Salt

by Jeremy Page

  ‘So, what you two been up to?’ he says, a gossipy tone I’m not used to in his voice.

  ‘Not been watching us through the binoculars?’ Elsie replies, content to carry on in her mischievous vein. She’s taking him on, and both of them are enjoying it.

  Kipper’s undeterred. ‘Han’t been here for twenty years or more,’ he says, looking around him proprietorily, and Elsie’s straight back with well, that’s a great fat lie. How does she know that, I think?

  Kipper sits down and begins to tie an elaborate knot in a length of rope he’s brought with him. He grins while he’s doing it, knowing he’s impressing Elsie, and I wonder whether he’s seeing her or whether he’s remembering Lil’ Mardler, sitting in the same place, all those years ago. He ties five knots together and makes a crab out of them, then throws it to me in a casual, offhanded gesture, as though he’s throwing me scraps.

  ‘Leave you to it,’ he says, suddenly getting up, quitting while he’s ahead.

  After that I was less keen to be on the Hansa. It was too visible and being there made Elsie behave that way. We started to walk on the Point, losing ourselves in its dry centre of mudflats, grasses and hot silent dunes. There, barefoot on the dream-scape of sand - so warm in the sun and cold in its shadow - I lay down while she poured fine white sand over my legs to see if she could build riges along them. She tutted when I moved and threatened to tickle my feet. There were rumours about us in Blakeney. I knew there were rumours. I saw it in the way the older lads looked at me, because they’d never looked at me before.

  I wish I didn’t have to mention the piece of paper I have, to this day, which still has a few last grains of white sand in it. The sand is there because I folded it, that day in the dunes, after I had written I love you on it. I remember watching a honeybee, filling the air with its soft buzz, brushing the grasses and bending them with its weight. Elsie’s body went tense when the bee landed on her hair, then she let it fly off. She spied the paper in my hand and demanded to read it. Reluctantly I gave it to her. She unfolded it and looked at it, knotting her brows to give it extra importance. Then she smiled and said she loved me too, and she always had. But I knew it wasn’t the same kind of love, and I wished I hadn’t written it.

  I have that piece of paper with me now because she gave it back.

  And yet if she hadn’t would it all have been different? Was this the moment where it all changed for ever - yes - I see the paper coming back to me, my words folded quietly inside it, and I remember the moment I took the paper and the sound of my terrible thin voice as it said her name. El and sie. Then louder, my Elsie, Elsie. And the look on her face - how her skin managed to redden and go white in the same instant, the tiny freckles which seemed to grow more defined like they were being stranded by a receding tide. And I saw clouds in her face too, the clouds which have blown above and through my family’s lives over the years as she tried to work out what was going on. I was speaking to her, and she put her hands on her ears as if she was a little girl again who doesn’t want to know.

  Eventually she took her hands away and I shut up.

  ‘You . . . little . . . shit!’ she said, then said shit! again. Then, with a touch of wonder, she said shit! once more, as if that’s all she could or wanted to say. ‘Since when?’

  It was one thing to be able to speak, but I’d never thought that it would be so strange to be listened to. This was a whole new world and I felt I’d made a great mistake.

  ‘Please, Elsie.’

  That night I couldn’t sleep, like on so many nights after it all blew up, after the three deaths, after the smoke which had begun in Kipper’s smokehouse had spread into all our lives. I lay in my bed listening to Goose’s snore on the other side of the room, staring through the window, as Hands had done so many years before me, contemplating the awesome dark shadow of the marsh and the glitter of moonlight on the high water of the Pit. I was haunted by the walk back through the dunes I’d had with Elsie. Kept returning to it in my thoughts. Our feet in the cold sand and a frightening chill between us.

  There’d been a full moon that night, and drifting across the sky was a series of flat, evenly shaped white clouds, dimly illuminated. They looked like sheets being hung out, being pulled along clotheslines to drip-dry over the marsh.

  Kipper had converted a room next to the smokehouse chimney into a laboratory of sorts, lined with shelves of powders, chemicals, mixing bowls, glassware, piping and boxes of fuses. People knew he made fireworks in his Lab and they thought he was crazy to make them next to the smokehouse. But Kipper knew it kept prying eyes away, which made sense for him, and besides, the chemicals and card would never get damp.

  Where my father’s study had been a dark place, smelling of tobacco, books, drying leaves and, increasingly, of his failure against the elm disease, the Lab had the bright sharp smell of acids and powders.

  Kipper is placing five such bottles in front of me, all with different-coloured lids.

  ‘Simple rule. Acid’s red, alkaline’s blue, brighter the colour, worse it gets. Only one colour open at any time. Ever open green make sure nothing else is open, apart from that window there. Same with black. White lids the only things you can touch with bare fingers, apart from that tin, which is full of biscuits. Here’s your tea. But don’t worry ’cause you’re never going to be in here when I ain’t.’

  He cuts some thick card tubing, about three inches. Moves chemicals off the shelves.

  ‘Always back where they come from.’ He spoons two powders into a mortar, places the card tube on the counter, bungs it, lets me pour the granules in.

  ‘Seen a lot of Elsie, haven’t you?’ he says casually. ‘Out on the wreck.’ The Lab had a row of windows facing north over the marsh, and across the Pit the Hansa floated like a mirage. There was a pair of binoculars on the windowsill.

  ‘Does she eat the limpets?’

  No, I wrote, says they taste of rust.

  ‘You eat them?’

  Roger does.

  ‘Get the runs he ain’t careful,’ he says, which makes me smile because Roger always stood with his legs crossed and sometimes he disappeared into the dunes for no reason at all.

  ‘Pack all that stuff down now,’ he says.

  I push the powder into the tube and press it in with a finger.

  ‘Real live wire, ain’t she?’ he says, forcing the subject. ‘Lot of lads got the hots for her down the Albatross.’

  I keep packing the powder.

  ‘When you’ve done with this rocket, you can give it to her if you like. What’s her favourite colour?’

  Red? I write.

  ‘Course,’ he says, reaching for some grey pellets. ‘Strontium salts, like autumn leaves. Best mix this with a touch of blue, you’ll see. Lot like painting, this.’ And he pours in more pellets then lets me stir them with a glass rod.

  ‘Copper sulphate - not too much, mind -’cause it’s a hot-head, that one.’

  Sunday was hot and airless, and then unexpectedly a sea-fret rolled in. The whole marsh went white and cold and damp and the air halved in temperature. Goose and I walked through it to Blakeney where a group of visitors in shorts were complaining about the weather, then beyond to Kipper’s smokehouse. In the fog we smelled the familiar whiff of fish before we saw it, and after that the smell of roasting lamb, thyme, onions and garlic. Goose looked severe. In the kitchen it was obvious she was out to corner Elsie. Her nose went in the oven and her finger went in the gravy. She prodded the potatoes on the tray and pressed the lamb with the flat of her knife to see the juice. And she was silent. Big praise. It took a lot to take the wind from the old girl’s sails. Kipper was in an odd mood. Since before the meal he’d been fussing around laying the long table in the dining room, and I thought his shoes had been polished. When he’d finally sat down, I saw him biting his nails, which was a thing I’d never seen him do before.

  The twins were the last to arrive, not exactly over the moon coming to their employer’s on a day off. They sto
od awkwardly in the study talking about rabbit traps they’d laid up in the oak copse. They looked too big for the room, standing below the light, bony-faced and heavy-limbed. The kind of lads who wear rough jackets and don’t feel the cold, even in crew-cuts. We’ll have rabbit next week, Elsie, they joked. And during the meal they kept asking for more because it made Elsie laugh every time they did, and when she cut more meat they grinned at something they’d clearly said to each other earlier. Outside, the fog glowed brightly through the windows, lighting the room with a harsh cold light as if fresh snow had fallen. A distinct light, which had once cast itself over my mother, sitting by the window during the winter before she’d died, sitting by the kitchen table quietly cupping her tea while the snow fell. Knowing her time had come.

  My uncle drank a lot of wine and kept filling Elsie’s glass too. She drank it enthusiastically and grew boisterous, implying the twins would get fat and then their cuddy would start to take on water. Both twins shifted in their seats to pull their stomachs in - that’s how I remember them best, doing things in unison, facing things blindly, reacting on instinct. Both had kept their jackets on. Looking back, I think I knew then that the twins would die together, and that I’d be there to witness it. How is that cuddy anyhow? my uncle says, trying to own the conversation. Comin’ on, Cliff says, comin’ on. Kipper lays his grey hands on the table palm down and begins to tell of an occasion when he was delivering to the hotel in Cley.

  ‘I come across this impromptu meeting in the lounge bar. Mickey Webb’s there, two of the coastguards, some bloke from Sheringham. I’m putting these trays of bloater pâté out the back and all I hear is them talking about you two and that boat of yours - ain’t seaworthy, they says, then one of the coastguards looks down at his pint and says I’m buggered if I’ll go out to pick ’em up when the time come - they ain’t got no right building a boat out of the wrecks of other boats - that ain’t right, and this guy from Sheringham says he’ll get the council on to it and Mickey says they ain’t got no power.’

  Elsie’s cheeks were becoming flushed and she wasn’t quite following the story. She said too loudly you’ll get me drunk! when her glass was filled, and then she cried out get me drunk! when it was empty again.

  ‘You tell ’em, Kipper!’ she yelled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Calm down, gal,’ Goose said.

  ‘Here, Elsie,’ my uncle interrupted, trying to control an unpredictable mood, ‘take your apron off.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve got a present for you.’

  ‘What about the story?’

  ‘What about the present?’

  ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘For nothing.’

  ‘Keep it.’

  And I saw Kipper felt trapped. Caught somewhere between wanting to act young, and knowing he wasn’t. It made his hand stay on the packet he’d placed on the table. His hand remained there and I knew he didn’t know what to do. Surely you only act like that when you’ve either got a lot to lose or something to hide? So what was at stake, with his polished shoes and his ironed twill shirt and his bitten fingernails?

  Eventually he slid the packet to her. Goose lit her pipe, deliberately puffing dry-lipped to make the embers glow, making a small sucking noise which only made the room seem quieter, and increasingly filling the air with smoke as if she wanted to fog the details of what might be going on.

  Elsie made the right noises when she found two silver seashell earrings in the box. For all the hard work, Kipper said, embarrassed they were too expensive for such a casual present. Lucky lass, Goose said, her eyes glinting with a metal darkness. Elsie made Kipper fix the earrings, pulling back her hair and lengthening the side of her neck. Sorry, ain’t good at this, he said after a while, his own neck reddening with the effort of it. Both twins looked on, staring at the bare skin of her neck and enjoying Kipper’s unease.

  ‘Done it,’ Kipper said.

  ‘That you have,’ Cliff said. ‘You certainly have.’

  ‘Kipper Langore,’ Goose said, ‘I should a sorted you out years ago.’

  Kipper took that well, his position at the party restored somewhat. He slid his chair back and leaned back with it, his chair, his house. That feel good it do, it really do.

  Goose walked a few paces behind me, deliberately, on the way back to Morston. She stopped several times on the path, twisting hawthorn twigs off the hedge and pushing them into her hair in a thoughtful manner. When we reached Lane End she said she should go back to that fen, as if that’s all there was to say. She sat on her bed and pushed her boots off with the end of her walking stick. Be with her father, poor soul’s lost his marbles. I don’t trust her and I don’t want her round hair.

  But I did. I wanted her on the Hansa, on the marsh, in her car, anywhere, just to be close. And when she was press-ganged at short notice into doing the yearly open-air theatre show at the Misfits, I gladly signed up too. The troupe’s leader was a bony square-shouldered young man called Lloyd, who infected everyone with boundless enthusiasm, loved to laugh and loved to muck in, often treading on toes because he spoke faster than he thought, and often literally treading on toes because he was amazingly clumsy. He drank from a mug with a broken handle, as if to remind himself to be more careful. Guiding this force of nature was his girlfriend, a pale, observant hippy from Norwich called Kat. She made thin roll-ups and seemed to move only as a last resort, and when she did it was with a sleepy long-armed grace, stretching or rotating her joints. She had a piece of driftwood hanging round her neck, like I hung my notebook.

  ‘Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth!’ Lloyd projected to a hall rather bigger than the Village Hall he was in, his band a reluctant group of waitresses stiff with embarrassment, myself, Roger with crossed arms and a creased brow, Elsie and the hotel’s car-park attendant, all of us there because we had to be. ‘Anyone read Midsummer Night’s Dream, then?’ he continued with a grin too wide for his face, knowing he’d win us over, and win us over he did.

  When it came to the performance, which also marked the end of the summer season, the hotel’s walled garden was decked with fairy lights. A small stage had been erected and the pond fenced off. Elsie was dressed in a thin cotton dress she’d made from a sheet with a wreath of laurel, pansies, sweet peas and lavender as a crown. She looked tall and beautiful and mysterious and she was loving being a queen, even backstage. Kat was trying to pull my donkey’s head over my own, and kept getting annoyed when I looked towards Elsie. Dumb ass, she whispered, affectionately, and pinched my arm to make me concentrate. Lloyd was drinking brandy from a bottle and doing a tongue-twister, and then, almost as if he’d walked the wrong way, he was unexpectedly on stage, addressing the audience, and the play had started. He on one side, and Kat on the other, taking turns to narrate the action, telling people to imagine the fragrant garden, the foolish players, the mischievous fairies.

  And then, dressed in my donkey’s head, I was on stage looking through papier-mâché eyeholes at Elsie lying asleep. Lloyd began to sing . . .

  ‘The ousel cock, so black of hue,

  With orange-tawny bill,

  The throstle with his note so true,

  The wren with little quill.’

  . . . and Titania was awakening, only it clearly wasn’t Titania but Elsie, my Elsie, with her bright red hair and her fawn-like face, gazing into my donkey eyes while a voice off stage, which must have been Kat’s, said, ‘On the first view, to say, to swear, I love thee.’ I love thee. And Elsie was guiding me across the grass and I was following her in a dream.

  ‘Lead him to my bower.’

  We sat on a seat made of dried flowers and lavender, and Elsie pulled me sleepily to her side. She put her hair across my chest and lay her head on my belly, and as she yawned and fell asleep Kat whispered:

  ‘So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle

  Gently entwist; the female ivy so

  Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.

  O! How I love
thee; how I dote on thee!’

  After the show the troupe went to the Albatross and someone bought me a pint. It was the first time I’d sat at the bar. I stared at the space above it where Arthur Quail’s map of the North Sea had once hung and thought of the story of Hands winning it in poker and then walking back to Goose’s cottage with it rolled up under his arm. Of the Dogger Bank joke he’d pulled on my grandmother, and of Lil’ Mardler, my mother, finding it years later.

  The beer tasted of soap, and nearly at the bottom I noticed Elsie wasn’t around.

  When Lloyd and Kat tried to get the whole bar singing a round, I slipped out, walking up the quiet road back to the hotel, still dressed in my donkey’s costume, though I held the head under my arm.

  The walled garden was empty and the hotel’s sheets had all been hung out to dry. White sheets against the night’s sky: the clouds I’d seen blowing across the marsh. So this was it.

  I sensed a movement. Then a splash. Someone was in the large pond, lying on their back in the water, staring up at the sky. It was Elsie. I crept closer and quickly realized her clothes were lying next to the edge where she’d taken them off. I didn’t know what to do. Elsie was there and she was stark naked, curved like a tusk of ivory against the dark water. She saw me, or I thought she saw me, because she twisted quickly, splashing like a fish as she grabbed for the side. Her head ducked below the brick edge, then all of a sudden she vaulted from the water, running dripping from the pool, not towards her clothes but towards the sheets.

  Then everything went quiet - had she seen me? Had she seen it was me? I stood by the pond and looked at her clothes. At the absolute nothingness of her costume, so flat and lifeless without Elsie. At the smudged outline her toes had worn in the leather of her sandals.