Salt by Jeremy Page Page B

inland than it’s ever been, and when we look closer we see the tidemark is partly made of thousands of rats, mice, voles and rabbits. A rat won’t be seen for years to come. And the same tidemark threads its way through Cley, Blakeney, Salthouse and Morston. On tree trunks and flagpoles, the tidemark is there - it even runs halfway across the sign of the Albatross Inn, and finally, about a foot lower than the ceiling, the same tidemark girdles inside Goose’s cottage.
    She looks at this mark, and knows ill things arrive on a high tide. Demons are left floundering in such places. She walks along the tideline to a newly washed-up boat - the Thistle Dew - which now sits lopsided on the marsh a couple of hundred feet from her cottage. It’s going to be a significant place for her, and me, in its time. But she doesn’t stop there, she continues along the tideline picking up drowned rabbits for an early supper, always on her guard, waiting for what the storm has left, and when she’s nearly back at Lane End, she sees it. It’s two days after the flood, and she notices a boy crying down by the creek. But he’s not crying about the storm . . .
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    ... I see my grandmother once again in her cottage, with a young daughter allowed for the first time to sit at the table. The young girl is staring bug-eyed at a length of boiled calf’s tongue curling on to her plate. The young child looks up anxiously at the trembling tip of the meat as it winds its way through the air towards her. Other children her age would be running wet fingers along the glass-topped counters of Mather’s Stores in the hunt for sherbet. The tongue is still intact, boiled limp and skewered with a steel knitting needle, but the end has unwound itself in the pan and now seems to point accusingly at the young girl’s mouth. As the tongue passes over the knife and fork it seems to wriggle before breaking free from the needle and, with vigorous life, springs on to the bare table. There it lies, stunned, before curling slowly - as if injured from the fall - into a foetal position, till it hugs the cool circular rim of the plate.
    Apparently the calf’s tongue began its journey to my mother’s mouth when Goose approached the crying boy down by the creek. The boy was new in the area. Not washed up on the tide, as it turned out, but staying with his great-uncle, who ran a farm on the heath. My grandmother had seen him eating pickles from a jar and beating off flies in August. He was either too weak or too clumsy to use the farm machinery, so had spent his days wandering the pasture as a kind of scarecrow, plucking the grass and bronzing his face, and the evenings with his knees trembling under the dining table of Will Langore, his great-uncle. Will Langore, who’d battled and lost to Hands over the poker table. After several months of forcing the farm’s food down the lad, the old man had leaned over the marbled remains of a joint of beef and pinched the boy’s biceps till they bruised. Satisfied, the tyrant stabbed a long curved knife into the table and said: ain’t a boy no more, best you kill that sick calf next week. Don’t kill it in the shed, walk it to the truck first or we’ll have to carry it. And that was that. The boy shot a pleading glance over to his older brother, found only betrayal where he’d hoped for support, flung his chair back and ran to the creek, where his tears could be drowned in all that water.
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    And my grandmother had found the boy as he cried, sat by him, watched him throwing stones into the mud of Morston Creek. Self-pitying rage shook the boy when he thought of the sick calf with the weeping eyes, who refused to suckle from its mother. Just a drink from the udder and it might live, you know. My grandmother made sounds of sympathy - while her mouth watered with the thought of tasty cuts. She’d have to play her hand well. First slaughter? she asked, and