by Jenny Colgan
It was this that made her love Mount Polbearne: the sense that its beauty was borrowed, temporary; that it had a hard edge too: the work and the pain that underpinned what it had always taken to live here. It had never been a home for the rich.
Until now, she supposed, with the weekenders and their second homes, and their nice fish restaurant and their loud, unabashed voices. But really, Mount Polbearne belonged to its people, the people who’d been raised here and had families here, and who had stayed through the bad times and the good.
Polly was lost in her reverie when she slowly began to realise something, then jumped up in horror. The town was dark, the world was dark; only the flashing of the lightning forking the sky illuminated them. The lighthouse had gone out.
Chapter Twenty-Three
‘What if the lighthouse goes out?’ she had asked her solicitor, who was, she remembered, the absolute cheapest one they could find at the time. He had looked a bit uncomfortable and said, ‘Well, you ring the coastguard,’ and Huckle had sniggered and said, ‘Polly, just take a really big torch up there and whizz round and round,’ and Polly had said, ‘That’s not very funny, it could be dangerous,’ and Lance, the young estate agent, had said he couldn’t remember ever hearing of the lighthouse going out, and then he had paused and said, well, you know, except in the daytime, obviously, and Huckle had giggled again and Polly had accused him of not taking this seriously and he had given her a big kiss on the cheek and said, ‘May I remind you, madam, that you are the one buying a four-storey house with one room per floor and a big electric hat, which is just about the least serious thing I have ever heard of,’ and the solicitor had rather peevishly looked at his watch and said, ‘Is this bird normally allowed to walk over important paperwork?’ and that had kind of been the end of that conversation.
There had been a storm before. A terrible storm that had rocked Mount Polbearne, that had destroyed half of its fishing fleet and taken one of its best men. They were only just recovering. That storm, Polly had slept through; had not realised what was happening; how serious and awful things could be.
This time, she did. And this time, she was right at the heart of it.
Now Polly deeply regretted her glibness and foolishness; she had to call the coastguard, but all the lines were down and all the mobile phones knocked out. This was a freak storm – it had come from nowhere – but the fact remained that she didn’t have any way of getting in touch with someone who could make things better.
Surely they’d notice, she thought. Surely people would notice there was no lighthouse. They’d send someone straight away. It would be obvious.
Although how would they get here? The causeway was of course completely impassable, and how on earth you’d launch a boat in this… Nobody would, she thought, apart from the RNLI. Nobody would ever be out in a boat in this, it would be completely crazy.
She pulled a blanket around her shoulders, for the night was very chilly, and went back down to the bathroom.
Thank God for IKEA, Polly thought. It was… well, it was unutterably useless, but it was better than nothing. Okay, better than absolutely nothing. She had eighty-five tea lights, more or less. She gathered them up in a pillowcase and took them upstairs, all the way to the very top, to the door that led to the outside of the lighthouse.
So. The mains electricity had failed, and the back-up generator too. This was the full extent of her technical knowledge on the subject. Huckle would have known what to do. He would have kick-started it like his bloody motorbike, it would be easy for him. But she didn’t have a clue.
And thank God, she’d forgotten, but here it was: a vast old torch, hanging off the nail next to the key. She checked: it worked fine. She breathed a huge sigh of relief, then, with some trepidation, unlocked the door leading on to the walkway steps.
At first, she thought she hadn’t managed to unlock the door at all, that it was jammed: the wind was pressed against it so hard, she couldn’t open it. The storm showed absolutely no signs of subsiding. The hail had stopped, but in its place was a heavy, solid rain that drenched her as soon as she managed to finally force the door open. It banged hard against the metal stairwell, and she took a step out, carefully, on to the walkway.
The breath was stolen from her lungs; she couldn’t breathe. The water poured down on her. The lightning crackled and buzzed all the way across the sky, now on this side, now the other, racking up the pounding waves. The thunder felt as if it was directly above her head, as if someone was throwing wardrobes across the sky. She clung to the metal balustrade, convinced that at any moment she would slip and tumble down, down down the side of the lighthouse and land in a crumpled heap at the bottom. Perhaps, she thought, they would bury her in Nan the Van. She choked back a sob and tried to stop her hands from shaking, but she was utterly frozen with nerves. It took every ounce of grit and courage she had not to turn and step back into the shelter of the lighthouse and close the door, and nobody would have blamed her if she’d done exactly that.
But she did not. Whimpering just a little, in a voice that couldn’t be heard at all above the storm, she inched forward, tiny bit by tiny bit, to put her hands on the opposite balustrade. The old iron wobbled precariously in the wind, so that she thought she was going to catapult straight over the fragile guard rail. She thought, ruefully, of sunnier times, when they had run lithely up and down these stairs as if it were nothing at all. If she got out of this, she told herself, she was going to move to a bungalow. In a desert.
She set one foot on the ladder, then the other. I can do this, she told herself. I can do this. But that was before she put her head above the bulk of the building, into the little gap between the lighthouse tower and the metal scaffold of the light itself, sitting in its own cage high, high up in the air. At once, the wind smacked her in the face; it was as if it was deliberately trying to take her head off. She was utterly blinded by the rain, which fell straight into her open mouth until she was gasping. Her hair was plastered to her head; her clothes were soaked through.
Truthfully Polly couldn’t quite remember how she made it: not just the last few steps on the ladder, but the perilous, slippery walkway round to the lighthouse casing door. Grabbing the balustrades with both hands, she pushed herself on, one foot in front of the other. At one point she nearly lost her footing. Her ankle went under and she howled and swore at the pain, hopping up again, her heart in full panic mode. The torch was swinging from her mouth, her teeth clenched on the end of it, as she could not hold it and balance at the same time. It took everything she had to slowly push herself forward again one more time, and onwards.
Finally she reached the plain door at the back of the lighthouse. She had to fumble for the key in the howling wind, trying with all her might not to let go of the torch, sobbing a little from the pain in her ankle, and terrified that she would drop the key through the grating and it would tumble down the lighthouse, lost.
Eventually she managed to still her trembling hands long enough to turn the key. She fell into the lamp room, her heart pounding, and forced the door shut behind her. And then, although it was still loud outside, it felt in that darkened room that everything was still. The roaring in Polly’s ears abated to manageable levels. A couple of the smaller panes on the underside of the lighthouse construction had shattered, but the main casing was thick and intact.
But outside, oh lord, what a sight. There were no birds in the air, certainly no moon or stars, just a great boiling vat of clouds and angry water, hurtling through the sky, through the sea, until there was barely any difference between the two. And the noise, oh, the noise was unbearable even inside, because it spoke of fear, and the very real knowledge of what a storm could do to people who didn’t live soft and comfortable on the mainland.
Polly let her pillowcase full of tea lights drop, and turned on her torch, shining the light around the heavy machinery, noting the great bulb no longer rotating in its winch. She found a fuse box, but looking in it couldn’t see anything
that might help, even when she flicked the switches up and down. Anyway, the entire region’s power was out, and this didn’t charge the secondary generator, so it was useless anyway.
She swallowed hard and went towards the box that said ‘Generator’ on it. She had never opened it before – legally speaking, this wasn’t even her property; it belonged to Trinity House, and she had simply signed over access rights in return for owning the space. She didn’t have the faintest clue what to do; she only knew that this was an incredibly rare occurrence.
Sure enough, once she’d found the Allen key that unlocked the panel, she found herself staring at a mass of electrical wiring. There was nothing here she could manage at all. She swore at the panel, which didn’t help, but bending down, she did notice something against the wall: a huge, old-fashioned square fog lantern with a large battery inside it.
With trembling fingers she reached out and switched it on, and to her massive relief, it shone out: shone out so strongly, in fact, that it blinded her completely and she had to jump back.
As soon as her eyelids stopped dazzling, she moved forward again to pick it up carefully from behind. Then, pulling her damp blanket a little closer around her shoulders – it was freezing up in the big light tower without the main light on – she moved towards the window and shone the big beam out into the night.
It wasn’t much; it hardly penetrated more than twenty metres into the howling dark. But it wasn’t about what she could see, Polly reasoned. It was about, hopefully, allowing other people to see the lighthouse. Not that anyone could possibly be out there, could they? Not at sea. They couldn’t be. She toyed with the idea of walking around the room to give the illusion of the light moving, but decided this wasn’t necessarily helpful, and she had absolutely no idea how long the battery would last, and how long it would take the emergency services to get here. So instead she stood and shone it out of the window, as close as she could get to the sea. Mount Polbearne was hardly visible from up here, nothing more than ghostly wisps of light through the hazy tumbling rain. Come on, thought Polly. Come on, storm. Blow yourself out. Move on to a place where people will just lose a couple of roof tiles.
There was a sudden screeching noise behind her. Polly jumped up in the air.
‘Christ,’ she said, as it came again: a kind of feedbacky noise. She turned her head to see what the hell had made it. Somewhere on the other side of the room a red light was blinking. She headed towards it. The noise went off again.
Frowning, Polly put the big lamp down on a stool by the window and turned towards the dark room to investigate.
She saw as she came closer that it was a walkie-talkie, and her heart leapt. The outside world! Thank God!
She picked it up and fiddled with various buttons. It had obviously been plugged in and was charged.
‘Polly? Polly? Over. Polly? Polly? Over,’ came a distorted voice.
She pressed the answer button.
‘Jayden, is that you?’
There was a long pause.
‘Jayden?’
‘No.’ The voice was recognisable now. It was Selina.
‘Hey,’ said Polly. She had forgotten about Selina’s strange behaviour from earlier. ‘Are the boys there?’
‘No,’ said Selina again. And indeed, there were fewer lights out in the streets. ‘They’ve all gone over to the beach. The RNLI picked them up and they launched from there. All down the coast it’s ruinous, apparently. Mount Polbearne is the only place the boats stayed beached.’
‘Because we know,’ said Polly, pounding her fist on the old desk unit. ‘Oh God. We know.’
She took a deep breath.
‘Can you see me?’ she said.
‘Only a glimmer,’ said Selina. ‘I’m upstairs, though. If I was down at boat level… well, I don’t know. Is that all the light you have?’
‘No,’ said Polly patiently. ‘Actually the light is working, I just thought it would be funnier to leave it off.’
‘What was it like getting up there?’ said Selina.
‘Grim,’ said Polly.
There was a pause.
‘All the men out there again,’ said Polly quietly, as they both thought of another storm.
‘Archie said there were holidaymakers out there. People fiddling about in boats.’
Polly instantly remembered how beautiful the afternoon had been: all those jolly sails bobbing their way to the horizon.
‘Oh my God,’ she said. And she peered out, trying desperately to see through the maelstrom, tilting the light down to try and break through. The storm would pass, it would soon be over, and everything would be all right. All she had to do was keep tilting the light down.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Polly felt drowsy, shining the light down and around the waves below. How could the storm be showing no signs of abating? It had roared on and on for two hours now at least. She dreaded to think what the brave boys were doing down along the coast with the RNLI. Although maybe everyone was safely gathered in now.
At least Mount Polbearne had no trees – none could grow in the onslaught of the wind on the hilltops. But on the mainland surely trees would be falling, blocking roads. Tiles would be off roofs; beach huts crushed like matchsticks, or simply lifted into the air. She felt for the beachside cafés and little surfing shacks strung along the hundreds of kilometres of coastline; she wondered about the lovely little kitchen at Reuben’s old place and wondered if it could survive. Well, Cornwall had taken a pounding before, and it could take one again, she knew. The railway line would be flooded. Flights would be grounded. At least she wouldn’t have to worry that Huckle might suddenly arrive without her having shaved her legs. She used to think that might happen, back before his staying away became normality, rather than a strange occurrence.
She gazed out into the endless night. It felt like this was the world now: a howling apocalyptic void, not the gentle breezy place she considered home.
Suddenly, her eyes caught something. She blinked, not trusting them. Then she moved closer to the window. Damn this scratchy perspex: it was fine for a light to shine out of, but not so good for seeing through properly. She stared ahead, then gasped.
Out on the causeway – or rather, where the causeway was when it wasn’t buried beneath several metres of turbulent water – something white was waving in the barely discernible light. Polly cursed her underpowered lamp again, and strained her eyes to see. Something… something was moving out there. Was it a large piece of flotsam? She hoped so: something that had been torn off a big ship – a tarp or a lifebelt or something insignificant and unimportant.
But then it would not be swinging so wildly in the wind, not like that, to and fro, as if it were still attached – just – to a boom.
Just as she was swearing again, a purple light went off just beside it, like a firework, suddenly and quickly illuminating the area. A flare. Someone had let off a flare.
Then she saw it. It was a dinghy, a little wooden Laser, being pulled and pummelled this way and that by the waves. There were figures on it – Polly could see them now – two figures. One was very small. Oh my God. One of the figures was a child.
They were nowhere near land, certainly not near enough to swim for it, which would be impossible anyway: they would be swept straight on to the rocks, the very rocks the lighthouse was there to warn against.
But what remained of the boat was twisting and rocking from side to side, and obviously taking on water more quickly than they could get rid of it. Her head was going down, deeper and deeper, as she came up and just – only just – surfaced over the crest of each new mountainous wave, before jetting back down into the valley. It was as if she was trying to navigate a row of office blocks; the waves now were over two storeys high.
Polly tried to shine the light towards the dinghy, then ran to the walkie-talkie, which crackled into life.
‘I saw it,’ said Selina immediately. ‘I saw a light, but I didn’t see where. Oh God, Polly, there’s nobody
here.’
‘It’s over by the causeway.’
‘Oh God,’ said Selina again.
If the little boat was tossed on to the causeway in this storm, it would simply shatter into matchsticks. The two people on board would be thrown into the water in their lifejackets. Lifejackets designed to keep them afloat in seawater, not protect them against the pulling, sucking rage of a Force 9 gale.
‘Selina,’ said Polly, trying to keep her voice as calm as possible. ‘I think I saw a child.’
There was a pause, before Selina swore viciously.
‘I’ll try the coastguard again,’ she said, before cutting out abruptly.