Salt (7 page)

 

And my grandmother had found the boy as he cried, sat by him, watched him throwing stones into the mud of Morston Creek. Self-pitying rage shook the boy when he thought of the sick calf with the weeping eyes, who refused to suckle from its mother. Just a drink from the udder and it might live, you know. My grandmother made sounds of sympathy - while her mouth watered with the thought of tasty cuts. She'd have to play her hand well. First slaughter? she asked, and when he nodded his head she shook hers. Oh, thass rough, it is. Rough. I ain't never killed nothin' that big an' I don't reckon I ever will.

Calf liver and bacon? Calf-feet fricassee? Calf-head pie? That old bastard Will Langore would claim every ounce of meat an' he'd want the liver too an' this lad ain't up to carryin' a head. Best be the tongue, oh yes, simple, on the skewer. Bit o' salt an' pepper.

Her trap was easily laid. Course you gotta give that tongue away. Don't you go leavin' that tongue in its head or you'll start hearin' that dead calf lowin' every time you slaughter. That ain't no fun I tell you. I seen grown men haunted, oh God haunted, till they take no more of it . . . And the boy looked at my grandmother and maybe she briefly saw the dreamy expression of faraway eyes she'd last seen in the man who'd vanished on the
Pip
. But it wasn't enough to stop her in her tracks, and as the boy's blue eyes flooded with the horror of what the marshwoman was saying, she pretended to slice her own throat with painful, drawn-out agony. An' there ain't no escape, she added, swallowing her spit, thinking the boy was close to taking off that night. Time to be a man, she muttered, turning to the horizon to conceal her grin. And maybe the boy thought of his older brother, grey-eyed and calm with it, well on the way to being just that.

Next morning, my grandmother woke before dawn. She saw the pale wood of her white picket gate swinging open in the gloom, and listened to the heavy tread of the boy as he walked up her path. Out come the knives, pestle and sewing kit. The tongue landed with a slap on the front step, and the boy walked off, leaving her gate wide open, to eat his silent breakfast with the men. That was the boy who gave my mother the tongue. And Goose, you did everything to make that boy stay, and yet just a few years later it would be everything to make Shrimp Langore leave.

5

Lil' Mardler had a childhood with no friends.
She live on the marsh an' there ain't no father. The mum's a rum 'un too - she scare the babies. Lil's diff'ernt, thass all I got to say
. Alone on a saltmarsh among gulls swallowing cod heads on the tideline. She's no longer a little scared girl. She's sixteen. She inhabits a landscape that is so big and flat it seems the edges slope up into the sky all round, where mud meets cloud banks and seems to continue up there till traces of creeks and water can be seen there too - she often thinks she stands in some vast and dreary dish which has no end. She's lived like this for years. She's learned how to walk in mud with her heels pointed down, the depths of the creeks and the strengths of the tide, knows where mud cracks are so deep you might break a leg - it's as if she has it all etched on the back of her hand. She knows the calendar by the buds on sea blite, the flowers on campion and dry seeds on curled dock. By the number of joints on a stem of samphire. And she never treads on a tern's egg, even though its shell is made of shingle.

Sandpipers pass her, skimming the creeks with wing-tips so fast they seem blurred. The tide slowly rises and falls in its long-fingered weave through the marsh. And in the centre of all this is the wreck of the
Hansa
. She knows its every detail, from the gannets and storm petrels carved along the gunwale, to the whale on the mizzenmast and the spirits of the North Sea rising towards its broken top. The grooves of the rough letters cut into the planks, so faint you could easily miss them as scratches:
Jeder macht mal eine kleine Dummheit
: we all have times of a little stupidity.

She's there, in the wheelhouse, her hair long and brown and as thick as rope, tied in a simple knot behind her head. Salt marks on her cheeks and forehead, lips slightly blue with cold. The sulky, defensive expression she used to pull as a child no longer fits her face. In the last year or two her cheeks have lost some of their softness. Her eyebrows have grown fuller and seem to sit on top of her eyes with a permanently hurt expression she can't shift. Her skin is less soft, the salt is finally getting in there too. She's grown tall and strong and with it she's grown petulant, and here, right now, she's fuming.

Because she's not alone. Sitting over by the prow with his chin resting awkwardly on the handrail is a young lad. We've met him before. He killed that calf just after the storm eight years ago, and now he spends much of his time out here, strung up on the wreck, his dreamy eyes not entirely without pain.

Lil' Mardler stamps about behind him, kicks the wheelhouse, slides about on the bones of the pilot's chair while she looks at the sagging shoulders of the boy sitting on the wreck. Her wreck. The wreck
her father
carved. She thinks nasty thoughts but the boy doesn't move. The pilot's chair grinds painfully as she swings it from side to side, then she paces over to him and stands so close a boy his age should go cold with fear that a girl like her might do something unexpected. Laugh at his face, scratch him on the arms, kiss him on the mouth like an adult. Lil' is sixteen and girls write the rules and she knows she'd get away with it, but something about his posture shows she wouldn't win this battle, so she goes back to the wheelhouse and makes the chair squeak like a gallows.

Then a strange thing happens. There, in front of her, she sees the boy's shoulders tense like someone's wringing water out of them. She looks beyond him and sees something, approaching them - a perfect wake spreading gorgeously across the water of the Pit. It looks like a float on a fishing line being reeled in. Then an arm is raised, followed immediately by another, and a no-nonsense front crawl breaks out. Another lad is heading for the
Hansa
, and my mother grips what's left of the wheel like a storm's coming.

The second lad's older than the first, taller by the inch or so to make all the difference, and where the first boy's eyes are as pale as a dawn sky, his brother's are grey like smoke. He clings to the side of the wreck, breaks a bit of rotten wood off the hull and chucks it in the water and Lil' thinks about kicking him in the face and how it was preferable before and decides to stay in the pilot's chair because he'll know she's done that deliberately. But the boy hardly notices. He's calling to his brother and making a big fuss about being pulled from the water and suddenly she's watching the dreamy one hauling the other one out and it seems the two boys have taken over the wreck entirely, because to them that's all it is - a wreck.

The taller boy's got a strong hard body and his face is bony and severe. He sits on the planks and takes some deep breaths to show how good his swim was. His hair's as wet as an otter's and the water streams down his back in fast, quick lines. Then he turns to her and grins and she's immediately disconcerted - because the boy grinning at her seems, for a second, to be entirely different from the one who climbed up on deck. Same person, same features - but two faces in one.

‘Mornin', cap'n, where we heading?'

Lil' Mardler pulls her ugliest most sarcastic smile and looks away.

‘I'm Kipper and he's Shrimp,' he says. ‘You got a name?'

‘He said his name was George,' my mother replies.

‘Well, it isn't.'

‘My name's May.'

‘No it ain't. You're Lil' Mardler, everyone knows that,' the boy says, laughing out loud. Even the dreamy one smiles at that.

‘And you're the boy they had to fish out the tree in the storm, ain't you,' she says. ‘Cryin' like a baby, they said.'

She's drawn first blood. Good on you, Lil', you used to give as good as you got.

 

Talking of first blood, earlier that morning, Lil' had been peeling potatoes over a bucket when she nicked herself badly with the knife. A thin line of blood had threaded into the water, turning it rust red. She'd thrown the knife in and run to the marsh, leaving Goose to finish the job and wonder what was going on with her daughter. Years had passed since Goose used to take Lil' out each day to pick samphire, pushing her out in the pram, filling it up, making the young girl walk back when it was full. Now, they got on like cats in a cage. Goose consulted the clouds, didn't like what they said, began to feel a growing sense of doom. She began to be suspicious of her daughter and this kind of thing with the spuds and the bucket was just the tip of it.

 

Lil' was preoccupied. She spent her days on the
Hansa
, watching from the wheelhouse as the brothers ate limpets and whelks, then more and more she sat nearer them, hearing them talk about the farm they lived on and how they'd leave it to rack and ruin one day. We ain't going to fill the old bastard's shoes. They were more interested in competing with each other than paying her much attention. In the mornings they'd swim across the Pit with knives between their teeth like a couple of pirates, in the same way Hands had done, seventeen years before. Then they'd throw stones, dive off the bow, race each other along the shore; all that boys' stuff and it all seemed endless wasted energy.

 

Shrimp was smaller than his brother, but was more easygoing. He had a broader back and a soft smile of puppy-fat above the waistband of his trunks. Light hair, and a face which seemed a little clumsy, all the features with their own edge of haphazardness. Said to look like his mother, though she'd died while they were so young neither of them remembered her. Shrimp put less effort into the throwing contests, but his stones went further. His older brother threw stones with a jarring action which changed style with each delivery, and though he chose his stones carefully, it made no difference. Shrimp's stones kept falling further away.

Knots were a different matter. Kipper excelled at them, had his own length of rope which he strung round his neck in the same way I've hung my notebook for most of my life, could tie a Spanish bowline with his eyes closed, or an armpit bight with three twists of his fingers. He once tied eight half-hitches to a masthead bend and crawled it across the deck like a crab, so my mother told me.

After so many solitary years as a marshgirl, she must have enjoyed the company. The Langore brothers went to a school their great-uncle paid for, hadn't been born in Blakeney, and so remained a little on the fringes themselves. Kipper hated the local kids, said they were mean and narrow-minded, that the boys were a bunch of women with tits in their shirts and nothing in their heads. He often got in fights, and had once pushed a boy on a bike off the edge of Blakeney Quay and gave no other reason than it was
Saturday afternoon
. It was about the best thing he could've said, because people kept their distance after that.

‘Your mum's mad, ain't she, Lil'?' Kipper says. He often tried to goad her with these frank comments. ‘She listens to clouds, don't she?'

Right at that very moment, Goose was in Lane End, staring at a frog, which was crawling across her kitchen tiles. She screamed, and began shooing it out the door with a broom.

On the
Hansa
, Lil' is not impressed. She can deal with Kipper Langore.

‘We got a saying for it.'

‘Who's we?' he says, hardening his look.

‘You ain't from Norfolk,' she says, and makes out she's happy to leave it at that.

Kipper waits, knowing Lil' is dying to tell him off, one way or the other. He's mature enough to let the trouble come to him. Eventually she gives way.

‘It's in the way it lean,' she says.

‘That's it?'

‘Thass it.'

Lil' is getting this feeling that once again he has the upper hand. She looks at Kipper and his brother on her wreck and she hates the way they're sitting there, legs splayed out untidy and big and both of them not at all bothered about her.

‘So what's it mean?' Shrimp says, casually.

‘Well, it mean nothing,' she says, and thinks how stupid she sounds, ‘it just mean the truth of something's not in the way he speak or what he do, it's in the way it lean, and this is Norfolk, everything lean one way or that. You got to think differently now, that's all.'

Kipper makes a
pah
sound and lies back on the deck, sucking a bit of samphire between his lips. The light's bright and she can't tell which face he seems to be wearing.

Shrimp smiles warmly at Lil'. ‘Well, that made a hell of a lot of sense,' he splutters and both boys start laughing and even Lil' finds the whole thing funny and right then that's when the notorious event happened, that's when the herring gull dived out of nowhere with the force of a missile, diving at some glint of metal or glass on the wheelhouse roof and missing it badly and instead hitting Lil' on the shoulder and head with its own dead weight and quickly it wasn't a flying soaring gull any more but a creature of some kind, hanging off her hair with its wings caught up and stiff either side of her shoulder. Lil' starts to scream and the gull strikes a free wing at her face and its beak darts open; it screams back at her - a loud
kay-ow
and a
yah-yah-yah
that pierces the air and both lads are there at the wheelhouse, not knowing what to do and standing with their hands out as if they're going to catch something. It's an eerie moment. Lil' opens an eye gradually and the gull just hangs there, its talons in her hair, and the boys see her ear is starting to bleed. Her shoulder is covered in shit. The gull starts to pant and scares itself again, kicking her and stabbing its head fast at her arm, then it bites her shirt and pulls at it and the red bead at the end of its beak looks like blood. Lil' tries to lift it but the gull starts off again shrieking, filling the wheelhouse with the flashes of its wings, they seem like blades in the air, while the full-throated
yah-kah-eee
it makes is ear-splitting and unearthly and it's mixed with Lil's own screaming now. Then another sound, a strange sound, and it's Shrimp who's making it - a quiet
cawing
. The gull becomes still and it turns to listen and as Shrimp steps into the wheelhouse the gull turns its head to look at him askance and it opens its beak and they see the sharp knife of its tongue inside. Shrimp keeps making this noise and the gull seems to relax, then Shrimp's holding it by the legs and trying to free Lil's hair, strand by strand. The gull hangs there, lifeless, letting Shrimp work, and then it starts to preen itself below the neck while Shrimp pulls it free. The herring gull hops clumsily into his hands and he holds it up and it doesn't seem to know it's free. Then unexpectedly it takes one lazy flap, glides out of Shrimp's hands, and flies off across the Pit.