Salt by Jeremy Page

Author:Jeremy Page
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2010-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

She never told me what the clouds revealed that first morning. But for the next few days she virtually lived out there, chewing mints and drinking from a flask. She seemed unconcerned with me, as if I’d been living there for years. Make do and be on with it. Hair’s your bed, get you some clothes, and will you stop that lookin’ at me! Just like with Hands as he fell into the same life two generations earlier. She was clearly an oddball. Still, she was my mother’s mother, and the same place and landscape that had formed Lil’ Mardler was now mine, and it felt like home, which was an unusual feeling in itself. But I’m hardly given the time to think, because I hear the sound of Goose’s large casserole pot clanking somewhere near and I know she’s walking out of Lane End with that heavy pot wrapped in her apron and I have to follow. She’s showing me the area and I can’t delay it any longer. I must mention the first time I saw the wreck of the Thistle Dew. And to think that the first time I saw it, I knew nothing of how I’d end up there. Don’t dawdle! she shouts. All right, all right. Yes, I see her quite clearly now, my grandmother, in the late-autumn twilight, a little woman on a long muddy path, boots too big, carrying that warm-smelling pot.

The Thistle Dew had once been a small boat, a cuddy at heart, but surprisingly broad in the beam, washed up on a tideline of briars and scrub no sea had reached since the great storm surge of 1953. Over the years it had been a hideaway, a storeroom and a cow shelter, and seemed to be caught mid-capsize. ‘Cain’t stop sinkin’,’ Goose said, highly amused. ‘That sunk in the Pit, now it keep sinkin’ in mud.’

Behind the wreck was a pile of driftwood, in places higher than the boat itself, giving the impression Bryn Pugh was living on the edge of a bonfire about to be lit. Bryn had left his rented flat in Blakeney to live there fulltime, to avoid rates and noise, and to have his own letterbox. He’d spent the summer laying out a shingle path to the wreck, erecting a bizarre bungalow’s porch, painted THISTLE DEW - pronounced the Norfolk way as This’ll Do - in small, neat letters below the gunwale, and supported the side with some heavy timber braces.

Inside, the lean felt stronger. His table, desk and bed were all propped on legs to compensate, but with one row of port-holes showing sky and the others showing mud you could still feel seasick in there. I’d never heard of Bryn Pugh before, but Goose’s evenings for several years had clearly been spent here; her smoking a pipe and him rolling tobacco, playing draughts and eating soups and stews and bowls of samphire.

He emerges from the piles of offcut wood, sketches, clothes, food, papers and books. His strong suntanned neck and his Clark Gable tache.

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