The Salt Road
Authors: Jane Johnson
The Salt Road
Jane Johnson was raised in Cornwall but now lives for half the year in Morocco, where she met and fell in love with her Berber husband when researching her previous novel,
The Tenth Gift
. She has been involved in the book industry for many years and combines her work as a publisher with writing for both adults and children.
The Salt Road
is the second of her Morocco-inspired novels.
By the same author
The Tenth Gift
(
published in hardback as
Crossed Bones)
The Salt Road
JANE JOHNSON
VIKING
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL
, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
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Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL
, England
First published 2010
Copyright © Jane Johnson, 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-141-91634-7
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand …
T.S. Eliot,
The Hollow Land
Salt is the soul of the desert
.
Sahrawi proverb
Must a people disappear for us to know they exist?
Mano Dayak, freedom fighter
and negotiator (d. 1995)
Table of Contents
1
When I was a child, I had a wigwam in our back garden: a circle of thin yellow cotton draped over a bamboo pole and pegged to the lawn. Every time my parents argued, that was where I went. I would lie on my stomach with my fingers in my ears and stare so hard at the red animals printed on its bright decorative border that after a while they began to dance and run, until I wasn’t in the garden any more but out on the plains, wearing a fringed deerskin tunic and feathers in my hair, just like the braves in the films I watched every Saturday morning in the cinema down the road.
Even at an early age I found it preferable to be outside in my little tent rather than inside the house. The tent was my space. It was as large as my imagination, which was infinite. But the house, for all its grandeur and Georgian spaciousness, felt small and suffocating. It was stuffed with
things
, as well as with my mother and father’s bitterness. They were both archaeologists, my parents: lovers of the past, they had surrounded themselves with boxes of yellowed papers, ancient artefacts, dusty objects; the fragile, friable husks of lost civilizations. I never understood why they decided to have me: even the quietest baby, the most house-trained toddler, the most studious child, would have disrupted the artificial, museum-like calm they had wrapped around themselves. In that house they lived separated from the rest of the world, in a bubble in which dust motes floated silently like the fake snow in a snow-globe. I was not the child to complement such a life, being a wild little creature, loud and messy and unbiddable. I liked to play rough games with the boys instead of engaging in the sedate, codified exchanges of the other girls. I had dolls, but more often than not I beheaded or scalped them, or buried them in the garden and forgot where they were. I had no interest in making fashionable outfits for the oddly attenuated pink plastic mannequins with their insectile torsos and brassy hair that the other girls so worshipped and adorned. I had little interest even in my own clothes: I preferred making mud missiles and catapults and chasing my playmates till my sides hurt from a combination of laughing and stitches, building hides and running around half naked, even in the winter.
‘You little savage!’ my mother would admonish, accompanying the words with a sharp smack on the backside. ‘For God’s sake put some clothes on, Isabelle.’ She would say this with all the severity her clipped French accent could deliver, as if she thought she could imprint civilized behaviour on me by the use of the full version of my old-fashioned name. But it never really worked.
My friends called me Izzy: it fitted the chaos of me, always buzzing, always noisy – such a trial.
In the garden behind our house my friends and I played at being cowboys and Indians, Zulus, King Arthur and Robin Hood, armed with swords and spears in the form of bamboo canes robbed from the vegetable patch, and make-believe bows and arrows. When it came to the Robin Hood game I always insisted on playing a merry man, or even the Sheriff of Nottingham – anything other than Maid Marian. In all the versions of the legend I’d come across Maid Marian didn’t do very much except get imprisoned and/or rescued, which didn’t greatly appeal to me. I had no interest in being the swooning prisoner: I wanted to wrestle and hit people with sticks, like the rough little tomboy I was. This was in the late sixties and early seventies: girlpower hadn’t yet turned Maid Marian, Guinevere, Arwen or any of the other complaisant heroines of legend into feisty, all-action go-getters. Besides, in comparison with the pale, pretty girls who were my friends, I was too ugly to play the heroine. I didn’t care: I liked being ugly. I had thick, black hair and dirty skin and earth under my nails and calluses on my feet, and that was how I preferred it. How I howled when my mother made me take a bath, when she attacked me with Wright’s coal tar soap, or tried to untangle my hair. If guests were staying at the house, as they occasionally did, she had to warn them, ‘Take no notice of the screaming: it’s only Isabelle. She hates having her hair washed.’
You’d never have recognized me three decades later.
The day I went to the solicitor’s office to take charge of the letter my father had left me in his will I wore a classic Armani trouser suit and Prada heels. My unruly hair was cut and straightened into a neat shoulder-length bob; my make-up was discreet and expertly applied. The dirt under my nails had been replaced with a practical square-cut French manicure. Ironic, really: I now presented myself in a manner of which my mother would have thoroughly approved, had she still been alive. It was hard even for me, who had travelled every step of the long path between the grubby little hooligan I had once been and the carefully turned-out businesswoman I had become, to reconcile the two.
The letter he left for me was short and cryptic, which was apposite: my father was a short and cryptic sort of man. It said:
My dear Isabelle
I know I have been a great disappointment to you, as a father and as a man. I do not ask for forgiveness, or even understanding. What I did was wrong: I knew it then, and I know it now. One bad decision leads to another and another and another; a chain of events leading to catastrophe. There is a story behind this catastrophe to be told, but I am not the one to tell it. It is something you need to piece together for yourself, for it belongs to you and I do not want to reinterpret it for you, or to spoil it as I have spoiled everything else. So I am leaving you the house: and something else besides. In the attic you will find a box with your name on it. Inside that box are what you might call ‘waymarkers’ for your life. I know you have always felt at odds with the world in which you found yourself, and I must take at least half of the blame for that; but perhaps by now you have come to terms with it. If that is indeed the case, forget this letter. Do not open the box. Sell the house and everything in it. Let sleeping beasts lie
.
Go in peace, Isabelle, and with my love. For the little it is worth.
Anthony Treslove-Fawcett
I read this in the lawyer’s office in Holborn, a brisk ten-minute walk away from the office where I worked as a highly paid tax accountant, with the solicitor and his clerk watching on curiously. Also in the envelope, a set of house keys on a battered leather fob.
‘All well?’ the solicitor asked brightly. A strange question to ask someone whose father has just died; though maybe he was not to know that I had not seen that father in the best part of thirty years; not in person, at least.
I was shaking so much I could hardly speak. ‘Yes, thank you,’ I replied, stowing the letter and keys clumsily into my handbag. Summoning every ounce of resolve, I gave him a smile so bright it would have dazzled blind Justice herself.
The senior partner tried not to show his disappointment at my failure to disclose the contents. Then he passed me a folder of papers and started to talk very fast.
All I wanted was to be outside now. I needed sunlight on me; I needed outdoor space. I could feel the walls of the office – its stacked shelves and massive filing cabinets – closing in on me. The words ‘probate’ and ‘frozen accounts’ and ‘legal process’ came at me thick and fast, a maddening buzz of flies in the back of my skull. While he was still in mid-sentence, I wrenched open the door, stepped out into the corridor and fled down the stairs.
When my father left us, I was fourteen. I had not cried, not one tear. I had mixed feelings about his absence: I hated him for walking out, despised him for running away and abandoning us; but from time to time I suffered flashes of mourning for the father he had occasionally shown himself to be and also felt a considerable relief that he was not there any more. It made life easier, if colder and poorer. My mother did not show the distress his disappearance must have caused her. She was not a demonstrative woman, my mother, and I didn’t understand her: she remained a mystery to me throughout my life. My father, with his volcanic temper and choleric disposition, seemed more like me; but my mother was a perfect Ice Queen, chilly and polite, interested only in the outward face one turned to the world. When it came to child-rearing she made it her business to monitor my progress at school, my appearance, my manners. She found emotional display vulgar, and I must have been a terrible disappointment to her with my exuberance and rages. She treated me with a sort of cool impatience, a repressed exasperation, forever repeating her corrections and strictures as if I were an espaliered pear tree that constantly needed lopping in order to make it grow along the correct lines. For most of my life I thought all mothers were like this.