Free Salt by Jeremy Page

she’s happy to leave it at that.
    Kipper waits, knowing Lil’ is dying to tell him off, one way or the other. He’s mature enough to let the trouble come to him. Eventually she gives way.
    â€˜It’s in the way it lean,’ she says.
    â€˜That’s it?’
    â€˜Thass it.’
    Lil’ is getting this feeling that once again he has the upper hand. She looks at Kipper and his brother on her wreck and she hates the way they’re sitting there, legs splayed out untidy and big and both of them not at all bothered about her.
    â€˜So what’s it mean?’ Shrimp says, casually.
    â€˜Well, it mean nothing,’ she says, and thinks how stupid she sounds, ‘it just mean the truth of something’s not in the way he speak or what he do, it’s in the way it lean, and this is Norfolk, everything lean one way or that. You got to think differently now, that’s all.’
    Kipper makes a pah sound and lies back on the deck, sucking a bit of samphire between his lips. The light’s bright and she can’t tell which face he seems to be wearing.
    Shrimp smiles warmly at Lil’. ‘Well, that made a hell of a lot of sense,’ he splutters and both boys start laughing and even Lil’ finds the whole thing funny and right then that’s when the notorious event happened, that’s when the herring gull dived out of nowhere with the force of a missile, diving at some glint of metal or glass on the wheelhouse roof and missing it badly and instead hitting Lil’ on the shoulder and head with its own dead weight and quickly it wasn’t a flying soaring gull any more but a creature of some kind, hanging off her hair with its wings caught up and stiff either side of her shoulder. Lil’ starts to scream and the gull strikes a free wing at her face and its beak darts open; it screams back at her - a loud kay-ow and a yah-yah-yah that pierces the air and both lads are there at the wheelhouse, not knowing what to do and standing with their hands out as if they’re going to catch something. It’s an eerie moment. Lil’ opens an eye gradually and the gull just hangs there, its talons in her hair, and the boys see her ear is starting to bleed. Her shoulder is covered in shit. The gull starts to pant and scares itself again, kicking her and stabbing its head fast at her arm, then it bites her shirt and pulls at it and the red bead at the end of its beak looks like blood. Lil’ tries to lift it but the gull starts off again shrieking, filling the wheelhouse with the flashes of its wings, they seem like blades in the air, while the full-throated yah-kah-eee it makes is ear-splitting and unearthly and it’s mixed with Lil’s own screaming now. Then another sound, a strange sound, and it’s Shrimp who’s making it - a quiet cawing . The gull becomes still and it turns to listen and as Shrimp steps into the wheelhouse the gull turns its head to look at him askance and it opens its beak and they see the sharp knife of its tongue inside. Shrimp keeps making this noise and the gull seems to relax, then Shrimp’s holding it by the legs and trying to free Lil’s hair, strand by strand. The gull hangs there, lifeless, letting Shrimp work, and then it starts to preen itself below the neck while Shrimp pulls it free. The herring gull hops clumsily into his hands and he holds it up and it doesn’t seem to know it’s free. Then unexpectedly it takes one lazy flap, glides out of Shrimp’s hands, and flies off across the Pit.
    Â 
    She looks at Shrimp differently after that. What he did with the gull was extraordinary. It makes her wonder about him. At night, when Goose is asleep, Lil’ goes out and sits by Morston Creek, thinking about Shrimp and looking up at the brilliant Norfolk stars. Among them all, she tries to see Sputnik 2, still orbiting after four years. She spends a lot of time thinking about Laika up there in the