by Jeremy Page
An instant later there was a deep oomph under the boat like the sea was suddenly as solid as soil and the whole cuddy lifted and broke and split around us. The sea peaked up like daggers between the boards and a rush of venomous noise spat out between the sharp edges of water and the steam of some liquid which wasn’t water and wasn’t air flew violently and stung me in my eyes, and my ears felt punched by a sound I hadn’t quite heard. And all four of us were falling through the juddering boat like we’d been up in the air and there was nothing beneath us and bits of wood and plank were turning in front of us like we had to examine them, and I saw my father’s switchblade razor flying once more like a beautiful sleek fish in front of me - the bull on its handle charging free.
The holes we fell through turned out to be full of the sea and there was no more explosion beneath us and the boat was rapidly nothing more than the cannibalized wreckage of all the boats it had once been, all sliding off on the waves as if they were trying to get back to their wrecks. Then in the middle of the wood and the splashing it felt oddly calm and I sensed a weird shape pass by me which wasn’t wood and was as cold as the sea and I stared into the water and saw the long grey flank of the hound tope, its passionless eye and its shark’s tail threading through the stunned wreckage.
It shouldn’t have happened in the middle of the sea, but I was standing on tiptoes on a sandbank. Further away, the bucket of eels bobbed at an angle, beyond them, the sight of Kipper Langore, no thought for anyone else, swimming for his life in that no-nonsense front crawl of his, heading for Blakeney Point. Head down, a breath to the right after every four strokes. You bastard. Near me, the twins struggling to stand upright on the bank while their waders filled with water. Cliff spluttering in the choppy waves and shouting insults and trying to claw his way towards me, and Sandy pulling him back or trying to hold on and both of them dragging each other to where the sandbank seemed higher.
I clung to a piece of wood and started paddling for the Point, while around me the water began to boil under a hail of raindrops as heavy as lead shot. And yes, I did look back. Several times in fact. Each time, the twins were a little smaller, standing like broken staithe posts half-buried in the sandbank amid the steam and mist of the storm.
In the sea again - my family always ending up in deep water. But I’d never been this far out or this lost in the middle of such a storm. The piece of driftwood I clung to was painted dark blue. And as I paddled and splashed I put my face against its cold gloss and felt it lifting me clear from the water. I knew my legs were still moving, but the water was cold and I didn’t really know whether I was going towards land or whether I was heading towards Dogger Bank and the swirl of North Sea, which had claimed my grandfather. If any of that story had been true. Blue gloss on the driftwood. Its colour seemed to be the only important thing. Above me, the storm hailed its heart out and pushed me further into the sea until I began to think the water might be some vast relaxing bed meant for sleep. My ears and eyes and mouth were full of water and my splashing legs sounded like the rain all round me. Dark blue wood. Yes, that’s vital. The Bastard cuddy was built of many boats, but none of them was this colour. And this piece had been in the sea a long time. It was covered in a film of seaweed, moving like soft hair in the water. A long smooth piece of wood, the back half of a dinghy perhaps, and painted in a precise script by a delicate hand were the letters P and i.
P and i.
P and i.
The rhythm of my paddling. Lean my head on the wood; feel the barnacles and limpets, feel the sea, feel the whale, Elsie beside me, floating off, floating off. And as the cold swept over me in waves larger than the sea itself, I went in and out of consciousness, thinking back on my favourite memory of diving under water in the Pit, diving through the shafts of sunlight on a warm summer’s day, the image of the Hansa refracting gently above me. Seals spinning and diving in the distance, the feel of the sandy bottom on my chest. I think of Hands’s carvings along the wreck’s gunwale: the gannet, the fish of the Dogger Bank, the storm petrels and the lobster.
And I remember that the the Pip had been painted Oxford blue. The P-i-p. The same shade of blue which was keeping me afloat now.
Nowhere to go but the bottom of the sea. Nowhere to go but the bottom of the sea. It went through my head because I’m sure that’s what Hands must have been saying when he clung to the same bit of wood. And then strangely I wasn’t on the Pip any more. The old smooth Oxford blue was gone, and in its place was the sharp dust of shingle and sand on my face. A wave which kept lifting me forward and pulling me back, dropping me on a beach and then rolling me off again. I slept some more, till the beach kept knocking me awake and I thumped it and tried to bang it quiet with my head. Why wouldn’t it leave me alone? I was happy on the Pip. I’d been searching for it all my life. And now this beach with its sand as sharp as broken glass. I crawled out of the wave on to the shore and fell into a deep sleep. When I woke my mouth was full of sand and I couldn’t - for a while - use my legs. But there they were, stretched out on the beach. There was the sea, and all around me the high-backed shore which could only be the Point. And the only thing which was missing was my piece of driftwood. It had disappeared. It wasn’t by my side. It wasn’t down the shoreline. Gradually I stood and started to look for it. Without my piece of the Pip I might always be lost.
But I never found it.
The storm had disappeared, leaving in its place a hot late-summer’s day. Across the Point, over short-cropped grass, sea lavender blew gently, surrounded by the bright green of the year’s new crop of samphire. Who would pick it this season, I thought, now Goose was in the home? The heatwave was continuing, the damp earth was steaming. Larks trilled their summer-meadow song - a sound so pure - all the times you’ve heard it before, all the times you hope to hear it again. And through the steamy air I saw the dark carcass of the Hansa. I walked to it and held its rotting hull. An old friend. I swam slowly across the channel and climbed out on the Morston side. The same spot where Hands had first appeared, buried up to his neck in mud.
Across the marsh, a man was hammering a SOLD banner over the FOR SALE sign outside Lane End, while a team of builders inside hacked off the old plaster with its tidemark from 1953.
The sun was low in the sky when I reached Kipper’s house. I must have been in the water all day. Or had it been days? I kept thinking I saw the twins standing like posts in the reedbeds, but I knew they were just visions.
No one was in. I went to the window where Elsie had left her handprint and I placed my print on the other side of the glass. Hello. I searched the house. The muddy footprints from my own shoes were the only signs anyone had been in. The arm of his chair, pockmarked where he knocked the embers from his pipe. Even that pipe - an affectation. The calm dim shadows of his front room, the smell of tobacco, the hint of fish. The cave-like room of a man, a collector, a man wanting to possess and display.
I went outside again to find the whole marsh bathed in a soft sunset glow. Summer’s so beautiful in Norfolk, I thought. Can this colour of light really exist anywhere else? I was sitting on the scrub lawn, and in front of me was the heavy wooden door of the smokehouse. Wisps of smoke curled out from the cracks like dark nails being pulled from the wood. I’d seen this before. In the clouds. A heavy door locked tight. I saw it in the clouds just after Kipper told me what he’d done with Elsie. What had he done with Elsie?
I tried to open the smokehouse door, but the latch had entirely gone. It had played up for years. Will someone please get that latch fixed! Kipper would say for the hundredth time - neither him nor the twins ever thinking it was necessary enough to do it. I put my finger in the hole where it had been but couldn’t get the door open. Finally I prised it with a bloater pole, and through the roll of sickening grey smoke that came out I saw my uncle, sitting on the earth, muddy and covered with strands of seaweed, surrounded by still-glowing oak chips, as peaceful as a Buddha.
He’d tried to put the fire out, but he would hav
e known the oak chips never really burned, they just smouldered, and it would take a week for them to go out naturally. He’d cleared the earth where he sat, and had crouched as low as possible in the hope that enough air might get in under the door for him to breathe, but there was no hope. Not really. I think he must have suffocated fairly quickly. In the minutes after the latch came away in his hand perhaps. So many times that had happened before, so many times me or one of the twins had pulled that door open.
Above him, the carving of Hands looked down like a guardian angel, both of them silent, as if I’d interrupted a long and detailed conversation.
Lived all your life by the sea and when it came down to it how strange you were so terrified of it. I suppose it was the effect of being stranded up that tree when you were a boy, the night of the great storm. Looking down into those angry waves and thinking they’d be back to get you, one day. That front crawl of yours, a friend to the last, getting you back to dry land without even a look over your shoulder. And then crawling into the warmth of your smokehouse: the action of a rat. Well, you’re dead now, Kipper, you deserve nothing less. You’ve done nothing but drive people away, force their hand, furnish your pocket, and where has it got you? Smoked with the bloaters, that’s where.
I had to touch him. To be sure. I reached out and held his hand. Dead man’s fingers all right. Odd that those grey eyes were shut and his mouth hung open, much like the bloaters themselves after five hours of smoking. And like them, his skin had taken on the waxy flypaper hue which said he was ready. Not quite smoked to the bone, as he would have said, but he wasn’t far off it either.
He’d last for years in his grave.
22
Thistle Dew (or, This’ll Do)
Hands, drowned; the same fate for his daughter over thirty years later, Lil’ Mardler, below the ice. Can never break through. My father, pecked ragged by chickens, underneath the spitting electricity pylons. Elsie, so full of life and then nothing, no goodbye, just a handprint on a window which will be cleaned away one day. And now Kipper. All of them living and losing their way on this thin strip of saltmarsh which can never be called land and never be called sea. With a legacy of madness and hurt which must be out there among the creeks and samphire, blowing in the wind. This coastal living has formed them, made them extraordinary, and killed them off.
A thin vein of salt running though all these lives, unquenched and resolute, like a filigree of bone, growing in us all, connecting us with each other and the land that’s made us. Salt marked our lives, the first thing to dry on our skin, the last thing to wash away, just as able to preserve as destroy. My family’s story has been written in salt and it’s lasted over the decades, but it’s taken its toll on the people who have lived it. It’s corroded their wills like the kiss of Ol’ Norse on the ruined wood of the Hansa.
Kipper began to fall forwards and I caught him, his head resting briefly on my shoulder. I pushed him back and propped him against the wall of his smokehouse, where he belonged, then wiped some of the dirt from his face. His skin felt warm, whereas mine felt icy. Then I pushed the door of the smokehouse shut, with him behind it, and walked slowly away, the night closing in, until I reached the collapsing shape of the Thistle Dew, abandoned and damp, in the vague wide shadow of the Morston Marshes. Inside it was featureless and disgusting, without light, without warmth. Since Bryn Pugh had left it had clearly been used as a smoking den, there were porn mags scuffed across the floor, and there was a sweet smell of piss and a smell of dark leathery mud.
I wedged myself into the corner, bringing the card and papers around me for warmth. Hidden. Safe, for the moment. Wait for the morning, make a decision then, stay awake and wait. But a chill rising like a tide within me, stealthy and unstoppable. The feeling of being drowned once again which wouldn’t leave - how the water had peaked like daggers with the force of the explosion, and how I’d hit the sea with my mouth wide open and in the gulps of water I swallowed, I must have drowned as much as survived. Life avoiding its own traps. I began to shiver and cough as my mind raced with the images of the last few hours: those tapers passing through the primus flame, the umbilical knot catching fire, the sight of my uncle, sat like a Buddha and smoked like a herring, dead behind those coffin doors of his smokehouse - my family’s story, with all its vanishings and exiles and secrets and lies, heading this way all along.
I fell into an exhausted sleep and began to dream that ice was growing alongside the wreck, inching its way along the hull with the sound of something feral and hungry. I saw it stretching in one glowing sheet over the marshes, dusted with fresh snow. There was a single line of footprints across it, leading out to sea. I followed them, knowing they were my mother’s, knowing all I had to do was catch up with her, reach her, not let her get away again. I trod in her steps, passing the Point, seeing the waves of the North Sea frozen eerily in mid movement, their long dark backs rising up in curls ready to break. Entombed in the ice, the frozen shapes of seals, all with Bryn Pugh’s chisel marks on them. There were wrecks out there too, the Pip, gnawed by the dogfish, the Mary Magdalene, still technicolour bright with its painted clouds, the Bastard like a bric-a-brac stall. I mustn’t let those footsteps get away. But I realized I was getting lost none the less, my mother was just too far away, and this would never be the way to reach her. The footsteps began to melt, the ice vanished, and I became aware that I was now standing in soil. Soft harvest soil - a giant field. This must be part of the map I now had to follow. I had a new direction. To return. Only a return can make sense, I thought. I must go back home.
As far as I could see were empty fields, windblown hedges and dusty tracks. The Norfolk Desert. Late-summer fragrances, a harvest where the land ripened into a bountiful larder. Pheasants braced in the trees, berries falling plump as raindrops, sweetcorn bursting from the husks. Roots growing fat in the ground as if the soil itself is turning edible and sweet: clay into carrots, stones into swedes.
But a harvest so quickly followed by slaughter. Shotguns filled with murder and lead, blasting into the air, the smells of wheat dust and diesel, of stubble burning in dark firestorms - men walking through the smoke dragging paraffin-soaked rags. Combines cutting long into the night, following their own headlamps, then being left, exhausted, covered in flour dust, the jaw of the cutting blade resting on the ground, full of a right to destroy.
I dreamed of all these things, returning, to the cold brick farmhouse on the edge of the Stow Bardolph Estate. Low outbuildings with their sinister black doorways and the pile of poaching traps spilling out like skeletal grins. The side door with its drab-painted porch and the room inside, never more than a place to heap boots, as chilly as a fridge. The thin damp carpets, the narrow stairs, the sense of something both unresolved and failed - a place which had never truly maintained a full and proper sense of life. Crusts of stale bread next to a cold mug of tea, still on the edge of the table. Here my mother washed the silverfish down the sink and grew her flowers in the garden, she repaired the decoy birds each evening, her heart slowly breaking, while my father learned his skills of bloodstock, became a man capable of attracting a younger, more hopeful woman, if only briefly. It was always a dismal spot, which could never have nurtured a family, how could we even have tried to do it there - it was destined to separate lives into threadbare elements.
And I knew my dream wouldn’t end here, my return was not to this place, my return had to be further away than this damp plot of soil which had never quite belonged to any of us. I had to carry on, to go further, into the Fens, where it’s so flat and huge it feels like you’re not only alone but that even the hills, trees and hedgerows have given up too. Into the precise and rigid geometry of agriculture, soil as black as old lava, something dead and yet also new-formed about it. A blank slate. To the drainage channels, trying to keep fields from returning back to the sea - but the nature of the land itself seems to be the seabed none the less. Be untamed and uncharted. Grow your life there but be under no illusions, the l
and knows itself as something other than you do. Past the heavy iron sluice gates and a sense of recognition growing in me as I continue, knowing that I’m close now, close to the chicken farm at Four Gotes. I imagine my father would be slumped in an armchair, in an unlit room, the flickering colour of his television giving the room the glow of an aquarium. He’s always there, frozen in time, hopeless, the sum of his failures, but he’s everything too - he’s my father. The sign to the egg farm would be falling off its hinges as I walk past. The chickens would murmur within their hencoops, another day closer to the butcher’s block. The pylons would drape across the bungalow with their broad dark pulse of life. Then I would knock at the door, wait, try the handle and let myself in. There’s a smell in there of neglect, but also a gentle familiarity too, the smell of Kipper’s living room and my father’s old study - his contribution to the house at the Saints I must have missed all these years. So familiar, like your own smell, so easy to overlook. I find the bungalow is all shadows and empty rooms, as if the pylons that straddle the building have drawn out its life in their ceaseless overhead flow.
My father is sitting in the armchair as I expected, his hair messy and sparse, like he’s just pulled off a jumper. He has no need to smooth it down. He’s asleep. The TV is on but it’s just the test card, the girl with the red headband, playing noughts and crosses with the doll, so unfailingly hopeful and poignant, never moving, never ageing, neither noughts nor crosses. The sound coming from the set is a drawn-out distant whine coming deep from within the wires. Gull’s asleep too, near my father’s chequered slippers - a Christmas gift from my mother ten years before, they’re grey and worn now but they still fit the feet, still keep a hint of the warmth of the original gift, the original moment he got them. Gull doesn’t move, doesn’t hear, doesn’t make a sound. I only know he’s alive because he’s still in this room, not buried outside next to the chickens he hates.