Salt by Jeremy Page Read Free Book Online

man who left her in the agonies of giving birth. She was talking about Norfolk itself.

4
    The Rag Cloud
    Here they come - two beads of torchlight across the marsh. One held slightly higher than the other, both trained on a ground so thick with mud it seems to swallow the light before it’s fallen. A mother and daughter wearing four coats between them, leaving the cottage to cross the creeks. Goose has her large salt-and-pepper hair bundled up at the back of her head, a variety of pins and sticks to keep it in place. She sleeps in it like that. Her daughter has tied rags into her own hair, over night, so now she has deep brown ringlets that spring up and down as she walks. The ground stinks with damp and the air is knife-sharp with winter. Not much wind, but the marshes are full of quiet expectant rushes of sound. Molluscs and crabs bubble in the creeks, small animals dash for cover. They press onwards as the sky lightens, picking through the mud and crossing the creeks on planks so slick with damp it’s as if the earth is full of steam. And when they reach the place on the marsh my grandmother always calls the tuft , they sit down with their collars turned up, and face forward like Easter Island statues.
    There’s some cirrus up there. Feathery and vague, reaching across the whole sky like a heavenly harp. It catches my grandmother’s eye immediately. Breath of the angels, she says. This time of morning it’s poached-salmon pink, but soon it’ll glow as bright as a bridal veil. See that, Lil’, see that cirrus? That come from space, it do, got nothing to do with us. They gaze at the cloud several miles above them.
    Cirrus is not just the milky cataract it seems at first glance. At the right time, at the right angle, vast shapes are in there. No other cloud has the capacity to create such an entire inverted landscape mirroring our own, filled with the dunes, creeks, fields and seas of its own ghostly creation. Goose is clearly in awe of its mystery, its enormity and its completeness, but it is just too far away, too unconnected with the world. She prefers the lower clouds.
    Hair - she says - coo-mulus! And here they are. Her favourite clouds. Ain’t them fat as turkeys! Right char-ac-ters. Mind, got to be patient with clouds, Lil’, they ain’t going to give it away first look, ’specially them fluff balls. Changelings, thass what they is, right clumsy too, they come ’cross the marsh like bumble bees too fat to fly. Never got how they float, they shoun’t be up there. But like bumble bees, she added, you can trust ’em. They don’t tell no lies. Other clouds were far more sly. The strat-o-coo-mulus, said the Norfolk way, for one. Bruise it do, too easy, like bad fruit, an’ worse still, thass a cloud don’t know whether it want to fly high or low - often try both an’ pull apart an’ that serve it right. Al-toe-stratus, plain bad tempered - cover the rest like a carpet. Real bastard that one, ain’t got nothing to say an’ bent on spoilin’.
    She went on. Cap clouds, scared of wind, stratus-fratus as giddy as ducklings, bobbing this way an’ that an’ fannyin’ around, drove crazy by that storm what formed them. Spiss-attus, best seen in first light, alto-coo-mulus baked gold as a piecrust. She was getting excited, beginning to make it up now, had names for clouds others had never seen: trawler clouds, you should see ’em, gal, they pass over a ship out there an’ they turn porn-o-graphic on account of them bored trawlermen’s dirty thoughts. ‘Viking’ clouds, them come from the nor’-east with shallow bases an’ armoured sails, right bristlin’ with trouble. Marl clouds, good for the farmers, bad for the fish. ‘Gannets’ were rafters, fat-bellied an’ fast to fall, an’ then you got leaf-mould an’ beech-nut in autumn, then October onwards, you got you the fungi - flat