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

storm, ain’t you,’ she says. ‘Cryin’ like a baby, they said.’
    She’s drawn first blood. Good on you, Lil’, you used to give as good as you got.
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    Talking of first blood, earlier that morning, Lil’ had been peeling potatoes over a bucket when she nicked herself badly with the knife. A thin line of blood had threaded into the water, turning it rust red. She’d thrown the knife in and run to the marsh, leaving Goose to finish the job and wonder what was going on with her daughter. Years had passed since Goose used to take Lil’ out each day to pick samphire, pushing her out in the pram, filling it up, making the young girl walk back when it was full. Now, they got on like cats in a cage. Goose consulted the clouds, didn’t like what they said, began to feel a growing sense of doom. She began to be suspicious of her daughter and this kind of thing with the spuds and the bucket was just the tip of it.
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    Lil’ was preoccupied. She spent her days on the Hansa , watching from the wheelhouse as the brothers ate limpets and whelks, then more and more she sat nearer them, hearing them talk about the farm they lived on and how they’d leave it to rack and ruin one day. We ain’t going to fill the old bastard’s shoes. They were more interested in competing with each other than paying her much attention. In the mornings they’d swim across the Pit with knives between their teeth like a couple of pirates, in the same way Hands had done, seventeen years before. Then they’d throw stones, dive off the bow, race each other along the shore; all that boys’ stuff and it all seemed endless wasted energy.
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    Shrimp was smaller than his brother, but was more easygoing. He had a broader back and a soft smile of puppy-fat above the waistband of his trunks. Light hair, and a face which seemed a little clumsy, all the features with their own edge of haphazardness. Said to look like his mother, though she’d died while they were so young neither of them remembered her. Shrimp put less effort into the throwing contests, but his stones went further. His older brother threw stones with a jarring action which changed style with each delivery, and though he chose his stones carefully, it made no difference. Shrimp’s stones kept falling further away.
    Knots were a different matter. Kipper excelled at them, had his own length of rope which he strung round his neck in the same way I’ve hung my notebook for most of my life, could tie a Spanish bowline with his eyes closed, or an armpit bight with three twists of his fingers. He once tied eight half-hitches to a masthead bend and crawled it across the deck like a crab, so my mother told me.
    After so many solitary years as a marshgirl, she must have enjoyed the company. The Langore brothers went to a school their great-uncle paid for, hadn’t been born in Blakeney, and so remained a little on the fringes themselves. Kipper hated the local kids, said they were mean and narrow-minded, that the boys were a bunch of women with tits in their shirts and nothing in their heads. He often got in fights, and had once pushed a boy on a bike off the edge of Blakeney Quay and gave no other reason than it was Saturday afternoon . It was about the best thing he could’ve said, because people kept their distance after that.
    â€˜Your mum’s mad, ain’t she, Lil’?’ Kipper says. He often tried to goad her with these frank comments. ‘She listens to clouds, don’t she?’
    Right at that very moment, Goose was in Lane End, staring at a frog, which was crawling across her kitchen tiles. She screamed, and began shooing it out the door with a broom.
    On the Hansa , Lil’ is not impressed. She can deal with Kipper Langore.
    â€˜We got a saying for it.’
    â€˜Who’s we?’ he says, hardening his look.
    â€˜You ain’t from Norfolk,’ she says, and makes out