Free Salt by Jeremy Page Page B

dungarees, she smells the cow on him and smelly stuff he’s put in his hair because he knew she’d be waiting up on the haystack; she smells a type of sweat she’s never smelled before. He pins her down and she giggles and coughs in the dust. She sees him in fragments, the way his hair’s trimmed round his ears, the softness round the corners of his mouth, the frayed top edge of his collar, a button stretching in its hole.
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    Goose wakes one morning to hear Lil’ Mardler being sick in a bucket. Lil’ is trying to keep it quiet but has reached that point when to keep quiet seems an added burden not worth bothering about. Goose brings her a glass of water and sits next to her on the bed. She puts a hand on her daughter’s knee, but that’s something both of them feel uncomfortable with so Goose stands up and holds the curtain and at that moment she says something very odd. She closes her eyes and says locusts under her breath. What? Lil’ says, feeling wretched. Nothin’, Goose says, and pulls the curtains apart and there they are, out there above the saltmarsh, a swarm of hundreds of tiny clouds. In each one the insect shape can be seen.
    Goose has finally caught up with what’s going on. Water turning to blood, the frog on the tiles, lice on the hedgehog, flies on the rabbit . . . a series of biblical omens. She’s heard about the illness in the cattle on Langore’s farm and the boils breaking out on the sick cow’s legs, how it managed to hail in a thunderstorm a few weeks ago. Now the locusts, up there in the clouds, and she knows that it’s all leading up to an exodus and that she’s going to lose someone again, like she lost Hands stealing off in the Pip , and this time it’s going to be her own daughter and she starts to shout at Lil’. The shouting lasts all day. By the end of it the saltmarsh is in darkness and Goose is in Lane End surrounded by the broken crockery and upturned chairs of an all-day argument and Lil’s sitting in the passenger seat of a car, heading off for a new life with Shrimp Langore driving a car he’s borrowed. All she’s decided to take is her crabbing line. While she tries to unknot it in her lap she looks out of the car window at dark Norfolk. She wonders if she can see Laika up there in the sky, somewhere, lonely and forgotten about, forever in orbit with no food or water.

6
    Dead, Vast and Middle
    A night without sleep, but a night before the depression took hold, before those nights when I’d watch her dreamily walk the length of the corridor, each step along a tightrope forming at her feet. A pale nightdress swaying between the walls, the thin crease of concentration between her brows like a tiny scar. That first night she’d woken up standing on the back lawn. It sounded strange to her out there. No dripping of water in the saltmarsh, no sound of waves curling along the Point a mile away. These were the sounds she’d always known, and maybe at sixteen she thought all the world might sound like Morston Marshes. But as she stood there in the dark, her crab line still knotted with the speed she’d stuffed it in her pocket, strange sounds and scents drifted up from the gloomy country below. Sounds of cars slipping through the dark, of a distant growl of machinery. And somewhere quite near, she felt the presence of a large body of water moving slowly in the night. She must have assumed a tide was rising. Some time before dawn she’d watched a light moving smoothly across the land in front of her and realized it must be a boat on the sea, because the light was so level and moved through the darkness without any deviation. Another part of the coast, but for one thing. She couldn’t smell salt. This was an odd, dark sea in front of her, quite unlike the North Sea off Norfolk. It was a sea that smelled rotten.
    I wonder if she thought of her mother, of the rawness of anger that had