by Jeremy Page
‘That ain’t the only reason,’ Kipper’s saying, his voice a little higher than normal. He’s trying to keep something light over there. He’s smiling and in profile one of his teeth gleams unfortunately, a little like a shark’s tooth. ‘Yeah, that’s for certain all right.’ Kipper’s agreeing too much. He’s trying to force a laugh where there is none, and Willie Slater knows it. There’s a loud male shout from the back bar.
‘What’s he doing, Pip?’ Elsie’s staring down at the table, the make-up she’s put on is too thick. Around her eyes it’s given her a permanently surprised look.
‘Making a fool of himself,’ I whisper.
‘He shouldn’t get involved. He always rises to it every time.’ What’s she being so protective about? Let him fight his own battles.
‘Elsie. What’s really going on with you and him?’
‘Oh Christ!’ she says. ‘You pick your times!’ And even while she’s saying this Kipper’s coming back from the bar, the pint, the half and the odd-shaped Cinzano glass looking as mismatched in his hands as we do in the corner.
‘Lads,’ he says, sitting down, ‘sexual repression in a coastal town. Discuss.’ The effort of forcing a joke is still with him. he drinks from his pint and Elsie puts a tense hand on his knee.
Willie Slater comes through, fat and unbalanced on the tile floor. His lips are wet with beer and one of his eyes has become lazy. He puts a whisky down in front of Kipper.
‘No offence meant,’ he says, staring at Elsie.
‘You’re all right,’ Kipper says.
‘You should come out on the speedboat sometime. The both o’ you - I mean all three of you,’ he says, glancing uneasily at me. I’m part of a mad family in his eyes. ‘Else - you’d love it.’
Elsie looks up at him, her chin straight and defined like the edge of an axe. ‘I doubt that very much, fat man.’
Willie Slater rolls back on his heels and raises his eyebrows comically, caught between staying and going.
‘Ohh, you’re feisty, ain’t you, lass?’
Kipper stands, his knuckles pressing on the bar table, bridling with anger.
‘Time, gent’eman, please!’ calls the barman, ringing it out like the ringside bell at the end of the round.
On New Year’s Eve, Kipper set his fireworks like an artillery range in the marsh halfway to Cley, leaving Elsie and myself in the house. Elsie, standing bloodless by the window, half in shadow, half a shadow herself. We were meant to go to the display but Elsie wasn’t going anywhere. She stood by the window and I stood by her, with the lights out, our breath touching the glass in a single misty cloud as the first fireworks leaped up. Hold me, she said, and I put my hand in hers and she stood slumped in front of the window not wanting to be there but doing as she was told as streaks of colour and light shot up into the sky. I imagined Kipper crouching low in the reeds by the firework pen, his expression set on Cley and the crowd building along the bank, the glowing taper in his hand, wondering where we were. The thin whistle of his rockets rising up from his fingertips - their scream turning to agony as they burned out over the rooftops, like the cries of gulls, diving and diving as they hunted eggs. From his boots the low snaps of fireworks crackling through the marsh - leaving blue trails as they search rat-like through the banks of reeds, looking this way, looking that. There’s the scatter of birds taking wing. The crowd begins to get nervous. All gettin’ a bit close, they think, the lights and bangs advancing on all sides, and now it’s rising and gathering pace till the cracks and booms are knocking the windows, waking the children, sending the pets under the beds. All that happening and there was Elsie, kissing me, her lips feeling wet and fleshy on my face. In Cley the sounds of the fireworks are clanging off the flint walls, the men get nervous, like when they hear the lifeboat going out. There are pints left half-drunk on tables. Elsie smiles and I see her face in the dark and I think I’m on the whale again, she’s so translucent. There’s Kipper, grinning like a devil in the marsh, his smoky eyes set on the village. He’s got their attention all right. And now the full arsenal of his Lab goes up. Flash powder cauterizes the air, explosions thud into the marsh. Here it come! he yells, you bastards! Imagining the Glaven lit up like lava, seeing the flames leap from roof to roof, even the windmill - such a picture postcard - with its sails on fire like a giant roman candle. This was the place where the storm had left Kipper high and dry in a tree, crying like a baby, and now he was bringing it back. You gutless bunch! I’m here! And with a sudden, quiet whuump of air, our window shifted in its frame, and the show was over.
‘I’m sorry for everything,’ Elsie said. ‘So sorry.’
‘You and me,’ I said, and she put her finger on my lips and said don’t talk, I don’t want you to talk.
We stayed by the window till we saw Kipper’s silhouette rising through the dark wave of the riverbank. He vanished as he climbed down the slope on this side. Elsie placed her hand on the windowpane and I wondered whether she was trying to stop him coming. And then he was at the door, stamping the marsh from his shoes and entering the house with sudden speed. The noise of him being inside broke the stillness which until that moment was so perfect, so crystal. He came into the room and shouted well! and with it I knew how much he needed adulation, not just for his fireworks, but his fish, his education, his whole scientific approach to life - all there to make us love him. Love this flawed man. Love and loathe him in equal measures, and I felt a darkly turning insight, of being on the outside but able to see in. His two faces, his many sides. How it would end for him. And us by the window said it all. Our breath was still there on the cold glass like a guilty conversation that wouldn’t fade.
That night, I fell asleep listening to the rumblings of their argument through the walls. And when I woke, Elsie was lying in bed with me. Perhaps it was the hotness of her breath and the familiar smell of her mouth which made me wake. Her hair had the colour of ash. For a while I gazed at her in the darkness, till I saw the obsidian gleam of her eyes and realized she was looking back at me.
‘Come with me. Let’s go to the Hansa before he’s up.’
The saltmarsh was always a soft thing, but that New Year’s morning the ground felt crisp with frost and unreal for it. When we reached the lagoon, the water was perfectly still and brilliant, as if it wasn’t water at all, but some light liquid metal with the sky trapped down in there, deep in its own reflection. Every few seconds a smooth lap curled along the whole length of the shore, and with it came a small breath of air. Elsie went off to free a cuddy from one of the moorings.
I punted us over with an oar while Elsie stood forward of the cabin. The prow of the boat was covered in frost, and it passed just a couple of inches above the water. There was something about that - that clean white powdery frost, and the water gently stretching next to it, which was so fragile. Just a lip of water splashing on to the deck - the smallest drop - and it would all be lost.
The Hansa floated eerily in the full tide, alive and constant in three generations of my family, for Hands, George, Lil’, Kipper, Elsie and myself. A part of our identity. Old and black, falling apart, and one of the family. I tied the painter to the gunwale and helped Elsie aboard. She stood on the words my grandfather had carved into the planks. Jeder macht mal eine kleine Dummheit, barely visible any more. She seemed excited and apprehensive and I suppose she knew then that this would be the last time for her.
On deck she went to the bow and breathed the salt air deeply. Then just as quickly her shoulders slumped and she began crying softly. I scrambled over and hugged her, realizing for the first time that I was now as tall as her. What was going on? What was happening?
‘We had a huge row,’ she said. ‘Kipper and me - he said these things, Pip, just to hurt, you know, he just wanted to hurt me. He said these things about you and me. I can’t take it . . .’ She trailed off, sobbing. ‘He’s going to make me ill - it’s already happening. Can’t you see - no, you never see, do you - not even your own mother . . .’ too up
set to stop herself. ‘You know, the best moment of my life was on that whale.’
It was just her and myself and miles of sky and water but I felt so watched, so vulnerable. All around us were the carvings. Those grey old carvings my grandfather had done with a German army penknife nearly fifty years ago.
‘He’s draining my life away,’ Elsie was saying weakly.
‘Elsie,’ I said, using her name as if naming her would make her stop, ‘we should leave. Run away. I’ll look after you. I’m good at running away.’
She let out a brief laugh. But I didn’t want her to laugh.
‘Get off this marsh,’ I said. ‘Let’s start somewhere else.’ I don’t know what I said - it was all coming out in one go - and Elsie wasn’t even listening. But by that time I wasn’t speaking for her anyway. I was speaking for me and I was speaking for my mother - because it was suddenly so clear I hadn’t saved her - my own mother - I couldn’t save her - but maybe I could save Elsie. Elsie - the girl who might be my own sister. It’s this marsh. This beautiful marsh. It will destroy us. It’s destroyed them all.
January was terrible. Cold, dark, frozen and silent. On the 31st, after more than two months of fading and fading, Elsie vanished entirely. She left us in the middle of the night. No note. No goodbye. Just gone. It was the anniversary of the great storm of 1953, just as Goose had predicted. A storm’s gonna come back, ain’t stoppin’ till it gets them who got away the first time. And this time, all that was left of Elsie, all that remained, was the smudge of her handprint, still there on the windowpane, like the wave of a ghost.
20
Crabs
The day after my mother went the ice went too. And with it the mile of footsteps she’d left melted into the drain and washed away for good. It’s odd thinking this way; had the thaw come a day earlier, would she have stared down at the water from the bridge at Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalen and simply turned back? Returned to the farm, made a bread-and-butter pudding for tea, and we’d have eaten it in silence and no one would have known how close, how terribly close she was. Spring’s coming, my father would say, and he’d show us how raw his hands had become over the last few weeks fixing fences in the estate, nothing colder than a cold length of wire, he would add. But that didn’t happen, and over the years I’ve thought that frozen winter was part and parcel of her own illness, that moments like that wait for us whatever, that spring would never have come as long as she’d lived.
And now it had happened again, family history circling like the storms round the North Sea. A cold snap. No mile of footprints, but the end of a journey none the less. Elsie was gone.
And she ain’t coming back, Kipper was saying, sounding oddly bullish about the whole thing, building a fire in the grate, snapping kindling and layering it in a lattice across the paper. She weren’t happy here, we all know that. We’d been talking things through. That was how he told me, that 1st of February morning, his back to me as he filled the grate. She’ll write when she feel better about things, there ain’t nothing we can do anyhow, once she make her mind up. Just his back to me. How can you scrutinize that? And me, plunged once more into silence - because Elsie had gone and with it she’d taken my voice. Best to keep busy, he said. I couldn’t tell if he was upset or not. There ain’t no more hams - we’ll get you work down the crab factory in Cromer. Pay’s good. And with that he turned. A grey-eyed look, which said that’s that, the deal’s done.
Spike yelled at me and I snapped out of the memory. Get that side and don’t slip and don’t reach too far or you’ll do your back in an’ that ain’t no use to no one! Kipper was wrong, Elsie’d been gone a month and she wasn’t writing. Now swing her over, Spike was saying, which was our cue to haul the crate off the Toyota and let it drop on the concrete, the crabs crashing inside like flints. It was seven in the morning and the fisherman was looking down at us from the cab of the truck and cracking jokes because he’d been up since three and his day was done. There were perhaps twelve crates on the truck, and each one had about twenty crabs in it and they’d sit hulked down on their shells with their claws drawn in. The crabs were wide and flat and tried to get us only when we lifted them from the crate. The larger ones were peppered with barnacles, and those barnacles, perhaps mistaking the crabs for flints themselves, had made the wrong choice. Because they were going to die also.
Spike was the cruellest man I’d ever met. Never saw him without a fag hanging from the corner of his mouth - it just hung there, half-smoked, stuck to dry lips, and if a crab swung a pincer at him he’d burn the crab’s eyes with the end of the cigarette. Did it to impress the fishermen, who thought he was the lowest of the low. They don’t feel pain, he’d say, but when he burned them their claws would clench into one thick knuckled fist under their bodies and a large bubble of spit would foam from their mouths. He was a demon, torturing and roasting and boiling his victims, and in its own way the crab factory was a region of hell and that suited me.
I’ll make some calls, Kipper had said, and that evening I’d heard him on the phone saying he won’t be no trouble, he don’t even talk, he just want to earn some cash. Kipper had shipped me off to Cromer into this inferno, swapping his smokehouse for the boiling tubs. But for me it was heading in the right direction - instead of hanging the dead in a smoking chimney, I was sliding the living into boiling water. Even at that stage I knew how this story would end for me.
So they came off the trucks and the crabs were lifted from their crates and pressed against a yardstick and graded for size. It was a quick process. Lift, measure, throw into a holding cart. And landing with the dry sound of skulls they’d slide against each other and rise up on one side and hold a pincer in the air. Pugilists, the lot of them. In the cart they’d spin and turn and overturn one another - enraged by the factory’s sudden violence, claiming territories, seeking safety under each other and folding their legs in fury. Left in the cart they’d eventually huddle down and stop moving. They’d blow some spit, and something would dart in and out of their mouths with the speed of a snake’s tongue. It gave the feeling they were watching you, judging, full of knowledge and knowing exactly what was coming next. Which was swift. Spike on one side of the cart and me on the other; we’d lift it to shoulder height and tip it in one motion into the boiling tank. Immediately the notorious shriek would emerge and I would think of the rising screech of Kipper’s fireworks as the crabs fell sideways to the bottom, spinning past the bubbles, and it seemed that in some of those bubbles were the last parts of their screams - bursting on the surface and filling the shed like as many crabby souls making their final dash for the sea. And if you kept your head away from the steam, and if the water cleared at all, you could just make out the bottom of the tank and see the claws move tighter, then relax and not move again. Or was it just a trick of the water? I rarely looked. Spike was waiting for me to crack because all the others had over the years, but as for me, when I entered that factory I had no conscience and I wasn’t going to let him have the monopoly on cruelty. Many before me had run off down Corner Street slamming brown-stained aprons into the gutter and I wouldn’t be one of them. I’d play Spike at his own game. Show no emotion and no compassion and if I gave him no response then his cruelty was pointless and it might take time but that would eventually get him.
After a while a brown scum would rise to the surface which stank and Spike always claimed it was the crabs shitting themselves and when the scum formed a froth so thick it could blow off the surface the crabs were ready. We lifted them out by raising a cage sunk deep in the tank, and when it was clear of the water we left them hanging in the air, up in their gibbet. They cooled like boiled eggs - the water evaporating from their shells leaving them dry and salty and burnished with heat.
By half eight in the morning the crabs were done and the dressing-women were there, full of talk and no-nonsense and Mary you been at it? and whass up love don’t fret so and juss comin’ back the pub like he always do like nothin’ ain’t happened. Yeah? Need some
ed-u-cation I reckon. Well him an’ all just like Eddie and the rest them old dogs, yeah? And the knifes would go into the shells between the back legs and with a crack the crab would unhinge and the meat would pull up and be freed from the shell and the bottom of the crab would be put to one side. All I’m sayin’ is he ain’t worth it - I ain’t havin’ a pop love but thass how I see it . . . Despite the heat of the boiling tank it was cold in the factory and they’d rub their noses with the backs of their hands while still holding the filthy knives. Phyllis had been there twenty years and the wood on the bench in front of her had worn down like a butcher’s block. Jayne and Karen were younger, but were toughening up from their forearms upwards. She’s late by two weeks an’ if it’s thass made him piss about then he got it comin’. They changed the radio station and made their own tea and ignored us and we skulked about wiping and sweeping while the knives slid in and the flesh came out: dead man’s fingers - the poisonous lungs of the crab - lifted from the bodies like wet grey leaves and thrown on the floor in front of the broom. The women cracked the pincers with the handles of their knives and those handles were so worn it looked like a dog had been chewing them. At any moment they might bring us in with a let’s ask the quiet one here or ain’t that right Spike or you still a virgin? We did the job no one else would do and in their eyes we were little more than the things we boiled.
A long winter, cold and draughty and filled with the struggle of forgetting what had happened. Forgetting the Hansa and Elsie and why she’d run away and whether any of it made any sense to me. Elsie, who had always been slightly beyond reach, whose hair colour even now could be seen in the burned shells of the crabs, and it was those crabs themselves - dying by the thousand - that saved me. Spike noticed it first. Instead of throwing them about like flints from one crate to another, I had begun to study them. I held them, dragged my fingernail across their dry-wood shells, stared into their eyes while their pincers snapped the air in front of my face. A crab’s eye looks like a piece of shingle on its stalk. Somehow it watches you through that stone, without blinking. I tapped their shells and pulled their armoured joints and pressed my ear to them and heard nothing - not even a whisper of the waves in my mother’s seashell.