Salt

by Jeremy Page

  ‘No it ain’t. You’re Lil’ Mardler, everyone knows that,’ the boy says, laughing out loud. Even the dreamy one smiles at that.

  ‘And you’re the boy they had to fish out the tree in the storm, ain’t you,’ she says. ‘Cryin’ like a baby, they said.’

  She’s drawn first blood. Good on you, Lil’, you used to give as good as you got.

  Talking of first blood, earlier that morning, Lil’ had been peeling potatoes over a bucket when she nicked herself badly with the knife. A thin line of blood had threaded into the water, turning it rust red. She’d thrown the knife in and run to the marsh, leaving Goose to finish the job and wonder what was going on with her daughter. Years had passed since Goose used to take Lil’ out each day to pick samphire, pushing her out in the pram, filling it up, making the young girl walk back when it was full. Now, they got on like cats in a cage. Goose consulted the clouds, didn’t like what they said, began to feel a growing sense of doom. She began to be suspicious of her daughter and this kind of thing with the spuds and the bucket was just the tip of it.

  Lil’ was preoccupied. She spent her days on the Hansa, watching from the wheelhouse as the brothers ate limpets and whelks, then more and more she sat nearer them, hearing them talk about the farm they lived on and how they’d leave it to rack and ruin one day. We ain’t going to fill the old bastard’s shoes. They were more interested in competing with each other than paying her much attention. In the mornings they’d swim across the Pit with knives between their teeth like a couple of pirates, in the same way Hands had done, seventeen years before. Then they’d throw stones, dive off the bow, race each other along the shore; all that boys’ stuff and it all seemed endless wasted energy.

  Shrimp was smaller than his brother, but was more easygoing. He had a broader back and a soft smile of puppy-fat above the waistband of his trunks. Light hair, and a face which seemed a little clumsy, all the features with their own edge of haphazardness. Said to look like his mother, though she’d died while they were so young neither of them remembered her. Shrimp put less effort into the throwing contests, but his stones went further. His older brother threw stones with a jarring action which changed style with each delivery, and though he chose his stones carefully, it made no difference. Shrimp’s stones kept falling further away.

  Knots were a different matter. Kipper excelled at them, had his own length of rope which he strung round his neck in the same way I’ve hung my notebook for most of my life, could tie a Spanish bowline with his eyes closed, or an armpit bight with three twists of his fingers. He once tied eight half-hitches to a masthead bend and crawled it across the deck like a crab, so my mother told me.

  After so many solitary years as a marshgirl, she must have enjoyed the company. The Langore brothers went to a school their great-uncle paid for, hadn’t been born in Blakeney, and so remained a little on the fringes themselves. Kipper hated the local kids, said they were mean and narrow-minded, that the boys were a bunch of women with tits in their shirts and nothing in their heads. He often got in fights, and had once pushed a boy on a bike off the edge of Blakeney Quay and gave no other reason than it was Saturday afternoon. It was about the best thing he could’ve said, because people kept their distance after that.

  ‘Your mum’s mad, ain’t she, Lil’?’ Kipper says. He often tried to goad her with these frank comments. ‘She listens to clouds, don’t she?’

  Right at that very moment, Goose was in Lane End, staring at a frog, which was crawling across her kitchen tiles. She screamed, and began shooing it out the door with a broom.

  On the Hansa, Lil’ is not impressed. She can deal with Kipper Langore.

  ‘We got a saying for it.’

  ‘Who’s we?’ he says, hardening his look.

  ‘You ain’t from Norfolk,’ she says, and makes out she’s happy to leave it at that.

  Kipper waits, knowing Lil’ is dying to tell him off, one way or the other. He’s mature enough to let the trouble come to him. Eventually she gives way.

  ‘It’s in the way it lean,’ she says.

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Thass it.’

  Lil’ is getting this feeling that once again he has the upper hand. She looks at Kipper and his brother on her wreck and she hates the way they’re sitting there, legs splayed out untidy and big and both of them not at all bothered about her.

  ‘So what’s it mean?’ Shrimp says, casually.

  ‘Well, it mean nothing,’ she says, and thinks how stupid she sounds, ‘it just mean the truth of something’s not in the way he speak or what he do, it’s in the way it lean, and this is Norfolk, everything lean one way or that. You got to think differently now, that’s all.’

  Kipper makes a pah sound and lies back on the deck, sucking a bit of samphire between his lips. The light’s bright and she can’t tell which face he seems to be wearing.

  Shrimp smiles warmly at Lil’. ‘Well, that made a hell of a lot of sense,’ he splutters and both boys start laughing and even Lil’ finds the whole thing funny and right then that’s when the notorious event happened, that’s when the herring gull dived out of nowhere with the force of a missile, diving at some glint of metal or glass on the wheelhouse roof and missing it badly and instead hitting Lil’ on the shoulder and head with its own dead weight and quickly it wasn’t a flying soaring gull any more but a creature of some kind, hanging off her hair with its wings caught up and stiff either side of her shoulder. Lil’ starts to scream and the gull strikes a free wing at her face and its beak darts open; it screams back at her - a loud kay-ow and a yah-yah-yah that pierces the air and both lads are there at the wheelhouse, not knowing what to do and standing with their hands out as if they’re going to catch something. It’s an eerie moment. Lil’ opens an eye gradually and the gull just hangs there, its talons in her hair, and the boys see her ear is starting to bleed. Her shoulder is covered in shit. The gull starts to pant and scares itself again, kicking her and stabbing its head fast at her arm, then it bites her shirt and pulls at it and the red bead at the end of its beak looks like blood. Lil’ tries to lift it but the gull starts off again shrieking, filling the wheelhouse with the flashes of its wings, they seem like blades in the air, while the full-throated yah-kah-eee it makes is ear-splitting and unearthly and it’s mixed with Lil’s own screaming now. Then another sound, a strange sound, and it’s Shrimp who’s making it - a quiet cawing. The gull becomes still and it turns to listen and as Shrimp steps into the wheelhouse the gull turns its head to look at him askance and it opens its beak and they see the sharp knife of its tongue inside. Shrimp keeps making this noise and the gull seems to relax, then Shrimp’s holding it by the legs and trying to free Lil’s hair, strand by strand. The gull hangs there, lifeless, letting Shrimp work, and then it starts to preen itself below the neck while Shrimp pulls it free. The herring gull hops clumsily into his hands and he holds it up and it doesn’t seem to know it’s free. Then unexpectedly it takes one lazy flap, glides out of Shrimp’s hands, and flies off across the Pit.

  She looks at Shrimp differently after that. What he did with the gull was extraordinary. It makes her wonder about him. At night, when Goose is asleep, Lil’ goes out and sits by Morston Creek, thinking about Shrimp and looking up at the brilliant Norfolk stars. Among them all, she tries to see Sputnik 2, still orbiting after four years. She spends a lot of time thinking about Laika up there in the satellite, in a tiny capsule with no food or water or any way of returning. She knows Laika’s dead but somehow, right there on the Norfolk saltmarsh, that dog is alive again, looking down on her in her patch of darkness, a cosmonaut’s hat on its head and heartbeat monitors on its side.

  The summer passes and the three of them spend their time fishing off the Hansa. Kipper and Shrimp, competing as always - but clearly they’ve both become interested in trying to land her, the girl between them. All three of them with bare legs dangling off the bow, staring down their lines, the only sound coming from Kipper’s habit of sucking air through stems
of samphire. The Langore brothers have identical rods and floats, they know about lines and hooks and bait, but it’s Lil’, with a look of pure satisfaction, who pulls in the first fish. It’s an angry thing, flapping and twisting on the end of her crabline. But when she reaches out to grab it Shrimp is there first, cutting her line and making the fish fall into the water. What did you do that for! she shouts, thinking he’s just as mean as his shapeshifting brother after all, and Shrimp just says it was a weever, a stingfish, it was going to sting you. He carries on looking at his float while Kipper looks at the two of them and he sees her hand reach up and gently touch Shrimp on his shoulder. Thanks, she whispers, and Kipper knows in this simplest of gestures that he’s lost.

  Walking back to Lane End with a bag of shopping, Goose approaches a hedgehog coming the other way. Middle of the day, on a path hardly wide enough for the two of them. The hedgehog shuffles towards her with the gait of an old tramp. She thinks of bad omens and stories of illness arriving in the form of wandering peasants dressed in rags, knocking on your door at night. While she’s thinking this the hedgehog keeps coming, determined and ill. When it’s almost under her feet she sees it’s blinded with lice crawling on every last spike of its body and over its face and into its eyes. She steps into the verge and the horror escalates, because she steps on a dead rabbit, releasing a cloud of flies rising as one horrid ball of wings. And she runs for it and then she realizes; she stops running and looks over the saltmarsh and thinks Lil’, oh no, it’s Lil’.

  But Lil’ is not at home, nor on the Hansa. She’s up at the Langores’ farm, sitting on top of the haybales in the barn. It’s dark and dusty and quiet in there, even though it’s the middle of the day and old man Langore’s down in the yard shouting orders. She can see the lower half of his legs and his boots through the open door. A vet’s there too, being as authoritative as he can; he should be used to farmers by now but old Langore’s got him riled. The vet keeps raising his voice and using scientific words. The two Langore brothers are in the yard also, trying to separate a cow from the herd; Lil’ can hear the cow’s hooves slipping on the concrete. The rest of the cows are stamping, the way horses do when they’re bothered. Ha! Kipper shouts Ha! Ha! And she hears the thwack of a stick against cowhide. Langore tries to bribe the vet and the vet says that’s it, that’s the last straw. Shoot that and with luck you won’t lose the herd. A heavy iron gate is clanked shut and the bolt slid, and then something moves near her and she thinks it’s a rat and she turns, scared, but instead of a rat she sees it’s Shrimp, wriggling through the gaps in the haybales, a wide grin on his face. Lil’ kicks loose hay at him and laughs and tries to shush him up when he spits out the hay from his mouth. He crawls right up to her and slaps her on the thigh likes she’s the cow in the yard and she makes a big fuss that that hurt then slaps him back and then they fight, her in her flannel shirt, him in his denim dungarees, she smells the cow on him and smelly stuff he’s put in his hair because he knew she’d be waiting up on the haystack; she smells a type of sweat she’s never smelled before. He pins her down and she giggles and coughs in the dust. She sees him in fragments, the way his hair’s trimmed round his ears, the softness round the corners of his mouth, the frayed top edge of his collar, a button stretching in its hole.

  Goose wakes one morning to hear Lil’ Mardler being sick in a bucket. Lil’ is trying to keep it quiet but has reached that point when to keep quiet seems an added burden not worth bothering about. Goose brings her a glass of water and sits next to her on the bed. She puts a hand on her daughter’s knee, but that’s something both of them feel uncomfortable with so Goose stands up and holds the curtain and at that moment she says something very odd. She closes her eyes and says locusts under her breath. What? Lil’ says, feeling wretched. Nothin’, Goose says, and pulls the curtains apart and there they are, out there above the saltmarsh, a swarm of hundreds of tiny clouds. In each one the insect shape can be seen.

  Goose has finally caught up with what’s going on. Water turning to blood, the frog on the tiles, lice on the hedgehog, flies on the rabbit . . . a series of biblical omens. She’s heard about the illness in the cattle on Langore’s farm and the boils breaking out on the sick cow’s legs, how it managed to hail in a thunderstorm a few weeks ago. Now the locusts, up there in the clouds, and she knows that it’s all leading up to an exodus and that she’s going to lose someone again, like she lost Hands stealing off in the Pip, and this time it’s going to be her own daughter and she starts to shout at Lil’. The shouting lasts all day. By the end of it the saltmarsh is in darkness and Goose is in Lane End surrounded by the broken crockery and upturned chairs of an all-day argument and Lil’s sitting in the passenger seat of a car, heading off for a new life with Shrimp Langore driving a car he’s borrowed. All she’s decided to take is her crabbing line. While she tries to unknot it in her lap she looks out of the car window at dark Norfolk. She wonders if she can see Laika up there in the sky, somewhere, lonely and forgotten about, forever in orbit with no food or water.

  6

  Dead, Vast and Middle

  A night without sleep, but a night before the depression took hold, before those nights when I’d watch her dreamily walk the length of the corridor, each step along a tightrope forming at her feet. A pale nightdress swaying between the walls, the thin crease of concentration between her brows like a tiny scar. That first night she’d woken up standing on the back lawn. It sounded strange to her out there. No dripping of water in the saltmarsh, no sound of waves curling along the Point a mile away. These were the sounds she’d always known, and maybe at sixteen she thought all the world might sound like Morston Marshes. But as she stood there in the dark, her crab line still knotted with the speed she’d stuffed it in her pocket, strange sounds and scents drifted up from the gloomy country below. Sounds of cars slipping through the dark, of a distant growl of machinery. And somewhere quite near, she felt the presence of a large body of water moving slowly in the night. She must have assumed a tide was rising. Some time before dawn she’d watched a light moving smoothly across the land in front of her and realized it must be a boat on the sea, because the light was so level and moved through the darkness without any deviation. Another part of the coast, but for one thing. She couldn’t smell salt. This was an odd, dark sea in front of her, quite unlike the North Sea off Norfolk. It was a sea that smelled rotten.

  I wonder if she thought of her mother, of the rawness of anger that had inexplicably started on the marshes and finished here, on the lawn. Or perhaps she thought about the strange unwelcome farmhouse that was to be her home. How it smelled of a man’s smell, how damp and unloved it seemed. Did she look up at the window of the bedroom and think of Shrimp Langore in there, exhausted, nervous, feeling his own private sense of dislocation? Was he asleep or was he spending the first night afraid to put the light on, sitting in a chair perhaps, smoking a cigarette, looking at the wild geometric print on the curtains and waiting for dawn to shine through them?

  They’d explored the house by candlelight. It was a dreary place which had been rented to a single man for many years. The air was heavy and depressing and full of the man’s idleness. A bucket had been knocked over in the hall, leaving a long dry stain covering the carpet like blood. There were empty miniatures of Bell’s Whisky and Grand Marnier in one of the rooms, stored in cardboard boxes. Some empty gun cartridges in the bedroom. And on the kitchen table, a mug of cold tea stood next to a pile of crumbs and mice shit.

  Stretched out on the bed, exhausted, they’d listened to the candle guttering in the corner and foxes barking in the distance. The candle flickered a nervous unsettling light across the walls as they lay on the damp mattress, and when the candle had finally burned out in the early hours, my mother had woken up outside on the back lawn.

  Low, brooding outbuildings with impenetrably dark doorways faced the cottage from across the yard. Spilling out of one of these was a pile of poaching traps, left there like discarded jawbones. She stared at them f
or a while, and at the greater darkness beyond them, then felt her way round the sides of the house, and as she touched the walls she tensed, realizing she’d been expecting the soothing contours of flints, not the damp, foreign texture of bricks.

  I see her there clearly, on the lawn with a car blanket round her shoulders, quietly singing ‘The Foggy, Foggy Dew’:

  ‘. . . of the winter time, and of the summer too, And of the many, many times that I held her in my arms, Just to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew.’

  And as dawn approaches she sees a damp, misty landscape in front of her. At first the mist looks like the pea-souper banks of a North Norfolk sea-fret. Then, lifting through the mist, the solid mast of a ship turns out to be a tall brick chimney, several miles away. It’s leaning. Soon, more chimneys appear on low huddled houses, dotted across the land. She sees water, not in the labyrinthine pattern of the creeks on the Morston saltmarshes, but water in straight unnatural lines as far as she can see. And the last thing to lift from the mist is at the bottom of the slope beyond the house, perhaps two miles away; the long curling shape of a huge brown river, the one she’d felt moving in the night. The land is absolutely flat, relentless, mud brown and dull green; not the soft level of the marshes, but a rigid, carved geometry of lines, furrows, paths and roads. It is the Fens.

  As the pale globe of the sun rises over her shoulder, she hears the tap of Shrimp’s finger on the upstairs window. When he’s rubbed the condensation away with a squeak, she sees his grinning face in the cold morning light. Brave, now it’s the new day. She sees his long shadow approaching hers over the lawn, and then feels a mischievous poke in her ribs.