Salt

by Jeremy Page

  ‘You do have to go back in September,’ Kat said to me one morning. First thing, an intimate time between us. Sitting in long grass on two camping stools, neither of us having washed, just the sound of the Calor gas stove and the tap of the porridge spoon stirring the pot.

  I can’t. There’s nothing there.

  ‘There are the people you love. Your family.’

  My family’s been destroyed several times over. My dad’s a chicken labourer, my uncle’s hated by all of North Norfolk - he’s sleeping with the only friend I’ve ever had. My gran’s gone or is going senile and my mother drowned herself. I push the notebook to Kat like we’re playing chess. Her move. It makes her laugh.

  ‘OK - fair point, but it’s still who you are. Come September me and Lloyd are back in our semi in Norwich. He’s working at an insurance firm and I’ll be helping at a nursery. We don’t save anything but we’ve got this thing going and we fight for it. I sometimes think you just don’t fight.’

  Lloyd would emerge from the van with the loudest stretch in East Anglia. Kiss his girl, give me a wink, then think about the porridge pot. He loved the fact I never spoke - it was the envy of a man who knew he talked too much. Same old, he’d say, checking out the breakfast, sitting on a tree stump in a chunky-knit jumper and rolling his first of the day. A big grin with the wide, straightforward teeth of the innocent, not a crease of concern on his face. Sex, porridge, a pint, all I need, mate.

  Gideon had been right. When you think you’re lost all you need do is look through the trees for the next path. Here, with Kat and Lloyd, I’d found it. Friendship. And I learned from them that summer. Lloyd felt everything and talked it through, life was simple for him - blacks and whites, rights and wrongs; whereas Kat was a dreamer, smoking thin cigarettes, painting flowers on her shoes and, gently, over the weeks, coaxing out a language between us, not in the way that myself and Cassie Crowe’s fenland education had been a battle of wills, but there, in the back of the theatre van, as the smell of woodsmoke and frying food wafted in from outside, her slender fingers wove magic out of the air. A sign language of mime and shapes and a great deal of patience. While Lloyd brewed the tea outside and split the yolks, we’d sit there, looked down on by the outlandish props and costumes of The Wild Man of Orford - lords, farmers, fishermen, soldiers, village virgins, buffoons and clowns. I began to tell her what I could of my life. Of the stories and non-stories. The herrings and red herrings. I told her about the Fens, about boats, about bonfires. Burning elm trees, decoys and bulls, tulip heads, curing fish, fondue sticks, clouds, whales and wrecks. Of stale sandwiches and mugs of cold tea on the corners of farmhouse dining tables.

  It was coming to the end of the season. The theatre troupe would do a couple more shows before Lloyd and Kat returned to their Norwich semi; Lloyd would spend the winter dreaming about the summer gone and the one to come while he stared at a typewriter. And I would have to go back.

  They dropped me on Blakeney Quay. Kat hugged me and told me to be strong and Lloyd made an awkward moment of it, not finding the right words and eventually muttering well - you know, anyway.

  I walked the half-mile to the smokehouse, where Kipper and Elsie had laid out a tea of sandwiches, Bakewell tart and pork pie. Kipper fussed with the teapot and brought plates from the kitchen. The smell of fish and tobacco, the ticking of the mantelpiece clock, the silence of the books on the shelves. Nothing had changed.

  ‘How I see it, we get Shrimp over and talk things through. What you want to do and that,’ Kipper said, leaning back in his chair.

  ‘Kip,’ Elsie said, ‘face it, he’s staying, here - I’ll make him up a bed in the storeroom. I know we’ve talked about it and you’re not keen, but you’re always doing stuff and I’m bored and it’ll only help, what with how it is.’

  Kipper shifted uneasily and looked away, his eyes as grey as an old photo. He hadn’t touched the food.

  Elsie reached for a slice of Bakewell and spoke through it.

  ‘I’m the boss now,’ she said, a cakey smile on her face, and with it she held out her hand, royally, for me to inspect the glinting newness of her engagement ring.

  19

  Herrings and Red Herrings

  ‘Came running home with your tail between your legs,’ Elsie said, coarsely whispering over the tabletop, ‘that’s your problem - just can’t see it through.’

  Cley Beach Café was the same as always. Humid and breathy, with the birders’ journal on display - its pages heavy with moisture - and salt-bleached postcards on the wall.

  ‘You’ve got to grow up,’ she said, ‘get a life.’

  I could do without the lecture, especially from her, shacked up with a man like him.

  ‘You gonna talk or what?’ she said.

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said, looking at her ring. It stung her.

  There was a smell of burned treacle and buttered toast. We were sitting in the corner and Elsie had been fiddling with the salt shaker since we’d sat down.

  ‘That day you ran away, Kipper was so pissed off. Said you should be locked up.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Just don’t start any trouble,’ she said, wiping the damp putty of salt round the shaker’s chrome top.

  ‘Why not? He’s just like my dad.’

  Elsie stared hard at me. ‘No, he’s not,’ she said, ‘you’ve got him wrong.’

  Behind her the café girl went through to the kitchen after a sniper’s glance at Elsie and I knew what would be going on in there, over the saucepan of hot treacle. She’s come here, you know, that girl, could be his daughter and her carrying on like that. With that one that don’t speak . . . he give me the spooks, he does, the way he look at you sometimes . . . din’t he run off ?

  Had they noticed the engagement ring? Surely not long till they did. Then the tongues would really start wagging.

  ‘Elsie ...’

  ‘Don’t, Pip. Please don’t ask. Don’t make this harder than it already is.’

  Kipper made breakfast at six. Smoked herring, two poached eggs, sometimes marmalade, like my father, both of them with the habit of cleaning the knife by sliding it into the soft centre of the toast. After that the radio would go off and I’d hear him putting his weather gear on before going outside. With him gone I’d make my own breakfast. Elsie would be in her bedroom listening to music. I’d knock on the door and take her tea. Sometimes I dared to sit on the bed, looking at her ruffled hair and rosy cheeks and the dark shape of my uncle’s slippers lurking under the bed. His side of the bed was tidy, hers was messy. His clothes hung along an open rail and seemed to fill the room with his presence. Hers slept dog-like on the floor.

  Elsie cooked a meal for her boys each evening, Kipper and me at the same table, stabbing our sausages, for the most in complete silence. Kipper made a fuss of mopping up the sauce, lessening the embarrassment. Plate won’t need washing up, he’d joke.

  ‘We should do this place up,’ Elsie said one night, out to cause trouble. ‘It’s too depressing. Men make depressing places to live in.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Kipper said, warily.

  ‘You can paint, can’t you?’ she said to me. ‘Well?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well then, I’ll get some charts and some paint and - ’ before she finished her sentence she was already crying. Tears welling and tipping with incredible urgency, without any change in the bright expression she’d started with.

  ‘Pip,’ my uncle said, ‘I think it’s best you . . .’

  Leave the room. Which I did. And in my storeroom bedroom I listened to the muffled argument they began to have.

  That was in November, and it was the beginning of the end.

  I started to keep my distance from them after that. Things weren’t right. She pretended all was fine, and he pretended he didn’t know it wasn’t. What would be next? A sudden pregnancy? That would be too much. Would she ask me to make her a quilt like Hands did for Goose, a quilt which would rise on her side of the bed as her
belly grew, while on his side he would tuck the quilt’s edge between his knees? Not willing to let go of what he had. It can’t happen. Not between them.

  Sometimes they went on to the marsh together and would eat a picnic against the wall of the pillbox near the oak wood. They’d talk all morning. Left behind them, the pile of fruit pips my uncle had neatly arranged, the heads from the shrimps, the grasses that Elsie always knotted when she sat still. Scuffmarks in the earth seemed to have the footprints of their conversation - how they paced round the issues, dragged their plans to and fro and pushed them into the mud.

  And sometimes while they were out there on the marsh I’d sneak into the Lab, using a key which was kept under a flint outside. There were new charts on the walls, diagrams of trajectories, primary- and secondary-burst shapes, colours and timings. Beneath them, a book filled with firework designs with headings such as ‘Alignment of Tube on Missile Body for Whistle Sound’, ‘Cross-section of Pellet Layers’, ‘Chamber Shapes’, ‘Necks of Pressure’ and, throughout, the necessity of improvements. A big display was planned for the coming New Year, and Kipper wanted to show Cley just what he could do. He was fed up with their friendliness when they wanted his fish, their disapproval when he turned his back. The back-garden whispers, the fourth-pint rants, the shop-counter glances - he’d had enough. They’d never forgotten the young lad who’d been burned by his fireworks in the Lab, or the inquest where Kipper had been absolved from blame. They’d smelled a rat, and ever since he’d been wreathed in the sulphurous cloud of his own making. Each year on Nor’ Sea Night, he’d be making it worse on himself. And now him carryin’ on with a girl half his age. Old enough to be her father. Him stinkin’ o’ fish an’ all. Nothing was more untrustworthy for the wives of Cley than to have a man in their midst showing their husbands how it could be done. Some of them remembered the night when Kipper Langore as a boy had to be dragged out of the tree in the great storm, the fuss he made, the endless tears. So the circle grew vicious. That he lived on the edge of the marsh, away from the village, and that everything he touched turned to salt - it all made sense to them. He was rotten news; always a rum ’un and now a bad ’un. Caught between sea and land and marsh, and yes, the marsh was the best place for him.

  A tap on the window and I was caught, caught in the Lab where I had no right to be. But not by Kipper this time. It was Eric, who worked a charcoal kiln at the top of the oak wood. I always knew when he’d been around because wherever he went he’d leave grey fingerprints. On the kettle, the knife, the invoice. Eric was a low-slung man with big eyebrows and creases like coal seams across his face. He’d spent too much time in the wood to speak much to anybody, and was the only person who smelled more smoky than Kipper. He held up a bag of charcoal and gave it a dry shake outside the window.

  I carried the charcoal to Kipper and Elsie where they were sitting by the pillbox and my uncle said great and clapped his hands and actually put his arm round my shoulder. He led me back to the smokehouse with an air of being glad to get away from whatever was going on, and because I was with him, because I’d brought him the long-awaited charcoal, he said I should help him out in the Lab and before I knew it I was back in there, listening to him with all that pent-up energy which only ever came out with the fireworks.

  ‘It’ll give a gold burst. If that’s in a sphere packed round the charge we’ll have a thirty-foot chrysanth. How about that, huh, thirty foot?’

  As he spoke he ground the charcoal in a pestle and mortar.

  ‘Get the grains smaller,’ he said, ‘she’ll burn faster. Don’t want it hanging around. There, glitter for sparkle.’

  He was making the biggest show in his life and he wanted these to really burn. Rows of hard-shelled cases were arranged on a shelf like an arsenal. I knew those were the noisy ones - filled with flash powder to explode like flak and burn the retina.

  ‘Coronation of Anne Boleyn, these guys wrap ’emselves up in damp leaves so they don’t get burned. They call ’emselves the greenmen,’ he was saying, while I looked along the shelves at the trays of different-shaped charges, the sounding tubes labelled WHISTLE, CRY, SCREAM, the colour-coded chemicals: copper sulphate, barium nitrate, strontium salts, a row of traditional Chinese bamboo tubes, a box of fuse-and-pellet chambers, sticks, touchpaper, wax, string, glue. In front of them, my uncle himself, looking less like my father than ever, too much energy in too small a room, mixing dry powders but seeing explosions.

  He let me look at his book. It reminded me of the ill-fated science journal my father kept while he tried to defeat Dutch elm disease. The same man whose only writing now was filling in the hen-to-egg ratio on a shit-spattered clipboard. And here was his brother - the designer, the alchemist, still caught in his art, in love with science. There had never really been any fair competition between them. Kipper ran rings round my father. He always had. Yet it was my father who’d landed the girl on the Hansa. That must’ve hurt.

  Christmas was close now and I had work in the smokehouse, not doing fish, but the curing of ham. Kipper had bought knuckles of pork by the sackful. From the middle of October the twins and I rubbed salt into the skin of all the cuts we’d got, working hard at the flesh till our own hands were as dry as pumice. We stood on the lawn at two trestle tables - both twins working the hocks, trimming skin, sizing and salting, passing them down to me as if we were rendering the corpses of a whole army. The hams were sunk in large barrels in the lawn, and while they were in the brine we prepared the next batch. After three days we drained them, then worked the skin again, rubbing salt and muscovado sugar into the meat. Kipper would join in at this stage - squatting down on the grass, poking and sniffing the hams, then, with a dash of ceremony, add saltpetre to the brine. Well done lads, my mouth’s watering. Saltpetre, which also went into his fireworks, from out the Lab and into the bellies of anyone who ate his meat - both of his industries coming together.

  All through October and November I worked this way in the freezing marsh wind, turning the pigs with a wooden paddle in their graves, and then after each batch had had a month, we stacked them in the smokehouse, on a high rack so the fat wouldn’t melt. If it did that, they’d be too dry. An ugly stain began to spread across my hands: the dark nicotine of a smokehouser’s tan. As a final touch, from high in the chimney I dripped honey over the hams while the twins raked the oak chippings beneath me.

  Cliff reaches up and pinches my ankle. ’Nother couple ’o days she’ll be ready, he says to his brother. Sandy crawls in beside him and grins wide-mouthed at me. Carve him Christmas Day, what d’ya think? I shift, sending down a cloud of soot to make them back out. Easy! they shout, together. That unnerved me, how they thought as one and used their shorthand like all twins do. They spent their time ribbing each other and taking the piss, but when it came down to it they were virtually inseparable. Kipper’ll send us all up one day we’re not careful, Sandy says, easily the more nervous of the two, about the firework Lab so close on the other side of the wall. Cliff’s still staring up at me. He looks at his brother, waiting for a nod to go ahead, then he whispers to me you want to make real fireworks? What d’ya reckon? Think it’s time you came up the shack, Sandy says.

  I know what that means. The shack’s where they made the dead man’s fingers.

  The twins left me there high in the chimney, where the bricks narrowed round me like the throat of an animal. Greasy with rendered pig and fish fat, inches thick with soot. As I scraped away at the blackened wall I revealed the heavily lined carving of a face - a wooden face encased in soot, as ugly as the Lincoln Imp.

  Outside I could hear the twins laughing and yanking the smokehouse door by its broken catch. This ain’t never gonna get fixed proper, Sandy said.

  The face looked like an old man with a thick beard, but it was covered with the wax of fish fat and smoke that had congealed over time. I pushed my knife into the carving till the blade touched the wood beneath, and carefully I exposed the original features: a young man’s face with a clean
-shaven chin. An honest, clear symmetry to his expression, a dreamy faraway look in his eyes. The face of an angel, carved in exactly the same style as the rest of the Hansa carvings. The face of Grandfather Hands.

  What was Kipper doing with it? Where had he found it? Had he broken it off all those years before when he spent the summer with his brother on the Hansa. Or was it Goose - that other imp - who was responsible for hanging it up there? What better fate for the man who’d deserted her than to have him smoked for years till he grew ugly with age and his dreamy look was lost for ever?

  On Friday nights we went to the Albatross. There’s Kipper, over by the bar, stooping to avoid the tankards hanging off the beams. Elsie is sitting in the corner with me. She’s been drinking Cinzano all evening and she’s kept her huge coat on, so her face is flushed. Her eyes look dark here in the pub, and strangely sunken. She’s wearing enormous hooped earrings and one of them keeps falling out. She seems nervous.

  Kipper’s leaning over the bar. A spotlight near him is striking across his face, making him look pretend and untrustworthy, like a waxwork image of himself. He’s listening to someone in the back bar. It’s Willie Slater and a couple of his mates - I can see Willie’s corduroy trousers and the wellies rolled down at the top.