Salt (25 page)

‘Want a photo?' she says, then she shouts
shit!
as we swerve past a parked car.

‘Where to?' she asks when we reach the coast road. Where
is
there to go? The coast road's like a root growing along a wall.

All this seems at odds with the girl I'd been writing to over the last few years - the one frozen in aspic - how could I have written so enthusiastically about the marshes, Goose's cooking and evenings spent in the
Thistle Dew
? I'd written about Gideon crying at his own sermon, about the dirty patch of plaster behind Goose's dining chair where she's leaned her head over the years. The 1953 tidemark girdling the walls. The chimneypot that leans like on so many fenland homes. About how Bryn Pugh had begun to smell of the damp, cooped up in
Thistle Dew
carving that block of sea-wood into Ol' Norse. A man losing his spirit. And about Kipper with his salty skin - how when you shook his hand you wanted to down a glass of water - about his two-faced face and the smoke that rose from the burning oak chippings under the fish, which never went out . . . All those letters, but written to a different Elsie. Why
was
she here?

She drives the hatchback too fast down the track to Cley Beach Café, with geese flying into the air and walkers stepping back on to the verge as we pass and Elsie laughing at them through the window.

‘I've got a summer job,' she says. ‘Cook at the hotel, the Misfits. How's your grandma?'

Same. Mad
. I write, though she's not interested in reading.

‘Your uncle got me the job. When he was over seeing your dad - few weeks back - I mean, someone had to. Well, we sort of bumped into each other. Mum's in hospital - she's getting treatment, and Dad's just gone AWOL with the tulips. Tulip-land. Probably hasn't noticed I'm gone. You've grown,' she adds, staring closely at me, deliberately. I point at the café and try to open the car door and Elsie has to lean over me and pull the lock herself. ‘Wimp,' she says.

Cley Beach Café is an oily wooden shack with small windows and a heavy door, built where Blakeney Point dovetails into North Norfolk. Next to it, the River Glaven reaches within a hundred feet of the North Sea, before being forced west into six miles of meandering creeks and the open lagoon of the Pit and the sea beyond. Built to fend off sea breaks and winds where the air is as wet as seawater, it's usually empty, apart from red-faced walkers staring into mugs of hot chocolate in a state of stunned trance. In winter it's a steam-filled room with sticky benches, with the ducks sheltering outside from the winds with necks buried in their backs. A generator growls all year long, lighting a few weather-proof fairy bulbs, and keeping an urn of water constantly hot. It's a place famed for its puddings. Always hot, always sweet, always at the end of gruelling walks, the taste didn't really matter. And that's a bonus, because everything served tastes slightly salty. The wood's withered by it, the cutlery stained by it, the notices made rotten by it.

We both have rhubarb crumble. Mine's with custard. She has ice cream.

I've missed you
, I write.
I've missed Three Holes and the Saints. But I never want to go back
.

‘Nothing's changed,' she says, glancing up at me over her drink, sucking on her straw to emphasize her cheekbones.

‘Hotel. I mean it's hardly a room.' She chases the last smears of crumble and licks them off her spoon, thoughtfully. ‘Still not talking then?'

I shake my head and wonder whether she knows. How can she? It's hard to look her in the eye.

‘Meet me tomorrow,' she says, then looks at me with a cool, smouldering gaze - the kind of look you practise - and gathers her hair on one side of her neck. ‘Better get back, you know', she says, getting up, and I know she doesn't really have to go.

That evening in Lane End, over roast potatoes and two thin sausages, I explained where I'd been, about Elsie appearing at the quayside and about her car and how she'd said the rhubarb was ‘tinned' in exactly the same voice Goose had used a few months before. Goose read what I'd written, all the while stroking her chin, and I noticed a few bristles were growing there. Her silence made me tense. Whass she after? she said at last, speaking to the space between us, as if I wasn't in the room. I shrugged, eager to respond, but not knowing what she meant or whether I was even being asked.

 

I waited for Elsie on the quay. The tide had turned, revealing a dark collar of seaweed along the wharf. My legs ached with standing still, but I missed Elsie throwing the door open - with such force I heard it bang - and I was sure she must have been sacked, already. She ran down the road clumsily, someone grown tall too quickly, then she walked on to the marsh, pretending not to see me. When I caught up with her she was tearing off an apron, which smelled of wet flour and butter.

‘One thing they
don't
know about is hygiene!' she shouted, not realizing people always spoke quietly on a marsh. Unless they're on a boat. ‘Who's that?' she said, pointing at the
Hansa
over the Pit, and I saw with dismay that Roger was already sitting on it. He was a local lad, quiet and dark-skinned, but no one really cared for him in the village. He'd been going out to the
Hansa
for months, and though initially I went on the wreck only when he wasn't there, we'd begun to sit there together, vying for the wheelhouse chair in the same way Lil' Mardler and the Langore brothers had once done.

 

‘You expect me to strip off, huh?' she said cheekily, knowing we had to swim. I began to take off my shoes and socks. I didn't look at Elsie, at just how far she was stripping down, but went ahead into the Pit, feeling her eyes on my back for several long seconds, then hearing her wince when she stepped into the water. And I thought of Frieston Marsh, beyond the beet factory at King's Lynn, on a mud-walk with Elsie and my mother. How black our bare legs had been, how Elsie had complained about sharp edges of shells buried deep in the mud, how she'd complained about the cold when we'd crossed a creek, and how in short, she'd complained.

 

‘I'm Elsie,' she said to Roger, dripping her way over the deck of the
Hansa
like she was bringing bad weather. He muttered an unconvincing
hiya
, and retreated behind the wheelhouse to set to work on some limpets with his penknife, giving me a cold glance as he did so. This was clearly our boat, and she was clearly a girl. Very clearly.

He didn't hang around. He walked off on to the Point and threw stones in a mud-pool. Elsie only seemed to notice him when he was way off in the distance, calling him stupid, which I agreed with as if I'd been dying to tell someone.

‘Like all virgins,' she added.

 

This was how Elsie took over the boat. We spent most afternoons after her shift on the
Hansa
, sitting on the deck. Sometimes we'd eat a pint of shrimp. I ate shrimp like my uncle, copying how carefully he pulled the body from the head, wiped the spinal column clear, then snapped the tail to ease the skin and legs apart. A final sharp breath to blow the eggs from the belly. Elsie swallowed them whole, leaving only the head between her fingers, and sometimes she even swallowed the head too, actually enjoying the crunchy salt of the skin, and the more fishy taste of the eggs. Sometimes she'd suck the head clean. She claimed it was the best bit. She ate five to every one of mine, and then we'd swim, me chasing her legs underwater as they kicked into the gloom, my eyes stinging with salt.

 

And with a gentle bump the sandy bottom of the Pit brushes my chest and I begin to swim above its ridges, following patterns of sand that look like a giant fingerprint. Above me, the sunlight falls in ripples through the water. My ears are numb to the world, hearing only the occasional knock and thud of passing outboards. The hulls of moored boats pass like storm clouds above me. I see miniature crabs fleeing my shadow, their shells wet and papery. My hand reaches forward as if I'm stretching through glass, brushing the horned wrack as it clings to pebbles on the estuary bed.

 

Back on the
Hansa
I would watch Elsie pulling herself on to the wreck, glistening like a fish, her hair flattened across her head and down her face. I remember watching how her skin dried in patches that spread and joined down the length of her legs, as if a new skin was crawling over her. Like my mother as a young girl, sitting on the
Hansa
while she watched the two Langore brothers swimming across the Pit like a couple of pirates. A girl on the wheelhouse, two boys in the water. A girl sunbathing, knowing the boys are looking at her. Boys prising off limpets and chucking stones and scratching words into the wood.

Elsie flexed her ankles, making them click, and then she drew a finger across her forehead, pulling her damp hair to one side. There were dots of moisture on her eyelashes, a dusting of salt like a stain on her cheeks. She kept her eyes shut. Behind me, Roger was again throwing stones into the low-tide mud. Elsie's eyes remained shut, occasionally twitching under the lids, a little shine there, on her eyelids, where the skin was tight. Gradually I let my gaze drift from her face, down the line of her neck, to linger on her front. On the stretched smooth contours of a part of her I'd never dared to look at before, at shapes seemingly held in place purely by the weight of the wet cotton. On her breathing. And as she exhaled, a breeze seemed to stir across the warm wooden deck and with it two small points under her T-shirt began to rise, as if the air itself were lifting them.

The stones still fell into the mud with sickening regularity. I stared at the gunwale, at a carved guillemot, which seemed more monkey than bird, and mocking with it. At the distant marshes and the boats moored in the Pit. All of it drew me back to Elsie. Lying next to me, at the centre of it all.

Suddenly Elsie's dark, liquid eyes were looking at me, then looking through me.

‘You wish,' she said, dismissively.

 

It turned out she hadn't been sacked from the Misfits, and as the weeks went by the menu had more and more of Elsie on it. And more of my mother too. Smoked eel and horseradish leaves, guinea fowl in plum sauce, bluit and fennel soup were all my mother's. There, under the leaves, my mother says, pointing to a clump of bluits in a pine wood. They look like dishrags. The young Elsie bends down, afraid to touch them. My mother giggles and pushes her own fingers under the mushrooms, lifting them gently. Musn't bruise them, she says, lowering them into the bag Elsie holds open for her. They walk off into the dappled sunlight, enjoying the quiet of the wood.

On the wreck, smelling the gulls' fishy sweet shit on the hot planks, we ate the meals my mother had once cooked; letting the tastes take me back across the years to a purer time, a time of my silence, my crayon drawings on the skirting boards, of her sad brown eyes looking at me with love and nothing but love in them.

It must have meant something to Elsie too, eating Auntie May's meals with me, dreaming of a time when we were all together. Sometimes she'd give me a long hard hug after we'd eaten. You stupid clod, she'd say, why am I so addicted to you? Then she'd push me off the deck and break the moment. Roger never got fed. He kept his distance or walked off through the dunes whacking the grasses with a stick. Sometimes, watching him sitting on a bank scowling back at me, I'd imagine he was some spectral reincarnation of my uncle, staring at his brother sitting on the
Hansa
with my mother. Looking at Shrimp with a sullen face, knowing that Lil' Mardler was captivated by his dreaming mind and his affinity with animals. My uncle in the dunes, knowing he'd lost the battle over the girl. Was this how it had been?

 

‘Look, Pip! Who's that?' Elsie's suddenly sitting up on the deck, shielding her eyes from the sun. Across the Pit there's a man swimming in a line towards us. A no-nonsense front crawl I've heard about before. Kipper Langore, acting the kid, coming out to the
Hansa
like he did over twenty years ago. When he gets close he yells at Elsie to drop the anchor and I see Elsie stroking her hair back and I know in that gesture she knew damn well Kipper was going to come out here. She's invited him. Invited him to our wreck. I look down at him and he sticks a cold wet hand up at me - help me up then - and I have to grab him, his bony long-fingered hand, and haul him on to the wreck and there he is, suddenly large and standing right in the middle of the deck. The whole world is his. Elsie leans back on her arms and stares at the sky. You drip on me there'll be hell to pay, she says, cheekily, and he immediately threatens to do so, their game comfortably bypassing me. Small streams of water are draining off his hard thin body, joining up with each other root-like down his legs, giving him a shifting, tricky look. His hair is slick and dark across his head; I notice he's letting it grow a little longer - distancing himself from the crew-cuts of the twins and the grown-out barber's cut of my father. He's a sly one all right, standing there with his feet planted widely on the planks.

‘So, what you two been up to?' he says, a gossipy tone I'm not used to in his voice.

‘Not been watching us through the binoculars?' Elsie replies, content to carry on in her mischievous vein. She's taking him on, and both of them are enjoying it.

Kipper's undeterred. ‘Han't been here for twenty years or more,' he says, looking around him proprietorily, and Elsie's straight back with well, that's a great fat lie. How does she know that, I think?

Kipper sits down and begins to tie an elaborate knot in a length of rope he's brought with him. He grins while he's doing it, knowing he's impressing Elsie, and I wonder whether he's seeing her or whether he's remembering Lil' Mardler, sitting in the same place, all those years ago. He ties five knots together and makes a crab out of them, then throws it to me in a casual, offhanded gesture, as though he's throwing me scraps.