by Jeremy Page
I touch my father on his shoulder - the twill shirt he’s wearing is worn soft and warm. He stirs and tries to focus his eyes and I know he’s been drinking hard that evening. Ahh, Pip, he says, quietly, and smiles with the haze of a pleasant dream. A moment he’s happy in. He’s peaceful in this state, the dreamer boy he once was. Gradually he wakes more. You’re here, ain’t you? he says. I nod, obedient and wanting to rest, feeling weary and just wanting to sit and watch the test card with him.
He continues to sit, wanting to keep his eyes closed, then jolts a little and clears his throat. He’s embarrassed by his loneliness. He rubs his forehead with a dirty hand. I’ll get you a drink, you must be thirsty. I’m glad you came. He rises stiffly from the chair and when he’s standing I smell the old smell of the chair’s cushions and the smell of chickens which is forever in his clothes. He grins, dry-lipped, but it passes, and he shuffles towards the kitchen. A switch is snapped on in there and a square of precise acid light is cast into the lounge. He lets out a yawn which almost sounds like he’s chewing something, then he appears in the doorway, pale and small, peering at me. Pip, he says.
I go into the kitchen and he makes me a hot drink of something from a packet, which smells malty and sweet. He lets me take a few sips - it’s far too hot to drink, then he says come through and he leads me to a room off the corridor I’ve never seen before. Inside is a single bed and a bookcase. The bed has the quilt I used to sleep under when I was a child. You’re tall now, he says, you’ve grown quick this year. And I look round and see that this is a room for me, a room he’s kept and made. It has all I left behind in the Saints, some of the crayon sketches I did when I was still a toddler, and other things I remembered, the cockchafer on its pin, the gyroscope he always had on his desk, things he would have given me one day; all left for me in this room. The same pair of curtains my mother used to revamp the spare room for herself. It’s all right in here, ain’t it, lad, it feel all right, don’t it? He’s tapping the bookcase with a sense of pride he doesn’t have for the rest of the house. If you want, you know, if it don’t bother you too much, you can stay in here, I don’t need the room . . . The words trail off into an awkward silence, and he breaks it by handing me a card folder from a shelf - I been keeping a scrapbook about you. I look in it. He comes closer, I can see the spikes of his stubble, now grey, and smell the sweated alcohol on his breath. His eyes look pale and watery and on the verge of tears. It’s a look he has permanently now.
Inside the scrapbook are various articles from regional papers. One headline says ‘Gruesome find in Smokehouse’, with a picture below it of Kipper’s smokehouse doors and the faulty catch. Another reports the double drowning of the twins. Separated at last, Cliff went east to wash up dead on Runton Beach, while Sandy went west, almost making Scolt Head against the tide. And that one, my father says, pointing to a black-and-white photograph, that’s me at Kipper’s funeral. My father, only smart at funerals now, wearing the same tie he wore to see my mother off. He’s leading Goose away from the grave, trying to jolly her along, repair their past. Weren’t that many people there, in the end. And he’s right, the grave-yard is almost empty. Still, it were a proper send-off, he adds, the duty giving his voice a hint of strength.
The overwhelming sadness that this homecoming is not real. It’s not happening. And I feel like I’m falling and I can’t help it but I put my arms round him and fall into him, on to his side, my father, and I reach up to his shoulder and almost hang there, for fear of letting go. I bury my face into his shirt and just stay still, unable to go any further, not wanting to move any more, I’ve come this far, this is as far as there is. Coming home is as far as you can go. He has to understand, this is all I have and all I am. I imagine his arm could go round me and the feel of him patting my back, gently, his gesture more important than anything he could say. We’ve been so apart, so estranged for so long, but now we are all there is, we are the ones who are left and we are the connection between what was and what is. It’s that simple.
Quietly my father says you need to go now, you got more to see, ain’t you? and I know it’s all just a lonely fantasy, I could never truly belong here, and I walk, sadly, out of the strange little child’s room he’s made for me and into a much larger room than the corridor ever was outside, and I realize I’m no longer in my father’s bungalow at all. I’m in a large bedroom in a Victorian building. There’s a smell of disinfectant and starched cotton and I see, over by the window, my grandmother’s bed, the one she insisted on having because from it there’s a slanted view of the marshes. I walk to her bed and crouch down to her level, and see an old woman asleep there, but it’s not Goose. It’s some other woman, and I think that Goose must have died too. I didn’t even know about it - Goose, who has always survived, lived through the storms, and the only one of us who never changed in all these years. Battling with clouds and telling endless stories, fighting off the worst thing of all - the temptation to give up. That was never an option for her. Drive people away, yes, but never give up. And now she’s disappeared like all the others.
As I back away from the bed I almost don’t see the figure of the old crow-like woman behind me, I turn and there she is, leaning on her stick, that flinty gleam of spirit in her eyes. I got my coat on, boy, she says, I’ve had this coat on three months waitin’ for you to turn up. Thought you weren’t never comin’. Thought you’d done a runner like your grandfather.
Goose puts her dry old hands on my shoulder. What you searching for, lad? she says. I ain’t got nothin’ to tell you ’cause there ain’t a wise bone in my whole body. All I ever learned is you got to keep on goin’. Thass the sum of all I know. Juss keep goin’.
She lets that sink in. You know, I ain’t comin’ with you. I ain’t goin’ nowhere now. I’m in this place for the dur-a-tion.
I turn to look for my father, knowing he’s not there either and never will be, and in his place I see a small impeccably neat man standing in the doorway. He must be about the same age as Goose. His hair is thin and parted tidily in a straight line across his head. He stands in a grey suit with smart creases, and he holds a simple bunch of sea lavender in his hand.
Well I never, Goose says, delighted. You came back.
Hands takes a single step into the room, smiles at her kindly, and holds his lavender out for the old marshwoman he never quite forgot.
The image doesn’t last long. It fades unstoppably and in its place are the bare wooden hull boards of the Thistle Dew, dim and wet in the first light of day, like the ribcage of a dead animal.
My skin is clammy and my clothes are soaked through with sweat. My chest is freezing and my bones are aching. I hold out a hand and see it trembling. I feel hot and shivery, but I’ve made it through the night. That’s important. I begin to crawl painfully to the doorway, though my vision is swimming and I keep feeling so dizzy I have to rest my head on the wood. It’s dark outside, unnaturally dark, and coming across the marsh is a large cloud. It’s so tall there’s no sky above it. I recognize it for the rag cloud it has once been. A cloud which is about to burst with its own storm. The thunder crashes deeply in it, and as the first fat drops of rain fall on the mud near the wreck I hear pigs squealing from a nearby field. Through the hedge I see them, beginning to scatter in all directions, mad with fear as the lake of water starts to tip out of the cloud. Others walk confused through the storm, grunting as the rain stings their backs. And the rain falls with flashes of silver like fish scales hitting the mud and I realize that there actually are fish falling, whole shoals of sprats bouncing on the mud, and as soon as the pigs see this in their field they’re eating them as fast as possible and not bothering to swallow but just cramming the fish into their mouths.
Then quickly the storm is gone. I start coughing, badly, and almost faint. My mouth is so dry. I try to wedge myself into a lying position among the corner beams of the wreck so I won’t slip over, and instantly I fall asleep, then wake to discover the marsh has been covered in a large
steaming fog. The marsh stains the fog a sick shade of green. I imagine the grey chimney of Kipper’s smokehouse, looming out there like the wrecked mast of a boat, and I crawl back further into my own wreck, nervously, I can feel the uncertain waves of my fever coming on again and I begin to hum Bryn’s song, the song I always think of when things go wrong . . .
‘. . . of the winter time, and of the summer too, And of the many, many times that I held her in my arms, Just to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew.’
The fog creeps into the wreck and I watch it condensing into the oaky fumes of a smokehouse fire. I’m sinking into a faint again. My vision keeps going - patches of shadows seem to spread along the ceiling, and from them I watch the tarry shapes of the fish and eels growing downwards in sinister clutches, and when they have formed all round me they’re so solid I reach out to touch them. I break off a piece of eel. It’s as dark as charcoal, as thick as thumbs.
I cautiously taste it - and here they come, the dry spices we rubbed into the flesh and the warm wooded flavour of Kipper’s smokehouse. It’s one of his all right. The eels begin to shiver with life and I see a clutch of hair-like elvers wriggling out of blanket weed Elsie and I have hauled from the water at Popham’s Eau Canal. I follow them as they thread their way down the bank and realize I’m no longer looking at them but into the river itself, with its dark corners of water and weed. My mother comes to my side and places a calm hand on my shoulder. What are you looking for in there? she asks. I’m looking for you, I say back, I see you in every river now. It makes her sigh, kindly. But I’m not in there yet, I’m still here, with you. We stand there, gazing at the water. Mum, please don’t leave me, don’t take your hand away from my shoulder. I won’t. But you will, you always will. She knows I’m right. I turn to look at her and see her hair is already wet, her eyes already glassy with the life she’s losing. Why did you do it? I say to her. But I’ve told you love, I’ve told you already - it was the way out. It was the path I’d never seen before. I think you’re on the same path yourself now, aren’t you? She smiles as she begins to fade away. You’re my love, remember that, you’re everything I could have wanted.
And the eels return for me, taking me back with them to a meal my mother cooked, where I’m staring at an eel on my father’s fork as it rises to his greasy lips. I look above him and see more eels, dozens of them, like tarred ropes - they’re high up in Kipper’s smokehouse like a brood of snakes coming in from the roof. More eels in the bucket on the tope cuddy, tying themselves in mysterious knots, excited by the scent of water and the promise of a storm, floating off through the wreckage. Eels knowing no boundaries and getting everywhere, always returning, whatever the obstacle, finding you out, coming from the sea like the tide itself - up the rivers and drains and dykes and ponds and gutters, following the lines they made thousands of years before, and there, in the wreck, quarrying me like prey.
Again I woke up, feeling weak and light-headed. I’d been sick on the floor and I had no idea whether it was day or night or whether the fog was still there. It seemed cloudy in the wreck, and I thought it might be the smoke of one of the fires - one of the great fires like the elm tree or the poor Mary Magdalene. Thoughts and memories rushing at me as if a tide was flooding over the marsh. Hands on the Pip under its quilted sail, adrift above the Dogger Bank, his compass spinning as the boat spirals into an infernal whirlpool - a giant hole in the North Sea where cod and flounder stick their heads out of the walls of water like Gideon’s painting The Parting of the Wash. A whirlpool so deep and wide it’s begun to spin the entire North Sea round it. I know about these storms - the storms that have always circled, returning across the centuries in regular rhythm, bringing with them the dead and drowned back to the saltmarsh.
Inexplicably the air begins to still, and I return to that calm, that silence of my mother’s room in the Quaker cottage hospital at Emneth Hungate. 1962. She’s sitting on the edge of the bed in the middle of the night, listening to the fen and smelling the vegetables in the soil. She’s so full of thoughts. In the corner of her hospital room I see the moth-eaten Andean condor, from the cage on Kelling Heath, rocking in misery. Something moves in my hand - and I know it’s the queen bee, trapped in the Swann Vesta matchbox in the bomb-shack, twitching its once plump body from corner to corner, dying of hunger in a Norfolk hut which has forgotten she’s ever existed. I see my mother again - rubbing her belly in the farmhouse at the Saints while it snows outside. A window growing colder by the second as the flakes settle - I see her place her hand on the glass and the print she leaves is Elsie’s, a tiniest sign of warmth in a world so icy that my mother’s going to be lost in it. The mile of footprints on a sheet of ice. How they melted - the impression of her feet somewhere, still, in the middle of the sea.
I’m sick again. I’m sweating, the fever begins to grow and tighten itself around me like the bars of a cage, and now I begin to see fondue sticks, crossing inappropriately over a party table. The sides of the Thistle Dew are no longer wood, but they’re the dry bricks of the bull-pen at the Stow Bardolph Estate, only the bull’s not there because I see it’s the ‘other woman’, pressed against the bricks with her dress pulled to one side, biting her lower lip. I think of Elsie. I think of Elsie and she’s naked, sitting astride me, and she too is biting her lower lip. We are on the whale. I press my fingers into Bryn’s old bunk bed and feel the soft wood giving way because it has become the blubber and flesh of the sperm whale, and we are at sea again, under the brilliant stars, as the whale journeys across the ocean. And suddenly I’m staring into the liquid shadows of the wreck once more, and in those shadows I see two bright eyes looking back at me. The figure leans forward and I know it’s Ol’ Norse, finally revealing himself, as ancient as the sea, with weed for hair and scales for skin. His breath smells of salt as he tells me I am lost. I’ve lost my map in life. I’ve been looking at clouds all the time and they’ve got nothing to say. On land and at sea and I always wash up, shipwrecked, time after time.
Stories started in the mud here, they’ve grown over time, they’re speaking with their own voices now, returning like the North Sea storms, changing each time, evolving, being added to, indefatigable like a cloud. You’ll never be free of them, he says, and Ol’ Norse grins at me and briefly, as he fades, I see the scales falling away from his skin to reveal my two-faced uncle, sitting in exactly the same posture. As calm as a Buddha once more as the smokehouse fire smoulders around him. Only it’s my uncle dressed in the full regalia of Neptune himself. A brilliantly shining trident in his right hand, three herring speared on the tines. You left me in there, he says. Left me in there with the damned fish while I banged on the door. Till my hands bled. And I could see you through the crack, all soaking wet and not doing a damn thing to help. Well, it serves you right. Serves you right for being so messed up. Serves us all for the lies we’ve laid. And as he says this I see the thick mane of the Red Poll bull shaking his head while my father pours whispers into its ear. My father’s voice, secret in that giant ear, but it’s my uncle’s voice I hear again, saying your father! The chicken man! Once a dreamer, always a dreamer. Spoke to the birds he did, spoke to the animals in the fields. Well he Shoo arlo birds. Hi shoo all ’er birds! And I see my father alone in a bungalow that smells of dead air, the double barrels of his Gallyon & Sons shotgun wedged into the roof of his mouth. His teeth chatter on the metal and he breathes in quick urgent gasps. He’s remembering the day Elsie called there to see him, how he dropped three warm eggs into her hand, turned back to his bungalow, weeping there under the pylons because he’s never told her, he just can’t tell her she’s his daughter. With blind Gull looking on, his fingers reaching for a trigger but he never pulls it and I look at the engraving on the stock and it’s not of pheasants and grouse any more but it’s of my father himself, broken by the chickens that mingle round his feet and peck his boots to shreds. Some of these things, but not all of them, broke my father’s spirit, sent my mother through the ice. Details, and in all o
f them a record of pain and disappointment, or compromise. The greasy stain behind Goose’s chair where she’s leaned her head for forty years, the dry hard-working skin on the back on my father’s neck, the farmer’s hands he now has, the jobs never done, the life never quite lived, the sense of failure, everywhere, failure which is acceptable because it’s just short of that other route, that of madness, which seems to have gone hand in hand with my family’s history. Never far away, just beyond the horizon perhaps, a tide which rises every twenty years or so to overrun the marsh. And my uncle’s laugh rings out and he starts to talk again about your mother and father - did a stupid thing, din’t they? Got ’emselves kicked out of North Norfolk ’cause she was pregnant. No! Getting sent to that godforsaken fen farm and then when the time comes giving that child away. You’re lying! My mother - her sad eyes in the Quaker hospital, looking back at me nodding. A little girl with red hair, he says. Go by the name of Elsie . . . Get out! I scream. Get out of here! Too late to talk now! my uncle shouts back, and with a fizz he lights a firework and the inside of the wreck shatters as it explodes and I am on the cuddy once more, with the jagged deck flying all around me and Cliff whispering sisterfucker! in my ear as he falls through the boat past the eels. I’m soaking wet, standing on the sandbank, and the tide’s rising and pressing my face into the net of the oyster cage - and the tight-lipped oysters do nothing to help me. The sand eel passes through the cage like a phantom once more. And Bryn is there, fiddling with the knot, old and grey and telling me that Goose has lost her mind - that once a long time ago she’d lost her daughter and now she couldn’t bear to lose me too and it was because of this she was going to be put in a home. A nice quiet home where she can relax and the nurses will know what to do. Briefly I glimpse Goose, swallowing a pill while a nurse tells her you’re just seeing things, that’s all, love. You’ve got a condition where you see things and this’ll make you feel better. And when the nurse turns round she has a sheet of my five-year-old drawings in front of her. She tears it up and says you’re going to start talking right now because I know you can and although she can’t see it, behind her head the Thistle Dew is silently filling up with my childhood sketches. Bulls and goats and fish and fire surrounding my father’s shotgun, poaching traps around his door, and across the roof the exquisite mural of clouds I drew inside the chicken coop. Stratus, cumulus nimbus, cirrus - and there, in the corner, the rag cloud, always there to catch me out.