Salt (37 page)

‘You staying there?' Cliff shouted above the racket of the engine.

Kipper nodded, crouching on the deck.

‘Suit yerself!' Cliff shouted, then to his brother said, ‘Well, how about that, he ain't got the nerve out here!' All three of us looked at Kipper, clutching the front of the cabin. After all this time, all his life living by the sea, put him on a boat and he was scared rigid.

‘She's coming this way,' Cliff said of the storm.

‘Got the primus?'

‘Stowed. You know - I ain't gonna try the heavy line. I'm going for the 18-pound uptide.'

‘Rod's a 40-pound.'

‘Don't matter. I'm going uptide and use the water.'

‘From the Banks?'

‘What d'ya reckon?'

‘Let's try it on the tide then take her further.'

And Sandy looked at me and said hounds love some weather anyhow. A hound being a male tope, the prize of their sea. So the twins settled into their fish-talk and were soon laughing about hooks and reels and traces and bait. They kept looking at Kipper, still clutching the front of the boat and looking nervous with it. That's one funny sight, Sandy said, then began to tell a story about a hound shark that got away - and not just the fish but the rod too, which had leaped from the tripod when a tope made its first charge and all he'd seen was his rod like a javelin skimming the water till the weight of the reel took it under.

‘Got the rod clipped nowadays,' he said. ‘He always make a charge and I let him go till he stop and then I hit him.'

Cliff disagreed. ‘You fish uptide he go ten feet you got to hit.'

‘Ten feet you reckon?'

‘ 'Specially if you've lip-hooked.'

Kipper kept staring at me, thin-lipped and uneasy, as the boat dipped and swayed into the deeper water. His time was coming. Beyond him the sky continued to deepen. The rag clouds were marshalling the storm and sending it higher. I began to make out the rudimentary shapes as they formed - Ol' Norse like a genie, wrapping his arms in vapours he pulled from the sea, spinning fish and animals and birds into his cloak. I was afraid to look. Everywhere the water was darkening and softening and I could smell the storm like a freshly cut onion.

We were beyond the Race by then and heading straight offshore. Blakeney, the Morston Meals, the Point and Holkham dunes were becoming a paper-thin line behind us, between sky and sea, as if a finger could wipe it clear.

‘Talk about the one that got away,' Cliff said with a wink to his brother. ‘Wonder who Elsie's screwing now.'

Just words, just words, I thought, remembering how the fire had locked itself into the acids in the enamel bowl. How the clear liquid had coiled and darkened and seemed to lose reflection, and I looked at the twins and Kipper and I knew I didn't have any fear any more, not of anything, and the twins seemed strangely uneasy and couldn't look back at me so they needlessly started to fuss with their tackle instead. Gradually the water became choppy beneath us. This was the shallow area they called the Banks.

‘We got to head back in!' Kipper shouted from the front.

Cliff cut the engine and shook his head back. I'm enjoyin' this, he muttered to his brother, we're gonna laugh about this one. Cliff glanced at me and reached for an eel. It twisted quickly round his fist like he was binding a belt across his knuckles ready to fight. It made it hard for him to get at the tail so he whacked it against the keel housing and it fell off him, stunned. He trapped it under his foot and cut it in half, about six inches above the tail. The eel coiled so tightly it rose with the knot it made, and then it began to loosen and twist into the gaps between the planks. Dark red blood and oil slid away from its severed end.

I watched the eel die, and felt my fist clench round something in my pocket. And as Cliff threaded the eel on to the wire trace I looked to see what it was and I saw the unmistakable insignia of the charging bull on my father's switchblade razor.

I sat back against the cabin, then, while Cliff cast off and Sandy cut another chunk of the eel, I opened the blade a fraction, nicked the end of my thumb with it and saw a tiny bead of blood there.

 

The water shivered round the boat and grew expectant and suddenly all those storm clouds seemed to look familiar, all those wicked rag clouds had been whipping up the sky into the same one I'd seen once before, that day at Bedlam Fen. Returning, again, like Goose always said it would, a North Sea storm caught in its own endless spin.

The twins were watching the rod tips and their lines and frying some butter on the primus for the rest of the eel. The cuddy fell silent apart from the hiss of the gas and the creaks of the screws and flathead nails that held the various parts of the boat together. Water sloshed around darkly under the deck boards, and occasionally one or other of them bailed with an empty margarine tub.

I opened the dry-bag and felt inside for the dead man's fingers. Each one had a smooth water-resistant taper attached to the end.

Sandy noticed the open bag and nudged his brother. Cliff looked at his line, then said what you got in there? I ignored him. He hadn't seen.

The butter started to spit and Sandy chucked in the eel. The smell of oily fish and butter and sea air made me think of Goose, how she used to stand by her stove in Lane End. I wondered whether she was standing in the dayroom, fascinated by the cloud-tops of the storm she could see rushing towards the land.

And at that point Cliff's rod tipped and the reel span with a high whiz. Both twins whooped and the line rushed and Sandy called
strike!
But Cliff waited and looked coolly at his twin as though he had all the time in the world. Gradually the line relaxed, and like a sniper Cliff lifted his rod from the tripod, wound a couple of turns on the reel to take the slack and jerked the rod backwards and suddenly he was shouting and reeling in and letting the shark fight the line and bite the trace and he knew he had it. Kipper was standing and beginning to edge his way round the side of the cabin, nervously. Sandy stamped delight and punched the gunwale with his knuckles and then punched Cliff on the arm and Cliff barged him back with his shoulder and both of them were laughing and standing up and really you shouldn't stand up on small boats and no one noticed the storm was hanging above our heads like the phantom mask of a giant with barred teeth and that in all that motion and ignoring everything around me I'd pulled out the razor and had placed it carefully on deck. My moment, my plan, the chance to finish. And now things were happening according to their own determined logic - I saw the fuses were all tying themselves together in a strange knot like the eels in the bucket and it was only halfway tied when I felt I knew what the knot was and it was none other than the clumsy granny-slip which Goose had tied in my mother's umbilical cord. And the knot made me laugh out loud and despite all that was going on both twins stopped what they were doing and stared strangely at me, knowing what was about to happen. Kipper too, nearly reaching me and his eyes wide in fear. But whether they realized it or not none of them moved when the knotted fuses passed through the flame of the primus and I held the sticks of dead man's fingers as they spat and fizzed in my hand like a bunch of frost-blackened carrots.

Though the twins acted in unison all their lives it was Sandy who screamed while Cliff looked on frozen in shock. Cliff continued to reel, even though he wasn't aware of doing so any more. And in my fist the fiery white flames of the fuses were burning chaotically round the knot and the sparks felt hot and painful on my skin. I remember seeing something darkly impenetrable and amazing in Kipper's eyes. Then Sandy jumped on me and was ramming my hand against the bulwark and somehow the sticks came loose and briefly they looked as if they were dancing about with their own excitement, their own explosive life they contained, till Cliff's boot lifted them on his toe and punted them over the side.

An instant later there was a deep
oomph
under the boat like the sea was suddenly as solid as soil and the whole cuddy lifted and broke and split around us. The sea peaked up like daggers between the boards and a rush of venomous noise spat out between the sharp edges of water and the steam of some liquid which wasn't water and wasn't air flew violently and stung me in my eyes, and my ears felt punched by a sound I hadn't quite heard. And all four of us were falling through the juddering boat like we'd been up in the air and there was nothing beneath us and bits of wood and plank were turning in front of us like we had to examine them, and I saw my father's switchblade razor flying once more like a beautiful sleek fish in front of me - the bull on its handle charging free.

The holes we fell through turned out to be full of the sea and there was no more explosion beneath us and the boat was rapidly nothing more than the cannibalized wreckage of all the boats it had once been, all sliding off on the waves as if they were trying to get back to their wrecks. Then in the middle of the wood and the splashing it felt oddly calm and I sensed a weird shape pass by me which wasn't wood and was as cold as the sea and I stared into the water and saw the long grey flank of the hound tope, its passionless eye and its shark's tail threading through the stunned wreckage.

 

It shouldn't have happened in the middle of the sea, but I was standing on tiptoes on a sandbank. Further away, the bucket of eels bobbed at an angle, beyond them, the sight of Kipper Langore, no thought for anyone else, swimming for his life in that no-nonsense front crawl of his, heading for Blakeney Point. Head down, a breath to the right after every four strokes. You bastard. Near me, the twins struggling to stand upright on the bank while their waders filled with water. Cliff spluttering in the choppy waves and shouting insults and trying to claw his way towards me, and Sandy pulling him back or trying to hold on and both of them dragging each other to where the sandbank seemed higher.

I clung to a piece of wood and started paddling for the Point, while around me the water began to boil under a hail of raindrops as heavy as lead shot. And yes, I did look back. Several times in fact. Each time, the twins were a little smaller, standing like broken staithe posts half-buried in the sandbank amid the steam and mist of the storm.

 

In the sea again - my family always ending up in deep water. But I'd never been this far out or this lost in the middle of such a storm. The piece of driftwood I clung to was painted dark blue. And as I paddled and splashed I put my face against its cold gloss and felt it lifting me clear from the water. I knew my legs were still moving, but the water was cold and I didn't really know whether I was going towards land or whether I was heading towards Dogger Bank and the swirl of North Sea, which had claimed my grandfather. If any of that story had been true. Blue gloss on the driftwood. Its colour seemed to be the only important thing. Above me, the storm hailed its heart out and pushed me further into the sea until I began to think the water might be some vast relaxing bed meant for sleep. My ears and eyes and mouth were full of water and my splashing legs sounded like the rain all round me. Dark blue wood. Yes, that's vital. The
Bastard
cuddy was built of many boats, but none of them was this colour. And this piece had been in the sea a long time. It was covered in a film of seaweed, moving like soft hair in the water. A long smooth piece of wood, the back half of a dinghy perhaps, and painted in a precise script by a delicate hand were the letters P and i.

P and i.

P and i.

The rhythm of my paddling. Lean my head on the wood; feel the barnacles and limpets, feel the sea, feel the whale, Elsie beside me, floating off, floating off. And as the cold swept over me in waves larger than the sea itself, I went in and out of consciousness, thinking back on my favourite memory of diving under water in the Pit, diving through the shafts of sunlight on a warm summer's day, the image of the
Hansa
refracting gently above me. Seals spinning and diving in the distance, the feel of the sandy bottom on my chest. I think of Hands's carvings along the wreck's gunwale: the gannet, the fish of the Dogger Bank, the storm petrels and the lobster.

And I remember that the the
Pip
had been painted Oxford blue. The
P-i-p
. The same shade of blue which was keeping me afloat now.

 

Nowhere to go but the bottom of the sea. Nowhere to go but the bottom of the sea. It went through my head because I'm sure that's what Hands must have been saying when he clung to the same bit of wood. And then strangely I wasn't on the
Pip
any more. The old smooth Oxford blue was gone, and in its place was the sharp dust of shingle and sand on my face. A wave which kept lifting me forward and pulling me back, dropping me on a beach and then rolling me off again. I slept some more, till the beach kept knocking me awake and I thumped it and tried to bang it quiet with my head. Why wouldn't it leave me alone? I was happy on the
Pip
. I'd been searching for it all my life. And now this beach with its sand as sharp as broken glass. I crawled out of the wave on to the shore and fell into a deep sleep. When I woke my mouth was full of sand and I couldn't - for a while - use my legs. But there they were, stretched out on the beach. There was the sea, and all around me the high-backed shore which could only be the Point. And the only thing which was missing was my piece of driftwood. It had disappeared. It wasn't by my side. It wasn't down the shoreline. Gradually I stood and started to look for it. Without my piece of the
Pip
I might always be lost.

But I never found it.

 

The storm had disappeared, leaving in its place a hot late-summer's day. Across the Point, over short-cropped grass, sea lavender blew gently, surrounded by the bright green of the year's new crop of samphire. Who would pick it this season, I thought, now Goose was in the home? The heatwave was continuing, the damp earth was steaming. Larks trilled their summer-meadow song - a sound so pure - all the times you've heard it before, all the times you hope to hear it again. And through the steamy air I saw the dark carcass of the
Hansa
. I walked to it and held its rotting hull. An old friend. I swam slowly across the channel and climbed out on the Morston side. The same spot where Hands had first appeared, buried up to his neck in mud.