Salt

by Jeremy Page

  I start to cry with fear - that I’ll die in this wreck, that I’ll die alone out here - and then I smell a gentle scent of vanilla. Of vanilla and scones and hard-boiled eggs, and when I look up there is Elsie, climbing clumsily into the Thistle Dew and sitting down on her haunches. I’m amazed to see her. Why did you leave? I ask her. I’ve been trying to sort things out. She smiles at that. We both have. It’s so good to see her. Are you my sister? Elsie looks level-gazed at me. I see her in all her details: the multistranded woven colours of her hair, the thin slot of worry her mouth has become, the look of sleeplessness around her eyes, but a calmness there too, a new calmness that seems unusual in Elsie. I want to remember these things. Because she begins to fade away, like she always will, just too beyond reach for me, this time I am sure, the last time I’ll ever see her. I touch the space where she’d been, and feel nothing but the cold waterlogged wood of the wreck. I lie down and give in to a thick numbing wave of sleep.

  My fever had run its course. After dark I left the wrecked boat with my mother’s seashell and a bag full of Kipper’s fireworks I’d stolen from his house. It was a warm and quiet September night, and across the marsh in the car park at Blakeney there was a large bonfire burning.

  I walked to the shore of the Pit, climbed into a dinghy and paddled over to the Hansa. The water was calm and at full tide, and the wreck looked once more like it was about to float off into the North Sea. I tied the boat to the gunwale, went to the wheelhouse and sat on the bones of the pilot’s chair. Rusted metal as cold as the sea, salty with age. Finally I’ve come home, I thought - you don’t need anything else, just the touch of something you understand in the middle of nowhere. A wrecked boat in the darkness. An acceptance. I leaned against the metal and for a moment felt my story in all its entirety, and all the stories that had made it, bending out into the night in calm pathways. And you keep on going. She’s right, that’s all there is to it.

  When my fireworks went off, their multicoloured maroon shot up into the empty dome of the Norfolk sky. Find me. Across the saltmarshes I watched as the distant bonfire parted into a string of lights and torches, and this string began to stretch across the marsh like a faintly twinkling necklace. As it came nearer, the necklace split and reformed as it navigated the creeks and channels until it arrived at the Pit, where the lights collected in groups and climbed into boats to cross the water and take me back. Take me back. And I thought how beautiful it must have looked from the land - my little show of fireworks, a distant bloom of colour and smoke in a landscape so dark it’s always drawn the light away and extinguished it like a blot.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Kate Barker at Viking, for her calm steering, advice and friendship, and to Kate Jones at ICM, for being tremendous throughout. Thanks, too, to Kathryn Court and Sloan Harris.

  Thanks to Cormac, for his knife-sharp pen, which never blunts, and the blood-red notes in the margins. Thank you Andrew, for our shared imagination and our humour, and thanks Mum, for your constant belief and love.

  Thanks to C13. Also, to Norfolk.

  Much thanks to you, my dear son Jacob, to whom this book is dedicated - you have shared so much of it with me, especially all of those mudwalks in the creeks. You are amazing.

  And thank you Liz, for your sensitive reading, your shining soul, and for your boundless support.