Salt

by Jeremy Page

  A simple gate and a path to the door. And a long time ago, my father and mother, carrying the sleeping Elsie along that same garden path, and the front door opening and there had been Ethel Holbeach, pretending she hadn’t been looking out for their return. The same front door opening now, warm interior light flooding out into a vast winter landscape, but it’s not kindly Mrs Holbeach with her flushed face this time; it’s Elsie. Elsie, who had also been looking out, this time for me. Elsie framed in the glorious soft light of the hall, dark-eyed, her hair wound up tight behind her head.

  ‘Hello Elsie,’ I said.

  ‘Hi. I’m so glad you’re here. How was the old man?’

  ‘Pecked.’

  I hadn’t been inside their house for years, but little had changed. And no sign to show Mrs Holbeach had died just a couple of weeks ago. The same photographs, awards and tulip paintings on the walls in rows as neat as the real ones outside. China cups on the dresser like I remembered. A full set of fine bone china, but a feeling that there’d never be guests to use them. The smell of beeswax and ironing. The trappings of a life carrying on regardless. As if Mrs Holbeach had popped out for shopping and never returned, and that that didn’t really matter because the chores of the house had somehow continued without her.

  Elsie was wearing a pair of faded blue dungarees and her father’s tartan slippers. She had made cakes and, unsure about what she was to do with me, sat me straight down at the table. Through the back I could see Mr Holbeach at the scullery sink, running cold water over a shiny galvanized bucket. He lay it on its side, checked the back-door lock, picked up the bucket and began to rinse it again.

  ‘Does he . . . know I’m here?’ I said, my voice bringing out a smile in Elsie which crinkled the sides of her nose. She shrugged nicely.

  ‘I doubt he’d be interested. Not my father, anyway.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He talks to himself in the tulip beds. Says God’ll punish him for not having children.’

  ‘He’s . . . ill,’ I said.

  ‘It’s these fucking fens, more like. Like Auntie May,’ Elsie said, then flashed an apologetic smile at me. ‘I mean, she didn’t really talk any more, did she? Towards the end.’ She looked at her father. ‘And I don’t care about him,’ she said, loudly, pushing bits of cake round her plate with the flat of her knife.

  ‘Ill, Elsie. That’s all.’

  ‘Pip,’ she said, softly, ‘we’ve both lost mothers now.’

  I tried to brighten things by telling her where I’d been, and when the words came too slowly I wrote them down. How I’d found my father in a field of chickens and how he’d become so used to chickens that his concentration had been shot to pieces.

  ‘I went to see him,’ she said. ‘He gave me some eggs. It’s really sad, he used to be a funny man.’

  Funny? I thought. I’d never seen him that way.

  I showed her the eggs he’d given me too.

  In the scullery, Mr Holbeach checked the back-door lock again.

  I slept on the couch in the living room, listening to the coots on the drain outside and Elsie in her room upstairs. I thought I’d stay up all night, listening to the sounds and silences of a strange house, three people and a thousand prize tulips tucked up in beds. But a stealthy exhaustion overtook me, and I drifted into its warmth and heaviness and felt I was on the edge of knowing something, feeling some shape that was just there, just beyond reach, a shape that had shadows and angles, which had been there all along. Travel had clarified it for me, and as I searched for it I was abruptly awake, some time in the middle of the night, lifting my head from the cushion and seeing Mr Holbeach sitting in the chair opposite me.

  ‘You’re the one caused all the trouble, ain’t you?’ he said in his sad, church-pew voice.

  I lay there, looking at him, too tired to reach for my notebook, too uncertain to move, till I fell asleep again. In the morning he was gone.

  We ate those eggs for breakfast and then Elsie and I cycled to the Saints and along by the Great Ouse to Wiggenhall St Peter Church. Elsie sat on the floodbank, plaiting grasses, while I went to see my mother’s grave. Since the funeral a tombstone had been set. It said ‘A Loving Wife and Mother’ below her name, chosen by my father from a book of sample inscriptions. May Langore. At least he’d finally used your real name.

  I remembered how her coffin had looked in the aisle. How terrified I’d been that at any moment it might start dripping river water.

  Elsie walked off down the bank and I put my hand on the earth and in my strange, scratchy voice I said hello. The word felt huge. And after that it was easier. Easier to let the words come out, dropping them on to my mother’s grave alongside a couple of tears as surprising and as hot as blood. I told her about the months I’d spent in the farmhouse living a feral life alongside my father’s. Of the burning chicken coop and the Rhode Island Red, of the night-time flight to Norfolk and the big man in the lorry with the soft voice. I told her about Goose, her clouds, of Gideon’s house where I’d discovered my voice and about practising it among the dunes and that I could speak to Elsie. And then I told her about Kipper, about the things I’d learned, of fireworks and fish, and how I loved the marsh and knew just how she must have loved it too.

  I saw Elsie’s shadow approaching, weaving between the tombstones. She sat down next to me and kissed my neck. It was a windy day, and her hair kept blowing in front of my eyes, obscuring my mother’s name on the stone.

  ‘Is that better?’ she said.

  We cycled to the Flags Café, about four miles away, built next to a giant sluice which separated the dark muddy water of a drainage channel from the green salt water of the Wash. We propped our bikes up against the sluice and watched flotsam circling in the eddy below. Always polystyrene caught there; like ice from a winter which never thawed. The wind made the iron resound with deep hollow echoes, and closer, putting our ears to the metal, we could hear barnacles below the high tidemark popping in the air. The flags themselves were on a row of poles alongside the A17, so windtorn and ragged from a wind which blew two hundred times a year that some were little more than half their original size.

  Inside the café it was full of the urn’s steam, frying fat and the smells of sugar and fags. I had a hot chocolate and Elsie had a cappuccino, which I’d never heard of before. The waitress made a big fuss of doing it in the kitchen, and when she came back she brought a black coffee alongside a bowl of whipped cream. Elsie spooned the cream on to the surface then spooned it into her mouth. She told me she was coming back to Blakeney.

  ‘When?’

  ‘June. I can’t stand it here. I’ll go mad and then I’ll have to grow tulips the rest of my life.’

  ‘Your dad,’ I said, ‘last night.’ Then I wrote down: He said I was the one caused all the trouble.

  ‘What’s he saying that for? He says that all the time anyhow.’

  ‘What’s he mean?’

  ‘Meaning he’s a mixed-up old man who blames everyone but himself. Don’t listen to it. He says all sorts of stuff about me and you.’

  ‘What stuff ?’

  ‘You’re too young, sweetheart. And I’m not going to tell you,’ she said, mischievously, and I wondered whether she wasn’t just making everything up as she went along.

  We had egg mayonnaise sandwiches and Cornish pasties and three packets of crisps. Elsie put the crisps inside her sandwiches and said they taste so much better that way. I should try it. I watched her eat, aware that I was hunched over my own plate, a gesture of apologizing for something, and I wished that I wasn’t doing it. She was wearing the silver seashell earrings Kipper had bought her last summer. Did she think about him when she put them on? It’s crafty of him, giving her a present which reminds her of him every time she looks in the mirror.

  ‘We should go away together,’ she said, unexpectedly. ‘I mean really go away. Change our names and rob banks and have lots of kids.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You can fire a gun, I take
it?’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘Would you kill for me?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Wanted, the outlaws Elsie Holbeach and Pip Langore, the silent killer,’ and she leaned over the table and kissed me and when I tried to move my head back I felt her hand on the back of my neck, pulling me towards her like a man does. I was kissed again and I felt her tongue lick my lips.

  ‘Cheese and onion,’ she said, giving me a wink.

  Outside, beneath the rags flapping on their poles, she hugged me for a long time and all I could see was the harvest colour of her hair and the distant shape of the beet factory across the marshes. And while she held me I felt her hand stroke down my back and then she gripped my backside and said mm, not bad in the most suggestive way she could. I pushed her away.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ I said.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Touching me.’

  ‘Because I know what’s going to happen.’ She got on her bike and moved the pedal round ready to push off. ‘I’ve seen it in the clouds,’ she said, cycling off with one hand on her handlebars and the other guiding the bike I’d rode. The lorries thundered past her. Very quickly she became a tiny shape, the way things do in a flat landscape. She didn’t look back at me once. Some people do, others don’t, and Elsie never did.

  The coach arrived and I decided to sit in the same seat I’d been in the previous day. In front of me, the herringbone pattern on the fabric - damn it, just damn it all.

  17

  The Whale

  In June, a whale beached itself on the sandbanks off Scolt Head, and lay in the surf, dying. When he go, they said in the Albatross, his death rattle’s gonna shake the windows in Burnham Overy - he’s groaning like a bull right now. It’s a solemn moment. There’s talk about taking a crab boat over there, getting a rope round its tail and dragging it out to sea, but that’s all it is so far, talk. We best raise a toast, someone says, and everyone at the bar lifts his pint.

  But Roger is full of plans about how he and I can sail there to see it. Forty-five-foot sperm whale, he says, there’s this crowd all along Brancaster Beach but they can’t get to it ’cause of Scolt Head Channel. We need a boat. And after a pause he adds, and we’ve got one, pointing to his father’s brand-new dinghy, bright white against the mud of Morston Creek. It’s called the Bishy-Barny-Bee, the Norfolk term for a ladybird. We’re sitting by the mudchute at the back of Lane End, and Goose is hanging out washing behind us, trying to listen in. Roger starts to whisper. Plan is, we take her into the Pit, then round the Point, see how she handles. Then tomorrow we’ll get some food in and go.

  That day we sail across the Pit, the saltmarshes already smelling of the warm rotted-green scent of summer. The Hansa drifts in and out of our view, flooded and black, steam rising from the deckbeams and a grin coming from the gash in its side. That’s where Elsie sat, the previous summer, as wet as an otter on the dry wood, lying on her back in a bright T-shirt, gazing at the clouds, loving the attention. Goose says she’s already back, working at the Misfits, though I haven’t seen her yet. The Bishy’s dark sail snaps above us and the boat tips forward, stretching the water by our side till it looks like molten glass. So was this how Hands felt that day he raised the quilted sail? The feel of water beneath him, the dry smell of sun-baked wood and of varnish, heating gently. Did he stretch his legs against the slow rise and fall of the sea, his ears deaf to the sound of a baby crying? Did his hand trail in the water behind him - scoring a groove in the sea which was instantly erased as he himself vanished?

  The tide curves round the Point with a lethal sinewy motion, more river than sea, arching its back into a stretch known as the Race. The flotsam that has washed out from Blakeney and in from the North Sea clings to us as if boat and rubbish are all orbiting a larger more powerful object. The sail flaps without power - filling and tipping the boat, then relaxing and beating again. Roger’s loving it, letting out the sheet so the Bishy slides off the Race to meet the North Sea in a long curve of crenulated waves. The boat lowers into them, braking, and we feel the sudden vertigo of deep water below us, dark and green and rising in long broad swells without obstacle. And out to sea, about a mile away, the twins’ boat, drifting beyond the banks, ropes trailing for tope. Roger holds the sheet tight like an old salt and looks where the wind pricks the sea. The gap closes quickly now on the twins; their hunched shapes over the side of the cuddy they’d built out of the wrecks of so many other boats. Low and heavy, with a cabin that looks like a garden shed, the twins keep adding bits on, ignoring common sense and building way beyond the necessary. Planks to reinforce earlier bodges, bits of driftwood which have no real use but are too sound to throw away, a green tarpaulin strung beneath the hull to keep it watertight, and which seems to gather the whole boat together and keep it one. Cliff’s painted dragon’s teeth on the prow, like on a bomber plane, and has written THE BASTARD in bleeding red letters next to it. It looks like a carnival float.

  As we approach a strange thing happens. The sea next to their boat buckles, and a second later, after a muffled fizz, a thin plume of steam rises. We’re close now, and as we steer in, the debris of dead fish starts to float up around the Bastard, more of them rising rigid from the shallows. The twins scoop their haul with keepnets as we go alongside. By Cliff’s foot there’s a bucket of eels, some herring and a dry box holding long dark candle-shaped sticks. He kicks a sack over it with his foot, but he needn’t have bothered. He knows we wouldn’t dare mention them. Dead man’s fingers they call them, after the grey lungs of the crab. Straw soaked in nitroglycerine and wrapped in wax, made from chemicals stolen from Kipper’s Lab.

  Roger is afraid of the twins. He knows he has a beating coming from them which sometimes seems distant, and other times more imminent, but the certainty is there, unspoken. One day, he’ll walk into some violence from them.

  Sandy, the other twin, begins to haul his rope in, hand over fist, until he reaches a thin shaft of metal which has been bent into a rough hook. A chunk of pork belly dangles from the meat like a tongue, and from the skin a baby crab hangs by one pincer.

  ‘Been dragging,’ he says to Cliff as he brushes the crab off.

  ‘Sand?’

  ‘Gravel. We should try off the Longs.’

  They both look towards the same featureless patch of water beyond the stern.

  ‘New boat?’ Cliff says to Roger.

  ‘Yeah. It’s my dad’s. Moves a bit heavy but she sits well.’

  ‘You’re full of shit,’ Cliff says.

  I’m standing, holding the mast and looking down at them.

  Cliff smiles sharp-toothed at me from his stinking boat. There are threads of rolling-tobacco on his lips. They’ve got a reputation for pulling girls in Blakeney. Even swapping girls halfway through the night, it’s said, all done to some signal they pass between each other in their grim flat. Bottle of tequila, a video on too loud, some girl staggering across the living-room floor, pissing herself when she trips up on Cliff’s outsized legs stretched across the carpet.

  A crab boat is dragging full throttle through the sea a little way off. The two fishermen wave at the twins in unison. The twins nod back and then watch as one of the men hurls a plastic buoy at the other. Sandy chucks a coke can overboard and follows it in with a bright green gob. The sea’s a lawless place.

  ‘We got news for you,’ Cliff says, looking at me. ‘Your girlfriend’s back. Came Sunday.’

  ‘And she’s well up for it,’ Sandy says, creasing up with laughter.

  ‘Well, you don’t have to tell that to laughing boy here.’

  ‘Always the quiet ones, yeah?’

  Unmistakably, I see a cloud in the half-sunk shape of the twins’ cuddy. I feel a rising sense of dread as Cliff starts to speak about Elsie, and in the rag cloud above I can make him out. Cliff, Sandy and two other people sitting in that phantom boat. Ah leave off - he’s all right, I hear, shouldn’t say that on a boat, anyhow, it’s bad luck. They’re star
ting to have a small row. Meanwhile the rag cloud’s changing. One of the figures is standing, and while the others watch, the whole cloud splits in two. The men are going to drown. I look at the twins’ cuddy in alarm - but all I see is Cliff - staring intently at me and saying . . . I said, did you hear me? Did you hear me? Sandy’s looking down at his tope-line, not wanting to be any part of this any more. He’s muttering for Cliff to shut the hell up. He’s shaking his head ever so slightly. I wonder what’s going on. What have I missed?

  Cliff knows I’m listening to him again. He has my full attention. Then he says the one word that changes my life.

  ‘Sisterfucker!’

  Elsie, returned to North Norfolk, in a tiny room at the back of the Misfits, putting her make-up bag on the shelf next to her mirror, hanging her clothes in a wardrobe, lying on the bed with her hands behind her head. Always coming back, staying close to me, but never within reach. Playing games, it seemed, wearing Kipper’s seashell earrings and kissing me, playfully, not quite playfully. Just who does she think she is - yes, who does she think she is?

  I’m at her bedroom window before dawn. It takes a long time to wake her - she’s not one for early mornings - but when she opens the curtains she sees I’m upset and knows better than to make a fuss. We sit on her bed for a while. I look at the cassettes she’s put next to a stereo, at the travel guides she has on a shelf, and propped against the wall there’s a picture of me and my mother sitting in the Mary Magdalene, near the bridge at Three Holes. I look at my mother as she in turn looks into the lens, at the camera that Elsie was holding.