Saltskin (3 page)

The low loom stood in the centre of the room, taking up
much of the space. It was made of golden wood, with fine
hemp wefts, that often struck Angelo as being like a giant
harp. He skittered on the spot with excitement as he rolled
the tension of the strings tight and pinged a dull note.

'Non!' snapped Pierre, and Angelo murmured, 'Sorry,'
but whistled as he got on with the chore of organising the
tall, ceiling-high racks. He loaded the spools of thread
in correct weights, colours and calibres, and on a small
blackboard he inventoried what they had. A small shaft
of amber light came in through the single window. Pierre
drew a diagram and harrumphed.

Together they dressed the warp of the low loom, using
a rake with spiked edges, and adjusted the rows so the
finished woven work would be as tightly spaced as a lace
handkerchief. They arranged their bobbins, combs and
other tools on the service ledge and, after starching and
drying the warp, they rolled it up, using the loom lever,
which swung loose and light like a swing but was secure
and ready to be unrolled as the tapestry progressed.

Angelo stood by the warp and glanced at Pierre. For
most of their acquaintance there had been the modifying
influence of Magdalene, and now her absence was like a
hole in a painting. Angelo wanted to say something funny
but nothing came. Instead, he reached for the rake to put
it away. The movement irritated Pierre, who swore under
his breath and made a tsking sound that stung Angelo, and
the urge to joke and whistle left him.

Before the weaving could begin, the thread had to be
dyed. Angelo spent hours on end with his freckled arms
plunged in dye pots up to his elbows, swilling and stirring
the skeins of wool and silk, his face broiling from the steam
and the first scents of his own body odour reaching his
nostrils. His muscles bulged as he hefted the chevillons
and spar he used to lift the skeins from the dye vat, like
tossing chitterlings in broth. Then he hooked the spools
that were dripping colour onto the double brackets and
winched them along to hang against the back wall to dry.

With an instinct for the right doses of dye, Angelo
tinted the finest raw silk dupion the cat-tongue pink of
the nymph's nipples, the scarlet red of her lips and the
translucent gold of her eyelashes. He stained floss silk
the alabaster hue of her skin and the violet of her eyes.
Large cords of wool he split and dyed in shades of heraldic
reds: copper and strawberry blond, scarlets of every hue
and streaks of bronze, maple, magenta, taking extra care
to extract from the dye vat at the exact moment, so the
varying shades were magically captured for her hair — even
yellow for strokes of sunlight. His arms became tattooed
with the lady's colour and she began to appear in his
thoughts, shadowy and unformed, erotic and just beyond
reach.

Pierre's knotted fingers would touch the skeins as they
dried and his eyes would flick to Angelo, who could not
read their expression, could not read the admiration. Pierre
believed the boy had an uncommon eye — an artisan's eye
for colour. Pierre listened to the boy's whistling and was
caught by his perfect pitch.

The weaving began and they hardly left the loom shop,
except to place orders for dyes or thread. One night, soon
after the tapestry was started, Angelo heard the snuffling of
Pierre's tears through the bedroom wall. He thought of the
other sounds he used to hear from the room: the moans.
Pierre's sobs drew Angelo like the whining keen of a dog.
He got out of his damp bed. 'Papa?' he said. But his voice
sounded wrong and immediately he regretted it, realised
his intrusion. Pierre tensed. The lump of his body seemed
so small in the bed.

One night, in the early stages of the tapestry, they
went upstairs, but the house was no home. Angelo spread
their supper of bread and cheese and a mutton leg, and sat
opposite Pierre, trawling his mind for conversation, and
yet the more he searched, the fewer words he could find.
They never talked of Magdalene; she'd become a forbidden
topic, as if she had been banished for bad behaviour. Yet
they were always thinking of her, in deep sighs, expressions
and shrugs. Angelo wanted in that moment so much to say
her name he could not swallow. And even though there
was hunger, all appetite had gone. He stood, but Pierre
barked impatiently, 'Eat.' He did not look at Angelo, for
the lad's grey head was an insistent reminder of loss.

Angelo said, 'Mama . . .' Why did she do it? he wanted
to ask.

Pierre's face sagged and his indrawn breath was so deep
and long and weary that Angelo could not be in the room
with it and he went to the door. Pierre said, 'Wait,' and
Angelo waited while Pierre put some mutton and cheese
between two slices of bread and gave it to the boy. There
was a pause that could have been filled with an embrace.
Each waited for the other to move, but neither did, and
Angelo went out into the dank night.

He scuttled blindly along the alley of Loves Court,
tripping on nothing but his own gauche limbs, and he
tried to yell, to howl, in an effort to replace the feeling
inside with another wild, alive notion, but the sounds that
came out sounded false. So he slowed, ate his food and
wandered the avenues and alleys. The stretch of his legs
heated him and brought a blush to his cheeks. He did not
want to go home but wanted to walk and walk, for it felt
like progress.

He was careful to cross over when he passed the Lock
Hospital in fear of the lunatics, the leprosy and the sinful
diseases, all incurable and borne on the wind. He walked
on until he reached the cloisters of the courtyard where
the orphans slept. Angelo gazed at the ornate grille of the
windows, wondering why the place looked like a manor
house, like a home where kidneys and kippers were served
on silver plates and boys wore curls like girls, their shoes
shining as they played on their rocking-horse and nurses
scolding them with love, pressing them to their bosoms
and feeding them sweets and hot milk sweetened with
honey before bed. He wanted to live in the manor house
too and he threw stones up and yelled for the boy he had
met at St Bride's. He yelled as if it were daylight, when
such noise might be appropriate, for it did not occur to
him that he should not be there, that he should not make
loud noises or throw stones at night.

A curtain twitched and a face appeared. Little Angelo's heart
skipped a beat and a real smile lit his face, but just then the door opened
and a man came out in his nightclothes. He said nothing but gave Angelo the
look of the ogre in one of Magdalene's storybooks. Angelo fled, but his smile
stayed with him as far as Stonecutters Alley, and only then did it slip away.

Increasingly, Angelo found the opposite of sadness in the
tapestry, and always in the morning he was there, eagerly
rubbing his hands together, partly from cold but mostly
with enthusiasm, for he couldn't wait to see what the lady
would look like life size. The idea made him happy. But
Magdalene was always in the room, and images popped
into his mind, making the pit of his stomach sink. He
couldn't believe she was gone; he was desperate to believe
she was hiding behind the door or had just left the room,
and although he resisted it with all his might, smiling hard
hard hard, he could not completely shake the horrible
feeling, could not make peace with the fact that he had
lost her.

Pierre excused himself from the loom shop one rainy
morning, saying he would be back for lunch, and he set
off towards his old haunting ground to visit a spiritualist.
She turned his hand over and stroked the lines of his palm.
After a moment she pushed it from her with a downward
move of her mouth, implying it held no interest, like an
empty pot. She looked at him with the glinting eye of a
sensitive. She was young, her dress clean but dated, and
about her throat hung a fine oval locket that seemed to
speak to the artisan in Pierre of nobility. Her room was
sparsely decorated, with no charlatan accessories except
for what appeared to be a vase filled with small pearl-like
buttons.

Because it was expected of her, she raised her hands in a
theatrical manner and breathed deeply. Then, acting bored,
she said plainly, 'I have nothing for you. You will die, and
soon. I have a message for a boy — you know who I mean.
He is ugly of face yet his heart is full of love. He must be
careful of this love, for it has a forked tongue. It has hate
in it, just as faith has fear. Tell him when he feels guilt it
is a sign that all is not well. Tell him not to be greedy or
he will be trapped in the twin worlds of melancholy and
madness.'

Her face took on a faint expression of horror, which
she masked. Then she stood abruptly, and Pierre noticed
she was fat with child. She ushered him out and he paid
her handsomely. Pierre turned his back and did not see her
throw a handful of powder after him.

When he returned to the loom shop with two hot mutton
pies he received a vivid image of Magdalene kissing her
son's forehead, and in the same moment Angelo touched
the spot on his brow, and between them in the room there
was a softening. Each received an assault of impressions; it
was as though thoughts, images, memories swirled between
them like a shared dream. One breathed in a memory and
the other breathed it out. Pierre recalled the aroma of her,
freshly loved, and Angelo smelt a musky scent.

But it was short, like the break in fighting where
enemies play in no-man's-land. And never again were they
generous to each other with their versions of Magdalene.
The jealousy each held in her life became stronger after
that moment. The pies were left uneaten.

Angelo, having gone upstairs to fetch something, passed
the chair Magdalene used to sit in, and over the back was a
quilt she had made of patches. He took it and laid it over
his bed, but that night he found it over Pierre's. Angelo's
face went hot with outrage and he snatched the quilt back,
but before he had it fully in his clutches Pierre had the
other end and they stood, rivals, with the quilt between
them like a tug-of-war rope.

'It's my mother's.'

'It's my wife's.'

'She made it before you came along.'

'If I hadn't come along you would be dead from
starvation.'

'Would I? I think fishmonger Bob would have stepped
in.' Angelo's words had the desired effect, but as he dragged
the quilt to his bed there was no triumph. The next day he
put it back over the chair and by evening it was on Pierre's
bed. Every time Angelo saw it an ugly jab poked him, like
a hated younger brother.

But there was the tapestry. Angelo's emotions, with nowhere
else to find solace, became threaded within the great tapestry as surely as
tears cried over soup become the soup. And yet underneath there was a pushing
up, like an air bubble just beneath his ribs. Sometimes it would bob up higher
and Angelo would giggle for no reason.

Over the winter months, slowly, a row at a time, the
tapestry took shape, weft shunting the thread into the
weave, Pierre at the treadle and Angelo combing the warp
smooth, intertwining one set of threads at right angles to
another set, weaving, changing colours from the rack on
which spools were mounted on equidistant spikes until
required. Row upon row, the lady began to take shape while
the rain fell loudly. Upon the loom she emerged from the
shaggy outline of threads, like Galatea carved from stone,
thought Angelo, remembering the story his mother had
read him. The idea of her was there already, some patches
filled in, others blank, and yet the feminine shape of her
body clearly showed: the dent and pout of her navel and
the line that enticed the eye to the giddying curves of her
serpentine end, the riot that would be her hair and the sloe
shape of her eyes all rendered purely.

So fine was the lady of the tapestry that Angelo felt in
his belly a giddy swooping that became more and more
important to him. He began to entertain the folly that he
might meet her one day, despite her ethereal origins. For
hadn't a whaler drawn her? Therefore she must be real,
as real as salt and soil. Something like promise or hope
seeded in him, and it became obvious, like a slap in the
face or the voice of God to Moses, that the nymph in
the tapestry was a gift just for him: a message, a sign, a way.
The notion that he had been singled out by a grand power
grew inside him the way yeast bloats the drinker. He fell
down the steps of what he thought was love, falling ever
deeper into a delicious longing. And with the clarity of
epiphany he realised he loved the nymph of the tapestry as
far as love could go.

He gorged on it, wallowed in it, mooned over it. He
wanted to talk about her, shake himself, jump, kick, scream,
laugh and roar, throw things and break them. He wanted
to let it out — the sudden bubble of beauty that she had
inflated below his heart. And in this way he transferred the
sorrow for his lost mother into a keening for the nymph
in the tapestry — a longing as real and potent as grief and
therefore indistinguishable from ecstatic love, true or false.

On one of his wanderings, under a pale sky, Angelo had
the vague notion that he would go to the orphanage and
seek the boy Davy. But instead he turned right towards the
Thames and passed Fleet Prison, where a prisoner begged
at the gate.

'Come, sinner,' called the prisoner, and gestured Angelo
over.

'I have nothing for your plate,' squeaked Angelo.

The prisoner gestured desperately. Angelo moved
closer. The prisoner made a grab through the bars and
snared Angelo's wrist. His eyes looked like boiled eggs,
goggly and blue-veined, and his voice had a resonance that
did not fit with his scrawny body.

'Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door shall be
opened. Ask and it shall be given. As to your faith so be it
unto you, sinner son.'