Salt (32 page)

We step out of the hut and see a massive tree, fallen, with its great branches either side of Gideon's shack in a tender embrace which so easily could have crushed us. Gideon smiles at me, and with a finger wet from the stream he touches my forehead and mutters a prayer.

‘Go back,' he said, ‘you must return.'

‘I can't,' I say to him.

‘Then you must find your own way.'

‘This isn't real,' I say. ‘It's all a dream.'

‘It's as real as you want it to be. Now look through there, through the trees.'

‘I can't see anything,' I say.

‘You will in the morning.'

 

I wake in the grey light of dawn, against the tree and chilled to the bone, and immediately I remember the dream and look through the trees. There, in a field behind the wood, is a van parked in the grass. A man gets up from a camping stool next to it and does a huge stretch. It's Lloyd, in a large multicoloured jumper, wiping the morning sausage and egg from his mouth on to its sleeve. As I walk up to him he grins widely. Morning, cocker, he says, the day meant for the likes of him. What you up to?

Kat's hanging up clothes, and she's more perceptive. She rushes up to me and I start crying. They sit me down on a camping chair and Lloyd says heh, heh, heh softly over and over again and Kat tells him to get some more eggs cooked.

 

‘Well, I reckon I go and see Kipper,' Lloyd said, certain of his right to speak his mind after reading the barest of facts I'd managed to scribble down.

‘Not a good idea,' Kat said, knowing him too well. I'd had breakfast and was now wearing Lloyd's jumper and a pair of his chunky-knit socks.

‘At least tell him to call off the dogs,' Lloyd said, conceding. Beyond the field we could all see Kipper's house and the smokehouse chimney. No one had come out yet.

‘We'll both go,' Kat said. ‘Then what we gonna do?'

 

I sat in the cab of the truck while Kat and Lloyd went to see Kipper. They knocked on the door and I saw him - slow to emerge - come out in his dressing gown. Lloyd let Kat do the talking. Kipper listened, then looked several times up towards me in the van. He leaned against his doorway and Kat hugged her coat round her for warmth. The discussion went on. Eventually Kipper went inside and a while later emerged with my tartan suitcase. He started to walk with it, towards the van, and Kat stopped him with a hand on his shoulder and he passed the case to her.

 

That night we parked the truck in a field in the middle of nowhere, with the huge sky of Norfolk stars above us. I looked at the sky and smelled the damp grass and I listened to my mother's seashell. The sea sounded calm and distant, like it had been on the whale just two nights earlier. Just two nights. Had I really seen Elsie lying on my uncle's bed? Had she really curled up the corners of her mouth into a smile?

We'd been to a village pub where Kat, Lloyd and I had had three pints each. Lloyd had explained the deal they'd cut with Kipper - that I could spend the summer holiday with them for as long as I wanted. But after that I'd have to go back. Then Lloyd had become angry about a bloke Kipper's age carrying on like he did. Elsie Holbeach's worth ten of him any day. A rant developing. Lloyd, Kat said, calming him, now's not the time. Her poise reining him in. I still think someone round here's got to stand up to him - he just takes the piss. The pint glass looked big in Kat's hand. You could do it, Pip, when you go back - it'd be the making of you. Later on Lloyd got embroiled in an argument with a drunken farmhand who'd been propped against the bar eavesdropping and rolling his eyes for his own amusement. It turned out the labourer had been hauling bales all day whereas Lloyd
han't never done a day's work in his life
. When Lloyd said the man should throw his pitchfork away and join the cause the man said fukkin pufter and went off for a piss. That cheered Lloyd up no end.

Later, as Lloyd took his own piss against the pub sign, he told me he'd met the same man in the same pub and had had the same row three years before. He chuckled as he shook himself dry, muttering Norfolk, oh yeah, under his breath.

 

We toured in that van, parking overnight in fields or pub car parks where Lloyd had the habit of leaving the keys behind the bar so he couldn't be done for drink-driving. Which had happened before. I slept in the cabin where Kat had rigged a curtain to go round the windscreen, but often I sat with the curtain open, looking over the grey fields in front of me, listening to the sound of ‘Buffalo Soldier' and the rhythm it lent to the bump and grind of Lloyd and Kat's nightly trysts. During the day we'd drive from one fête to another, doing the carnivals, farm-shows and festivals of the Norfolk summer. I walked round with a sandwich board, took the tickets, prepared the props. The play that year was a two-man retelling of
The Wild Man of Orford
, the story of a half-man half-fish who'd been caught in nets off Suffolk. He'd been tortured in Orford Castle where he cried for the sea every night, and over the months his captors relented, seeing sense in letting this strange man covered in scales have a swim. Only, the man escaped the nets and was never seen again. It made the children cry.

‘You do have to go back in September,' Kat said to me one morning. First thing, an intimate time between us. Sitting in long grass on two camping stools, neither of us having washed, just the sound of the Calor gas stove and the tap of the porridge spoon stirring the pot.

‘There are the people you love. Your family.'

My family's been destroyed several times over. My dad's a chicken labourer, my uncle's hated by all of North Norfolk - he's sleeping with the only friend I've ever had. My gran's gone or is going senile and my mother drowned herself
. I push the notebook to Kat like we're playing chess. Her move. It makes her laugh.

‘OK - fair point, but it's still who you are. Come September me and Lloyd are back in our semi in Norwich. He's working at an insurance firm and I'll be helping at a nursery. We don't save anything but we've got this thing going and we fight for it. I sometimes think you just don't fight.'

Lloyd would emerge from the van with the loudest stretch in East Anglia. Kiss his girl, give me a wink, then think about the porridge pot. He loved the fact I never spoke - it was the envy of a man who knew he talked too much. Same old, he'd say, checking out the breakfast, sitting on a tree stump in a chunky-knit jumper and rolling his first of the day. A big grin with the wide, straightforward teeth of the innocent, not a crease of concern on his face. Sex, porridge, a pint, all I need, mate.

Gideon had been right. When you think you're lost all you need do is look through the trees for the next path. Here, with Kat and Lloyd, I'd found it. Friendship. And I learned from them that summer. Lloyd felt everything and talked it through, life was simple for him - blacks and whites, rights and wrongs; whereas Kat was a dreamer, smoking thin cigarettes, painting flowers on her shoes and, gently, over the weeks, coaxing out a language between us, not in the way that myself and Cassie Crowe's fenland education had been a battle of wills, but there, in the back of the theatre van, as the smell of woodsmoke and frying food wafted in from outside, her slender fingers wove magic out of the air. A sign language of mime and shapes and a great deal of patience. While Lloyd brewed the tea outside and split the yolks, we'd sit there, looked down on by the outlandish props and costumes of
The Wild Man of Orford
- lords, farmers, fishermen, soldiers, village virgins, buffoons and clowns. I began to tell her what I could of my life. Of the stories and non-stories. The herrings and red herrings. I told her about the Fens, about boats, about bonfires. Burning elm trees, decoys and bulls, tulip heads, curing fish, fondue sticks, clouds, whales and wrecks. Of stale sandwiches and mugs of cold tea on the corners of farmhouse dining tables.

 

It was coming to the end of the season. The theatre troupe would do a couple more shows before Lloyd and Kat returned to their Norwich semi; Lloyd would spend the winter dreaming about the summer gone and the one to come while he stared at a typewriter. And I would have to go back.

They dropped me on Blakeney Quay. Kat hugged me and told me to be strong and Lloyd made an awkward moment of it, not finding the right words and eventually muttering well - you know, anyway.

I walked the half-mile to the smokehouse, where Kipper and Elsie had laid out a tea of sandwiches, Bakewell tart and pork pie. Kipper fussed with the teapot and brought plates from the kitchen. The smell of fish and tobacco, the ticking of the mantelpiece clock, the silence of the books on the shelves. Nothing had changed.

‘How I see it, we get Shrimp over and talk things through. What you want to do and that,' Kipper said, leaning back in his chair.

‘Kip,' Elsie said, ‘face it, he's staying, here - I'll make him up a bed in the storeroom. I know we've talked about it and you're not keen, but you're always doing stuff and I'm bored and it'll only help, what with how it is.'

Kipper shifted uneasily and looked away, his eyes as grey as an old photo. He hadn't touched the food.

Elsie reached for a slice of Bakewell and spoke through it.

‘I'm the boss now,' she said, a cakey smile on her face, and with it she held out her hand, royally, for me to inspect the glinting newness of her engagement ring.

19

‘Came running home with your tail between your legs,' Elsie said, coarsely whispering over the tabletop, ‘that's your problem - just can't see it through.'

Cley Beach Café was the same as always. Humid and breathy, with the birders' journal on display - its pages heavy with moisture - and salt-bleached postcards on the wall.

‘You've got to grow up,' she said, ‘get a life.'

I could do without the lecture, especially from her, shacked up with a man like him.

‘You gonna talk or what?' she said.

‘Congratulations,' I said, looking at her ring. It stung her.

There was a smell of burned treacle and buttered toast. We were sitting in the corner and Elsie had been fiddling with the salt shaker since we'd sat down.

‘That day you ran away, Kipper was so pissed off. Said you should be locked up.'

‘I don't care.'

‘Just don't start any trouble,' she said, wiping the damp putty of salt round the shaker's chrome top.

‘Why not? He's just like my dad.'

Elsie stared hard at me. ‘No, he's not,' she said, ‘you've got him wrong.'

Behind her the café girl went through to the kitchen after a sniper's glance at Elsie and I knew what would be going on in there, over the saucepan of hot treacle.
She's come here, you know, that girl, could be his daughter and her carrying on like that.
With that one that don't speak . . . he give me the spooks, he does, the way he look at you sometimes . . . din't he run off ?

Had they noticed the engagement ring? Surely not long till they did. Then the tongues would really start wagging.

‘Elsie ...'

‘Don't, Pip. Please don't ask. Don't make this harder than it already is.'

 

Kipper made breakfast at six. Smoked herring, two poached eggs, sometimes marmalade, like my father, both of them with the habit of cleaning the knife by sliding it into the soft centre of the toast. After that the radio would go off and I'd hear him putting his weather gear on before going outside. With him gone I'd make my own breakfast. Elsie would be in her bedroom listening to music. I'd knock on the door and take her tea. Sometimes I dared to sit on the bed, looking at her ruffled hair and rosy cheeks and the dark shape of my uncle's slippers lurking under the bed. His side of the bed was tidy, hers was messy. His clothes hung along an open rail and seemed to fill the room with his presence. Hers slept dog-like on the floor.

Elsie cooked a meal for her boys each evening, Kipper and me at the same table, stabbing our sausages, for the most in complete silence. Kipper made a fuss of mopping up the sauce, lessening the embarrassment. Plate won't need washing up, he'd joke.

‘We should do this place up,' Elsie said one night, out to cause trouble. ‘It's too depressing. Men make depressing places to live in.'

‘Yeah?' Kipper said, warily.

‘You can paint, can't you?' she said to me. ‘Well?'

I nodded.

‘Well then, I'll get some charts and some paint and - ' before she finished her sentence she was already crying. Tears welling and tipping with incredible urgency, without any change in the bright expression she'd started with.

‘Pip,' my uncle said, ‘I think it's best you . . .'

Leave the room. Which I did. And in my storeroom bedroom I listened to the muffled argument they began to have.

That was in November, and it was the beginning of the end.

 

I started to keep my distance from them after that. Things weren't right. She pretended all was fine, and he pretended he didn't know it wasn't. What would be next? A sudden pregnancy? That would be too much. Would she ask me to make her a quilt like Hands did for Goose, a quilt which would rise on her side of the bed as her belly grew, while on his side he would tuck the quilt's edge between his knees? Not willing to let go of what he had. It can't happen. Not between them.

Sometimes they went on to the marsh together and would eat a picnic against the wall of the pillbox near the oak wood. They'd talk all morning. Left behind them, the pile of fruit pips my uncle had neatly arranged, the heads from the shrimps, the grasses that Elsie always knotted when she sat still. Scuffmarks in the earth seemed to have the footprints of their conversation - how they paced round the issues, dragged their plans to and fro and pushed them into the mud.