Salt (30 page)

‘Remember when Auntie May took us to Bedlam Fen?' she says. ‘That was it, I thought, we're never going back. No more Three Holes and tulips or walking along that stinking drain. I didn't know what I wanted, not really, but I knew I loved your mother - really loved her - and I really wanted her to take us away. You know, away from everything. I could've worked in a shop or something. Buy food and cook it for you and save up for a car and teach you to drive . . .'

Was this really my sister? Cliff had said so. But it was still the same Elsie. Here I was back on the
Bishy
, and just from its motion in the water I began to think of another small boat. Of a rural scene, in the Fens. Of my mother and father sitting in the prow of the
Mary Magdalene
, the rudder bolted tight behind them, leaning this way and that to steer the boat between the banks of the sluice drain. The distant horizon - merely a dot between the banks, ten miles ahead, part of the world has been left unmade there. And out of that disappearing point - with no smoke or mirrors - the Holbeach family appearing. Ethel, plump as a turnip, Mr, wordless and preoccupied, even then, eating haslet and drinking cordial while their little girl played by the water's edge. The eel-trap pulling between Elsie's six-year-old fingers. The boat drifting close till it bumps into the bank and all four adults not knowing quite what to do. How to play it.

It was no ordinary meeting. There was something in the air. Something passing silently between the parents. A recognition. A caution. The Fens are darker at night than anywhere else. Stories are made that never see the light of day and who'll believe the things old man Holbeach might say now, to the daughter who never listened to start with?

Look! Elsie whispers. Passing beneath us we see a lion's mane jellyfish, as big as a car tyre, contracting suddenly in a silent cough, then rising, blind and on fire, it seems, with its own sting.

We smell Holkham before we reach it, the breeze has carried over a hot scent of pines and sand, and as the water shallows I jump in and drag the boat on to the beach. Together we tug it up the sand on to the high tideline. It looks conspicuous like that, very much someone else's boat, a long way from its mooring.

Elsie wanders off into the dunes. The fir trees behind them make a distantly unreal sound, like listening to the sea at night. It's a rising sound that rolls along the line of the beach like a slow wave breaking. When she's gone I wonder what's happening; why, in fact, she and I are here together, alone on this enormous beach. She's hijacked the day - it's running to her agenda now, like it always does. I follow her into the trees and find her in a small grass clearing. She's laying out the rest of the stolen food. She eats greedily, rolling radishes and piccalilli in slices of ham and licking her fingers clean. There are Scotch eggs, artichoke hearts in oil, tomatoes, pears, a jar of cooked prawns, chocolate and a bottle of red wine. It smells hot and dusty and there's sand between the roots of the grass. I eat some prawns and artichokes, then place fir cones in a circle round us, and when she gives me the bottle of wine, I have to push the cork in to open it. The wine leaps out in a dark red gout, bruising my shirt and making Elsie laugh. You're wounded, she jokes. I agree. You kill me, I say. We drink from the bottle, taking it in turns, listening to branches cracking somewhere in the wood, and staring out at the golden white of the beach and the glitter of the sea beyond. I've never seen a sight better than the sight of water between trees.

Elsie lies down after the food and stretches out her arms to stroke the ground. Like an angel, she says, stroking my wings. Her summer dress looks thin, and the faint orchid design seems like petals have been scattered on her before they blew away, leaving just their imprint.

I pick at the tines of a fir cone, occasionally stealing glances at Elsie to see how patches of sunlight move across her. Her breathing, rising and falling. The limpness of her ankles. The dusty soles of her feet, the traces of sand under her nails, the slight knitting of her brows and the shine of skin along the ridge of her nose. I think how important it is to remember all this, remember her in so much detail.

 

We're there until the sun gets low in the sky. I feel slumped with the wine. The boat would be missed by now, surely. I didn't know whether I was capable of sailing it back. Maybe it's best just to leave it here. But then that leaves her, and me, and what do we do?

I crawl over to her till I hear her breathing. I think she's asleep. I smell the comforting fragrance of her breath each time she exhales, and as I'd done before I try to see things in the pattern of freckles you can make out only when you're this close. The tiny pursed shape of her upper lip, still childlike. The two tendons at the base of her neck, between which is a delicate egg-shaped depression as if a thumb has smoothed it there, pulsing gently. Below it, the harder shape of the top of her chest, pushing all away, and the first button of her dress.

It's undone; and so am I.

That button, hard as a fingernail in all that softness. Half-upright where the dress has pulled itself free. The soft frayed edge of the eye that has released it. Elsie looks at me with a watery gaze. She smiles.

‘You know what it is?' she whispers. ‘It's midsummer's night.'

We walk back to the
Bishy
. The setting sun has made all the colours seem unnaturally saturated. The gunwale looks like lipstick has been run round it, the rust-red sail looks as bright as blood, and Elsie's hair has the colour of ripe corn. We push the boat in and drift round the promontory of the beach. About two miles away we see the outline of Scolt Head Island - little more than a heap of dunes and grasses with wide, empty beaches. All along the coast, Norfolk is sinking into the North Sea with incredible softness, a landscape made entirely of lavender greys, chalk blue and dull green. And against that, one solitary dark shape, its own island in all that evening scene. There's nothing so dark and black as this in the whole of Norfolk. Even when we're a mile away it still seems vast. Out of place. I no longer have any doubts; the light is closing in, we're miles from home, but the whale is magnificent, like a ruin. It's mesmerizing.

Elsie jumps off the boat and wades though the surf to reach the body. It's enormous, lying on its side, flattened by its own dead weight. When I join her she's already running her hand along the old leathery skin. Even though the light is really fading now, there's enough to see how the skin is just a mass of deep scars, calluses, barnacles and folds. Each rock off the coast of Newfoundland, each battle with giant squid, each crossing of the Atlantic has etched a hieroglyph. An entire history written on skin. And are smells too: a strong, musky smell of the sea, a sulphurous smell where the skin has been burned by the sun, and a rotting stench, sickly and overwhelming. A male sperm whale. A row of blunt white teeth line the length of the jaw, which sticks into the sand like a javelin. Above them, the roof of the mouth is pockmarked with sockets, disappearing into the closed muscle of its throat.

Elsie has climbed on to the whale, running her hand along the ridges of skin like it's the bark of an old oak. She looks upset and distant, in her own world. She's stroking the whale and looking at me and she's saying it's so - so sad. So sad. And I climb on to the whale myself, feeling the skin bow ever so slightly with my weight until I'm sitting next to Elsie, not sure if she wants me to be there. The whale feels incredibly huge and completely impenetrable. It has no eye, or not one that we can find. Just wide, flat, thick skin. I think of the line of white vertebrae like a shattered treetrunk, somewhere in there, a giant's ribcage, a vast and silent heart and secret pools of ambergris.

‘Midsummer's night,' she says again, and lies her head down on the whale. The longest day, it's a day to be cautious of. I think of the play in the Misfits garden, last summer; of the sheets hanging out to dry across the lawn like the clouds I'd seen over the marsh. And then I'm drawn to that other cloud, the one which I've wondered about for ages - the cloud in the exact shape of a dead sperm whale, drifting over the marshes as my father drove his car away. Here I am, on the whale. A month before my fourteenth birthday. Arrived at the moment.

The air is dry and the sky is stunning. I begin to fall asleep, watching the stars swimming in and out of the night. Perhaps I do sleep. The wine's making my head spin very gently, as if the whale is floating out to sea, with memories of the ocean: of calm depths beneath the storms, of surfacing in the mid-Atlantic night, of silent icebergs in the dead calm of Arctic winter. The huge bell-jar of the night's sky above us. I drift with the whale, feeling the sad beat of its heart thump through the flesh, and the long slow rhythm of its tail behind us. And still the stars, glittering above. A shooting star now, etching a brief line across the blackness to mark the moment of its death. And little more than a smudge by my side, a cloud rising into the sky - a cloud which becomes Elsie's dress being lifted over her head. And as I turn to look at her I have the impression that she's asleep too. That her sudden nakedness is nothing more than the soft grey of a faded photograph, unreal and beyond reach. Moving gradually towards me, rolling into me with the motion of the whale until her hair gathers round my face like soft grasses and I feel her weight climbing across me and smothering me and I feel the soft skin of her back with my fingertips and I hear the smallest giggle escaping her mouth. And on her breath I detect the smell that reminds me so much of my mother.

 

It was cold and grey and Elsie was kneeling by my side, rocking me to and fro. She was in her flimsy dress with the orchid print and she was shivering.

‘Pip, I want to go back now,' she said. ‘It's time to go back.'

I lifted myself heavily from the whale. Its skin was covered in a fine salt dew. Elsie kissed me on my mouth and sniffed loudly.

‘I'm so thirsty,' she said. She looked small and damp and her chin looked sharp with worry. Her eyes were dark and surrounded by a waxy sleeplessness, and she wouldn't look at me.

‘Thanks,' she said, steadily, ‘for bringing me here. For being with me here.'

My last memory of that place is of sitting on the whale, hugging my legs for warmth, while Elsie walked to the
Bishy
. The beach was misty and ordinary and Elsie looked so thin and lost in the enormity of it, and the whale felt low and slab-like beneath me.

 

It was a long cold sail back to Morston, both of us shivering and hungry. Gradually the Point loomed ahead, wide and snub-nosed, surrounded by off-lying banks and islands. It was low tide. We sailed against the flow of the race with a hard sail, the current nearly enough to halt us. Then we were in the Pit, and, on the beach where Hands had been found, standing and masking her eyes against the light and then briskly walking towards us, Goose was wading into the water up to the hem of her dress and when she reached the boat she grabbed a rowlock with an iron grip and reached for Elsie with her other hand. She grabbed Elsie like you'd grab a dog, round the collar, and as Elsie's face crumpled with surprise and shock, Goose gave her a mighty shove, sending her backwards and over the side. With Elsie gone and splashing and swearing furiously at Goose, the old woman turned to me, and using the same grip she dragged me from the boat too. I remember watching the
Bishy
spinning behind me as I was hauled over the transom. The bang the rudder gave my knee. The angry snap of the sail as it broke free of the sheet.

I was under water, dragged out again, being pulled on to the shore. Behind me Elsie was falling about and splashing, soaked, trying to catch the drifting boat. And then she was out of sight.

I stumbled along with Goose, looking at the marsh weeds and worm casts in the mud and wondering what was happening. We weren't going back to the cottage. And then suddenly I knew where I was. It was the oyster creek. A long snaking creek on the wrong side of the Morston Channel, filled with low dark oyster cages sitting on the mud. And Goose was kicking open one of the latches with her boot and I was thrown in - little more than a sack of her rubbish. She slammed the top of the cage down and threaded a rope through the latch and tied both ends to a post sticking in the mud. I lay in the cage and pulled at the wood and splashed in the watery mud and at the bottom and all around me I felt the brittle, sharp edges of the oysters. Shells shut against my plight in the midst of their own.

And then it was quiet. Through the net I saw Goose's deep footsteps in the mud leading to the stake. A little pattern of prints where she'd tied the rope, and a single determinedly straight line leading away.

Time passed. Boats swung in their moorings. Rafting gannets drifted inshore. Staithing posts left wakes as the tide gathered momentum. An entire sea lifting imperceptibly against the coast of Norfolk. And a hushed, inanimate tongue of the sea trickled up the creek. All around me the barnacles sniffed the tide and licked their lips, and I was caught in the net, forgotten about, as the water rose around me.

18

Trapped in a cage full of oysters - what was going on? What, possibly, could make Goose do this? The water rising, a chill spreading from my fingers to my arms, bringing an ache with it, making my thoughts clouded. I was seeing visions of being naked on the dead whale, the eerie sight of Elsie's dress lifting over her head. The starry sky, the gentlest of giggles in all that vastness. Such intimacy there, such a sense of unknowns. Fleeting sensations of her body, as hard and smooth as beech wood, pushing itself on me, a determination of purpose that was frightening. My sister? I don't know. It's so difficult to be sure - it's so full of fenland secrets and little moments over the years - the thought of my mother, that first day in the Saints, the imprint of a frayed cushion on her cheek and the sounds of George hurling rubbish about in the yard - how she itches her oddly shaped belly-button which could be because of the heat that day or it could be because she was pregnant, with Elsie. A secret gesture, the tiniest of scratches, and I alone, across the years, have seen it now. Or the dreamcatcher she hung on her bedroom window, through which she saw one thing and one thing only in all that grimy fenland distance - the small patch of red tulips in the Holbeach's acre - and it's so difficult to hold on to an image like this and see what it means, and abruptly, with a sneeze, I'm brought back to the oyster net and I see there's not much space above the rising tide left in the cage, and I think I'm going to drown in there for sure and maybe at the moment of drowning I might realize what the truth has been all this time. Elsie . . . my mother . . . my grandfather - himself buried up to his neck once with a rising tide all round him. How must he have felt? Falling out of the sky, or more likely a German bomber, burying his parachute and flight jacket and keeping his boots - the last thing a man gives up, only to be caught in the mud. All that adventure over Europe and there he was, about to drown in this rotten North Norfolk marsh.