The Lighthouse

CHAPTER NINE. Oranges

Futh wakes in pain. His swollen brain is throbbing and the light hurts his eyes. He closes them and goes back to sleep. When he next stirs, it is late, mid-morning, and he has missed breakfast again.

He goes into the bathroom. Feeling fuzzy, holding on to the edge of the sink, he turns on a tap and splashes his face, his bed-warmed and sleep-steeped skin shocked by the cold water. He drinks straight from the tap, daring to touch the end of it with his lips despite the germs which his Aunt Frieda has told him flourish on taps and drinking fountains. Without looking at himself in the mirror, he returns to the bedroom. Going to the window and opening the curtains, he is pleased to discover a dreary morning, an overcast sky, the prospect of a cooler day.

He does not remember looking out of this window yesterday, either when he arrived or when he went to bed. He does not recall checking for an escape route. It is just as well, he thinks, because this room is on the third floor and there is nothing to climb out onto and nothing to break a fall. Had he realised this, he would have spent half the night worrying about it and the other half having bad dreams.

He sits down on the bed, next to his suitcase. It was his honeymoon suitcase, a wedding present from his father, who was his best man.

Futh had first asked a man at work, who turned him down. Gloria said, ‘Aren’t you going to ask Kenny?’ So Futh asked Kenny, who just laughed.

Then he asked his father, who, shaking his head, said, ‘Have you got no one else?’ But he did it, and he took Futh out for a drink and said, raising his glass, that the French called this ‘l’enterrement de vie de garçon’. ‘The burial,’ he said, ‘of a boy’s life.’

They held the wedding reception in the function room of a local pub. There was a dance floor on which his father slow-danced with Gloria, and onto which Angela’s mother kept trying to persuade Futh, and which Angela repeatedly refused to leave despite Futh’s preference for an early night. And there was a buffet which was drying out by the time Futh left Angela on the dance floor and went out into the corridor to get away from the disco’s noise and flashing lights.

At the far end of the corridor, a back door was propped open and through it he could see one end of a patio in darkness and rain beginning to fall. He stepped outside and a security light came on, illuminating him on the empty slabs. There was a square of lawn, edged at his end by the patio and the wall to which the security light was attached. Running down one side of the lawn was the outside wall of the corridor, and on the opposite side a hedge screened the garden from the road. At the far end was the wall of the function room which he had just left, and above that the bedroom which he had booked for the night.

He wandered onto the wet grass. Rain always reminded him of meeting Angela at the motorway service station, the smell of his wet coat in her car. He ambled down to the end of the garden. He reckoned that if he stood anywhere else he could be seen from the function room, but standing against its wall he could not. And moreover, the security light sensor apparently did not reach that far. The light went off and Futh stood in darkness outside the function room, in thick grass between patches of nettles, enjoying the rain smell and remembering Angela.

‘What you can smell,’ he had said to her on some rainy woodland walk, inhaling deeply, ‘is bacterial spores. They are stored in dried-out soil and released by rainfall and carried in the damp air to our noses.’

When Futh began to feel really wet, he headed back inside. As he crossed the lawn, the security light snapped on again and he felt like an animal in headlights, about to be mown down.

He did not go back into the function room but slipped past the open door and went straight upstairs to the bedroom. He heard the party continuing without him, and it sounded louder, he thought, than it had done when he was down there. He could hear the voices shrieking through the floorboards, feel the pulse of the disco music under his feet.

He went to the window and peered out, looking for his escape route. The room had a view of the lawn, and the patio on the far side. It was a dormer window — beneath it, the roof sloped away. Although he could not see down to the ground, he knew that if he had to jump he would land on grass, or at worst in the nettles near which he had been standing a few minutes earlier. Satisfied that he was safe, he drew the curtains.

He peeled off his damp clothes and hung them over the cold radiator and the backs of the chairs to dry. He took off his watch and put it down on the dressing table. Opening his new suitcase, he took out his wash bag and went to the bathroom. Angela’s wash bag was already in there and he rummaged through it. He smelt a few of her products, and tested them, scrubbing his skin with her exfoliating cream in the shower. After towel drying himself, he trimmed his fingernails and toenails. He powdered his feet and put some of Angela’s replenishing night cream on his face and neck, and balm on the thin skin around his eyes. He combed his hair and brushed and flossed his teeth.

Back in the bedroom, he looked through his suitcase for the outfit in which he would be going away, laying it out ready for the morning. He reassured himself that he had brought his wallet, the travellers cheques, the booking confirmation for the flight and the hire car and the honeymoon accommodation, lining all these things up next to his watch.

He put on his pyjamas, got into bed and switched off his lamp. He lay there, smelling of Angela, noting the total absence of light in the room — none coming in from outside, no little red dot from a television on stand-by, no digital display of red or green numbers on a radio alarm clock — and he waited for Angela to come up.

Some time later, he was woken by the security light at the back of the pub flashing on, glaring through the curtains. He got out of bed to look outside, reaching the window and drawing aside the curtain just as the light went off again. He stood in darkness, listening to the wedding reception still going strong down below.

He opened the window, appreciating the cool night air. He wondered whether there was anyone out there, in the garden, but he could not see a thing — there was not much light from the moon — and he could not hear anything due to the noise from downstairs. He stood there for a while looking out at the night, his duvet-warmed feet growing cold on the bare floorboards, before he caught the smell of cigarette smoke coming in through the open window. After a minute, the security light snapped on again and he saw Angela in her wedding dress, watched her crossing the patio and disappearing through the back door. Anticipating her now coming to bed with the cigarette smell on her skin and in her hair and in her mouth, he closed the window and drew the curtain again.

He got back into bed, meaning to lie awake and wait for Angela but instead falling asleep. He woke with no idea what time it was or if Angela was with him. It was dark, and it was quiet, the reception finally over. He reached across to Angela’s side of the bed, half-expecting to find it empty, instead feeling the mound of her body beneath the covers, touching her skin which was still cold from having been outside. He whispered, ‘Are you awake?’ but she did not answer. He went back to sleep.

In the morning, they had breakfast in the dining room. Futh took a small continental breakfast from the buffet and went to sit at a table with his father and Gloria. He poured a cup of coffee for himself and one for Angela, but he did not start eating, preferring to wait for Angela who had wandered over to the cooked breakfasts. Turning to look for her, he saw her standing talking to Kenny. Angela, glancing up and seeing Futh watching her, made her way back to the table without a breakfast. Kenny turned back to the buffet, filling his plate.

‘He’ll be hungry,’ said Gloria. ‘He didn’t get here until all the wedding food had been cleared away.’

‘I didn’t know he was coming,’ said Futh.

‘Of course he came,’ said Gloria. ‘He wouldn’t have missed this for the world.’

Kenny came to the table and sat down with his full English breakfast. ‘I don’t get this at home,’ he said, picking up his knife and fork.

‘You would at my house,’ said Gloria, but Kenny ignored her, cutting into his sausage and egg.

Futh began to say to Angela, ‘This is Kenny,’ but he was interrupted.

‘They’ve already met,’ said Gloria. ‘They met last night.’

Futh said, ‘They met before last night,’ and Angela looked surprised. ‘You met at the university open day,’ he added.

Kenny, forking a piece of black pudding, wiping it in the spreading yolk of his egg, said, ‘Do you remember that, Angela?’

She nodded, but gingerly, as if it hurt.

Futh said to Angela, ‘I’ve known Kenny since infant school.’

‘We were neighbours,’ said Kenny. ‘He pissed himself in my bed.’

Futh broke open his croissant and looked with annoyance at the way it fell apart, at the brittle, greasy flakes covering his fingers and his plate.

Angela seemed dazed. She pushed her black coffee away without drinking it, putting her forehead in the palm of her hand.

Futh looked up and said, ‘You should have come to bed when I did.’

Angela, without taking her head out of her hand, said, ‘Yes.’

When everyone had finished, Kenny took out his cigarettes and offered them around the table. When Angela declined, Futh, thinking that smoking was something she had learnt to do in secret, said, ‘Have one.’ He was more than happy for her to have the occasional cigarette. It would be months before he came to dislike the smell of it on her.

Looking confused, she said, ‘I don’t smoke.’

Kenny lit up and Futh excused himself, wanting to call the taxi company to make sure that the taxi was not going to be late.

When the taxi came, late after all, it was raining again. Futh held his coat over Angela’s head as they hurried from the pub to the waiting taxi. They got in the back and Futh opened his window to smell the rain. After a few minutes of riding along like that, Angela leaned over and closed it and Futh caught a whiff of Kenny’s cigarette smoke on her. He sat there in his damp coat looking out at all the rain and it was, he thought, a bit like the night he and Angela met at the motorway service station.

The honeymoon was dreadful — they had delayed flights and lost luggage, twin beds and upset stomachs, bad weather and arguments about Angela having to do all the driving, and then the hire car broke down.

‘It was bad,’ Angela told people afterwards. ‘I’m not sure you could have a worse holiday.’

With the exception of their honeymoon, for which Futh was responsible, Angela took care of all their holidays. Even at Christmas, it was Angela who arranged for them to visit her mother, her father, his father, and Futh just went with her. Last Christmas, though, for the first time, they made separate arrangements and Futh went alone to his father’s flat, which was really Gloria’s flat, chosen for its proximity to Kenny and his family.

Futh drove over on Christmas morning. He had only been driving for a few months, had only ever driven to and from work, and never in the snow, which had fallen unexpectedly overnight. Angela had been picked up by her brother after breakfast and taken over to her father’s house. Futh, leaving soon afterwards, found that his car refused to start in the cold weather, so he took Angela’s. Searching for a scraper with which to clear the windscreen, looking in the glove compartment, he found a small towel. He took it out and found it all crusted up. He sniffed it and put it back, clearing the windscreen with a credit card.

He could not see how to change the heater settings and a fierce jet of initially ice-cold and then increasingly hot air blew directly onto his toes as he drove up the empty motorway.

Gloria let him in with a smile. ‘Come in out of the cold,’ she said, taking the hat from his head before he was even through the door, slipping his coat off his shoulders, unwinding the scarf from around his neck. When the front door shut behind him, the hallway seemed very narrow; the space in which he stood, between the closed door and Gloria, seemed rather small. He felt naked without his outerwear on.

Gloria turned and led the way upstairs, her scent trailing behind her, and Futh followed.

In the living room, Gloria guided him past the dining table — already set with place mats, cutlery, wine glasses and crackers — to a seat on the sofa beside the roaring log fire. She filled a tumbler from a jug of mulled wine on the coffee table and pressed it into his hand. He took a few medicinal gulps of the piping hot wine and then leaned forward and put the glass down. Gloria topped up her own glass and sat down beside him, slipping off her mules and crossing her legs towards him, poking playfully at his leg with her big toe. He looked down at her bare foot, her hot-pink nail varnish.

‘Your father’s in a bad mood,’ she said.

‘Ah,’ said Futh. ‘Where is he?’

‘He’s in the kitchen.’

‘I should go and say hello.’ Futh leaned forward again, preparing to stand.

Gloria, putting her hand, her honeysuckle-pink fingernails, on his thigh, said, ‘No, you shouldn’t.’ Futh, after a pause, during which he picked up his glass again and took another scalding swig, settled back into his seat. Gloria’s fingers plucked at his trouser leg, tugging at a loose thread. ‘You’ve nobody looking after you,’ she said.

Futh glanced at her. Firelight glinted off her oversized earrings. He looked away. Already he was feeling sedated by the mulled wine and the heat, pickled and roasted like his father’s pork hocks. Once more he went to stand up, got to his feet and went to the window.

Outside, everything was buried under inches of snow. Futh leaned his forehead against the cool windowpane and watched a boy building an igloo in a back garden, the boy’s breath visible in the cold air.

‘Come back over here,’ said Gloria. ‘It’s lovely and warm by the fire.’

Futh stayed where he was for a moment, gazing out, as if he had not heard her. Then, lifting his head and turning away from the window, he walked back to the sofa. He sat down where he had been and Gloria returned her painted fingertips to his thigh. She moved her face a fraction closer to his and said, ‘You look so much like your father.’

‘I’m not like him at all,’ said Futh.

‘You’re more like your mother,’ said Gloria.

Futh watched the fire blazing in the hearth.

‘She left very suddenly, didn’t she?’ said Gloria. ‘She just disappeared.’

‘Yes,’ said Futh, ‘she did.’

There was a thud behind them and Futh looked up to see his father standing there with oven gloves on his hands, a roasted chicken on the dining table.

Gloria lifted her hand from Futh’s leg and wrapped it around her glass. Standing, slipping her feet into her mules, she went to stand beside Futh’s father, saying, ‘That looks lovely,’ but he was already walking away again.

He returned with a dish of vegetables and two bottles of wine. One bottle was almost empty and he poured the last inch into his glass, drinking half of it before raising the dregs to nobody in particular. ‘To family,’ he said.

Gloria sat herself down, straightening her cutlery and laying her napkin over her lap. Futh came over from the fire and took his place at the table. His father uncorked the other bottle of wine and emptied it into the three large glasses. He carved the chicken while Gloria dished out vegetables.

Futh took his plate and his father said, ‘So Angela’s leaving you.’

‘We’re separating,’ said Futh, lifting his cutlery, ‘yes.’

‘What did you do?’ asked his father.

‘What?’

‘Why’s she leaving you?’

‘I didn’t do anything,’ said Futh.

‘She got bored,’ said his father.

Gloria reached over and gave Futh’s leg a consolatory pat and a squeeze.

Futh put down his cutlery and stood up. He was closer to the window but went to the fire, crouching down in front of it and picking up the poker.

‘Some women,’ said Gloria, ‘don’t appreciate what they’ve got.’

Futh, stoking the still-raging fire, said quietly to himself, ‘And some people don’t know what’s theirs and what’s not.’

He did not hear his father moving from the table and crossing the room. He only knew someone was standing behind him when he was pulled up by his collar, turned around and smacked. He dropped the poker and it fell at his feet, its red-hot tip singeing the carpet. His father returned to the table. Futh picked up the poker, put it back where it belonged, followed his father back to the table and sat down.

They pulled their crackers and put on their paper hats. Gloria got a paste necklace in her cracker and wore that too, and they listened to the Christmas service on the radio.

After lunch, a rug was moved from another part of the room and placed in front of the hearth, covering the scorch mark made by the poker. ‘There you are, you’d never know,’ said Gloria, turning back the corner of the rug with her foot to take another look at the blackened carpet, poking at it with her bare toe.

His hangover is getting worse. Futh, drinking more water, wishes that he had thought to pack aspirin. He thinks about showering but just gets dressed instead, putting the lighthouse in his pocket and applying new plasters to his messed-up heels before pulling on his thick walking socks and, steeling himself, his boots. Then, zipping up his honeymoon suitcase and leaving it by the door ready for transfer, he sets off.

He walks two miles just looking for an open bakery. It is almost midday before he begins the day’s hiking.

His route takes him across cornfields and then into forest. It is late August, almost autumn, harvest time, but for now the leaves are still green and there are blackberries on the bushes. The undergrowth is busy with mice and lizards and the air is full of darting insects nipping at him.

There are rain clouds gathering and the darkening sky and the forest canopy make it feel like dusk even in the early afternoon. Here and there, he emerges into daylight, coming to viewpoints overlooking the Rhine. It is possible to see a long way, to see miles of river and railway track, boats and trains on their way to Koblenz or Bonn, or further, to Cologne or Düsseldorf, or further still towards Rotterdam and Utrecht and the North Sea. But he is not looking, is unable to think of anything except how much his feet hurt.

When he rests, he feels his feet throbbing inside his boots. He knows that his plasters have come away, but if he takes off his boots he does not think he will ever put them back on. He continues on his way, the path returning him to the gloomy forest.

He walks ever more slowly as the afternoon wears on. The path seems never-ending but the viewpoints have tailed off. In the fading light, Futh, with everything but a torch in his backpack, begins to feel that the path might now be taking him deeper and deeper into the forest and that he might never find his way out. He could believe that the trees themselves were, in the darkness, shifting and spreading around him, to enclose him, to keep him there. He can barely see where he is treading, cannot tell what it is that his boots sink into here or what cracks beneath them there. At one point, he stops and considers turning back, remembering something he has read about deep-sea divers getting confused about which way is up, thinking that they are surfacing even as they dive deeper. But he ploughs on, and finally the trees thin out and he emerges from the forest into the twilight, returning to civilisation, and the streetlights are coming on to light his way.

He has passed the midpoint of his circular walk, has walked more miles than he has left to go. He will be back at his starting point, back in Hellhaus, by the end of the week, and every step now takes him closer.

He abandons the rest of the day’s hiking. Finding his way to the station, he catches a train to his next overnight stop, resting his miserable feet and leaning his head on the rattling window against which the rain has begun to fall.

‘There were still shipwrecks,’ his father said, ‘after the lighthouse was built.’

Futh’s mother was sunbathing in a bikini top and shorts. She had taken off her walking boots and socks and stretched out her bare feet, but Futh still had his on. His father was wearing ordinary shoes and ruining them.

His mother liked to walk and Futh liked to go with her. There were hills where they lived, where the houses ended. You left the shop on the corner with your quarter pound of sweets in a paper bag and walked across a field and there you were, going up into the hills. The hills skirted the town. It was possible to walk for miles along the top without losing sight of their house, although his mother always kept walking until she did, humming tunes which were lost to the wind. His father never came, and his mother no longer asked him.

Up on the cliffs in Cornwall, his father was talking about wrecking and plundering, and telling some story about a ghost ship crashing over and over again into the rocks around the lighthouse, and Futh saw his mother rolling her eyes. He had seen this before, his mother fidgeting while his father held forth. This was how it always began, with his father going on in this manner and his mother rolling her eyes and twitching and sighing like some creature stirring. If, after some time, his father was still talking, his mother would begin with her provocative interjections. ‘Nobody’s listening,’ she would say, or, ‘Nobody cares.’ And then perhaps there would be silence, or perhaps his father’s temper would flare — he lost his temper easily but it was all over just as quickly.

She gave a great sigh. His father was oblivious. ‘The light,’ he said, ‘flashes every three seconds and can be seen from thirty miles away. In fog, the foghorn is used.’

Futh wandered off, as if there might be somewhere to escape to. He had in his hand the perfume, the silver lighthouse, which he had taken out of his mother’s handbag. Returning after a short while with the glass vial out of its silver case, he found his father still talking about foghorns, or perhaps he had been waiting and was just picking up where he had left off, and his mother said without opening her eyes, ‘Do you know how much you bore me?’

Futh watched his father silently placing the remains of the picnic in the cool box, packing the plastic plates and beakers into the rucksack, putting the lid on the Thermos of cold coffee and shaking off the picnic blanket on which only he had been sitting, a breeze getting up as he tried to fold it. Finally, with everything packed away, his father stood still. He looked at his wife lying in the grass with the sun on her, and Futh watched the gulls. He watched them until his mother, standing, said, ‘I’m going home,’ and then, looking down, he saw his hand and the blood where he was cut, the little bottle broken, his mother’s perfume in his wound.

The same afternoon, they collected their luggage from the caravan site and took the train back from Cornwall. His mother changed in the toilets, swapping her sun clothes for travelling clothes and putting on shoes with heels, slipping them off again as soon as she sat down.

When the train was moving, his father went to the buffet car and did not return until they were almost home. His mother fell asleep with her bare feet on the grubby floor, her short, pale-blond hair resting against the dirty window. The perfume case, containing the broken glass vial, was in Futh’s pocket. She might have known he had it, but did not ask for it back. His unwashed hands and his boots smelt strongly of violets. His mother smelt of the leftover orange she had eaten in the carriage before falling asleep. Years later, when Futh worked in the manufacturing of artificial odours, the smell of octyl acetate would make him feel sad.

He knew, sitting there on the rushing train, that his mother was leaving them. He knew that when the train reached their station, the holiday would be over and then she would go. He wanted the train to slow down; he wanted it never to stop. He wanted his mother to keep on sleeping, his father to stay in the bar. But the train sped on and the daylight went and through the windows, in the dark, Futh glimpsed the names of the stations they were hurrying through and he knew that they were almost home. His father returned from the bar, and the noise he made coming into the carriage looking for his seat woke Futh’s mother, and the train slowed, and trundled to a stop.

Futh can’t for the life of him remember his mother’s favourite song, how it goes, and as he walks from the train station to that night’s hotel he keeps humming at it, trying to pin it down. In the end, he almost has it.

Arriving at the hotel in wet boots, he finds that it has an indoor porch where other walkers have left their muddy footwear. He does the same, stowing his in a spare corner for the night.

Getting his key, he goes to his room and straight into the bathroom to run a hot bath. While he waits for the tub to fill he looks around the bedroom. He approves of the décor. The curtains and the bedding are made of the same material, with a nature theme which is echoed in the watercolour over the bed and the embroidered cover of the cushion on the armchair. The colours are picked out in the paint on the walls and the woodwork. He appreciates such womanly touches. He would like something like this in his flat.

He is satisfied by the sight of a fire escape immediately outside the window.

He undresses, packing his clothes straight into his suitcase, trying to keep the clean things separate from the dirty things. He thinks about doing some stretches like he used to have to do at school before running. He tries to touch his toes but can’t quite reach them and even then it hurts the backs of his legs. At first this makes him feel old, but then he recalls not being able to do it at school either. He was never any good at running anyway. He sits down on the edge of the bed and does some ankle exercises but they are excruciating.

He goes into his suitcase and takes out his alarm clock, sets it for the morning and puts it by the bed. On his way back to the bathroom, he stops by the window to look at the view beyond the fire escape — the night sky, the dark hillside, the moonlit river. He thinks of opening the window to let the night air in and discovers that the window frame is painted shut.

He steps gingerly into the tub, his raw heels stinging. As he lowers himself in, slowly reclining his weary torso, the deep water rises up. It washes against his jaw and his cheeks like waves against the hull of a boat and closes over his head.