The Salt Marsh (6 page)

‘We've met. Nukiller trains.'

She was flattered by his recognition; she was more likely to remember other people's faces than they were to remember hers these days. She had become invisible since Jim's death, saying nothing and disappearing.

‘Nukiller trains,' she said. ‘That's right. The meetings.'

The meetings had been Luke's idea. Luke had talked it through with Dave, because Dave had contacts in Greenpeace and he knew about the power station. Dave had said, in his usual dismissive way, that he didn't think a protest would achieve much, but he could put Luke in touch with a couple of people if he thought it would help. Luke had sweet-talked the landlord of the local pub, persuaded him to let them use the back room. They had stuck up posters and dished out a few flyers in the insular towns scattered around the marsh. Lydd. New Romney. Rye. The meeting had attracted only a handful of people and over half of those had been from the archaeology group Sam had joined the previous June when she first came down to Dungeness with Dave. Not much local interest in protesting against a power station that provided jobs.

The man with the beaky nose and black ponytail had slipped into the back of the room late, unnoticed except by her, because she was sitting at the front, her mind wandering while Luke held the floor. His oily fisherman's jumper sagged off his bony frame and gave him the appearance of a scarecrow. At the end of the meeting, as everybody was shuffling around to leave, he had stood and announced he was there because he wanted to protect the ancient powers of the land from the destructive evils of capitalism and the nuclear industry. Luke rolled his eyes. After the meeting, Luke said he distrusted ageing hippies, the sixties generation who talked about revolution and the dawning of a new age while amassing personal fortunes from selling industrially produced natural products to the gullible and guilty middle classes. Softy sell-outs. Luke was concerned that the hippy's rambling might put other, saner people off – he wanted to stick to the science. She was less doctrinaire than Luke. She saw magic in a kestrel swooping and didn't see a contradiction between matters of science and the soul. Nature was her spiritual retreat, an escape from her own darkness, solid and real when all else around her vanished. And anyway, she nursed her private, nagging preoccupation with the occult, her dog-eared copy of
Daemonologie
always close to hand.

The hippy had reappeared at the second meeting in early May. The room was packed this time – Chernobyl had done a better job of attracting people than their posters. He spoke again. The waste transportation routes were negative leylines, he said, emitting bad energy, destroying the earth's natural magic. People nodded politely. Luke repeated the rational arguments, the risks of nuclear waste transportation, the impacts of exposure to radiation. Accidents happened at nuclear power stations – look at Chernobyl – so why should anybody believe the promises that transportation of nuclear waste was safe? He proposed a local protest at the railhead where the spent fuel rod containers were transferred from the lorries with their sinister black and yellow radioactive symbol to the train heading north to the Sellafield reprocessing plant. A small crowd, a few placards and, if they were lucky, a journo from the local newspaper. There wasn't much debate; everybody was in favour of the protest. Why not? It didn't require much effort, there was nothing illegal about it. The lorries weren't even well guarded. After the meeting, she and Luke had joked about the hippy and his leylines. But in her head, she had marked him down as interesting, tried to classify him. Two types of dark worshipper existed, according to King James and his
Daemonologie
: the treacherous witches that he despised so much and who were nearly always women, and then the male practitioners of magic – the Magi and necromancers who studied the heavenly sciences and summoned the dead. She had decided that the hippy was a Magus.

Up close, his eyes were solid black, iris and pupil indistinguishable. Stoned, undoubtedly, but something deeper there as well, a magnetic pull.

‘Are you...' The endings of his words dragged. ‘OK?'

She nodded, wiped her nose on her finger, sussed him out over the white line of her hand. About the same age as her father, she reckoned. Late forties. Or, at least, about the same age her father would have been if he were still alive.

‘I thought you were somebody else,' she said.

He seemed thrown by her statement – as if he half thought he was somebody else too – and he turned away, waved his hand at the silver Channel. ‘I'd be a bit careful down here at night. It can be confusing, the sand, the water. And the tide is...' His sentence drifted off.

‘I'm not staying much longer. I just came down to see a friend.' She was wary of giving too much away. ‘I'm driving back to London soon.'

He nodded. ‘Would you like a cup of tea before you set off?'

Now she was thrown – the prosaic nature of the offer, the prospect of being alone at night with a man she hardly knew. What if he was a nutter?

‘It's OK, thanks. I'm fine.'

‘If you change your mind, I live...' He pointed north along the shore. ‘The cabin with the grey window frames.'

He stepped away, respecting her space and solitude, she noted. She was the only nutter on the beach – shouting at the shingle, waiting for her boyfriend to turn up. She could do with a cup of tea. She had often wondered what the clapboard fishermen's cabins were like inside and, anyway, he wasn't a complete stranger; she'd met him twice before.

‘Hang on a moment. I'll come with you.'

She ran after him.

‘Alastair,' he said.

She was disappointed; she had half hoped he would be called something more romantic. Eagle. River. Thunder.

He said, ‘It's easier to walk along the low tide mark, where the shingle turns to sand.' His drawl contained the trace of a Cornish burr. ‘People used to wear flat wooden clogs so they could walk across the stones. Back-stays.'

She grinned, relaxed. She liked a bit of history, so long as it wasn't hers. So did he, it seemed: he reached the ends of his sentences when he talked about the past. He gestured at a rotting boat, beached above the high tide mark like a decomposing whale.

‘There's been a fishing community here for centuries. There's never been a harbour, though. The boats are hauled across the shingle. The fishermen stayed here in the winter then sailed round the coast to East Anglia for the summer. They had fishing rights there too. Den and strand. Rights to land and dry their nets on the beach.'

‘Do you fish?'

‘Me? No. I wouldn't know where to start. The only time I've caught anything is when I won a goldfish at a fair when I was a kid.'

He turned inland, treading an iron boat rail track embedded in the stones, the path marked by bleached driftwood spears, shards of twisted metal. They clambered over the ridges until they were on the flatter ground where the shingle was carpeted with prostrate broom and the beach blurred with flotsam gardens: poppies, blue glass floats, gale-battered roses, red-capped gnomes. They reached a black plank-clad cabin, its sombre windows overlooking the sea, bamboo wind chimes clinking in the breeze.

‘Have you lived here long?'

‘About a year. I rent it from an old lady, a fisherman's widow. She moved to a care home after she had a fall. She's not ready to sell the place yet.'

A rusty can with a long nozzle had been placed in front of the door.

She pointed. ‘What's that?'

‘It's a funt. A smuggler's lamp. You only see the light when you are looking directly at the spout. You can make Morse code signals with your hand. Places that are good for fishermen are good for smugglers. If you can land a fishing boat you can land a carrier.'

Smuggling. Drugs. Of course, that made sense – he was a small-time drug dealer, she reckoned; how else would an ageing hippy make a living out here at the end of the world if he knew nothing about fishing?

He said, ‘I use the funt to let people know whether I'm in or not. If it's out the front, they can knock on the door; if it's round the back, I'm not at home.'

He produced a key from a pocket, twisted it in the mortise. ‘I don't know why I bother locking up. The back door is buggered. Anybody could walk in that way if they felt like it. It's the damp rot. The older cabins are made from driftwood – some of the timbers must be ancient, reused down the centuries.'

He reached for a paraffin lamp hanging on a hook by the door, struck a match, twiddled the wick. The light guttered, flicked shadows around the timbered walls.

‘The storm last week,' he said. ‘It knocked my power out and nobody has been round to repair it. It's ironic, living next to a power station and being without...'

She finished his sentence. ‘Electricity.'

‘I'll put the kettle on. Milk?'

‘Yes please. No sugar. Thanks.'

He walked through an arch to a tiny galley kitchen, sent the gas whooshing as he ignited the stove. She stood still and listened to the noises of the night; wind sighing under the floorboards, gulls crying, and then another sound she couldn't identify. Tap tap tap. Silence. Tap tap again, this time on the other side of the room. A call and answer. Alastair seemed oblivious, he was gazing out the back window, head haloed by the solar glow of the power station. The tap tap ceased. Ancient timbers creaking in the wind perhaps.

She surveyed the shadowed room; wooden apple crates and cardboard boxes stacked against one wall as if he had only just moved in, or was forever poised to pack up and run. Not much furniture apart from a couple of chairs and a hefty oak desk strewn with notebooks, magazines, glass ashtray probably swiped from the pub. A school science lab test tube rack complete with six cork-stoppered test tubes sat awkwardly among the papers. Amateur drug-making kit? Best not to ask. He walked through from the kitchen holding two steaming mugs and she looked away from the desk, didn't want him to catch her staring at his equipment.

‘Death watch,' he said.

She twitched.

‘Tap tap.'

‘Oh. Death watch beetles. The tapping.'

‘Yeah, they only call each other in the evenings. It's the old timbers, damp wood – an ideal home for death watch beetles.'

‘Does the lady who owns the place know she's infested?'

‘I don't think it's worth bothering her. You can have death watch for centuries before the timbers collapse. She'll be long gone before this place crumbles. Sometimes it's easier not to know.'

She parked herself in a dilapidated armchair by a makeshift splintery crate table, its surface cluttered with animal remains: a line of bleached bird skulls and a selection of feathered wings, carefully arranged in descending size order. Below the wings, an unmacerated skeleton of some unidentifiable small animal, the bones still fused, shreds of skin and cartilage attached. She poked the pile with a finger, flinched at the feel of the rubbery flesh. He walked over, removed the decaying carcass and placed it in his pocket before he set her cup down in the space he had cleared.

‘It's a toad,' he said. ‘I'm gonna leave the bones outside so the ants can strip them clean.'

She pulled a face.

He said, ‘It was dead already. Like the birds.' He gestured at the beaky skulls and wings. ‘I find lots of dead birds out on the marsh. I don't know what it is about the marshlands, they attract death. That's where the toad came from too – caught by a crow most likely – they can't stomach the skins. Toads taste as bad as they look. The crows only eat the innards. Even rats leave the skin of the toad.'

‘Why do you want the bones?'

‘I'll wait for a full moon and throw them in a stream. That's how the Toad Men acquired their magic powers.'

‘Toad Men?'

‘Old English sorcerers.'

Toad Men. Sorcerers. She had been right, he was a Magus, a practitioner of the occult. Her hand went to her birthmark.

*

She retracted it when she realized what she was doing, hoped he hadn't noticed.

‘White or black magic?' she asked.

‘Toad Men? They could be either. That's the thing with magic, the ancient powers. You can start off with good intentions, but you get drawn in, you have to defend yourself against the accusations and curses, find some way of turning them around, reversing them, and before you know it, you are on the dark side.'

He caught her eye. She looked away.

‘It goes with the territory,' he said. ‘You have to learn to live with it.' He retreated to the chair at his desk. ‘Anybody who thinks life is black and white is kidding themselves anyway. Nothing is ever that clear.' He blew the steaming vapours across his mug and stared at its contents; a scryer searching for prophecies and omens in the tannin liquid. She selected one of the wings from his crate-top collection and examined its golden topside, ran her fingers over the outer blades, the comblike edge of the outermost feather. Barn owl, she decided, designed for silent, ghostlike flight. She brushed its downy softness against her cheek, realized Alastair had finished examining his cup and was watching her. She replaced the wing on the crate hastily.

‘Spliff?' he asked.

She nodded. He opened a drawer, removed a plastic bag of weed and Rizlas, rolled in silence, flicked a lighter, leaned back in his chair and inhaled. The smoke gathered, hung around his brow. He flipped the joint, angled the roach to her. She inhaled, exhaled. Inhaled again. The weed hit her harder than she had expected. The room pitched, the cabin like a gently rocking boat, becalmed in mid-channel, going nowhere.

‘Good stuff,' he said.

He twisted the silver skull ring on his left index finger, tipped his head at her coat, the Che Guevara badge she had fished out from the bag of her dad's belongings and pinned to her lapel above her nuclear power no thanks badge.