Salt

by Jeremy Page

  She was hiding somewhere between the washing lines. I followed her wet footprints along the brick path, and towards the end of the row I saw a deep indistinct shadow through one of the sheets. A breeze filled the material and Elsie’s silhouette moved with it, defining itself, then softly drifting away. I heard her breathing, and saw the shape of her hair as she turned, looking down the rows for me. Gradually I moved the sheet forward till the shadow of her became slender and dark. Swiftly the material went taut along the line of her thigh. The sheet stuck wetly to her skin, wrapping her leg as she turned. Then suddenly the shape of her other leg appeared, like the limb of a tree. She stayed like this for a while, with the cotton sticking to her legs and the points of her fingers pressing into the material in front of me. A game developing. Then her fingers curled into the palm of her hand, and slowly she took a step into the material, so that it stuck to the flat of her belly and the curves of her breasts. She pushed her face and hair even further into the fabric until they made their own relief, and as she did so, I pushed the sheet in between her breasts and felt their weight moving towards my fingers and my hand was trembling but I kept it there and then I lifted my other hand so I could touch her . . .

  What I remember next was the clothes pegs flying off the line as she ripped the sheet down, and there she was, staring defiantly, outrage and challenge in her eyes, holding the sheet against her like a matador.

  ‘The fuck are you doing?’ she said, angrily emphasizing each word. Her mouth shivered with a cold raw sneer. I stood, deflated, still dressed as a donkey, while she burned her gaze at me. Then, quite unexpectedly, she raised her hand and lifted my chin. The sneer was gone, the anger abating. ‘I’m sorry, Pip, you’re lovely and you’re just a boy,’ she said. ‘Keep away from me.’

  And then she was gone, walking across the grass wrapped up in her sheet, a blur of white against dark bushes, like the ghost of my mother, sleepwalking, never finding peace, finding me and holding me and then vanishing like vapour.

  So there I was, a donkey, ridiculed and being ridiculous, because that’s all a donkey can be. A stubborn mute ass who would never fit in.

  As I walked away from the washing lines I imagined I saw smoke, and I began to blink because my eyes were smarting. Then I smelled it. Not the greasy, fishy smoke of my uncle’s smokehouse, but the fragrant warmth of his pipe, and on the ground among the shadows its knocked-out embers, still glowing.

  16

  Four Gotes, Three Holes

  The bus seats had a herringbone pattern in the fabric and it unnerved me. It reminded me of the herringbone brickwork on my uncle’s smokehouse and the herringbone stitch I’d once glimpsed running along the hem of Elsie’s bra in the shadows of her armpit. That was in her bedroom in the house at Three Holes, and that was where the bus was taking me. It was February, six months after the night at the Misfits. Elsie had gone back to her parents in November and I’d heard nothing from her until her postcard in January.

  Through the autumn and early winter I’d continued going to Kipper’s smoky living room, sitting at the desk by the window, but he’d lost interest in my studies. Instead of planning lessons he’d spend most of his time in his Lab, preparing the rockets and bombs for Nor’ Sea Night. Soon I began to miss the small things he used to do, such as leaving fossil sea urchins or belemnites for me on my desk. We’d eat silent lunches of pork pie and chutney, roe on toast or rollmops and brown bread cut into triangles. And in the afternoon I’d help the twins stack the smokehouse, threading herring on the bars, from mouth to gill, mouth to gill, and because I was the smallest, I had the task of crawling round the back of the smoking racks to drag the oak chips forward, hearing my uncle and the muted clink of glass bottles on the other side of the warm brick wall. Back in his study and smelling of smoke I’d flick through the bookshelves, waiting for the time to go home, noticing unfamiliar changes to his house: a bunch of flowers in a vase on the mantelpiece; a newly washed tablecloth; a tidied boot-rack by the marsh door to stop mud getting in. A woman’s touch. And I knew it was Elsie. Spending more and more time here, in the evenings when I wasn’t around, cooking meals and drinking red wine, listening to Kipper’s stories and the jokes he pulled, winding her hair around a finger near her temple while he talked. A little hiccup. A giggle. An apology. And then some of her capriciousness - an uncalled-for comment - a cruel piss-take, and now it would be my uncle laughing. Fen girl - you’re a wild cat all right.

  I’d always steeled myself for the time I might see her climbing astride a motorbike and putting her arms round some local lad. Holding him tight as he gunned the throttle around Blakeney. But spending evenings with my uncle was much, much worse. The poor squit, saw me in the pond, thought he’d try it on. Kipper, roaring with laughter and gaining capital from going over the story again. Don’t! Don’t! Holding his sides. Dirty little sod, feeling me up. Touching me . . . Right here. And she points to the place. She pushes her chest out and points to the place. And do you know he can speak? He’s a dark horse that ’un. Been stringing us along all this time.

  I saw her only once in that time, and that was through the bonfire’s flames on Nor’ Sea Night. Her hair impossibly bright. But an inscrutable expression, filled with shadows and secrets. She came to me and led me on to the marsh, pressed her forehead into my neck and I felt the fire’s warmth on her skin, the coldness of the marsh on her back.

  ‘Come and visit me,’ she said.

  ‘Where?’ I said, with difficulty.

  ‘That’s so good. So good to hear you. I’m going back to Three Holes. Season’s over.’

  ‘El-sie, I miss you.’

  ‘Me too. Look, just don’t balls it all up, all right?’

  And with that she’d gone, walking first back to the fire and then vanishing beyond, along the roads of dark Norfolk to the greater darkness of the Lincolnshire Fen, in winter, just about the darkest place there is. At the end of January she sent me a postcard: My mum has died. They found her face down in the tulip beds. Please come as soon as you can. I’m not staying here a second longer than I have to.

  So there I was unexpectedly sitting on the coach to King’s Lynn, staring at the herringbone pattern, holding her card in my hand. Through the windows the buildings looked damp with winter, stained like sugar cubes in fields the colour of wet tea leaves. A journey of Norfolk’s softness giving way to ever-growing geometry. Power lines and poplars, drainage dykes and roads, all pulled taut over the soil, unimpeded by the earth below till all was flat.

  Tydd St Giles, Tydd St Mary, Tydd Gote, Four Gotes. That’s where I got off the bus on my first stop, and the first thing I noticed was an overwhelming smell of chickens. By the thousand. A sweet dusty smell of their sweat and shit and bran. An address in my pocket in my uncle’s handwriting. The name of a farm, which I could also see hanging from a signpost down the road: FOUR GOTES EGGS. A ragged hedge, and through it I saw the farm opening up into row upon row of chicken coops laid out across a dull earth field. Three sets of power lines stretched in parallel over the soil, and the electricity made a soft wide buzzing sound in the drizzle. There were two or three hundred of the coops, and one man, more scarecrow than I’d ever seen him, but him all the same. My father. The way he chose to lean when he didn’t need to, the way he bustled across the mud as if avoiding low branches. He was slamming the lid down on a coop and picking his way between the feeders with the action of someone grown used to pushing his way through chickens. He lifted another lid and let it fall, a second later I heard the sound, then he was jotting something on a clipboard and when he slotted his pencil under the clip he looked up, bang on cue, and gave me a wave, taking the cap off his head like he was on a harbour quay.

  Until then I’d thought this would be a surprise visit. Those Langore brothers were still thick as thieves.

  The sound of the pylons grew louder above us and we met by a chain-link gate, which clicked with an electric current, and when he let me in he took his cap off again, a polite gesture. He w
as close to me, holding the cap in front of him, looking at the ground and asking how I was, how Goose was, had the journey been all right.

  ‘You came, then,’ he said, abruptly. I looked around at the large bleak field, at the bright clumps of bronze hens making their way back to the coops, at the aluminium feeders the colour of elephant skin and the chain-link fence, dotted with feathers.

  ‘Not bad this. Pays quite well.’

  He’d aged. His donkey jacket was torn at the pockets and his boots had a sandblasted look where the chickens had pecked through to the toecaps.

  We leaned against a coop and I wrote down that I wanted to see Mum’s grave and his new bungalow and the dog. Underneath us the hens stirred and clawed their way round the nesting boxes.

  I wrote down Elsie, her mother’s died and he bent towards the notebook and took a drawn-out breath.

  ‘Yeah, Elsie,’ he said, biting his lip thoughtfully. ‘You going there?’ he added, brightly, and when I nodded he said, ‘Well, you know, send her all the best and that.’

  He stiffened next to me as he looked towards the horizon.

  The sail of a boat was gliding through what seemed to be a ploughed field. River Nene, he said. A tall line of poplars sliced diagonally across the view, and halfway along their row the trees had grown shorter where the soil wasn’t so good. I remembered him standing by the burning coop at the farm. How the dead chicken had hung from his hand while the Rhode Island hen had burst burning from its hiding place. And my father’s boot as he stamped it dead with a farmer’s strength and forthrightness which was all but gone now. His spirit now stamped out of him by monotonous, bleak, hard work. The man who’d quelled the nature of bulls with a whisper. Now nothing more than a pair of boots half-pecked apart.

  ‘Vicious,’ he said, catching me looking at his feet. ‘Still, pays the bills.’

  I wasn’t sure what I was doing there; and then he was walking off again, looking round, distracted, used only to hens interrupting his train of thought.

  His bungalow was built where no one else would live, under the convergence of two power lines. They fizzed angrily above us as we went deliberately to the back door - as a farmer always does, even when he no longer lives on a farm. Inside, it also smelled of chickens, like fermented beer, hot and enclosed, the smell of a coop. And there was a smell I remember from the Saints - the smell of dampness and wood and the Pears soap that he scrubbed his face with in the morning, and the smell of him in the middle of it all, an ageing man with unwashed clothes and no inclination to open windows. Neglect. Chicken shit was on the patio and on the windowsills outside. The bungalow felt besieged. He didn’t take his boots off. Washing-up was piled in the sink, soaking in cold water, the remnants of several meals bleeding into a grease-spotted tideline round the stainless steel. Tins were left open on the side next to crusts of bread and packets of biscuits. With me there he seemed to see the mess of it for the first time. He went to the sink and his shoulders dipped at the sight of it and then his hand rubbed the back of his neck where it was permanently tanned from outside work and his skin had a cracked, sparsely haired look like the skin of a pig. His fingers played with a mole there, a thing I remember him doing when he was studying the elm disease in his study, and he stared at something in the sink for a long time then he turned back to me and we both sat at the table. It was the table from the Saints, the burned ring from the base of a casserole pot my mother had put down on it five years ago still there. Chicken casserole, with tarragon and cider.

  No sooner had he sat down than he was up again, saying there was interesting birdlife here - when swans come landing at Welney Marsh you see them flying over several hundred a time. A flight path, that’s what it is - they follow the Nene, I reckon. Whooper and Bewick’s - sun’s on them up there even though it’s just gone dark. He opened a packet of Swiss roll and cut several thick slices and put them on a plate. There was a picture of the Alps on the label and it looked odd, so green and snow-capped with a bright blue sky, there, on the table in the middle of the Fens. He didn’t like chocolate, as I remember, but he ate the roll.

  He made tea and the pot had a top from a different pot on it and he poured mine in a cup and saucer and his in a mug that said Wingate’s Agri Seeds on it. I still make a good cup of tea, he said, the faint sound of an old boast in his voice, reviving his spirits. Secret’s to scald the pot, most people don’t have time for that now. You’ve got to have time for tea, that’s what I say.

  Something moved in the room I guessed to be his bedroom and through the doorway I saw Gull, as old as the hills, lying on a blanket. The blanket was so full of the old dog’s hair it seemed he was lying on a second skin, the pelt of his own vanished life at the farm. Hates the hens, my father said, looking at the dog. Can’t stand them, and Gull gave a single, lazy thump of his tail because he knew he was being talked about. I showed him some sketches I’d drawn of the marsh and one of the Hansa, which I gave to him. He told me about the days he’d spent on the wreck with the brother who’d just renamed himself as Kipper, and how they’d been scared at first of the young girl who called the shots. She were a right miss, that’s true, used to sit in the wheelhouse with her feet up. He smiled when he told me about all that, and when I wrote down a question about him and his understanding of birds and animals he looked at the notebook eagerly and said yeah, that’s something I just can’t explain. Always had this way with animals, ’specially birds. Some way I’ve got of looking them in the eye, make them friendly. There was this time with a gull, ’spect you know the story, that’s why I called that old pile of bones through there Gull. This gull lands out of nowhere and it gets all caught up in your mother’s hair. She was right scared. He ain’t a bad dog, he added, for some reason. We sat in silence for a while. Our tea was finished. Then he said mind you, hens are different, ain’t got no way with them, that’s for sure.

  Outside the pylons spat with sudden loudness as a heavier rain fell, and as I looked up I couldn’t even see the wires that had seemed to stretch in such a sinister embrace above the bungalow. He led me into the chicken enclosure and before I went he lifted the lid of a coop and pulled out three warm eggs. He gave them to me, pretending it was a great crime, hiding them with his cap as he dropped them carefully into my pocket, even though it was dusk and no one was watching anyway. Don’t tell no one, he said, and then made a noise deep in his throat which sounded like an apology.

  I left him there, watching him getting wet while he settled them for the night, halfway through a routine I’d interrupted, a routine which had such a definite start and finish his attention had never entirely been away from it. The coach growled its way into the village and as it approached I watched him a little longer through the hedge. Turning this way and that, ticking boxes on his clipboard. Imprisoned by chicken wire, almost half-bird himself.

  Sitting down in the coach after a day of little other than sitting down made me weary. The landscape was entirely flat, but the old bus lumbered and growled its way through the gears, its dark oily engine full of sand. I thought of the life my parents had made for themselves here, of my mother and father driving back from the Quaker hospital - the road too long and too straight for the couple they’d become. The skies all round deepened, stained by the fields beneath them. Gathering, ominous clouds like the storm at Bedlam Fen. A small boat in a vast landscape. Three people in the boat, so unbearably fragile, the whole lot of it.

  A couple of large fenland women had hauled themselves into the bus at a village stop and their clothes gave off a damp vegetable odour. I rubbed the window with my elbow, then made the cleared patch into the shape of a neat picture frame, and through the smeared glass I saw the darkening furrows of fields spreading into dusk, the monstrous shapes of root vegetables hidden deep in the earth, buildings collapsing into the fen, then a glimpse of my father, standing by his bungalow in the cruciform shape of a wretched scarecrow, and finally, my mother sinking into the weeded depth of a passing drain, holding her breath and
pinching her nose.

  I shut my eyes and listened to the women’s thick brown accents. Sumbody made rite muck o’ that job - called it off till Sat-day - thass right? - says ’e won’t cum no more - bess get Tommy down fix it - jokin’! That lazy bugger! - still got that van though. Their talking gave off the iron smell of strong tea, so similar to the rooty smell of the fields and the tobacco odour of the bus seats; their words, their breath, the laboured progress of the bus and its dying engine, all part of the same.

  The sign for Three Holes was flashing past the window, and the driver was grinding the bus through the gears while he watched me in his mirror. He left me at the stop and drove off into the envelope of fenland night. No one was about. People were inside their houses, in their living rooms, with heavy-curtained windows, protecting the preciousness of their own individual pockets of light from an overwhelming darkness.

  I went to the bridges at the confluence of the three drainage dykes and as I stared down at the water I remembered my mother saying can you see the three holes? The three holes here? Now, some say there’s a fourth hole, a secret channel, a secret river going deep into the earth. Where do you think it is? A child’s game. And now nothing, nothing but three miserable water channels stretching into the night like the points of a compass. But a compass without direction because it pointed to nowhere. We used to stand on that bridge and love the three holes, at their ability to take you instantly to three different horizons, but there, that lonely night, I felt the drains were not so much leading me away as holding me at their empty junction point.

  As I walked off the road, on to the soft mud path, I saw the landscape was glowing with a cold, bone-like greyness. The blank fen had the vertiginous, expansive feel of a desert, with lights dotted in the distance like cattle’s eyes caught in headlights. By my side was the dark oily water of the drain and, soon, the black brick shape of Elsie’s house, with its rows of tulip beds lit by light spilling from the windows.