Salt Story Read Online Free Page B

that stage of the night, he was dealing with Sarah the Warrior Princess and she possessed a bicycle.
    I fled into the deep, dark night. He was fleet of foot but I was so much fleeter by wheel. I could hear his footsteps thudding behind me and his throaty, anguished cry, ‘Sarah, Sarah!’ I rode that bicycle like a demon. My heart thumped with whisky and hubris. Took the corner at the town hall and gunned it home.
    Well. Sounds good. I took the corner and gunned it, like, I ramped the throttle on an iron charger throbbing between my thighs and performed an attention-seeking rumble-streak down the highway. The truth is, I came to grief quietly and in slow motion when I hit the curb outside the kindergarten.
    The whole Christmas party crashed with me; a half-empty bottle of wine (not half-full by this point), my handbag, mobile phone and my beautiful grey coat, which I still haven’t found. (If you have found it, please give it back. You will never be able to wear it in this town and anyway, it’s itchy.)
    My body hurt a bit but my whiskyed adrenalin helped me out of the gutter and I rose to travel the road once more. I’d forgotten all about my bereft toothfisherman and was alternately giggling and nursing a rapidly swelling elbow. If you fall off, then you gotta get back on again, was my reasoning. Yes?
    The second crash really hurt.

OH, ’TIS MY DELIGHT, ON A SHINY NIGHT...
    Salt thought he would give me training in some more nefarious activities. In the middle of the night, he took the boat straight to the buoy roped to a skeletal, submerged tree. Silken clouds strained the frugal moonlight across the water.
    â€˜No lights. No talking – voices carry across the water,’ the ancient mariner growled at me. The net, with extra-heavy lead line, was sunk below the surface. An hour later we pulled up fat black bream that gleamed golden like dollars in the murky waters, eight inches apart. We hauled in that net in fifteen minutes flat, dumping it fish and all onto a hasty tarp, leaving the unmeshing till later.
    Salt was jollier than I’ve ever seen him. He was back on the game, faithful to his ancestral roots and he belted out ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’, forgetting all about his own earlier cautions.

    When I was bound apprentice in famous Lincolnshire
    â€™Twas well I served my master for nigh on seven years
    Till I took up poaching, as you shall quickly hear
    Oh, ’tis my delight, on a shiny night
    In the season of the year.

    As me and my companions was setting out a snare
    â€™Twas then we spied the gamekeeper, for him we didn’t care.
    For we can wrestle and fight, my boys, and jump from anywhere.
    Oh, ’tis my delight, on a shiny night
    In the season of the year.

    Over water darkened by paperbarks lining the banks, I handled the boat and was guided back to shore by Salt’s gravelly rhyme and song, the decks smelling of clean, fresh river fish. Well, he’s trolleyed, I thought. He’s been drinking cask wine. We’ll be bush-bashing for hours to find our camp again. How will he find our launching spot in this melancholy maze of strange groves and rivulets? Every landing looked the same to me in the sulky midnight gloom.
    He guided me straight to the tree that my elastic-sided boots lay beneath. I pulled the boots onto my bare feet and then backed the four-wheel drive down to the water in the dark. Salt, that canny old sea-dog, had just presented me another tutorial on the practical theory on one of the finer arts – and how fine it is only the initiated know.

NO JOB FOR A SOBER MAN
    â€˜The best place to be,’ said Salt. ‘No slinking around the paperbarks tonight. Right here, where everyone can see us.’
    The last time we visited, we had the place to ourselves. Now, the moment we crunched on to the little beach, people were everywhere and especially interested in us, it seemed. I hoped Salt knew his stuff.
    I chucked the swags