The Salt Marsh

by Clare Carson

  She walked into the kitchen, Harry’s question in her head. Does the name Dave Daley mean anything to you? She fiddled with a saucepan, water, coffee. The black sludge glugged, a geyser of erupting volcanic gases. Coffee brewed the Turkish way, as demonstrated by Luke, in memory of his late father. Strange how the bereaved and damaged found one another out, recognized each other in a crowded room. Negative attraction. Her, Dave, Luke. Luke’s father was English and Monika, his mother, was German – another reason he and Dave had bonded.

  *

  Monika came from Cologne; she had married Ben, an Englishman and a failed academic according to Luke. Ben thought he should have been a Professor of English Literature but didn’t quite make the grade. Shortly after Luke was born, Ben had become bitter and critical of everything European, including his wife. He left them to be something big with the British Council in Istanbul where he said he felt at home. Ben admired all things Turkish and claimed that Ottoman culture was far superior to anything Europe had to offer. Luke visited him in the summers and it was during one of these holidays that his father died of a heart attack. Luke had found the body but he couldn’t remember the details because he was only six at the time. His mother had filled the blanks in when he was older. All his memories of his father were echoes, he said, not real but retold stories. Luke’s Turkish coffee was another of these ripples, a small attempt to connect with his long dead, largely unknown father.

  She sipped the coffee and felt his skin touching hers, ached with his absence. She rubbed her damp eyes, walked back to the phone in the hallway, dialled his home number, counted the rings. Five. Nobody picked up. She couldn’t put the receiver down, just in case somebody was there. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. Still, she couldn’t let go. Not yet. She would hang on until he answered, until eternity. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Somebody picked up. Spyder.

  ‘Kinell.’ Kinell. The South London alphabet: K is for fucking hell. ‘Will you stop ringin’ the friggin’ phone. Who is it anyway?’

  Pause while she wondered whether she should say anything or replace the receiver without speaking.

  ‘It’s Sam.’

  ‘Oh, you. Might have guessed. He still ain’t here. So you can piss off and stop buggin me.’

  He slammed the receiver down.

  *

  Skell wasn’t much more than a hundred miles from Vauxhall, but all roads leaving London were slow. Heavy rain had left pools of standing water that fanned as the camper van ploughed through them. Single lane across East Anglia. She ignored her impatient tail of cars as she crawled through the regimented pines of Thetford Forest, past the RAF base, a black transporter plane coming in to land like a giant hornet. Dogged rain bombarded relentless cabbage fields. She didn’t spot the sea until she’d been looking at it for ten minutes because it had merged with the sky in a seamless grey blur. Off the main road, into the hawthorn-hedged lanes, over a humpback bridge, swifts diving for midges in the meadow beyond. Battered Land Rover behind. Skell’s dilapidated windmill sails marked the horizon; a reminder that the place had once been a port busy enough to have its own red-light alley, until the river inlet had silted up and left the harbourmaster’s house overlooking a saltmarsh. Stone terraced fishermen’s cottages, narrow flint passageways once bustling, now abandoned to the cold easterlies blasting in from the North Sea. Skell had the forlorn air of a cheated wife, unsure how long to hang on before she gave up hope and walked away.

  Sam parked her grime-caked van around the back of the village, water pouring down the run-offs at the side of the road. Through the puddled flint-walled lokes between the houses, sharp around a right-angled corner. A wild strawberry glowed like a ruby in the grass edging of the path. She stooped, plucked and dropped the tangy berry in her mouth, then spat it out when she saw a Labrador advancing, leg-cocking and spraying the verge as it moseyed along. The Barbour-wearing dog walker tweaked a stiff smile as she passed.

  The foxgloves in the walled garden behind Dave’s place drooped with the weight of the day’s deluge. She poked her hand through the wrought-iron gate in the wall, tried the latch. Locked. She made her way along the side of the house, peered through the kitchen window, light on. Dave must be home; he always switched the lights off when he left the house. She leaned to one side, trying to see if he was at the far end of the kitchen, but her line of sight was obscured by a palm cross propped against the pane. She rapped the glass with her knuckle. No reply. She walked almost to the end of the loke where the path joined the main street through the village, cut right across the paved front garden with its neat lavender and rosemary beds, and rang the doorbell. No answer. She rang again. Nothing. She stooped, pushed the letterbox open, peered, nothing, nobody. Her eyes watered, breath shallow, throat constricting.

  ‘Dave. Where the fuck are you?’

  Eventually his voice.

  ‘OK, OK, I’m coming. Give us a chance.’

  She watched him waddling towards her through the rectangle of the letterbox, and before he had a chance to reach the door, she shouted, ‘What were you doing?’

  He opened the door.

  ‘Having a crap. I didn’t realize I needed to clear it with you first.’

  ‘I thought something might have happened to you.’

  ‘God, you’re jumpy.’

  *

  They retreated to the kitchen; rusty-red flagstone floor, pine dresser displaying hand-thrown thick pottery mugs.

  ‘Look at all this.’ He waved his hand around the kitchen dismissively.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s so... so bourgeois.’

  ‘Better than the curling lino and stained Formica we have in Vauxhall.’

  ‘I’d rather be in Vauxhall.’

  ‘I’d rather you were too.’ She meant it, although even as she said it she heard Luke’s voice in her head – Listen, there’s something else... Dave – and a slither of something she didn’t like crept into her mind. Doubt. She brushed it away.

  Dave said, ‘It’s not like you to be so forthcoming with your affections. What’s wrong with you?’

  She was about to say, well, Luke’s gone missing, but silently reddened instead.

  ‘I know,’ Dave said. ‘Of course. You need a shoulder to cry on.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I understand.’

  He brewed her a cuppa – a Barry’s tea bag dunked in one of his precious Aston Villa mugs. He had two and he had taken them both with him when he moved to Skell. Loyalty to his beloved football team prevented him from drinking tea out of anything else, least of all a hand-thrown pottery cup. The kitchen had an Aga but Dave couldn’t quite cope with the extravagance of leaving it on the whole time in order to use it occasionally. He had acquired a range of electrical equipment to supplant its various functions: plug-in kettle, Morphy Richards toaster, Baby Belling cooker, single-bar heater. His collection of cheap domestic appliances and his tacky football mugs made him seem like an unwelcome refugee in this expensively rustic interior.

  ‘So, what’s the story?’ Dave asked.

  ‘Luke is in some kind of trouble because of the protest at the power station. He went down to meet this power station worker at Dungeness and then he disappeared.’

  Dave shook his head, tipped himself backwards on the dining chair, foot resting against a table leg, arms folded, eyeing her through his thick lenses.

  ‘A protest at a power station? Why would he be in trouble because of that? Why would anybody give a toss?’

  Dave was dismissive about politics, activism, conspiracy theories. So even if she did tell him about the file and MI5’s computer index he would probably scoff. His aversion to politics stemmed, she figured, from his Brummie Irish childhood. He remembered the carnage of the IRA’s pub bombings in 1974 and he experienced the backlash against anyone Irish afterwards. The events made him wary, not angry – more interested in physical chain reactions than political agitation for change.

  She said, ‘Well, you ca
n be cynical about it all, but look what happened to the Rainbow Warrior.’

  ‘Yes, but the Rainbow Warrior was a bit different from a couple of people waving a banner around in Dungeness. The Rainbow Warrior was a highly organized set-up. They were in New Zealand because they were planning to disrupt the French government’s nuclear weapons tests. The Rainbow Warrior was challenging the French state’s security apparatus. Which is why the French secret services blew it up. It was a real threat. You and Luke, I mean you are just asking a few people to come and join you at a bloody roadside and shout a few slogans. It’s a symbolic gesture. It wouldn’t be a threat to anybody.’

  She didn’t respond.

  ‘He’s probably gone off somewhere for a couple of days. As he said. To see a mate, I would guess.’ He dunked a chocolate Hobnob in his tea, swirled, removed the biscuit, sucked the soggy half. ‘Luke’s really got under your skin, hasn’t he. You can’t stop obsessing about him.’

  She scowled. Dave seemed to enjoy scratching at her relationship.

  ‘I’m just saying, that’s all,’ he said.

  ‘Just saying what?’

  ‘Just saying that he doesn’t have to ask your permission if he decides to head off somewhere by himself for a couple of days.’

  ‘He didn’t say he was heading off somewhere. He said something had come up. He sounded scared.’

  Dave reached for another biscuit.

  ‘Maybe he made it sound more dramatic because he was worried you would blow your top at him if he said he wanted to go off for a few days with his mates.’

  She took a slurp of her tea, examined the mug, beginning to feel she had made a mistake, driving up to Skell.

  Dave said, ‘OK. Let’s see if we can work this out. Was he in Dungeness when he called you on Saturday morning?’

  ‘He phoned me twice. The first phone call, the one I picked up at about nine on Saturday morning, was from Dungeness. He told me he was there early, waiting to meet this contact from the power station. The second phone call, which I think he made at about ten thirty, must have been after the meeting. I had already gone, so he left me a message.’ She replayed Luke’s words in her head, tried to make sense of them. ‘He said he had to go. He must have been about to drive off somewhere. There was background noise on the tape, wind and breakers I think. So I suppose he was still in Dungeness then.’

  A flicker of – what – concern, or doubt about her version of events perhaps, registered in Dave’s dark eyes darting around behind the lenses. What was he thinking? She’s deluded?

  *

  Or was he hiding something from her? Trust nobody. She dunked her biscuit, watched it disintegrate and sink to the bottom of the mug, tried to block the disquieting voices in her head.

  He pushed himself away from the table. ‘Let’s have something to eat, then go for a walk.’

  ‘You’ve got something cooking in the Aga then?’

  ‘Nope.’ He rummaged in a cupboard, produced a can of baked beans, tipped it in a saucepan, plonked it on the Belling.

  The sky was clearing behind them to the west, but it was still leaden overhead and coal-black in the east. Spitting rain hit her cheeks, the back end of the downpour. They crossed the high street – once the main harbour road – ducked under the arch by the old customs house, slithered along the muddy edges of an oily puddle, disturbed a toad, cut around the back of the windmill and climbed the steps to the coast path. She balanced on top of the stile, watched the waves of wind-flexed rushes. The mudflats, the saltpans and the tidal lagoons shimmered in the low evening sun, radiated yellow, and she thought of Chernobyl’s plume, the nuclear rain falling across the uplands.

  She jumped down from the stile, swished her hand through the damp stems.

  ‘What did you say about the dangers of radioactive contamination from the Chernobyl fallout?’ she asked.

  He pushed his glasses up his nose, surveyed the coastal plain.

  ‘Well, obviously there’s the immediate direct hit, and the north of Britain got some of that, although nowhere near as much as countries closer to the original source. Ukraine, Belarus, Germany and Sweden. But then there’s the secondary contamination with long-lived radionuclides like caesium 137. That happens through soil absorption, wash-off, bioaccumulation in plants and animals – the stuff we eat – that sort of thing.’

  ‘Comforting.’

  ‘You know my view. Levels of contamination in Britain are unlikely to be high enough to harm human health.’

  ‘Not even in the long term?’

  He shrugged. ‘Who cares about the long term? In the long term we’re all dead anyway.’

  ‘That’s a bit flippant.’

  ‘OK. Sorry. But the thing is, the long-term impacts of Chernobyl are not going to be anywhere near as bad as the long-term health and environmental impacts of straightforward air pollution – car fumes, industrial smog. I’m always amazed by the extent to which people turn a blind eye to the hazards they live with every day, because it’s too inconvenient to recognize them.’

  He pointed across the headland. ‘That’s the field centre where I work, beyond the dunes, at the end of Flaxby Point.’

  The distant building sat at the furthest edge of a beckoning finger of shingle and sand that curled round to form a bay on its inner side. The ocean was bluer here than the grey Channel at Dungeness, but it was the same longshore waves that coaxed the fringes of the land into these shifting, unreliable spits and marshes. A red-rimmed rainbow arched the sky, bright against the cloudbank, and dropped down on the roof of a solitary house. She pointed. ‘Look where the rainbow ends.’

  ‘Bane House.’

  ‘Does anybody live there?’

  ‘It’s deserted. I’ve seen people camping in it occasionally.’

  ‘Let’s walk over and see if it’s harbouring a crock of gold.’

  The drizzle eased, the rainbow evaporated, leaving the dusky sky and sea more amethyst than blue. A grey heron took off from an inlet as they approached, its landing gear still trailing. She felt at home in these ghost lands borrowed from the water, earthsea, inhabited only by smugglers and the fishermen who had travelled this coast for centuries. What was that phrase that Alastair had used? Den and strand. The fishermen from Dungeness had rights to land and dry their nets on these beaches, summer migrants to East Anglia returning south to Dungeness for the winter fishing. Dungeness. Her mind snapped back to Luke, his disappearance. She couldn’t stop thinking about him.

  ‘Is it possible Luke might have been given some information from this power station worker he met that’s put him in danger?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Safety problem? Maybe Dungeness is another Chernobyl waiting to happen.’

  ‘Well, there have always been questions about why anybody in their right mind would build a nuclear power station on a bed of shifting shingle in an area prone to flooding. But that’s hardly secret information.’

  ‘OK then. Could he have found out about some criminal activity?’

  ‘What sort of criminal activity?’

  ‘Dunno. Somebody stealing nuclear material.’

  ‘Why would anybody steal nuclear material?’

  ‘Build a bomb.’

  ‘That’s pretty far-fetched, even by your standards.’

  ‘But theoretically, is it possible?’

  ‘Theoretically, anything is possible.’

  ‘Jesus. You know what I mean. Is it possible, for example, that somebody could build a bomb with the waste material being transported from Dungeness to Sellafield?’

  He frowned. ‘I’m not an expert on nuclear weapons, but I’d say it certainly wouldn’t be easy.’

  ‘Yes, but possible?’

  She watched his face while she waited for him to answer and she sensed that her question had troubled him in some way she couldn’t fathom.

  ‘OK, if you want a sensible answer, let me think it through.’

  The wind strengthened as they approached the coast. A vee
of geese flew silently overhead. She moved closer to Dave so she could hear him speak.

  ‘So, well, nuclear bombs are usually made from plutonium. The fission process in a power plant produces plutonium. And, of course, the spent fuel rods do contain the products of the fission process.’

  ‘Bomb material?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Not easily. For a start, the plutonium produced by power plants is generally reactor grade, not the purer weapons grade. Which doesn’t mean reactor grade plutonium can’t be used to make a bomb – but I would imagine it’s extremely difficult to do. Those spent fuel rods are not exactly small. Any would-be bomb maker would have to magic away a piece of metal that weighed several tons, perform some kind of extraction process to obtain any fissionable material and then create a device that could set off the chain reaction for an explosion when and where you wanted it to happen. And you have to do all of this while protecting yourself from radiation. Otherwise you’re fried. Obviously it’s possible. But, personally, I think you would need some sort of state backing to steal nuclear material and turn it into a bomb. It’s a bit of an organizational nightmare. It would cost a fortune to put all of that in place.’

  She plucked a frond of sea lavender, wound the tough stem round her fingers. Dave revelled in being the rational scientist. He referred to himself as a northern chemist, even though he came from the Midlands. Political divide, not geographical, he maintained – anywhere north of Watford was off the radar as far as Westminster was concerned. Whatever. He wasn’t even a proper chemist. He was a biochemist. He twiddled his lip nervously, as if there was something eating him. She attempted to process what he was saying and not saying, winkle out the cause of his edginess. She said, ‘I still think the power station worker must have given Luke some information that has made him feel he might be targeted in some way.’

  He snapped, ‘Why does everybody assume there’s always some threat or conspiracy attached to anything to do with nuclear power? Why can’t people just look at the science?’