Salt (20 page)

My uncle walked over to me and crouched down. His face was thick with sweat like an actor's under hot stage lights.

‘Well, this is something.'

Hurriedly Goose shoved him aside and was down at my level too.

‘Where's your father?' she said.

I shook my head.

‘He's run off, Goose. Ain't you? Run off like a wild 'un.'

‘Shut up. Is that true? You've run off ?'

I nodded cautiously, not sure how they'd take it, and both of them laughed.

‘Well done,' Goose said, and Kipper ruffled my hair, the same way my father had done less than twenty-four hours ago. His switchblade razor still in my pocket.

‘Looks like you've got a night ahead of you,' I heard my uncle say. ‘Does Shrimp know you're here?' he asked. I shook my head. ‘Right, well, we should let him know. He'll worry. You understand?'

Slowly, in an uncomfortable silence, they led me to Lane End while all around the birds began to settle.

 

So there I was, standing in Goose's cottage, miles from the Saints and my father, and all that my mother had said about it was true. The tiled floor in brick-red and black squares, the red ones worn down more than the black over the years. The heavily greased cooking range, the curtain she drew across the room to divide it. Her bed, sagging on the side she always slept on, the tin bath in the corner, and girdling the walls, higher than I thought it could possibly have been, the dirty brown tidemark of the 1953 flood.

As with Hands's first evening there, thirty-five years before me, she started to fill the tin bath. I was told to undress, and when I stood before her with my cold skinny body I held my breath so my chest wouldn't look so narrow. She pinched my arm and felt my ribs and cursed my father.

I soaked in the bath, watching my grandmother separate yolks from whites of half a dozen eggs. Birds cried across the marsh outside. I felt waves of tiredness as the heat filled my body, alongside a hazed notion that my grip on what was real had slipped. That I wasn't really there, in the bath. That I was back in the cold barren shadows of the farmhouse, with my father somewhere near but totally distant, or that I'd slipped into a dream where I was half in my life, half in the story of Grandfather Hands, two generations before. Into the stories I'd been told so many times that they had become more safe and familiar and real than the last few months of my life. I was Hands - this is how he must have felt that first night on the saltmarsh. This is how it all began. If I can just start again here I'll be able to tell where it all went wrong. Here in this bath I could float in some unattainable region of warmth where the events of the last twenty-four hours and the story of my grandfather could mix. Time had pulled elastically all around me, layering my new world with overlapping visions, and it was time which now seemed to stretch in wide, silent avenues over the dark countryside of Norfolk, taking me this way and that, linking scenes and stories into which I drifted. Somewhere in its centre I was there, in the bathtub above the candles, the straggly late-season samphire waiting by my side. Soft, fleshy samphire. Even to think the word was a conjuring of beauty. There, my grandmother separating the yolks from the whites. The muscle of the egg dripping down from the shell. And across the floor, the pale marble figure of Hands in the smoke-blackened bath, his dark leather boots lurking under the surface, a perplexed, amused look on his face. My grandmother, thinking of the suit hung up ready for the man who would some day fall into her life, separating eggs and picking seaweed from the stems of samphire. Hands, like his grandson so many years later, both of them thinking of the previous twenty-four hours and how they'd finally come to be in this strange, warm bath.

Outside, the marsh stretched into the vast blackness of the North Norfolk night, like the endless quilt my grandmother had spun so many years before, so rich in textures. So full with meaning. How Hands had begun that quilt in the dark evenings of his first few months on the marsh. How his horizon-seeking eyes had been turned myopic by the tiny needle-and-thread of my grandmother's design. I thought all was possible, even the sprightly breeze that had woken him during that fateful day in 1945, when he'd raised the quilt on the
Pip
, never to be seen again. And as I left Hands in the middle of the waves, I thought of the lorry man with the soft felt hat, driving somewhere through the darkness, returning to his lover, and the sound of his low singing voice and the sonorous lament of his sighs. His big fingers pulling the wheel. An adventure that only I knew about, already so far away. Of my uncle in his heavy iron welding-mask, the fireworks in his padded gloves beginning to spit a stream of soft red light; and the acrid smell of the smoke as gentle as fog across the marsh, my grandmother lost somewhere in its middle, howling like a banshee. I thought of the cool steel of my father's razor, with its bone handle and insignia of a charging bull, folded in the pocket of my trousers on the floor. Of the long dark nights I'd spent in that house, both of us avoiding each other because that way neither of us had to think about my mother. Too much.

As I drifted in and out of these scenes I listened to my grandmother, talking to herself, sometimes to me. I knew only fragments about this odd woman, with her big grey hair tied up on the back of her head. My mother said Goose had never cut her hair since Hands had left, but that's nearly thirty-five years! It can't be true. But it did look enormous, with all its historic pins keeping it in place. It's just one of the fragments I knew about her. Fragments and unreliable stories. Somewhere across the marsh at his smokehouse my uncle would be phoning my father. The telephone would ring twenty or thirty times in the empty farmhouse. My father roused from a hangover, or standing in the centre of the yard, listening to the ringing phone, a pile of firewood across his arms. Or maybe he'd spent the day searching the country for me in his car, driving till the petrol ran out and slamming the steering wheel with frustration. I saw my uncle hunched over the telephone in his study, the receiver hugging the line of his cheek like a pirate's beard, concentrated and gently mocking, describing a small boy walking over the marsh towards him ... carrying that tartan case, you know the one - ridiculous he looked, like someone who'd been shipwrecked . . . But all that is to come. Interrupting the phantom images comes the smell of hollandaise. First the vinegar, sharp and fruity, a smell of apples and onions. Then the warm gold smell of eggs, and I imagined being back in the shadowed calm of the chicken coop. The Rhode Island Red, looking at me from behind the nesting boxes. Never taking its eyes off me. The smell of dust and dried shit on the wood, then the wet taste of a charcoal pencil between my teeth as I cross-hatched the clouds I'd drawn on the ceiling. Then I smelled butter - the rich summery smell of a farmhouse kitchen - and I saw my mother slicing cooking butter with a warm knife. Her mother, pouring in a dark brown fish stock, bringing me back to the marsh where it all began.

Suddenly the samphire was there, laid across two white plates next to the thick yellow hollandaise, then she was dragging the stems through the sauce and then pulling them between my teeth. Hands - how could you ever have left? Goose was telling me something important. There was trouble, she was saying, plenny of it. Maimed a boy with them fireworks. Stupid child, for sure, that one, but who knows. The short is he's got 'em all against him, see. Cley and Blakeney an' all. Burned his hands and he's got this scar up his face like the light-en-in' got him. Only ten, poor bugger. Goose took the plates away and cut me cheese to have with bread. Course they want their fire and they want them fireworks but not any of this. Can't have it all ways. Won't take his fish now, but that don't stop him. He just keep on smokin'.

She leaned back in her chair, out of the pool of light that came from a lamp above the table. Her eyes glinted like knapped flint. I imagined the creases in her face were filled with salt.

‘You like that plant, don't you, boy?' she said, satisfied.

I was put in a bed in the corner, behind a small curtain screen. I opened my tartan suitcase and pulled out my mother's dreamcatcher and leaned it against the windowpane. Beyond, the dark flat marsh stretched to a dismal horizon. Low grey clouds filled the sky like ships at anchor. I thought of Elsie. Of her red hair and the soft bronze strands of hair above her knees. Then I imagined my father, his eyes raw with lack of sleep, gripping the steering wheel, driving through the Norfolk night. And I felt his switchblade razor in my hand and knew that if he stepped foot in the cottage I would use it.

13

I dreamed of Ol' Norse that night, climbing out of the North Sea, drip drip on the shore, a steely look in his eye. The stink from his rotten bones, the scaly skin, the squelch of his footsteps and his salted breath, which can wither a plant. Seaweed hanging from his shoulders. His ancient face, as stormy as winter, as craggy as flint. I sensed him prowling outside then standing with a hunter's silence on the lawn, listening to the waves breaking on the Point, calling his return. I dreamed him first, then I wasn't dreaming, and I was aware it was very dark, very dark indeed, and like a conjured genie there was Ol' Norse himself, in the house, crossing the tiles, coming at me with a staff raised before him and I knew it wasn't Ol' Norse but my father, and the staff had the dull metal gleam of his Gallyon 12-bore.

He stopped halfway across the room, at a half-lean, focusing his gaze in the lethal manner a heron has by the water's edge. His gun behind him as counterbalance. Then he turned and walked back to the door, his weight entirely on his toes. When he opened the door, the air inside the room shifted like it was one solid object. And as he did this, his murderous face changed to that of my grandmother. His shotgun, her walking stick.

‘What are you looking at?' she said. ‘Get a jumper on.'

She threw me a dark blue gansey and led me outside. We crossed the marsh, my boots getting heavier with the mud, until we stopped at a small raised bank, which was covered with the scuff marks and litter of someone who spent much of their time there. The sky was vast and cold and luminous. This was the
tuft
, where she did her cloud watching.

Distantly, Blakeney's flint walls looked featureless and grey. A few windows shone, and the headlights of a milk float swept calmly across the marsh towards us. A second later we heard its rising electric wail as it climbed the High Street.

Then, as I stared across the great flat shadow of the saltmarshes, there seemed to be ghostly disturbances in its stillness, and I realized two or three figures were walking out along the thick muddied paths. I heard the squelch of their waders and a muted rattle of tools carried in plastic buckets.

‘Luggers,' Goose said, breaking the silence she and I had had since leaving the cottage. ‘Bait digging.'

As she said this I watched one of the men leave the path and wade straight into the Pit, like Ol' Norse returning from his night-time prowl. The man's walk slowed as the water lapped to his waist. The bucket became buoyant behind him and made a sleek fantail of ripples showing his path. After a couple of minutes the water shallowed, and he dragged himself out on to the other side of the channel and soon vanished in the further darkness of the Point's dunes.

‘Voice out there, on the Point,' my grandmother said, ‘in the dunes. Ain't heard nothin' like it. Ain't male or female and ain't a bird neither. There's stuff out here would make you scream out loud though you ain't never said nothin'. Every night in the creeks, armies of 'em diggin' new channels. Creatures with shovels an' bare backs, I tell you.' And then she was watching the sky, staring at some wide translucent cirrus, glowing pink in the sunrise. Muttering and nodding like some sideshow fortune-teller as downdraughts pulled the clouds into the giant ribcage of an animal.

‘Stop staring at me,' she said abruptly. ‘I ain't crazy. You're just like him, ain't you? That one I found buried in the mud.' She laughed, showing the quirky angled teeth of a madwoman. ‘Thass where the bugger was, up to his neck like a broken shrimp-rake,' she said, pointing to a featureless strip of mud-bank and sandy shore by the Pit. Back inland I saw a car drive up to Lane End and a man get out. He knocked briefly at the door, cupped his face to the window and then immediately set across the marsh. A more upright walk than my father's, a poise to it he'd never had, which suggested the likelihood of changing tack at any moment. It made him look untrustworthy.

‘Got an apprentice, Goose?' He stopped a little way off, deliberately looking at the sky, out across the marsh, then at another lugger making his way through the Pit. ‘Yep. Rain coming.'

‘Juss out disturbin' terns, Kipper Langore?'

‘Called him. About the lad.'

‘He answer?'

‘Said he weren't surprised. Been looking all day but weren't worried.'

‘That fits.'

Kipper gave me a sideways smile and bent down to my height. A crack from his knees. His hands smelled of smoke.

‘Is he comin'?' she said.

‘No. That OK with you, Pip? Stay with your gran a while?'

Kipper had a thin dark jacket on with the collar turned up. Despite living on the marsh he always looked cold. This early in the morning Kipper's skin had a pale hue, like the fish he smoked. His nose was sharp and pinched around the nostrils. A gleam across his cheekbones

‘Think I might visit him,' he said. ‘Well, you know . . . don't know what's happening really since . . . I don't know. Sounded odd. Think he's giving up and I don't know we'll get answers out of this one.'

‘You got enough on your plate,' she told him. ‘Luggers givin' you the shoulder.'