Read Online Salt by Jeremy Page - Free Book Online Page A

The sulky, defensive expression she used to pull as a child no longer fits her face. In the last year or two her cheeks have lost some of their softness. Her eyebrows have grown fuller and seem to sit on top of her eyes with a permanently hurt expression she can’t shift. Her skin is less soft, the salt is finally getting in there too. She’s grown tall and strong and with it she’s grown petulant, and here, right now, she’s fuming.
    Because she’s not alone. Sitting over by the prow with his chin resting awkwardly on the handrail is a young lad. We’ve met him before. He killed that calf just after the storm eight years ago, and now he spends much of his time out here, strung up on the wreck, his dreamy eyes not entirely without pain.
    Lil’ Mardler stamps about behind him, kicks the wheelhouse, slides about on the bones of the pilot’s chair while she looks at the sagging shoulders of the boy sitting on the wreck. Her wreck. The wreck her father carved. She thinks nasty thoughts but the boy doesn’t move. The pilot’s chair grinds painfully as she swings it from side to side, then she paces over to him and stands so close a boy his age should go cold with fear that a girl like her might do something unexpected. Laugh at his face, scratch him on the arms, kiss him on the mouth like an adult. Lil’ is sixteen and girls write the rules and she knows she’d get away with it, but something about his posture shows she wouldn’t win this battle, so she goes back to the wheelhouse and makes the chair squeak like a gallows.
    Then a strange thing happens. There, in front of her, she sees the boy’s shoulders tense like someone’s wringing water out of them. She looks beyond him and sees something, approaching them - a perfect wake spreading gorgeously across the water of the Pit. It looks like a float on a fishing line being reeled in. Then an arm is raised, followed immediately by another, and a no-nonsense front crawl breaks out. Another lad is heading for the Hansa , and my mother grips what’s left of the wheel like a storm’s coming.
    The second lad’s older than the first, taller by the inch or so to make all the difference, and where the first boy’s eyes are as pale as a dawn sky, his brother’s are grey like smoke. He clings to the side of the wreck, breaks a bit of rotten wood off the hull and chucks it in the water and Lil’ thinks about kicking him in the face and how it was preferable before and decides to stay in the pilot’s chair because he’ll know she’s done that deliberately. But the boy hardly notices. He’s calling to his brother and making a big fuss about being pulled from the water and suddenly she’s watching the dreamy one hauling the other one out and it seems the two boys have taken over the wreck entirely, because to them that’s all it is - a wreck.
    The taller boy’s got a strong hard body and his face is bony and severe. He sits on the planks and takes some deep breaths to show how good his swim was. His hair’s as wet as an otter’s and the water streams down his back in fast, quick lines. Then he turns to her and grins and she’s immediately disconcerted - because the boy grinning at her seems, for a second, to be entirely different from the one who climbed up on deck. Same person, same features - but two faces in one.
    â€˜Mornin’, cap’n, where we heading?’
    Lil’ Mardler pulls her ugliest most sarcastic smile and looks away.
    â€˜I’m Kipper and he’s Shrimp,’ he says. ‘You got a name?’
    â€˜He said his name was George,’ my mother replies.
    â€˜Well, it isn’t.’
    â€˜My name’s May.’
    â€˜No it ain’t. You’re Lil’ Mardler, everyone knows that,’ the boy says, laughing out loud. Even the dreamy one smiles at that.
    â€˜And you’re the boy they had to fish out the tree in the