Salt

by Jeremy Page

  Snow had been falling for weeks, snow on snow on snow. On the first morning I’d made my snowman from it, and he’d grown lumpy under fresh falls and his carrot nose had turned black as wood with frostbite.

  Inside, I remember that chill. The chill of a house deep in the throes of winter. Sometimes a feeble breeze would stir and the ice would tinkle in the trees outside. Stove and fires burned all day long, but the wallpaper stayed damp and chilly to the touch. The snow reflected a harsh white light into all the rooms, making surfaces appear flat and cold. And there, by the kitchen table, her face like marble, sits my mother. A mug of tea cupped between her hands. She’s whistling a tune almost too quiet to hear.

  With the kitten gone, the rooms seemed more still than I’d ever known them. My father moved about the house like a caged animal, not raising his eyes to look at anyone, grunting the business of the day over a supper which he often heated up to eat by himself. Even my daily dough scupltures failed to have any effect on her. She’d hold them preciously, turn them softly in her hands and then put them back on the table and stare into mid-space. Each day I’d work and work at my sculptures to make ever more elaborate shapes, anxiously watching them rise in the oven to see if it might be the one that woke her from her dream. But none of them worked.

  I wasn’t there when it happened. I was at the estate, making one of the most complicated dough sculptures I’d ever attempted, with plaits, twists and glazes of egg yolk and sprinklings of poppy seed. I wasn’t there when it happened, but I knew when it happened. The exact moment.

  Her car was found parked on the middle of the bridge at Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalen. Pointing back towards the farm road. I was in the kitchen, by the warm stove, my hands raw with scooping snow off the railings outside, and now white and greasy with uncooked dough. But I saw her in my mind. I saw her getting out of the car and stepping into the deep snow that had fallen on to the road. I heard the crump of the snow as she walked to the railings of the bridge and looked distantly along the frozen ice of the Great Ouse Drain. This was the point where the Mary Magdalene had often lurched into the water, its planks covered with picnics and flasks of coffee and cordial. That same launching slope, once dazzlingly bright with summer flowers, now dark and icy, with the mud cut up and frozen. And she looks at the river which dissects the punishing flatness of the Fens, vanishing to a distant level, going nowhere. Hers is a gaze that has been passed down to her from her own father’s love of horizons.

  The dough pulls elastically between my fingers. And my mother steps on to the ice that covers the river. Below her, the mud and reeds are frozen in a twilight world of their own. Even the water itself seems sluggish and congealed between the stems. My mother steps cautiously till she stands in the middle of the river, the banks twenty feet away on either side. No one is about. Again, that incredible silence, across the ice, along the banks, in the fields. The entire Fens are one single object to her, with this solid, twenty-mile piece of ice shining like a dagger through it.

  She begins to walk, her feet scuffing the snow which has settled on the ice, walking in a straight line down the drain towards a horizon which is never going to get any closer. Occasionally the ice grows black and watery where a tired current’s churned it from below. The only sounds come from the pressure of her foot as the whole twenty-mile sheet of ice bends with her footsteps. Strange stretching noises as the ice bears her weight. Muffled squeaks like wood beginning to split.

  I reach into the oven and remove my golden dough sculpture and put it on a cold white plate. My fingers touch the chilled, smooth porcelain, and I watch the heat from the baked dough spread a breath of condensation around its base.

  There. I wasn’t there. A mile away from her parked car, twenty feet from either bank, the jagged shape of split ice. Shards of frozen river rising into the air where a small brown pool marks the end of a straight line of footprints. A mile of footprints. I’ve often thought about them. How long it takes to make them, how unwavering they were. How they melted into the river some time during the next day and there wasn’t anything to be done to stop that happening, because water holds on to nothing.

  Sometimes I hear that great crack as the ice gives way. I see the scything movement of broken ice slipping away from a sudden hole, and spreading like blood on to the ice is the dark, glassy water of the river.

  Her body was discovered near the bridge where she’d left the car. A mile back downriver, she had floated under the path of her footprints. That was the bridge where she’d climbed out of the small rowing boat in the arms of her newlywed husband, and half a mile downstream, the church where she’d been married. The church where she was also buried. Confetti and ice and footprints - the river’s taken it all away. And on the dark polished wood of the coffin I placed the elaborate shape of the dough sculpture I’d made to cure her marsh fever.

  Get in! my father says, his face close to mine. I’ve been led out of the church and there’s a raw wind blowing over the Fens. Get in! I don’t want to leave her in there. He’s pushing me towards a car and the few people walking out of the church have naturally formed a space around us. They’re all in black. Their faces look cold and grey with the stress, reddening with the wind. Goose is there, able to deal with the wind but clearly not the occasion. She’s in a cheap black coat and has brought a walking stick with her. She looks like an old American Indian, wise and smoky, bowed under a pressure only she can understand. She has a keen eye on my father and a tight grip on the stick, as if it’s about to be raised at him.

  ‘Whass your plan, George Langore?’ she says, the wind tearing at her words but not her determination. That’s beyond question. A hard edge of flint in all this watery landscape.

  I’ll get him home, my father says to the crowd, ignoring the black crow in its centre. She takes a step forward and my father seems to shrink as his grip on me tightens. I can see the redness of my wrist where he’s holding it. But I’m still not wanting to leave the church with that smooth coffin in its aisle. Goose hardens with another comment but is calmed when Kipper steps forward, as tall as an undertaker, impossibly upright and commanding. He gives a nod to my father - those Langore brothers at it again.

  Now my father has his arm round my shoulders and he’s dropped down to my height. He hasn’t shaved. He’s smiling oddly because people are watching but I see there’s a crazed look in his eye. He feels cornered by the occasion. All right, lad, he goes, let’s not make a scene. He’s been drinking all morning from a hip flask and the smell of the warm alcohol mixes with the cold air. Too late for a scene, I thought. You’re years too late.

  And I see Ethel Holbeach bundled up in her fen-coat lean forward when my father pushes me to the open car door. Mr Holbeach, holding her back with the thinnest of smiles.

  Then I’m in the car and I start kicking the dashboard and slamming my fist at the door and he’s driving me out of there as fast as he can. He swings off the church track on to the road and nearly hits a car and he shouts abuse out the window at the driver. Then he slews on to the verge and back on the road and that’s his mood, that’s it set for the rest of the day.

  Back at the house he slams all the doors and I slam mine and he shouts at me and at my mother and then he starts emptying her room, making a pile of her clothes and burning it in the late afternoon. So bitterly cold out there but my father’s just in a T-shirt because his blood’s so up.

  He gave up work. He didn’t sleep. In the night I could hear him pacing the corridor, descending the stairs, the click of his study door shutting tight. Gull, old and deaf, thumping the wall with his tail. Sometimes the phone might ring and its sound would charge the air with a strange unwelcome sense of urgency in a house so empty. Neither of us would pick it up. It might ring thirty or forty times before the relieving, overwhelming silence returned.

  I should be put in care, they said to him, just for a while, you understand, not too long but till you all get through. Various women were put forward as possible foster mothers. O
n one occasion I was taken to a farmhouse where two older children kicked me in my shins and a ruddy-faced girl said she’d drown me in grain. My father was called for.

  The carpets became soiled, the windows grimy, the air became thick and gloomy. Filigrees of damp grew up the plaster and spider’s webs wove their own grey fabric across curtains which were neither opened nor closed. Doors warped gently into their frames. In the evenings I watched television and practised my writing. Each day there’d be a power cut, the image on the television abruptly contracting with a fizz to a solitary, fading dot. I lit candles and continued with my letters.

  One by one the light bulbs blew and were never replaced, making the house ever darker, choosing to fade from view, a wounded spirit. In its place, nature took over, with slugs moving dreamily over the carpets and walls by night, their elaborate trails glistening by day, and snails huddled in brittle clusters on the kitchen cupboard doors. I realized it was the house itself, that damp little building in the field, which was asserting its right to change, to rot regardless of its occupants. That house, which had been foul and damp and unloved when my parents had first seen it - which had become clean and warm only as a passing veneer through my mother’s attempt to make it a home - had always only ever been one step away from ruin.

  Ten years old, I was living my life like an animal, orbiting my father. Was there a summer that year? I don’t remember. Autumn came and with it the leaves my mother had seen as buds were now falling in the yard, blowing into heaps and rotting on the ground. And threading through the air as the leaves fell, thin wisps of grey smoke, growing in volume, collecting around the sheds and dashing in low flurries across the yard.

  Soon the house smelled of it. The air became woody and foul. I pushed open my father’s bedroom door and found the room empty, clothes heaped on the floor, opened tins of peaches and beans on the table, two or three bottles of pills with their caps off and a collection of spirits. He’d been drinking for weeks, but the pills meant something new. I tried to read the strange names on the labels, but as I cleared the door some shape stirred on the bed and I spun round to see Gull snarling. The old working dog was lying on the bed, on his side, as heavy as a pig, faded and smelly, like an old coat. His eyes were milky with cataracts but the jaw wrinkled up with hate. I threw a tin of something at him and slammed the door behind me before rushing into the bathroom.

  He was on the lawn next to the overgrown vegetable patch with a dead hen hanging from his hand. It was the first time I’d seen him that day, and he looked stooped and severe. He was motionless, absorbed in watching the fire he’d set. The chicken coop. Long fingers of blue smoke blew from the gaps in the planks, and larger smoke balls rolled out from the hatch. As the heat grew he took a step back, but that was the only movement he made. I imagined my mural of clouds inside the coop - how they would come alive as the smoke grew, painting and smoke one and the same element, both sealed in wood. And I remembered crawling out of the hatch with dry chicken shit on my clothes and feathers in my hair and looking up and grinning at my mother, standing where I was standing now, waving at me through the bathroom window.

  The smoke plumed into a solid tumbling core and in a wild flurry of panic a chicken came through the hatch. It was the Rhode Island Red, the one which always hid behind the boxes. Its back and wing were on fire and it beat the ground - neck outstretched with pain and terror. My father stood, stunned, then hurriedly ran to the chicken and scuffed dirt at it with his boot and when that didn’t work he stamped on its wing and he stamped again and then he put his boot on the chicken’s back and pressed down firmly and for a long time with as much pressure as he could.

  After that, he squatted by its side, with the other chicken dropped a few feet away. He touched the back of the chicken’s neck, very softly, then put his hands up and buried his face in them.

  I sat on the edge of the cold bath and looked blankly at the basin. I smelled my father’s shaving soap and saw the line of his stubble stuck on the china like a tidemark. I thought about the pills in his room. The blade of the razor by the spikes of the shaving brush. The razor had a bone handle with a charging-bull insignia engraved into it. When the kitchen door opened downstairs I stood up and in one movement I was folding the blade of the razor into its bone handle and then I glimpsed my reflection in the basin mirror and I winked at it because for a moment I hadn’t recognized myself.

  I think he slept for much of the afternoon. I stayed in my room. Some time around five I went back to the bathroom and looked through the window. The coop was nothing but a charred shape in the dirt, a lightning strike in the lawn, with only the stoutest wooden studs burning like ingots in the centre. The burned hen still lay there, to the side of the ashes, but the other one had gone. Perhaps he was planning on eating it, like he had the others.

  I waited till dusk, and when I heard some stirring of movement coming from his room, I moved on to the landing, crouching at my end of it, concealed by its darkness.

  When he stepped out of his room and began to pull the door closed I was running fast and low at him. The razor was unhinged in my hand and I imagined it glinting like a sleek fish in some deep dark water and that would be all he’d see at first would be this strange gleaming flash of steel flying down the corridor before he realized that it was me, voicelessly lunging at him, and that we weren’t avoiding each other any more and that he’d have to raise his hands like he’d done earlier in the day but this time he’d have to be quick. And I smelled the alcohol on his breath or his clothes as I wriggled through the flailing shapes of his arms with the steel fish in front of my eyes now and pushing it forward and flashing it up and down till it seemed to be slower in the air and I knew that the shining blade was cutting on something and I came close to his head now and I saw his hair swinging oddly in front of me and I felt how intimate this action was and how I’d not been this close to him in months. It was utterly without sound. And now he was finding some deep strength somewhere beyond the hazy world of his drink and I was being picked up and flung against the wall, and I was winded and doubled by it but I was still at him and the beautiful fish was wriggling on the line in front of my eyes and I willed it forward and made it dance wildly and again it started to leap at his shirt and then higher and we began to fall down on to the carpet like a couple of drunk lovers and really we should be laughing and laughing at how ridiculous this all was and how we’d gone too far, but not yet far enough . . .

  Suddenly the door opened at the end of the corridor and my father stepped out of his room. He saw me at the top of the stairs. He pulled the door shut, took half a step towards me, stopped, then let out a warm quiet chuckle.

  Although it was now dark, the window at the end of the corridor was slightly lighter. He was little more than a silhouette.

  ‘What are you doing up? Can’t sleep?’ His words sounded unconvincing, playing a father’s role he’d long forgotten. The wind pressed up against the window outside and died away.

  ‘It can’t go on like this.’

  And with that he began to walk calmly down the corridor, drew level with me, and began to descend the stairs. Two or three steps down he stopped, turned, and ruffled my hair like a father should.

  I packed straight away: my mother’s American-Indian dreamcatcher, her recipe book, the shell she gave me so I’d always be able to hear the North Sea, the crabline she’d brought with her seventeen years before. The photo of Hands, the one of my parents on their wedding day. It all went in my tartan suitcase alongside my notebooks filled with all the words I’d never spoken.

  My father was nowhere to be found when I went downstairs. Quietly, in the virtual dark, I made myself a cup of tea and got together a meagre supper of hard cheese and stale bread. I ate it at the corner of the breakfast table, the sights and smells of my mother’s wonderful cooking so far away, in another world. It was difficult to eat the bread. My mouth was dry. I had to wash it down with gulps of tea. All the while I was tense with the effort of listening
out for my father, but I never heard him at all. For the first time I noticed the Gallyon & Sons shotgun was missing from its usual place by the corner of the dresser.

  Hurriedly, I picked up the tartan suitcase and opened the kitchen door. My last ever sight of that house was seeing crumbs of stale bread on the corner of the kitchen table and by their side the half-full mug of tea, already growing cold. The same sight that had greeted my parents when they’d entered that damp, neglected place all those years ago. The house had gone full circle. And I was leaving.

  12

  Fireworks

  Don’t you worry, nairly home, the lorry driver said in a broad Norfolk accent. It woke me up. The man was large and bearded with a soft cap pulled across his forehead. It had a blue jay’s feather tucked into the band. But the big man didn’t turn to look at me, or say anything more. We drove along the road and a little while later he reached for a tape and I heard the soft murmuring of country music. He sang in a quiet deep voice for the chorus, and every now and then he spoke out to no one in particular, about nothing in particular, but often saying the name Michele. His hands were large, but he held the steering wheel as if it was the brim of a hat, politely, between the tips of his fingers. The country breeds this kind of calmness and strength.