The Lamplighters

21

Twenty-three days on the tower

When I’m ashore, Helen and I take turns with the washing-up and when it’s my turn it’s a chore to be done as quickly as possible. Afterwards, there might be an episode of Paul Temple to watch on the telly, or if it’s a clear night I’ll walk the short distance from the cottages to the cliff edge, and look out at the lighthouse and miss her.

Here it’s a ritual, a task to take my time over because my time doesn’t need to be anywhere else. I might do it with a post-supper fag in my mouth, and every so often one of the others hovers an ashtray under to let the ash drop off. Otherwise it drops into the sink and I’ll have to fish it out and start again.

In spite of the fags, we take cleanliness seriously. Ask any one of us and we’ll say we don’t mind so much at home, partly because a lot of the time the wives look after that side of things (Helen doesn’t, but that’s what I like about her), and partly because at home it’s not important. If you’re living on a tower there isn’t much space, so that space has to be spick and span. You could eat your lunch off any floor here, any surface. So, if I drop my ash into the washing-up, I’ll drain it out and do it again. It’s a nice spot to spend half an hour in, at the window looking out at the sea, as sheer and silver as Bacofoil. Before now I’ve done the plates twice because it’s been so agreeable.

‘D’you read any poems?’ Vince asks, smoking at the table with a game of clock patience. He’s got ‘Supersonic Rocket Ship’ going on the player.

‘Sometimes.’

‘They say there’s a poem for anything that happens in your life.’

‘I think that’s true.’

‘Still, when there’s nothing much else to do.’

‘No, nothing much else.’

He’s waiting for me to take the mick. Even if you have a dream round here that you want to talk about, you’ll get called a soppy prick. But Vince isn’t what you’d guess him to be. Rock bands, pens and fags, that’s his lot. The Kinks, Deep Purple, Led Zepp, T. Rex. Bill and I don’t bother with music; we’re content with the wireless on the dresser that on a good day picks up I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue on Radio 4. The reception’s patchy but just hearing Barry Cryer’s voice reminds us there are other people out there and other lives happening. For that reason, I don’t always feel like listening to it, but if I don’t, I won’t tell Bill to turn it off; I’ll just go somewhere else.

‘Who do you like then?’

‘Got to be Thomas,’ I say. ‘“Do not go gentle into that good night”.’

‘Don’t know it.’

‘You ought to.’

‘A lot of these guys are poets,’ he says. ‘Davies and Bowie and that; the stuff they write, the tune’s only part of it, the words stand out on their own.’

‘Bob Dylan.’

‘Right on.’

‘Have you read Walt Whitman? Out of the cradle endlessly rocking… Out of the Ninth-month midnight.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Not a lot without the rest of it. Even then it’s what it means to you.’

‘My girl at home,’ says Vince. ‘I wrote her a few lines.’

‘What did she think?’

‘Chicks dig poetry.’ He smiles. ‘So that ended up meaning something pretty decent for me, if you catch my drift. I was making it up in my mind to start with. Nights banged up go slow. I just had these thoughts and they fitted together here and there, quite nice some of the time. I think it helps to get whatever it is inside your head and put it down on paper so you can look at it and then it seems smaller than before.’

‘What were they about?’

‘You’d need a drink in me for that.’

‘You wouldn’t show me one?’

‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘Since it’s you.’

‘Good.’

‘It’s likely shit. It’s trippy but I think you’ll get it; that’s why you’ll get it. I don’t want stuff bottled up. It ain’t good to bottle stuff up.’

‘No.’

‘Got to let it out.’

‘Any time, Vince; you know that.’

‘Thanks, Mr PK. And don’t tell Bill, will you?’

‘About the poems?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I won’t.’

‘It’s not his thing.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Just do. He’d pull it apart. He wouldn’t mean to, but he couldn’t help himself.’

Twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six days

Suns rise and moons rise. Lamps lit and lights put out. Stars swing on the night frame, ancient patterns reordered, saucepan on the tilt, crab upside down, Scorpio and Mazzaroth and equinox. Wind waves and horses ride, froth and spume then calm and calm; endless sea, rapidly changing mood, whispering and whistling its sad song, soul song, lost song, gone but never for long, up again until it’s rolling, and at the heart of it our Maiden, rooted down like a centuries-old oak, hunkered right into the rock.

Big swell, bright day, grease the fog-jib and oil the lenses. Tinned steak tastes better than it smells and I take a photograph of sky and sea on the Nikon because there isn’t anything to separate the two. An RAF fighter goes past about a quarter of a mile off, at lantern-level; I wave but he won’t see.

Sleep or try to. In the stuffy dark there go the planes again, but they don’t come past, Bill tells me, it was just that one. I need to sleep. Not sleeping, so hours become days without my noticing, days into nights, strike them off on the calendar so we don’t get lost, it’s today, it’s tomorrow, it’s Whitman’s Ninth-month midnight.

Friday. A boat comes past. Day-trippers loop the tower, calling, ‘Hello, anyone up there?’ They’re out of their minds this time of year, bundled in hats and scarves, but if there’s a fisherman willing to do it then good luck to him. To the tourists, we’re a novelty: ‘Home for Christmas?’ they shout. I can’t tell if they’re asking it or saying it because of the noise of the foam on the rocks, and anyway, only one of us is. Bill’s ready; he’ll be ready by then.

You start to see it in a man, after a while. Forty days for Bill and counting. He’ll need to stretch his legs and hold his wife and children. You see it in a friend, when he’s getting to the point of forgetting all that, when he’s forgetting there’s life outside and this one wall isn’t the end of the earth. Bill gets flinty and loses his sense of humour – that’s how you know it’s forty days. It’s always forty days.

Twenty-eight days

There’s a strip of white paint on the floor of the oil store that needs recoating, so I spend a careful hour doing that, making the line perfect and better than it was before. When that’s done, I clean the brushes on the set-off until they look brand new. I often think how there’s painting to be got on with in the cottage ashore, but it doesn’t interest me much, and Trident sends a man out every once in a while for that. Here, I’ll seek out things that need doing, even if they could probably last a while longer without looking shabby. I’ll get to fixing or improving whatever it is right away.

Before we joined the service, Helen and I lived in a bedsit in Tufnell Park. On Sunday mornings I’d go and buy the paper and take her back a roll from the bakery on the corner. She’d eat it in bed, sheets tangled round her legs, and afterwards we’d shake the crumbs off and drink grainy black coffee, then go for a walk on Hampstead Heath. I question what our lives would be like if we’d stayed there. Helen would be happier. She wouldn’t think she had given up her life for mine because that’s how she feels, and once or twice she’s said she might as well have married into the army.

Longings and regrets I get on middle watch. I once heard a tale about a keeper who got infatuated with this girl from his hometown. They’d blown hot and cold all summer and he didn’t know what the situation was until a boat came out one day and there she was, standing in the fore, knee-deep in ropes and lifejackets, and she cried out that she loved him. The mates I was with, we all pissed ourselves laughing as that’s how it goes when there’s anything to do with feelings or romance or anything like that. But privately I thought different.

It isn’t easy for some people to say what’s inside them. It isn’t easy for me.

I thought about doing that for Helen, but it wouldn’t work as well coming into land and besides there isn’t a boatman I’d trust. I overthought it and by then it seemed daft. The kind of thing you do when you’re twenty-five, not fifty. There comes a point where too much has happened. Water under the bridge: too much of that.

Back inside for a bath. Vince is in the living room listening to his records and I call in to him, the wind’s blowing up, but he doesn’t hear, and it isn’t important enough to repeat. The bath’s in the kitchen, a tin bucket and flannel; I stand there in my underpants and soap as quickly as possible. It isn’t pleasant, just functional. Dry and get dressed and immediately make a cup of tea because I’m cold and my hair’s wet.

The first memory I have is to do with wet hair. My mother towelling my head dry with no-nonsense strokes, the rough practicality with which mothers spit on their fingers to wipe dirty mouths, impatient and concerned. Later on, she did it for my dad. He was a child by then, so I stopped being one. I grew up, grew past him.

It’s a heft to lift the bucket through the wall cavity and empty it out the window, so I go up to the gallery and do it off there, only once I’m tipping it over the rails a northwesterly comes out of nowhere and gusts me aside. I almost lose my grip, which would have had me grovelling to the others all over Christmas – sorry, lads, no bathroom facilities, I’m afraid – but I manage to hold on and get drenched for my efforts. My trousers are soaked and the belly part of my pullover.

The wind’s freezing, my knuckles pink and cracked on the rim of the pail. Quickly I go inside and down to the bedroom, dropping the bucket back first, to get changed.

Bill’s asleep in there. His curtain’s open; he’s on his side so I can make out the line of his ear and the thick muscle of his shoulder. I’ve always thought of Bill as slight – small and flighty, like a thief on the Underground. Recently he’s bulked up. Or has he always been like this? Sometimes, when you look at a man, you see him afresh: proximity cheated you into thinking he’s someone he’s not.

He’s snoring, gently. Occasionally it strikes me how much time I spend with men I’d otherwise have nothing to do with. At home, I don’t make friends easily. I don’t have the knack. People come and go; there’s no time; I can’t find a way in. Here, it isn’t a choice. We learn to live together in a narrow column with no way out. Men become friends and friends become brothers. For only children, this is as good as it gets. When I was a boy, I heard it as ‘lonely children’; I thought it was that through to when I was fourteen and saw the right thing printed on a medical pamphlet.

Moving quietly, I take a jumper from my locker, but that pair of trousers was my last, so I reckon Bill won’t mind if I steal a pair of his. We’re about the same size if I don’t wear a belt. Mine will be ages drying and the Rayburn’s all we’ve got for that.

Once I’ve got the trousers on, it’s force of habit to feel in the pockets. When I do, my hand meets a familiar object. I’m not sure at first in what way it’s familiar – what it is, exactly, I’m feeling, just that it’s known to me.

When I asked Helen to marry me, I couldn’t afford a ring. At least not the one she deserved, a sapphire from Hatton Garden, set between two diamonds. It was another five years and a sizeable bank loan before I could give her that. But weeks before, we’d taken a trip out of town and she’d seen a necklace she liked on a bric-a-brac stall. It was nothing special. A plain silver chain with a pendant in the shape of an anchor. It had cost me ten pounds. Even though the ring she wears now is worth more than that, it’s this chain that always meant the most.

Helen thinks I haven’t noticed that she’s stopped wearing it. But I notice everything about her, all that’s changed when I go ashore.

I should have sent a boat for her, I think, the anchor chain running through my fingers in the final moments of a life that’s mine and a wife I recognize; I should have sent a boat for her with a message shouted from the front. So she knew.

On the stairs, in the dank daylight, I take the necklace out of Bill’s trouser pocket and look at it, then in at him, trying to fathom what to any other man would be obvious but to me is an impossible hiding, a lie too devastating, the series of events that must have unfolded to which I’ve been ignorant.

Constellations changed. The sky fell. The man I thought was my friend.

22

Sharks are blank. That’s why they frighten. They’re cool torpedoes of blubber, sliced at the gills, equipped with teeth. Fat and teeth, that’s the thing. Needles in a bowl of curd.

I saw one once. Sitting there fishing when all of a sudden there he was, a big grey lozenge coming at me through the water, like one of the pills Jenny gives me when I can’t sleep. I got my line up quick, but all he did was circle the tower a couple of times then swim away. I’d thought him a basker, but Arthur said a great white. Arthur knows better. There’d been sightings on our neighbour lights too.

When I came ashore and told Jenny, she grabbed me, her breath sharp with wine, and said, ‘Bill, promise me you’ll never go fishing off that set-off again.’ Then at night she tried for me with her eyes full of sorry and why not.

I didn’t tell her it wasn’t fear I’d felt for that shark but admiration. If he had a family, he’d left them behind. If he had a wife, he’d eaten her by now.

Forty-five days on the tower

The gale hits us mid-week. Sometimes I can see the heavy weather coming in, hulking clouds marching on the tower and the sea getting ready to do its thing, but other times the rain and wind attack us out of nowhere. Before I know it, I’m eating breakfast in the kitchen with the spray smacking the window.

‘Fuck,’ says Vince, who normally acts unconcerned, but I’ve noticed he’s smoking his next fag off his last. Even with the shutters closed, the noise is off the scale. Rain rinses the glass and the sea’s gone sickly like someone put too much milk in it. The tower shakes, vibrating from bottom to top, a queer feeling as if we’re caught in an electrical current, rippling from the base through the soles of our feet, out the tops of our heads and up. Boulders slam in at fifty miles an hour. I can’t believe we’ll stay standing.

Arthur’s reading an old copy of National Geographic. He isn’t worried. What happened to him makes it unlikely he’d be afraid of much, in the long run. That’s why I don’t feel guilty. Helen shouldn’t either. He’s already been through the worst.

Usually in the weather Arthur will have his reassuring words to say, such as everything those engineers learned from Smeaton’s stump, and all the lighthouses over hundreds of years that were built and fell and built and fell until they learned how to do it properly, with dovetails and metal joints and granite dug into the bedrock.

All it does is talk down to me. Makes me feel like the novice he hauled onto the set-off that day. Arthur knows best. What do I know?

Today, though, he doesn’t speak. He carries on reading National Geographic, looking up once at Vince to say yes please to a cup of tea. The magazine must be from back in ’65, at least. The clock keeps ticking. Four minutes past eleven. The fags get smoked and on it goes.

Midday. Up to the PK, the afternoon watchman. The fog gun’s deafening. It’s a rum job operating the jib; you’d think it would be a break in the monotony but all it is is sitting inside the doorway pressing a plunger and what could be more monotonous than that? In low visibility, whoever’s watch it is has to sit pressing that bloody plunger every five minutes for hours at a time. The rest of us have to listen to it, have our meals or try to sleep, all with these blasts ringing out twelve times an hour. Trident give us earplugs for it, same as they do for families on rock or shore lights, but that’s a bastard in itself. You can’t do anything with it going off. You can’t think straight.

The action comes when I’ve got to get back out on the gallery, wind down the jib and reload the charges. I don’t like being out there with the sea chucking itself about and the wind shrilling so sharp it gives me earache. When I’m ashore I can still hear that wind tunnelling through my head, sighing and creaking on a fair day or whining in a squall. Arthur likes it. He likes being out on the gallery, seeing it in motion. He’s in the lantern now on one of the kitchen chairs, his thumb on the trigger.

‘All right, Bill?’

The horn blasts. BURRRRRRRRR.

‘Brought you tea,’ I say, putting the cup by his feet. He isn’t wearing shoes and his socks don’t match. He doesn’t say thank you. Just goes on staring at the sea.

‘What’s for supper?’ he says after a minute.

I stop at the stairs. Put my hands in my pockets.

‘Steak and kidney.’

‘Good day for it.’

‘Ashore’d be better.’

Arthur lights a cigarette. ‘Not long now for you, matey.’

‘Thirteen days.’

Thirteen days until I see her again. The smell of her hair, like cloves. The first time her lips met mine, a snowflake passing through the light beam.

‘What’ll you do when you get back?’ he asks.

‘Have a beer. Sleep in a proper bed.’

BURRRRRRRRR.

‘Say hello to Helen for me, won’t you?’

‘Always do.’

The PK runs his thumb around the plunger. ‘What was in the parcel?’

‘What?’

‘Jenny’s, what Vince brought off.’

‘Usual. Letter. Chocs.’

I could smoke but I haven’t got my fags and Arthur isn’t in a sharing mood. He gets this way, in the weather. Dazed. Half here. Like the old man he is.

‘Makes me guilty,’ I say. ‘That’s why she does it.’

‘Jenny’s a good wife. Helen would never do that.’

BURRRRRRRRR.

‘Do what?’

I know all the things Helen does. Or that I’d like her to do, and that she will do for me, sometime soon, when she accepts she doesn’t owe him a thing.

‘The good wife,’ says Arthur. ‘Not for me.’

He might see now if he looks at me, but he doesn’t look.

Helen says he never looks at her. If she were mine, I would never take my eyes off her. I already do that. Quietly. When Jenny can’t see. I watch for the front door to Admiral to open and for Helen to step out and pat her handbag for the house keys. Her eyes cross the glass; she’s saying hello and she hasn’t forgotten, she’s thinking about me just as much as I’m thinking about her; she wants us to be together, as quickly as we can. Then Jenny yells at me from the kitchen for not checking on the baby, who’s gone and dropped his scrambled egg on the floor.

In the time Arthur’s been my Principal Keeper, it’s been right here in front of him. Helen said they don’t touch. Don’t talk. Still, he’s never suspected a thing.

Some feelings you can’t help. I said that to Helen the first time, when she stood at the washing machine before we said goodbye, I said, I just can’t help it. It isn’t to do with Arthur and if he weren’t married to her there’d never be a problem. But he is. They were married while I was still in short trousers having my dad sit on the end of my bed and run his belt across his palm.

‘Jenny could be more independent-minded,’ I say. ‘Like Helen.’

It’s a dare to say her name out loud, in front of him. I want to keep saying it.

‘You like independent women, Bill?’

‘Better than the alternative.’

‘Is it?’

‘That time we went out in Mortehaven.’ I’m pushing it – just to see. ‘It was Helen’s birthday. She wore that blue dress she’d bought up in London. We got a sitter and went to the Seven Sisters and shared that fish platter.’

‘I bought that dress for her.’

‘It suited her.’

‘Still does.’

‘Helen complained about the wine. Didn’t put Jenny off drinking it. When we came home, Jenny was crying over me. Said she felt ugly and stupid next to Helen. I said if she hadn’t drunk so much, she mightn’t be feeling so bad about it.’

‘She’s protective.’

‘She’s drunk.’

‘Why does she drink?’

‘Fucked if I know. Whatever it is, she’s an incoming missile. When I get ashore, I don’t know what I’m going to get.’

‘Neither does she,’ says Arthur.

‘What?’

‘Helen told me once it was like a stranger coming back.’

‘With me?’

Arthur meets my eye, at last. He’s smoking down into the filter, the gritty bit, the sour bit. ‘No,’ he says. ‘With me.’

BURRRRRRRRR.

‘Tea’s getting cold,’ I say, backing away.

‘Get some sleep, Bill.’ He puts out the fag and goes to reload the charges.

Forty-six days

Two hours to go till my watch. Got that feeling in my stomach, or is it just a deeper version of what’s already there, the queasiness that puts me in the in-between place? Not on land or sea, not at home and not away, in between but I don’t know where, just floating. Helen tells me not to think about the bad places. Sometimes I can’t help it.

I tell her things I’ve never told my wife.

How I was twelve when I saw him. I was in the passenger seat of my neighbour’s car, Mrs E; her boy was in my class, a little shit if ever I knew one. My hair was still wet from swimming. I was thinking about the brass tin where my brother hid the smokes, in the old man’s gun chest. I’d nick one, smoke it under the porch before they got back.

At the bottom of the hill, there was a sharp bend going down into Mortehaven. Mrs E slowed the car almost to a stop, and as she did a man crossed the road in front of us. He was so strange-looking, I soaked up every detail about him. He had silver hair and carried a briefcase. He wore sunglasses, even though it was February and freezing. It struck me that none of his outfit fitted the time. This was the start of the fifties, and the styling of the suit, as silver as the hair, was, even to what the old man called my ‘dumb boy’s brain’, from another decade, the twenties maybe. He looked relaxed but purposeful, like he was expected somewhere but was comfortably on time.

The man went down a side street. We moved on. Mrs E drove the Sunbeam like a ninety-year-old, blinking and twitching, her nose pressed up to the windscreen. Five minutes passed, which is a fair distance when you’re travelling by car, so I couldn’t believe it when we came down past the Post Office and the same man crossed the road ahead of us. Again, from left to right. Again, the weird hair and suit, the sunglasses and briefcase. He stepped right out of the hedge, right out of nowhere, so Mrs E had to swerve onto the verge and the horn blared, pointlessly. He didn’t see us. Didn’t see the car, or the fact he’d nearly been hit. Didn’t seem to notice us at all.

It wasn’t possible he’d arrived there before we did. Even if he’d come by car or bus or bike, he couldn’t have overtaken us – nothing had overtaken us – and there was no other road into Mortehaven. He couldn’t have walked; he’d barely have got past the mount. Unless he had a twin, dressed the same way, who moved identically, there was that – but I knew in my gut that wasn’t the point. The point was we had seen not just the same man but the same moment: his crossing from left to right, the angle of his head, the swing of the briefcase, the winter sun glancing off his eyewear, even the number of steps he took, as if it wasn’t a road he was on but another, invisible surface, transposed over the top of the high street like a badly developed photograph.

Mrs E turned to me and said, ‘What in God’s name was that?’

That. Not he.

To this day, I don’t have an answer to her question.

I never told the old man about it. Never told my brothers. Through the weeks that came after, the stranger with the briefcase faded slowly from my mind. I didn’t even speak about it when Mrs E died, unexpectedly, when she was out one morning buying her husband’s Valley Echo. The newsagent said she’d come over curious, seen someone she recognized through the window. The paper fell to the floor.

Only now, twenty-three years later, as I’m sitting on a tower lighthouse with Coronation Street on the telly and Vince boiling some godawful-smelling cauliflower stew two floors down, I’m thinking about him again. Too much time out here for thinking – that’s what the old man didn’t reckon on. It depends who you are, if you let your mind get one over on you. Hauntings that won’t let you go.

Weak boy, wet boy; the sooner you get on the lighthouses the better.

The moon pale-eyed through the window. Weird moon. Weird thoughts. Moons out here so bright it hurts. Against everything else they’re brighter than they should be. Imagining the moon is the sun and the whole world turned inside out.

This time I’m the one in the silver suit. I’m the one stepping into the road; I can feel the curves of the case, the weight of mysterious things inside, and I look over at the car, the boy in the passenger seat of a Sunbeam-Talbot, and I say to him,

Run.

‘Bill?’

Arthur’s at the door. There’s a knife from the kitchen in his hand.

‘Sorry. I fell asleep. Fuck. What time is it?’

‘Seven.’ He points the blade at me. It glints. ‘You can help me if you like.’

23

Fifteen days on the tower

Coastguard Hart Point calling the group, how do you read me, please, over?

Hart Point, Tango, going down. Hart Point, Foxtrot, going down. Hart Point, Lima, going down. Hart Point, Whiskey, going down. Hart Point, Yankee, going down.

Tango, Tango, hello from Hart Point, how do you receive me, please, over?

Hart Point, Tango replying, receiving you loud and clear and a fine afternoon it is too, are you receiving me, over?

Hearing you well, Tango, thank you and it is indeed a fine day. Hart Point to Foxtrot, Hart Point to Foxtrot; good afternoon, are you receiving me, over?

Foxtrot, Foxtrot to Hart Point, afternoon from us all, receiving you clearly, over.

Roger that, Foxtrot. This is Hart Point to Lima, how do you hear me, over?

Lima to Hart Point, hearing you loud and clear, hello to the group, this is Lima to Hart Point, nothing else to report, thank you, over.

Thank you, Lima. Whiskey, this is Hart Point to Whiskey, are you reading me?

Whiskey, Whiskey to Hart Point, reading you fine, Steve, over.

Thanks, Ron. Hart Point to Yankee, Hart Point to Yankee; are you receiving me, please, over?

Yankee, Yankee to Hart Point, Vince here, happy to hear your voices, reception good on both wavelengths, hearing you well, thanks, over.

Thank you, Vince. Best wishes to the group, Hart Point over and out.

Sixteen days

I pinched a couple of the chocolates Bill’s wife sent him. Had a chance to last night while Bill was watching telly. I’ll admit I take a peek in their stores from time to time to see if there’s anything I fancy, and if there’s enough, it’s finders keepers. Even if Bill noticed, I don’t think he’d mind. He doesn’t talk about his wife with much affection.

‘Wait till you’re married half your life,’ he says, whenever I mention Michelle. ‘It’s not the same once you get that ring on her finger.’

Out on the set-off with my fishing line; unlikely I’ll hook much but you never know, pollock or mackerel, that’d be nice, bit of garlic rubbed in like Bill showed me and some dried parsley. Might have a lemon still knocking about. My fingers sticking out of my gloves are stiff with cold so it’s a pain to get the chocs out but worth it.

Dark coating, lilac cream inside, salty on the tongue after I’ve swallowed. I wonder if I’ll ever have a woman who makes me things like this, just cos she can, just cos she wants to. Before I went off, Michelle and me talked about how we’d stay together and not have anyone else on the scene. I think about it more than she does cos what exactly am I getting up to on this sorry rock with two other blokes? It’s her who’s back in town with the nightclubs and those eyelashes. When I play ‘Waterloo Sunset’ I see us walking over Waterloo Bridge and her turning to me and saying, ‘I never knew a man so well that I didn’t know at all.’ She shouldn’t mind about that. No one knows. Not even the PK and Bill and I’m with them every day. That’s all right. What I show people and what I am – those are two separate things. Isn’t it the same for everyone?

Fishing’s as much about sitting there as it is about getting a tug on the line, even in the bitter cold with my coat pulled up to my eyebrows and my balls frozen solid. I feel like the most minuscule person when I’m surrounded by so much sea. I used to fantasize about water while I was locked up, not baths or drizzly rain but Olympic-sized pools of it, and oceans that stretched on for miles. When you can’t have it, you want it.

Better not let the PK see me without the safety line attached, but honestly, it’s a faff, and then you have to sit with this knot under your arse and it hurts like buggery. Every PK’s got his way of operating depending on what he thinks is going to be a risk to his station: Arthur says we’ve got to have the line reeved cos there was that time he nearly got swept off the Eddystone, and if he hadn’t had Lady Luck smiling down on him, he’d never be here to tell the story.

Whatever happens on a lighthouse falls back on the PK. Arthur told me about a young keeper who got lost that way off the Scottish coast, one of those that gets passed down as a warning but if the same thing happened on the Eddystone then there’s no reason why it couldn’t here. The PK in charge on that tower never got over it. It went that this young keeper fancied doing some fishing one day and the weather was fine, not a cloud in the sky and the sea was as calm as you like. He told the Assistant he was off to do just that, and the Assistant says, ‘Right you are, bring me back a catch for my tea.’ Meanwhile the PK’s fast asleep in his bunk, none the wiser, so this keeper goes down to where I am now, sitting here like I am with his legs dangling down off the set-off and that’s the last we know of him. When the Assistant goes to fetch him a while later there’s nobody there. Course they’re all bamboozled. The Assistant didn’t hear anything, nobody shouting for help, and it seemed that even if this bloke had fallen in, he’d still be there in the water, calling for them. But he isn’t. He’s just gone, fishing line and all. It was only the PK’s and the Assistant’s word that each other hadn’t been to blame.

The PK in charge took responsibility. The way he saw it, it was his to bear. Then the Landmark Board found these books in the keeper’s bunk, about the devil and the occult, all sorts of spooky shit you don’t want to be getting near. Black magic marks scratched across the bedroom, pentagrams and horned hands; symbols picked into the walls. Sends a shiver down my spine just thinking about it.

I bring up the line and go back inside.

As I do, I see a shape on the water, bobbing away from me. I squint; it isn’t driftwood, or a buoy or a bird; it’s a shoal of tuna near the surface or a plastic bag, a few plastic bags, billowed out. Or is it bigger than that, more solid, the size and shape of a man – is he face-down, face-up, arms out? Not sure. The water vibrates. I can’t be certain whether I’ve seen it at all and even though I’m trying I can’t catch it any longer.

‘What’s for lunch, then?’ Bill’s doing the brass between the kitchen and the bedroom. This is the only bit that ever needs doing: we must get grubby hands from smoking or checkers, then we’re too tired going upstairs to bed so we forget ourselves.

‘A bit of seaweed and a crisp packet, if you want it.’

‘Bloody hell.’

He’s scrubbing viciously, even though the rails are clean as new pennies. When I said to Arthur yesterday that Bill looked ready to get gone, he gave me one of his sideways looks and said, down in his throat, ‘You’re right about that.’

‘I think I saw a body,’ I tell him.

Bill stops polishing. ‘What?’

‘Just now.’

‘Where?’

‘Where d’you bloody think? In the sea.’

Bill wipes his hands, slowly. ‘Who was it?’

‘I don’t know. Some swimmer.’

‘You sure?’

‘No.’

Course, when we get outside, there’s nothing to be found – it was gone anyway before I said anything to Bill and I don’t know for certain what I saw, only that it’s put me on edge. I want to ask the PK what to do but Bill says don’t bother, the PK’s up in his bunk, he’s not had any rest and it’s starting to turn against him. Arthur’s showing the strain – haven’t I noticed? He doesn’t need this.

‘He had goggles on,’ I say.

‘Who?’

‘The swimmer. Red ones.’

‘Get on the R/T,’ says Bill. ‘They can deal with it if they want. Bugger’ll be long dead anyway. He was dead, wasn’t he?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t want to make a song out of it. It could’ve been a seal.’

‘In goggles?’

‘I don’t know if it had goggles on.’

‘You don’t know much, do you?’

I think about the gun hidden under the kitchen sink. Thankful it’s there. Just in case we’re not alone.

Up to the kitchen and Bill makes tea, strong, two sugars, which get dumped in with a tablespoon so it’s actually more like six. All this sea makes you see things that aren’t there. The PK told me that. If you look at the same picture for long enough, the mind comes up with an object to disrupt it, to test if you’re concentrating. Desert mirages, you get the same on the sea. Colours like you wouldn’t believe; splashes and whirlpools; shapes on the surface that flitter and vanish. Even on a flat sea the water gets chopped about and broken, black and shivering up close like a bag of rubbish left out overnight. You could peel a hole in the sky and stick your finger through, to touch whatever’s behind. It would feel soft and needing. It wouldn’t want to let you go.

When you’re with the sea every day, it takes whatever’s inside you and shines it back. Blood and fur, a child’s high scream: and my friend in my arms, grown cold.

‘Drink up,’ says Bill.

The hot, sweet tea makes me sick. Or it’s the body.

‘Arthur ever tell you about the sailor up north?’ Bill clicks his lighter, singeing the end of his fag. I say no, go on. ‘Bugger’s boat got wrecked on the rocks round the light. Everyone on it drowned; the shipment was lost. This sailor blamed Arthur. Said it was the fault of the lighthouse. His crew’d been out at sea for so long, looking at a bloody great horizon with nothing on it that when they finally saw the beam, they couldn’t tell how far away it was. Distances change.’ He taps his temple with the butt of the smoke. ‘You think an object’s further than it is, then all of a sudden you’re on it.’

‘You think I made it up?’

‘No. Just you can’t always trust what’s real.’

‘The PK’s seen it all.’

Bill sucks long on the stick. ‘Arthur isn’t who he used to be.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s not the same person.’

‘I didn’t think you knew him before.’

‘I didn’t. Helen told me.’

I say, ‘He can’t be chipper all the time. Would you be, after…?’

‘It’s not that,’ says Bill. ‘It’s when people go wrong and you don’t recognize them any more. That’s what Helen says. It comes up on you like the bloody lighthouse on that shipwreck, all of a sudden you haven’t a fucking idea who you married.’

In the afternoon it starts to snow. Snow on a tower’s weird because there isn’t anything to give you bearings. You don’t see it piling up on the roof of a car or covering a farmer’s field, so you can’t guess how much of it’s fallen, just that it keeps coming from the sky and the sky’s the colour of bone. The sea accepts it quietly. Water, way below, metal-dull and motionless. Before I worked on a lighthouse, I thought the sea was always the same colour, didn’t think much beyond it being blue or green but actually it’s hardly ever blue or green. It’s a whole load of colours and they’re mostly black or brown, yellow, gold, sometimes pink if it’s churning.

Up in the lantern I put my entry in the weather log, sign my initials then leave it on the desk for the next watchman. The PK’s taught me all sorts about how the sea works and what the weather does to make it a certain way on some days and not others. S for snow, O for overcast, P for passing showers. The pages before are a whole alphabet of letters. It’ll never not strike me as magic how the weather changes in no time at all. It’s like a person who shouts and then sleeps, and the snow is its dreaming.

Letters to Denote the State of the Weather. Drizzling. Gloomy. Lightning. Squall. Thunder. Wet dew. Haze. I like the feel and look of them, how some of them feel how they sound. Thunder sounds like a boulder rolling towards you. Haze is slow and lazy. Squall’s like you’re thrown in a tizz. Same as the names of the things that live in the sea, which sound like pebbles clinking on the beach. Periwinkle, mussel, sea squirt, whelk. Every few months we get a pile of books brought out that we share with the other lighthouses in the group, a travelling library. I read the lot.

I had a foster mum who was big on books. About the only one who was. She’d make a point of reading to us and it was down to those words sounding different from the words I knew in my life. The words that made up my life were short, hard words like oi and fuck and you cunt, bricks for bashing you over the head.

Every time I heard a word I liked, that I felt something for, I memorized it. It felt like the more I read, the more free I was in my mind, and if you’re free in your mind then it doesn’t matter what else is going on. In prison I got a dictionary and found odd little words that I thought were terrific. Birds, there are lots of those. Kittiwakes and cormorants. Curlews. Pipits. Sound like they’ve got the wind running right through them. I copied words down and learned that when you put them together and messed around with them a bit you could get something new out of it again.

But I’m still stumped when I’m writing my letter to Michelle, propped up in my bunk when my watch is done, notepad on my blanket, pen in my hand, figuring out how to put it all down and I don’t know where to begin. A is for apology. D is for deceit.

It’s time to tell her the truth.

I see her in her London flat, toes grazing her calf as she opens the envelope.