Salt by Jeremy Page Page A

bark. Above them they see the terrified boy, as white as his fear, dissected by branches and twigs as though the storm has torn him apart, and throughout the tree they see the branches are covered with rats like as many wet leaves. Some of the rats jump for the boat, the men scream, then more rats fall into the water as if they’re coming from the clouds themselves and each rat drowns quickly and without fuss the way things do when there is no hope.
    The boy is moving down through the tree. As they grab his ankle he’s pulled right out of his own shirt, as if part of him wants to cling up there still. It’s the Langore boy, one of them says, recognizing him. John, ain’t it? he says, their faces almost touching in the dark. Kipper , the boy whispers, the nickname he’s called himself. Then suddenly the boy panics, flailing wildly at the men while the boat tips to its gunwales, and one of the men sees through the dark rain the army bo’sun knocking the boy cold with a fist the size of a pile-driver. And though the storm still rages, both men share a big grin at that.
    Â 
    Back at the cottage, Goose claims the same tin bath in which Hands feared he might be cooked or drowned all of a sudden popped up like a life-raft. Into it she went. She rocked about all night long in that thing, shivering against the icy metal sides - sluiced from one corner of the room to the other a couple of feet beneath the ceiling, with bread, pans, cups, saucers, cupboards and all the driftwood she’d collected over the years spinning in a dismal galaxy around her.
    Through the night she plundered this flotsam. She ate a jarful of pickled eggs, oh boy, drank an entire shelf’s worth of elderflower wine. Roaring drunk, some time in the middle of the night she began to hear the noises she’d been dreading. Along with the wind, the crashing waves, the surging tide, she heard the moans of all the people who’d drowned in that storm over the centuries. There were thousands of them, going back through history, and before the night was out, there’d be hundreds more. Danish longshoremen caught on a sandbar three hundred years before, tumbling rudely into the cottage, cursing the night away as they clung to what was left of the bed. In Olde English, men calling out the names of their faithful dogs as the waves overran them. Bales of Norfolk wool - five hundred years old - rolling in the waves outside. Sheep too - so she says. And against the awful din of the storm she even claimed she heard the death throes of a mammoth - one of Norfolk’s last, she supposed - which had drowned in the same storm fifty thousand years before.
    Early the next morning, a sombre line of men tied themselves to each other along a rope, then waded to her cottage through the freezing water to collect her body. They found her snoring like a good ’un in the bath, now wrecked on top of the bed.
    She lived through that storm and spent years dreading the day it would return. Not out of fear for the tin bath, but because she wasn’t keen on meeting the hundred and forty people who died in Suffolk and Norfolk that night: Millie Eccles, stoker of rumours about Goose, who died on her bike; Ned Boddy, whose bungalow was swept away and who Goose owed money to - found standing in a pit with his boots filled with shingle when the water drained away; Jackie Rudd, who’d once bought a dozen bad eggs from Goose - never forgiven. They were all drowned that night, and they’d all be back to get her, she thought.
    The last day of January - that’s the date of the storm. A night of mysteries, of vanishings and appearances. And as each year passed, Goose was more wary of that date than any other in the calendar. I always thought it was part of her nonsense, until I experienced my own vanishing on that night, many years later.
    Â 
    The flood retreats leaving a filthy stink and a dirty brown tidemark along the fields and marshes, further