The Lamplighters

11

The time I think of you the most is when the sun comes up. The moment before, the minute or two, when night yawns for morning and the sea starts to separate from the sky. Day after day the sun comes back. I don’t know why. I’ve had my light safe here, shining through the dark and I’ll keep it shining; the sun needn’t bother today. But still he comes and still come my thoughts of you. Where you are and what you are doing. Even though I’m not a man who thinks about things like this, it’s now, in this moment, that I do. A man alone through the lonely hours, I nearly believe that because the sun keeps rising, and because I extinguish my light dawn after dawn as soon as it’s no longer needed, you might be there when I go downstairs. You’ll be sitting at the table with one of the others, older, perhaps, than when I last saw you, or maybe the same.

Eighteen days on the tower

Hours turn into nights turn into dawns turn into weeks, and on and on the wide sea rolls and the sting rain beats and the sun shines into evening, morning, conversations in the half-light, the never-light, conversations that never happened or are happening now.

‘Mastermind was on again,’ says Bill in the kitchen, fag in his mouth, hunched over his seashells. Every keeper needs a hobby, I told him when he started, and more’s the better if it calls for useful workmanship, a pursuit you can go at day after day until it’s perfect. An old PK I worked under taught me how to make a schooner and put it in a bottle. Personally I found it nit-picky, having to glue the sails just so. It took weeks of prep before I could slide it in and pull the rigging, and if I’d glued a whisker out of place the whole lot was wrecked. Loneliness pushes a man to his standards. I know this because I’ve been on the Maiden twenty-odd years and Bill’s done it for two.

‘Anything good?’

‘Crusades,’ he says. ‘Thunderbirds.’

‘You should have a go.’

‘With what?’

‘Whatever it is you know about.’

Bill blows his shell carving and sets it aside, then leans back in his chair with his arms behind his head. My Assistant has a studious, timid look, his hair lopped close round his ears, his features small and precise: if you saw him ashore, you’d think him an accountant. Smoke travels up his nostrils and escapes in twin jets from the corners of his mouth, where it joins the ghostly haze of whoever was puffing away in here last.

‘I know about a lot of things,’ he says, ‘but not enough about any one of them.’

‘You know about the sea.’

‘It needs to be specific, doesn’t it. You can’t just say to that old bastard Magnusson, ask me about the sea. It’s too big a topic, they’d never allow it.’

‘All right then, the lights.’

‘Don’t be a prick; you can’t have a specialist subject on your own job. Name: Bill Walker. Occupation: lighthouse keeper. Subject: lighthouse-keeping.’

He stubs out his Embassy, lights another. Given how cold it is this time of year, we have to keep the windows fastened, and seeing as this is where we do all our cooking and smoking, and all our smoking cooking, it’s heading for a proper fug-up.

‘Looking forward to having Vince back?’ I ask.

Bill expels air through his nose. ‘Can’t say I’m fussed either way.’

I take his mug and switch on the kettle. Out here our days and nights are organized by cups of tea – especially this time of year, December, heart of winter, when it gets light so late and dark so early and always so numbingly cold. Waking at four for my morning watch, back to bed after lunch, waking again later on, the curtains drawn, the afternoon gone. Is it today, tomorrow, next week, how long have I been sleeping?

The mug’s one of Frank’s, red and black with Brandenburger Tor written across it. Frank’s so finicky he’ll certainly take it with him when he goes ashore tomorrow, in case one of us nicks it. We all have our tea different so whoever’s making it has to remember. Even with Vince coming back and he’s been away weeks, we’ll make sure we get it right. It shows we pay attention. At home Helen never gives me sugar but I don’t complain, just go along with it instead of having the argument. Here we’ll get to teasing. You fucking halfwit, that fishing net holds on to things longer than you do.

Bill says, ‘D’you know Frank puts the milk in first? Bag, milk, water on top.’

‘Fuck off. Milk goes second.’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘The tea can’t infuse in the milk otherwise.’

‘If you’re using words like “infuse” you can get fucked.’

‘If I were that PK at Longships you’d be wise to watch your language.’ But the swearing’s like the tea: all the effing and blinding helps the conversation along. If you’re swearing at someone, you’re saying you’re friends and you understand each other. It doesn’t matter who it is, or that I’m the one in charge. We’ll slip back into it as soon as we’re here and put it aside as soon as we’re ashore. If the wives could listen in on five minutes of it, they’d be appalled. At home, we’ve got to bite our tongues off before we ask how the fuck she’s been getting on and how fucking nice it is to see her and by the way what the fuck are we having for our fucking tea?

‘There was this woman last night,’ says Bill; ‘she did the Solar System.’

‘There you go then, that’s bigger than the sea.’

‘Yeah, but it’s bloody obvious what they’d ask, the planets and whatnot. They’d ask about Neptune and Saturn and they’d definitely ask about Uranus.’

‘Never gets tired, Bill, you fucking idiot.’

‘But with the sea it’s less obvious. Everything about the sea’s less obvious.’

‘I like that.’

‘Not me. Don’t like what I can’t see.’

When Bill first came to the Maiden, I thought, how’s this going to go? Some men open up to you and others don’t. Bill was quiet, contained. He reminded me of a silverback I saw once, in London Zoo, staring out of a plastic box where the visitors came in. I’ve tried since to work out what exactly I saw in that animal’s expression. Anger and boredom, long burned out. Resignation for itself. Pity towards me.

There’s a lot of time for talk, especially on middle watch, midnight to four, when you find your conversations sloping down all sorts of dark alleys that you never mention again come the morning. Whoever’s coming off watch before you will get you up, fetch you tea and a plate of cheese and digestive biscuits and bring it all up to the lantern, where he’ll sit with you for an hour before going off to his bed. He’ll do this to wake you up, get your brain engaged so you don’t fall back asleep when you’re there on your own. When it’s Bill and me, he’ll tell me things he’ll wish he hadn’t in the light of day. How he should have been a different man and had a different life and said no at the points he said yes. How Jenny asks for the seashells he’s done, but he doesn’t want to give them to her. He’d sooner keep them to himself, like so many other things.

Upstairs for a sleep. The banana bunks took some getting used to when I started. Land men marvel at the idea – ‘There was me thinking it’s a joke, you’ve really got to sleep on those bloody bent beds?’ – but over the years my spine must have curved to accommodate them, because I used to get back pain after two months on the tower and when I went ashore I’d have the aches and soreness of a man twice my age. These days I barely feel it. Lying in a normal bed feels rigid and unwelcoming. I have to make an effort to fall asleep straight on my back, but when I wake up my chest is on my knees.

I should be gone as soon as my head hits the pillow. Whether the chance comes about at a backward hour of the night or early morning, or a brief, shadowy submersion before the middle watchman exhibits his light, we take what we can get.

Or I did, once, on lights gone by. These days sleep skitters away from me on dry, clawed feet. My mind turns to visions of the deep sea, and of Helen; visions of the tower as I see it when I’m ashore, just visible in the distance, and the vertiginous, disbelieving sensation of being there and here at once, or in neither place. I turn from the curtain that separates my bunk from the room; I watch the wall in the dark, listening to the sea, to my slow heartbeat, my mind turning; I think, and I remember.

Nineteen days

Brilliant sunshine means ideal conditions for Frank’s relief, which turns up late, just before lunch, seeing as the boat wouldn’t start. All in all, it’s a good getaway for him and a good landing for Vince, who even on a rough sea seems to step off the launch and onto the set-off with barely any trouble at all. Vince is young with black hair and a Supertramp moustache. It doesn’t take long for him to settle in. Everything’s got its place and we’re practised in unpacking our belongings swiftly so we can slot back into our responsibilities as efficiently as possible. Letters from home arrive in a sealed waterproof bag. There’s an official one for me, marked for the Principal Keeper.

‘That’s the end of it then,’ says Vince. ‘No moon for Brezhnev.’

We’re waiting for our grub while Vince talks about the Soviet rocket launch that exploded in the sky last month. It’s disorientating to hear about things in the real world, the other world. That world could cease to be and for a time we’d be none the wiser. I’m not sure I need that world. Any city, any town, any room wider than the length of two men lying down, seems frivolous with light and noise and unnecessarily complicated.

‘Bloody communists,’ says Bill. ‘Talk about a bunch of wet fucking blankets. What’s worse – the threat of war or just getting on with it?’

‘No way, man,’ says Vince. ‘I’m a pacifist.’

‘Course you bloody are.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Pacifism’s an excuse for doing fuck all. Except maybe growing facial hair and shagging your way across London.’

Vince sits back in his chair and smokes. He’s only been with us nine months but he’s as familiar as the kitchen dresser. I’ve seen dozens of keepers come and go, but some you grow to like more than others. I’m not sure Bill likes him.

‘You’re jealous,’ he says to Bill.

‘Fuck off.’

‘How long since you were twenty-two?’

‘Not as long as you think, you rude prick.’

This is how it is between them, Vince ribbing Bill for being an old man even though he’s still in his thirties, and Bill coming back like he’s put out. It’s meant to be good for a laugh, but it gets to Bill, I can tell. He never lived like that. He was married by twenty, Jenny already talking about having his babies. The lighthouses calling him in.

Vince has brought gammon from the mainland, which smells unbelievable frying on the stove with a cracked egg, spluttering and popping. It’s two weeks now since Bill or I have had meat that hasn’t come out of a can, and canned meat’s better than nothing but it’s not a patch on the real thing. Soon enough everything that comes out of a can starts to taste the same, of the can, whether it’s fruit cocktail or a slab of Spam. Actually, the Spam’s OK if it’s cooked, but if it’s just cold dumped out on the plate like Vince or Frank would do it’s enough to turn you vegetarian.

Bill’s cook today; he makes the best meals out of any of us. Vince is useless and I’m all right, although less enthusiastic about it because I do a lot of it ashore whereas Bill doesn’t do any. His wife does everything for him. Bill says that’s what it must be like being in prison, having everything done for you ‘save wiping your arse’, then Vince says it’s not like being in prison, since there wouldn’t be orange meringues or rum baba or women offering to rub your feet, would there? Bill says, s’pose you’d know, you crook. Then it’s up to me to smooth the waters, before it stops being a joke.

Vince says, ‘What do you think, Mr PK?’

‘About what?’

‘Keeping a lid on it, or letting it blow?’

I want to say that all this about the Cold War, about Nixon and the USSR and Japanese planes crashing out of Moscow, strikes me as pointless. If we all had a tower to be on and a couple of people to be with, just to be, without expectation or interference, to put in the light at night and extinguish it at dawn, to sleep and be awake, talk and be silent, live and die, all on our islands, couldn’t we avoid the rest?

Instead I tell him, ‘You’ve got to keep the peace if you can.’ And hope I can do that on this particular spell.

But Vince’s talk of spaceships reminds me of a time years ago. It was dawn at Beachy Head and I was alone in the lantern, about to let the sun step in, when I saw an object fall into the sea. It was a soft, foggy morning, early enough for lingering stars left behind, a morning so beautiful you wonder that heaven isn’t already here if only we took the time to look up and see, and then there it was, shimmering metal, shot out of nowhere, digested by the water and leaving no trace of itself. I couldn’t know its size or how far away it was because the sea looks eternal from way up there.

I did see it and I couldn’t explain it. A piece of aircraft, a flap or spoiler, that’s the explanation, I know, I do know that; but there was something in the way it moved, some dynamic in its falling that had more grace and purpose than I can describe. I told no one, not the men I was with and not Helen. But I thought it was you.

Such a precious gift that you gave me and I thank you for that.

The bedroom’s kept dark because there’s usually someone asleep in there, or trying to sleep, at any time of the day or night. In winter the constant dark is disorientating, our single window indicating dawn as easily as dusk. When I close the door my hand rests there, soft-edged, inanimate, and it looks as if this hand doesn’t belong to me but to a younger man, who might in another universe be opening a door, not closing it.

The book I’m reading is called Obelisk and Hourglass, about the history of time. I found it in the Oxfam charity shop on Mortehaven high street. I have this idea that later on I’ll see the things in person that I’ve read about: the Egyptian pyramids, the temples of South America, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. When I’d do it doesn’t matter; it’s holding the possibility in my mind that’s the important thing.

After we were married, Helen and I travelled to Venice. We spent a week eating oily bread and ham as pink and thin as tissue paper. We wandered through dank passages and under bridges that smelled of eggs and salt. It seems unreal to me now, a sunken world of shadows and water, ringing bells and roofs of gold.

The Obelisk paperback is soft, with a sundial on the front. On the tower, we measure our time in days: how far each of us is into his eight-week spell. Helen says it’s like prisoners chalking the walls and maybe it is a little like that. In ancient China they had a way of telling the hours with a candle. They marked the wax with lines and saw how much of it had melted, and in that way the hours never got lost. You could collect the wax and remould it and relight it if you wanted. Have that time all over again.

Helen doesn’t know and I would never tell her. I would never speak about you. Some things are off limits and you are such a thing. But I wonder about the candle and about time burned through; and if hours, when they pass, are gone permanently, or if there is a way of bringing them back. What if I can get you back?

I’ve been out here too long. Lonely nights and reels of dark, spooling and unravelling to the black sea, the sky blacker still. Put a man, the most cynical of men, on morning watch when the sun comes up and the bloodshot sky bursts orange and have him tell me this is all there is. This isn’t all there is.

In the screen behind my closed eyes, a throbbing flashlight occults from the shore. It calls from the darkness, shining, shining, insisting that I turn and see.

12

Thirty-five days on the tower

How many times have I put in this light? Eight months of the year, every year, give or take an overdue, so that’s two hundred and forty days; multiply that by the number of years I’ve been in the service and that’s getting on for fifteen, which makes it three thousand six hundred times that I’ve lit this light or some version of it. As for the number of hours I’ve spent on a lighthouse in all that time, I’d rather not know.

Brew the meths, warm the vapour, turn the tap and set a match to the mantle. I could do this blindfolded, though I doubt Trident would allow it. The flames flap in their glass cage. On the Maiden the illumination itself doesn’t move; instead the lenses around it rotate, magnifying the beam across the sea.

It’s eight o’clock. I’m off at midnight. In having the ‘all night in’ I’m able to sleep the hours that ashore would make up a normal night. Between now and then I’ll watch for the burner getting bunged or the pressure dropping; I’ll log the weather, temperature, visibility, barometric pressure and wind force. Aside from that, and those aren’t things I need to pay attention to any more, I’ll sit and think about how a man could shake up his life if he was unhappy with his lot. There are plenty of hours to do that. When I’m putting in my lights and extinguishing my lights, the whole world relies on me. Dawn and dusk are mine alone, to do with as I please. It’s a powerful feeling.

Vince brought back a parcel from Jenny. If I don’t read her letter now it’ll hang over me, watching me in the same way as if she were here. Sometimes up top with the light you can feel another person, if you try. You can feel they’re here with you whether you like that idea or not. They could be sitting right next to you; you start to feel it in the hairs on your arms. Or they’re behind you, looking at the back of your head, thinking all sorts of thoughts about you that you’d rather they didn’t have. You turn to check and there’s no one there, the lantern’s empty, just you. But you checked.

She’s put in the usual box of homemade chocolates. I see her spooning each one into its paper case, The Archers on in the background. Jenny Heaton. The first time I saw her coming out of school with her hair in plaits and her skirt hanging over her knees. Jenny’s never liked her knees; she says they’re lumpy. Her sister told her they looked like Cornish pasties and she never got over it. A bit like when I went out with the girl who lived next door, Susan Price, and months down the line she broke up with me, saying, ‘You’re too short, Bill Walker, I need someone taller.’

It wasn’t bad with Jenny at first. We’d lie in bed at her mum’s house, her mum pie-eyed on the sofa downstairs, Jenny’s cold fingers gripping mine. I could feel her knees under the quilt, told her I liked them, there was nothing the matter with them, why didn’t she let me kiss her again? We didn’t talk much. I’ve never been a talker and she didn’t mind that; I thought that was a good thing about her, different to other girls. Then one time she whispered, in the dark, ‘You’re just like me, Bill,’ and I lay there till morning, worried. The main thing had been to go to bed with a girl, so I could tell my brothers I had. Now I felt this neediness creeping up on me. The key in the lock.

Jenny’s written the letter on the paper she nicked from the fancy hotel in Brighton where we stayed on our honeymoon.

I feel her fingers in mine, in that bed.

Down in the kitchen I make toast with the processed white bread Vince delivered. Mother’s Pride’s a family, a family of bread. You can’t make toast with the loaves we bake, which half the time come out like crumpets and the other like scones. The grill burns the edges, but I prefer that, and someone once said charcoal was good for you, didn’t they, just a bit because of the carbon. I cover it in Marmite so you can’t tell. When I bite the toast the sound it makes reminds me of sticks on a bonfire, cracking.

There’re only so many excuses a man can make for himself. I’m a coward. Must be. When I was ten, my dad found me reading by torchlight in my bedroom. He boxed me on the ears and said, ‘You’ll go blind squinting like that; the service won’t look twice at you in glasses.’ I trusted him about the glasses and that being on a lighthouse was the only thing I’d be good at, so I had better bloody manage it otherwise what else would I do? The old man got ill years after and took to his bed, where he grew thinner and thinner until one day he disappeared, apart from the sour hole where his mouth used to be, rasping, ‘It was your fault.’ And it was. I’d come out upside down and twisted round, like a kitten in a drowning sack.

The sea infected us all. We couldn’t get away from it, even in death. The old man had a cousin in Dorset who lived in a flat overlooking West Bay. Inside she had paintings of the sea, Old Testament ones of violent skies and frothing waves; ships flung to and fro on slinging seas. I hated going there, the whirling pools and battle scenes, cannons firing, red flags on masts slapped by the bitter wind. The place smelled of dry sherry and the flaky shortbread biscuits she baked and stored in plastic. When she died, we took a boat out from Lyme and scattered her ashes on the water. A lot of it blew back in my face and I thought, then, I’ll never get away from this bloody sea.

It didn’t matter that I never learned to swim. Dad said, you don’t need to swim to sit on a light. In lessons the teacher threw in a brick; I struggled at the surface with my eyes closed and my nose held, the children’s taunts echoing in my blocked ears.

Up top, the hours creep round. Time passes, invisibly. Hours get lost and even though I’m paid to be awake and to all intents and purposes I am awake, there’s no doubting I go into a semi-sleep state because when I’m up in the lantern on my own all sorts of weird ideas go through my head and I can only say they’re part of my dreams. Jenny ashore with the baby crying and the girls fighting; toys on the carpet, a Sindy undressed, her head turned on its shoulders so the breasts are at the back because Jenny won’t buy them the male version on account of they’ll soon be getting up to all sorts. Screaming at teatime, over fishcakes. How would it be to never go back?

My wife counting the days to the relief and when it comes the boat sets out and the weather’s good so she’s getting excited, getting the bits in that she always gets, food and drink I liked ages ago but don’t any more. Only I don’t go back. I don’t know where I go or how this happens, but that’s the good part, not knowing. Just happens.

Before midnight I fetch Vince from the bedroom. I jog him awake with the heel of my hand and the usual greeting – ‘Come on, you lazy shit, time to get up’ – before going down to the kitchen to make our tray. Vince needs that first nudge and then another after I’ve made the drinks and then finally he’ll get his arse up to the light.

I’d never bother putting biscuits on crockery at home and God knows why I do here. Two fat wedges of the old Davidstow, which is growing waxy at the edges, speckled white, meaning we’d better eat it quick.

Vince is up there already, surprising me; he’s got a leather jacket thrown over his pyjamas. He and Arthur are poles apart, Arthur dressing for duty like he’s anticipating the Trident inspectors any minute, bristles shaved, hair combed, shoes shined, while Vince loafs about in BHS bedwear and a pair of slippers approximating dog fur.

With keepers you’ve worked with, you soon get accustomed to their pattern of doing things. Vince hasn’t been out here a year yet, and what with the chopping and changing of who’s on with who, I’ve only spent a short time in his company. But a month on the tower is a decade ashore for how well you get to know someone. Vince’ll drink his tea straight down before he says much, and when he does it won’t be a pleasantry about the weather or the state of the light or anything else that’s happened that day. In this crossover hour, the rules go out the window. Rules about what you can and can’t do. What you can and can’t say. This is when Vince told me what he got locked up for. Not the old, petty stuff. I mean the bad time.

‘You never said what your problem is,’ he says.

‘With what?’

‘This.’ He picks his teeth. ‘The sea.’

‘Just don’t like it, do I.’

‘Why?’

‘Who cares why? You’d never say to a pilot, if you like flying planes then you’ll love the sky, and ask him to jump out the cockpit straight into it.’

‘There’s always a reason, though, ain’t there.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s dogs, for me,’ says Vince. ‘One of the fosters had this feral bastard Rottweiler – one day it came at me, just like that, nothing I did. Got hold of my arm and started shaking it like a piece of meat – and it was a piece of meat, my arm, to that dog. Guess what its name was? Petal. Fucking Petal, for a dog like that. Since then I can’t be doing with dogs. Just expect it to go at me if I see one.’

‘I’ve got my thing about the sea and it’s got its thing about me.’

‘I don’t think the sea feels much about anyone.’

But that’s just it. The indifference. The old man used to look at me in the flat in Dorset, when we visited that cousin of his. He never blinked. He’d come into my room when everyone else was asleep and take off his belt and sit there, on the end of my bed, his wrists pale in the moonlight, unsure what to do with it next, or with me. The sea glared at me from the walls. It didn’t help me then and it won’t help me now.

‘I’m sick of it,’ I tell him. ‘Sick to my stomach.’

‘You mean seasick.’

‘No.’

Although I get that too. Coming out here, I fucking hate that crossing. Even if it’s fair it doesn’t agree with me, bouncing around like a jack-in-the-box. If I never had to do it again, I’d be glad. I dread the way back as soon as I’m ashore and when I’m ashore I dread coming off. That means life should be best for me when I’m home or on the tower, only it’s not. Life’s no good for me anywhere. Except with her.

‘Why ain’t you doing another job?’ Vince asks. I hear him chew the sweating cheese. A slurp of tea.

‘Jesus. What’s this, the fucking Gestapo?’

‘No need to go at me. Just like that fucking dog, ain’t you.’

‘We’ve got the house. It’s not a bad set-up. Don’t know what else I’d do.’

‘You could train again.’

‘Easy for you,’ I say. ‘You haven’t got children, a wife, having to get food on the table. All that shit, over and over, twenty-three quid a week and then what?’

‘PK, for you.’

‘I’m not Arthur.’

‘You could be.’

The biscuit’s turned to carpet in my mouth. ‘I’m not like him.’

Often, I’m tempted to say it. What I’ve done to Arthur. What I’m still doing. Just to hear how it sounds. I could tell Vince. But the moment’s gone.

‘Man, I love being back,’ he says. ‘These lighthouses. More beauty in them than I’ve seen. That’s what I’m in it for. Getting that promotion. Soon I’ll get to Assistant, like you, then a cottage to call my own. PK one day. Having my life on the lights.’

‘Doesn’t take much, then.’

‘Lightkeeping’s a skill, in my opinion.’

‘What skill? All we do is light a fire and watch it go then put it out again. There’s all the cleaning but a monkey could do that if it was trained long enough. Check in on the R/T. Cook a bit. What else is there?’

‘Aw, it’s more than that,’ says Vince. ‘I’ve said to you before I’m used to life in a cage, and there’re people who can hack it and people who can’t. And it’s seen as bad to be OK with the cage. You know? As if the whole point of everything is to be on the outside. But if you’re content when you’re banged up, whether it’s in Wandsworth or out on a lighthouse, where you’re not behind bars but you’re still trapped in every other sense of it, that’s enough to see you through. We had boys in the nick who were like lions in there. They’d be fighting and smashing stuff or killing themselves all cos of this thought they had about being free. Tell you what, Bill: I felt free the entire time I was in there. Never once did I feel like I wasn’t. It’s more than that, ain’t it? That’s all I’m saying. If you don’t like being on a tower, it’s not cos it’s the tower that’s wrong.’

My first landing on the Maiden was the worst. I’d heard stories about the Maiden Rock: she’ll rough you up, keep your eye on the ball or you’re fish food, mate. The Occasional I was set to replace was already overdue by a fortnight and his wife was sick; under other circumstances they wouldn’t have sent a relief with the weather as it was, waves toppling and rain bucketing, but Trident made the decision, so we did it.

I spent most of the crossing hunched over the side, the smell of the boatman’s cigar mingling with salt spray and the sting of bile. I thought of the brick at the bottom of the swimming pool and how I’d be thrashing, deaf and blind, while I drowned.

We had a slugging sea, yanking us up and thumping us down, whumping and wheezing, the prow scarcely making headway against the wind. The sight of the tower on the open water fascinated me in a morbid, avid way, like how other large manmade structures do, giant pylons or cooling chimneys or the massive beached hull of a steel container ship.

There wasn’t a lot of prep. You just arrived and let the men in the boat and on the set-off do the rest. I grasped the mechanics of it, had been told to consider myself the same as the supply cartons being lifted off, just to hang there and trust I’d be carried. You’ve got to trust the people on either end of the rope. But the problem that day wasn’t the men or the winch; it was the sea, because the sea couldn’t make up its mind what it was doing. I made a mess of the harness, a flimsy loop that went under my armpits, and the bit I held on to chafed between my palms.

I was hauled up in the air, sick as a dog, inched higher until the tower came close at last. I tried not to look too long at the spitting sea beneath my feet and what a distance seemed to have opened up there.

Suddenly there was a drop, the sea plunging thirty feet and sweeping the boat too far from the tower. The air filled with hollers and a blind sense of urgency. I squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’t care at that point what became of me. For a time, I swung on the harness at the mercy of the elements, the waves skimming my shoes then pitching back down. There were bellows from the boat,

‘Bring him in, bring him in!’ Then,

‘Bring him back, are you trying to kill him?’

Rain bit my face, the wind battering and ripping through my clothes. I opened my eyes and saw a man leaning over the set-off, Arthur Black, my Principal Keeper, his hand within reach. I lunged, but the sea beat me to it, slamming me into the concrete with such force it would be minutes before I could breathe properly again. ‘Well done, lad,’ said my PK, ‘you’re all right there.’ I grabbed the dog steps, freezing slippery cold, and began my ascent to the hot dim mouth of the entrance.

Arthur made me tea and fed me fags till I’d warmed up.

Poor Bill. Pathetic Bill. I could see him thinking it. Bill who never came in easy, without vomit down his front and terror in his soul. Bill whose hand was never the one that stretched for a lesser man’s, but only the one that received: never the stone from which PKs were carved. Drowning at the surface and he never reached the brick.

Sometimes, after I’ve done one of my seashells, even if I’m happy with it, I’ll drop it into the ocean from the bedroom window. The wind carries it off and I like the idea of that shell being returned to the sea. All that travelling over millions of years, all that effort, rolling in the grind of the prehistoric wash, only to be spat up on a distant shore and have a man like me scratch his imaginings into its body, defile its shape for his own satisfaction, then when he’s done he puts it right back where it started.

13

Two days on the tower

Tuesday morning. Three weeks till Christmas. A light won’t take days off or give you holidays; it wants you all the time. The others’ll soon start thinking what their families are doing and feeling pissed off they’re stuck here while at home the fir trees are going up and the mince pies getting eaten. That’s the done thing, so I’ve heard. I don’t think I’ve ever celebrated Christmas right. In the clink we had a sloppy dinner and paper hats, but as for the so-called magic of it, I don’t know what that means.

This time of year, you can’t extinguish your light till gone eight. But when the sun makes it through, I set to dismantling the burners, replacing them with clean ones in readiness for the night. Then I hang the curtains round the lenses. Unlikely once you get into December that the sun ramps up proper enough to start a fire but it’s second nature, and anyway it keeps them clean. It feels like you’re getting the light dressed for the day and then at night you take its clothes off again. I’d never tell the others that.

As the morning watchman, I’m on breakfast. We’ve got a nice pack of bacon from when I came off, so I fry that up then keep it warm in the Rayburn till the others get up. Normally the smell gets them up and no matter what anyone says there isn’t a better smell on the planet than frying bacon. It’s not bad being chef on the Maiden cos the PK’s nearly as crap as I am, so I don’t feel self-conscious about the meals I put up. On my first island post the keepers there were really stuck-up about the food and sarcastic whenever I set a plate in front of them, which was rude since they never taught me any sodding thing about cookery even when I asked. It’s only a knack you pick up, for me anyway. I don’t even know what half the ingredients are before I get started.

‘Anyone hear the birds?’ I ask, once we’re sitting round tucking in.

‘What birds?’ says Arthur.

‘Last night. Whole load of ’em came flying in at me.’

The PK’s up then, going to check upstairs cos it’s his lantern; even if we’re the ones keeping watch, it’s still his light to look after. He checks on it like it’s his child.

Bill’s got his head low to the plate, which he always does when he eats, right down close to whatever he’s eating, and a fag smoking in the ashtray next to him so he can puff and chew and puff and chew. He looks at Arthur’s empty chair.

‘Why’d you let him talk to you like that?’ he says.

‘Huh?’

‘Like you’re a fucking dimwit.’

I wipe my mouth. ‘You’re the one who calls me that.’

‘Did you see what he did?’

‘What?’

‘Rushing off to see what’s been fucked. What you’ve fucked. Thinks you can’t be trusted with your watch. Thinks the same of me.’

It’s fair game for a couple of keepers to have a moan about whoever’s not in the room – like unscrewing a bottle, a way of letting it out, just to say, ‘Did you notice how annoying it was when he did this; he can be such a stingy prick from time to time, can’t he?’ Not meant unkindly but it just keeps things bubbling away instead of bubbling over.

But Bill’s edgier than normal. Tired. I watch him smoke the last of the Embassy, grind it out then push his plate away. The PK comes back.

‘Didn’t think about cleaning them up?’ he says to me, a bit sharp.

‘You wouldn’t’ve had any grub till lunch if I had. Bill’ll do it, won’t you, Bill?’

‘Fuck off.’

Arthur clears the table with a, ‘Thanks, that was good.’

After breakfast, I get the bucket and shovel and go on up there to the gallery. In fairness I hadn’t realized how many birds there were cos they came in like moths in the early hours, sometime around five, and who’s to say what you’re seeing then or if you’re seeing it straight. What with all the feathers and flapping it could’ve been ten or a hundred. I smoke a cigarette in the harsh cold; dead grey sea and dead grey sky and my hands look dead grey too while I scrape them up. Shearwaters – they’re pests anyhow, says Bill, no great loss, but I don’t agree with that while I’m looking at them all flattened and twisted round on their necks. On the Bishop Rock once, I heard the keepers there found the gallery stuffed full of birds, living, squawking ones. There’d been nowhere to set foot, not a spare inch, it was like Noah’s bloody Ark. It wasn’t till darkness fell and the birds got the full glare of the lantern that they flew off, dozens of them. The lighthouse beam drew them in and dazzled them, or else it frightened them away.

Three days

I thought I’d find it hard coming back to the tower this time, what with things going strong between Michelle and me. But actually, once I’ve done a couple of nights it’s a good thing. I’ve got all the time in the world to think about her, here. What I said to Bill on middle watch was right – I want to make Assistant, it’s all I want, and to get that security cos Trident look after you for life. Then I’ll be able to say to her, all right, how about it? I’ll be a man with prospects for once.

It’s me on lunch then the PK does the washing-up then his usual thing of sitting in his chair with a cup of tea and opening a crossword puzzle. He spares me a fag. Arthur’s a good one for sharing. When I got my station at Alderney the PK there never shared a single thing he had, didn’t see the point in it. He’d sticker his jars and packets with Keep Out and Hands Off: it meant he was fine for butter and tobacco and HP Sauce, but nobody wanted his company. Arthur doesn’t give a lot of thought to possessions, comestible or otherwise. It all passes, he says; it’s stuff, it doesn’t last. The feeling you get when you’re all sitting round having a fine old time, that lasts.

‘Miserably failing to meet expectations,’ he says.

‘Piss off, the spuds weren’t that rough.’

‘Two words. Six letters, five letters.’

‘One of those fuckers; I’m no good at those.’

‘You’ve got to think of it two ways,’ says the PK. ‘There’s the literal clue, the one on the surface, then there’s the clue inside. That one takes some special thinking.’

‘Don’t think I’ve got much special thinking in my brain.’

‘It’s a question of how you look at it.’

‘Give me another.’

‘Brew some magic up, pal.’

‘Just made you a cup,’ I say.

‘That’s the clue, you prat. Five letters.’

‘Bollocks.’

‘That’s eight.’ He smiles. ‘You nearly said it a minute ago. Here, look here.’

Arthur shows me. It goes over my head, truth be told.

‘I can’t see it.’

‘Near the end. Look.’

‘Oh,’ I say as he writes it in.

Bill was wrong about the PK. Arthur’s one of those that wants to help you be better than you are, instead of getting shirty or uptight about your being younger than him or taking over or any of the things I reckon Bill thinks about me. The PK’s patient. He’ll show me how things are done. I admire him, how he feels about the sea; it’s how it should be for a lighthouse keeper. It’s a shame it isn’t like that for everyone.

I don’t know if Bill knows that I know. That Arthur told me once on graveyard watch what happened to him years ago, when he started on the Maiden, before Bill had joined the service, before I was even walking. I lost my tongue when he said it. Didn’t know how to react. I hadn’t been expecting it. Why would I? You don’t expect it.

I just looked at Arthur and thought, that’s the kind of man I want to be. So’s you’d never guess what he’d lived through. You spend your time looking up to the PK, thinking he’ll have the answers, then he isn’t at all what you thought.

Neil Young on the Sony and my bunk curtain drawn. Bill’s downstairs with his drill whistling; it’s somewhere between night and day and I’m glad of the music that takes me to another place. Back in Michelle’s crammed studio on Stratford Road, Neil or John Denver or King Crimson. Wine bottles with candles stuffed into them and wax down the sides; cushions with diamond mirrors sewn on. A cat in the doorway, licking its paws. Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River. Shenandoah. Now that’s got no business being a word. Ought to be a magic spell or a distant moon. Everything washed in the orange of canned peaches. Lots of my thoughts of Michelle come with their own light. Purple smoke in the bedroom. Bright green when she goes out barefoot to the garden and yells the puss in for tea. What’s the cat’s name? Sykes? No. Staines? Poor bugger. Steptoe? Can’t be.

Michelle’s too good for me. Least I’ve got the brains to know it.

I never would have had the balls to go after her if it weren’t for Trident House signing me up and that only happened by accident. There aren’t a lot of keepers my age at the moment – there’re better wages to be had on the North Sea oil rigs, but it depends what kind of work you like doing and what shape your history’s in. April ’70 I’d been out in the world a couple of weeks when I bumped into this bloke in the pub; he bought me a pint and told me he’d kept lights up on Pladda and Skerryvore back in the day. Like the other times I was waiting to get nicked again. That was what I was used to, so I knew I’d fuck up on purpose once I was done with the outside. But the more this bloke went on about the lights, the more I thought they’d suit me. All he said was, you can’t be the lonely type – you’ve got to think that being on your own is a good thing.

I didn’t bank on Trident letting me in once they found out my record, but a few weeks later I got my letter in the post. They must’ve thought, he’ll do, thick as a brick but he’s keen. Fact is, there’s not a lot to be getting on with on a lighthouse. The simplicity of it’s what does it. Small tasks that absorb your mind. The illumination at night, then cleaning, cooking, checking in with the other lights in the group. Making sure there’s no bad feeling between you and the men you’re with, cos that’s the thing you can’t predict. You have to keep the atmosphere friendly and that to me seems the most important part. Making the best of it with the others, cos if you let that get one over on you it becomes a virus, spreading and multiplying, then by the time you realize, you’re all infected, the rot’s set in and there’s nowhere to go.

I look back on meeting that old keeper in the pub and it feels like I was getting sent a message. I wasn’t a lost cause. The world hadn’t given up on me yet.

Soon, I’ll have to tell Michelle. It’s been long enough now. Have to be honest about myself, cos what’s the point in carrying on and making this life for us and asking her to marry me, if we can’t do any of that cos I’ve got this big bloody lie sitting between us? Not the stuff I did before – she knows about that. I’m talking about the last time.

Trouble is, it’s not the sort of thing you drop in on a first date, or even a third, then after a while it gets too hard to bring up. With me being away so much, it means when I come back it’s like we start all over again. Back to the beginning, the holding hands, the wondering, the wanting. I’m not going to ruin that.

The more I like her the harder it is, and I don’t want to like her too much, but you can’t help these things.

Lies are easy to make. You just say nothing. Do nothing. Let the other person decide what’s real. I wouldn’t want to know if I were her. Every day I try to forget.

When I close my eyes, I can still see it, as clear as if it happened last night. Blood and fur, a child’s high scream: and my friend in my arms, grown cold.

My whole life I’ve looked over my shoulder to see who’s coming. I still look behind me, even out here on the sea where there’s nobody but us.

I live with the knowledge I’ve got enemies. Bad people who do bad things and they want to do bad things to me. I get afraid of going to sleep sometimes because of the nightmares I have. That they’ll find me here, on this rock. You thought you had it in you to get out from under but you’re wrong, son. You’ll never be more than you are.

I’m never going back. Not to prison. Not to my old life.

That’s why I brought it off with me. Hid it in the wall cranny under the sink where the others won’t find it. It’s safe there. You’d have to know where to look.

At some point I fall asleep, cos next thing I know Bill’s shoving me awake in the thick, groggy dark and telling me to get upstairs cos the light’s not going to watch itself and if he doesn’t get some bloody kip soon he might do something he’ll regret.