Saltskin Read Free

sea wave toward her, whispering the name
only he used for her. 'Mama?' His voice upset him for it
sounded odd — it echoed about the stone walls and made
his throat constrict.
    He said her name again, low, warning. He moved
toward her, and as he approached, more of her was revealed
to him: her white forehead and then her closed eyes, the
bridge of her nose, the heart point of her chin, and he went
pale when he saw the bathwater swilled crimson rose and
the transparent waxy sheen of her skin.
    Angelo screamed and threw the eel across the room. He
made a dash at the bath, landing on the rim, whereupon
it capsized, drenching him with water. Magdalene slid,
heavy and awkward, onto his lap like a reversed pieta. He
grabbed at her, grunting as he tried to get a grip, but she
was rubbery and slippery and so very cold. He pulled her
from the hollows of her armpits, tried to stand, tried to
make her stand, but his feet slid on the newly muddied
floor and shot out from under him and he fell hard on his
back, with the dead weight of Magdalene on top of him,
her face in the crook of his neck. Angelo breathed hard
and jagged at the ceiling. His mouth worked spastically to
make sounds for help but he could not, his shocked face
pale as fatty hogget.
    He saw the black eel snake from its bag across the filthy floor,
    winding itself audaciously around the table leg, and he thought, we must get
    up now and tend to it. He lifted her arm and waggled it and a trickle of watery
    blood ran from the blurred gash of her wrist to his grubby fingers. Water
    from the upturned tin bath gushed out the door and made a path through the
    cobblestones and dirt, trickling past the basement window of the loom shop.
     
    Pierre glanced up from the trance of his work and felt
the twinge of hunger in his belly. He stretched and every
vertebra clicked; he moaned with the self-righteous pity
of the aged. He cracked his fingers and thought for the
hundredth time that day, I am old, and looked forward to
a slice of bread and a mug of beer. He moved slowly and
stiffly, as pious as a monk, for he insisted to himself that he
was better than most. Resting the bar of thread between the
wefts on the low loom, Pierre walked out into the street,
where he, too, caught on the air a whiff of discontent,
which he took to be the natural state of the world. He
ambled into his home and found the boy Angelo prone,
trapped by the dead body of Magdalene. He stepped over
them towards the larder, for his instinct was to pretend he
had not seen.
    But the boy had seen, and the image never left him.
His spirit snapped like cotton thread that had been bitten
through, and the shock turned his vibrant ginger hair grey.
The separation from his mother wounded him and he was
to spend the rest of his life trying to mend it.

2.
The Letter
    Winter set in with a vengeance. Hail and rain assaulted
London, carried on furious winds that uprooted entire
trees, blew off roof shingles, upended carriages and tossed
little girls off their papery feet. Angelo's clothes were
perpetually damp. The sun barely made its power known
through the grey density of fog, and frosty shadowed
corners rarely thawed. The stretches of daylight became
shorter and shorter and the shadows chased at heels. With
the dense mists it seemed always to be dusk; even the
dawns lacked the brilliant bursts of coloured light. Even
the moon was dark.
    Mildew grew to mould on the walls, and the crystals of
rising damp settled in the house and in their lungs, splitting
and growing. Angelo coughed up phlegm, his nose ran with
snot down the groove to his mouth, drying in crusts, and
his eyes were bloodshot and irritated with the stinging salt
of smothered tears. He could not find warmth anywhere.
And he bit his nails and made up scenarios as to why his
mother had had to leave him. The ultimate sacrifice — she
had to do it, for his betterment. But the bag of gold or the
long-lost real father or any such fancy never materialised.
And