Salt

by Jeremy Page

  I settled back in the dark, remembering how the farm had slipped from view as I’d run down the drive. Such a sharp black night. No moon, and so many stars it seemed the lowest of them were hovering just a few feet above the soil, at a child’s reach. The sad little house had retreated quickly into the damp fields, a boat which had been sinking for years, and I smelled the ashes of burned elms, then saw their remains, piled and charred in the fields like the bones of large animals. The metallic tap of my shoes on the tarmac. A badger hobbling fast over a field’s sharp stubble. Noises in the hedgerows. Signposts stood with the eerie poise of scarecrows, pointing in all directions into the darkness. I’d felt like my father’s gyroscope; spinning, drifting, twisting, staying put. Each junction meant a new identity; each step a new resolve. It made no odds to me which direction I went, though, as long as it wasn’t back.

  I’d reached King’s Lynn some time after midnight. The sickly artificial glow of its streetlights replaced the crystal darkness of the country, an unwanted false dawn that made me feel exposed, a ten-year-old with a suitcase and no reason to be there. Questions would be asked. I’d stuck to the verges while trucks roared past, but increasingly the verges themselves felt tattered and poisoned as the road became an industrial area dominated by the brooding shape of the beet refinery and the long angular fences and supply roads that fed it. Once I’d been here with my mother, carrying two orange swedes in a string bag along the Dyke Road back to her car. Even though the road was bad the lorries used to take it at speed, and their crop cargo shook and bounced until various vegetables flew over the tailgate. It was easy pickings for us. Finding a swede in the verge half-caked in Lincolnshire mud and bruised from the fall was like finding some glorious nugget. The beet factory had always been the furthest point of our journeys in the Mary Magdalene. It squatted on the soft marsh like a defeated giant. Even at night the huge doors were still open and inside minute-looking forklift trucks moved to and fro in a flood of cold light, like hell was being stoked in there.

  Further along the bypass was a haulage depot and, next to it, an all-night truck stop. There was a smell of fat and burning eggs. Several trucks. Names on the lorries seemed like destinations at a train station: Derby Haulage, Worksop Machine Parts, Bromsgrove and International, Norfolk Line . . .

  Unexpectedly a car had pulled into the yard and I’d ducked from its headlamps. It stopped, a girl got out, stretched, and went to another door while the driver climbed across to the passenger seat. As it drove off I’d climbed the two metal rungs of a lorry’s cab in the same effortless way I’d seen men swing up the ladder of a combine. The door wasn’t locked. It was dark and silent in there, with stubbed-out cigarettes on the dashboard and air fresheners hanging from the sun-visors. A CB radio hung from the mirror. I’d hidden behind the driver’s seat and listened to the café across the yard. A single rough burst of laughter, a kitchen door slamming shut. I’d felt my heart racing and began to think of what I was doing, how this truck might hopefully take me to North Norfolk or how it might swing round in the car park and drive somewhere else. I’d thought of my father, drinking spirits in his room and shouting at Gull to shift off the bed. And the fields and trees beyond him and the smell of wet damp earth and the gentle crack of a branch splitting somewhere deep in the middle of a wood. Of the delicate sensations of safety and being alone, as a spreading tiredness and a feeling of being beyond reach was falling all around me . . .

  I woke again as the engine stopped and watched the man climbing out of the cab with a weary sigh. It was just before dawn. Farmer’s breakfast. A quiet street in a small town, with houses made of flint and the name Holt written in neat letters above a grocer’s awning. The man was ambling towards a door, pushing the hat back on his head and trying to tuck his shirt in. He knocked on the door and as he did so he cleaned his boots on the back of his trousers. A woman in a dressing gown appeared and immediately began kissing him with both her hands holding his large bearded face. He let out a big smothered laugh and pushed her into the house and shut the door.

  As the sun rose I was walking out of the town, crossing empty fields, the suitcase heavy with words from a life I’d left. Such a still landscape. Far away, rooks blew up from some trees, disturbing the air. Horses stood silently in the damp pasture of a field, all of them facing the rising sun, breath steaming from their nostrils. I stopped in some birch woods by a stream collecting in a series of pools. I washed and then drank some of the water, and sat for a while on the bank. A wood pigeon’s song echoed distantly - you . . . dir-ty . . . rott-er, you . . . dir-ty ... rott-er, as my mother used to say. Trees, fields, soil dusted with sand, birds flying lazily in the morning air. Eventually a heath where for miles all I could see was a low sea of heather and clumps of dark spiky gorse. I tucked an ash twig behind my ear to ward off adders. Wild lavender grew by the path, and I lay down in it till the sun was higher and I began to feel warm again. It felt like a magical land, deserted and full of a deep fragrant nature. And there, across the heath, were three isolated elms, healthy and forgotten by the disease.

  Late in the afternoon I came to the edge of the heath and stretching below me were the wide flat expanses of the North Norfolk saltmarshes. The creeks and pools of seawater glistening in a complicated labyrinth of patterns and beyond was the sea itself. Blue grey and fen-flat. Ships on the horizon, becoming lozenge-shaped as they passed each other. Small, delicate clouds were rolling in off the water, and I imagined my grandmother with her eye on them, sitting on some raised part of the marsh.

  There was an aviary on the heath, and as I walked past the cages I could see the birds sitting in them or flitting from perch to perch. Through the wire I saw an ancient moth-eaten Andean condor, which sat rocking in a cage, while sparrows hopped in and out through the wire. Someone was sweeping the floor next to the great bird. He saw me looking through the wire and said his problem is that he lives for ever. Them sparrows are dead in a few years, but this one’s got all the time in the world.

  The path off the heath led into a village called Salthouse, built on the edge of the marsh, where the front doors had sandbags against them ready for autumn tides. The churchyard had gravestones with skulls and crossbones on them, and a single gravestone outside the church wall with the inscription:

  He lived, And Died, By Suicide

  Along a raised footpath across the marsh, I passed pools of bulrushes and flocks of geese noisily feeding in the mud. Ducks and swans toiled across the pools while terns, gulls and lapwings flew above them purposefully. The whole scene felt electric with life. Cley next the Sea, then the River Glaven, and I thought of my mother telling me stories of Goose and the man Hands who became my grandfather. How this area had briefly united these two very strange people and how Goose had subsequently buried the whole landscape in a complicated fabric of stories, lies and mythologies until no one knew what was true any more.

  The sun was getting low in the sky as I reached Blakeney, colouring the bare flint walls of the town that rose from the marshes with a soft pink light. Beyond, the path curved once more on to the marshes, to the hamlet of Morston and the tiny shape of Goose’s cottage, Lane End, at its edge.

  Dozens of birds flew up in panic as I approached over the marsh, followed by a whooshing sound and a brittle crack, like the sound of a rifle. In the fading light there were two figures out there, letting off fireworks. The man was wearing some sort of heavy iron welding mask, and was releasing rockets at arm’s length with large gloves. The woman, a little way off, threw fireworks in the air where they exploded in sharp white puffs of smoke above her head. Each time one went off she leaped crazily before reaching into a bag to throw up more. Fireworks were shooting in all directions, sometimes skidding fast off the mud, or falling with sudden gasps of steam into the creeks. Around them, birds were running and falling through the grass and taking flight. The man was being more scientific than the woman, sometimes holding the rockets until he felt their strength before letting go. In contrast, the
woman was losing control, whirling in an explosive cloud of smoke lit up with the brief, neurotic flashes of gunpowder, like some unnatural dervish.

  But it was my uncle, taking off his iron mask, who first saw me as I walked up.

  ‘Goose! Goose!’ he shouted.

  Something exploded above my grandmother’s head before she too saw me, dirty and tired, standing a few feet away from them.

  ‘Whass this?’ she said. ‘Whass going on hair?’

  My uncle walked over to me and crouched down. His face was thick with sweat like an actor’s under hot stage lights.

  ‘Well, this is something.’

  Hurriedly Goose shoved him aside and was down at my level too.

  ‘Where’s your father?’ she said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘He’s run off, Goose. Ain’t you? Run off like a wild ’un.’

  ‘Shut up. Is that true? You’ve run off ?’

  I nodded cautiously, not sure how they’d take it, and both of them laughed.

  ‘Well done,’ Goose said, and Kipper ruffled my hair, the same way my father had done less than twenty-four hours ago. His switchblade razor still in my pocket.

  ‘Looks like you’ve got a night ahead of you,’ I heard my uncle say. ‘Does Shrimp know you’re here?’ he asked. I shook my head. ‘Right, well, we should let him know. He’ll worry. You understand?’

  Slowly, in an uncomfortable silence, they led me to Lane End while all around the birds began to settle.

  So there I was, standing in Goose’s cottage, miles from the Saints and my father, and all that my mother had said about it was true. The tiled floor in brick-red and black squares, the red ones worn down more than the black over the years. The heavily greased cooking range, the curtain she drew across the room to divide it. Her bed, sagging on the side she always slept on, the tin bath in the corner, and girdling the walls, higher than I thought it could possibly have been, the dirty brown tidemark of the 1953 flood.

  As with Hands’s first evening there, thirty-five years before me, she started to fill the tin bath. I was told to undress, and when I stood before her with my cold skinny body I held my breath so my chest wouldn’t look so narrow. She pinched my arm and felt my ribs and cursed my father.

  I soaked in the bath, watching my grandmother separate yolks from whites of half a dozen eggs. Birds cried across the marsh outside. I felt waves of tiredness as the heat filled my body, alongside a hazed notion that my grip on what was real had slipped. That I wasn’t really there, in the bath. That I was back in the cold barren shadows of the farmhouse, with my father somewhere near but totally distant, or that I’d slipped into a dream where I was half in my life, half in the story of Grandfather Hands, two generations before. Into the stories I’d been told so many times that they had become more safe and familiar and real than the last few months of my life. I was Hands - this is how he must have felt that first night on the saltmarsh. This is how it all began. If I can just start again here I’ll be able to tell where it all went wrong. Here in this bath I could float in some unattainable region of warmth where the events of the last twenty-four hours and the story of my grandfather could mix. Time had pulled elastically all around me, layering my new world with overlapping visions, and it was time which now seemed to stretch in wide, silent avenues over the dark countryside of Norfolk, taking me this way and that, linking scenes and stories into which I drifted. Somewhere in its centre I was there, in the bathtub above the candles, the straggly late-season samphire waiting by my side. Soft, fleshy samphire. Even to think the word was a conjuring of beauty. There, my grandmother separating the yolks from the whites. The muscle of the egg dripping down from the shell. And across the floor, the pale marble figure of Hands in the smoke-blackened bath, his dark leather boots lurking under the surface, a perplexed, amused look on his face. My grandmother, thinking of the suit hung up ready for the man who would some day fall into her life, separating eggs and picking seaweed from the stems of samphire. Hands, like his grandson so many years later, both of them thinking of the previous twenty-four hours and how they’d finally come to be in this strange, warm bath.

  Outside, the marsh stretched into the vast blackness of the North Norfolk night, like the endless quilt my grandmother had spun so many years before, so rich in textures. So full with meaning. How Hands had begun that quilt in the dark evenings of his first few months on the marsh. How his horizon-seeking eyes had been turned myopic by the tiny needle-and-thread of my grandmother’s design. I thought all was possible, even the sprightly breeze that had woken him during that fateful day in 1945, when he’d raised the quilt on the Pip, never to be seen again. And as I left Hands in the middle of the waves, I thought of the lorry man with the soft felt hat, driving somewhere through the darkness, returning to his lover, and the sound of his low singing voice and the sonorous lament of his sighs. His big fingers pulling the wheel. An adventure that only I knew about, already so far away. Of my uncle in his heavy iron welding-mask, the fireworks in his padded gloves beginning to spit a stream of soft red light; and the acrid smell of the smoke as gentle as fog across the marsh, my grandmother lost somewhere in its middle, howling like a banshee. I thought of the cool steel of my father’s razor, with its bone handle and insignia of a charging bull, folded in the pocket of my trousers on the floor. Of the long dark nights I’d spent in that house, both of us avoiding each other because that way neither of us had to think about my mother. Too much.

  As I drifted in and out of these scenes I listened to my grandmother, talking to herself, sometimes to me. I knew only fragments about this odd woman, with her big grey hair tied up on the back of her head. My mother said Goose had never cut her hair since Hands had left, but that’s nearly thirty-five years! It can’t be true. But it did look enormous, with all its historic pins keeping it in place. It’s just one of the fragments I knew about her. Fragments and unreliable stories. Somewhere across the marsh at his smokehouse my uncle would be phoning my father. The telephone would ring twenty or thirty times in the empty farmhouse. My father roused from a hangover, or standing in the centre of the yard, listening to the ringing phone, a pile of firewood across his arms. Or maybe he’d spent the day searching the country for me in his car, driving till the petrol ran out and slamming the steering wheel with frustration. I saw my uncle hunched over the telephone in his study, the receiver hugging the line of his cheek like a pirate’s beard, concentrated and gently mocking, describing a small boy walking over the marsh towards him ... carrying that tartan case, you know the one - ridiculous he looked, like someone who’d been shipwrecked . . . But all that is to come. Interrupting the phantom images comes the smell of hollandaise. First the vinegar, sharp and fruity, a smell of apples and onions. Then the warm gold smell of eggs, and I imagined being back in the shadowed calm of the chicken coop. The Rhode Island Red, looking at me from behind the nesting boxes. Never taking its eyes off me. The smell of dust and dried shit on the wood, then the wet taste of a charcoal pencil between my teeth as I cross-hatched the clouds I’d drawn on the ceiling. Then I smelled butter - the rich summery smell of a farmhouse kitchen - and I saw my mother slicing cooking butter with a warm knife. Her mother, pouring in a dark brown fish stock, bringing me back to the marsh where it all began.

  Suddenly the samphire was there, laid across two white plates next to the thick yellow hollandaise, then she was dragging the stems through the sauce and then pulling them between my teeth. Hands - how could you ever have left? Goose was telling me something important. There was trouble, she was saying, plenny of it. Maimed a boy with them fireworks. Stupid child, for sure, that one, but who knows. The short is he’s got ’em all against him, see. Cley and Blakeney an’ all. Burned his hands and he’s got this scar up his face like the light-en-in’ got him. Only ten, poor bugger. Goose took the plates away and cut me cheese to have with bread. Course they want their fire and they want them fireworks but not any of this. Can’t have it all ways. Won’t take his fish now, but that don�
�t stop him. He just keep on smokin’.

  She leaned back in her chair, out of the pool of light that came from a lamp above the table. Her eyes glinted like knapped flint. I imagined the creases in her face were filled with salt.

  ‘You like that plant, don’t you, boy?’ she said, satisfied.

  I was put in a bed in the corner, behind a small curtain screen. I opened my tartan suitcase and pulled out my mother’s dreamcatcher and leaned it against the windowpane. Beyond, the dark flat marsh stretched to a dismal horizon. Low grey clouds filled the sky like ships at anchor. I thought of Elsie. Of her red hair and the soft bronze strands of hair above her knees. Then I imagined my father, his eyes raw with lack of sleep, gripping the steering wheel, driving through the Norfolk night. And I felt his switchblade razor in my hand and knew that if he stepped foot in the cottage I would use it.

  13

  Ol’ Norse

  I dreamed of Ol’ Norse that night, climbing out of the North Sea, drip drip on the shore, a steely look in his eye. The stink from his rotten bones, the scaly skin, the squelch of his footsteps and his salted breath, which can wither a plant. Seaweed hanging from his shoulders. His ancient face, as stormy as winter, as craggy as flint. I sensed him prowling outside then standing with a hunter’s silence on the lawn, listening to the waves breaking on the Point, calling his return. I dreamed him first, then I wasn’t dreaming, and I was aware it was very dark, very dark indeed, and like a conjured genie there was Ol’ Norse himself, in the house, crossing the tiles, coming at me with a staff raised before him and I knew it wasn’t Ol’ Norse but my father, and the staff had the dull metal gleam of his Gallyon 12-bore.