The Lamplighters

30

Postcards never finished; postcards never sent. I tear them up and drop them into the sea so I can watch them float away. In another life, a lucky one, I see the pieces washing onto shore. She’ll find them, gather them to her, put them back together. It will all make sense.

Thirty-six days on the tower

‘What’s wrong with you?’ Bill says to Vince over Wednesday’s lunch of chicken soup and days-old bread, which is starting to harden and mould. The soup’s canned, jellied on top, but once it’s heated and thickened up it’s OK. ‘You look sick as a dog.’

‘Something I ate. Feel like bloody death warmed up.’

Bill smokes and grins at me, like it’s all a fucking joke.

‘What?’ I say.

‘Nothing. Christ, someone’s got to keep their pecker up.’

Vince stirs his soup without appetite. I can’t blame him; I’m craving fresh meat now, fresh anything. On the rocks up north, we used to keep chickens – the good ones gave us eggs our whole stay and those that didn’t wound up in a stew. We’d look at the fowl when we got there and hope at least one of them was getting henpecked for the sake of our stomachs.

‘My guts,’ complains Vince. ‘They’re wrung out.’

Bill says, ‘We’ll get you off before the weather turns, eh, Arthur?’

I scrape my chin, running a thumbnail along the spines growing there. I see Helen, looking at me with tenderness, or what I mistook for tenderness but was more likely disdain. What are you doing with a beard, Arthur Black? You’ve never had a beard in all the time I’ve known you, and it isn’t you, it isn’t you at all.

There was a time when she didn’t know me, and it might be me, after all.

‘Just that it’d be you and me then, Bill.’

He flicks his fag ash into the soup bowl.

‘Wouldn’t be for long,’ he says. ‘They’d bring someone else.’

Right now, looking at my Assistant, I think I’d like to sweep the cups and plates from the table, send the whole mess flying as I launch myself against him and wipe that stupid fucking grin off his treacherous face.

‘No,’ I say. ‘It wouldn’t be long.’

Vince glances between us.

‘What do you want to do?’ I ask him.

‘I’ll be right,’ he says, shoving the food away. ‘Rather not haul some poor bugger off right before Christmas.’

Bill says, ‘I’m not doing your fucking watch for you if that’s what you’re after.’

‘Thanks for the sympathy, man.’

‘You’ll get plenty of that ashore, from the doctor.’

‘Anyone’d think you wanted me gone, you bastard.’

Bill shrugs. ‘Just don’t want your lurgy, mate. The thunder bucket’s under enough strain as it is.’

Vince puts his head in his hands. ‘Could’ve been my cooking,’ he groans.

‘If it was anyone’s…’ says Bill.

‘I thought if we all had it—’

‘Which we soon bloody will—’

‘I’ll give it a day,’ says Vince. ‘See if it passes.’

‘I’ll do your watch,’ I tell him. ‘Go back to bed.’

When he’s gone, Bill says, ‘Get a boat out, Arthur. He looks like shit.’

‘That’s my decision. It’ll be over tomorrow.’

‘If it isn’t?’

‘Then we call in.’

‘Not if there’s a bloody great sea on.’

‘There won’t be.’

‘Not what the forecast says,’ says Bill.

I light a cigarette. ‘The forecast isn’t always right.’

‘And you are?’

When the time came for those hens up north, my PK showed me how. He held her upside down and told me to slit her throat. One clean slice from left to right.

‘What are you getting at, Bill?’

He looks at me for a moment.

‘Fuck it,’ he says eventually. ‘You’re the PK, not me. Do what you want.’

I gathered these dolostones at Flamborough Head. My PK back then took me aside on a quiet day and said, ‘Here’s a penny, lad, and some vinegar, now go see what you make of it.’ The rocks with calcium in them fizzed with the acid; I learned how to classify their hardness on a scale of one to ten, scratching the hardest with a coin. He gave me his pad and guidebook with all his jottings inside: he’d taken up painting by then and that was him saying, this is yours now, have this for a while then pass it on.

For Helen, the stones are morbid. For me, it’s the opposite. When you’re touching a rock that’s been here thousands of years, you’re holding hands with history.

She says I’m more comfortable on the tower than I am on land and maybe that’s right. Life ashore feels wrong to me. I’m thrown about by the unsteadiness of it all. Telephones ring unexpectedly. Local shops sell two types of milk and I can’t decide which to buy. People tell me their news in detail, in shops or at the bus stop: ‘Morning, Arthur, back so soon? Doesn’t seem like yesterday since I last saw you. Did Helen tell you Laura’s Stan’s finally had his bladder stones removed?’ They’ll talk about next week or some date in July that I know I won’t be here for, but I’ll nod along with it, knowing it won’t make the slightest bit of difference to me. In that way it’s only ever a halfway house, the land life, in that I’m there but not there, like going to a party full of people I’ve never met, ignorant of the dress code and having to leave before midnight.

When I’m ashore I have to pretend to be a man I’m not, part of something I’m not part of. It’s difficult to explain it to normal people. They wouldn’t have an interest in the endless quiet stillness of the morning watch, or in how the cooking of a good braise can occupy one’s thoughts all day and the day after. Lighthouse worlds are small. Slow. That’s what other people can’t do: they can’t do things slowly and with meaning.

My brain works differently here. Ashore it sort of goes to sleep; it isn’t as sharp as it is now. Take when I’m going off on the relief, I’ll know exactly how much my bag of tricks should weigh with all the bits and pieces inside – slippers, underpants, towels, comb, handkerchiefs, facecloth, working trousers, comfortable trousers, pullovers, sponge bag, fags, shaving soap. That’s to do with my lighthouse life, so I’ll know how heavy each item is on its own and all together, and if something’s missing I’ll be able to say without thinking too hard what that is. Before now I’ve stopped Helen on the jetty to tell her I’ve left my nail clippers in the cupboard in the bathroom. In ordinary life, I lose all that. There’s too much to bother with and no point anyway because it’s always changing. So, while it might seem like the tower demands less of me, or it’s here I go into a switched-off state, that’d be wrong.

Helen will confuse me even more when I go back. She’ll want to talk to me on some nights and not on others. She’ll go out and I won’t know where.

Though I could guess now, where. Bill mightn’t be it. She could have plenty, poking fun behind my back, calling me the fool, the man who can’t hold on to his wife.

I can’t rest for thoughts of them together. How could she? And him, whom I took under my wing when he got here, showing him the ropes and showing him friendship; calming him after the fright and sickness of the crossing, and all along – how long? – he wasn’t the person I thought.

I can’t rest for thoughts of you.

Sleep is the refuge, but it won’t let me close. In my bunk I get hot then cold, sweat then shiver, it’s night then it’s dawn and I can’t remember any time in between.

One of our generators has packed up. I radio the mainland for assistance and they say they’ll send a man out. But really, I don’t want him here. Don’t want anybody new. Anybody at all.

By four o’clock a stiff fog advances over the sea: they’ve missed their chance. I go up to the gallery to load the jib. It’s freezing outside, unnaturally quiet.

There’s a smudge on the gallery, a single footprint.

Small. I blink. It’s gone.

Fog does this. Makes everything muffled and still. I wouldn’t be the first keeper to attribute a temperament to the elements, seeing as they become as close companions to us as our mates indoors, but there is a particular quality to fog. It smothers light and sound, shrinking the world until the spot you’re in is the only one left.

December sun is weak at the best of times. Now it’s lemonish, cream on the turn. Families ashore will be setting up their Christmas trees and decorating their homes with ribbons and candles. Helen and I used to make the effort, but we don’t these days. We’ll always have the teatime angel chimes because those were the ones she grew up with, and a length of tinsel wrapped around the mirror. I’m rarely there for Christmas. There’s no point in her doing it alone.

I enter F and G into the weather log – G denoting ‘gloomy’ – then read the thermometer and record the visibility, which is barely a stone’s throw from the tower.

I spend a long time doing it, longer than the others. They don’t inscribe much – dates, symbols, at the required three hours, nothing that belongs to them truly. I don’t know why I’m writing or what I’m writing especially. Perhaps I’m writing to you. It’s the fog or the hours or the endlessness of everything.

Outside, I pick up a feather from when Vince shovelled his birds. Vince says, ‘Stop calling them my birds, they’re not my bloody birds,’ but they are in the way I think of them, because he was the one that found them. I steady the feather before releasing it. It hovers for a moment, held by the clotted air, then disappears. It doesn’t drop, or fall, or flip away as it would on a breeze. It vanishes.

When I stand, it’s to see a shape on the sea, out in the distance, emerging from the fog. So Trident did send someone. Only the boat’s coming from the wrong direction, from the open water. It can’t be maintenance, after all. I squint, uncertain if it’s a quirk of the weather, but my binoculars confirm the boat is coming in fast. Without hesitation I wind the jib and press the plunger to fire the gun. It sounds deafeningly, splitting the smoke. The clock’s on for five minutes but I fire another immediately, before winding the jib again to reload.

The boat seems not to hear. It hastens to the tower, oblivious to the explosions and to my now waving arms, hollering at it to steer clear.

Through the binoculars, my target appears faintly. The boat’s mast is tall but the vessel itself is compact. I see a head piloting it and decide that if I can see him, he must be able to see me, so I call again, ‘Hard to starboard, hard to starboard!’

The gun explodes. Why does he advance? Can he not detect my light?

Now I can make out his torn sail, with no more movement inside it than a sock on a line on a still day. He’s coming in for help; he doesn’t want to go around. I shout that I’ll prepare the winch and he doesn’t respond so I use the flag semaphore. At last, he lifts an arm.

‘Hello!’ I call. ‘I see you!’

He keeps one arm up, fingers together, more like a paddle than a hand. Not only is the vessel small but he is too.

‘Hello,’ I say again, not shouting this time.

The boat turns starboard but the person inside is waving now. It isn’t a wave of SOS but one of recognition. He passes the tower. I watch him go and in seconds the fog takes him. He’s gone.

31

Fifty-three days on the tower

Sid arrives on Thursday. We’ve barely cleared breakfast before Arthur gives the heads-up that the dinghy’s coming in and it’s the mechanic to fix the generator. He looks surprised, as if he didn’t expect it. The fog’s still dense. I didn’t reckon on Trident shipping any man out. Why doesn’t Arthur question it? This week his beard has grown dark, his eyes darker still. There are keepers who stay so long on towers they start to hear mermaids.

It takes minutes of shouting into the dead gloom before the boat’s positioned and our newcomer’s strapped to the harness. His boatman is no one I recognize; he’s masked in a sou’wester, his face hidden, but he does a fine job of keeping the rope taut and the boat at a steady distance, which is no mean feat because the sea round the tower’s gone like bathwater down a plughole. It’s the rocks that do me in: cold hunks of carbon that man’s got nothing to do with. Same as the ocean, same as the sky. There isn’t any feeling, no connection at all. And if that’s what life comes down to then that makes sense to me. There isn’t heaven or hell or good or bad, because none of it cares.

‘Pleased t’ meet you,’ says the mechanic. ‘I’m Sid.’

He puts his hand out. He’s taller than Arthur or me, with a boxer’s build. I swear if the Trident Fellows ever had to spend more than a night on a sea light, they’d stop hiring people who take up the space of two. Sid’s older than the norm. He has a tattoo on his arm, of a man’s skull inside the jaws of a wolf. His hair is thick and pale.

‘Where’re you from then?’ Arthur asks, once the three of us are sitting in the kitchen, smoking, our hands round mugs of tea.

‘All over.’ Sid shakes his empty pack then pilfers one of Arthur’s. ‘I never stay put. Was told I’d be good for the lighthouses, like one o’ ye, because they move ye round and that. But this, nah, couldn’t be doing with it. Too bloody small.’

Sid looks about, as if he’s never been on a tower station before and how amusing are the little table and chairs and the men living their lives inside.

Normally when people come on, they know they’re not part of it. This is our world they’re in, so they have to toe the line, just like it’d be ashore if you hired a plumber and he came round to do a job. But there’s an unnatural feeling about Sid. I can’t say what. His voice is high-pitched for a bloke and for someone that big; it’s not entirely like a woman’s, but not far off. It doesn’t sit on him, like it doesn’t belong to him, and the more because the accent is broad, northern, and reminds me of my granddad, who had fists like hams and a nose like a misshapen root vegetable.

He reminds me of someone all over. He reminds me of a dream I once had.

‘Me, I need space,’ says Sid. ‘Suits me fine to pay a visit once in a while but I couldn’t be doing with living here. Got a light? Ta. Fuck, ye boys must smoke a lot; I only smoke when I’m bored. Why ain’t ye got any washing-up liquid, eh? I thought ye keepers were obsessed with all tha’. But ye ain’t got any.’

The PK frowns. ‘We’re waiting for Trident to approve it.’

‘Ye should’ve said. I could’ve brought some over; could’ve got some from Spar, call it an early Christmas present. Wouldn’t’ve been a bother.’

‘Soap does all right.’

‘Don’t ye lot get fed up? Sitting round doing fuck all, all day.’

‘It’s a bit more than that,’ says Arthur.

‘Right, but still boring.’

‘Not once you’re used to it.’

‘Wouldn’t want to get used to it, mate. Aye, that’d be the worry.’ Sid blows smoke in the direction of the weight tube. ‘Imagine ye still had to wind that bugger up and down all day and night. Don’t half take up space, does it?’

Arthur agrees, then says about the weights on chains there used to be inside, and how whoever’s watch it was had to wind the weights all the way up to the lantern to turn the lenses before dropping them back down again. Every forty minutes, like a grandfather clock. Arthur would’ve enjoyed it, I think, before it was done electrically; it’s his sort of thing: head down, get on with it, like my dad and his dad before. One of the reasons Arthur’s their golden boy. Trident’s trustworthy long-service veteran who’s never so much as stepped an inch out of line. Arthur proves the tower life works. Men can survive it and survive it well. Every keeper I’ve been stationed with talks about learning from him. Like he’s a Holy Grail they might someday get to touch.

He isn’t like that, once you know. That’s why whatever she says to me now about how she’s made a mistake, I don’t believe it.

‘It’s a right thing, is cancer,’ says Sid, stubbing out his fag. ‘What a riot that is. D’ye know I’ve had it three times? I’m the original bullet dodger, me. Must have a cat in me to have all these lives. More tea? Ta, two sugars, don’t be shy about it, pal; yep, two, that’s it. Dunno what I’m doing taking these tin-pot jobs – but I am, guess I need t’ make a God’s penny. Show me someone who’s had cancer that many times, it really takes it out o’ ye, it does. Dogs get it too. I never knew that but me mate’s dog had it, but the dog didn’t get owt for it because he’s a dog, so he died. Where’s yer third?’

‘Third?’ says Arthur.

‘Yer other man.’

‘Sleeping.’

‘At this hour? Flippin’ ’eck, what’s this for him, a holiday?’

‘He’s sick.’

‘If he’s sick in his bed, he can’t be up t’ much. Ye should tell him I’ve had cancer three bleedin’ times and see what he makes o’ that. I almost want to get it again, ye know. It’s turned into a bit of a game for me now. Seeing as I’m winning at it, I’ll have another pot and see how I do, how many times I can beat it. It’s a rough one, those hospitals. They say I’m like a bad penny in how I keep turning up.’

‘My mother was from Yorkshire.’ It’s the first thing I’ve said to him.

‘Yeah?’ He turns on me. Silver eyes. ‘Where was your granny from?’

‘What?’

‘I don’t need your life story, pal.’

‘I guessed. The accent.’

‘Then ye’re a crap guess. Like I said, I’m from all over. Being that way, ye get to witness the whole circus o’ life. Ye two ever heard of the white rook? I’ve a pal said he saw one once, on the Maiden Rock. It were definitely the Maiden, it was, hundred per cent. Not a gull, me mate knows these things, it were a white rook. He was up on the gallery and this bloody bird comes right out of nowhere and sits down next to him, giving him the beady eye. Totally white, it was, a flippin’ great big white rook.’

‘We don’t get rooks out here,’ says Arthur.

‘Ye did that time. It was ages ago, mind. I’ve got a thing about birds, can’t stand the buggers. They’re prehistoric in the way they look, aren’t they, all beaks and feet and flapping about. Ye ever tried helping a bird when it’s got it sen in difficulty? It bloody screams at ye, it does, it’s terrifying.’

Eventually, I get Sid down to the generator. I watch the back of his head as we go down the staircase – one turn to the oil, one to the paraffin, one to the store. His hair is the strangest colour, almost white but not quite, and not the white that comes with age. There’s a tremor of recognition in a dark part of my brain but it breaks apart when I reach for it.

The mechanic’s so big I can’t think how we’ll both fit down there with the batteries and crammed-in machinery, but we do. Arthur says I’m to stay with him. I don’t want to. I don’t like how he looks at me, as if he knows every thought I ever had.

‘Who’s your boatman?’

Sid sets to work on draining the fuel. ‘Ye what?’

‘Your boatman. I don’t know him.’

‘I don’t know him neither, pal.’

‘We usually get Jory. He’s our usual one.’

‘Sorry to disappoint.’ It’s murky down here, thick with shadows. ‘Bet ye were hoping for extras, weren’t you, Christmas being around the corner.’

‘Sometimes that happens.’

‘Yeah, ye lighthouse keepers like thinking of yeselves as a bleedin’ charity.’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’

‘I heard all the nippers at the school send ye presents.’ Sid’s fingers work swiftly; he doesn’t pay attention to what he’s doing, he does it absent-mindedly, like someone stirring a pot while on the phone. ‘And the church too. Ye’re not running a platoon out in Vietnam, pal, don’t feel too sorry for yeselves.’

‘We’re always grateful for it.’

‘It’s over the top if ye ask me. And d’ye want to hear another thing, Bill? Another thing’s this tendonitis. Ye ever had it? Ye can thank your lucky stars then – I woke up with me hand all seized up, couldn’t move it a bit; and not just me hand but me wrist and all the way up to me elbow, completely dead it were, might as well’ve had a sack o’ spuds tied to me for all the good it did. This doctor said to me—’

‘The cancer doctor?’

‘Nah, different one, this doctor says, Sidney, ye’ve got tendonitis. I say I got what-what? An’ he tells me it’s where the nerve gets trapped going into yer hand, and ye have to put up with it till it gets better cos there’s fuck-all else to be done.’ He rolls his shoulders; there’s a cracking sound. ‘Course, I couldn’t work then and that were the pits, though not as bad as the cancer, that really were a thing, but turns out the quack were right and this tendonitis did go away on its own. It caught me unawares, it did. Bit like that white rook ye’ve got out here.’

‘There isn’t a white rook.’

‘Suit yourself. Me mate knows what he’s talking about.’

‘Who is your mate? I might know him.’

Sid takes out the carburettor. ‘Ye married, Bill?’

‘Yes.’

‘Jenny, ain’t it?’

‘How do you know her name?’

He unscrews the float bowl. ‘Reminds me of a donkey.’

‘I’ll tell her you said that.’

‘How’s it going then? With Jenny. I heard she’s a drunk.’

The smell of fuel fills my nostrils. ‘What?’

‘Things get around.’ Those eyes cross mine. ‘Ashore, like. People talk.’

‘That’s none of your damn business.’

‘Right ye are. Should mind me big nose. Only Ah’m curious as to what makes a man and woman want to stay together their whole lives, ye know. It fascinates me, like. Ah’m not married meself, never wanted it. Can’t think o’ much worse.’

I’ve got to speak, or I’ll punch him. Got to fill my mouth or I’ll fill my fist. My dad said, You’re a boy who gets hit, Bill; you’re not a boy who hits.

‘Shit, ain’t it.’ Sid picks up a wire brush. ‘Being tied down all that time. Life’s a long haul. Couldn’t be arsed with it. Bit of a loner, me.’

‘You get lots of time apart in this job.’

‘Which you like, eh, Bill.’

My head hurts.

‘Ah’m sorry,’ he says. ‘Just interested. People come to me with their problems.’

‘I don’t have problems.’

Down here Sid looks younger than he did upstairs. His hands as they wipe the gunk out of the bowl are smooth, not belonging to a man who gets his fingers covered in grease for a living. I can’t stop thinking of his teeth when he smiled, bright white, the canines sharp. My chest feels like I’ve swallowed a bag of sand.

‘Ye keep telling tha sen that, pal,’ he says. ‘Ye’ll never guess what I was before I started in this game. Go on. Have a guess. Bet ye can’t.’

‘I can’t.’

‘I already gave ye a clue.’ He sprays the jet passage. ‘People came to me with their problems. Once a week. On a Sunday. Bloody hell, ye’re no churchgoer then!’

‘You were a priest?’

‘What’s the matter – don’t I look like a holy man?’

‘No.’

‘It were a long time ago. Pass me that flathead, would ye?’

‘Why?’

‘I need it.’

‘Why a priest?’

‘Reason I told ye that was so’s ye’d get whatever it is off yer chest.’

‘I don’t have anything on my chest.’

He wipes his nose with the tattooed arm. ‘What about that bag?’

‘What bag?’

‘Ye said summat like ye had a bag of sand on yer chest what with everything you had corked up inside it.’

I peer at him. Closer.

‘Ye don’t love yer wife Jenny Donkey but ye’d have a crack at the PK’s.’ Sid turns the screwdriver in his hands. ‘Yep, ye’d have a crack at ’er. Loved her for ages, haven’t ye, ever since ye came here and yer own wife looked shabby standing next to her. Ye feel about Helen so strong ye can’t look at her straight. Can’t even touch her, even to help with her shopping bags; ye’re worried it’ll be obvious to him and then he’ll know. Well, he already knows, pal. He knows what ye want, how fucked ye are over her. Surprised? Course he knows, ye idiot. Ye think he’s old and past it, don’t ye, and what’s a bugger like that goin’ t’ do with ye? I wouldn’t want t’ guess at it, pal. That’s a man with nothing to lose.’

‘I don’t know who the hell you are—’

‘Aye, ye do. Ye know exactly who I am.’

Sid taps the pad of his index finger against the pad of his thumb. It sounds like an old telephone line connecting.

‘Ye missed the boat with Helen,’ he says. ‘After what happened to ’em, she’s ruined now, ain’t she? She’ll never get better, and ye didn’t do it with her. He did.’

‘Don’t talk about Helen again,’ I warn him. ‘You don’t know her.’

‘Nor do ye, ye crazy fuck. But I know ye. Aye, I know all o’ ye. Just enough and enough’s as good as a feast.’

He wipes his hands and smiles again, showing his jaw teeth.

‘Now what am I getting for me dinner? Been ages since I had me some home-cooked grub.’

32

Eighteen days on the tower

Someone comes to bed, but that doesn’t mean it’s night. It’s dark, but that doesn’t mean it’s night. Or maybe it is night, there’s always a chance. Slivers of happenings and sounds that belong in the real world: the steam off a cup of tea or the dinner-canteen stench of a tin of Heinz ravioli. Nowhere to go and nowhere to be except holed up in the same place, sick to the stomach, stomach like a net filled with crabs, worried and waiting and the days on repeat. In the nick I had a slit to see daylight; they don’t want you getting spoiled on the amount of light you get, cos light’s a luxury for a man with a dark heart in his chest. But when it was clear, I’d glimpse the stars, five or six of them maybe, and they seemed the most beautiful things to me then and they still do now. I’d be lying there with some con on the bunk above, snoring or scratching his balls, and I’d stare at those stars for as long as it took me before I went to sleep.

It’s worse for the others. They’ve got to deal with covering my watch and cleaning up after me. Me, I’m used to shitting and puking in buckets. Bill and the PK are used to fine china and porcelain bogs, or whatever bogs are made out of. Being sick here or being sick in the clink, it doesn’t make much of a difference.

The PK comes in. Kneels, gets a box out his cupboard. I can hear the rocks and stones as they knock against each other, knock-knock, soft, cold, constant. Time passes.

‘Did I tell you I read palms?’ Michelle said to me after she finished work. I was meeting her at Charing Cross; she came out of a busy station, umbrella hanging like something shot, and waved and smiled. I thought, how the hell did I manage this?

‘Not into that crap, are you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Dead people. Thinking you’ve lived before.’

‘I don’t know what I think about that.’ We passed over Trafalgar Square. Grey pigeons on a grey column. ‘My nan showed me how to do the palms.’

‘Yeah?’

‘And Tarot.’

‘Those cards with the goats swinging upside down.’

‘You’ve never done it.’

‘Course I bloody haven’t!’

‘I’ll do it for you if you like.’

She didn’t. We went back to her bedsit on Stratford Road and fucked instead. When I woke up next morning, she had one of my hands in hers and was looking at it.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

She said: ‘You don’t have a fate line.’

I said, ‘Should I?’ She said yes. I said as long as I’ve got a heart line that’s fine by me. You’ve got one of those, she said.

Half awake, half asleep, drowning in a half-world. Last night I heard the PK’s voice on the radio. He’s calling for a doctor, isn’t he? Arthur will take care of me.

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

A man coming at me over the sea. White hair, white skin; feet dripping on the set-off, hands on the dog steps. Here he is at the entrance. At the door now.

I promised Michelle it was over. When I wrote to her, I swore, there’ll be no more fighting now. No more danger. Trust me.

There was a bloke in the lock-up, he played a lot of chess and he’s the one I learned it from; he said it was like being one of the pieces, one of the big ones, let’s say a horse. If you put the horse on the board, it’s part of the game and there are ways the game can get it. But if you take it off, it’s just a horse, there’s nothing else to call it, it can’t be boxed in or got at or played; it isn’t even part of the game any more.

You have to take yourself off the board every once in a while. Get back to who you are – the real you, when you’re alone and there’s no pretending. You can do that on a lighthouse. There’s no one pulling you this way or pushing you that.

When they come for me, that’s when I’ll know. What I’m made of. What I’ve got. What I’m willing to do.

My secret in the kitchen under the sink. Like the PK and his stones, that private pleasure. I imagine the weight of the gun, its curves as smooth as hers.

Hours I’ve been floating. Dimly aware of the PK coming into the bedroom, the creak of a bunk and the swish of a curtain in the deep, deep dark, then a whisper,

‘Vince, can you hear me? Not long now, mate.’

Drifting in that darkness, enough to lift my thoughts up to the top of the tower, part of the sky or part of the sea, or else I’m lost somewhere on land, searching for that unknowable, unreachable light, feeling I’ve died.

Nineteen days

A time I remember, some day in the middle of a million days when we ran out of fags. Patting a pocket like a slack-skinned cheek, realizing, shit, we’ve smoked them all. Three keepers legging it between floors, raiding coats and shirts, every nook where an in-case-of-emergency fag might once have been stowed. Shaking every box and tin, thinking of that mate that gave me one once and then I went and hid it and I can’t remember where. The mission for butts tossed in bins, twisting the nubs to get the innards out and rolling them into a smokable flute. One or two puffs but worth it.

Smoking on a light’s more than habit. Two and a half minutes of being in the time that you’re in. Quiet heart, quiet soul. Then what? Waiting for a boat to pass by, putting in an ask for a crew to come but that could be days, and the hours stretch on and on and the sea makes fun of us, tiny men with tiny desires.

Then Arthur found a pack. If it were Bill, he’d have kept it. Fags aren’t like tins of sardines and they don’t have to be shared. But the PK put a smoke by each of our places – one a day, no more for him, no less for us, and that fag was anticipated to the point of something divine. The three of us smoking after dinner in silence, warm crackle of paper, the soft pup of our lips. Nothing before or since ever tasted as good.

A nightmare jolts me, or it could be the sheets, which are wet with sweat and tangled between my legs. I was climbing then my muscles gave out and I fell and I woke up.

Someone else, knock-knock – there’s talk in the background, in the distance, above or below I can’t tell, but someone else is here cos Bill and the PK use their smarter voices then, better and clearer instead of the grunts and swears.

I try to sit. My back peels off the wrinkled sheet. Blood rushes to my head. It hurts; I lie down.

Belly empty but to think about food makes me sick. To think about the chocolates Bill’s wife sent over makes me sick. Sockets hurt, sockets all over, those points in the body where round things go in round-shaped holes. There’s a bucket on the floor. I don’t know when I last used it or it was cleared away.

They’ve brought a doctor, that’s it. I want a doctor. But it isn’t a doctor, it isn’t anyone; I’m dreaming of going on the gallery for the fresh air and to let the wind blast it out of me but I’ll never get up there, I’ll never get up, and it feels like thirst, actual thirst, the need to get out, a drink I have to have or I’ll die. What if I die?

When I wake again it’s freezing cold. The wall is freezing damp. I pull the sheet and blanket and they’re freezing too.

Brackish dreams I wade through up to my knees, coating my tongue in bitter liquor. Back there again, walking, the block of flats up ahead. I saw it not as it had been in real life but changed. Crooked. My mate Reg behind me, the others too: I didn’t see them but I felt them, heard the shift of their jackets as they moved…

Let’s go back. Let’s not do this.

But the dream carried on as if it never heard and the dog was barking now. I saw its teeth. Its veined black gums and the scab that oozed when it snarled.

Blood and fur, a child’s high scream. My friend grown cold in my arms.

The window outside the bedroom is an opaque square. I think of F for fog.

Three voices.

I need water. I expect to come to the kitchen and see myself there, with the others, the PK, Bill and me, sitting round smoking over a game of cards, and it’s my own voice I’ve been hearing, and the standing version, the one thinking this, isn’t involved at all. He’s invisible. Dead. He died somewhere back there in his dreams.

But when I make it downstairs, it isn’t me I see.

It’s a big, silver-haired bloke.

Arthur says, ‘About time.’

The big, silver-haired bloke doesn’t say anything, but he looks at me, and smiles.