Salt Lane

by William Shaw

  She didn’t speak for a while; she just stared out of the window.

  Drugs and outdoor living had not been kind to her. Her skin was leathery and wrinkled, her hair thin. Freya Brindley had replaced her missing teeth; Hilary Keen had not. Those she had were brown or black. Her jawline had shrunk, altering the shape of her face.

  And yet, despite her decrepitude and the sharp smell she gave off, Julian still sat with one arm around her.

  ‘You told my son I was dead,’ she said eventually.

  ‘It was a mistake. I apologise. He was always convinced you were alive, you know? He kept looking for you.’

  Hilary Keen nodded. ‘It was Freya, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She sniffled into her sleeve. ‘I always thought she’d come to a bad end, I suppose. Who did it?’

  ‘I still don’t know. It’s one of the things I’m trying to find out,’ said Cupidi.

  Hilary lapsed into silence again for a while. They had passed through Kidbrooke, and the traffic was moving faster. The A2 was an ugly road, dirty houses on either side here, cheap places that had been bodged and altered, reclad and refashioned over time by people trying to make something of them. Speeding up to sixty, the wind blew hair into her face so she wound the window up. Hilary’s stink reasserted itself in the car.

  ‘I used to think she was amazing,’ Hilary said eventually. ‘I wanted to be like her. She turned up one day in a beautiful old car… I don’t remember what it was.’ Her voice was deep for a small woman; a smoker’s voice.

  ‘A Mercedes,’ Cupidi told her.

  ‘Yes. How did you know that?’

  ‘I spoke to Daniel Kay.’

  ‘My God. Daniel. He’s still alive then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Hilary lapsed into silence again. They passed the junction with the M25, heading into Kent. The bland road was always full of lorries, pouring into the county.

  ‘You’re going too fast,’ said Hilary.

  Cupidi checked the speedometer. She was at exactly seventy now.

  ‘Everyone’s going too fast,’ she said again.

  She had not been in a car for so long, Cupidi realised. It must seem like a ridiculous speed to be travelling if you’d spent much of the last two decades sitting on street corners. She slowed to sixty. Other cars roared past her.

  ‘Is Daniel OK?’ Hilary asked eventually.

  ‘Yes. He’s doing pretty well. Very well, I’d say.’

  Hilary nodded. ‘He’s clean, then? I’m glad.’

  ‘Who’s Daniel?’ asked Julian.

  ‘A man I used to know,’ she said cautiously.

  Cupidi’s eyes flicked up to the mirror again. Hilary was looking directly at her, as if trying to work out how much Cupidi knew.

  Unwilling to hold the gaze, Hilary turned her head away towards her son. ‘It’s not like heroin wasn’t around before Freya arrived, but we all thought it was a dirty drug.’ She laughed. ‘We were into weed and pills. But she was so good at it. She made it seem beautiful. For a while. It all became a bit of a blur after that.’

  ‘It was the drugs,’ said Julian. He was looking for a reason why his mother had abandoned him, Cupidi supposed.

  ‘Yes. Well. I don’t know. I used to wonder about that. It was money, too. For years we’d been travelling around existing on almost nothing. We were so proud of that. We didn’t need anything. What we got we earned from farm work. There was always something to do. In Cornwall we picked cabbages. In Essex and Kent we did fruit. I spent days pulling leeks or parsnips. There were organic farms that needed everything doing by hand. The pay wasn’t much, but I liked it. Daniel did, too. And that was the whole thing. We didn’t have to earn much, which is why the farmers didn’t mind having us around. They actually wanted people like us who come by when they need us to and work cheaply. And in return we’d get some food from them. They’d pay us in eggs, or meat sometimes. That was even cheaper for them. We didn’t have much money ever, and we were proud of that. Money was a straight-world thing.’

  A lorry indicated it was about to join their lane. Cupidi braked to let it out. The car behind her pressed its horn.

  ‘And then the city people started coming in, and the drugs came along and everything changed. Heroin meant money. You needed to earn to buy it. Or steal. You got money if you sold it. Suddenly there was money in our lives and everything was different.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with money,’ said Julian. ‘It was drugs.’

  ‘I’m not sure. All sorts of things went wrong. We were all in love with Freya. I was. Daniel certainly was. I remember I caught him smoking heroin one day in his bus. It was her that started it.’

  ‘Love, drugs and money,’ said Cupidi. ‘If we didn’t have them, there wouldn’t be any crime at all.’

  ‘If she shot up, then it was OK. She made it all right. I swore I would never do that. The idea of putting a needle into yourself revolted me. But then Daniel was, then I was too, and everything went haywire. I couldn’t stop myself. If you’ve never been into it, you wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘No,’ said Cupidi. ‘I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Everything changes when hard drugs come on site. People get paranoid. The police start taking an interest. Freya was savvy. She never used to get caught. I used to wonder why that was. I figured it out in the end.’

  ‘Because she was the dealer, and you were the users.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Hilary laughed. ‘You understand. It was because she was making her living dealing to the rest of us. I was still going out and earning money on the farms so I could… you know, afford to buy her gear. That made me more vulnerable. I’d be shooting up in the mobile toilets they’d bring onto the farm.’ She shook her head. ‘She never had to leave the site. And then, because I had a kid, they targeted me. Social workers started coming around. I swear to God, however bad I got, I always looked after you, Jules.’

  ‘Is that what you used to call me?’

  ‘Ju-Ju. That’s the way you used to say your name.’

  ‘What was I like?’

  ‘A pest,’ she said. ‘Into everything. Too smart for your own good. Show me your ankle. Roll up your trousers.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No, the other one, your right leg.’

  He lifted it onto the car seat, pulling down his sock.

  ‘There. You can just see it still. It’s faint, though.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You had one of those bouncy balls. It rolled under Daniel’s big bus one day. I’d told you not go after it, that it wasn’t safe under there, but you crawled all the way under to get it out. Cut yourself on a bit of glass. I was horrified.’ She laughed. ‘Bandaged it up, though. Look.’

  ‘I wondered what it was.’

  ‘There was I saying I always looked after you. You must think I’m terrible.’

  ‘How old was I?’

  ‘You must have been about to turn three. It was just before I left you.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Thing is, I knew I was getting bad. I knew it wouldn’t be long before they locked me up. I was a rotten addict. Always have been. I had to do something, else they’d take you away. They kept saying they would. You would be coming up to school age, and what would I do then? And Daniel hated them turning up to the site all the time, the police and the social workers. People blamed me.’

  ‘So you gave me to your sister.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m so, so, so, so sorry.’

  He nodded, but said nothing.

  ‘Did she ever talk about me?’

  ‘No.’

  Tears rolled down Hilary’s cheek.

  ‘Never. There were no photos of you or anything. It was like you didn’t exist.’

  ‘Can’t say I blame her.’

  ‘I do. I suppose the problem was, she never really wanted to bring up a child.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ju-Ju. It was the best I could do at the time.’

  It was as
if she had forgotten she was there, thought Cupidi. They have so much to say to each other. She was eavesdropping on their lifetimes’-worth of hurt.

  ‘I had always meant to come back for you. I knew I had to get myself away from other users like Daniel and Freya. There was a truck going down to Spain to meet up with some circus people down there, and I took you to my sister’s house and just left you there. I thought it would be a month or two. But I couldn’t kick it. I tried. I really tried, I promise you. I tried so bloody hard. But I’m an addict. Like I said in that note I wrote for you. I thought about you every day.’

  ‘What note?’

  ‘In the kitchen. On your board.’

  ‘You didn’t write a note,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and looked away. ‘Didn’t I?’

  ‘I never saw anything…’ Then he frowned. Cupidi could see the thought growing.

  ‘No, no. I must have got that wrong,’ Hilary intervened. ‘I get confused. I probably just wished I’d written something like that.’

  Cupidi caught her eye again, for a second when she turned again to look at her son. There was a momentary flicker of darkness in her gaze, but it had gone in a second. Julian never noticed. She was good, thought Cupidi. Years of conniving to get drugs, or a place to sleep, had made her canny.

  ‘Every day,’ she said.

  ‘But not enough to stop and be my mother.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  They stopped talking. Cupidi drove.

  At sixty miles an hour, the journey seemed to take an age, both of them silent in the back of the car. Whenever she sped up, Hilary started to look agitated. Only in the early evening light, when they were driving over the marsh towards Dungeness, did Hilary’s face change. She pressed her face against the window.

  At Lydd, when they turned onto the Dungeness Road, she opened her mouth again. ‘You live here?’

  ‘Yes, with my daughter.’

  Hilary’s eyes lit up. She looked young again.

  ‘We camped here once. Daniel and the rest of us. Before it all went wrong. In the summer. Out on the end by the lighthouses. It was just after you were born.’

  ‘That’s where we’re heading now,’ said Cupidi.

  ‘You’re kidding me?’ Hilary laughed. ‘Oh, wow! It was beautiful here. They moved us on after a while. It took them a while because of you, Ju-Ju. They weren’t allowed to evict us straight away because I had a little baby.’

  ‘I had my uses.’

  ‘Be as bitter as you want. I don’t mind. It’s fine. I understand.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m spoiling it.’

  They turned onto the single-track road.

  ‘It looks exactly the same. We had all our buses and trailers lined up along there. There are old railway carriages, aren’t there?’

  ‘Yes. You remember it?’

  ‘I used to fantasise about living in one of them.’

  They passed the Britannia Inn and the lighthouses, turned right in front of the power station, then headed up the track towards Cupidi’s house.

  ‘You actually live here?’

  ‘First time I saw it, I thought it was the strangest place in the world,’ said Cupidi.

  ‘It’s like a weird dream,’ said Hilary. ‘Like everything is rewinding.’

  At the back of the house, they got out, stretching after the long journey. It was muggy and hot. There was going to be a storm soon.

  Helen was in a deckchair, a novel in one hand and a paper fan in the other. ‘Who’s this?’

  Cupidi introduced them all. ‘I have somewhere for you to stay,’ she said to Hilary, ‘but I’ll need to give you a bath first in my house. Get you into some clean clothes.’

  ‘It’s amazing,’ said Hilary, slowly looking around.

  Cupidi took her mother aside. ‘Sorry. You can move back into the cabin when they’re gone if you like.’

  ‘I’ll cope, I suppose.’

  ‘Where’s Zoë?’

  ‘Not back yet. I spoke to her on the phone. She says she’ll be back by eight. I made her promise. She doesn’t ever come back until it’s almost dark.’

  ‘It’s going to rain. If she’s not back soon, she’ll be soaked.’

  Behind the power station, thick clouds were building, huge, black and rolling. A hot wind was picking up, scattering dead petals from the scraggy rosebushes at the back of the house.

  THIRTY-NINE

  With an empty black plastic bag in one hand, Cupidi led the woman up to the bathroom and gradually stripped the clothes from her body while the bath ran.

  The woman stood there, acquiescent, unembarrassed by her nakedness and the state of her body. The skin on her neck and hands was thick with grime. Blackness sat under fingernails, in the whorls of her fingertips, in the wrinkles and cracks. It would take more than one bath for her to get completely clean, but at least she wouldn’t smell as badly as she did now.

  ‘Arms,’ she said, lifting Hilary’s vest off, as she had her own daughter’s when she was a child. It was stained with sweat. She dropped it into the rubbish bag. ‘You can have some of mine to wear. They might be a bit big.’

  Hilary didn’t react. Years of homelessness and addiction left her passive. Cupidi tested the bathwater, adding shampoo to make bubbles.

  Hilary was naked now from the waist up. Cupidi paused. ‘What happened at the campsite, the night of the fire? Did you find out about that?’

  ‘I was in Spain by then.’

  ‘But you heard?’

  Hilary sat down on the toilet and started rolling her tights down her thin legs. ‘Through the grapevine. There was this alternative circus I hung out with. You know, fire-eating, chainsaws…’

  ‘Very nineties.’

  She laughed. ‘Yes. They had an old finca outside Lleida in Catalonia. I used to sing in bands, so I told them I was working up some kind of act with my singing. Maybe I was, I don’t know. I was a mess. I used to have a good voice once. But they put me up for a couple of years, and during that time other travellers would come through the town. So I learned bits and pieces of what had gone on at the site. People said there had been this fire. That children had been killed. I heard that Daniel was badly disfigured.’

  She trod on one half of her woollen tights and lifted the other to pull them off. On her calf, hidden till now, there was a single tattoo, not particularly well done: Ju-Ju.

  ‘The poor children. I kept thinking, that would have been Jules, if I was still there.’

  Freya was completely naked now: bony, scabbed on her knees and on her shoulder. Abscesses had left red scars on her arms and legs. The paleness of the skin on her body contrasted with the burnt brown of her head and limbs.

  Gingerly she lowered herself into the water.

  ‘It’s hot,’ she complained.

  Cupidi added more cold.

  ‘Did you know the children who died?’

  ‘No. They were innocent bystanders, I think. The poor mother.’

  ‘These travellers who came through, did they ever tell you who set the fire?’

  ‘Oh yes. Everyone knew. It was just one of those stories that went around. But it was Daniel’s fault at the start of it. Apparently he was clucking.’

  Cupidi had been around addicts enough to know their language. ‘Clucking’ was that skin-scratching, nervy-eyed behaviour of someone who needed the next fix. ‘Daniel set the fire? I thought—’

  ‘No. Not Daniel. He wanted some heroin, but I can’t judge. I’ve done bad things, too. I’ve robbed people because I needed the stuff more than they did. So people say he stole Freya’s stash. But, like, all of it. Not just enough for himself. All of it. When she found out, she went ape.’

  The obscured glass window darkened. The rain cloud was over them now.

  ‘So you think she tried to kill him?’

  ‘Definitely. Everyone knew it. Or scare him. I don’t know. Some people think she was psycho all along. Whatever it was, it just got out of hand. There was a lot
of substance abuse. People were nuts. And then Daniel was in hospital and she was never heard of again.’

  She picked up a handful of the bubbles that the shampoo had made.

  ‘Are you OK?’ asked Cupidi.

  ‘I’ve been using. I’m not feeling great,’ she said.

  ‘You need sleep. I’ve a bed made up, ready for you when you’re clean. I’ll give you some food and then you can rest.’

  ‘Is Julian going back to London?’

  ‘He’s staying tonight. He’s called his wife and told her.’

  ‘He’s lovely, isn’t he, my son?’

  ‘He’s going to need a lot of help working it all out with you,’ Cupidi said. ‘And with his wife.’

  She snorted. ‘Don’t look at me. I’m no good at any of that.’

  ‘Well, you’re going to bloody have to be,’ Cupidi said.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘If you can’t, then there was no point tracking him down, was there?’

  Rain spattered suddenly onto the window. Cupidi could hear a door somewhere downstairs banging in the wind. She wondered if Zoë was back yet.

  ‘So as far as you know, Freya just disappeared?’

  ‘She used to be my friend. She was in the ward with me, when I had Julian. Nicking the gas and air, mind. Then, after the fire, I never heard anything of her ever again. I asked, but nobody knew anything. I thought she would have died after all this time. Every few years I’d come back to England. I had this dream of finding my son again, of making it up to Julian. I came back last year, and thought I’d try and make a go of it, try and find my feet. I was looking for Julian, and I started asking after her again too, but I didn’t really know anybody. Everyone I knew was dead, or they’d moved on. But when I tried signing on, I was accused of having false papers. “That’s not you,” they said. “It can’t be. That’s somebody else’s identity you’ve stolen,” they said. It was like a nightmare. I couldn’t even get straight again because of her. She ruined my life.’

  ‘I think she was living around here for years,’ said Cupidi. ‘She had cleaned up, but she was hiding. She knew the moment she used her own name she’d be arrested for what she did to those kids. She knew you were gone. And so she pretended to be you.’