The Salt Marsh (9 page)

She extinguished the torch, eased the photo of him into her back pocket, tried to sleep. She could still hear his voice in her head, smell his sweat, feel his weight on her. Not only the dead that haunted. Desire, she thought then, was as much a madness as grief, like being possessed. She searched for a soft spot on the hard earth, dozed, stars turning around her head, a distant green flame dancing, a will-o-the-wisp tempting her into the marshlands.

The cooing of wood pigeons woke her, coral sky above, ground cold below. She reached over to touch Luke, and then she remembered she was alone and felt a stab in her side, a pain of absence. She sat up. The willow leaves rustled. She held her breath. There it was again – something heavy pushing through the undergrowth. She wrestled with the zip of her sleeping bag, pushed herself to her feet, out of the hut. A muscular badger barrelled past her, almost knocked her sideways as it crashed through the nettles, desperate to return to its sett. She laughed. Scared by a badger. She surveyed the meadow; rabbits scampered and waved their scuts. Rooks mingled with the lambs. And then the early-morning peace was shattered by the noise of an engine revving. Behind her. Luke? She pounded down the mound and heard the vehicle pulling away. The road was hidden by a line of stunted willows and the mist that hung above the sewers at dusk and dawn. She made a beeline for the boundary, feet slipping on dewy grass, came to a halt at the channel's bank, stood on her toes among the reeds. Too late.

*

She couldn't see anything. Diesel engine, though, she could tell from the sound it made. She walked along the field's border, searching for footprints or other giveaways that might reveal the presence of an intruder. Nothing. She was on edge. Just a farmer doing his rounds, checking his flocks. A colony of pipistrelles swept through the morning mist, swarming before they returned to their roost. She was letting her mind wander too far; time to drive home.

She traipsed back to the Lookers' Hut, rolled up her sleeping bag, cast a final glance around the shelter and spotted a rusty horseshoe lying in the disused hearth. She'd not noticed that before. She walked over, kicked the horseshoe with her foot and dislodged a clump of hair that had been trapped beneath one of its ends. Curious, she squatted, prodded the strands with her fingernail. It definitely wasn't Luke's hair, far too straight and dark for that, which was a relief. She poked in the loose earth and dislodged something solid, half buried. She scrabbled and eased out a small black object. Not a stone. She blew the dirt from its surface – a bone. She examined it, rolling it in her hand. Sheep bone. No, there was something improbably human about it. She panicked, dug. Searching. Her fingers touched hard surfaces. Pebbles. Old brick. Broken glass. She gouged out fragments, dirt behind her nails, fingers scraped and oozing blood. Gripped by a sudden, irrational fear that Luke's body was lying under the soil. She dug and dug until she was satisfied there was nothing there. No more bones. And then she sat back on her heels, wiped her forehead with the back of her arm, licked her lips, tasted the salt. Laughed at herself. Of course Luke wasn't dead and buried here in the Lookers' Hut. She was becoming a crazy woman, love sick.

She picked up the small bone she had found, examined it again and tried to assess what was in her hand. New? Ancient?

*

Charred, possibly. An animal – if not a sheep then a cat. What was it doing there? Was the bone connected to the hair? The horseshoe? Impossible to tell. She thought about Alastair's crate-top mortuary – bird skulls, toad's carcass – and speculated that the objects could be some kind of spell or charm left by a superstitious Looker. Smuggling, dissent, witchcraft, Alastair had said they all went hand in hand out here on the marsh, the contested ground. She laughed at herself. Too much hanging out with ageing dope-smoking hippies who collected toads' bones. They were random objects, finds of an archaeological field walk, a surface hodgepodge; a stray lock of hair caught under an abandoned horseshoe, the bone the remains of somebody's dinner. Still it amused her – calmed her – to have a story, no matter how irrational, to explain her findings. Shepherd's charms. She decided to leave them in the hearth. Then a chink of doubt made her scoop up the bone and hair again, wrap them in a tissue and place them in her pocket. Next time she saw Dave, she would show them to him. Ask for his expert opinion on the bone. Sheep? Cat? Human even? It was the kind of thing he found interesting anyway – body parts, decomposition. She could entertain him with her theories.

She whistled the familiar zither tune to herself as she crossed the bridge and clambered into the van. She couldn't keep the notes out of her head.
The Third Man.
The film's shadows and tunnels played in her mind, and she wished she could banish them, these persistent reminders of the dark places inhabited by her father. She focused on Luke. He had driven back to London because she hadn't turned up at the Lookers' Hut at six. She would find a message from him on her answering machine when she returned to Vauxhall, and it would explain exactly what had happened. She was sure of that. She released the handbrake, glanced over her shoulder; Saturn gleamed on the horizon.

FOUR

S
HE WIGGLED THE
key in the lock. She felt at home here in south London. Dave had been part of the comfort. They met at a party the previous year: she was leaning against a wall canoodling a cigarette when Dave gravitated to her side, and they discovered their common experience – the recent death of a parent. He had studied biochemistry at Oxford and was completing a PhD at Imperial. He told her, with his Brummie accent and a wry smile, that he was researching marine biota anthropogenic radionuclide concentration in the immediate environment of a nuclear power station. You what, she replied. He was measuring the amount of human-produced radioactive shit that ended up in the flora and fauna around Dungeness. Caesium 137 was his speciality. Was there a lot of radioactive shit in the fish from Dungeness then, she asked. Not so much as there was around Sellafield, he said, where all the waste products from the nuclear industry were processed; the Irish Sea had much higher concentrations of anthropogenic radionuclides than the English Channel. Phew, big relief for us southerners then, she said. Cod generally contained the highest levels of radionuclides, he explained, because of its position in the food chain. She made the requisite joke about fission chips. He said eating the cod wouldn't do anybody any long-term damage anyway; you needed a ton of the stuff for that. How do you know it won't do any long-term damage, she spluttered. It's been tested, by scientists, like him, he added, at Dungeness, in the experimental research station where he analysed the concentration of caesium 137 in samples of marine life collected from the beach and exposed other samples of marine life to caesium 137 to monitor the impact of different levels of radiation.

He was exactly as she would like her older brother to be if she had one, she decided – quirky, dead-pan, clever. She had turned to him when she was disintegrating and he had invited her to share his house in Vauxhall. Well, it wasn't exactly his house. A short-term lease from a housing co-operative on the far edge of a square of once grand and now run-down houses inhabited by a rebel alliance of Birk-wearing tofu-eaters, ageing anarcho-syndicalists, Spanish punks and militant earth mothers. The tide of London's redevelopment had not yet reached Vauxhall. The square was a rubber dinghy of alternative living in a sea of mouldering council estates, drug dealers and MPs who mistakenly thought they were purchasing a second home in the more salubrious enclave of Kennington down the road.

‘I think he's got a thing about you,' Jess had said after she had helped Sam to move in and Dave had skulked around, joining in with their banter.

‘Just because we get on. You always think everybody has a thing about everybody else.'

She was irritated with her sister for bringing sex into the equation with Dave, tainting her comfort.

*

She had been unsettled when Dave had decamped to Norfolk for six months, left her living alone temporarily. Although Luke was around a lot, of course, filled the space. Still, she missed Dave's company. Dave had been awarded his PhD just before reactor number four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, 26 April 1986. He had watched the news reports coming in from the Ukraine with fanatical interest. The explosion had sent a plume of radioactive isotopes high up into the atmosphere. Caesium 137. Iodine 131. Strontium 90. The cloud headed east on the prevailing wind.

‘The most volatile isotopes take the longest to return to earth,' he said. ‘In a few days' time, the plume will be a mass of caesium 137.'

He became obsessed with the weather, constantly phoning a meteorologist friend for news. Dave provided her with a running report; the wind had shifted direction, twirled around. South. West. North-west. Heading their way. Then he was outside the front door, in the middle of the street, craning his neck and eyeballing the clouds, heavy with foreboding.

‘If the plume hits this lot, we're fucked.' He sounded grimly satisfied with the prospect.

‘Why?'

‘Because we'll be drenched in radioactive rain.'

The storm clouds swept across England and burst on the northern uplands. Dave observed that every cloud had a silver lining and, in his case, it was a surge in demand for experts on the environmental impacts of anthropogenic radionuclides. The phone started ringing. His head, bespectacled and prematurely balding, appeared on late-night news programmes, spouting stories about the half-life of caesium 137, radionuclides rained into the ground, sucked up by grass roots, eaten by sheep and cows. Radioactive roasts and glowing milk bottles. Although, of course, he added as an almost disappointed afterthought, the scientific evidence so far suggested it was unlikely the levels of contamination in Britain would be high enough to have any major impact on human health. His performance earned him a six-month research post at Imperial's field centre in Skell: baseline mapping of caesium 137 in the biota of Norfolk's saltmarshes.

‘I'm going to miss you,' she said.

‘Come on. You've got Luke. He's practically moved in here. I'm beginning to feel like a gooseberry in my own home.'

‘Don't be silly. You know Luke always wants you to join in.'

‘Yeah. Exactly.' Sam ignored his tone. In early May, as she was planning the protest in Dungeness with Luke, he had hired a van and transported half his gear to some academic's second home in Skell. Left her feeling guilty in Vauxhall.

She shoved the door with her shoulder. The dampness made it stick. The door gave, she stumbled into the hall, the answering machine flashing in the dim light. She leaped over and pressed the message button, watched the spools on the small cassette rewind, stop and play. A crackle on the line, then Luke's voice cut in and prompted an instantaneous surge of relief.

‘Sam. Are you there? Will you pick up? It's me. Luke.' Pause. ‘Oh god, I hope you haven't set off already. Oh shit. Look, Sam. I'm so sorry about this mess. I have to go. Something has come up. I can't hang around here. Listen, there's something else... Dave... Don't worry, OK. Everything will be fine. Really. I'll call.'

She replayed the message. Her immediate relief was replaced with acute anxiety. The message was so strange, the tension oozed from the answering machine.
I have to go. Something has come up.
What was that about? And why did he mention Dave? She dialled Luke's home number, twisted the skin on her forearm between her finger and thumb while the phone rang and rang. No answer. She made some coffee, called Luke's number again. Still no answer. She replayed the message he had left. The tension was palpable, but now she heard sounds and intonations she had missed the first time. Fear. Real fear that made her skin prickle. And at the end of his message there was a sudden crackle of background noise, as if he had opened the door of the telephone box and the white noise of the external world had intruded. Was that a voice? She couldn't quite make it out, the quality of the recording wasn't clear enough. What time had he called? Her first conversation with him, the one where he had called to tell her he was already in Dungeness, had been at nine. She left the house at ten, so she reckoned he must have left the message shortly afterwards. Ten thirty perhaps. She replayed the tape again. ‘Don't worry, OK. Everything will be fine.' Why did he think it was necessary to say that? Because he was worried that everything wasn't going to be fine? What was going on? She eyeballed the phone, willed it to ring. It did. She leaped for the receiver, jammed it to her ear. A pause filled with electronic twanging.

‘Hello. Sam, is that you?'

Liz. Her heart sank.

‘Hello, Mum.'

She could hear her own voice bouncing around in electronic space.

‘I'm sending you a postcard.'

‘Great. Thanks for letting me know.'

‘I'm writing a recipe on it. Vegetarian.'

‘Recipe?'

‘A traditional Greek recipe. We went to a taverna yesterday evening when we arrived.'

We. Sam didn't want to know about we.

‘Roger bumped into this man he knew and the man gave him the ingredients for the recipe. You have to try it.'

Typical. Liz hardly ever phoned her and when she finally bothered, it was at the moment that she was hoping somebody else would ring. And she wanted to talk about a recipe.

‘Mum. I was at the graveyard yesterday morning for Jim's remembrance ceremony, you know, the one you were supposed to come to but didn't, and then I went down to Dungeness and camped out overnight. I've only just got home and I'm too tired to talk about recipes. But thank you for thinking of me.'

‘Try the recipe,' Liz said.

Sam couldn't quite be bothered to contest.

‘OK, I will.'

‘Good. The really interesting thing about
Paradise Lost
, of course, is that Satan is a sympathetic character.'