Salt (35 page)

Spike drew the air in between his teeth, waited for me to walk out, but knew he wasn't quite getting me and that unnerved him.

Like my father listening to the Red Poll bull at the Stow Bardolph Estate, I let those crabs teach me. At night, in the flat above the factory, I thought of how they lurked off the coast, deep underwater, waiting for the boats to come out. Spike and I shared the flat and he spent the evenings watching videos and sitting on a sofa which had already had thirty years of people like him sitting on it. When he went to bed I stared at the sofa, saw his shape pressed into its old cushions, the sweat-mark his head made on the wall behind it, and I imagined all those crabs off the coast, all facing the town that hung on to the cliffs above them. Flexing their knuckles. Waiting for the pots to lower on to the seabed. Down there they'd plot and plan and crawl into the cage to pinch the cod's head and wait till dawn. Others would watch a piece of bacon rind lower on the end of a string and they'd hang on to that bacon like it was life itself even though the fall from the pier's railings might kill them. It was as if they wanted to be caught, to be boiled by the hundred like martyrs. It made me wonder about Gideon's painting of the crab factory with the clouds of boiling steam and the vigorous shape of St Gengulf in its midst, rescuing crabs from certain death by reaching bare-armed into the boiling tank, then letting them crawl their way in a line down Corner Street like a persecuted nation, backing old ladies into shop doorways as they return to the sea. Back to the cod-headed pots once more. And I realized the crab would be caught and caught and would outlive us all. Because the hard-shelled crab can never be broken, despite any torture; it keeps its secrets inside its shell and when that shell is cracked open those secrets cannot be found.

 

Kipper sent me a postcard in September, telling me Goose was going to be put in a home. The Marge in Upper Sheringham, where she'd have a view of the sea and three hot meals a day. That same morning I hung up my apron, caught the Coast Hopper minibus to Blakeney and put my bag in my old room at Kipper's house. He didn't seem pleased to see me but he knew he couldn't turn me away. Probably thought about sending me back to my father and his field of chickens again. By the afternoon I was walking down to Lane End across the saltmarsh, watching the hares thundering across the sea lavender. Her gate was off its hinges, pushed into the hedge, and the pile of driftwood she'd collected over the years now looked like the pile of off-cuts behind Bryn Pugh's
Thistle Dew
wreck. Tiles were lifting like the hard crust of Fenland mud at Three Holes when the tulips first broke through. The windows were grimy. The chimney had bent. Junk in the garden. After many years of being the person Morston ignored, Goose had obviously become the person they talked about. Junk like that was all right on a high watermark, but not on your own doorstep, and Morston, after all, was becoming popular with weekenders. It looked like the cottage had been washed up there by the dirty kiss of a spring tide.

Goose had been packed off in a hurry. Boots, tools, papers and the old tin bath lay in a mess on the tiles, as if the 1953 storm had only just gone out the door. I went to the range - just as Hands would have done in those last days of 1945. His nimble fingers might have lifted the cloth over a proving loaf, or dipped themselves in the sauce of Goose's fish pie, but for me there was nothing but the stains, splatters, burns and spills of many years' hard cooking. The mud brown of beef gravy, the flaking scales of an ancient hollandaise and I couldn't help but be there, thirty-odd years earlier, by Lil' Mardler's side as she stands on a stool to stir the pot while Goose looks on.

‘Mind that don't stick.'

‘I won't let it.'

‘It's stickin'.'

‘No it
isn't
.'

‘There, thass stuck, you fool - you've done it now.'

And so it goes on. My mother growing up, noticing things on the marshes - how the samphire grows near the terns' nesting sites - how they might be served next to each other on the plate. How a mussel opens only when it's ready to eat. How the chickens try to avoid fish bones because they taint their eggs. She takes it all in and practises her art. Till one day she's ready to leave like Hands before her and me after her. The whole family line, hell-bent on running. And now it's Goose herself, the only one of us to have stuck it out, truly, without changing. Lane End would be sold to pay for her bills, and while I could stay with Kipper for the time being, I'd have to move on. Be like the crab - crawl into the pot, grip the cod's head.

Take whatever comes.

 

The dayroom was large and as hot as a greenhouse, with a TV facing no one in particular and large leatherette seats round the sides. I hadn't seen Goose for a long time, and now, everyone looked like Goose except Goose herself, because without the saltmarsh and the clouds rushing about her head she was just a little old lady slipping down a plastic-covered chair. Someone had finally persuaded her to have her hair cut. That must have been a scene all right. Holding her down while the clippers go in. Like shearing a sheep. She had a very small head now.

‘That one,' she said to me in a loud whisper, ‘that one by the window - she's that bitch from Bodham.'

I sat on the easy chair next to hers and looked across the room at a plump woman fussing with a newspaper, trying to fold it inside out.

‘Ain't that right,' Goose said, ‘messed with them clouds, live up the farm on the heath and she change them clouds - did it for years till we go sort her out.' The woman flapped the paper smartly. I remembered something my mother had told me - how Goose had spent a year believing someone inland was changing clouds as they passed overhead before they reached the saltmarsh. How Goose had taken my mother to see the woman, found her on the lawn hanging sheets out. They'd had a big row.

‘Serve her right to come here to die,' Goose was saying, and the plump woman gave her a mean look over the paper. I wasn't sure Goose knew who I was any more.

That was with my mother
, I wrote on a notelet, which I then didn't show to her.

Goose sat in the easy chair and started to laugh, showing off her uneven row of madwoman's teeth.

‘Pip Langore, you remember the seal, don't you? Yes, you do, I can see you do, that seal I got us. That make me laugh still.'

She squinted at me with her flint-grey eyes, making me remember the day she'd brought back a dead seal to Lane End. She'd put it on the floor and had tapped the frame of my bed with her walking stick to wake me up. Look what I got us, boy, she'd said. Goose had the seal on a piece of newspaper like it was fishing bait, all greasy and very dead, and she had stood next to it in her thick wool socks. Willie Slater hit it, she'd said, her face creasing up in some poorly disguised glee. Hit it off the Longs in that new speedboat, silly prat, what's he gone and done spendin' two thousand on a speedboat with a hun'erd horse power just to impress that girl he's got. Well, she weren't impressed when he hits the seal pup, were she?

She'd begun prodding the seal and telling me what had happened next. Willie Slater's slowin' the boat as he come to the mouth of Morston Creek. He's got one arm round that tart an' he's got this look of thunder about him 'cause this dead seal's on the back seat an' it's all bloody on the up-hol-estery. Goose had levered the seal's jaw open the way you do a cat when you get a pill down it, and she'd pulled out a strand of seaweed before going on. So Willie's cut the throttle out there an' he's havin' this blazing row.
We cain't take that pup in, you hair
, he'd said, Norfolk to the core despite his money.
Them's protected and I don't want no trouble
. End of, he was saying. But the girl's in the back of the boat stroking the bloody thing and saying
it's so young, so young
through her tears.

The long and short of it had been Willie got his way, because he'd killed the seal showing off and it was his corpse to get rid of.

Goose had described hearing the satisfying splash as the pup was thrown overboard, the engine restarting, and watching the ugly profiles of Willie Slater and the girl, who now hated him, passing in the lolly-red speedboat as it went down the channel.

‘Had to wade out there I did, clothes an' all. Poor bugger just bobbin' up on the surface an' I pull it in by its tail.'

That was the story, that was how the seal found its way to Lane End, not for dignified burial, but for a pepper sauce. Wanted sealmeat all my days, she'd said. Her impatience had made her burn it, the sauce disguised that somewhat, and we'd eaten it like steak, with sharp knives and new potatoes.

But I think Goose loved this story so much because she'd thrown the carcass, those few disjointed bones, out on the lawn ‘for the foxes'. There are no foxes on the saltmarsh. Those bones had been for the villagers, and they saw them all right. The bloody woman's killed and eaten a seal. She's just gone and done the unimaginable. A woman like that could eat their children.

The wickedness of the memory was making Goose chuckle.

‘We got us our stories all right, ain't we lad? They cain't do nothin' to take them off of us.' She reached for her stick and pointed out a place setting on the breakfast table on the other side of the room. There was a childlike label with ‘kitty's place' written on it in lower-case letters, a cartoon cat leaning against the first k of her name.

‘We've got music and movement after lunch,' Goose said. ‘Bastards. I'm gonna flash my fanny.'

A carer marched in at that point and Goose resigned herself to being hauled up the chair. She shooed the woman off and leaned forward, whispering for the first time.

‘Lissen hair,' she said, ‘you watch out for Kipper Langore. I ain't saying that man's out to harm but he is a liability, you unnerstand? Closer you get to a man like that the worse it get. Ever'thing he touch turn to salt in the end.'

With that she sat back in her chair.

‘Have to burn everythin' now,' she said quickly. ‘Down Lane End - make a good fire, I ain't goin' back.'

 

And that's exactly what I did. When I'd finished pulling the furniture from the house I unlocked the shed and looked at the junk in there. A crab pot, spare transom and rudder, an overcoat, half a barrel, bags of garden ties, string, rags, wire, twine, netting. Beneath it, the snapped-off prow of a rowing boat, painted Oxford blue. It could only be one thing, kept and kept hidden in an outside shed. The
Pip
. My namesake. The boat Hands had apparently repaired, recaulked, revarnished, repainted, and sailed away in. The boat of Goose's original myth. I closed my eyes and thought of Hands raising the quilted sail, of his determined long-distance gaze and his mind set on Europe. And he looked at me and gave me a knowing wink.

It all went on the lawn where I doused it with paraffin, and as dusk fell I set light to it, the upturned prow of the
Pip
in the centre. It took until the flames were a man's height before the bees came out - one by one - their wings on fire, burning briefly, carried upward by the punch of heat into the black Norfolk sky. And mixing in with the bees I began to watch amaretto wrappers lifting as they burned, lit by candles at the fondue party at Stow Bardolph all those years ago. My mother's face full of the knowledge of what was going on with her husband and the younger woman, letting the wrappers cast a tragic light on her while my father tried to be the man he never was.

 

‘What d'you want?' Kipper says, wreathed in smoke, leaning there in the smokehouse doorway. I just stand there while he rakes the oak chippings. He's in an odd mood.

He unthreads bloaters from the pipes, being careful not to break their gills, and calmly says, ‘I don't reckon we'll be seeing Else again, and without her I don't reckon there's much reason you sticking around. I don't want you here no more.'

It's all lies. It's all a big lie.

‘She had us good and proper,' he says.

He must have got rid of her, sent her away, arranged things - because he always arranges things because that's how the Langore brothers have always done it - pillar to post.

You got rid of her
, I write.

‘What - like May?' he says casually. ‘Like your mother?' My uncle has stopped doing the bloaters and is staring at me from in the smoke. ‘That's why your mum and dad went to the Fens. It weren't some bright new beginning. It was 'cause she was knocked up. And it weren't you. It was your sister, Elsie Holbeach.'

He said that - I'm sure he said that.
Did he?
He told me Elsie was my sister and he told me he'd packed her off and I just stood there outside his smokehouse, holding the broken latch on the old door and above both of us the clouds started arranging themselves.

‘Now, get away from me,' he said.

 

That evening I went to Cley and knocked on the flat where the twins lived. Cliff came to the door and I gave him my note:
I want to make dead man's fingers
.

21

Whatever happen don't let it smoke or it'll have your face off, Cliff said, as we walked through the oak copse on the way to the field. The oak wood smelled dry and old like a church. Sandy lit a cigarette as we walked and Cliff told him to stub it out, bloody fool, and they both had a laugh at that. Through the trees the field raked up at an angle into the sky, and the shack was there, perched on its crest. ‘We're stopping here by the hedge, all right?' Cliff said. They gave me the demijohns, and a newspaper filled with ice cubes. Remember how I told you, all right? Any trouble and we ain't going to be any part of this, OK? I nodded, but they were part of it all right, they were part of my plan.