Salt (38 page)

 

Across the marsh, a man was hammering a SOLD banner over the FOR SALE sign outside Lane End, while a team of builders inside hacked off the old plaster with its tidemark from 1953.

The sun was low in the sky when I reached Kipper's house. I must have been in the water all day. Or had it been days? I kept thinking I saw the twins standing like posts in the reedbeds, but I knew they were just visions.

No one was in. I went to the window where Elsie had left her handprint and I placed my print on the other side of the glass. Hello. I searched the house. The muddy footprints from my own shoes were the only signs anyone had been in. The arm of his chair, pockmarked where he knocked the embers from his pipe. Even that pipe - an affectation. The calm dim shadows of his front room, the smell of tobacco, the hint of fish. The cave-like room of a man, a collector, a man wanting to possess and display.

I went outside again to find the whole marsh bathed in a soft sunset glow. Summer's so beautiful in Norfolk, I thought. Can this colour of light really exist anywhere else? I was sitting on the scrub lawn, and in front of me was the heavy wooden door of the smokehouse. Wisps of smoke curled out from the cracks like dark nails being pulled from the wood. I'd seen this before. In the clouds. A heavy door locked tight. I saw it in the clouds just after Kipper told me what he'd done with Elsie. What
had
he done with Elsie?

I tried to open the smokehouse door, but the latch had entirely gone. It had played up for years. Will someone please get that latch fixed! Kipper would say for the hundredth time - neither him nor the twins ever thinking it was necessary enough to do it. I put my finger in the hole where it had been but couldn't get the door open. Finally I prised it with a bloater pole, and through the roll of sickening grey smoke that came out I saw my uncle, sitting on the earth, muddy and covered with strands of seaweed, surrounded by still-glowing oak chips, as peaceful as a Buddha.

He'd tried to put the fire out, but he would have known the oak chips never really burned, they just smouldered, and it would take a week for them to go out naturally. He'd cleared the earth where he sat, and had crouched as low as possible in the hope that enough air might get in under the door for him to breathe, but there was no hope. Not really. I think he must have suffocated fairly quickly. In the minutes after the latch came away in his hand perhaps. So many times that had happened before, so many times me or one of the twins had pulled that door open.

Above him, the carving of Hands looked down like a guardian angel, both of them silent, as if I'd interrupted a long and detailed conversation.

Lived all your life by the sea and when it came down to it how strange you were so terrified of it. I suppose it was the effect of being stranded up that tree when you were a boy, the night of the great storm. Looking down into those angry waves and thinking they'd be back to get you, one day. That front crawl of yours, a friend to the last, getting you back to dry land without even a look over your shoulder. And then crawling into the warmth of your smokehouse: the action of a rat. Well, you're dead now, Kipper, you deserve nothing less. You've done nothing but drive people away, force their hand, furnish your pocket, and where has it got you? Smoked with the bloaters, that's where.

I had to touch him. To be sure. I reached out and held his hand. Dead man's fingers all right. Odd that those grey eyes were shut and his mouth hung open, much like the bloaters themselves after five hours of smoking. And like them, his skin had taken on the waxy flypaper hue which said he was ready. Not quite smoked to the bone, as he would have said, but he wasn't far off it either.

He'd last for years in his grave.

22

Thistle Dew
(or, This'll Do)

Hands, drowned; the same fate for his daughter over thirty years later, Lil' Mardler, below the ice. Can never break through. My father, pecked ragged by chickens, underneath the spitting electricity pylons. Elsie, so full of life and then nothing, no goodbye, just a handprint on a window which will be cleaned away one day. And now Kipper. All of them living and losing their way on this thin strip of saltmarsh which can never be called land and never be called sea. With a legacy of madness and hurt which must be out there among the creeks and samphire, blowing in the wind. This coastal living has formed them, made them extraordinary, and killed them off.

A thin vein of salt running though all these lives, unquenched and resolute, like a filigree of bone, growing in us all, connecting us with each other and the land that's made us. Salt marked our lives, the first thing to dry on our skin, the last thing to wash away, just as able to preserve as destroy. My family's story has been written in salt and it's lasted over the decades, but it's taken its toll on the people who have lived it. It's corroded their wills like the kiss of Ol' Norse on the ruined wood of the
Hansa
.

 

Kipper began to fall forwards and I caught him, his head resting briefly on my shoulder. I pushed him back and propped him against the wall of his smokehouse, where he belonged, then wiped some of the dirt from his face. His skin felt warm, whereas mine felt icy. Then I pushed the door of the smokehouse shut, with him behind it, and walked slowly away, the night closing in, until I reached the collapsing shape of the
Thistle Dew
, abandoned and damp, in the vague wide shadow of the Morston Marshes. Inside it was featureless and disgusting, without light, without warmth. Since Bryn Pugh had left it had clearly been used as a smoking den, there were porn mags scuffed across the floor, and there was a sweet smell of piss and a smell of dark leathery mud.

I wedged myself into the corner, bringing the card and papers around me for warmth. Hidden. Safe, for the moment. Wait for the morning, make a decision then, stay awake and wait. But a chill rising like a tide within me, stealthy and unstoppable. The feeling of being drowned once again which wouldn't leave - how the water had peaked like daggers with the force of the explosion, and how I'd hit the sea with my mouth wide open and in the gulps of water I swallowed, I must have drowned as much as survived. Life avoiding its own traps. I began to shiver and cough as my mind raced with the images of the last few hours: those tapers passing through the primus flame, the umbilical knot catching fire, the sight of my uncle, sat like a Buddha and smoked like a herring, dead behind those coffin doors of his smokehouse - my family's story, with all its vanishings and exiles and secrets and lies, heading this way all along.

 

I fell into an exhausted sleep and began to dream that ice was growing alongside the wreck, inching its way along the hull with the sound of something feral and hungry. I saw it stretching in one glowing sheet over the marshes, dusted with fresh snow. There was a single line of footprints across it, leading out to sea. I followed them, knowing they were my mother's, knowing all I had to do was catch up with her, reach her, not let her get away again. I trod in her steps, passing the Point, seeing the waves of the North Sea frozen eerily in mid movement, their long dark backs rising up in curls ready to break. Entombed in the ice, the frozen shapes of seals, all with Bryn Pugh's chisel marks on them. There were wrecks out there too, the
Pip
, gnawed by the dogfish, the
Mary Magdalene
, still technicolour bright with its painted clouds, the
Bastard
like a bric-a-brac stall. I mustn't let those footsteps get away. But I realized I was getting lost none the less, my mother was just too far away, and this would never be the way to reach her. The footsteps began to melt, the ice vanished, and I became aware that I was now standing in soil. Soft harvest soil - a giant field. This must be part of the map I now had to follow. I had a new direction. To return. Only a return can make sense, I thought. I must go back home.

As far as I could see were empty fields, windblown hedges and dusty tracks. The Norfolk Desert. Late-summer fragrances, a harvest where the land ripened into a bountiful larder. Pheasants braced in the trees, berries falling plump as raindrops, sweetcorn bursting from the husks. Roots growing fat in the ground as if the soil itself is turning edible and sweet: clay into carrots, stones into swedes.

But a harvest so quickly followed by slaughter. Shotguns filled with murder and lead, blasting into the air, the smells of wheat dust and diesel, of stubble burning in dark firestorms - men walking through the smoke dragging paraffin-soaked rags. Combines cutting long into the night, following their own headlamps, then being left, exhausted, covered in flour dust, the jaw of the cutting blade resting on the ground, full of a right to destroy.

I dreamed of all these things, returning, to the cold brick farmhouse on the edge of the Stow Bardolph Estate. Low outbuildings with their sinister black doorways and the pile of poaching traps spilling out like skeletal grins. The side door with its drab-painted porch and the room inside, never more than a place to heap boots, as chilly as a fridge. The thin damp carpets, the narrow stairs, the sense of something both unresolved and failed - a place which had never truly maintained a full and proper sense of life. Crusts of stale bread next to a cold mug of tea, still on the edge of the table. Here my mother washed the silverfish down the sink and grew her flowers in the garden, she repaired the decoy birds each evening, her heart slowly breaking, while my father learned his skills of bloodstock, became a man capable of attracting a younger, more hopeful woman, if only briefly. It was always a dismal spot, which could never have nurtured a family, how could we even have tried to do it there - it was destined to separate lives into threadbare elements.

And I knew my dream wouldn't end here, my return was not to this place, my return had to be further away than this damp plot of soil which had never quite belonged to any of us. I had to carry on, to go further, into the Fens, where it's so flat and huge it feels like you're not only alone but that even the hills, trees and hedgerows have given up too. Into the precise and rigid geometry of agriculture, soil as black as old lava, something dead and yet also new-formed about it. A blank slate. To the drainage channels, trying to keep fields from returning back to the sea - but the nature of the land itself seems to be the seabed none the less. Be untamed and uncharted. Grow your life there but be under no illusions, the land knows itself as something other than you do. Past the heavy iron sluice gates and a sense of recognition growing in me as I continue, knowing that I'm close now, close to the chicken farm at Four Gotes. I imagine my father would be slumped in an armchair, in an unlit room, the flickering colour of his television giving the room the glow of an aquarium. He's always there, frozen in time, hopeless, the sum of his failures, but he's everything too - he's my father. The sign to the egg farm would be falling off its hinges as I walk past. The chickens would murmur within their hencoops, another day closer to the butcher's block. The pylons would drape across the bungalow with their broad dark pulse of life. Then I would knock at the door, wait, try the handle and let myself in. There's a smell in there of neglect, but also a gentle familiarity too, the smell of Kipper's living room and my father's old study - his contribution to the house at the Saints I must have missed all these years. So familiar, like your own smell, so easy to overlook. I find the bungalow is all shadows and empty rooms, as if the pylons that straddle the building have drawn out its life in their ceaseless overhead flow.

My father is sitting in the armchair as I expected, his hair messy and sparse, like he's just pulled off a jumper. He has no need to smooth it down. He's asleep. The TV is on but it's just the test card, the girl with the red headband, playing noughts and crosses with the doll, so unfailingly hopeful and poignant, never moving, never ageing, neither noughts nor crosses. The sound coming from the set is a drawn-out distant whine coming deep from within the wires. Gull's asleep too, near my father's chequered slippers - a Christmas gift from my mother ten years before, they're grey and worn now but they still fit the feet, still keep a hint of the warmth of the original gift, the original moment he got them. Gull doesn't move, doesn't hear, doesn't make a sound. I only know he's alive because he's still in this room, not buried outside next to the chickens he hates.

I touch my father on his shoulder - the twill shirt he's wearing is worn soft and warm. He stirs and tries to focus his eyes and I know he's been drinking hard that evening. Ahh, Pip, he says, quietly, and smiles with the haze of a pleasant dream. A moment he's happy in. He's peaceful in this state, the dreamer boy he once was. Gradually he wakes more. You're here, ain't you? he says. I nod, obedient and wanting to rest, feeling weary and just wanting to sit and watch the test card with him.

He continues to sit, wanting to keep his eyes closed, then jolts a little and clears his throat. He's embarrassed by his loneliness. He rubs his forehead with a dirty hand. I'll get you a drink, you must be thirsty. I'm glad you came. He rises stiffly from the chair and when he's standing I smell the old smell of the chair's cushions and the smell of chickens which is forever in his clothes. He grins, dry-lipped, but it passes, and he shuffles towards the kitchen. A switch is snapped on in there and a square of precise acid light is cast into the lounge. He lets out a yawn which almost sounds like he's chewing something, then he appears in the doorway, pale and small, peering at me. Pip, he says.

I go into the kitchen and he makes me a hot drink of something from a packet, which smells malty and sweet. He lets me take a few sips - it's far too hot to drink, then he says come through and he leads me to a room off the corridor I've never seen before. Inside is a single bed and a bookcase. The bed has the quilt I used to sleep under when I was a child. You're tall now, he says, you've grown quick this year. And I look round and see that this is a room for me, a room he's kept and made. It has all I left behind in the Saints, some of the crayon sketches I did when I was still a toddler, and other things I remembered, the cockchafer on its pin, the gyroscope he always had on his desk, things he would have given me one day; all left for me in this room. The same pair of curtains my mother used to revamp the spare room for herself. It's all right in here, ain't it, lad, it feel all right, don't it? He's tapping the bookcase with a sense of pride he doesn't have for the rest of the house. If you want, you know, if it don't bother you too much, you can stay in here, I don't need the room . . . The words trail off into an awkward silence, and he breaks it by handing me a card folder from a shelf - I been keeping a scrapbook about you. I look in it. He comes closer, I can see the spikes of his stubble, now grey, and smell the sweated alcohol on his breath. His eyes look pale and watery and on the verge of tears. It's a look he has permanently now.