Salt (34 page)

‘They ought to sink those hulks,’ said Ruby.

Clare, who was standing next to me, hummed her agreement. ‘They’re a danger. Kids will always go out to them, because the shore is always so blocked off with salt crust.’

‘And because they’re kids,’ said Ruby. ‘They’ll go for that reason alone.’

‘They can’t sink them,’ said somebody else. This was a woman who didn’t work in our office, and so who (perhaps) hadn’t got into the habits of public cynicism that were the patter with us. ‘They will still maybe develop them. They’ll be the first boats in the Senaarian Navy.’ The hulks had started out as the hulls for the great Galilean barges, ways of taking trade from Senaar to the other southern nations, at a time when the roads weren’t safe from the terrorists. But they had not been well built, and they had been extremely expensive, and when the terrorists were got rid of, the need to continue the project had faded away. I think it was true that the official version saw the hulks as a future investment, to be completed one day; but I suppose few enough believed that. Just to look at them, to see how much damage they had endured from the repeated Whispers and the corrosion of the chlorine and salt, belied the idea that they would ever be anything other than floating platforms of decay.

But once this other person had spoken the official line, about the Great Senaarian Navy, the mood to carp at officialdom was dissipated. It gave the occasion a nervous edge, and we felt like the children we were, bickering and bitching about parental rules.

‘Still,’ said Ruby, voicing one of the few comments that could be offered without being gainsaid by anybody. ‘Still, it’s a wicked shame about the boy being drowned.’

‘Oh, it is,’ said Clare. And she started crying again, and so did Ruby. And so did I, with that same half-ashamed, half-grateful sense of public release.

I think I had a particular vision of the drowned boy, one that came to me spontaneously as soon as Ruby had come panting into the office with the news. I saw him as I remembered my brother, Zed, when he was perhaps six or seven. I saw him as that sort of creature, with skin the colour of pale whiskey in the sunshine, and limbs narrow as ropes; I saw him dancing in the yellow sunlight of earth, laughing and rushing. There was always something fluid about Zed. Father was stern with him, because he was a boy, to exactly the degree
he was yielding with me because I was a girl. Sometimes Zed would take refuge behind me, as if my frail femaleness could perhaps shield him. He was a fluid boy, always laughing, in motion, always flowing; but my father was as strong and as rigid as a rock. As strong as the hill about which the farm seemed to rest by sufferance; as tall as the town house in which we spent winter, six storeys high, dominating the street. I suppose that was why I thought of Zed, because the collocation of
boy
and
drowned
made me connect with my memories of the fluidity of my brother.

But then the crowd went silent, and the outboat started towards the shore, bringing with it only a hollow disappointment. The diver, tugged along behind the outboat, found his footing on the beach and started up through the water to the dry land, carrying the body, salt breaking like ice about his steps. He was no boy, to my eyes, but rather a man. I later discovered he was fourteen, a week shy of his fifteenth birthday. The tears dried up. He was not a boy, he was a man. They carried his lazily drooping body from the water’s edge, with strings of water dribbling from his flaccid arms and head. And suddenly the sight of him revolted me, and I had to turn away.

It seems strange to have experienced that sort of reaction at the thought of a man, of a man dead. I always valued men, felt most comfortable with men. Loved men, their company, their conversation, and simultaneously despised the banality of female companionship. But now I feel banished from the world of men. Now my world is the office, and the women I work with. There are few enough men around anyway, with the war taking the best of them. But after what happened to me, my reactions to men have been broken, like a long bone; the wound’s edge still bright with pain. From time to time, I might be struck with the sheer beauty of a squad of men marching down the road, their legs moving with such precise rhythm. But at other times, as with the drowned boy, the fact that I can mentally shuffle a human being from the ‘boy’ pigeonhole to the ‘man’ pigeonhole can lead to profound upset. Ruby didn’t notice me turn away, or at least if she did I suppose
she assumed it was because I was so upset at the thought of a young man drowned. Ruby has never understood how friable I am, or even that a personality can be taken that way, with self-contradictory moods. Ruby sees the world as a straightforward thing.

Afterwards, back in the office, Ruby said, ‘I was speaking with somebody in the crowd. They say he was only weeks away from an army commission.’

‘I heard that,’ said Clare. ‘He was only a few days from turning fifteen.’

‘It’s a shame,’ I said, although I didn’t really feel it was. But Ruby and Clare exchanged significant glances. If ever I comment on a man they consider it significant, be the comment ever so conventional. They expect me to announce a sudden marriage, I suppose; and they think it odd that I have left it so long. It’s been years since hibernation, they say. A good-looking woman like you shouldn’t wait around for ever. I know, of course, without it needing to be spelled out, that when they say
good-looking
they actually mean
not as good-looking as you used to be
. I am broad now, and my midriff droops. I have started playing absently with my arms and neck in the shower, tugging at the skin there, pulling it into a flap and letting go. It slinks back into position, but only slowly. It’s nothing more than age, of course; nothing but Old Adam as Ruby puts it (when referring to herself, of course; she’d never talk about me in those terms). Ruby is biologically sixty-something and I am only just past forty, so there is more Old Adam about her. But she has a husband, a man younger than her, about whom malicious stories sometimes circulate. He is a supply officer in the army, which keeps him away from the front line. ‘Good thing too,’ Ruby says, and then blushes for thinking so unpatriotic a thing. I wonder what Ander would have done, had he survived. Would he have insisted on going to the front line? I think he would, because he would have feared the stigma of not doing so. And, more than this, I think he would have been a good front-line soldier.

When Father introduced me to Ander I assumed he was one of Father’s ‘people’. This nebulous crowd had never really coalesced in
my imagination beyond an indistinct vision of interchangeable men in uniforms, or in suits, who sometimes called by the city house. What they did, or precisely how they related to my father, was not something I could easily have put into words. Nonetheless, it seemed to me utterly in the way of things that my father had ‘people’, just as it seemed logical to assume that all such people were smaller than he was. Father was a tall man, and not bulky about the body, but he held himself so taut he gave the impression of greater muscle than he had; and most of the people I saw him with were indeed shorter than he. Ander certainly was, a tubby little man with a swirl of hair on a bald head that even I could look down on, and which put me in mind of a pattern of debris left dry on the bottom of the sink after the water had curled away down the plughole. Perhaps, on that first day, it struck me as odd that Father went out of his way to introduce me to Ander, when he never usually bothered introducing other of his people. But it was only a full day later when I even began thinking about him properly, only when the realisation came over me (and, of course, Father would never say something like this in so many words) that Ander was intended as my future husband.

I was twenty-five. I had never really thought of myself marrying. Or, to be more precise, I suppose I had
thought
of marrying; I suppose I had always assumed that one day I would be married, as most women were, but I had never
felt
marrying. The emotion had never twisted in my solar plexus. The thinking, accordingly, had an almost abstract quality to it. I suppose I daydreamed about big weddings, about a house of my own, all those girl-things, but in these fantasies the role of the groom was always taken by some imaginary and indistinct man-figure. He was probably of the conventional sort, slim, tall, dark, blue-uniformed, I don’t know (it is hard to think back to pre-Ander and actually remember), but by the same token he was absolutely not real. I never, for instance, daydreamed of marrying anybody I actually knew. And when Ander said his first stuttering hellos, my mind was as ignorant and blithe as if he had been an old woman. I said ‘hello’ back, and we walked in the garden for a while. I thought I was making polite conversation.
Indeed, I
was
making polite conversation; it was just that Ander heard more than politeness in it.

When it occurred to me belatedly, the following day, after a number of carefully non-specific hints from Father, that Ander was going to return and ask for my hand, I did feel panic. There was an instinct to rebel against this future; but that meant rebelling against Father, something I had not thought of doing since I had been a very little girl, and the grounds for rebellion had been accordingly petty. But to deny my father? This was so removed from possibility that I could only conceptualise it in oblique, symbolic ways. I thought of all the things that Ander might do to offend Father, and then I dwelt on imagining Father spouting his fearsome rage at Ander. But this was getting me nowhere.

And so I took myself to my room, at the top of the house, and lay on my bed, and tried to re-imagine Ander minutely. He was so plain that I had barely registered him, and it was hard to conjure up the precise order of his features. He was short, his flesh arranged itself in rolls, but not the loose, flabby rolls of the obese; rather, a series of tight, packed rolls at forehead, chin, neck. He was mostly bald, and his head was speckled like a red-pink egg. His lips bulged. I had never really contemplated kissing a man before, but as I struggled to recall his lips it seemed to me revolting to have to put my
own
thin lips against two such thick ones. A man shorter than myself! All the ridiculous girlhood fantasies, the dreams that most girls have at a younger age, pressed for entry to my mind: surely I deserved a soap opera husband? A man
taller
than me, as
young
as me? A handsome man? I thought how grateful I was that Zed was off on another training camp, because he would certainly have mocked me with theatrical and comical expressions of disgust at the prospect of Ander, and I daresay he would have made me cry.

But the thought of that somehow brought me a certain calm. I was able to discipline myself. When Ander returned two days later, he was even more nervous than before. We went into the garden again, as he hummed and coughed his way towards the question. And as I sat there I was struck by something about him. He was, as Zed would
hootingly have pointed out, quite ugly; and even his ugliness was without distinction, for there were any number of men out in the city whose faces and figures were equally squat and coarse. But, for all this, he was a man, and a person. I stared at his eyes (it made him nervous, I recall), and I thought to myself, perhaps he was handsome once. He was forty-four when he asked me to marry him, but I thought of him at seventeen, or eighteen. And his eyes were a glowing blue colour. Indeed the flurry of his complexion, that redness, only served to make the blue eyes stand out all the more powerfully. I thought of him young, slim (maybe), with a full head of hair, and then I thought of those same eyes beaming out of his face. Why do eyes age not at all? Why can’t human beings be made out of eye-stuff, so that we might maintain our glow into old age? I thought to myself that Ander’s features connoted not ‘handsomeness’ but ‘man-ness’, and that as such they were perfectly fine.

After the wedding, we went away for a honeymoon cruise, on a thirty-metre yacht that another friend of my father’s loaned us. It was Ander and myself, with two crewmen and a chef. But, as we sailed round and about, through Hercules’ Pillars and down the coast of Africa, I got to see another side of my new husband. Where before he had always been stumbling shy, physically awkward and stiff around me, or else tripping over garden weeds, or dropping cutlery from the dinner table, in the bright yellow honeymoon sunshine he clambered about the yacht like a monkey. He stripped to the waist, revealing the same patchy, swirly hair on his body as head, and sprinted up and down the rigging. I was quietly upset by this, for reasons I wasn’t entirely able to articulate to myself. It was, somehow, unseemly; as if my husband had revealed himself a fraud, as if his gaucherie had been nothing but an act and now he was taunting me with his true agility. Perhaps I was angry because a part of me had hoped I had been marrying a man who would always be less than me, and this display jarred with that expectation. Certainly I was rather angry, and the anger came out in high-pitched shouts of concern up the rigging. ‘Be careful, dear! You’d better come down now.’ Or, ‘Don’t, don’t, you’ll fall in. There are sharks in these waters, you know.’

After the honeymoon I did indeed get a house of my own, two hundred metres down the avenue from Father’s town house. And with nothing to do, and the housework attended to by servants, I spent much time strolling up the way and simply being in my old and more familiar place. Father would sometimes come across me, and joke that I had run away from home. That was a fantasy that sometimes occurred to me, in fact. Not that my husband was a bad husband. He was not. I think he was a fine husband. But there was a certain awkwardness that never wilted between us, a certain kind of wrapping that he was never able quite to pull off me.

Part of it was ill-timing, of course. The first three years of our marriage coincided with the coming to fruition of the plans for the Voyage, the voyage here, to Salt. Ander’s own anxieties about going, about liquidating enough capital to see us clear on the new world, about arranging all his affairs on Earth, all that was rather overshadowed for me by the ructions in the family that was no longer, strictly or completely, mine. Zed refused to go to the new world, absolutely refused. Father absolutely insisted that he would, that we all would. There were horrible arguments, in which Father shouted about how the army had taught Zed no discipline, and in which Zed howled, positively howled, a series of incoherences. And these were only the fights that I witnessed; there must have been many more, when I was down the road in my own home. Through all of them the one strand that kept us as a family together was that Zed never once contemplated actually leaving Father’s house and making a life for himself. Father seemed so absolutely a fact of nature with us that we could no more conceive of an alternative to his will than we could an alternative to our hearts’ beating.