Salt

by Jeremy Page

  The walls were covered with snares, traps and poaching wires. Eight-strand snares with peg and tealers hung from nails in the roof, badger-tunnel snares along a wall, fox one-lever-release traps down by the window, and several mole-shaft traps in a wooden tray by the table. Their metal smelled of wild garlic. There were photos too, of a fat very dead pike being held over the side of a boat, a pile of rabbit corpses across the freshly ploughed furrows of a field. A fox with his hind leg broken and torn.

  I have to do this. I have to see all this through.

  On the table was a Swan Vesta matchbox, and as I slid it open something twitched from one side to the other. It was a queen bee, starved but alive, curled into the box lengthwise with its still-iridescent abdomen moving in some kind of agony. Its wings were paper dry and in pieces around it. I carefully slid it back into the box and began to make the dead man’s fingers, carefully reading the method in Kipper’s journal. Never leave the mix, it said, and then in his best writing my uncle had eulogized the chemicals:

  Glycerine is made as a by-product of making soap. Uses: emollient and laxative.

  C₃H₈O₃ sulphuric acid: (containing sexivalent sulphur) dense and oily, colourless.

  H₂SO₄, nitric acid: (containing nitrogen in the quinquevalent state) (mix of five), colourless, poisonous.

  HNO₃ (glycerine + OLI?).

  Nitro-glycerine is yellowish. The colour of smoked fish skin!

  I poured the liquids from the demijohns and began to stir with a glass rod, round the bowl, round the bowl, the sound of the rod on the enamel and I saw the folds of dough on a proving loaf, and then the flour dust on the soft hair of my mother’s arms. Thin dark hairs covering in dust as if years and years were passing while I watched. Pass me the raisins, she says, and I see we’re making a malt loaf together, to be ready when Elsie comes round with Mrs Holbeach. Flowers growing outside the kitchen window. Not all of them, she says, as I tip the bowl into the mix. She saves one or two and says these are special, these are ours, and she pops them into my mouth and I taste the salt and flour and butter on her fingers. Why did you walk out on to the ice? I say to her and it makes her laugh. Why? I ask again. Because that was the way out, wasn’t it, my love, that was the path I’d never seen before.

  The goat looked at me with the mean emptiness of its species. Beyond it, my father, looking up at me from the books on his desk in the pool of green light as I appeared in my pyjamas in the middle of the night at the door of his study, me, woken by bad dreams and now unable to understand the look of impatience he gave me, waiting for him to flick his pen to shoo me away from the door down the corridor to go pester my mother, and I thought, at that moment, how my entire life seemed to be an inexhaustible journey of wrong turns and unresolved moments. That I had to take charge now. I had to find my own way out.

  And then something was stinging my eyes and I saw all the ice cubes were just water and rising out from the enamel bowl were the first wisps of smoke curling strangely and gently out of the liquid. What had my uncle written, don’t let it smoke, never leave the mix, not what to do if it smoked. I stirred harder, then left it, then stirred again, softer this time. Whatever I did the smoke kept coming, growing stronger, following some rule deep within it that had nothing to do with me. I thought of the traps, which were like evil grinning mouths, and then, curiously, of Goose’s hollandaise, the one she’d stirred in 1944 while Hands looked on, folding the mixture in so the egg didn’t curdle, and a hollandaise has always curdled for me, even while my mother looked on and that was no use, just no use at all and then that damned goat was there by my elbow, tugging at my shirt and I tried to push it away and it butted me back and some of the mixture slopped up the side of the bowl. Careful! Each drip a fully-made bomb just waiting to go off.

  The smell of the acids was filling the air, and as I looked down at the mix in the dim light of the trap room, I saw the strong silent curls of smoke rising from the colourless liquids and I sensed the profound beauty of science. Powerless to do anything but stare at the rising vapour, like I’d once gazed down the burning barrels of a shotgun and seen the heat haze rising from the metal, as if I was witnessing some dark, revealing miracle.

  The mysterious fire was locking itself into the molecules of these densely coiled fluids. I was enthralled by it, and there, I wanted to plunge my hands into the mix and feel the violence of the acids. I took my lead from Kipper at that point, methodically arranging the goose feathers into rows, damping them into the mixture and carefully rolling them within the sheets of wax. Rolling them like firework tapers, a thin line of fuse cord down their centres like the spine of a wild animal. Dead man’s fingers, the explosives those twins had never dared to make themselves, stacked on the side of the trestle table as the sun lowered over the field outside and its rays glowed through the window as if through the bars of a fire and I thought about this shack on the crest of its own hill and about how Norfolk’s veins were filled with a deep, explosive fire just waiting to get out.

  It was dusk when we walked back through the oak copse. The twins let me carry the dead man’s fingers and Sandy led the goat ahead of us. It was sick and needed to be put down, Cliff reckoned, and he said he would have done it there and then at the shack except you should always make it walk to its grave before you killed it because then you didn’t have to carry it, like George Langore, the dreamer boy, had been told all those years before when he’d had to kill his first sick calf. I held the dead man’s fingers, smelled the fear in my shirt and looked up at the evening sky. Here come the clouds, I thought.

  Here come the clouds.

  Early morning, still dark across the marsh, and Kipper’s standing on the lawn in a blue smock holding a mug of tea in his hands.

  ‘You’re joking,’ he’s saying, ‘you can’t think of going out today.’

  Across the lawn the twins are standing with their fishing gear. ‘Come on, Kipper,’ Cliff says, ‘you gotta do it some day and you ain’t never caught a hound yet.’

  ‘I know that, but it’s gonna be bad weather coming and your boat ain’t nothing but a floating wreck.’

  That sounds like a compliment to the twins.

  ‘Kipper, we’ll bait you up, get you a hound and be back for lunch, how about it?’

  ‘When’s the tide?’ Kipper asks.

  ‘She’ll float in a half-hour. If we stick to the channel then go wide off the Longs we’ll get an extra run.’

  ‘Pip’s coming,’ Sandy says, ‘he’s gonna catch his first hound.’

  ‘No one should be on a boat today,’ Kipper says, sniffing the air, a little hint of that old competitive edge in his voice. He looks at me in a calm, level way. He knows something is up. Things are still not straight between him and me. I’m unnerving him.

  ‘All right,’ he says.

  All four of us crossed the saltmarsh towards the Bastard, which was tied up to a rough wooden staithe in a former oyster creek. The twins carried the heavy rods and bait bucket and bags and they were trying not to slip in the mud and they were scuffing their boots through the sea lavender. I was trailing, holding the dry-bag, and in it I’d secretly put the rough sticks of dead man’s fingers, each one of them rolled and sealed in wax. They were further wrapped in cotton wool. Kipper came up to my side.

  ‘What you up to?’ he said, directly. ‘Why are you suddenly hanging out with these two?’

  I ignored him. Across the marshes the sky was filling with clouds. Ugly grey banks of storm clouds, and barging their way through the cumulus were coming the trickster fractonimbus - the rag clouds - wasp-like, quarrying the weather and stoking up a sky so filled with trouble it looked like a winterland of mountains and ice. A storm was coming. A hell of a storm.

  The twins had noticed it by the time we reached the Bastard. Don’t look pretty, Cliff said, always the first to talk, and Sandy said we shoun’t go out ’cause the luggers are heading back in. Pussies, Cliff said, and they both laughed. Sandy pushed the cuddy down with the weight of o
ne leg and said what d’ya reckon to his brother. I ain’t going back, not with all this stuff, Cliff said, besides, boat’s made out of wrecks, ain’t it?

  ‘This is madness,’ Kipper said, beyond the point of turning back. We climbed in and Cliff towed the boat into the channel till the water was as high as his chest on the waders. He hauled himself on to the bow like he was scaling a wall, and Sandy dropped the outboard on the transom, fixed the wing nuts and pulled the cord. Three times, then it fired with a dirty cough of two-stroke exhaust. Sandy held the tiller, staring at the horizon in the manner of all boatmen, while Cliff pulled himself round the cabin dragging the trim of the boat so heavily on one side the rods fell and I grabbed the dry-bag in case it tipped. Sensing the sea, the eels coiled and writhed in their bucket like hoses filling with water. Kipper, looking for space on a small boat, edged his way front of the cabin till he was crouching near the bow itself.

  ‘You staying there?’ Cliff shouted above the racket of the engine.

  Kipper nodded, crouching on the deck.

  ‘Suit yerself!’ Cliff shouted, then to his brother said, ‘Well, how about that, he ain’t got the nerve out here!’ All three of us looked at Kipper, clutching the front of the cabin. After all this time, all his life living by the sea, put him on a boat and he was scared rigid.

  ‘She’s coming this way,’ Cliff said of the storm.

  ‘Got the primus?’

  ‘Stowed. You know - I ain’t gonna try the heavy line. I’m going for the 18-pound uptide.’

  ‘Rod’s a 40-pound.’

  ‘Don’t matter. I’m going uptide and use the water.’

  ‘From the Banks?’

  ‘What d’ya reckon?’

  ‘Let’s try it on the tide then take her further.’

  And Sandy looked at me and said hounds love some weather anyhow. A hound being a male tope, the prize of their sea. So the twins settled into their fish-talk and were soon laughing about hooks and reels and traces and bait. They kept looking at Kipper, still clutching the front of the boat and looking nervous with it. That’s one funny sight, Sandy said, then began to tell a story about a hound shark that got away - and not just the fish but the rod too, which had leaped from the tripod when a tope made its first charge and all he’d seen was his rod like a javelin skimming the water till the weight of the reel took it under.

  ‘Got the rod clipped nowadays,’ he said. ‘He always make a charge and I let him go till he stop and then I hit him.’

  Cliff disagreed. ‘You fish uptide he go ten feet you got to hit.’

  ‘Ten feet you reckon?’

  ‘ ’Specially if you’ve lip-hooked.’

  Kipper kept staring at me, thin-lipped and uneasy, as the boat dipped and swayed into the deeper water. His time was coming. Beyond him the sky continued to deepen. The rag clouds were marshalling the storm and sending it higher. I began to make out the rudimentary shapes as they formed - Ol’ Norse like a genie, wrapping his arms in vapours he pulled from the sea, spinning fish and animals and birds into his cloak. I was afraid to look. Everywhere the water was darkening and softening and I could smell the storm like a freshly cut onion.

  We were beyond the Race by then and heading straight offshore. Blakeney, the Morston Meals, the Point and Holkham dunes were becoming a paper-thin line behind us, between sky and sea, as if a finger could wipe it clear.

  ‘Talk about the one that got away,’ Cliff said with a wink to his brother. ‘Wonder who Elsie’s screwing now.’

  Just words, just words, I thought, remembering how the fire had locked itself into the acids in the enamel bowl. How the clear liquid had coiled and darkened and seemed to lose reflection, and I looked at the twins and Kipper and I knew I didn’t have any fear any more, not of anything, and the twins seemed strangely uneasy and couldn’t look back at me so they needlessly started to fuss with their tackle instead. Gradually the water became choppy beneath us. This was the shallow area they called the Banks.

  ‘We got to head back in!’ Kipper shouted from the front.

  Cliff cut the engine and shook his head back. I’m enjoyin’ this, he muttered to his brother, we’re gonna laugh about this one. Cliff glanced at me and reached for an eel. It twisted quickly round his fist like he was binding a belt across his knuckles ready to fight. It made it hard for him to get at the tail so he whacked it against the keel housing and it fell off him, stunned. He trapped it under his foot and cut it in half, about six inches above the tail. The eel coiled so tightly it rose with the knot it made, and then it began to loosen and twist into the gaps between the planks. Dark red blood and oil slid away from its severed end.

  I watched the eel die, and felt my fist clench round something in my pocket. And as Cliff threaded the eel on to the wire trace I looked to see what it was and I saw the unmistakable insignia of the charging bull on my father’s switchblade razor.

  I sat back against the cabin, then, while Cliff cast off and Sandy cut another chunk of the eel, I opened the blade a fraction, nicked the end of my thumb with it and saw a tiny bead of blood there.

  The water shivered round the boat and grew expectant and suddenly all those storm clouds seemed to look familiar, all those wicked rag clouds had been whipping up the sky into the same one I’d seen once before, that day at Bedlam Fen. Returning, again, like Goose always said it would, a North Sea storm caught in its own endless spin.

  The twins were watching the rod tips and their lines and frying some butter on the primus for the rest of the eel. The cuddy fell silent apart from the hiss of the gas and the creaks of the screws and flathead nails that held the various parts of the boat together. Water sloshed around darkly under the deck boards, and occasionally one or other of them bailed with an empty margarine tub.

  I opened the dry-bag and felt inside for the dead man’s fingers. Each one had a smooth water-resistant taper attached to the end.

  Sandy noticed the open bag and nudged his brother. Cliff looked at his line, then said what you got in there? I ignored him. He hadn’t seen.

  The butter started to spit and Sandy chucked in the eel. The smell of oily fish and butter and sea air made me think of Goose, how she used to stand by her stove in Lane End. I wondered whether she was standing in the dayroom, fascinated by the cloud-tops of the storm she could see rushing towards the land.

  And at that point Cliff’s rod tipped and the reel span with a high whiz. Both twins whooped and the line rushed and Sandy called strike! But Cliff waited and looked coolly at his twin as though he had all the time in the world. Gradually the line relaxed, and like a sniper Cliff lifted his rod from the tripod, wound a couple of turns on the reel to take the slack and jerked the rod backwards and suddenly he was shouting and reeling in and letting the shark fight the line and bite the trace and he knew he had it. Kipper was standing and beginning to edge his way round the side of the cabin, nervously. Sandy stamped delight and punched the gunwale with his knuckles and then punched Cliff on the arm and Cliff barged him back with his shoulder and both of them were laughing and standing up and really you shouldn’t stand up on small boats and no one noticed the storm was hanging above our heads like the phantom mask of a giant with barred teeth and that in all that motion and ignoring everything around me I’d pulled out the razor and had placed it carefully on deck. My moment, my plan, the chance to finish. And now things were happening according to their own determined logic - I saw the fuses were all tying themselves together in a strange knot like the eels in the bucket and it was only halfway tied when I felt I knew what the knot was and it was none other than the clumsy granny-slip which Goose had tied in my mother’s umbilical cord. And the knot made me laugh out loud and despite all that was going on both twins stopped what they were doing and stared strangely at me, knowing what was about to happen. Kipper too, nearly reaching me and his eyes wide in fear. But whether they realized it or not none of them moved when the knotted fuses passed through the flame of the primus and I held the sticks of dead man’s fingers as they sp
at and fizzed in my hand like a bunch of frost-blackened carrots.

  Though the twins acted in unison all their lives it was Sandy who screamed while Cliff looked on frozen in shock. Cliff continued to reel, even though he wasn’t aware of doing so any more. And in my fist the fiery white flames of the fuses were burning chaotically round the knot and the sparks felt hot and painful on my skin. I remember seeing something darkly impenetrable and amazing in Kipper’s eyes. Then Sandy jumped on me and was ramming my hand against the bulwark and somehow the sticks came loose and briefly they looked as if they were dancing about with their own excitement, their own explosive life they contained, till Cliff’s boot lifted them on his toe and punted them over the side.