The Lamplighters

48

He went to visit the birds on Friday, every Friday, before the sun came up. He climbed the hill, it was difficult in the dark, and unlatched the gate. The sound of the gate as it unlatched – click – was like a match being struck, and that’s how the sun knew when to come up. The sun would say, Arthur’s here, he’s lit the candle: it’s time.

It was a hostile path if you didn’t know it well. Divots and grooves lay in wait; tufts of overgrown grass, bleached and dried during the long hot summer, scratched his bare legs. He’d sooner have worn trousers, but it was time and motion, his father said; he had to be dressed for school.

When he got there, Mrs McDermott would make an example of him: ‘The state of you, Arthur Black; you look as though you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards.’ Sometimes in the rush down to the primary his laces unravelled, he tripped and scuffed his knee, or a tree branch snagged his blazer. There’d be a splash of bird shit on his shoe. The children called him Bird Boy. He didn’t mind. Being high above the sea, the gulls cooing and warbling in the soft shadows of the rafters, was all he desired, the kind of contentment that sat in his hand like a paperweight.

At lunch, when the other boys were flicking custard at each other and slipping baked beans up their noses, Arthur thought of the birds. On the sports field when Rodney Carver thrust into him with a rugby ball and hissed, ‘Go on then, you scrawny-arsed girl,’ he’d have visions of their wings diving down from the hillside, a cloud descending on Rodney and the despotic PE teacher, whose pale, freckled, hairless legs visited Arthur in dreams like the left-behind pork rind of his mother’s Sunday roast.

With the birds he wasn’t lonely. Sometimes he sketched them, watching their bodies shuffle awkwardly over each other, feathers shivering, pellets of crap splashing on wood. The smell was of deep, unused cupboards and the faint tang of meat paste.

When his father had first shown him the coop – ‘Come on, Tuppence, do you want to see something clever?’ – Arthur had staggered with him up the hill. ‘They get better,’ he’d said, ‘then they fly away.’ Nobody knew why the birds fell from the sky. Arthur found them outside the front door or among the yew berries in the garden, their wings slapping the ground. His father woke him in the night: ‘Look, lad, quiet now, gently now, see…’ The twilight mystery of his father’s cupped palms and the quivering body inside; its heart thrumming, exquisitely vulnerable and soft.

Loneliness hardened in Arthur’s stomach. At home each room was silence except for the ticking of a mantel clock. His mother drifted about half asleep while her husband tinkered with watches in a back room, slowly growing myopic. He couldn’t recall what his father had been like before the war – lighter in the shoulders, softer in his smile; now his old claws scratched, leaving blood on the bed sheets. The house woke at four in the morning to a sharp cry, like a chair being scraped from a table.

Frequently he could feel his loneliness: he could locate it with his fingers and if he pushed too hard, it hurt. If he ate quickly, it hurt. He drank a lot of water, to flush it out, but it never came. He kept expecting to see it after he’d visited the lavatory. Small and blue. Afraid. He did not know what he would do with it. He did not know what he would do without it.

The sun arrived as a smelted line, fierce orange, throwing kindling across the sea. Arthur detected the lighthouse from here, a yellow eye peeling soundlessly open.

At school he learned about the tower. He found it incredible that men lived on there, a family of three, and this seemed to him the answer for he’d never be lonely again, then, with two others who couldn’t get off. While the boys in class put up their hands to answer questions about shipwrecks and the engineer Stevensons, melancholy sanded a nook in his heart. The lighthouse reached for him in a way that was indescribable, yearning, as if it was sad and it needed him.

He learned about sailors drowning on tooth-sharp rocks, swaying masts by the hunter’s moon, the metallic chime of a death bell, vomit spraying, shit stinking, merchants’ bellows as their stocks sank and those on land waited for riches to drift into shore. He read Treasure Island and thought it marvellous that a storyteller and a lighthouse builder could be part of the same family. He learned about the men who erected the sea towers, how a lot of them died, how they worked on half-sunk slabs miles from land, blown sideways by cross-winds, their hands salt-splintered, fixing blocks to watch them wash away, or, once finished, to witness years of toil topple on a high sea. Nobody ever admired their work because nobody ever went there.

On his eleventh birthday, he saw the white bird. It was larger than the rest. It flew in off the sea, as pure as snow, and looked at him with a pinkish eye.

Later, he asked his father, who said, a dove? Arthur said, no, not a dove. What then? I don’t know. His father went to look. When he came back, he told Arthur that there was no white bird, what a bloody imagination, you don’t get birds like that out here. But I saw it. Course you did. Now go get me my matches, there’s a good lad.

49

Arthur woke with a start, the black night close. Thick wafts of dream floated dumbly to the surface. Only it wasn’t night, it was morning. Eight thirty. It was the curtain that made it dark. He drew it and saw Bill in the bunk opposite. Christmas Eve.

He held his hands in front of him, palms turned upwards, as if in offering for his life, something loaf-sized, a newborn baby. Memories or inventions, he could no longer tell them apart. When he shut his eyes, visions of Tommy remained. Hazel eyes. An outstretched hand. Where did his boy go in these halfway hours?

Frequently, when alone, he heard it. A tap of footsteps. A rustle in a dark corner. A scrape down deep in the store when the others were asleep, but when Arthur reached it, he could only stand there confused, like an elderly man at a bus shelter.

Vince was at the window, looking back to shore.

‘What are you waiting for?’

‘Nothing.’

Arthur judged how the young man’s size and strength compared with his own, the long legs, the wide back, but there must be a weak point, if nothing more than the element of surprise. He put the television on; there was a piece on the one o’clock news about Ghaffar Khan. When Arthur moved, when he talked, it was as though in the strangle of a deep sleep. He felt inexpressibly heavy and withdrawn.

‘What’d you be doing at home?’ asked Vince.

‘Wrapping presents. Carols from King’s. It isn’t what it used to be.’

‘No. Course not. Sorry. I was forgetting.’

‘I don’t expect you to remember.’

‘But I should.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t. Anything else on?’

‘Some Davy Crockett pile o’ shite. Tea?’

‘I’m going fishing.’

‘Fishing?’ said Vince. ‘It’s freezing.’

‘Christmas tradition,’ Arthur said. Not that it was or would ever be.

The point was not to catch anything, the point was to sit and look. Ripples lapped beneath the dog steps. A chill darted into his coat. Shapes curled out of the mist, distorted and divided. He could feel the thing looking back at him now, intently, invisibly. It could come at him from anywhere, across the water or down from the sky. He didn’t know when that would be.

The sea smouldered, grey wisps playing over the surface. Looking up, he saw the tower was decapitated at the kitchen, with the fog gun sounding in the cloud.

Arthur heard a patter behind him, of lightly running footsteps, as in a game of hide and seek. Patpatpatpatpat.

He turned. Nobody there.

He was imagining too much these days.

The footsteps came again. Patpatpatpatpat.

A tinkle of laughter: a child.

Arthur put down his line and followed the curve of the set-off, right the way round until he was back where he started. The laughter skipped in and out of the mist, muted one second then ringing the next. A giggle.

Wait, he said, light-headed. Round and round. The fishing line dissolved and so did the door, nothing to mark where the circle was complete, and it occurred to Arthur that a circle had no start or finish, of course it didn’t, it just went on forever. One hand on the tower, the other in front, thinking at any moment he’d touch it.

What? A shirt collar. An elbow. Skin.

Wait, he said. Wait.

He stopped and listened, so the footsteps could catch up with him. Unsure which of them was running to find and which to escape. He advanced, the steps seeming by now too fast altogether, too fast to be contained on the warp of the set-off, too fast not to have come up on him already and rushed straight past. He tripped and fell and caught hold of an eyebolt, legs thrown and dangling over the sea. The gun blasted, high above. No one would hear him.

He felt for the safety line and dragged himself up.

Laughter pealed, tantalizingly near.

Hey!

A dry cough. A cat with a hairball.

Hey!

Arthur blinked.

He hauled himself to sitting and held the fishing rod. Immediately there was a tug: a youngster pulling a lock of hair. It tugged again, jerking him forward.

The line was taut. He drove his weight against it; it was heavy and grew heavier with every wrench, the line stretched to snapping but now he was bringing it up, and for a second it felt as though he was winning because there it was, a shape floating to the surface of an uncertain, mist-bathed sea, just as his dream had that morning, a shape horribly familiar to him and yet unknown. It was a shark, after all – but the dreadfulness of it was distorted by the mist and of course it was not a shark, and he wished to drop his line but a grim compulsion made this impossible, rooting him to the spot only to sit and see, as he had come out here to do, his eyes flinching from the sight but retained by the force of malign curiosity.

I’ve caught not a fish but my boy.

I’ve hooked him in his cheek.

The line broke. The boy took it with him, down, and disappeared in the murk; the surface parted and came together and all that was left was the mirror madness of the father’s desperation, looking down, his face twisted and strange.

50

The Spirit of Ynys had brought a turkey crown from the mainland and a bottle of red wine, which did along with tinned vegetables and a jug of Bisto gravy. No Christmas pudding, instead a can of spotted dick. Bill was cook. He chain-smoked over the pans.

Arthur pushed his food away. The more he watched Bill through the curling smoke, the louder it got: the sound of fingernails on plaster. Sometimes the scratching sounded very close to him, as if it could be on him or inside him.

‘Can you hear that?’

‘Hear what?’ said Vince.

Afterwards, in the living room, Vince found an Old Grey Whistle Test. Four men in a band called Focus, one on a keyboard singing in a high-pitched voice. At the end they sang ‘Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year’.

They watched the Queen’s Speech. Twenty-five years married to Philip; Britain about to join the Economic Community; the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Patience and tolerance were more vital now than ever, she said, in families as well as nations.

Arthur judged his nation of three. Private thoughts infected him. He wondered that it was possible to be so full of something that was not apparent to other people.

The others claimed the forecast was wrong. There was no storm on the way: Bill was going to be fine for his relief. Arthur’s head hurt. It had hurt for a week. It was hard to remember things he had done and things he had said. Not being able to worried him.

The mist had lifted. Through his binoculars, he saw land in the distance, boats, smudges of houses. He thought his wife could be staring back; they’d be signalling to each other without ever knowing.

He hoped Helen was happy; he hoped she found happiness.

It hadn’t been fair to marry her. He shouldn’t have married anyone.

He went down to the kitchen because if he was away, it might come. It might come when his back was turned, as it had in the fog, when he wasn’t paying attention, just as he hadn’t been paying attention on the day he had lost his boy.

Arthur filled a cup with water then ascended to the bedroom, where Bill and Vince were sleeping. He stood for a minute, maybe longer, in the doorway. He held the water like someone who had been asked to bring it, but who hovered, uncertain, until invited to come forward.

The pain in his head was sharp. Piano keys played in the wrong order.

Hey!

Footsteps ran up the staircase.

Patpatpatpatpat.

When he got up to the lantern, it was only a bird. A shearwater, wings on glass. It had found its way in through an open window. He let it fly about for a bit, hurting itself. Then he opened the door to the gallery and went back downstairs.

Darkness fell after four. The moon was so huge he could see its craters. A full moon: a bad omen. There was a connection between those cosmic things – the moon, the tides, the winds – that amounted to an equation, the closest man could witness to the signature of God. Arthur could not believe that a human had been there; a human foot with blisters and bunions and toenails in need of cutting had felt the moon’s surface beneath and it was real. Before science they believed that stars were holes in the floor of heaven.

The wind stirred. A keeper he had worked with on the Longships used to say the stays out here wouldn’t be as bad if you knew you could rely on your relief. If you could get ashore when you were meant to, that’d make it better. You could look forward to it without it getting moved at the last minute and messing around with you.

Arthur had invited the weather. The storm he’d inscribed in the log, writing it every day, summoning it into being by sheer force of will.

Later, when they found the journal, they would say that he had lost his mind. He was frail, unable, defective; he’d be better off abandoning the service. Better off at home with a wife who didn’t love him and every time he looked at her, he would see the face of their dead child and of the man she had betrayed him for.

Arthur had prided himself on his thirty years’ service. When he’d been given Principal Keeper, his noblest award, he’d pledged to wear the regimentals every day. Clean-shaven, shoes shined, it was a matter of dignity, his long-service stripes. People said, ‘It can’t do you any good, Arthur, doing that job, it can’t do you any good after Tommy; you should be with Helen, that’s where you should be, at home, with her,’ but the light was the only place he had left. Being here had saved his soul, but his head was gone away now, he knew, as if he’d left the house with it still hanging on the key hook.

Do you remember walking over the fallow field? I held your hand, soft and damp. We watched the swallows dive and soar. Sunset light. I loved you.

His reflection in the mirror was alarming. The pouches under his eyes had grown hard. His expression was not his own. His beard had grown full without him noticing and the noises in his head grew louder by the hour.

Outside, in the dark, he drew the sea towards him.

The wind blew a warning, up, up; from the bottom boulder rising a black and twisted thing, waiting always, ready now.

51

Arthur woke cleanly, like a swimmer breaking the surface. The wind was deafening. Around and everywhere the sea thrashed, sucking and slapping the granite, sending up whorls of spray. With the shutters closed the air inside was fetid and stifling, deathly cold, stinging the nostrils. His head felt clear, his thoughts transparent.

Boxing Day. Bill wasn’t going anywhere.

Arthur heard it again. He moved out of bed and went downstairs, down around the sweating inner wall, down into the weather, down into the sea.

His wife never understood why he continued to abide the water – but he saw no point in hating the place where their son had gone. For her, the sea had killed Tommy, his body brought back and burned, the ashes kept in a box. Arthur didn’t think a boy should be kept in a box, a five-year-old who in life had never been still for a minute. Instead he was here, in the ocean, where he would wash from north to south, from east to west. He would shimmer in the morning sun and dance circles in the twilight.

Helen said, how can you stand it, I don’t know how you can bloody stand it, and he never knew how to reply. To reply that this was where Tommy was, that he felt him here, would have hurt her. So, he said nothing. And she turned in bed, and Arthur thought of the neighbour lights he would see on middle watch, their reassuring company, reminding him that another man had his eyes open somewhere not far away.

If he’d said: When I’m there, our son’s not alone. He waits for me when I’m ashore, with you; he wants me back, his daddy. If he’d said that, she would have hit him, because Tommy was hers more than his. She didn’t know how Tommy’s death cry haunted him. It would never leave him. It was crusted in the stars and molten in the water; the dancing fire at dusk and the instant at dawn when he pinched the wick to black.

Arthur put a hand on the banister. When he took it away it left a misty print, shrinking and vanishing.

Nothing survived. Nothing was permanent. All was lost in the depths.

The entrance door, when he reached it, was as cold as his rocks. There was hardly an instant between feeling the marks and knowing their origin. Fingernails on the locking bar. Trying to get out or trying to get in.

52

The storm worsened. White lather spumed on top of mounting waves. The wind dashed and bawled. Thunder ground across the flashing vault.

Arthur climbed the stairs to the lantern. The walls dripped condensation. He expected to find it, too, on his own skin, as if there were no space between his body and the building that contained it, but when he touched his cheek it was dry and warm.

Vince’s watch ended. His began. He loaded the charges and the detonator tore into the cyclone, shouting a warning that was split by the wind. Waves toppled, crests broke, spindrift flew from the chaotic surface. Bolts of light cracked the churning dark, the sea black, the heavens black, the ocean heaping and foaming. His tower trembled against the onslaught, foam exploding from her base to her lamp.

Arthur closed his eyes and imagined falling forward. The thought of drowning did not frighten him.

A dart of lightning shot into the sea.

For an instant, the waves illuminated. Arthur thought he saw the boat. He couldn’t be sure until there was another clap and there it was: a flailing vessel.

Tiny. Wooden. A torn sail.

He heaved open the door to the gallery, blown back by wind and rain, and threw himself against the rail. It was a simple craft, a rowing boat, lifted and smashed on the swell.

‘Stay clear!’

His words were snatched by the gale. A burst of radiance and the boat reappeared. The oarsman came into sight and what he’d believed before he now knew.

Down the stairs, gripping the rail, his feet unable to keep up with his need to meet that sailor face to face. But before he had a chance to reach it, three floors down he heard the entrance door bang.

Patpatpatpatpat.

Coming towards him, up, up, childish laughter.

Hey!

Arthur turned on his heel. He lost the footsteps somewhere past the living room and it was only later, much later, that he went back down to look and saw the marks left there, not shoes but a bare sole, a little violin and five dots for toes.

53

By Friday the wind was dead, the rain soft now but constant.

Bill radioed the mainland.

‘Can you get someone out?’ His lips were scabrous, the skin around his fingernails torn. Sixty-one days on the tower.

‘Not possible, Bill, it’s heavy back here.’

Arthur stood behind him, observing from the doorway.

Bill turned. A gloss of sweat shone on his brow, in spite of the cold.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it tomorrow.’

‘Right you are, Bill, we’ll get someone out for you in the morning.’

Arthur thought, he thinks I’ve got it in me to hurt him.

He would have every reason, he knew, to hurt Bill. But then he thought of the rowing boat. The small head piloting it and the hand lifted in hello.

I see you.

Arthur wasn’t made of that and never had been. He could make a fist but not use it, however much he might like to.

Bill paused in the transmission. One day. One night. One more.

‘OK,’ he said, and there was another beat, a longer one, during which he hung his head and closed his eyes. The line pipped. ‘Over and out.’

54

‘Arthur, wake up. Wake up.’

He opened his eyes. The bedroom was a wormhole in outer space, soft blue interior, scattered with stars. Bill stood next to his bunk. Even in the gloom, because of the gloom, he saw his mate’s worried face, the sockets deep and the glint of his irises.

‘Wake up,’ said Bill again.

‘What is it?’

Bill’s voice was hoarse. Hardly a whisper.

‘Something’s happened.’

‘What?’

‘He’s gone.’

‘Bill.’

‘Vince. He’s gone. Just now. He’s gone.’

Arthur peered at those ink-bright eyes.

‘Bill,’ he said, ‘you’re dreaming.’

‘I’m not.’

‘You’re not making sense.’

‘Are you?’

‘Bill—’

‘Are you awake?’

‘Sit down. You’re walking in your sleep.’

‘He’s dead,’ said Bill. ‘Vince. He’s gone. Just now.’

‘I’ll get him.’

‘I saw.’

‘I’ll get him. I’ll show you.’

‘I couldn’t,’ said Bill. ‘I tried.’

‘Wait.’

‘We were outside. It came from nowhere.’

‘Sit down, Bill.’

‘It came from nowhere.’

‘Sit down.’

‘Vince was shouting. I couldn’t—’

‘I’ll get him.’

‘I tried. But the sea.’

‘It can’t—’

‘He’s gone. The sea. He’s gone.’

Arthur heard the soothing wind and the gentle surge of the water. He could not hear music from a cassette player, or smell cigarette smoke.

His feet met the floor; he pulled on his trousers and sweater. He knew it was too late, but that was the thing: what happened on his tower was his cross to bear.

Behind him, in the pit of the bedroom, Bill lifted an object from the cupboard. There was a sliver of time in which Arthur turned his head and realized what that was, and a series of thoughts ran through his mind, one after the other. He thought of his father leading him up the grass-knotted hill, the soft ferns against his bare legs, the warble and shuffle of the gulls in the rafters. He thought of the sea glowing yellow at sunrise, of nebulous clouds tinged with pink. He thought of the first lighthouse he had been stationed on at Start Point, and the keepers there, older than him, with their throaty laughs and sour-smelling pipes, climbing the iron staircase and grinding their fags out with the hard pads of their thumbs. He thought of Helen on their wedding day, of kissing her; her telling him they were going to have a baby and the joy he’d felt when she had. He thought of Tommy, always his, the light that never lowered. He thought of the thousands of times he had put a candle on the sea and the many sailors who’d steered their ships by it. He thought how sorry he was for what happened to them, his wife, his friend, now and in the past, and for never being able to make it up to her.

He thought what a shame it was for it to end this way, in loss and confusion, because he had made mistakes and he wasn’t the man he’d been. Arthur had liked loneliness, but in the end, loneliness hadn’t liked him; it had done things to him that took parts of him away and it wasn’t enough to be on this island, after all. There was an instant in which he realized what object Bill had picked up, what Bill intended to do with it, before he opened the door and the bar of sedimentary rock collided with the back of his head.

55

Bill hadn’t meant for Vince to drown. But once Vince had drowned, the rest seemed straightforward.

Jenny always told him that he never stood up for himself. His father had said the same. Bill would have liked to stand up to his father. He’d have liked to put his hands around the old bastard’s throat – his hands or his belt, the old bastard’s belt – and squeeze.

He lifted the PK’s body from the bedroom and dragged it downstairs. It was heavy; he had to switch to hauling him over his shoulder and carrying him that way, like a soldier in the trenches, saving another man’s life.

He had never seen Arthur’s feet. The nails were cut short, the toes smattered with hair. Poor fool hadn’t had time to put his socks on.

In the hall at home, above the shrine of his mother, there’d been a ship’s clock with Carpe Diem stamped across the top. Bill thought of her smile, her admiring eyes.

Helen’s smile. Helen’s eyes.

He reached the kitchen. Threw his burden to the table. Blood smeared across the laminate top, trickling from a now indistinguishable place – the smash in the PK’s nose, his split eye and temple, but those injuries were lost amid the mess of blood and bone. Bill saw he had done more than was necessary, but he’d had to make sure.

Adrenaline made him strong. His heart beat wildly; his breath was ragged, stimulated, the oxygen fresh. His hands before him were stained the colour of iodine. It impressed him how effectively his mind was working, how sharp were his thoughts. In the morning, the relief boat would come. Bill would explain. No one could blame him for these tragedies, and no one could hold him accountable for what he did later, once Jenny had calmed, once it was deemed acceptable to go after a dead man’s wife.

How could his marriage be expected to survive? How could he be expected to return unchanged? There would be no expectations. For the first time: none.

Bill wiped the PK’s hands and then his own. He cased his own fingers in gloves then lifted the clock from the wall and set it ahead, to eight forty-five, the time of the son’s demise. Helen had told him that on the settee at Masters, when she’d turned up one day, asking for Jenny. Jenny had been out, so Bill had made tea and listened while she talked and cried. She told him everything, right down to the detail. Eight forty-five in the morning. In the end, to kiss her was the only kind thing.

Arthur was leaving his signature. It was as close to an admission as they’d get.

Bill put the batteries back the wrong way round. He pressed Arthur’s fingertips to the places he had touched. Then he climbed two floors to the living room, where he changed the clock there, switched the points and took it back down for the same.

Now he stood over Arthur’s body, thinking what to do with it. It was hard to believe this was the man who’d made Bill feel so small. The master PK: felled like a tree.

Wiping the table relaxed him. Bill cleaned its top, its sides, its underside, the chair and the marks on the floor. He didn’t hurry; he took his time. He rinsed the blood down the sink and then he cleaned the sink, and then he balled the cloth into a fist and threw it out the window into the sea. Next he lifted two plates from the dresser, stepping over the PK in order to do so, and two sets of cutlery from the drawer. Again, he knelt to brush Arthur’s hands over these items before setting them all on the table, with two cups, salt and pepper, and a nearly done tube of mustard.

The jar of sausages was a conceit. Arthur told him once that sausages had been Tommy’s favourite. Bill didn’t need to incorporate the detail, but he did because it made him feel diligent. Attentive. All the things a good lighthouse keeper should be.

With the kitchen stage set, he made tea in the PK’s mug and took it up to the living room, where he sat in the PK’s chair and thought about the PK’s wife.

Helen deserved happiness. She would be happy after this. Bill vowed to spend the rest of his days chasing down her happiness, and when he found it, he’d nail it to the bed where they made love every night and he’d never let her go.

How deep would Vince be now? How far down? Bill had the faint concern the SAK’s body would wash up, but it didn’t really matter if it did. He had his story. They’d have no reason to disbelieve it. Arthur had lost his senses, killed his Supernumerary and meant to kill Bill too. There had been no other way but for Bill to defend himself.

He was sorry, he’d tell them, for the old-timer, he was; he’d liked Arthur, and it had been a shock, what he’d turned into and what he’d become.

56

Vincent Bourne ought to have died many times before he did. He ought to have died when he was born, due to the umbilical cord getting wrapped around his neck and the midwife who delivered him not noticing until he was blue. When he was four and living with the Richardsons, he’d walked out into the road in front of a car and the car had swerved at the last minute. At fifteen he’d fallen off a twenty-foot wall, breaking his arm.

All these episodes in his life adding up to the eventual payback: his number called on this particular date at that particular time.

He’d been smoking on the set-off when it caught him. Not a boat with Eddie Evans or a mechanic with an alias. None of the things he had convinced himself of.

The air was crisp. The sea pitched on, rinsing the boulders and rocks. Today, the world felt good.

He allowed himself to believe it was over. That, perhaps, there was no one out to get him. Nothing to be afraid of. The future lay ahead. Michelle wouldn’t care what he’d done; she knew him; she wasn’t going anywhere. Relief and lightness touched his soul. Happiness, he supposed.

Bill came down, looking carsick. Vince offered a fag, but the Assistant said no.

‘I should give up,’ Bill said.

Vince lifted an eyebrow. ‘That’ll be the day.’

What happened was simple – insultingly simple for a moment that took a man’s life. Vince flicked the butt and it landed on the set-off instead of in the water. He went to the edge to scuff it in, when very quickly the sea foamed up, as sudden as boiling milk in a pan. The tower seemed to sink, momentarily, like a dunked biscuit; then it came up again and the sea fell away. Vince fell with it, smacking his elbow, then his head. He thought, shit, and tried to hold on but there was nothing to hold on to. His head was leaking blood, making it difficult to see or concentrate. The water sucked him down over the concrete, and when the concrete was lost there were only the waves.

His muscles seized. His ears rang. The tower was gone; how could it be that he’d just been standing there, and now it was beyond reach?

All he could think of was Michelle. Her mouth, her arms, how it felt to go into them and rest his face in the soft, sweet hollow of her neck.

He lost the strength in his legs and the sea was pushing him further out.

Bill was shouting. Vince shouted back but he didn’t know what he was shouting, if they were words he was using or a different noise he had never made before.

57

Bill drank his tea, sitting in the PK’s chair. It wasn’t that he had disliked Vince. Liking had nothing to do with it. It had simply been too good a chance to pass up, so he hadn’t. Vince’s death was an exit sign. A way out. A parachute in a nosedive.

What he’d told Arthur was true. He had tried. When he had seen Vince in the waves, he’d thrown a rope across the water. It had been a weak throw, admittedly – too far for the Supernumerary to be able to catch it. Then it had dawned on him that he didn’t have to throw very well. Not if he didn’t want to.

Vince had fought awhile and it was then that Bill had decided, as coolly and evenly as he decided to get rid of one of his shells. When he knew it was one he could do without. He dropped the rope into the sea and stood, impassive, watching his comrade drown.

Tomorrow the men who came would say, yes, we see it now, oh hell, what an unfortunate business. But Trident House would choose to keep it quiet. They would award Bill a prize for his bravery, promoting him quickly to another light.

Months on, he would leave the service and take Helen with him. He would marry her. They would move away from the sea.

Possibly he would tell her the truth, one day. Possibly he wouldn’t. It depended how upset she was; how pleased she was that he was the one who had lived.

58

A noise from downstairs made him startle.

Bill doubted whether he had heard it, but then it came again:

Patpatpatpatpat.

Far below, way below.

He took a hardback from the living-room bookcase – Prehistoric Man by J. Augusta and another faded name. The PK would be addled; that ought to do it.

You’re a stupid boy, he heard his father say. Check, don’t assume. I knew you’d cock this up.

Bill went down to the bedroom, his back to the wall, round and down, but when he reached the kitchen Arthur was lying exactly where he’d left him.

Hey!

He turned. ‘Who’s there?’

His voice echoed down the spiral.

‘Who’s there?’

Patpatpatpatpat.

He descended, the book held high, telling himself it was the wind. When he reached the entrance level, he felt reassured. The door was closed as it had been.

The only person on this tower was him.

Still, he checked the gunmetal and shook the bolts across as far as they would go, before securing the locking bar. He resolved not to open it again until there was somebody living on the other side.

Evening arrived though it was close after four. The day swam beyond the horizon.

In spite of what happened, the light was put in as it always was.

Bill was the last man alive. Sometimes, on middle watch, he would pretend this was true. That everyone on the planet had perished. He would turn the transmitter off so he could no longer hear the ships talking to each other and he’d sit with his back to the shore lights.

The Maiden glowed steadily, a head torch in a mysterious cave. Bill had been caving once, at school, and recalled the tight passages and claustrophobia. They had been roped to each other’s waists, slithering through oily warrens like babies about to be born. The caves had seemed organic, like intestines. All it took was for one of them to lose his head. He’d banged his shoulder, fear surging, thinking he could neither breathe nor move, before a shove from behind splurged him into an echoless chamber and the worst was in knowing the only way out was back the way they’d come.

Rigor set in and Arthur’s corpse stiffened; hauling it up four floors nearly finished him.

Next to Bill in the lantern, the Principal Keeper’s body was a shadow bulk, mountains at dusk in winter. It was fitting to keep a companion for these last hours, before doing what had to be done. By the time morning came, Bill would be shaken but coherent. He had never been creative – an unimaginative boy – but this wouldn’t take much elaboration.

First, he would show them the clocks. The meal for the dead son. Then he would show them the log. Years, Arthur had been living and dying out here on this rock, slowly losing his mind. It was bound to get to a bloke, after all. Couldn’t put up with it, sick and tired of it, sick to death of it, the lights, the bloody lights.

Ashore, they would marvel at how Bill had survived.

What a tale it would be, and Bill Walker its hero; it would be passed down through generations like the tale of the keepers at Smalls.

Through the night he polished every surface, as if preparing the tower for burial. He scrubbed and scoured each step between the kitchen and the lantern, every inch that Arthur’s body had touched. No mark or blemish escaped the scrutiny that only lighthouse-keeping had taught him. Bill left no trace.

Downstairs, he worked swiftly; he did not like to linger long in that underbelly, soft with shadows and the mystical shapes of dinghy and rope. He did not like to think of the noises he had heard or the laughter, the whispers that circled, imagined, just imagined, a product of the task and the aloneness. He could not open that door.

From Arthur’s cabinet, he collected the rocks. Many times, he had seen the PK lean over them. It seemed fitting that their weight should now carry him down.

Bill took a dozen and left the rest. Nestled among the ones he’d chosen was Helen’s silver anchor. There it was, then. Arthur had claimed it back for himself. Bill smiled, fastening the chain around his neck.

59

Tonight, the light burned beautiful. Across the sea the Maiden lantern dispatched her beam, smoothing a path through which ships could pass without fear.

It was difficult getting Arthur into the overcoat, the arms locked, his joints dense and awkward to manipulate. Bill rested the Principal Keeper on the gallery rail. He packed his four pockets with stones.

One push would be all it took. Bill thought of Helen at home, going to bed, unaware that in the morning her life would begin again.

He drove his weight against the man on the bar and leaned as hard as he could.

Hey!

Running footsteps, a child’s laughter.

Patpatpatpatpat.

A jolt from behind. Bill grunted, knocked off balance. Footsteps came at him from every direction. Whispers. A whistle. Then another blow, shunting him forward.

Alarmed, Bill gripped Arthur’s body. Horror stole his breath, and whether it was that alone that joined them or a thing he could not name, he had no time to think, for next the weight of the dead man dropped, and dragged him over the rail.

White wall sped past, ghostly, everlasting. Arthur’s body fused to his and together they smashed into the cold, liquid dark.

Briefly Bill lost consciousness; he sliced his leg and hit his head. His ears were flooded with blood and terror and water. Over and over, he thought, no, this isn’t it, pointlessly, over and over. Arthur’s mass drew him down, while Bill rolled in a surfeit of fear, his legs thrashing and fighting, and the more he thrashed and fought, the more the sea engulfed him. Blood filled his nose and mouth; it seemed to fill his head.

In desperation, in shock and regret, he gripped the keeper who kept him. Arthur was Bill’s guardian, the man he had always wanted to be.

In the dark, in the dim, from a distance the scuffle resembled a flock of gannets, scrapping over fish entrails. Agitation on the surface, a few muffled cries. Nothing to hear but seals calling sadly for each other.

Through the mist of Bill’s drowning, there came a boat, its captain leaning over, his hand outstretched.

In a glow it arrived, a lamp-bearing wanderer down a long tunnel. Its sail was windless and torn. The hand that came to them was small.

Arthur’s touch left him and the cold bit him like an apple. The boat took Arthur in, warm, home; Bill clawed for it, but it had not come for him.

On the lighthouse gallery, a hundred feet up, the metal door blew closed. A white bird circled the top of the tower before heading out to sea.