Salt (33 page)

And sometimes while they were out there on the marsh I'd sneak into the Lab, using a key which was kept under a flint outside. There were new charts on the walls, diagrams of trajectories, primary- and secondary-burst shapes, colours and timings. Beneath them, a book filled with firework designs with headings such as ‘Alignment of Tube on Missile Body for Whistle Sound', ‘Cross-section of Pellet Layers', ‘Chamber Shapes', ‘Necks of Pressure' and, throughout, the necessity of improvements. A big display was planned for the coming New Year, and Kipper wanted to show Cley just what he could do. He was fed up with their friendliness when they wanted his fish, their disapproval when he turned his back. The back-garden whispers, the fourth-pint rants, the shop-counter glances - he'd had enough. They'd never forgotten the young lad who'd been burned by his fireworks in the Lab, or the inquest where Kipper had been absolved from blame. They'd smelled a rat, and ever since he'd been wreathed in the sulphurous cloud of his own making. Each year on Nor' Sea Night, he'd be making it worse on himself.
And now him carryin' on with a girl half his age. Old enough to be her father. Him stinkin' o' fish an' all
. Nothing was more untrustworthy for the wives of Cley than to have a man in their midst showing their husbands how it could be done. Some of them remembered the night when Kipper Langore as a boy had to be dragged out of the tree in the great storm, the fuss he made, the endless tears. So the circle grew vicious. That he lived on the edge of the marsh, away from the village, and that everything he touched turned to salt - it all made sense to them. He was rotten news; always a rum 'un and now a bad 'un. Caught between sea and land and marsh, and yes, the marsh was the best place for him.

 

A tap on the window and I was caught, caught in the Lab where I had no right to be. But not by Kipper this time. It was Eric, who worked a charcoal kiln at the top of the oak wood. I always knew when he'd been around because wherever he went he'd leave grey fingerprints. On the kettle, the knife, the invoice. Eric was a low-slung man with big eyebrows and creases like coal seams across his face. He'd spent too much time in the wood to speak much to anybody, and was the only person who smelled more smoky than Kipper. He held up a bag of charcoal and gave it a dry shake outside the window.

I carried the charcoal to Kipper and Elsie where they were sitting by the pillbox and my uncle said great and clapped his hands and actually put his arm round my shoulder. He led me back to the smokehouse with an air of being glad to get away from whatever was going on, and because I was with him, because I'd brought him the long-awaited charcoal, he said I should help him out in the Lab and before I knew it I was back in there, listening to him with all that pent-up energy which only ever came out with the fireworks.

‘It'll give a gold burst. If that's in a sphere packed round the charge we'll have a thirty-foot chrysanth. How about that, huh, thirty foot?'

As he spoke he ground the charcoal in a pestle and mortar.

‘Get the grains smaller,' he said, ‘she'll burn faster. Don't want it hanging around. There, glitter for sparkle.'

He was making the biggest show in his life and he wanted these to really burn. Rows of hard-shelled cases were arranged on a shelf like an arsenal. I knew those were the noisy ones - filled with flash powder to explode like flak and burn the retina.

‘Coronation of Anne Boleyn, these guys wrap 'emselves up in damp leaves so they don't get burned. They call 'emselves the greenmen,' he was saying, while I looked along the shelves at the trays of different-shaped charges, the sounding tubes labelled WHISTLE, CRY, SCREAM, the colour-coded chemicals: copper sulphate, barium nitrate, strontium salts, a row of traditional Chinese bamboo tubes, a box of fuse-and-pellet chambers, sticks, touchpaper, wax, string, glue. In front of them, my uncle himself, looking less like my father than ever, too much energy in too small a room, mixing dry powders but seeing explosions.

He let me look at his book. It reminded me of the ill-fated science journal my father kept while he tried to defeat Dutch elm disease. The same man whose only writing now was filling in the hen-to-egg ratio on a shit-spattered clipboard. And here was his brother - the designer, the alchemist, still caught in his art, in love with science. There had never really been any fair competition between them. Kipper ran rings round my father. He always had. Yet it was my father who'd landed the girl on the
Hansa
. That must've hurt.

 

Christmas was close now and I had work in the smokehouse, not doing fish, but the curing of ham. Kipper had bought knuckles of pork by the sackful. From the middle of October the twins and I rubbed salt into the skin of all the cuts we'd got, working hard at the flesh till our own hands were as dry as pumice. We stood on the lawn at two trestle tables - both twins working the hocks, trimming skin, sizing and salting, passing them down to me as if we were rendering the corpses of a whole army. The hams were sunk in large barrels in the lawn, and while they were in the brine we prepared the next batch. After three days we drained them, then worked the skin again, rubbing salt and muscovado sugar into the meat. Kipper would join in at this stage - squatting down on the grass, poking and sniffing the hams, then, with a dash of ceremony, add saltpetre to the brine. Well done lads, my mouth's watering. Saltpetre, which also went into his fireworks, from out the Lab and into the bellies of anyone who ate his meat - both of his industries coming together.

All through October and November I worked this way in the freezing marsh wind, turning the pigs with a wooden paddle in their graves, and then after each batch had had a month, we stacked them in the smokehouse, on a high rack so the fat wouldn't melt. If it did that, they'd be too dry. An ugly stain began to spread across my hands: the dark nicotine of a smokehouser's tan. As a final touch, from high in the chimney I dripped honey over the hams while the twins raked the oak chippings beneath me.

Cliff reaches up and pinches my ankle. 'Nother couple 'o days she'll be ready, he says to his brother. Sandy crawls in beside him and grins wide-mouthed at me. Carve him Christmas Day, what d'ya think? I shift, sending down a cloud of soot to make them back out.
Easy!
they shout, together. That unnerved me, how they thought as one and used their shorthand like all twins do. They spent their time ribbing each other and taking the piss, but when it came down to it they were virtually inseparable. Kipper'll send us all up one day we're not careful, Sandy says, easily the more nervous of the two, about the firework Lab so close on the other side of the wall. Cliff's still staring up at me. He looks at his brother, waiting for a nod to go ahead, then he whispers to me you want to make
real
fireworks? What d'ya reckon? Think it's time you came up the shack, Sandy says.

I know what that means. The shack's where they made the dead man's fingers.

 

The twins left me there high in the chimney, where the bricks narrowed round me like the throat of an animal. Greasy with rendered pig and fish fat, inches thick with soot. As I scraped away at the blackened wall I revealed the heavily lined carving of a face - a wooden face encased in soot, as ugly as the Lincoln Imp.

Outside I could hear the twins laughing and yanking the smokehouse door by its broken catch. This ain't never gonna get fixed proper, Sandy said.

The face looked like an old man with a thick beard, but it was covered with the wax of fish fat and smoke that had congealed over time. I pushed my knife into the carving till the blade touched the wood beneath, and carefully I exposed the original features: a young man's face with a clean-shaven chin. An honest, clear symmetry to his expression, a dreamy faraway look in his eyes. The face of an angel, carved in exactly the same style as the rest of the
Hansa
carvings. The face of Grandfather Hands.

What was Kipper doing with it? Where had he found it? Had he broken it off all those years before when he spent the summer with his brother on the
Hansa
. Or was it Goose - that other imp - who was responsible for hanging it up there? What better fate for the man who'd deserted her than to have him smoked for years till he grew ugly with age and his dreamy look was lost for ever?

 

On Friday nights we went to the Albatross. There's Kipper, over by the bar, stooping to avoid the tankards hanging off the beams. Elsie is sitting in the corner with me. She's been drinking Cinzano all evening and she's kept her huge coat on, so her face is flushed. Her eyes look dark here in the pub, and strangely sunken. She's wearing enormous hooped earrings and one of them keeps falling out. She seems nervous.

Kipper's leaning over the bar. A spotlight near him is striking across his face, making him look pretend and untrustworthy, like a waxwork image of himself. He's listening to someone in the back bar. It's Willie Slater and a couple of his mates - I can see Willie's corduroy trousers and the wellies rolled down at the top.

‘That ain't the only reason,' Kipper's saying, his voice a little higher than normal. He's trying to keep something light over there. He's smiling and in profile one of his teeth gleams unfortunately, a little like a shark's tooth. ‘Yeah, that's for certain all right.' Kipper's agreeing too much. He's trying to force a laugh where there is none, and Willie Slater knows it. There's a loud male shout from the back bar.

‘What's he doing, Pip?' Elsie's staring down at the table, the make-up she's put on is too thick. Around her eyes it's given her a permanently surprised look.

‘Making a fool of himself,' I whisper.

‘He shouldn't get involved. He always rises to it every time.' What's she being so protective about? Let him fight his own battles.

‘Elsie. What's really going on with you and him?'

‘Oh Christ!' she says. ‘You pick your times!' And even while she's saying this Kipper's coming back from the bar, the pint, the half and the odd-shaped Cinzano glass looking as mismatched in his hands as we do in the corner.

‘Lads,' he says, sitting down, ‘sexual repression in a coastal town. Discuss.' The effort of forcing a joke is still with him. he drinks from his pint and Elsie puts a tense hand on his knee.

Willie Slater comes through, fat and unbalanced on the tile floor. His lips are wet with beer and one of his eyes has become lazy. He puts a whisky down in front of Kipper.

‘No offence meant,' he says, staring at Elsie.

‘You're all right,' Kipper says.

‘You should come out on the speedboat sometime. The both o' you - I mean all three of you,' he says, glancing uneasily at me. I'm part of a mad family in his eyes. ‘Else - you'd love it.'

Elsie looks up at him, her chin straight and defined like the edge of an axe. ‘I doubt that very much, fat man.'

Willie Slater rolls back on his heels and raises his eyebrows comically, caught between staying and going.

‘Ohh, you're feisty, ain't you, lass?'

Kipper stands, his knuckles pressing on the bar table, bridling with anger.

‘Time, gent'eman, please!' calls the barman, ringing it out like the ringside bell at the end of the round.

On New Year's Eve, Kipper set his fireworks like an artillery range in the marsh halfway to Cley, leaving Elsie and myself in the house. Elsie, standing bloodless by the window, half in shadow, half a shadow herself. We were meant to go to the display but Elsie wasn't going anywhere. She stood by the window and I stood by her, with the lights out, our breath touching the glass in a single misty cloud as the first fireworks leaped up. Hold me, she said, and I put my hand in hers and she stood slumped in front of the window not wanting to be there but doing as she was told as streaks of colour and light shot up into the sky. I imagined Kipper crouching low in the reeds by the firework pen, his expression set on Cley and the crowd building along the bank, the glowing taper in his hand, wondering where we were. The thin whistle of his rockets rising up from his fingertips - their scream turning to agony as they burned out over the rooftops, like the cries of gulls, diving and diving as they hunted eggs. From his boots the low snaps of fireworks crackling through the marsh - leaving blue trails as they search rat-like through the banks of reeds, looking this way, looking that. There's the scatter of birds taking wing. The crowd begins to get nervous. All gettin' a bit close, they think, the lights and bangs advancing on all sides, and now it's rising and gathering pace till the cracks and booms are knocking the windows, waking the children, sending the pets under the beds. All that happening and there was Elsie, kissing me, her lips feeling wet and fleshy on my face. In Cley the sounds of the fireworks are clanging off the flint walls, the men get nervous, like when they hear the lifeboat going out. There are pints left half-drunk on tables. Elsie smiles and I see her face in the dark and I think I'm on the whale again, she's so translucent. There's Kipper, grinning like a devil in the marsh, his smoky eyes set on the village. He's got their attention all right. And now the full arsenal of his Lab goes up. Flash powder cauterizes the air, explosions thud into the marsh.
Here it come!
he yells,
you bastards!
Imagining the Glaven lit up like lava, seeing the flames leap from roof to roof, even the windmill - such a picture postcard - with its sails on fire like a giant roman candle. This was the place where the storm had left Kipper high and dry in a tree, crying like a baby, and now he was bringing it back.
You gutless bunch! I'm here!
And with a sudden, quiet whuump of air, our window shifted in its frame, and the show was over.

‘I'm sorry for everything,' Elsie said. ‘So sorry.'