Saltskin Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1. Angelo: London, late eighteenth century

  Chapter 2. The Letter

  Chapter 3. The Tapestry

  Chapter 4. Fathoms of Love: Dreaming

  Chapter 5. Night Cart

  Chapter 6. Jacob’s River, New Zealand

  Chapter 7. Train Station, modern day

  Chapter 8. Fishing: Dreaming

  Chapter 9. The Tower

  Chapter 10. Destiny Waltz

  Chapter 11. Mother Mary, 1970s

  Chapter 12. The Attic

  Chapter 13. Friday Night

  Chapter 14. Black Liquid: Dreaming

  Chapter 15. Ball Gowns and Small Towns

  Chapter 16. Lost Man

  Chapter 17. Dirty Deeds

  Chapter 18. Bathing

  Chapter 19. The Photograph

  Chapter 20. Singing: Dreaming

  Chapter 21. Intimacy

  Chapter 22. Hunches

  Chapter 23. Allies

  Chapter 24. Spellbound

  Chapter 25. Relics

  Chapter 26. Tombs of Time: Dreaming

  Chapter 27. Mermaid Skin Slippers

  Chapter 28. New Life of Forgetting

  Chapter 29. Blackout

  Chapter 30. Gilda

  Acknowledgements

  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 b
ravery 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. Bluecoat 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 su
rface 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.

  He pushed the door and saw Magdalene, her back to him, sitting in the tin bathtub, the shape of a woman’s curves, in front of the kitchen fire. Oh, is it wash day? thought Angelo, the way one ignores countless hunches, choosing the less frightening scenario — excuse, reason, version of the truth — stalling for a better answer. He stepped into the room. It wasn’t wash day — that was Wednesday. This was Friday, the day of the fish market. But Angelo was young enough not to have grasped the notion of date and time; for him it still moved in direct relation to his wishes.

  The kitchen was small and dank, its gloom exaggerated by the curtains drawn against the light of the morning. The dirt floor needed sweeping, straw and vegetable peelings uneven under foot. Angelo stood very still, like in the statue game, puzzled that his mother hadn’t waited for him. They usually bathed together, with him reclined between his mother’s legs while she sponged him clean with a cloth, her breasts nuzzling comfortingly at his back and her breath marking his wet face.