Salt by Jeremy Page Read Free Book Online Page A

caps, double ceps, agaric an’ blewit. Proud of all that, she is. I seen scale clouds fall out a mackerel sky, then lissen, ’cause you got all them tidal clouds too, such as the double anvils of high-ebb thunder, full o’ bad luck, and those mysterious low-drain feathers. You got your mash cloud, crumble, sprout, beet, lambchop, liver, steakside, plaiceback and gill.
    â€˜OK, Lil’ Mardler?’
    Â 
    So here comes a cloud, freeing itself from the tangle of trees, heather and gorse from the hill behind Blakeney. Fat, full with rain, a couple of hundred feet above the saltmarsh. Goose’s cloud eye is on it straight, her daughter silent and spellbound by her side. It’s an odd cloud, because - strictly speaking - it doesn’t exist. It’s been created purely for my grandmother’s eyes, and, according to the rules of meteorology, it shouldn’t actually float at all. It’s a small, boisterous fractonimbus known as a rag cloud. Rag clouds play a crucial part in my family’s story. There’s a rag cloud painted on the hull of a boat, and there’s a rag cloud in human form walking across a fen, dressed in heavy waterproofs. They’re always tricksters. This cloud is the savage last breath of a storm. It has broken away from the rest of the nimbus, whipping up the rearguard of a huge deluge, and can do any of a variety of things. While calmer rag clouds disappear, blowing themselves out, knowing when they’re beaten, others are more mischievous; rapidly growing in height and shape and - in true nebula form - they begin to spawn new storms and clouds of their own. This one’s definitely a loner trickster and has never had a storm to follow. It’s low and dark and dense and - to stir things up - is going against the direction of the wind.
    Now Goose knows someone somewhere is playing silly buggers.
    It falls lower till Goose is under its shadow and she can take a good look up its skirts. A single fractonimbus cloud like this can hide little from the canny woman’s eyes. She’s able to turn it inside out, pull it apart, shred it, mix it and send it packing, all in a few moments. But it has a few tricks up its sleeves. She begins with the shape. This one looks like a fishing cuddy at first glance - no, let’s make it a living thing - a goat. I’m tempted to make it the sperm whale, because I’d like to know whether she could have predicted the string of events that happened to me after I saw that shape in a cloud. But no - the legs of the goat are already there. A couple of horns, a stubborn look, a wispy beard. I know she likes goats, and my mother does too, so this is a welcome sight for them. But my grandmother doesn’t waste time admiring.
    This liar cloud has a dark, purplish heart to it and fine white extremities. It’s really cheating now. In the belly of the cloud she quickly sees what it’s hiding. This rag cloud’s chased down many other clouds in its brief, phantom life, and each cloud has left its trace. There’s a wrecked boat in there, a bull, some dough-like sculptures, a Saint painted in icon style. There are some lights also - what looks like a burning bush or a tree on fire, some fireworks against a winter’s sky. Now my grandmother is really scratching her head. I wonder what she might make of it all. I don’t think she’s ever seen a cloud quite like it, not even in the ones when her daughter was born.
    You know - I think she’s stumped.
    While this ugly rag cloud squats on top of her, a line of cumulus fractus rolls down towards her. The sky becomes masked with a fine, milky steam of cirrostratus. Some cumulonimbus, up they waft - giddy and rowdy, jostling to get down there too. Out at sea now, some of that North Sea water whips up into vapour plumes: Folkestone Pillars tower along the horizon like as many demonic chess pieces. Festoon clouds, caught up in the Holkham pines to the west. A