somebody mentioned him. Nothing more.’

  Luke’s answerphone message played in her mind. Listen, there’s something else... Dave...

  Harry said, ‘I’ll see what I can find out.’

  She wanted him to say something more reassuring. He didn’t.

  ‘I’ll contact you one way or another when I’ve got something. In the meantime keep your head down till I know what’s what. Sit tight. I’ll sort it.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You’ve got my number. Bye for now. Oh, better to use a phone box next time.’

  Harry replaced the receiver abruptly and she realized she’d forgotten to ask him about the whistling, ‘The Third Man Theme’, check whether that was his call me signal. She thought about ringing him back, but didn’t want to aggravate him. It would have to wait until the next time they spoke. The whistler seemed like a minor worry right at that moment anyway compared to a file marked terrorist. I’ll sort it. She wasn’t sure whether she was relieved or alarmed to hear that phrase. I’ll sort it when uttered by an agent of the secret state usually meant you were already up to your neck in it. First Luke disappeared and now this, her file waiting to be added to a computerized terrorist list. What was her name doing on that pile? And what was all this about Dave? That had to be a mistake. Sit tight, Harry had said, but it didn’t feel like a viable option when she was being dragged sideways by hidden tides and crosscurrents. She lay down on the floor, miserable, limbs trembling with tension and exhaustion.

  She opened her eyes; her bones ached, the hallway had already darkened in the afternoon shadows. She must have slept there, on the damp boards, for hours. She gazed up at the cracked ceiling tiles; asbestos, Dave had said, invisible killer. Time bomb, ticking away inside. Not even aware you’ve inhaled the fibre until you wake up one morning thirty years later to discover your lungs are fucked and you’ve got six weeks left before you die. Thanks, Dave, for the interesting information. She coughed. Patted her chest. A snail inched past her nose, retracted its horns when she sighed. She pushed herself on to her hands and knees, crawled to the phone, dialled Luke’s number. Nobody picked up. She was like the snail, fumbling along the damp wainscot, no idea where she was going. She needed to recover herself, clear her head, walk along the river.

  *

  She stood on Vauxhall Bridge, the dusk air thick with city grime. Downstream, the eastern horizon of Docklands was crowded with cranes reaching heavenwards, as if searching for salvation. Behind, a ruddy sun was setting on the derelict cold store and the chimneys of Battersea power station. She fixed her eyes on the water running below and summoned her father. The first time she had seen Jim underneath Vauxhall Bridge was earlier that year. January. She was walking home late from the nightclub where she worked twice a week. A vast perigee moon hung over Westminster, the river little more than a mercury ribbon, sucked dry by the lunar pull. She glanced over the bridge and saw a figure standing among the rotting timbers, the remains of a Bronze Age jetty that marked the muddy foreshore. She knew instantly the figure was Jim, although she couldn’t be sure how she knew. She called out his name. He didn’t react. Still, she was certain it was him. She wasn’t scared, she wasn’t even surprised – she had half expected him to reappear. Where are you going? Over the hills and far away. Will you come back? I’ve always come back before, haven’t I? When she looked again, he had vanished. Death hadn’t changed the pattern.

  She watched a solitary waterman rowing with the current, oars dipping, pulling. Traffic growled over the bridge and a helicopter buzzed along the line of the river. Through the white noise she heard a mournful whistle, the familiar tune. She leaned over the railing, couldn’t see anything, hurtled down to Albert Embankment. The land below the bridge had been purchased by property developers and fenced, the gate padlocked, but there was a hole in the chainlink under Alembic House. She crawled through, around the scattered bricks, prostrate scaffold poles, down the slipway to the shore. The river flickered from lead to quicksilver as she descended to its level. There was no sign of Jim. She scanned the muddy banks. A trickling caught her attention; water running down a channel from a tunnel entrance in the embankment wall, invisible from the bridge. Sewage? She stumbled across the rocks, clambered on to the grey concrete lip, bilge water seeping into her shoes, waded up past greening timbers. The entrance was blocked by a vast portcullis sluice gate that looked like the mouth of hell, and above it a sign. River Effra run-off. She had always imagined the underground Effra to be a wild torrent flowing deep below the streets of south London. Not a crap-filled dribble. She pushed against the iron; it refused to budge. She squinted through the gaps, shadows danced along the tunnel wall, a rat crept through the rubbish. She hollered.

  ‘Jim.’

  Her voice echoed around the bricks. Jim... im... im. Then silence apart from the drip, drip, drip of water trickling. The wetness of her shoes made her look down. A line of footprints in the wallow trailed into the tunnel, as if somebody had managed to walk through the sluice gate. Jim was in there somewhere, hiding out in the rivers buried beneath London. She dismissed the idea. She shouldered the iron barricade again.

  *

  Definitely locked. And yet, there was the trail of footprints – somebody obviously had walked into the tunnel, somehow. She squatted, poked at the tangle of rotting vegetation, cans, plastic bags, matted hair entwined around the base of the sluice. A smooth grey object caught her attention. She yanked and nagged until it was free, carefully wiped away the slime and found a spiteful face grimacing at her from the belly of a ceramic pot, its neck sealed with a lump of cracked black wax. She shook the bottle gently; it rattled. She tipped it upside down without thinking, stuck her hand under the bottle’s mouth as the wax splintered, caught the falling objects. A puff of fetid mist filled her nostrils and a dribble of liquid passed through her fingers. She coughed, almost dropped the lot. What was that smell? Asparagus? Worse than that. Urine. She unfurled her fist and gingerly examined the bottle’s contents she had scrunched in her palm. A slither of what looked like bark and a roll of shrivelled brown felt. She spread the material with a finger; it was cut in the shape of a heart and had three dressmaker’s pins stuck through it. She reeled; there was something unnerving about the way these strange artefacts – bones, hair, bottles with peculiar contents – kept appearing at her feet; she was a field walker among the darkness. She poked the woody slither and thought of the green-haired woman she had met at the spring fair when she was eleven, the packet of bark shards she had pushed into Sam’s hand. Was it willow? The bark of the bitter withy, the tree of death and grief and weeping? She contemplated the bottle’s strange contents for a while, then pushed t
hem back into its belly. She was examining the gurning face again when she sensed somebody watching her. She looked up. A man in a parka holding a metal detector waved at her from the river’s edge; there were often treasure-seekers here when the tide was low.

  ‘What have you found?’ he shouted.

  ‘I’m not sure.’ She jumped down from the run-off channel, walked over to him, showed him the pot. His eyes gleamed.

  ‘That’s a nice one, very nice.’ He had an Indian accent. ‘Very well spotted. I’ve found one myself, but it was cracked.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A bellarmine. A witch’s bottle.’

  She twitched, nearly dropped the bottle. She had been right, she was an archaeologist of the occult. She tried to remember whether Daemonologie mentioned bellarmines; she didn’t think it did. King James was more interested in torture methods than the artefacts of magic.

  ‘It’s a protection against witchcraft, a counter-curse. People thought the river had mystical powers, so they chucked charms and counter-charms in the water. And then hundreds of years later they surface, appear in the mud.’ He eyed it enviously. ‘Where did you find it?’

  She pointed to the sluice gate.

  ‘The Effra run-off,’ he said. ‘The Vauxhall sluice, they’ve just finished building that. It’s supposed to provide extra drainage for the Effra, flood control. They’ll need that by the end of the summer with all the rain we’ve been having. They open the gate when the drains are full and let the water out into the river.’

  She pictured the footsteps leading along the chute.

  ‘So the sluice gate is usually locked?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘It’s not possible to get in?’

  ‘Oh, it’s easy to get in. There are hundreds of entrances. You just have to find a manhole. Most of them have access ladders.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘There’s a whole other world down there below London, the underground rivers, the drains and sewers. Some people say you can tell which manholes lead to the rivers by the gurgling they make. And the smell they give off. I’ve never been down there myself.’ His brown eyes swivelled back to the bellarmine. ‘You should take that to the Museum of London. It could be old. Seventeenth-century even. Although, people didn’t stop using them then, so it might be much more recent than that.’

  She thought of the green-haired stallholder again, wondered whether she was a user of bellarmines as well as a seller of herbal remedies.

  ‘I could take it if you want,’ he said.

  ‘No, it’s OK.’ She said it too quickly, curled her fingers around the bottle like Gollum clutching his precious. The treasure-seeker didn’t take offence.

  ‘As you like. It’s a lucky find. Very lucky.’ He paused. ‘Unless of course you tip the contents out and then you reverse the charm and curse yourself, and that would be very unlucky.’

  She giggled nervously, wiped her hand on her coat. ‘I wouldn’t do anything so stupid.’

  ‘I was only joking anyway, I don’t believe in all that witchcraft stuff myself.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  He nodded at the bellarmine. ‘Although there are plenty of people who do. There’s a lot of it about – irrational beliefs, fears and accusations. That’s why I come out here, to escape.’

  He replaced his headphones over his ears, trudged under the bridge, waving his metal detector in front of him, disappeared from view. She lifted the bottle to her face; the malicious bellarmine face leered back at her. Jesus, what had she done? She’d upended a bloody witch’s bottle, tipped its contents out, and reversed the charm. She was so stupid. Maybe if she handed it over to a museum, got rid of it, she could negate the curse, undo any damage. Somewhere deep inside, she knew that wasn’t going to work. Whoever had dropped it in her path – the River Effra, the maker of the footprints, a cunning woman – she was the finder, so she was the keeper. She had to deal with it; she couldn’t pass it on. She weighed the bottle in her hand as she slithered back across the shore, decided against taking it home because it smelled so rank, and left it at the top of the slipway above high tide mark, well hidden in a gutter. She would come back for it when she had decided how to deal with its peculiar contents.

  A trail of wet footprints followed her as she traipsed under the railway arches. She dialled Luke’s number as soon as she reached home. It rang. And rang. Then somebody picked up. Elation.

  ‘Hello.’

  Deflation. It was Spyder. Luke’s scumbag housemate. She met Spyder when she started working in the Soho nightclub the previous September. He worked in a club around the corner. Hate at first sight. Posh boy slumming it, small-time drug dealer, all-round git.

  ‘It’s Sam. Is Luke there?’

  ‘No. Ain’t he with you?’

  Ain’t. Seriously, who was he trying to kid with his mockney accent?

  ‘No. He isn’t with me.’

  ‘I wonder who he’s stayin’ with then.’

  Piss off, scumbag.

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘Friday night at the club. We both worked the shift.’

  ‘You didn’t see him Saturday morning?’

  ‘I told you that. Friday night. I stayed out after the club closed, he said he wanted to get home. I got home about five in the morning, crashed, woke up midday and he wasn’t there.’

  ‘Did he say anything to you about where he was going or what he was doing on Saturday?’

  ‘No. What’s all this about anyway? Has he left you?’

  ‘No. Thanks for your help.’

  ‘Pleasure, darlin’.’

  She jammed the receiver down, sat in the dark hall with her arms wrapped around her knees, listened for the gurgling of the Effra somewhere way below. She pictured the bellarmine, its pierced felt heart, the willow bark. She held her palm to her face – her skin still reeked of piss. She had upended the contents of the witch’s bottle, reversed the magic, flipped it from a blessing to a curse. She was turning everything she touched to shit.

  FIVE

  SHE WAS WOKEN in the early hours by the call of a vixen. The cries of nocturnal animals – the shriek of an owl, the scream of a fox – had an unnerving human edge. She went to the window, pulled back the curtain. Not one fox, but a pack of fifteen or twenty animals, weaving between parked cars and puddles like trained urban assassins. The creatures halted in unison and lifted their heads. A solitary howl set them running again, hunting unseen prey, some beast deadly enough to warrant a co-ordinated pack attack. The red stream flowed down the road, merged with the shadows. She returned to her bed, lay awake, thinking of Luke. Dave.

  She waited for the first pale light, ran down to the phone box – she was wary of using her own phone to call Dave, she didn’t want to reveal her plans to anybody who might be tapping her line. Dave was an insomniac, like her. Three a.m. was her witching hour, the time when she gave up on sleep, crept downstairs to make a cup of tea. Dave was often sitting at the kitchen table already, the glare of the bare bulb glinting off his bald patch, squinting through his John Lennon gold-rimmed NHS glasses, usually reading a journal article he had photocopied earlier in the college library. Three a.m. was the time they had found his mother, Astrid, floating face up in the Digbeth Branch Canal, under Love Lane Bridge. She was from Berlin, fourteen years old in 1945 when the Soviets invaded. Astrid had been raped by the Red Army, her mother too. They had survived, ended up in Birmingham. Astrid had met John Daley when he came over from Tipperary to find building work. They fell in love and had four children, the youngest of whom was Dave, and they seemed to be happy for a while, but the past caught up with her in the end.

  Early morning was the time Sam missed Dave most, since he had decamped to Skell. He answered the phone after two rings. He attempted to ask her how she was, but she launched straight into the disappearance of Luke, or at least the story she felt it was safe to relate. The plan to meet Luke at Dungeness, Luke’s message on the answerphone. She d
idn’t want to tell him about Harry and the file, not on the phone. She wasn’t sure how she was going to tell him about that anyway. She wasn’t coherent, jabbered on. Dave was dismissive.

  ‘He’s probably gone off for a couple of days to see a mate.’

  Difficult to convey the seriousness of the situation when she was self-censoring.

  ‘Yes, but what about the Greenpeace stuff?’

  She whispered, as if it would make any difference if somebody was eavesdropping.

  ‘The Greenpeace stuff? I wouldn’t worry about that. It’s not like, you know, you’re doing really dodgy stuff.’

  Condescending sod. As she had explained to Harry, Dave maintained what he saw as a professional relationship with environmental campaigners; he was happy to provide them with scientific advice, but he was not a protestor.

  ‘I know we’re not doing anything really dodgy. But it doesn’t mean to say that other people won’t interpret it as dodgy, does it?’

  Impatient tut from Dave at the other end of the line.

  ‘Listen. Can I drive up to Skell and talk?’

  ‘Of course you can. But Sam...’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take it easy on the road. You sound like you’re getting a bit...’

  ‘A bit what?’

  Hysterical. She silently dared him to say it. He didn’t.

  ‘Tired and stressed. Drive up here, we can talk everything through calmly and work it out.’

  ‘OK. I’ll be there this afternoon.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And Dave.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Thanks for being helpful.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. Anytime you want to dump your shit on me, Sam. It’s fine.’

  She ran home, eager to get on the road, fumbled with her key, pushed the door, the red light of the answering machine flashed. She pressed play. The cassette whirred, paused, a breath, the familiar tune and then somebody spoke. ‘Trust nobody.’ Was it Harry’s voice? Was there the hint of a Welsh accent? She rewound the tape, replayed. She couldn’t be sure it was Harry, but the message was unambiguous. Trust nobody. A clear warning. About whom?