Read Online Salt by Jeremy Page - Free Book Online

when he nodded his head she shook hers. Oh, thass rough, it is. Rough. I ain’t never killed nothin’ that big an’ I don’t reckon I ever will.
    Calf liver and bacon? Calf-feet fricassee? Calf-head pie? That old bastard Will Langore would claim every ounce of meat an’ he’d want the liver too an’ this lad ain’t up to carryin’ a head. Best be the tongue, oh yes, simple, on the skewer. Bit o’ salt an’ pepper.
    Her trap was easily laid. Course you gotta give that tongue away. Don’t you go leavin’ that tongue in its head or you’ll start hearin’ that dead calf lowin’ every time you slaughter. That ain’t no fun I tell you. I seen grown men haunted, oh God haunted, till they take no more of it . . . And the boy looked at my grandmother and maybe she briefly saw the dreamy expression of faraway eyes she’d last seen in the man who’d vanished on the Pip . But it wasn’t enough to stop her in her tracks, and as the boy’s blue eyes flooded with the horror of what the marshwoman was saying, she pretended to slice her own throat with painful, drawn-out agony. An’ there ain’t no escape, she added, swallowing her spit, thinking the boy was close to taking off that night. Time to be a man, she muttered, turning to the horizon to conceal her grin. And maybe the boy thought of his older brother, grey-eyed and calm with it, well on the way to being just that.
    Next morning, my grandmother woke before dawn. She saw the pale wood of her white picket gate swinging open in the gloom, and listened to the heavy tread of the boy as he walked up her path. Out come the knives, pestle and sewing kit. The tongue landed with a slap on the front step, and the boy walked off, leaving her gate wide open, to eat his silent breakfast with the men. That was the boy who gave my mother the tongue. And Goose, you did everything to make that boy stay, and yet just a few years later it would be everything to make Shrimp Langore leave.

5
    Lil’ Mardler
    Lil’ Mardler had a childhood with no friends. She live on the marsh an’ there ain’t no father. The mum’s a rum ’un too - she scare the babies. Lil’s diff’ernt, thass all I got to say . Alone on a saltmarsh among gulls swallowing cod heads on the tideline. She’s no longer a little scared girl. She’s sixteen. She inhabits a landscape that is so big and flat it seems the edges slope up into the sky all round, where mud meets cloud banks and seems to continue up there till traces of creeks and water can be seen there too - she often thinks she stands in some vast and dreary dish which has no end. She’s lived like this for years. She’s learned how to walk in mud with her heels pointed down, the depths of the creeks and the strengths of the tide, knows where mud cracks are so deep you might break a leg - it’s as if she has it all etched on the back of her hand. She knows the calendar by the buds on sea blite, the flowers on campion and dry seeds on curled dock. By the number of joints on a stem of samphire. And she never treads on a tern’s egg, even though its shell is made of shingle.
    Sandpipers pass her, skimming the creeks with wing-tips so fast they seem blurred. The tide slowly rises and falls in its long-fingered weave through the marsh. And in the centre of all this is the wreck of the Hansa . She knows its every detail, from the gannets and storm petrels carved along the gunwale, to the whale on the mizzenmast and the spirits of the North Sea rising towards its broken top. The grooves of the rough letters cut into the planks, so faint you could easily miss them as scratches: Jeder macht mal eine kleine Dummheit : we all have times of a little stupidity.
    She’s there, in the wheelhouse, her hair long and brown and as thick as rope, tied in a simple knot behind her head. Salt marks on her cheeks and forehead, lips slightly blue with cold.