by Cole Morton
‘Seriously?’ Gabe puts his hand up, realizing what she is telling him.
‘He got his way.’
The bastard.
‘You think that is horrifying, do you? Your face says so. Yes, it is. I think so, now. I thought so then, but I didn’t feel anything, or see a way out. It was what it was. That’s the hell you’re in, the madness, you think it will stop if you can just get pregnant. Everything will be made right and you’ll be okay then. Back in love. So you push the feelings away and try again. You wait. After the procedure there is nothing else you can do. You can’t eat much, or sleep much. You have two weeks to wait. This is where we are now, Gabriel, with hours to go before I can find out if it has worked, although I know the answer. I’ve always known, but still the hope won’t quite die, so the hours feel like days. You dread the test but you want it to come. Time moves so slowly. You close up then. You feel the hope subside and it’s a relief. You know before the test that the life inside you, if there ever was one, has died. You know but you dare not say so. Only I just did. I know it, right now.’
She retrieves her glass and drains the bourbon in one gulp, and winces. Then holds it out to be topped up again. ‘So you have the first drink in a very, very long time.’
He stops halfway out of his seat, bottle held towards her, sitting back down. ‘No more. Just in case.’
‘In case of what? A baby? No chance. There is nothing. Why should you care?’
He shouldn’t. That’s the truth. He feels guilty, although he has done nothing to feel guilty about. Who is he accountable to now – a voice in his head? Rí, where are you?
‘I had to come here,’ says Sarah, putting the glass down. ‘To get away from him. I took a train to Seaford, then a bus to Cuckmere Haven – you know the Coastguard Cottages by the sea where the river comes out? We went there once when I was young, but I never told him about that, for some reason. That’s where my bags are.’
That makes sense. The other end of the Seven Sisters, half a dozen miles away over the hills without roads. There are no patrols there. You can hide if you want to.
‘Jack was convinced you were at Beachy Head.’
‘Good. I was never going there. We stayed at a farm once, back over the other side of the Head towards town; he will have asked there. The Seven Sisters are even more beautiful and almost as high. I didn’t mean to come this far, but I was walking and the tower drew me. Then the storm came down, so suddenly. How can it do that? I had to take shelter. I’m sorry.’
‘I don’t mind. I’m glad.’
‘Why?’
He doesn’t know. Or doesn’t want to say.
‘Me too,’ she says, with surprising warmth. ‘I knew he would come looking for me but I need this time, this space. I want to do the next bit on my own. My life. My choice.’
‘Someone should say this, Sarah, so I will. You don’t have to do it.’
‘Thank you, I do know that.’
This can’t happen, thinks Gabe with rising panic. This astonishing woman, filling his lighthouse with her presence, cannot be allowed to take her own life. ‘You can’t—’
‘Yes I can, if I want to. That is the point. All my life I have done what other people want. My father, always telling me to be a brave girl. The Bible, saying marry or burn. Do you know that saying? Marry or give in to the flesh and burn in hell. So I did. The doctors, saying no babies for you. You are barren. You are worthless, you are not a woman, but a husk of a body—’
‘They don’t say that.’
‘A shell. A dry skin left on the dirt by a snake—’
‘Stop it—’
‘An empty tin can rattling in the bin. Why, Gabriel? Do you not like me saying these things? This is me. This is what I am. Nothing, nobody.’
‘That’s not true.’
She’s getting worked up. ‘This is me. The real me. You want to see me? Here I am. Come on! You want more? Get ready for it.’ She looks at him strangely, suddenly suspicious, and her voice changes. ‘What is your game anyway? What are you doing, keeping me here? Do you think you are going to have me? Is that it? You want me?’
He turns away, not wanting her to see his face and not wanting to accept what he knows he feels but can’t feel, not now, it’s impossible and wrong and it hurts. For God’s sake. What is she doing here?
Looking out of the window is the answer, with her hands and forehead pressed to the glass.
‘We might as well get that out in the open, Gabe, if that is your intention. Is that what it takes to stay here for the night?’
‘No.’
‘Say now if it is.’
‘Sarah . . .’
‘You are a man, Gabe. You are alone.’
‘You are out of order. You hear me? Shut it. Shut up. I didn’t ask you in here—’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘That’s—’
‘Come back to the house, you said. For a nice cup of tea. Cheer yourself up. Well, mister lighthouse keeper, is that all you had in mind? Tea? You got more than you asked for. So, you want it?’
Gabe is at a loss. If only this were for real. No, don’t think like that. If only, he would . . . no. Rí, for God’s sake, where are you? He throws his hands up to say please, stop it, just give it a rest. He has to calm her down.
Say her name.
‘Sarah . . .’
‘Oh, you don’t want me, I’m not enough, okay. Empty husk. Useless. Worthless,’ she says, mumbling, sliding down the window, down to the floor like a coiling rope, head down and all closed up.
‘You’re not,’ he says, going across and kneeling beside her but being careful. ‘You shouldn’t say those things, they are not true. You’re amazing, Sarah. You’re incredible.’
‘You are full of crap.’
‘Maybe. Most of the time. Not now.’ He softens his voice, gets right down on the cold stone floor there, but doesn’t touch. Mustn’t touch. ‘You need to know something, Sarah. You are safe here.’
She looks up at him, hair in her wet, wide eyes.
‘You can stay. I promise.’
‘I am tired, Gabe. I need a place, just for now.’
‘Sarah, stay. Alive, I mean. Not here. Wherever your life is. Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying. Yes I do. Live, Sarah. Please.’
She hangs her head again and is still for a long, long time. So long that he lets her be and moves around the room, putting things back into order, waiting. For what, he is not sure.
‘You don’t understand,’ she says quietly, on her feet again.
‘I must confess I don’t.’
‘I have not been myself for so long. I’ve been what they wanted me to be. My father, the church, the doctors. Jack. I told you that. I am repeating myself. I lost sight of who I was, but coming here – not to you, no offence, but to this place, this sea and sky – I remember. I have denied my real identity, my self, my mother . . . all of it. I am Sarah Hallelujah Jones, the daughter of Jasmine who has gone, so long ago, but has never left. I want to be able to see her again, Gabe. I only remember the light. I can’t see her face, only a light.’
‘You are going to have a child, Sarah. Maybe.’
‘Ha! You think? There is no child. That won’t happen.’
‘It might—’
‘Do you know my body? Are you inside me?’
He can’t help his reaction – a flashing thought, no more – and she notices.
‘Ah. We are back to that again! I’m sorry. I needed to know.’
‘The doors are locked, but the keys are on the table. Take them. You can go at any time.’
‘Out there? I would go the wrong way in the dark.’
‘I can take you anywhere. The car—’
‘Is a death trap, by the look of it.’
‘Sarah—’
‘I know. You said.
It must seem strange. You can’t understand. It’s simple, in my mind. If there is a line, there will be a child. I will stay with him, with my life. If there is no line, and this is what I know will happen, then my decision is made. The life I have must end. I have known this for a long time. This pain must stop.’
‘The pain will pass . . .’
‘Seven years, Gabe. Prodding. Poking. Knives. Drugs. Hope, despair, hope, despair, hope, that is the worst of it. Hope rising when you wish it would not, because you know it will die, more painfully every time. It is a kind of torture. Now it will end, all that. Either way. I am too tired for anything else. What you’re talking about would only be a step from one state to another, anyway. Step outside the capsule of the lantern room and float free, like a space walk. Like ashes in the wind. Like gravity. It’s natural.’
‘How can you talk about it like that?’
‘I’ve thought about it more often than you.’
‘How do you know? I have seen what is left behind.’
She smiles to herself, strangely. ‘But anyway, no need to worry. It’s not your fault. What will be will be. Tomorrow.’ Sarah looks at her watch. ‘Today, in fact. When the sun comes up. Will you let me stay here until then?’
He can’t. His heart is breaking again. It is obscene. She’s so young, so lovely, how dare she do this? How can he help her?
You must, Gabe. You must.
You had no choice, Rí. She has a choice.
Help her make one. Help her.
Saying nothing, he moves to the seat where Sarah has sat down again, and puts his arm along the wooden curve behind her. She shifts up into him, and leans so that her head is resting on him and she can feel his breath on her forehead and his arm around her, close.
‘I will,’ he says. ‘God help us both.’
Forty-four
They can’t sit like that for ever. Perhaps it would be better if they could, now that a balance has been reached between them, but the balance cannot last. There must be a tipping point, after which things begin to slide, one way or another. Sometimes in life it is a kiss, but not now. Sarah needs more than a physical gesture to rescue her. Gabe is sitting there with her scent in his nostrils, her hair almost in his mouth, the softness of a breast against his arm, a nod away from kissing her forehead then her face then her lips, but he knows that would be a betrayal. He is not about to risk Rí’s wrath, even as he knows very well that there is no wrath. There is no Rí except in his heart, his mind, on his skin. The sadness is always there – he wades through it waist deep every moment of every day, lies down with it lapping at his mouth at night. He wants to be furious with Sarah for being ready to throw everything she has away, and all the hurt it will cause, but what is the point? He feels for her. He knows what grief can do, even if it is grief for a life that has not yet begun. So he offers her the one thing he can. His only love.
‘She went away on a summer’s day,’ he says quietly, hoping Sarah’s slow and deep breathing means she is asleep. ‘It was quick, at least. We knew it was coming some time, but not when. They said it could be years, a whole lifetime. It was inoperable, sitting in her brain, waiting. No need to shave her head then. Live every day as if it is your last. We had three years, eight months, four days and eleven hours together, from the moment outside the bar when she kissed me to the moment in the garden here when she turned to say the honeysuckle was in bloom and she fell . . .’
Turning, like a dancer. Falling, like a sleeper.
‘I went to her and held her and she was warm, breathing. I shook her and hugged her and kissed her, but she would not speak and she lay there in the chalk with dust on her clothes. I couldn’t phone. There was no signal. I pulled her into the car and drove down to the town, to the hospital, as fast as I could. Took the wing off on a bollard. The police stopped me and I said help me, there is something wrong, and they did and she was gone and the ambulance came, but she was gone, there was nothing they could do they said, she was gone, just gone . . .’
Always and for ever.
The noise he makes is pitiful. The anger left him long ago. Regret is all, now. The keeper of the light with no light left to keep. The man who cannot leave, however much it hurts to stay. This is home, she said, and he has had no other. This tower on a windy hill is where she wanted to be with him and where she is now. This is where he let her go on a sharpening day in late summer, raising a fist and opening his fingers, because he had to. Letting go of the ashes that vanished in a moment like a twist of smoke. Now she hangs in the air between the sky and the sea, like the spirit woman in the song she used to sing, and she leaves her lover grounded, unable to lift his feet from the earth, always sensing her just out of reach, seeing her face in the shifting clouds.
Always. And for ever.
Sarah is not asleep, she heard it all. Reaching up above her head, she finds his jaw with her cool fingers and without turning around, says, ‘I’m sorry.’
Of course. That’s what they all say, when they say anything at all. At first there was astonishment among the friends they had left in London, and endlessly painful discussions about how awful it was, how she had never been ill, how cruel it was to take somebody like that so unexpectedly. They had not known. That was her plan. There was a lot of sympathy, a crushing weight of goodwill, but one man’s grief is another man’s boredom in the end. So after the memorial service, after the weeping, drunken friends, he came back here to hide himself away in the tower, with only Maria.
‘Really, I am sorry,’ says Sarah. ‘You must think me selfish.’
‘You have a choice. That’s all. She didn’t.’
‘Would you be angry with me if I did what you think I want to do?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s that over there?’ Sarah’s looking at a pile of white feathers on the floor, beside the end of the semi-circular sofa bench. There’s another by the pile of wood and another a few feet away and they are all connected somehow, like someone has rolled up wings and put them away for another day. ‘Is it all the same thing?’
Now Gabe knows he is encircled. There are three of them in this room. ‘It’s an angel,’ he says, and Sarah laughs. ‘Really. She made it. The last thing. For in here. An installation. It hung from there . . .’ He looks to the circle at the centre of the ceiling, where a hook hangs from the lead cross in the middle of the stained-glass compass. ‘It was beautiful. He or she, you never know with angels, was going to fly.’
Sarah shifts on the sofa, pulls herself away, sits up. ‘How?’
‘Like a kite. I’m not sure. There is no weight to it. She made it to fly away on the thermals and to be biodegradable, so that it could do no harm.’
‘Can I see?’ Sarah is up and moving towards the feathers.
‘No! Don’t touch it!’
‘Wow. I’m sorry.’ She backs away.
Okay, Gabe. Okay. Easy. Empty. His eyes close. She says nothing. Good. So that’s it. She’ll go. No point even apologizing. Stupid, but what does she expect, coming in here? Who the hell is she anyway?
Then he feels a hand on his head, in his hair, running through his hair, and the other on his cheek again. He’s so tired. Her touch is refreshing, water in the desert. He opens his eyes to her but Sarah is nowhere near him; it wasn’t her, she’s on the other side of the room, bending down, lifting the angel. Carefully. She does it so carefully, as if lifting a child. Feathers cascade over her arm. She’s having difficulty. Gabe is afraid she will tear the wing, so he goes to her and takes the next part and the next, until the soft, weightless silk and paper and feather angel is in both their arms. And without saying anything, without even saying how she knows what to do, Sarah finds the head of the angel with golden eyes looking upwards and moves a chair across with her foot and stands on the chair and lifts the angel up towards the hook and tries to put him back where he – or she – belongs.
‘I tore i
t down,’ says Gabe, swallowing the pain in his throat. ‘I fixed the hook when . . . but I didn’t put it back up. Why are you doing this?’
‘I don’t know. Help me.’
He finds the long pole they bought for opening higher windows, with a boat hook and spike on the end. She offers a loop of thread at the back of the angel’s head and he lifts it into place on the ceiling hook.
‘Where do these go?’
Together they unfold the wings and the arms that run through them and fix the frame of the featherweight angel so that he or she is in the room, filling the room, the angel of the south with arms wide open. The uplights illuminate the wings. The man and the woman caught in the shimmering light of the angel’s embrace. Sarah’s legs shake and the chair wobbles and she seems about to fall, but Gabe grabs her waist and holds her there steady and safe, his head against her belly.
That is what Magda sees, as she stands outside the tower in the half-dark, looking up at the lantern room. A shimmering light and the Keeper and the beautiful stranger in a loving embrace. Now she knows why the Lord made her sleepless, why she was called from her bed to climb the hill in the moonlight. She had thought it was to make a deal, silence for silence – no police, no accusations on either side – but instead it was to do this, to be a witness, which is God’s work. Magda takes a photograph with the camera on her phone. Then she hurries away through the cold, waking dawn, back to the pub and Jack.
Forty-five
The day is coming. The moon has slid away but there are stars above, around and beneath them still, falling through time and bouncing upwards again on the mirror of the sea. Far away to the east there is a low glow, a promise. The air is unusually calm, the almost-morning wind feathers their faces as they stand on the balcony outside the lantern room, with their backs to the glass and the angel inside. Shoulder to shoulder, hands side by side on the rail, not quite touching, when he speaks.
‘I don’t blame you. I’ve thought about it many times. Of course I have, living here. It would be so easy, look.’
They are somewhere between twenty and thirty feet from the ground, although it feels like more, and below them on this side of the tower is only a precariously narrow ledge, pockmarked and filled in with pools of builder’s gravel to make a way around the building for those who dare, but no more than eight feet wide before it falls away to the rocks. It looks narrower. Much narrower. Four seconds on from there, the outcome would be certain.