Salt (27 page)

And then, dressed in my donkey's head, I was on stage looking through papier-mâché eyeholes at Elsie lying asleep. Lloyd began to sing . . .

 

. . . and Titania was awakening, only it clearly wasn't Titania but Elsie, my Elsie, with her bright red hair and her fawn-like face, gazing into my donkey eyes while a voice off stage, which must have been Kat's, said, ‘On the first view, to say, to swear, I love thee.'
I love thee
. And Elsie was guiding me across the grass and I was following her in a dream.

‘Lead him to my bower.'

We sat on a seat made of dried flowers and lavender, and Elsie pulled me sleepily to her side. She put her hair across my chest and lay her head on my belly, and as she yawned and fell asleep Kat whispered:

 

After the show the troupe went to the Albatross and someone bought me a pint. It was the first time I'd sat at the bar. I stared at the space above it where Arthur Quail's map of the North Sea had once hung and thought of the story of Hands winning it in poker and then walking back to Goose's cottage with it rolled up under his arm. Of the Dogger Bank joke he'd pulled on my grandmother, and of Lil' Mardler, my mother, finding it years later.

The beer tasted of soap, and nearly at the bottom I noticed Elsie wasn't around.

When Lloyd and Kat tried to get the whole bar singing a round, I slipped out, walking up the quiet road back to the hotel, still dressed in my donkey's costume, though I held the head under my arm.

 

The walled garden was empty and the hotel's sheets had all been hung out to dry. White sheets against the night's sky: the clouds I'd seen blowing across the marsh. So this was it.

I sensed a movement. Then a splash. Someone was in the large pond, lying on their back in the water, staring up at the sky. It was Elsie. I crept closer and quickly realized her clothes were lying next to the edge where she'd taken them off. I didn't know what to do. Elsie was there and she was stark naked, curved like a tusk of ivory against the dark water. She saw me, or I thought she saw me, because she twisted quickly, splashing like a fish as she grabbed for the side. Her head ducked below the brick edge, then all of a sudden she vaulted from the water, running dripping from the pool, not towards her clothes but towards the sheets.

Then everything went quiet - had she seen me? Had she seen it was me? I stood by the pond and looked at her clothes. At the absolute nothingness of her costume, so flat and lifeless without Elsie. At the smudged outline her toes had worn in the leather of her sandals.

She was hiding somewhere between the washing lines. I followed her wet footprints along the brick path, and towards the end of the row I saw a deep indistinct shadow through one of the sheets. A breeze filled the material and Elsie's silhouette moved with it, defining itself, then softly drifting away. I heard her breathing, and saw the shape of her hair as she turned, looking down the rows for me. Gradually I moved the sheet forward till the shadow of her became slender and dark. Swiftly the material went taut along the line of her thigh. The sheet stuck wetly to her skin, wrapping her leg as she turned. Then suddenly the shape of her other leg appeared, like the limb of a tree. She stayed like this for a while, with the cotton sticking to her legs and the points of her fingers pressing into the material in front of me. A game developing. Then her fingers curled into the palm of her hand, and slowly she took a step into the material, so that it stuck to the flat of her belly and the curves of her breasts. She pushed her face and hair even further into the fabric until they made their own relief, and as she did so, I pushed the sheet in between her breasts and felt their weight moving towards my fingers and my hand was trembling but I kept it there and then I lifted my other hand so I could touch her . . .

What I remember next was the clothes pegs flying off the line as she ripped the sheet down, and there she was, staring defiantly, outrage and challenge in her eyes, holding the sheet against her like a matador.

‘The fuck are you doing?' she said, angrily emphasizing each word. Her mouth shivered with a cold raw sneer. I stood, deflated, still dressed as a donkey, while she burned her gaze at me. Then, quite unexpectedly, she raised her hand and lifted my chin. The sneer was gone, the anger abating. ‘I'm sorry, Pip, you're lovely and you're just a boy,' she said. ‘Keep away from me.'

And then she was gone, walking across the grass wrapped up in her sheet, a blur of white against dark bushes, like the ghost of my mother, sleepwalking, never finding peace, finding me and holding me and then vanishing like vapour.

So there I was, a donkey, ridiculed and being ridiculous, because that's all a donkey can be. A stubborn mute ass who would never fit in.

As I walked away from the washing lines I imagined I saw smoke, and I began to blink because my eyes were smarting. Then I smelled it. Not the greasy, fishy smoke of my uncle's smokehouse, but the fragrant warmth of his pipe, and on the ground among the shadows its knocked-out embers, still glowing.

16

The bus seats had a herringbone pattern in the fabric and it unnerved me. It reminded me of the herringbone brickwork on my uncle's smokehouse and the herringbone stitch I'd once glimpsed running along the hem of Elsie's bra in the shadows of her armpit. That was in her bedroom in the house at Three Holes, and that was where the bus was taking me. It was February, six months after the night at the Misfits. Elsie had gone back to her parents in November and I'd heard nothing from her until her postcard in January.

 

Through the autumn and early winter I'd continued going to Kipper's smoky living room, sitting at the desk by the window, but he'd lost interest in my studies. Instead of planning lessons he'd spend most of his time in his Lab, preparing the rockets and bombs for Nor' Sea Night. Soon I began to miss the small things he used to do, such as leaving fossil sea urchins or belemnites for me on my desk. We'd eat silent lunches of pork pie and chutney, roe on toast or rollmops and brown bread cut into triangles. And in the afternoon I'd help the twins stack the smokehouse, threading herring on the bars, from mouth to gill, mouth to gill, and because I was the smallest, I had the task of crawling round the back of the smoking racks to drag the oak chips forward, hearing my uncle and the muted clink of glass bottles on the other side of the warm brick wall. Back in his study and smelling of smoke I'd flick through the bookshelves, waiting for the time to go home, noticing unfamiliar changes to his house: a bunch of flowers in a vase on the mantelpiece; a newly washed tablecloth; a tidied boot-rack by the marsh door to stop mud getting in. A woman's touch. And I knew it was Elsie. Spending more and more time here, in the evenings when I wasn't around, cooking meals and drinking red wine, listening to Kipper's stories and the jokes he pulled, winding her hair around a finger near her temple while he talked. A little hiccup. A giggle. An apology. And then some of her capriciousness - an uncalled-for comment - a cruel piss-take, and now it would be my uncle laughing. Fen girl - you're a wild cat all right.

I'd always steeled myself for the time I might see her climbing astride a motorbike and putting her arms round some local lad. Holding him tight as he gunned the throttle around Blakeney. But spending evenings with my uncle was much, much worse. The poor squit, saw me in the pond, thought he'd try it on. Kipper, roaring with laughter and gaining capital from going over the story again. Don't! Don't! Holding his sides. Dirty little sod, feeling me up. Touching me . . . Right here. And she points to the place. She pushes her chest out and points to the place. And do you know he can speak? He's a dark horse that 'un. Been stringing us along all this time.

I saw her only once in that time, and that was through the bonfire's flames on Nor' Sea Night. Her hair impossibly bright. But an inscrutable expression, filled with shadows and secrets. She came to me and led me on to the marsh, pressed her forehead into my neck and I felt the fire's warmth on her skin, the coldness of the marsh on her back.

‘Come and visit me,' she said.

‘Where?' I said, with difficulty.

‘That's so good. So good to hear you. I'm going back to Three Holes. Season's over.'

‘El-sie, I miss you.'

‘Me too. Look, just don't balls it all up, all right?'

And with that she'd gone, walking first back to the fire and then vanishing beyond, along the roads of dark Norfolk to the greater darkness of the Lincolnshire Fen, in winter, just about the darkest place there is. At the end of January she sent me a postcard:
My mum has died. They found her face down in the tulip beds. Please come as soon as you can. I'm not staying here a second longer than I have to.

 

So there I was unexpectedly sitting on the coach to King's Lynn, staring at the herringbone pattern, holding her card in my hand. Through the windows the buildings looked damp with winter, stained like sugar cubes in fields the colour of wet tea leaves. A journey of Norfolk's softness giving way to ever-growing geometry. Power lines and poplars, drainage dykes and roads, all pulled taut over the soil, unimpeded by the earth below till all was flat.

Tydd St Giles, Tydd St Mary, Tydd Gote, Four Gotes. That's where I got off the bus on my first stop, and the first thing I noticed was an overwhelming smell of chickens. By the thousand. A sweet dusty smell of their sweat and shit and bran. An address in my pocket in my uncle's handwriting. The name of a farm, which I could also see hanging from a signpost down the road: FOUR GOTES EGGS. A ragged hedge, and through it I saw the farm opening up into row upon row of chicken coops laid out across a dull earth field. Three sets of power lines stretched in parallel over the soil, and the electricity made a soft wide buzzing sound in the drizzle. There were two or three hundred of the coops, and one man, more scarecrow than I'd ever seen him, but him all the same. My father. The way he chose to lean when he didn't need to, the way he bustled across the mud as if avoiding low branches. He was slamming the lid down on a coop and picking his way between the feeders with the action of someone grown used to pushing his way through chickens. He lifted another lid and let it fall, a second later I heard the sound, then he was jotting something on a clipboard and when he slotted his pencil under the clip he looked up, bang on cue, and gave me a wave, taking the cap off his head like he was on a harbour quay.

Until then I'd thought this would be a surprise visit. Those Langore brothers were still thick as thieves.

The sound of the pylons grew louder above us and we met by a chain-link gate, which clicked with an electric current, and when he let me in he took his cap off again, a polite gesture. He was close to me, holding the cap in front of him, looking at the ground and asking how I was, how Goose was, had the journey been all right.

‘You came, then,' he said, abruptly. I looked around at the large bleak field, at the bright clumps of bronze hens making their way back to the coops, at the aluminium feeders the colour of elephant skin and the chain-link fence, dotted with feathers.

‘Not bad this. Pays quite well.'

He'd aged. His donkey jacket was torn at the pockets and his boots had a sandblasted look where the chickens had pecked through to the toecaps.

We leaned against a coop and I wrote down that I wanted to see Mum's grave and his new bungalow and the dog. Underneath us the hens stirred and clawed their way round the nesting boxes.

I wrote down
Elsie
,
her mother's died
and he bent towards the notebook and took a drawn-out breath.

‘Yeah, Elsie,' he said, biting his lip thoughtfully. ‘You going there?' he added, brightly, and when I nodded he said, ‘Well, you know, send her all the best and that.'

He stiffened next to me as he looked towards the horizon.

The sail of a boat was gliding through what seemed to be a ploughed field. River Nene, he said. A tall line of poplars sliced diagonally across the view, and halfway along their row the trees had grown shorter where the soil wasn't so good. I remembered him standing by the burning coop at the farm. How the dead chicken had hung from his hand while the Rhode Island hen had burst burning from its hiding place. And my father's boot as he stamped it dead with a farmer's strength and forthrightness which was all but gone now. His spirit now stamped out of him by monotonous, bleak, hard work. The man who'd quelled the nature of bulls with a whisper. Now nothing more than a pair of boots half-pecked apart.

‘Vicious,' he said, catching me looking at his feet. ‘Still, pays the bills.'

I wasn't sure what I was doing there; and then he was walking off again, looking round, distracted, used only to hens interrupting his train of thought.

 

His bungalow was built where no one else would live, under the convergence of two power lines. They fizzed angrily above us as we went deliberately to the back door - as a farmer always does, even when he no longer lives on a farm. Inside, it also smelled of chickens, like fermented beer, hot and enclosed, the smell of a coop. And there was a smell I remember from the Saints - the smell of dampness and wood and the Pears soap that he scrubbed his face with in the morning, and the smell of him in the middle of it all, an ageing man with unwashed clothes and no inclination to open windows. Neglect. Chicken shit was on the patio and on the windowsills outside. The bungalow felt besieged. He didn't take his boots off. Washing-up was piled in the sink, soaking in cold water, the remnants of several meals bleeding into a grease-spotted tideline round the stainless steel. Tins were left open on the side next to crusts of bread and packets of biscuits. With me there he seemed to see the mess of it for the first time. He went to the sink and his shoulders dipped at the sight of it and then his hand rubbed the back of his neck where it was permanently tanned from outside work and his skin had a cracked, sparsely haired look like the skin of a pig. His fingers played with a mole there, a thing I remember him doing when he was studying the elm disease in his study, and he stared at something in the sink for a long time then he turned back to me and we both sat at the table. It was the table from the Saints, the burned ring from the base of a casserole pot my mother had put down on it five years ago still there. Chicken casserole, with tarragon and cider.