Salt

by Jeremy Page

  Someone plunged into the creek, pulling the net to wrestle with the latch and briefly I knew it must be Grandfather Hands - those nimble fingers working on the knot. But then I was being lifted like a sack and instead of my grandfather’s dreamy blue eyes I saw the rough unkempt stubble of Bryn Pugh’s chin.

  Soon I was inside, standing on the tiles with the marsh and sea dripping off me, shivering, while Goose sat on the foot of her bed, the way you do when you think you’re ill, locked into her own world. Bryn, standing behind me, nervous of a situation he doesn’t understand. But of the three he knows he must take charge, however hard.

  Goose, I’ve got him here - he’s safe. Goose? Less clear him up, heh? Don’t do nothin’ today but get him cleaned up.

  She heard all right but she didn’t move. Bryn crossed to her and placed a calming hand on her neck. Her shoulders sank, the effort of the day getting to her. Even her hair, usually tied up at the back of her head, was beginning to unravel - with several of the pins that kept it in place hanging like thorns. Bryn squeezed her shoulder and her eyes flickered with confusion. Kitty, he whispered, we’ll get some help OK? Don’t rush. You ain’t never rushed all your life. He loves her very much, I thought, he must have loved her all this time. And I had no choices any more but to listen to the soothing compelling voice of my own instinct: you must go. You must go now. Take your suitcase, though its handle reminds you of past hurts, of running away, pack your mother’s dreamcatcher, her crabline, the photo of Hands and the one of your parents’ wedding day. Leave, because everyone in your family always leaves. Pass Goose, small and bewildered on the edge of her bed, don’t stop.

  Bryn was outside. Where you gonna go? he asked gently. She din’t mean it. Din’t mean none of it. She ain’t right and she need some help, and she din’t mean none of it. I strapped the case to my bike and he helped me tie a knot. I could see it made him feel better. He told me he was moving on too. The marsh was a sick place to live, he said. It ain’t right, livin’ on land that ain’t really land at all. He tied more knots on to the knot, tying in his frustration about this marsh life with each pull of the string till the knot was as large as a knuckle. Shouldn’t have lived here, not for any time. And with that the knot was complete and sculptured and as gnarly as the one Goose had tied in my mother’s belly-button. He looked at me one last time and cracked his face into a smile but there was just too much worry all round so he turned away and sniffed loudly at the marsh. Thistle Dew’s all yours, he said weakly.

  I cycled towards Blakeney, only once looking back at the tiny figure of Bryn Pugh being swallowed by the saltmarsh. I ate chips on the quay as a blood-red sunset broke through the clouds near the horizon. That was the direction of Lane End, my past on fire again - fire coming for me, always. Below me, the tide which might have drowned me gently flowed out, and the water was itself once more: inanimate, impartial, finding its own level. The twilight came. No wind. Sounds drifted across the marsh on warm, dry air. Terns on the Point. Luggers with their buckets, going to the flats. Everything going about its usual business in the usual fashion. Just an empty coastal town, washed up itself, life at a dead end with nowhere to go.

  Everything was quiet when I got to the smokehouse. He’d do the rounds at half-ten, remove the bloaters, restoke, rake and lay a ham for overnight. But as I walked to the house the door opened with an eerie magic, and there he stood, leaning in the frame, neither coming out nor staying in, the orange glow of the hallway light behind him.

  ‘Thought it’d be you,’ he said flatly. ‘Talk gets ’cross this marsh quick.’

  He deliberately blocked the space, leaning the way a man does when he’s proving something, his face completely shadowed, making it expressionless and sinister. The light behind him glinted darkly off his flat oiled hair, then a faint reflection of the light picked out the dull shine of his eyes. His pipe glowed as he drew breath.

  ‘Not good, you know. Not good at all.’

  He let his words hang. In no hurry.

  ‘Best come in,’ he said.

  I followed him down the hall and into the lounge, thinking Elsie would be at the table, all held-in and sheepish and ready for a row. But in her place sat one of the fish buyers, a pale thin man who never spoke much and managed to unnerve everyone except my uncle.

  ‘Bang on cue,’ Kipper said with a concession of lightness because the other man was there, ‘the young adventurer.’

  The man nodded casually, then with a bony hand slid me a notepad of A4 paper across the table. He let his hand fall to the side, exhausted by even this. There was a diagram of a fish on the top sheet next to instructions about salt curing.

  ‘I’ll tell you straight,’ my uncle said, in a louder voice than usual, ‘you got a nerve coming here. I ain’t saying what you did was wrong or dangerous or nothing, but it ain’t right none the less. You understand?’

  Where’s Elsie? I wrote.

  ‘Now, you want to tell your side of the story, that’s fine. That’s fine by me, OK? But that’s up to you.’

  Kipper stood against the fireplace to increase his hold on the room. He rested his arm on the mantelpiece, his hand touching the face of the clock there. Master of time and precision. Behind him was my sketch of him as the exiled Neptune, trident in hand, a smoked fish on each tine.

  ‘You eaten?’

  Some chips, I wrote.

  ‘What’s he put?’ Kipper said, a little impatiently.

  ‘Chips,’ the fish buyer said.

  ‘Fix him a sandwich would you?’ he said to the man. ‘And we’ll have a Scotch, right?’

  The fish buyer unfolded himself from the table and went to the kitchen. Kipper bent down and spat into the grate. He straightened, looked at me calmly, wiped his sleeve across his mouth.

  ‘She’s in bed. An’ she ain’t well - so it’s no good you askin’. She ain’t seein’ you tonight.’

  What had he been told? Just what did they think I’d done? I stared at the pencil and paper. I didn’t know where to start.

  He waited.

  ‘I’ve called your dad . . . he says you can stay there a while. Till you - till whatever.’

  When?

  ‘Morning. Get the coach. He’ll pick you up from Lynn.’

  A done deal. A field of chickens, the overwhelming smell of their shit, the depressing bungalow with Gull blind and violent in one of the rooms, and my father making efforts to clear a space in his life for me.

  ‘Sometimes I look at you I don’t reckon you’ve got any Langore blood in you at all. You’re from that other side, ain’t you - the side of your mother and grandmother. There’s madness in you.’

  The sandwich came and was put on the table. Slices of white bread on the corner of a farmhouse table, just like the first night my parents entered their new home at the Saints; and the night I left, all those years later. A sign of abandonment, and of flight. I couldn’t just give in to it. I didn’t know where I was, what I was doing there or what I should be doing, numb but for an overwhelming, sudden rush of tiredness. I ran, ran for the door and the marsh outside and the reed bed and its dusty alleyways of stalks and the reeds snapped like fireworks all round me and then I hugged the ground and it all went silent.

  Kipper and the fish buyer went after me with torches, but the search seemed half-hearted and they soon gave up. Kipper made the man wheel my bike and suitcase into the house, then I listened to him tending the smokehouse racks. A man gives up when he stops his chores. Till then he’ll always be himself. The clock chimed eleven in the lounge behind him. He began whistling a tune, then went inside and drew the curtains.

  The light was on in my uncle’s bedroom, and though the curtains were drawn, there was enough of a gap to see in. I thought it might have been left deliberately.

  I saw Elsie in there, lying in bed with the blanket pulled tight up to her neck. Seeking comfort. Her skin was marble smooth and her hair was like bronze seaweed across the pillow. A mermaid in Neptune’s cave. Perfectly still, asleep,
but as I watched, the bed beneath her moved, gently - as if a wave was drifting through the room - and I realized Kipper was now sitting at the foot of it. He was taking his shoes off. And in the seconds before the light went off, the tiniest of smiles spread across her lips.

  That’s how I found out, I suppose. God, what a fool I’d been - all those hours on the Hansa while Kipper Langore watched us with his binoculars, his mouth set in a confident grin. Take your time, take your time, don’t rush the girl. How he swam out there with his bloody front crawl. What a kid! Climbing on the wreck like he’d done twenty years earlier. Losing the girl then and making up for it now - now, with Lil’ Mardler’s daughter? Damn your fucking smoke and your two-faced face.

  I was in trouble, I realized, real trouble, facing a second night spent out in the open, while Kipper and Elsie were snug in there, behind the curtain. Doing God knows what. There was no place for me there. I walked up the track and into the oak wood behind his house. It was quiet and enclosed in the wood, with the old trees heavy and dark above me. I’d taken a car blanket from Kipper’s shed, and I wrapped it tight round me and sat against a trunk. Why does this hurt constantly return in my family? Why are we always having to run away? Hands gets on the Pip, my mother gets on the ice, I’m in the wood, looking through the trees at Kipper’s house, the smoke from the smokehouse chimney smudging the buildings from view. Goings on, badly erased. I don’t want to sleep, but I’m exhausted, so thoroughly exhausted. Even the bark of the oak feels soft. I give in to it, I sleep, and I dream. I dream that I’m walking through the oak wood, looking at a glimmer of light between the trunks, but it’s not the lights of my uncle’s house. It’s coming from the doorway of an old wooden shack. When I get close I can smell beans being cooked on a stove inside, I hear the thin hiss of a primus stove, and I see the white hair of an old man sitting under the acid light of a storm lantern. Briefly it looks like there might be several people in there, because the shadows dance about so quickly as he stirs the pot.

  Come in, come in, the man says, then he looks at me and says well, well, my old friend. You need beans, more beans than I think I have. It’s Gideon. He peers at me with his distant milky gaze and he adds nice to see you at last. Our paths we’ve followed - they’ve come to the same point, have they not?

  I dream about eating the beans with some bread and then he heats more beans and pours them over more bread. We have strong sugary tea and he stirs it with a buttery knife and the fat makes little oily pools on the surface. He only has one cup, so we take turns sipping that. It tastes fantastic. The shack’s filled with the tins, sacks, newspapers and paints Gideon takes everywhere, along with boxes of chocolate, homemade gingerbread men, fruitcakes and shortbread in biscuit tins. It’s like a fairytale. He opens up everything and lets me feast on whatever I like. The Lord’s been kind, he says, seeing as I’m partial to malt loaf especially. We have chocolate Rice Krispies in cupcake wrappers, and slabs of carrot cake with cheese sliced on top. Not the place I thought I was heading - but I’m no complainer, he says. And then sadly he adds I’m nearly finished here, you know. My job here in the oak wood. And with this he picks up the large dark shape of a church Bible, little more than its two hard covers of dimpled black leather, with the last few of its loose pages inside. Remember I told you we need a map in life? If we lose that we have nothing? Well, here is mine - the stream outside this shack feeds into the River Glaven, friend, that’s my job. I have been floating the pages of this holy book down the stream, one by one. Outside the hut I see the large pages of the Bible have clogged up the stream like old clothes. But! he says emphatically, I shall save Ecclesiastes. That is my Book. That is my map of life. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again, he says, stroking his beard into a point. We go to the stream and he tears a page out of the Bible and lets it float in. It’s the story of Lot. The paper is so dry after a hundred years of being in a church the water runs over it like mercury. Then he speaks again: Now you may or may not tell me but there was a miracle that day wasn’t there? When you came to my house. You see - the lobby’s right by the kitchen and I heard you. I heard you say your first ever word and I fell on to my knees, that’s right, on my knees and prayed. A miracle - that’s what it was.

  With this he leads me back into the shed. It feels safe and warm in there. He turns the gas lamp off, and we both sit listening to the owls screeching like banshees in the wood. Something has alarmed them. Suddenly there’s a surging of noise and breaking of twigs which rises and grows and rushes at us and with it comes a huge splitting noise of wood. The ground trembles as things fall from the shelves in the dark, then all is still again. The oak tree, Gideon says. I’ve been waiting for it.

  We step out of the hut and see a massive tree, fallen, with its great branches either side of Gideon’s shack in a tender embrace which so easily could have crushed us. Gideon smiles at me, and with a finger wet from the stream he touches my forehead and mutters a prayer.

  ‘Go back,’ he said, ‘you must return.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I say to him.

  ‘Then you must find your own way.’

  ‘This isn’t real,’ I say. ‘It’s all a dream.’

  ‘It’s as real as you want it to be. Now look through there, through the trees.’

  ‘I can’t see anything,’ I say.

  ‘You will in the morning.’

  I wake in the grey light of dawn, against the tree and chilled to the bone, and immediately I remember the dream and look through the trees. There, in a field behind the wood, is a van parked in the grass. A man gets up from a camping stool next to it and does a huge stretch. It’s Lloyd, in a large multicoloured jumper, wiping the morning sausage and egg from his mouth on to its sleeve. As I walk up to him he grins widely. Morning, cocker, he says, the day meant for the likes of him. What you up to?

  Kat’s hanging up clothes, and she’s more perceptive. She rushes up to me and I start crying. They sit me down on a camping chair and Lloyd says heh, heh, heh softly over and over again and Kat tells him to get some more eggs cooked.

  ‘Well, I reckon I go and see Kipper,’ Lloyd said, certain of his right to speak his mind after reading the barest of facts I’d managed to scribble down.

  ‘Not a good idea,’ Kat said, knowing him too well. I’d had breakfast and was now wearing Lloyd’s jumper and a pair of his chunky-knit socks.

  ‘At least tell him to call off the dogs,’ Lloyd said, conceding. Beyond the field we could all see Kipper’s house and the smokehouse chimney. No one had come out yet.

  ‘We’ll both go,’ Kat said. ‘Then what we gonna do?’

  I sat in the cab of the truck while Kat and Lloyd went to see Kipper. They knocked on the door and I saw him - slow to emerge - come out in his dressing gown. Lloyd let Kat do the talking. Kipper listened, then looked several times up towards me in the van. He leaned against his doorway and Kat hugged her coat round her for warmth. The discussion went on. Eventually Kipper went inside and a while later emerged with my tartan suitcase. He started to walk with it, towards the van, and Kat stopped him with a hand on his shoulder and he passed the case to her.

  That night we parked the truck in a field in the middle of nowhere, with the huge sky of Norfolk stars above us. I looked at the sky and smelled the damp grass and I listened to my mother’s seashell. The sea sounded calm and distant, like it had been on the whale just two nights earlier. Just two nights. Had I really seen Elsie lying on my uncle’s bed? Had she really curled up the corners of her mouth into a smile?

  We’d been to a village pub where Kat, Lloyd and I had had three pints each. Lloyd had explained the deal they’d cut with Kipper - that I could spend the summer holiday with them for as long as I wanted. But after that I’d have to go back. Then Lloyd had become angry about a bloke Kipper’s age carrying on like he did. Elsie Holbeach’s worth ten of him any day. A rant developing. Lloyd, Kat said, calming him, now’s not the tim
e. Her poise reining him in. I still think someone round here’s got to stand up to him - he just takes the piss. The pint glass looked big in Kat’s hand. You could do it, Pip, when you go back - it’d be the making of you. Later on Lloyd got embroiled in an argument with a drunken farmhand who’d been propped against the bar eavesdropping and rolling his eyes for his own amusement. It turned out the labourer had been hauling bales all day whereas Lloyd han’t never done a day’s work in his life. When Lloyd said the man should throw his pitchfork away and join the cause the man said fukkin pufter and went off for a piss. That cheered Lloyd up no end.

  Later, as Lloyd took his own piss against the pub sign, he told me he’d met the same man in the same pub and had had the same row three years before. He chuckled as he shook himself dry, muttering Norfolk, oh yeah, under his breath.

  We toured in that van, parking overnight in fields or pub car parks where Lloyd had the habit of leaving the keys behind the bar so he couldn’t be done for drink-driving. Which had happened before. I slept in the cabin where Kat had rigged a curtain to go round the windscreen, but often I sat with the curtain open, looking over the grey fields in front of me, listening to the sound of ‘Buffalo Soldier’ and the rhythm it lent to the bump and grind of Lloyd and Kat’s nightly trysts. During the day we’d drive from one fête to another, doing the carnivals, farm-shows and festivals of the Norfolk summer. I walked round with a sandwich board, took the tickets, prepared the props. The play that year was a two-man retelling of The Wild Man of Orford, the story of a half-man half-fish who’d been caught in nets off Suffolk. He’d been tortured in Orford Castle where he cried for the sea every night, and over the months his captors relented, seeing sense in letting this strange man covered in scales have a swim. Only, the man escaped the nets and was never seen again. It made the children cry.