Salt (8 page)

 

She looks at Shrimp differently after that. What he did with the gull was extraordinary. It makes her wonder about him. At night, when Goose is asleep, Lil' goes out and sits by Morston Creek, thinking about Shrimp and looking up at the brilliant Norfolk stars. Among them all, she tries to see Sputnik 2, still orbiting after four years. She spends a lot of time thinking about Laika up there in the satellite, in a tiny capsule with no food or water or any way of returning. She knows Laika's dead but somehow, right there on the Norfolk saltmarsh, that dog is alive again, looking down on her in her patch of darkness, a cosmonaut's hat on its head and heartbeat monitors on its side.

 

The summer passes and the three of them spend their time fishing off the
Hansa
. Kipper and Shrimp, competing as always - but clearly they've both become interested in trying to land her, the girl between them. All three of them with bare legs dangling off the bow, staring down their lines, the only sound coming from Kipper's habit of sucking air through stems of samphire. The Langore brothers have identical rods and floats, they know about lines and hooks and bait, but it's Lil', with a look of pure satisfaction, who pulls in the first fish. It's an angry thing, flapping and twisting on the end of her crabline. But when she reaches out to grab it Shrimp is there first, cutting her line and making the fish fall into the water.
What did you do that for!
she shouts, thinking he's just as mean as his shapeshifting brother after all, and Shrimp just says it was a weever, a stingfish, it was going to sting you. He carries on looking at his float while Kipper looks at the two of them and he sees her hand reach up and gently touch Shrimp on his shoulder. Thanks, she whispers, and Kipper knows in this simplest of gestures that he's lost.

 

Walking back to Lane End with a bag of shopping, Goose approaches a hedgehog coming the other way. Middle of the day, on a path hardly wide enough for the two of them. The hedgehog shuffles towards her with the gait of an old tramp. She thinks of bad omens and stories of illness arriving in the form of wandering peasants dressed in rags, knocking on your door at night. While she's thinking this the hedgehog keeps coming, determined and ill. When it's almost under her feet she sees it's blinded with lice crawling on every last spike of its body and over its face and into its eyes. She steps into the verge and the horror escalates, because she steps on a dead rabbit, releasing a cloud of flies rising as one horrid ball of wings. And she runs for it and then she realizes; she stops running and looks over the saltmarsh and thinks Lil', oh no, it's Lil'.

 

But Lil' is not at home, nor on the
Hansa
. She's up at the Langores' farm, sitting on top of the haybales in the barn. It's dark and dusty and quiet in there, even though it's the middle of the day and old man Langore's down in the yard shouting orders. She can see the lower half of his legs and his boots through the open door. A vet's there too, being as authoritative as he can; he should be used to farmers by now but old Langore's got him riled. The vet keeps raising his voice and using scientific words. The two Langore brothers are in the yard also, trying to separate a cow from the herd; Lil' can hear the cow's hooves slipping on the concrete. The rest of the cows are stamping, the way horses do when they're bothered.
Ha!
Kipper shouts
Ha! Ha!
And she hears the thwack of a stick against cowhide. Langore tries to bribe the vet and the vet says that's it, that's the last straw. Shoot that and with luck you won't lose the herd. A heavy iron gate is clanked shut and the bolt slid, and then something moves near her and she thinks it's a rat and she turns, scared, but instead of a rat she sees it's Shrimp, wriggling through the gaps in the haybales, a wide grin on his face. Lil' kicks loose hay at him and laughs and tries to shush him up when he spits out the hay from his mouth. He crawls right up to her and slaps her on the thigh likes she's the cow in the yard and she makes a big fuss that that hurt then slaps him back and then they fight, her in her flannel shirt, him in his denim dungarees, she smells the cow on him and smelly stuff he's put in his hair because he knew she'd be waiting up on the haystack; she smells a type of sweat she's never smelled before. He pins her down and she giggles and coughs in the dust. She sees him in fragments, the way his hair's trimmed round his ears, the softness round the corners of his mouth, the frayed top edge of his collar, a button stretching in its hole.

 

Goose wakes one morning to hear Lil' Mardler being sick in a bucket. Lil' is trying to keep it quiet but has reached that point when to keep quiet seems an added burden not worth bothering about. Goose brings her a glass of water and sits next to her on the bed. She puts a hand on her daughter's knee, but that's something both of them feel uncomfortable with so Goose stands up and holds the curtain and at that moment she says something very odd. She closes her eyes and says
locusts
under her breath. What? Lil' says, feeling wretched. Nothin', Goose says, and pulls the curtains apart and there they are, out there above the saltmarsh, a swarm of hundreds of tiny clouds. In each one the insect shape can be seen.

Goose has finally caught up with what's going on. Water turning to blood, the frog on the tiles, lice on the hedgehog, flies on the rabbit . . . a series of biblical omens. She's heard about the illness in the cattle on Langore's farm and the boils breaking out on the sick cow's legs, how it managed to hail in a thunderstorm a few weeks ago. Now the locusts, up there in the clouds, and she knows that it's all leading up to an exodus and that she's going to lose someone again, like she lost Hands stealing off in the
Pip
, and this time it's going to be her own daughter and she starts to shout at Lil'. The shouting lasts all day. By the end of it the saltmarsh is in darkness and Goose is in Lane End surrounded by the broken crockery and upturned chairs of an all-day argument and Lil's sitting in the passenger seat of a car, heading off for a new life with Shrimp Langore driving a car he's borrowed. All she's decided to take is her crabbing line. While she tries to unknot it in her lap she looks out of the car window at dark Norfolk. She wonders if she can see Laika up there in the sky, somewhere, lonely and forgotten about, forever in orbit with no food or water.

6

A night without sleep, but a night before the depression took hold, before those nights when I'd watch her dreamily walk the length of the corridor, each step along a tightrope forming at her feet. A pale nightdress swaying between the walls, the thin crease of concentration between her brows like a tiny scar. That first night she'd woken up standing on the back lawn. It sounded strange to her out there. No dripping of water in the saltmarsh, no sound of waves curling along the Point a mile away. These were the sounds she'd always known, and maybe at sixteen she thought all the world might sound like Morston Marshes. But as she stood there in the dark, her crab line still knotted with the speed she'd stuffed it in her pocket, strange sounds and scents drifted up from the gloomy country below. Sounds of cars slipping through the dark, of a distant growl of machinery. And somewhere quite near, she felt the presence of a large body of water moving slowly in the night. She must have assumed a tide was rising. Some time before dawn she'd watched a light moving smoothly across the land in front of her and realized it must be a boat on the sea, because the light was so level and moved through the darkness without any deviation. Another part of the coast, but for one thing. She couldn't smell salt. This was an odd, dark sea in front of her, quite unlike the North Sea off Norfolk. It was a sea that smelled rotten.

I wonder if she thought of her mother, of the rawness of anger that had inexplicably started on the marshes and finished here, on the lawn. Or perhaps she thought about the strange unwelcome farmhouse that was to be her home. How it smelled of a man's smell, how damp and unloved it seemed. Did she look up at the window of the bedroom and think of Shrimp Langore in there, exhausted, nervous, feeling his own private sense of dislocation? Was he asleep or was he spending the first night afraid to put the light on, sitting in a chair perhaps, smoking a cigarette, looking at the wild geometric print on the curtains and waiting for dawn to shine through them?

 

They'd explored the house by candlelight. It was a dreary place which had been rented to a single man for many years. The air was heavy and depressing and full of the man's idleness. A bucket had been knocked over in the hall, leaving a long dry stain covering the carpet like blood. There were empty miniatures of Bell's Whisky and Grand Marnier in one of the rooms, stored in cardboard boxes. Some empty gun cartridges in the bedroom. And on the kitchen table, a mug of cold tea stood next to a pile of crumbs and mice shit.

Stretched out on the bed, exhausted, they'd listened to the candle guttering in the corner and foxes barking in the distance. The candle flickered a nervous unsettling light across the walls as they lay on the damp mattress, and when the candle had finally burned out in the early hours, my mother had woken up outside on the back lawn.

Low, brooding outbuildings with impenetrably dark doorways faced the cottage from across the yard. Spilling out of one of these was a pile of poaching traps, left there like discarded jawbones. She stared at them for a while, and at the greater darkness beyond them, then felt her way round the sides of the house, and as she touched the walls she tensed, realizing she'd been expecting the soothing contours of flints, not the damp, foreign texture of bricks.

I see her there clearly, on the lawn with a car blanket round her shoulders, quietly singing ‘The Foggy, Foggy Dew':

 

And as dawn approaches she sees a damp, misty landscape in front of her. At first the mist looks like the pea-souper banks of a North Norfolk sea-fret. Then, lifting through the mist, the solid mast of a ship turns out to be a tall brick chimney, several miles away. It's leaning. Soon, more chimneys appear on low huddled houses, dotted across the land. She sees water, not in the labyrinthine pattern of the creeks on the Morston saltmarshes, but water in straight unnatural lines as far as she can see. And the last thing to lift from the mist is at the bottom of the slope beyond the house, perhaps two miles away; the long curling shape of a huge brown river, the one she'd felt moving in the night. The land is absolutely flat, relentless, mud brown and dull green; not the soft level of the marshes, but a rigid, carved geometry of lines, furrows, paths and roads. It is the Fens.

 

As the pale globe of the sun rises over her shoulder, she hears the tap of Shrimp's finger on the upstairs window. When he's rubbed the condensation away with a squeak, she sees his grinning face in the cold morning light. Brave, now it's the new day. She sees his long shadow approaching hers over the lawn, and then feels a mischievous poke in her ribs.

‘You sleep?' he says

‘Not sure.'

‘Hear the foxes? Going for it, weren't they? Han't heard foxes like that for ages.'

Lil' looks vaguely where she thought the foxes had been calling from, looks back, looks directly at Shrimp to gauge his mood.

‘Are we still in Norfolk?'

Shrimp laughs at her and, because the sun's rising higher now, he points out the Fens to her.

‘That's Lincolnshire.'

Below them, four small villages were lifting out of the soil, the sunlight slick on the wet tiles of the roofs.

‘The Saints them villages are called, Lil'. Wiggenhall St Germans, Wiggenhall St Mary the Virgin, Wiggenhall St Peter and Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalen. It's called the Saints here, everyone knows it as the Saints. It's all ours - and I don't want to be called Shrimp no more. I was christened George, and so I'm George now.'

‘George,' she whispers to buoy his spirits. She'd like to be called May, she wants to leave Lil' behind, but she feels this is his moment to feel right about himself, so she says nothing.

Armies of tractors are beginning to crawl into the fields, ploughing, pushing, dragging and sifting the soil as if obsessed with levelling the land.

And Lil' asks again, ‘But are we still in Norfolk?'

George puts his arm round her, feels the dew in the blanket wrapped round her shoulders, and leads her inside.

Yes, it was still Norfolk. Norfolk's broad in the beam, full of soft fields and quite up to thwarting an escape. But they nearly made it.

 

During that first morning the details of George Langore's plan were outlined. Using some connection dug up in his great-uncle's farming past, and his own reputation for understanding bloodstock of all kinds, a position of gamekeeper-cum-stockman had been created at the Stow Bardolph Estate, a mile away. With it came this tied farm-cottage, three small outbuildings, a pigsty, animal pen, hen loft and lawn, part of which was laid out as a vegetable patch. For the past seven years it had been tenanted by Harold Flott, gamekeeper, who'd been known as a lazy farmer. Lazy and filthy. Year on year the estate's pheasant stock had dwindled, escaped, fought itself in pre-shooting battles and pecked mercilessly at Flott's ankles so that when the call was raised and the beaters marched, only the occasional wild, startled, feather-ragged pheasant took wing. Flott had left the house with a cup of tea still made and ready to drink and the crumbs of his midday snack on the table.

Lil' listened to all this as she lay on a couch drifting in and out of sleep. George talked nervously about pheasant rearing, training, pen design and bloodstock heredity till her eyelids finally fell with accepted weariness. George, at last silenced by the deep breathing of his patient, tucked the blanket round her, and stepped out into the milky morning sunlight of the yard. He did what any man would do: went straight to the sheds to sort the machinery, stocks, junk and rubble, eyeing what was useful, what should be salvaged, repaired, sharpened, tied, folded, turned and burned.