Free The Salt Marsh by Clare Carson Page A

despite being alone. She wasn’t in a fit state to drive back to London anyway. She unrolled her sleeping bag on the patch of ground she knew from previous trial and error to be the most comfortable place to rest, extinguished her torch, lay back, linked her hands behind her head. A shooting star fell down the blackness above. A fox screamed. She couldn’t settle; she reached for her torch again, dug in the back pocket of her jeans and removed a photo, examined it in the beam. She had snapped it in the light of the campfire, sideways on, his face shadowed, mysterious smile, eyes half closed, the dreamy, unfocused gaze of the short-sighted. And the stoned.
    They had ended up camping in the Lookers’ Hut almost by accident. May Day bank holiday. Luke was driving the kombi – she had put him on her insurance. The road south had been slow, packed with Londoners heading for the coast, and when they reached the outskirts of Hastings, they came to a near standstill. Hastings was depressing. The once grand sweep of white Regency homes had been reduced to rotting social security B&Bs, clinging to the southernmost fringe of England. The Channel dishwater swirled around the beach, flecking shingle with brown foam. The promenade was awash with teenage girls pushing prams, men in vests hanging out drinking Tennent’s. As they inched past the Old Town, she spotted a knot of people dressed in green, dancing – a spark of life, excitement, a parade. The traffic was at a standstill and the revellers were weaving around the cars. Her mind was wandering when she was startled by the hard thump of a fist on the van’s front.
    â€˜Oi,’ she shouted. ‘Don’t do that to my van.’
    A blackened face snarled at her through the windscreen, red mouth gaping, arms flapping to reveal his rag-feathered cape before he vanished into a backstreet. Crow-man. The grotesque figure jolted her memory, knocked her back to the Beltane fair she had visited with her dad when she was eleven. Eight years ago. She hadn’t thought about the fair for a long while, hadn’t wanted to remember the events of that odd May Day. The van stopped and started, inched along the traffic-jammed road, and she had an uneasy sense of her past spiralling around, catching up, her father forever appearing and disappearing.
Where are you going? Over the hills and far away.
    The delay in Hastings meant they arrived in Dungeness at dusk. They attempted to light a campfire on the beach, but the mist was rolling in from the Channel and the flames spluttered and died. They decided to drive back to London across the marsh. Bad call. The mist followed them inland; curling wraiths in the weak halogen headlights becoming dense and impenetrable. They took a wrong turning, ended up in a breaker’s yard full of rusting double-deckers and guarded by a couple of snarling ridgebacks. Luke reversed the van, the dogs snapping at the tyres. She searched the map and located the nearest Lookers’ Hut that would, at least, provide them with some shelter for the night.
    There were no farm buildings around, so they didn’t have to worry about being spotted as they humped their gear across the wet grass. They gathered the dropped branches from the overhanging willow, piled them on the soil floor of the hut, wary of using the old fireplace in case the chimney was blocked by birds’ nests, managed to ignite the wood by scrunching up the pages of a newspaper and using it as kindling. ‘Beltane fire,’ she said, without thinking. As she spoke she pictured the green-haired woman and her herbal remedies – the packet of bitter withy – found herself slipping from the melancholia that had dogged her all day to something bleaker – childlike powerlessness, events she could not control. She rescued a thin willow branch from the campfire, waved it in the air like a wand.
    â€˜What are you doing?’ Luke asked.
    â€˜I’m