Saltskin

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Authors: Louise Moulin

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Saltskin

Louise Moulin

Louise Moulin was born in the seventies and currently
lives in Aramoana, in a cottage just over the sand dunes
from the sea. Saltskin is her first book. She is working on a
stage play and her second novel.

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

ISBN 978 1869792374

Version 1.0

www.randomhouse.co.uk

National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Moulin, Louise.
Saltskin / Louise Moulin.

ISBN: 978 1869792374

Version 1.0

I. Title.
NZ823.3—dc 22

A BLACK SWAN BOOK
published by
Random House New Zealand
18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland, New Zealand
www.randomhouse.co.nz

Random House International
Random House
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London, SW1V 2SA
United Kingdom

Random House Australia (Pty) Ltd
20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney
New South Wales 2061, Australia

Random House South Africa Pty Ltd
Isle of Houghton
Corner Boundary Road and Carse O'Gowrie
Houghton 2198, South Africa

Random House Publishers India Private Ltd
301 World Trade Tower, Hotel Intercontinental Grand Complex
Barakhamba Lane, New Delhi 110 001, India

First published 2008

© 2008 Louise Moulin

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Design: Elin Bruhn Termannsen
Cover design: Clint Hutzulak/Mutasis Creative
Cover photographs: gettyimages
Box image: iStock, photograph Duncan Walker

For Laura Faire and Marc Sim – friends of mine

1.
Angelo: London,
late eighteenth century

She named him Angelo. While he swam in the waters of her
womb Magdalene wished for her son a mighty love. She
branded him with her will as surely as if it were scorched
upon his skin. And so it was that when he slithered crimson
from her, an expectation pulsed in his blood for the most
grandiose love of all.

He was a good boy. He was an unusual boy.

 

London's St Bride's Church bells signalled market day.
Later, Angelo would go over the morning in his head a
thousand times and always he would ask: Why had the
day been so ordinary? Why had he not a premonition his
mother was to die?

Angelo ate his bread and cheese and ran from the house,
with his mother's kiss warm on his cheek and her hot coins
in his hand. He skipped along the row of houses just like his
own in Loves Court, over a fence onto George Alley, and,
with a charge inside him like sunlight, he sprinted head down
to Fleet Market. The stall-owners hauled their boxes, buckets
and crates of vegetables, spices, oils, vinegars, honey and
grains, dried fruit and cloths of wool and silk along the bustling
aisles to their stands. Horse and carts similarly stacked came
from outlying settlements, their goods then unloaded and
arranged for sale. The din of the crowd — bartering, haggling,
gossiping — and the aroma of fresh pastries, cinnamon and
thyme all jumbled together, discordant yet melodious, like
the noise of a celebration. And over it all, like the top note of
an orchestra, the stench of fish.

Angelo ran alongside the gutter, cobblestones smooth
and well worn under his bare feet, which were tough and
calloused from boyhood adventures. Autumn leaves tried
to gain flight on the breeze but recent rain had left them
sodden and without heart; they lifted a little and fell
drearily. Angelo's auburn hair bounced on his scalp and
caught the light so that he seemed to carry about his head
a halo made of a thousand strands of gold and rust.

He ran with his hands flat and pumping and his whole
body bent forward in a charge. His jaw was set in a grim
manner — the face he used for running. He cut madly into
the crowd of maids and children and apprentices on errands
for their household, mistresses and masters. A haughty
carriage forced itself along the closed-off street, scattering
people and raising invective. Angelo leapt over a dropped
crate of carrots, racing up and down each crowded aisle of
stalls the way a dog irreverently crosses properties: skidding
sharply at each corner and tearing up the next, just to feel
the pleasure of speed in his ten-year-old legs.

He stopped at the well that drew from the covered-over
Fleet River, even though he had been told not to drink
from it, for what was once a river wide enough for a Roman
ship was now but a rat- and sewage-infested stream. Angelo
pulled the wooden bucket to him and guzzled greedily;
water flowed over his plentiful freckles, caught upon his
translucent eyelashes and slid down over the beauty spot
above his lip. It was just a dark mole, yet it caught the eye
of all who looked upon the boy — incongruously beautiful
on a remarkably ugly face, as if it were the marking of a mad
hatter. Shaking his head so that water beads flew off him
like sweat off a street-fighter, Angelo made fists with his
little hands and let out a cry of jubilation and freedom.

He was a wild child. A boy given easily to the indulgence
of mischief, who followed its heady scent wherever it led.
He was physically acrobatic, emotionally volatile and
endowed with an imagination that was destined to be the
source of much trouble in his life.

Angelo bullrushed his way to the pieman and paid his
penny. He ate the hot mutton filling with his mouth wide
to let out the steam, which plumed with the frost in the
air. His mouth burned but he was undeterred. He tore
ferociously at the pie in the same way he attacked life: with
foolish bravery and unrelenting enthusiasm. He wiped his
mouth on his tunic sleeve and, struck by a force he could
not deny, picked up a stone and threw it with all his might
into the crowd. Then he ran behind a stall, sniggering at
the yelp from the frills of the crowd. He hid gleefully for
a time, then came out and charged through the pigeons
gathered like squawking women, squealing all the while.

Angelo spied the fishmongers with their barrows wheeled
through the town from the Thames and he remembered
his errands. He hesitated, jerking his head like a sparrow:
which one to approach? But always Magdalene would ask:
'Did you get it off Bob?' And if he hadn't she would shake
her head, slowly at first and then quickly, close her eyes
and turn from him. There was no choice.

'Ginger's boy,' muttered fishmonger Bob, his sideways
look oily and sly.

'One eel,' said Angelo, his chin jutted defiantly.

The man put a curling, writhing eel in a sack and tied a
brown string around it. Angelo gave his money, snatched
the bag and ran.

'You give Ginger my lovin', laddie,' yelled the fishmonger,
and the stench of the man's breath in that minute
was a phantom with a black cape flying after the boy.

Angelo ran, red-faced and furious, nipping between
the great skirts of the women, past Fleet Prison where two
inmates begged for their allotted twenty-four hours. He ran
all the way, taking the short route through Stonecutters Alley
to St Bride's Church, climbed the splintered scaffolding,
which had been there since he could remember, and sat
clutching the eel in its bag. He craned his head back and
gazed up at the giant steeple, which was prone to attracting
lightning, until he saw the lights of stars in his eyeballs.
Then he brought his head forward, stared down into a
giant puddle below his dangling feet, and brooded.

Many men called Magdalene 'Ginger'. Sometimes their
tone was sweet and soft as a beloved's caress upon a cheek.
They whispered it to her as she passed, or they grabbed her
arm and spat the name at her, at once stung and sorrowful,
implying she belonged to them but had abandoned them.
Angelo saw in their eyes a hurt he could not explain, as
if something irreplaceable had been stolen by a trusted
friend. He saw loneliness, too, and it made him afraid.
Magdalene treated them all in the same manner, the way a
barmaid is generous and equal with her patrons. She would
coo to them reassuringly, deftly disengaging herself from
their grip of hand or eye, and walk on, her long red hair
provocatively loose.

Magdalene reassured her fiery son, bade him pay no mind. And
in her patrician voice, husky and sweet, she would explain that she was so
called because of her colouring. Red-headed people had a special role to play
for God, and although it was a force for good, some people did not know how
to accept good things when they expected only bad. Magdalene would not cover
her hair like other women; she let her curls unfurl like liquid fire down
her back. She did not tell her son that red hair was feared as a mark of a
devil's consort, or the ring of harlotry, or the colouring of Judas. For although
life had been a disappointment, Magdalene believed the devil only existed
if you called him by name — he only visited by invitation. She believed
heaven lived in your heart.

 

Angelo's stepfather, Pierre, was an old man who had already
been twice married and widowed. He was distant, in a way
that suggested everything he had to say had already been
said, words no longer holding any power or purpose to
him, and accordingly his ears had lost the ability to hear
not just words but feelings too. He had small eyes and a
gravelly beard, once silky and black but now patchy and
grey, like an aged alley-cat who had endured too many
late-night scraps. The contours of his face were ravaged by
time and disappointment, and all the moistness of youth
had long since been sucked from his skin, which hung in
wasteful, pallid folds from his bones.

Pierre barely spoke to Angelo; all messages were
passed through the filter of Magdalene, like whey through
muslin. Nor did he look at his stepson. Instead, Pierre's
gaze followed Magdalene whenever she was near, and
sometimes she would cradle his head against her stomach,
and his face would glaze over like a drunkard's and mews
came from his throat. Angelo would look away and kick
something or shove something to bring her attention back
to him, and she would sigh. One male provided shelter
and food; the other was her source of life.

Every morning from his bed in the loft Angelo heard
the sounds of bodies moving in the bedroom off the
kitchen and they prompted him to rise. Pierre's grunts and
gasps were like those of a birthing farm animal. Magdalene
crooned, and there was the slap slap of flesh on flesh. After,
Magdalene would emerge to see Angelo sitting patiently
and pained at the table, and she would always come to
him and kiss the soft space between his neck and shoulder,
breathing in his little child aroma, and tell him he smelt
like a rose, while she smelt only of Pierre.

Pierre would emerge, a cross between a near-dead tree,
dry of all its sap, and a swaggering pirate who has just mated
with a native girl. Whatever his posture, it always seemed
to Angelo to be distasteful, like farting in church. They
would eat an awkward morning meal, with Magdalene
smiling anxiously for all of them, dividing her attention
equally between the two, leaving little for herself. Then
Pierre would push away from the table, wipe his hands on
his tunic and retreat for the day to the loom shop in the
basement.

Pierre had once worked as tapissier for the Great Wardrobe
in Soho, his skills spent on weaving chair and table
furnishings and repairing tapestries for royalty and the
gentry. He was considered a great talent, partly because he
hailed from France, and at the height of his favour he set up
on his own, signing each piece no longer with the symbol
of the Aria House but with a simple P.P. for Pierre Page.

Angelo, hungry for time alone with his mother, would stay on
a fraction longer before running down to the loom shop to begin his day as
an apprentice weaver under Pierre.

 

The eel writhed with more intensity in the sack, then
quietened. A squat boy wearing the blue coat of the
Newgate Street orphanage climbed up on the scaffolding
and sat beside Angelo. Angelo barely noticed him; his
mind was focused on his jealousy over his mother and who
owned the right to call her what name — who owned the
right to call her at all. His anguish showed on his face in
taut creases, as if he were being pressed into a bed of nails.
Blue-coat coughed politely and Angelo glared at the boy,
straight in the eye. At times Angelo's face would appear
crude with the intensity of his emotions — he contorted
his face, screwed it about like a rag being wrung. The boy
stared back with no expression, undaunted. They stared
so long and so hard it became a contest; the detail of four
irises became imprinted: Angelo's a merge of glassy blues
like the crystalline centre of ice, refracting the light. Bluecoat's,
by contrast, a dark brown with treacle warmth. The
boys liked each other, were struck by it.

Without breaking eye contact, each watched amusement
change the radiance in the other's eyes and, as their stare
lapsed into a gaze, their eyes twinkled.

'Me, I'm Davy,' said the orphan boy.

'Angelo Page.'

Davy leaned closer and said seriously, 'I can see a little
Davy in Angelo's eyes. Can you see a little Angelo in
Davy's eyes?'

Angelo shoved him hard and the boy almost lost his
balance. He was hurt but tried not to show it, affecting
the gruffness of a man. It didn't work, but Davy was
used to people taking unexpected swipes. He leapt off
the scaffolding onto the tiered steps, landing awkwardly,
and once down there he felt all he could do was leave.
Around the other side of the church a neat row of orphans,
each carrying a globe, a quadrant and a pen, prepared to
walk back to the orphanage. Davy had to join them or
be missed. He made to walk away, then, hesitating, took
from his pocket a marble as yellow as yellow could be, and
chucked it to Angelo.

'Make a wish,' he said, and walked off, hands in pockets,
cap to the side, whistling.

Angelo rolled the marble along the lines of his palm. He
watched the boy cross the church grounds and seamlessly
join his group, until the bobbing heads could no longer
be seen.

He stared down into the waters of the puddle. The sky
was projected on its surface like a mirror. White clouds
rippled and he became aware of himself reflected, like
Narcissus. He was surprised to see another boy, and when
he saw that it was himself he closed his eyes and made a
big, big wish for something that there were no words for
but which had the fragrance of paradise. Then he tossed
the marble in the puddle and opened his eyes at the splash.
The surface was no longer smooth, the sky had vanished,
and he was a broken image wiggling on the outward ripples.
But even then he didn't have a notion that his life was
about to change forever.

Angelo, with the eel from the fishmonger slithering
slimy and serpentine in its sack, half ran, half skipped along
the weave of the streets to his house, high on the notion
of a new friend. He had missed that Davy had been hurt
by the shove — he missed most of the signs people gave to
indicate their discomfort. His long limbs flung about with
his stride, loose-jointed like a rag doll.

He could hear the clack clack of the loom long before
he reached home, and by contrast he became aware of the
background silence of the street. An unwelcome shiver
clenched his scalp. Angelo slowed his pace and only then
did a sour dread seep into his veins. It was unexpected,
like a sip of tea sugared with salt. At the door to his house
he inexplicably knocked, intuiting that behind the heavy
wood door he would find a scene intimate and private.

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