The Salt Marsh Read online

  *

  The conversation with her therapist gave her a bad night’s sleep. She arose fuzzy-headed. Saturday morning, ten a.m. Time to head south, to London’s periphery. Standing in the hallway, her brain checked the list of camping gear while her eyes followed a going nowhere snail trail that shimmered across the doormat bristles. She wondered why she had suggested the ceremony in the first place. She wished she could skip the graveyard, drive straight down to Dungeness. The phone rang. The second call that day: Luke had phoned her first thing. She wavered, pick it up or leave it? Unlikely to be Luke again. Perhaps it was Dave, calling from Skell to tell her he had spotted a bittern in the reeds or something like that. She enjoyed talking to Dave, but she didn’t have the time right now; she had to leave otherwise she would be late. Decided to ignore the call: if it was important they could leave a message.

  The dog next door howled. The phone rang and rang again and then the answering machine cut in with her disembodied voice. ‘There is no one at home to take your call. Please leave a message after the tone.’ The tape whirred. Beeped. A pause. A heavy breath, and then the familiar tune. ‘The Third Man Theme’. For a moment she thought Jim was on the other end of the line, whistling impatiently while he waited for her to pick up. Her hand reached for the receiver then stopped in mid-air when she remembered that was impossible. The whistling ceased. There was a clunk as a receiver at the far end was replaced. The cassette spooled backwards and left the red message light blinking. She retracted her hand, wiped the perspiration from her face, walked away, climbed the stairs, checked her bedroom window was closed. The floorboards lurched. She slumped, head down, knees up, covered her face with her hands. Who was whistling down her phone? She recalled her conversation with the therapist, the click she had dismissed as rain; perhaps somebody was listening to her conversations after all. Some weird knicker sniffer was letting her know they were out there. She didn’t want to think about it, block it out. She took a deep breath, returned downstairs. The red light of the answering machine winked in the gloom. Her hand hovered, index finger over play. She pressed the message erase button. And it was only then that she recalled her conversation with Luke earlier in the morning, and she wondered whether he had given too much away.

  *

  Inside the house where she had grown up, two suitcases stood by the front door. Liz was shouting instructions to Jess about some Folio Society special offer she had paid for but still hadn’t been delivered. Roger was leering in the background. Sam had realized, in the aftermath of her father’s death, that Roger had been hovering for longer than she had suspected. Leafing through an old family album, it had become apparent that Jim was more or less absent from the photographs while Roger appeared in nearly every one of them. Spritzer in hand, lurking in front of the blackcurrant bush at a summer barbecue. Hand to hair on a windy afternoon’s chance encounter in Greenwich Park. Why hadn’t she noticed before? Roger the Todger, they used to call him. They couldn’t any more, at least not within earshot of Liz. Partner was the coy term her mother used. Liz turned to her youngest daughter as she made her way into the front room.

  ‘Sam.’

  There was guilt in Liz’s enunciation.

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘I was worried you wouldn’t arrive in time for me to say goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye?’

  ‘We’re heading to the airport. The flight leaves early afternoon.’

  ‘Aren’t you coming to the graveyard?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘I thought you were leaving for Greece tomorrow. That’s why I arranged the memorial service two days early. To fit in with your plans.’ She hoped that sounded like an accusation. It provoked a marginally defensive response.

  ‘Roger found some cheaper tickets. If it were just a holiday, I would have waited. But it’s work and all the travel costs come out of the research grant.’

  In the fuzzy margins of her vision, Roger was gliding closer. She ignored him.

  ‘How is a cruise around the Greek Islands connected to your research on Marlowe?’

  Roger intervened. ‘Not Marlowe. We are doing a joint project on Milton.’

  She sidestepped, inserted her back between him and her mother. Milton was an uncharacteristic departure for Liz – she usually went for spies of sorts. Marlowe, Jim. Even Roger had once worked for the Special Boat Service. There was nothing to suggest Milton had ever been a spy, although he had worked as a political propagandist for Oliver Cromwell.

  ‘Milton? Isn’t he a bit... boring?’

  ‘Hidden depths.’ Liz said it without looking at Sam.

  ‘Really? I still don’t see the Greek connection.’

  Roger edged around Sam, pressed his hand against the base of Liz’s spine and propelled her in the direction of the door. The possessiveness of the gesture made Sam want to puke.

  ‘We’d better go,’ he said.

  ‘Paradise Lost. Classical references,’ Liz said. She was halfway through the door. ‘The Fall. I’ll phone to see how it went with your father.’

  Your father. Two years after his death and Liz still referred to Jim as ‘your father’ when he irritated her. She hovered on the threshold.

  ‘Speaking of your father, Harry called.’

  ‘Harry?’ She couldn’t disguise the shock. Liz seemed oblivious.

  ‘He said he needed to talk to you.’

  ‘Oh.’ She managed to say the oh casually, despite her panic. Why would Harry want to speak to her? Now? Perhaps she had summoned him up by digging out his photograph. Then it occurred to her that it could have been Harry who whistled down the telephone line; a signal she would know. A comforting explanation for the eerie call – she’d hold on to that.

  ‘What’s Harry doing these days?’ she asked Liz. ‘Isn’t he working for some weird part of Intelligence?’

  ‘Intelligence? How would I know? He was your father’s friend. Yours as well, it seems. The three of you...’

  Liz opened her handbag, faffed, pulled out a slip of paper, snapped the bag shut, handed the scrap to Sam.

  ‘Here’s his number. I hope you’re not involved in anything stupid.’ Liz hauled her suitcase over the threshold. ‘Roger says he thinks you can be a bit naïve sometimes.’

  ‘He what?’

  Her mother shut the door.

  *

  Helen and Jess lounged on the floor, dark hair curtaining pale faces, a cross of cards laid out between them. Sam was sandier than her sisters, khaki eyes to their sapphire blue, but you could tell they were related. Shared attitude if nothing else; the wayward sisters. Jess still lived at home, doing shifts at the local frozen-food supermarket, meagre earnings spent on her chopper that she used on weekend runs with the Outlaws, the local biker gang. Helen had moved out before Jim had died, scraped enough cash from the shop she managed for a deposit on a one-bed flat north of the river in Kentish Town. She sold trendy clothes to her nightclubbing friends. The poseurs, Jim used to call them. You can talk, Helen used to say. Helen reached for the card at the top of the cross, flipped it over.

  ‘Tarot?’ Sam asked.

  ‘The Moon.’ She held the card in the air, waved it in Sam’s direction. ‘Deception and shadows. Travel without a clear destination.’

  ‘Not my card,’ Sam said.

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’ Helen scooped the pack into a pile. ‘So we’re off to the graveyard then. Let’s get on with it.’

  ‘Do we need to take anything?’ Jess asked.

  ‘No.’

  Sam said, ‘Wait a minute. Are there any of Jim’s old things lying around?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to leave something on his grave.’

  Helen scowled. But then Jess said, ‘Liz cleared out the last of Jim’s junk before she left. She’s stuffed it in a rubbish bag in the cupboard under the stairs in case you wanted to take anything.’

  ‘Why has Liz cleared out Jim’s stuff?’

  ‘Two years. She probably wants to move on.�
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  ‘Or maybe she wants Roger to move in,’ Helen said.

  ‘Well, she might want him to,’ Jess said. ‘But she’ll think twice about asking him because she’ll lose her police widow’s pension if he does.’

  ‘Will she?’ Helen said. ‘That’s so fucking typical of the Force. What a bunch of sexist gits. She should have the right to shack up with whoever she wants to shack up with.’

  Sam silently disagreed. She had stopped off at the house a couple of weeks previously with Luke because she had wanted to introduce him to Liz. She had never been in the habit of introducing her boyfriends to her parents. Liz wasn’t really interested and Jim couldn’t be guaranteed to react to anybody in anything approaching a civil manner. She’d never been serious enough about anybody to want to introduce them to her parents anyway. But she thought she would give it a try with Luke. He was different. Roger had opened the door, much to her annoyance. Liz was there, but had taken a backseat. Roger had been ostentatiously hostile to Luke, subjecting him to a tirade of questions about his work as a photographer and the places to which he had travelled. Luke had answered Roger’s aggressiveness with his usual good humour. Luke was difficult to rile. Or, at least, he didn’t get mad about personal issues. Only politics. Injustice. Luke had laughed it off when Sam ranted afterwards. Roger’s behaviour was out of order, his questions tinged with a possessiveness that gave her the creeps, trying to establish himself as the dominant male of the household, showing Luke who was boss. He could get stuffed. If Liz wanted to hang around with him that was her business, but Sam wasn’t about to put up with him assuming he had some sort of responsibility for her. Ownership even. Jesus no.

  ‘Don’t let it get to you,’ Luke said. ‘Give him a break. It must be hard to be the new man edging his way into a family of feisty women.’

  ‘Maybe he shouldn’t bother then.’

  ‘Liz must have invited him,’ Luke reminded her gently.

  *

  She tried to dispel the image of Roger leering as she peered at Jim’s relics, dumped in the black rubbish bag under the stairs. Full of rubble. Pieces of unidentifiable electronic equipment, bunch of Yale keys, aviator sunglasses with one lens missing, blue Chairman Mao cap, Che Guevara badge. All of it extraneous. The last traces of his undercover life – a bag full of props for his false identities. The remnants of his legends. Perhaps that was the essence of Jim; a replicant, nothing but fake memories. What did that make her? She pinned the Che Guevara badge on her coat, next to her yellow and red smiling sun nuclear power no thanks badge, stuck her hand in the bag again. Lucky dip. Her fingers closed on a pile of small black soft leather-bound notebooks squished together with a rubber band. He must have been handed them for note taking, observations on objects of surveillance. There was nothing obvious to indicate they had been issued by the Force, but they were all the same and she couldn’t imagine Jim going out and buying one diary, let alone the same diary every year. She extracted one from the bundle and opened it at a random page. A doodle; Kilroy, the bald man with a big nose poking his head over a wall. Jim had scrawled ‘Kilroy was here’ below the picture. So much for diligent surveillance notes. She was touched by the casual scribble, a reminder of Jim’s errant schoolboy side, a trace of the real person below the cover of cop bravado. She closed the diary, spotted the gold embossed date on the front cover: 1984. The year of his death.

  ‘Are we going to do this or not?’ Helen had appeared from nowhere, leaning against the front door, tapping her foot.

  ‘Coming.’

  She stuffed the diary in her pocket, and returned the others to the rubbish bag, jammed it back under the stairs.

  *

  Crow trap country, that was where Jim was buried, out in the grubby edgelands among the gypsies and the criminals. May Day fairs she’d rather forget. They walked together, the three of them, paused under the lychgate – the first time she had been back here since her father’s funeral two years previously. She pulled her Oxfam raincoat tight, a comfort blanket she needed even when it was sweaty. Jim was buried on the north side of the church. A vast black bird was writhing on his grave, wings spread, lost in some avian anting ecstasy and oblivious to their approach. The crow lifted its head, caught Sam in its beady stare, flapped into a stunted rowan tree from where it continued its scrutiny. The bird’s eye drew Sam in until she was the crow, the bird on the branch, watching herself down below. Helen pinched her arm.

  ‘It wants to be your friend.’ She sounded jealous.

  The limestone tomb was already lichen-starred, the hard edges of his epitaph softened. ‘Jim Coyle. 10th August 1937 – 23rd June 1984.’ A shiny churchyard beetle was feeling its way across the engraved letters backwards, like a witch’s curse, a name invoked the wrong way round. elyoC miJ.

  She turned to Helen. ‘Do you think Mum should have put something more on the tombstone?’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Dunno. Rest in peace?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Might have helped.’

  ‘Helped what?’

  ‘The transition. The passage towards the light.’

  Helen scoffed. ‘The light? What light? There was no light with Jim.’

  Jess lit the spliff she had been busy rolling. Sam traced the cracked earth on the grave with her plimsoll, jabbed the loose soil. ‘How do we know he’s still down there?’

  ‘Where else would he be?’

  ‘Maybe somebody dug him up.’

  ‘Don’t be a wally.’

  ‘The earth has been disturbed.’

  ‘Must have been the crow. And anyway, why would anybody want to dig up Jim?’

  Sam didn’t have an answer to that.

  ‘You’d have to be bloody stupid to dig him up,’ Helen said. ‘Lord knows what’s buried down there with him.’

  Jess puffed blue smoke, passed the joint to Helen. ‘What do we do now?’

  Helen glared at Sam. ‘Search me,’ Sam said.

  ‘It was your idea.’

  ‘I know.’

  She had suggested it months ago, marked in her head as the line under her father’s death. And now they were here, it seemed pointless. Worse than pointless. She had no idea how to proceed. She squatted, eyes level with the yellow ragwort sprouting from the soil’s fissures, plucked and twiddled a seeded grass stem. Here’s a tree in summer. She ran her finger and thumb along the stem, pulled away the seeds, leaving a bare stalk. Here’s a tree in winter. She thought of Jim then, the morgue, his corpse, the husk. She held the grass seeds between her finger and thumb. Here’s a bunch of flowers. She sprinkled the seeds on the grave. Here come April showers. Death brings forth new life. Even the dodgy seed can reproduce.

  ‘We could improvise a Ouija board,’ Helen said. ‘See if we can contact him. Ask him how he’s doing.’

  Sam said, ‘The Ouija board only ever worked when you pushed the bottle with your finger.’

  ‘I thought you were the one who was pushing it.’ Helen cackled. Jess joined in. Sam said nothing. Helen jabbed Sam in the back with the tip of her ankle boot, leaned down, passed her the joint. ‘Although you know what really did work?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The House of Levitation.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Sam said. ‘God, that was strange.’ The House of Levitation; the ritual had filled the long summer of ‘76, the year of the drought when all hosepipes had been banned and it was too hot to go out on their bikes. Everybody wanted to be the corpse, because being dead didn’t require any effort. Of course, her sisters and their mates usually got what they wanted, so she had only played the cadaver once – lying on the warm soil, cardigan slung over her face, half dozing in the heat while Jess and Helen and three or so friends knelt around her and chanted. Welcome to the House of Levitation. This girl looks ill, this girl is ill, this girl looks dead, this girl is dead. And then suddenly she was up in the air, weightless, high above the heads of the chanting mourners, a fleeting sensation of flight and brilliant white light before
she had looked down, screamed and fallen back to earth. She wasn’t sure what she had experienced, but she couldn’t dispel the nagging unease, the pull. Her hand touched the birthmark on the side of her face.

  ‘What was the final line of that chant?’ Jess asked.

  ‘Light as a feather,’ Sam said. ‘Stiff as a board.’

  ‘Weird.’ Jess’s eyes were fixed on Jim’s headstone. ‘Perhaps he is still here. Hanging around, unable to leave and rest in peace. Maybe something is weighing him down.’

  The crow squatting on the rowan cawed, irritated, flew away.

  Sam said, ‘Do you ever see Jim?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Helen demanded.

  ‘Do you ever catch a glimpse of him in the street or propping up a bar somewhere?’

  ‘No. I don’t see him.’ Jess narrowed her eyes. ‘Do you?’

  Sam let the smoke drift out of her open mouth, curl away. ‘No.’

  ‘So why did you ask if we had seen him?’ Helen said.

  ‘Just making conversation.’

  ‘God, I’d hate to be stuck with you at a party.’

  Sam wriggled her hand in her pocket, felt the soft corner of the police diary, removed and placed it gently on the ground in front of the headstone.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘One of Jim’s diaries.’

  ‘Is that a good idea?’

  She blanked her sisters’ glares, stared at the diary, black rectangle against the brown earth, closed book. She searched for something to say, the right words, but they didn’t come. Neither of her sisters spoke. They stood heads bowed by the grave and only the rooks could be heard. Eventually Helen said, ‘Some things in this life will never be resolved. And Jim is one of them.’