Salt

by Jeremy Page

  ‘. . . the boy has made a satisfactory recovery and it is expected he will receive no further treatment. John Langore, known locally as Kipper, released a statement yesterday saying how glad he is this business is now thankfully behind them. He wished the boy a speedy convalescence and urged all to make a fresh start. However, Marge Vickers, aunt to the injured boy, later added a note of caution. ‘‘Although Mr Langore appears to be without blame for this sad incident, he is still on the marsh making unregulated fireworks, and I would ask all mothers to think twice about letting their children wander near him.’’ ’

  Gideon’s trying not to be interested. Gossip’s an evil practice.

  ‘End of,’ Goose says, ‘he’s wriggled out, all right. Them Langore brothers always did. Mind - he were always the dark one.’

  Gideon sagely raises a finger with a simple hijack: ‘So we have Cain and we have Abel. Here, on the Norfolk coast.’

  It’s a platform for him to launch into what was obviously a familiar sermon, as he pulls out a half-finished scene of an old man and two young girls sitting in a Norfolk barn: ‘Not far from this humble house we have Lot and his two daughters. We can see them here, in the barn where the Deed happened. Mr Pugh was kind enough to read me the story from the pages of the Eastern Daily Press. Lovely daughters, apparently, but given to drink, and lonely too. And the old man, weakened in the head, I believe. But here is the barn where they got him drunk and I shall not tell you more but this is how it is.’

  Bryn takes the painting and frowns at it.

  ‘Is this before or after they get him in bed?’ he says.

  Ignoring him, Gideon reaches for another painting.

  ‘Here, on Yarmouth’s Pleasure Front we have Leufredus, rather an ill-natured saint it’s said, and next to him this tubby woman and her two overfed children . . . well, look, Leufredus has made them go bald after they poked fun at his own lack of hair. See here, the children can’t believe their own reflections in their toffee-apples.’ The painting has a SOLD sticker on its bottom-right corner.

  ‘Shouldn’t the old boy’s trousers be down at least?’ Bryn continues, still looking at the picture of Lot and his daughters.

  We drink herbal tea and Bramble eats digestives on the carpet. Gideon keeps looking at me with great sadness.

  ‘Ahh, silence. Such a . . . such a thing . . . Come with me,’ he says, and I follow him into a second room, which had once been a kitchen. Now, like the rest of the house, it’s cluttered with frames and canvases. There’s a smell of egg. Opened tins of varnish, gesso, acrylic washes, turps and linseed share the cooker with a saucepan in which he’s boiled his breakfast.

  As with the living room, saints and sinners peer from the frames in a variety of confrontations. Burning bushes and golden calves stand abstractly in fields or in the middle of roundabouts. An old man is being chased by seagulls, his pockets brimming with stolen carrots. In a tall painting leaning against the fridge is Moses himself, making his way between the parted waves of the Wash while seals and cod look on incredulously through the glassy walls of water on both sides. Moses with an easel on his back, a stout pair of waders and Gideon’s unmistakable white hair. Saints are being tortured in here; Gideon has graffitied some of the pictures with WHY DIDN’T YOU RUN? or SINS OF FLESH! in bright paints. In here, Lot has Gideon’s thin white beard and quizzical expression, being held down by daughters stripped of their clothes and drunk on wine, one pulling his trousers off while her sister pushes him into the straw and kisses him with a fleshy, puckered mouth.

  By this time Gideon has vanished between the canvases into a back lobby. I can hear him rummaging from the other side of the wall, muttering to himself and talking to the pictures with affectionate greetings. Ahh! Such a long time . . . Judas, you poor misguided rotter . . . wakey wakey, Lazarus, no point being in that cupboard . . . From the front room I hear Goose laughing with Bryn as he again sings his local tunes - Always a Dandy, this little Andy, he’ll be a naughty boy-oi!

  I feel trapped and hot and confused by a cluttered Norfolk I don’t understand.

  Gideon reappears with two small pictures painted on boards hinged in the middle. On the left, Mary Magdalene, sitting in a boat; on the right, St Lawrence.

  ‘This man,’ Gideon says, ‘protects against fire. When they were grilling him to death he said, ‘‘I’m done one side, best turn me over.’’ You’ll need them both, he says to me, kindly, giving me a glass of water.

  And as he leaves the room he whispers in my ear, ‘Remember, we all need a map to follow in life. Without a map we’ve got nowhere to go.’

  From the front room I hear Bryn singing ‘The Foggy, Foggy Dew’:

  ‘She sighed, she cried, she damn’d near died,

  She said: ‘‘What shall I do?’’

  So I hauled her into bed and I covered up her head,

  Just to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew.’

  There by the sink I gulp from the glass and look at the fog outside through a dirty window, partially seeing my mother there, dream-walking into the alley, a crease of concentration on her brow. She comes to the window. Always the worrier, she says, sadly, my little worried boy. She leans her dark head against the glass, wearily. You’ve brought us back home, Pip, me, your father and you. And something rises through her, bending her body and pulling her softly away from the window. Forever floating under the ice, she drifts away. I’m left with the rising sensation I’ve had all day. A certainty that something miraculous is about to happen, and then a hot dry feeling in my throat, a feeling of such burning urgent upset, and I lean to the window to stretch for a last glimpse of my mother and I hear the word muuh.

  For a second, I don’t know where it’s come from. And then I realize.

  I’ve spoken it.

  A Norfolk Miracle, brought about by the ceaseless choreography of tides, creeks, birds and salt. Rising in me and spreading across this landscape like my grandmother’s quilt, long past the point when I thought my lost voice and all its words had rotted away like dead leaves. Could they still be there, in me, after all these years, waiting to be spoken? Ohh . . . I wished my mother had heard. I wished she’d heard me speak so I could hear her say well done, my love, I knew it, I just knew it!

  But it’s too late for that. As my first winter there continued, my evenings were in the quietly creaking cottage of Lane End, virtually orphaned, thinking of the wide expanse of marshes outside, holding back the waves with nothing more than mud and grass, of the pure long sweep of the Point as it curved into the North Sea and the calm water of the Pit which it sheltered. How this landscape had turned men into dreamers: Hands with his carvings, Shrimp with his animals, Kipper with his fireworks, Bryn with the seals and Gideon with the paintings. All of those men, and not a father among them.

  ‘Lissen, boy,’ Goose said one evening, over a baked ham-and-artichoke pie, ‘I din’t want a tell you, but I seen your father’s car. On Kipper’s lawn. You want a make yourself scarce I’d unnerstand.’ Goose went over to the Thistle Dew, and as soon as she’d gone I cycled along the flood bank to Blakeney, which was shuttered up against the marshes and the night, with small barred windows glowing like fireplaces in the flint walls. I stopped in the High Street and listened to the sound a small coastal town makes, so utterly silent apart from a soft warm noise coming from the Albatross Inn. Somewhere up the street was the sound of water dripping from an overflow into a backyard it’ll never fill. A breeze stirring the weeds growing between houses and pavement - curtains behind windows moving in a draught. More draughty inside than out. And other sounds too, of cables snapping against the masts of boats on the quay, of gulls still in flight up there like the ghosts they are, reminding me of where I am and that this town and this place are right there with me, on the edge of things. Then the door of the pub opened and a lone man came out, lighting a cigarette between cupped hands and pulling his hood over like the faceless men of the mud creatures that day on Bedlam Fen, and I cycled on, past the quay, the car park a
nd along the road till the tarmac gave out and the marsh began again. I approached my uncle’s house and sheds, and in their centre, a black shape against a blacker sky, the chimney of his smokehouse. My father’s car, dull and unreflective, was parked outside.

  I left the bike in the rushes and crawled to the spot where the marsh became a rough lawn. I was close to the house and Kipper had no need for curtains. He was standing there, with my father, by a roaring fireplace, scoffing fish and chips from the newspaper in a room largely filled with smoke, and I saw my father blinking with it. Two tumblers of whisky sparkled on the mantelpiece with their own little fires.

  From inside the house I heard the sound of a laugh and the fainter sound of a clock chime eleven. At that, Kipper threw his remaining chips into the fire and called to another room. I heard the latch open behind the house, and a young lad with a crew-cut and a pissed-off expression walked across the lawn to the smokehouse. As he opened its door a thick grey pall curled out. He went inside. Then straight behind him, walking across the same line of the lawn, I watched transfixed as the same lad walked again to the smokehouse. Once more, he opened the door, the smoke came out, and he went inside. What was going on? And there, now, outside, my uncle was also standing on the lawn, leaning against one of the windowsills, calmly looking towards me. My father joined him and stood a little way off, staring at the ground. They didn’t speak. Then out of the smokehouse came two boys carrying fish strung up on four long pipes. A dozen herrings; identical twins.

  ‘Eel ain’t done,’ the first twin said, wiping smoke from his eyes with the sleeve of his smock. ‘More o’ this and the macks’ll be dry - ’

  ‘OK, Cliff, you’ve said your piece,’ Kipper said, cutting him short.

  The first twin, the one called Cliff, shrugged and looked to his brother. They had the same face all right, shadowed under the eyes and thin across the forehead. Cliff had the air of being the elder brother though. He stood with his leg forward and had draped his arm over the pipe like it was a rifle.

  ‘Pint?’ the other one asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Cliff said. ‘We’ll do the hocks in the morning.’

  ‘You crease me up, you do,’ Kipper said. ‘Off you go then.’

  The two lads grinned at each other and walked off towards Cley, leaving my father and uncle on the lawn. My father went to his car, searching for his keys in his dungarees pockets.

  ‘Had too much to drink, haven’t you?’ Kipper said.

  ‘You can stop that,’ my father replied, his cheeks flushed at a half-turn towards his brother. ‘You can’t speak to me like you do them twins.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Why don’t you just spit it out?’

  ‘Off you go, Shrimp.’

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ my father said, his back clearly tensing.

  My uncle leaned against the wall, apparently satisfied to have riled his brother.

  ‘All I’m saying,’ Kipper begins darkly, ‘is you lost one woman already. You gotta act responsibly.’

  My father went to his car shaking his head.

  ‘Face up to it, Shrimp.’

  ‘I said don’t call me that.’ And with that he drove off

  It was the run-up to Christmas. The pigs were being pickled in vats on Kipper’s lawn, the trout was in his smokehouse, and Norfolk was turning effortlessly from harvest to slaughter. Ducks flew off the ponds into an air spitting with leadshot, pheasants were snared in the hedges, geese strangled in farmers’ hands. In low factory sheds turkeys were rammed into crates by the thousand, loaded on to lorries and driven to meat processors. A time of year when Gideon cried each day for the shame of it, the sheer crime of all this killing. We’ve lost our way in life, we have no map.

  In the damp winter shadows of the Thistle Dew, Bryn carves a figure of Ol’ Norse from a beam of sea-defence groyne. His knife works at the hard wood, giving the old devil the wide snarling grin of a dogfish, cheeks covered in scales and bladderwrack for his hair. It’s become an obsession, the two of them in that tiny cramped room, spending the winter together, Bryn getting warm by chipping away at the wood, Ol’ Norse looking back, grinning at the folly of it like some hideous gargoyle. It’s a dance of death. In the larders of Norfolk the pheasants are hung for the meat to darken. The hocks on Kipper’s lawn are turned in their graves, drained, salted and finally smoked. And as the face of Ol’ Norse begins to emerge from the sea wood - a face of malign intent and utter mischief - the turkeys reach their end, clipped to a moving track, hung by their feet, because a turkey will fight and stamp till the bitter end but when it’s upside down it will enter that dream-state so close to death. And close to death they are, because the track moves with a gentle motion to a slaughter that is so simple, so devastating: a pair of pincers, which mechanically removes their heads. Below them a trench as large as a swimming pool fills with blood and is emptied on to the field each night. Someone has to shovel those heads up by the thousand, someone has to open the sluice and gaze at the bird blood as it drains away. The sodium lights of the factory reflect on the pool’s surface like a Norfolk sunset, a dark wide stain on the field outside where all this blood has returned, silently, to Norfolk’s heart.

  Left behind is a county scraped clear of its leaves, soil cracked bare by the frost, woods silent and haunted by their own loss of life. Bark, flint, chalk, all dead, all retreated into a relentless winter numbness. The north wind arrives, bringing with it the menacing scent of the sea, so wild and untamed, sweeping down, marshalling anyone brave enough to bundle themselves up in winter coats through the draughty alleyways of coastal towns. They turn up their collars and lean into it, into all it has to offer, then huddle themselves in places like the Albatross, nursing a pint and sharing their trauma, staring at the warm cosy glow behind the glass panes of the log burner. They complain, remembering other winters, then as the months go on the winter beats even complaint from them.

  By February the men have drunk their way through and there’s not much left to them. There’s salt on their skins. They’re fed up. They’ve forced themselves to survive but there’s still an ache out there, all round, the sky’s as tight as a drum with a frozenness they can’t quite reach, but which all of them know is reaching out for them.

  Then something relaxes. They count the coffin dodgers who’ve made it against the odds. The birds turn up from God-knows-where, oblivious and stupid in their routines.

  And whatever the weather, come rain, sleet and driving wind, I’m out on the marsh, running the flats of thrift, purslane, lavender and samphire, jumping the creeks, wading through the Pit to reach the Point. There, among the seas of marram and lyme, surrounded all round by water, I was able to speak. First I coughed up the sound I’d made in Gideon’s kitchen, then odd-throated noises like a dog’s growl, and slowly, one by one, I shaped the noises till I strung a gurgh and an ell into gull, and, soon after, a sea-ll, a p-it and, finally, a long-drawn-out hann-sa. A coarse noise emerging between dunes and reeds, neither male nor female nor seal nor bird. The very voice my grandmother said had haunted her on the Point all her life.

  I’d decided to keep my voice secret. If I started to speak, I’d end up at the local school. Once, and once only, I’d been taken there - Kipper’s idea - to see what would happen. He’s a tough ’un, Goose, see if he ain’t, he says. What happened was I sat at the back of the class, friendless, rubbing the tops of my shoes on the backs of my trousers and thinking the last time I’d been put in glossy polished shoes was for my mother’s funeral. The children turned to stare at me when the teacher wrote on the blackboard. I was just the latest generation to come out of a mad family to them. They spoke in unison when the teacher said How do we do? and then flocked to the door when a bell rang. The teacher made me write in the notebook hung round my neck, and then showed the class some of my drawings of birds and seals. Pufter! a girl said, and because she said that I was surrounded at lunchtime by four girls, all younger and bigger than me, who told me my mother was Lil’ Mardler,
who always told lies and then she killed herself.

  Yes, that’s what happened. Me watching their mean-lipped mouths chanting:

  ‘Marshy Mardler lost again

  Through the ice and down the drain.’

  Tough luck, Kipper. You’re going to learn the hard way about me. It takes more than a half-baked idea to change my ways. And your next idea wasn’t so great either, thinking you’d have a go at teaching me yourself, three days a week, like Cassie Crowe, that crayon-stealer who’d managed - against the odds - to teach me to write. Goose wasn’t happy, probably because education had never worked for her, and partly because she thought it’d be harder for her to unlearn the rubbish Kipper would fill my head with.

  On the first day she not only walked with me to his house, but sat in the living room while Kipper fussed with books and pens and arranged the right chair by a window which had good enough light but not too much of a view. Goose flattened her skirt across her knees and gazed at her hands as if they were an old pair of gardening gloves she was thinking of chucking. She crossed one foot behind the other. An oddly formal pose. Indoor spaces made her nervous. She knocked out her pipe on the fireplace and Kipper turned his smoky gaze on her, smiling and saying get out in those creeks where you belong, mud-woman. Don’t lissen to none of it, she said, on her way out. Then we watched her in the yard as she hauled open the smokehouse door and helped herself to a bloater, which she wrapped, still smoking, under her coat.

  ‘Bloody woman,’ Kipper said, his voice tight and not quite managing to be humorous. ‘I’ll tell you straight off,’ he added, ‘don’t you let me down. There’s plenty round here ready to string me up for stuff I have or haven’t done. Shrimp ain’t no use to no one, not you and not himself, so you’re up to me now.’ Laying down the law made him embarrassed. He picked a flint fossil off the mantelpiece, turned it over in his hands, placed it back, readjusted it to leave no sign of ever touching it. ‘Well that’s about it,’ he said, running out of steam. Then he left.