Salt (29 page)

‘What stuff ?'

‘You're too young, sweetheart. And I'm not going to tell you,' she said, mischievously, and I wondered whether she wasn't just making everything up as she went along.

We had egg mayonnaise sandwiches and Cornish pasties and three packets of crisps. Elsie put the crisps inside her sandwiches and said they taste so much better that way. I should try it. I watched her eat, aware that I was hunched over my own plate, a gesture of apologizing for something, and I wished that I wasn't doing it. She was wearing the silver seashell earrings Kipper had bought her last summer. Did she think about him when she put them on? It's crafty of him, giving her a present which reminds her of him every time she looks in the mirror.

‘We should go away together,' she said, unexpectedly. ‘I mean
really
go away. Change our names and rob banks and have lots of kids.'

‘OK.'

‘You
can
fire a gun, I take it?'

‘Course.'

‘Would you kill for me?'

‘Yep.'

‘Wanted, the outlaws Elsie Holbeach and Pip Langore, the silent killer,' and she leaned over the table and kissed me and when I tried to move my head back I felt her hand on the back of my neck, pulling me towards her like a man does. I was kissed again and I felt her tongue lick my lips.

‘Cheese and onion,' she said, giving me a wink.

Outside, beneath the rags flapping on their poles, she hugged me for a long time and all I could see was the harvest colour of her hair and the distant shape of the beet factory across the marshes. And while she held me I felt her hand stroke down my back and then she gripped my backside and said
mm, not bad
in the most suggestive way she could. I pushed her away.

‘Why are you doing this?' I said.

‘Doing what?'

‘Touching me.'

‘Because I know what's going to happen.' She got on her bike and moved the pedal round ready to push off. ‘I've seen it in the clouds,' she said, cycling off with one hand on her handlebars and the other guiding the bike I'd rode. The lorries thundered past her. Very quickly she became a tiny shape, the way things do in a flat landscape. She didn't look back at me once. Some people do, others don't, and Elsie never did.

The coach arrived and I decided to sit in the same seat I'd been in the previous day. In front of me, the herringbone pattern on the fabric - damn it, just damn it all.

17

In June, a whale beached itself on the sandbanks off Scolt Head, and lay in the surf, dying. When he go, they said in the Albatross, his death rattle's gonna shake the windows in Burnham Overy - he's groaning like a bull right now. It's a solemn moment. There's talk about taking a crab boat over there, getting a rope round its tail and dragging it out to sea, but that's all it is so far, talk. We best raise a toast, someone says, and everyone at the bar lifts his pint.

But Roger is full of plans about how he and I can sail there to see it. Forty-five-foot sperm whale, he says, there's this crowd all along Brancaster Beach but they can't get to it 'cause of Scolt Head Channel. We need a boat. And after a pause he adds, and we've got one, pointing to his father's brand-new dinghy, bright white against the mud of Morston Creek. It's called the
Bishy-Barny-Bee
, the Norfolk term for a ladybird. We're sitting by the mudchute at the back of Lane End, and Goose is hanging out washing behind us, trying to listen in. Roger starts to whisper. Plan is, we take her into the Pit, then round the Point, see how she handles. Then tomorrow we'll get some food in and go.

 

That day we sail across the Pit, the saltmarshes already smelling of the warm rotted-green scent of summer. The
Hansa
drifts in and out of our view, flooded and black, steam rising from the deckbeams and a grin coming from the gash in its side. That's where Elsie sat, the previous summer, as wet as an otter on the dry wood, lying on her back in a bright T-shirt, gazing at the clouds, loving the attention. Goose says she's already back, working at the Misfits, though I haven't seen her yet. The
Bishy
's dark sail snaps above us and the boat tips forward, stretching the water by our side till it looks like molten glass. So was this how Hands felt that day he raised the quilted sail? The feel of water beneath him, the dry smell of sun-baked wood and of varnish, heating gently. Did he stretch his legs against the slow rise and fall of the sea, his ears deaf to the sound of a baby crying? Did his hand trail in the water behind him - scoring a groove in the sea which was instantly erased as he himself vanished?

The tide curves round the Point with a lethal sinewy motion, more river than sea, arching its back into a stretch known as the Race. The flotsam that has washed out from Blakeney and in from the North Sea clings to us as if boat and rubbish are all orbiting a larger more powerful object. The sail flaps without power - filling and tipping the boat, then relaxing and beating again. Roger's loving it, letting out the sheet so the
Bishy
slides off the Race to meet the North Sea in a long curve of crenulated waves. The boat lowers into them, braking, and we feel the sudden vertigo of deep water below us, dark and green and rising in long broad swells without obstacle. And out to sea, about a mile away, the twins' boat, drifting beyond the banks, ropes trailing for tope. Roger holds the sheet tight like an old salt and looks where the wind pricks the sea. The gap closes quickly now on the twins; their hunched shapes over the side of the cuddy they'd built out of the wrecks of so many other boats. Low and heavy, with a cabin that looks like a garden shed, the twins keep adding bits on, ignoring common sense and building way beyond the necessary. Planks to reinforce earlier bodges, bits of driftwood which have no real use but are too sound to throw away, a green tarpaulin strung beneath the hull to keep it watertight, and which seems to gather the whole boat together and keep it one. Cliff's painted dragon's teeth on the prow, like on a bomber plane, and has written THE BASTARD in bleeding red letters next to it. It looks like a carnival float.

As we approach a strange thing happens. The sea next to their boat buckles, and a second later, after a muffled fizz, a thin plume of steam rises. We're close now, and as we steer in, the debris of dead fish starts to float up around the
Bastard
, more of them rising rigid from the shallows. The twins scoop their haul with keepnets as we go alongside. By Cliff's foot there's a bucket of eels, some herring and a dry box holding long dark candle-shaped sticks. He kicks a sack over it with his foot, but he needn't have bothered. He knows we wouldn't dare mention them. Dead man's fingers they call them, after the grey lungs of the crab. Straw soaked in nitroglycerine and wrapped in wax, made from chemicals stolen from Kipper's Lab.

Roger is afraid of the twins. He knows he has a beating coming from them which sometimes seems distant, and other times more imminent, but the certainty is there, unspoken. One day, he'll walk into some violence from them.

Sandy, the other twin, begins to haul his rope in, hand over fist, until he reaches a thin shaft of metal which has been bent into a rough hook. A chunk of pork belly dangles from the meat like a tongue, and from the skin a baby crab hangs by one pincer.

‘Been dragging,' he says to Cliff as he brushes the crab off.

‘Sand?'

‘Gravel. We should try off the Longs.'

They both look towards the same featureless patch of water beyond the stern.

‘New boat?' Cliff says to Roger.

‘Yeah. It's my dad's. Moves a bit heavy but she sits well.'

‘You're full of shit,' Cliff says.

I'm standing, holding the mast and looking down at them.

Cliff smiles sharp-toothed at me from his stinking boat. There are threads of rolling-tobacco on his lips. They've got a reputation for pulling girls in Blakeney. Even swapping girls halfway through the night, it's said, all done to some signal they pass between each other in their grim flat. Bottle of tequila, a video on too loud, some girl staggering across the living-room floor, pissing herself when she trips up on Cliff's outsized legs stretched across the carpet.

A crab boat is dragging full throttle through the sea a little way off. The two fishermen wave at the twins in unison. The twins nod back and then watch as one of the men hurls a plastic buoy at the other. Sandy chucks a coke can overboard and follows it in with a bright green gob. The sea's a lawless place.

‘We got news for you,' Cliff says, looking at me. ‘Your girlfriend's back. Came Sunday.'

‘And she's well up for it,' Sandy says, creasing up with laughter.

‘Well, you don't have to tell that to laughing boy here.'

‘Always the quiet ones, yeah?'

Unmistakably, I see a cloud in the half-sunk shape of the twins' cuddy. I feel a rising sense of dread as Cliff starts to speak about Elsie, and in the rag cloud above I can make him out. Cliff, Sandy and two other people sitting in that phantom boat. Ah leave off - he's all right, I hear, shouldn't say that on a boat, anyhow, it's bad luck. They're starting to have a small row. Meanwhile the rag cloud's changing. One of the figures is standing, and while the others watch, the whole cloud splits in two. The men are going to drown. I look at the twins' cuddy in alarm - but all I see is Cliff - staring intently at me and saying . . . I said, did you hear me?
Did you hear me?
Sandy's looking down at his tope-line, not wanting to be any part of this any more. He's muttering for Cliff to shut the hell up. He's shaking his head ever so slightly. I wonder what's going on. What have I missed?

Cliff knows I'm listening to him again. He has my full attention. Then he says the one word that changes my life.

‘Sisterfucker!'

 

Elsie, returned to North Norfolk, in a tiny room at the back of the Misfits, putting her make-up bag on the shelf next to her mirror, hanging her clothes in a wardrobe, lying on the bed with her hands behind her head. Always coming back, staying close to me, but never within reach. Playing games, it seemed, wearing Kipper's seashell earrings and kissing me, playfully, not quite playfully. Just who does she think she is - yes, who
does
she think she is?

I'm at her bedroom window before dawn. It takes a long time to wake her - she's not one for early mornings - but when she opens the curtains she sees I'm upset and knows better than to make a fuss. We sit on her bed for a while. I look at the cassettes she's put next to a stereo, at the travel guides she has on a shelf, and propped against the wall there's a picture of me and my mother sitting in the
Mary Magdalene
, near the bridge at Three Holes. I look at my mother as she in turn looks into the lens, at the camera that Elsie was holding.

She makes small talk about her father, how he's totally lost it now, how he wanders up and down the tulip beds even when it's winter. She's never going back, it seems. She tells me she might stay at Kip's for a while, if the job at the hotel doesn't last. How she's going to save up and go to India, and how, if she runs out of money when she's travelling, she's going to sell her hair.

‘Kip's?' I say.

She doesn't answer. She has a way of abruptly falling silent which unsettles me.

‘What's up with you?' she says in a level voice.

I don't know. I really don't know, but Elsie's part of it. She always has been. She looks at me for a while. I wonder how similar we look.

‘You're growing up,' she says. ‘Now, look away, will you.'

I turn to face the back of the door. Behind me, I hear Elsie taking off her T-shirt then pull her pyjama trousers down. The sound of her bare feet padding across the carpet to the chest of drawers. A couple of drawers opening and shutting. In no hurry. She begins to hum. I continue to stare at the door and she sits on the bed again. I hear the strappy sound of her knickers being pulled up her legs, the thin sound of the elastic snapping into place as she again stands up. Something being pulled off a coat hanger.

‘I'm decent,' she says, and I turn to see her standing in a thin summer dress with an orchid print on it. ‘It's new,' she says. ‘So?'

‘So what?' I say.

‘I'm all yours. Where are we going?'

I suddenly know exactly where we're going.

‘We're going to see a whale.'

 

Elsie steals food from the kitchen and I steal the
Bishy
from the creek. At the last moment I'm full of doubts. I suggest we tell Roger and see if he wants to come along. Yeah, right, Elsie says. It's clearly not an option.

Half an hour later I'm guiding the dinghy out of the Pit into the North Sea. The rust-red sail passes its shadow across me, snapping into the breeze with a smell of old canvas. All that air and wind and a sail will never lose its smell. It's a hot day, and I'm already thirsty. Elsie's on the seat below the mast. There's a buttery light glowing on her skin, and salt has dried like flour on her cheeks. Her gaze is on Holkham Meals in the distance, with its low sandy islands and banks of fir trees. She's squinting in the light. Her back's a long shallow curve up to her shoulders, and I look at the delicate ridge of her collarbone as it pushes out the straps of her dress from her skin.
A seal!
she yells, pointing, and we watch it alongside us, sad and unblinking, rolling off into the deep again. Occasionally we pass above a sandbank, where the water becomes so shallow we can get out and walk, even though we're a mile out to sea. The sheer oddity of it makes Elsie reel with laughter - she's a fen girl, after all - she jumps overboard to stand on the sandbank while I hold the side of the stolen boat. Then she slides herself cautiously to the sandbank's edge, where it tips down suddenly into deep water again. She reaches out for my hand.