Salt (19 page)

I think he slept for much of the afternoon. I stayed in my room. Some time around five I went back to the bathroom and looked through the window. The coop was nothing but a charred shape in the dirt, a lightning strike in the lawn, with only the stoutest wooden studs burning like ingots in the centre. The burned hen still lay there, to the side of the ashes, but the other one had gone. Perhaps he was planning on eating it, like he had the others.

I waited till dusk, and when I heard some stirring of movement coming from his room, I moved on to the landing, crouching at my end of it, concealed by its darkness.

When he stepped out of his room and began to pull the door closed I was running fast and low at him. The razor was unhinged in my hand and I imagined it glinting like a sleek fish in some deep dark water and that would be all he'd see at first would be this strange gleaming flash of steel flying down the corridor before he realized that it was me, voicelessly lunging at him, and that we weren't avoiding each other any more and that he'd have to raise his hands like he'd done earlier in the day but this time he'd have to be quick. And I smelled the alcohol on his breath or his clothes as I wriggled through the flailing shapes of his arms with the steel fish in front of my eyes now and pushing it forward and flashing it up and down till it seemed to be slower in the air and I knew that the shining blade was cutting on something and I came close to his head now and I saw his hair swinging oddly in front of me and I felt how intimate this action was and how I'd not been this close to him in months. It was utterly without sound. And now he was finding some deep strength somewhere beyond the hazy world of his drink and I was being picked up and flung against the wall, and I was winded and doubled by it but I was still at him and the beautiful fish was wriggling on the line in front of my eyes and I willed it forward and made it dance wildly and again it started to leap at his shirt and then higher and we began to fall down on to the carpet like a couple of drunk lovers and really we should be laughing and laughing at how ridiculous this all was and how we'd gone too far, but not yet far enough . . .

 

Suddenly the door opened at the end of the corridor and my father stepped out of his room. He saw me at the top of the stairs. He pulled the door shut, took half a step towards me, stopped, then let out a warm quiet chuckle.

Although it was now dark, the window at the end of the corridor was slightly lighter. He was little more than a silhouette.

‘What are you doing up? Can't sleep?' His words sounded unconvincing, playing a father's role he'd long forgotten. The wind pressed up against the window outside and died away.

‘It can't go on like this.'

And with that he began to walk calmly down the corridor, drew level with me, and began to descend the stairs. Two or three steps down he stopped, turned, and ruffled my hair like a father should.

 

I packed straight away: my mother's American-Indian dreamcatcher, her recipe book, the shell she gave me so I'd always be able to hear the North Sea, the crabline she'd brought with her seventeen years before. The photo of Hands, the one of my parents on their wedding day. It all went in my tartan suitcase alongside my notebooks filled with all the words I'd never spoken.

My father was nowhere to be found when I went downstairs. Quietly, in the virtual dark, I made myself a cup of tea and got together a meagre supper of hard cheese and stale bread. I ate it at the corner of the breakfast table, the sights and smells of my mother's wonderful cooking so far away, in another world. It was difficult to eat the bread. My mouth was dry. I had to wash it down with gulps of tea. All the while I was tense with the effort of listening out for my father, but I never heard him at all. For the first time I noticed the Gallyon & Sons shotgun was missing from its usual place by the corner of the dresser.

Hurriedly, I picked up the tartan suitcase and opened the kitchen door. My last ever sight of that house was seeing crumbs of stale bread on the corner of the kitchen table and by their side the half-full mug of tea, already growing cold. The same sight that had greeted my parents when they'd entered that damp, neglected place all those years ago. The house had gone full circle. And I was leaving.

12

Don't you worry, nairly home, the lorry driver said in a broad Norfolk accent. It woke me up. The man was large and bearded with a soft cap pulled across his forehead. It had a blue jay's feather tucked into the band. But the big man didn't turn to look at me, or say anything more. We drove along the road and a little while later he reached for a tape and I heard the soft murmuring of country music. He sang in a quiet deep voice for the chorus, and every now and then he spoke out to no one in particular, about nothing in particular, but often saying the name Michele. His hands were large, but he held the steering wheel as if it was the brim of a hat, politely, between the tips of his fingers. The country breeds this kind of calmness and strength.

I settled back in the dark, remembering how the farm had slipped from view as I'd run down the drive. Such a sharp black night. No moon, and so many stars it seemed the lowest of them were hovering just a few feet above the soil, at a child's reach. The sad little house had retreated quickly into the damp fields, a boat which had been sinking for years, and I smelled the ashes of burned elms, then saw their remains, piled and charred in the fields like the bones of large animals. The metallic tap of my shoes on the tarmac. A badger hobbling fast over a field's sharp stubble. Noises in the hedgerows. Signposts stood with the eerie poise of scarecrows, pointing in all directions into the darkness. I'd felt like my father's gyroscope; spinning, drifting, twisting, staying put. Each junction meant a new identity; each step a new resolve. It made no odds to me which direction I went, though, as long as it wasn't back.

 

I'd reached King's Lynn some time after midnight. The sickly artificial glow of its streetlights replaced the crystal darkness of the country, an unwanted false dawn that made me feel exposed, a ten-year-old with a suitcase and no reason to be there. Questions would be asked. I'd stuck to the verges while trucks roared past, but increasingly the verges themselves felt tattered and poisoned as the road became an industrial area dominated by the brooding shape of the beet refinery and the long angular fences and supply roads that fed it. Once I'd been here with my mother, carrying two orange swedes in a string bag along the Dyke Road back to her car. Even though the road was bad the lorries used to take it at speed, and their crop cargo shook and bounced until various vegetables flew over the tailgate. It was easy pickings for us. Finding a swede in the verge half-caked in Lincolnshire mud and bruised from the fall was like finding some glorious nugget. The beet factory had always been the furthest point of our journeys in the
Mary Magdalene
. It squatted on the soft marsh like a defeated giant. Even at night the huge doors were still open and inside minute-looking forklift trucks moved to and fro in a flood of cold light, like hell was being stoked in there.

Further along the bypass was a haulage depot and, next to it, an all-night truck stop. There was a smell of fat and burning eggs. Several trucks. Names on the lorries seemed like destinations at a train station: Derby Haulage, Worksop Machine Parts, Bromsgrove and International, Norfolk Line . . .

Unexpectedly a car had pulled into the yard and I'd ducked from its headlamps. It stopped, a girl got out, stretched, and went to another door while the driver climbed across to the passenger seat. As it drove off I'd climbed the two metal rungs of a lorry's cab in the same effortless way I'd seen men swing up the ladder of a combine. The door wasn't locked. It was dark and silent in there, with stubbed-out cigarettes on the dashboard and air fresheners hanging from the sun-visors. A CB radio hung from the mirror. I'd hidden behind the driver's seat and listened to the café across the yard. A single rough burst of laughter, a kitchen door slamming shut. I'd felt my heart racing and began to think of what I was doing, how this truck might hopefully take me to North Norfolk or how it might swing round in the car park and drive somewhere else. I'd thought of my father, drinking spirits in his room and shouting at Gull to shift off the bed. And the fields and trees beyond him and the smell of wet damp earth and the gentle crack of a branch splitting somewhere deep in the middle of a wood. Of the delicate sensations of safety and being alone, as a spreading tiredness and a feeling of being beyond reach was falling all around me . . .

 

I woke again as the engine stopped and watched the man climbing out of the cab with a weary sigh. It was just before dawn. Farmer's breakfast. A quiet street in a small town, with houses made of flint and the name Holt written in neat letters above a grocer's awning. The man was ambling towards a door, pushing the hat back on his head and trying to tuck his shirt in. He knocked on the door and as he did so he cleaned his boots on the back of his trousers. A woman in a dressing gown appeared and immediately began kissing him with both her hands holding his large bearded face. He let out a big smothered laugh and pushed her into the house and shut the door.

 

As the sun rose I was walking out of the town, crossing empty fields, the suitcase heavy with words from a life I'd left. Such a still landscape. Far away, rooks blew up from some trees, disturbing the air. Horses stood silently in the damp pasture of a field, all of them facing the rising sun, breath steaming from their nostrils. I stopped in some birch woods by a stream collecting in a series of pools. I washed and then drank some of the water, and sat for a while on the bank. A wood pigeon's song echoed distantly -
you . . . dir-ty . . . rott-er, you . . . dir-ty ... rott-er
, as my mother used to say. Trees, fields, soil dusted with sand, birds flying lazily in the morning air. Eventually a heath where for miles all I could see was a low sea of heather and clumps of dark spiky gorse. I tucked an ash twig behind my ear to ward off adders. Wild lavender grew by the path, and I lay down in it till the sun was higher and I began to feel warm again. It felt like a magical land, deserted and full of a deep fragrant nature. And there, across the heath, were three isolated elms, healthy and forgotten by the disease.

Late in the afternoon I came to the edge of the heath and stretching below me were the wide flat expanses of the North Norfolk saltmarshes. The creeks and pools of seawater glistening in a complicated labyrinth of patterns and beyond was the sea itself. Blue grey and fen-flat. Ships on the horizon, becoming lozenge-shaped as they passed each other. Small, delicate clouds were rolling in off the water, and I imagined my grandmother with her eye on them, sitting on some raised part of the marsh.

There was an aviary on the heath, and as I walked past the cages I could see the birds sitting in them or flitting from perch to perch. Through the wire I saw an ancient moth-eaten Andean condor, which sat rocking in a cage, while sparrows hopped in and out through the wire. Someone was sweeping the floor next to the great bird. He saw me looking through the wire and said his problem is that he lives for ever. Them sparrows are dead in a few years, but this one's got all the time in the world.

The path off the heath led into a village called Salthouse, built on the edge of the marsh, where the front doors had sandbags against them ready for autumn tides. The churchyard had gravestones with skulls and crossbones on them, and a single gravestone outside the church wall with the inscription:

 

Along a raised footpath across the marsh, I passed pools of bulrushes and flocks of geese noisily feeding in the mud. Ducks and swans toiled across the pools while terns, gulls and lapwings flew above them purposefully. The whole scene felt electric with life. Cley next the Sea, then the River Glaven, and I thought of my mother telling me stories of Goose and the man Hands who became my grandfather. How this area had briefly united these two very strange people and how Goose had subsequently buried the whole landscape in a complicated fabric of stories, lies and mythologies until no one knew what was true any more.

 

The sun was getting low in the sky as I reached Blakeney, colouring the bare flint walls of the town that rose from the marshes with a soft pink light. Beyond, the path curved once more on to the marshes, to the hamlet of Morston and the tiny shape of Goose's cottage, Lane End, at its edge.

Dozens of birds flew up in panic as I approached over the marsh, followed by a whooshing sound and a brittle crack, like the sound of a rifle. In the fading light there were two figures out there, letting off fireworks. The man was wearing some sort of heavy iron welding mask, and was releasing rockets at arm's length with large gloves. The woman, a little way off, threw fireworks in the air where they exploded in sharp white puffs of smoke above her head. Each time one went off she leaped crazily before reaching into a bag to throw up more. Fireworks were shooting in all directions, sometimes skidding fast off the mud, or falling with sudden gasps of steam into the creeks. Around them, birds were running and falling through the grass and taking flight. The man was being more scientific than the woman, sometimes holding the rockets until he felt their strength before letting go. In contrast, the woman was losing control, whirling in an explosive cloud of smoke lit up with the brief, neurotic flashes of gunpowder, like some unnatural dervish.

But it was my uncle, taking off his iron mask, who first saw me as I walked up.

‘Goose! Goose!' he shouted.

Something exploded above my grandmother's head before she too saw me, dirty and tired, standing a few feet away from them.

‘Whass this?' she said. ‘Whass going on hair?'