Salt (36 page)

 

Inside the shack it had the earthy smell of a potting shed. The first room had a dry-baked trestle table in front of a small sash window. There were cobwebs on the glass and a milky view of the field outside. Piled into particular order was the usual farming heap: scythes with thirty years' work on their blades, forks, picks, dibbers, plungers, blunted screwdrivers, paint tins hammered shut, jam jars full with nails, lengths of rope, twine, barbed wire, bands, sacking, chemical bags, seed bags, agricultural calendars, worming tablets. Throw nothing away, end up with nothing. Tools chucked down in frustration, treated with disregard and impatience, botched repairs, jobs half finished, problems half solved. The air was thick with the odour of damp soil, grass seeds, dead birds, old magazines, rat shit, diesel, Vaseline, turps, tea bags, apples and, through it all, the sharp smell of rusted iron as if the machinery had grown half vegetable.

A second room was tidier, though it too had a sour stink. By the window was another trestle table, this one held up by bricks at one end. This was where the twins had left the enamel bowl, the wax, goose feathers and, beside them, Kipper's firework journal. They'd stolen that from the Lab. His book of spells, yet when I opened it there were two sets of handwriting - the neat copperplate of my uncle and the lazily wandering letters of my father on loose sheets folded into the spine, from a time when his study and his science was an intriguing, secret world. This book was the combined dream of the Langore brothers' science, listing the instructions that could counter the stories the women peddled - the myths of clouds and sails and flowers and food and Ol' Norse and creek-diggers and spirits of the North Sea and the ghosts of ancient storms. All the things that kept us men from the straight and narrow. Read the Book and train your mind. Rationalize, concentrate, like Hands did with his sail.

Those brothers, swimming across the Pit to the
Hansa
; oh yes, Kipper you'd tied the knots all right, but Shrimp had thrown further and he could talk to the birds. I thought of all the jobs they'd both done here; of all those my father had done at Stow Bardolph Estate, the breeding tables, the weights and measures, the ledgers he'd tried to neaten up; and I thought of Kipper arriving at my parents' wedding with his bag of fireworks and his clothes beginning to smell of fish and smoke. They'd tried, both of them, breeding bulls and selling fish and curing hocks but really, it had all come to nothing. They'd never done anything but be the boys they always were.

I read my father's name in the journal and the date: 8 May 1968. My mother's birthday. Next to it, in his still-dreaming script:
The Manufacture of Artificial Amber
. From later years,
The Chicken's Nervous System
, curious annotations . . .
watch it ferment but mind you don't breathe it in . . . a poker will do, though one of those three-quarter fencing posts is better . . . the cigarette does not burn the leaf
. . . I see him in his study, a threadbare rug beneath his desk, cool to touch, always slightly damp; I see him reaching for books off the shelf as the smell of a meat pie my mother's baked him rises from the plate on his desk. He's forgotten about it. He's nibbling the corners of the page as he thinks. The green desk lamplight on his face like a wartime code-breaker, and he turns to me and says whatever happen don't let it smoke or it'll have your face off.

 

Behind me something stirred and I thought it was my father the chicken man and I turned to see a rope pulling taut across the doorway. The rope pulled tighter and flecks of dust sprang out of the twine. Then it went slack, and in came a goat, chewing a magazine photo of Elvis, slipping as it trod across a pile of potato skins. The skins themselves were leather-dry, but still sprouting with the potato's ceaseless self-belief. An optimistic vegetable, that one. I sat next to the goat, just beyond the length of its tether. The goat didn't like this much, but knew the length of the rope and didn't bother to jab. It was an old billy, with long stained whiskers, a grey mottled ridge of hair down its back and hooves as dark as coal. Beyond the goat, a small room blackened by the fire that had once nearly burned the shack down. I realized that this was where the young boy from Cley had received his burns, not a firework blowing up in his face, but making the dead man's fingers for the twins, and it was Kipper who'd taken the blame. I sat at the table and stared across the field at the twins, both of them in dirty work jeans and T-shirts. It was getting hot out there. Sandy had taken off his Doc Martens and Cliff was reading a paper. Bloody dead man's fingers, I thought. I'd show them. What time was it, half-nine - ten? A few miles away Goose would be banging her radio into life, knocking it against the easy chair till the batteries fell into place while the smell of poached eggs rose from the kitchens. She'd check the mealy Upper Sheringham clouds while a nurse beat the pillows and paced the floor and she'd squint at the nurse's arse and wonder whether she'd start her comments or leave them till later. My father dragging chickens off their eggs, Kipper beating the price down on fish. A vein of arrogance running through my family.

The walls were covered with snares, traps and poaching wires. Eight-strand snares with peg and tealers hung from nails in the roof, badger-tunnel snares along a wall, fox one-lever-release traps down by the window, and several mole-shaft traps in a wooden tray by the table. Their metal smelled of wild garlic. There were photos too, of a fat very dead pike being held over the side of a boat, a pile of rabbit corpses across the freshly ploughed furrows of a field. A fox with his hind leg broken and torn.

I have to do this. I have to see all this through.

On the table was a Swan Vesta matchbox, and as I slid it open something twitched from one side to the other. It was a queen bee, starved but alive, curled into the box lengthwise with its still-iridescent abdomen moving in some kind of agony. Its wings were paper dry and in pieces around it. I carefully slid it back into the box and began to make the dead man's fingers, carefully reading the method in Kipper's journal.
Never leave the mix
, it said, and then in his best writing my uncle had eulogized the chemicals:

 

I poured the liquids from the demijohns and began to stir with a glass rod, round the bowl, round the bowl, the sound of the rod on the enamel and I saw the folds of dough on a proving loaf, and then the flour dust on the soft hair of my mother's arms. Thin dark hairs covering in dust as if years and years were passing while I watched. Pass me the raisins, she says, and I see we're making a malt loaf together, to be ready when Elsie comes round with Mrs Holbeach. Flowers growing outside the kitchen window. Not all of them, she says, as I tip the bowl into the mix. She saves one or two and says these are special, these are ours, and she pops them into my mouth and I taste the salt and flour and butter on her fingers. Why did you walk out on to the ice? I say to her and it makes her laugh. Why? I ask again. Because that was the way out, wasn't it, my love, that was the path I'd never seen before.

The goat looked at me with the mean emptiness of its species. Beyond it, my father, looking up at me from the books on his desk in the pool of green light as I appeared in my pyjamas in the middle of the night at the door of his study, me, woken by bad dreams and now unable to understand the look of impatience he gave me, waiting for him to flick his pen to shoo me away from the door down the corridor to go pester my mother, and I thought, at that moment, how my entire life seemed to be an inexhaustible journey of wrong turns and unresolved moments. That I had to take charge now. I had to find my own way out.

And then something was stinging my eyes and I saw all the ice cubes were just water and rising out from the enamel bowl were the first wisps of smoke curling strangely and gently out of the liquid. What had my uncle written, don't let it smoke, never leave the mix, not what to do if it smoked. I stirred harder, then left it, then stirred again, softer this time. Whatever I did the smoke kept coming, growing stronger, following some rule deep within it that had nothing to do with me. I thought of the traps, which were like evil grinning mouths, and then, curiously, of Goose's hollandaise, the one she'd stirred in 1944 while Hands looked on, folding the mixture in so the egg didn't curdle, and a hollandaise has always curdled for me, even while my mother looked on and that was no use, just no use at all and then that damned goat was there by my elbow, tugging at my shirt and I tried to push it away and it butted me back and some of the mixture slopped up the side of the bowl.
Careful!
Each drip a fully-made bomb just waiting to go off.

The smell of the acids was filling the air, and as I looked down at the mix in the dim light of the trap room, I saw the strong silent curls of smoke rising from the colourless liquids and I sensed the profound beauty of science. Powerless to do anything but stare at the rising vapour, like I'd once gazed down the burning barrels of a shotgun and seen the heat haze rising from the metal, as if I was witnessing some dark, revealing miracle.

The mysterious fire was locking itself into the molecules of these densely coiled fluids. I was enthralled by it, and there, I wanted to plunge my hands into the mix and feel the violence of the acids. I took my lead from Kipper at that point, methodically arranging the goose feathers into rows, damping them into the mixture and carefully rolling them within the sheets of wax. Rolling them like firework tapers, a thin line of fuse cord down their centres like the spine of a wild animal. Dead man's fingers, the explosives those twins had never dared to make themselves, stacked on the side of the trestle table as the sun lowered over the field outside and its rays glowed through the window as if through the bars of a fire and I thought about this shack on the crest of its own hill and about how Norfolk's veins were filled with a deep, explosive fire just waiting to get out.

 

It was dusk when we walked back through the oak copse. The twins let me carry the dead man's fingers and Sandy led the goat ahead of us. It was sick and needed to be put down, Cliff reckoned, and he said he would have done it there and then at the shack except you should always make it walk to its grave before you killed it because then you didn't have to carry it, like George Langore, the dreamer boy, had been told all those years before when he'd had to kill his first sick calf. I held the dead man's fingers, smelled the fear in my shirt and looked up at the evening sky. Here come the clouds, I thought.

Here come the clouds.

 

Early morning, still dark across the marsh, and Kipper's standing on the lawn in a blue smock holding a mug of tea in his hands.

‘You're joking,' he's saying, ‘you can't think of going out today.'

Across the lawn the twins are standing with their fishing gear. ‘Come on, Kipper,' Cliff says, ‘you gotta do it some day and you ain't never caught a hound yet.'

‘I know that, but it's gonna be bad weather coming and your boat ain't nothing but a floating wreck.'

That sounds like a compliment to the twins.

‘Kipper, we'll bait you up, get you a hound and be back for lunch, how about it?'

‘When's the tide?' Kipper asks.

‘She'll float in a half-hour. If we stick to the channel then go wide off the Longs we'll get an extra run.'

‘Pip's coming,' Sandy says, ‘he's gonna catch his first hound.'

‘No one should be on a boat today,' Kipper says, sniffing the air, a little hint of that old competitive edge in his voice. He looks at me in a calm, level way. He knows something is up. Things are still not straight between him and me. I'm unnerving him.

‘All right,' he says.

 

All four of us crossed the saltmarsh towards the
Bastard
, which was tied up to a rough wooden staithe in a former oyster creek. The twins carried the heavy rods and bait bucket and bags and they were trying not to slip in the mud and they were scuffing their boots through the sea lavender. I was trailing, holding the dry-bag, and in it I'd secretly put the rough sticks of dead man's fingers, each one of them rolled and sealed in wax. They were further wrapped in cotton wool. Kipper came up to my side.

‘What you up to?' he said, directly. ‘Why are you suddenly hanging out with these two?'

I ignored him. Across the marshes the sky was filling with clouds. Ugly grey banks of storm clouds, and barging their way through the cumulus were coming the trickster fractonimbus - the rag clouds - wasp-like, quarrying the weather and stoking up a sky so filled with trouble it looked like a winterland of mountains and ice. A storm was coming. A hell of a storm.

The twins had noticed it by the time we reached the
Bastard
. Don't look pretty, Cliff said, always the first to talk, and Sandy said we shoun't go out 'cause the luggers are heading back in. Pussies, Cliff said, and they both laughed. Sandy pushed the cuddy down with the weight of one leg and said what d'ya reckon to his brother. I ain't going back, not with all this stuff, Cliff said, besides, boat's made out of wrecks, ain't it?

‘This is madness,' Kipper said, beyond the point of turning back. We climbed in and Cliff towed the boat into the channel till the water was as high as his chest on the waders. He hauled himself on to the bow like he was scaling a wall, and Sandy dropped the outboard on the transom, fixed the wing nuts and pulled the cord. Three times, then it fired with a dirty cough of two-stroke exhaust. Sandy held the tiller, staring at the horizon in the manner of all boatmen, while Cliff pulled himself round the cabin dragging the trim of the boat so heavily on one side the rods fell and I grabbed the dry-bag in case it tipped. Sensing the sea, the eels coiled and writhed in their bucket like hoses filling with water. Kipper, looking for space on a small boat, edged his way front of the cabin till he was crouching near the bow itself.