by Emma Stonex
Upstairs for a sleep. The banana bunks took some getting used to when I started. Land men marvel at the idea – ‘There was me thinking it’s a joke, you’ve really got to sleep on those bloody bent beds?’ – but over the years my spine must have curved to accommodate them, because I used to get back pain after two months on the tower and when I went ashore I’d have the aches and soreness of a man twice my age. These days I barely feel it. Lying in a normal bed feels rigid and unwelcoming. I have to make an effort to fall asleep straight on my back, but when I wake up my chest is on my knees.
I should be gone as soon as my head hits the pillow. Whether the chance comes about at a backward hour of the night or early morning, or a brief, shadowy submersion before the middle watchman exhibits his light, we take what we can get.
Or I did, once, on lights gone by. These days sleep skitters away from me on dry, clawed feet. My mind turns to visions of the deep sea, and of Helen; visions of the tower as I see it when I’m ashore, just visible in the distance, and the vertiginous, disbelieving sensation of being there and here at once, or in neither place. I turn from the curtain that separates my bunk from the room; I watch the wall in the dark, listening to the sea, to my slow heartbeat, my mind turning; I think, and I remember.
Nineteen days
Brilliant sunshine means ideal conditions for Frank’s relief, which turns up late, just before lunch, seeing as the boat wouldn’t start. All in all, it’s a good getaway for him and a good landing for Vince, who even on a rough sea seems to step off the launch and onto the set-off with barely any trouble at all. Vince is young with black hair and a Supertramp moustache. It doesn’t take long for him to settle in. Everything’s got its place and we’re practised in unpacking our belongings swiftly so we can slot back into our responsibilities as efficiently as possible. Letters from home arrive in a sealed waterproof bag. There’s an official one for me, marked for the Principal Keeper.
‘That’s the end of it then,’ says Vince. ‘No moon for Brezhnev.’
We’re waiting for our grub while Vince talks about the Soviet rocket launch that exploded in the sky last month. It’s disorientating to hear about things in the real world, the other world. That world could cease to be and for a time we’d be none the wiser. I’m not sure I need that world. Any city, any town, any room wider than the length of two men lying down, seems frivolous with light and noise and unnecessarily complicated.
‘Bloody communists,’ says Bill. ‘Talk about a bunch of wet fucking blankets. What’s worse – the threat of war or just getting on with it?’
‘No way, man,’ says Vince. ‘I’m a pacifist.’
‘Course you bloody are.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Pacifism’s an excuse for doing fuck all. Except maybe growing facial hair and shagging your way across London.’
Vince sits back in his chair and smokes. He’s only been with us nine months but he’s as familiar as the kitchen dresser. I’ve seen dozens of keepers come and go, but some you grow to like more than others. I’m not sure Bill likes him.
‘You’re jealous,’ he says to Bill.
‘Fuck off.’
‘How long since you were twenty-two?’
‘Not as long as you think, you rude prick.’
This is how it is between them, Vince ribbing Bill for being an old man even though he’s still in his thirties, and Bill coming back like he’s put out. It’s meant to be good for a laugh, but it gets to Bill, I can tell. He never lived like that. He was married by twenty, Jenny already talking about having his babies. The lighthouses calling him in.
Vince has brought gammon from the mainland, which smells unbelievable frying on the stove with a cracked egg, spluttering and popping. It’s two weeks now since Bill or I have had meat that hasn’t come out of a can, and canned meat’s better than nothing but it’s not a patch on the real thing. Soon enough everything that comes out of a can starts to taste the same, of the can, whether it’s fruit cocktail or a slab of Spam. Actually, the Spam’s OK if it’s cooked, but if it’s just cold dumped out on the plate like Vince or Frank would do it’s enough to turn you vegetarian.
Bill’s cook today; he makes the best meals out of any of us. Vince is useless and I’m all right, although less enthusiastic about it because I do a lot of it ashore whereas Bill doesn’t do any. His wife does everything for him. Bill says that’s what it must be like being in prison, having everything done for you ‘save wiping your arse’, then Vince says it’s not like being in prison, since there wouldn’t be orange meringues or rum baba or women offering to rub your feet, would there? Bill says, s’pose you’d know, you crook. Then it’s up to me to smooth the waters, before it stops being a joke.
Vince says, ‘What do you think, Mr PK?’
‘About what?’
‘Keeping a lid on it, or letting it blow?’
I want to say that all this about the Cold War, about Nixon and the USSR and Japanese planes crashing out of Moscow, strikes me as pointless. If we all had a tower to be on and a couple of people to be with, just to be, without expectation or interference, to put in the light at night and extinguish it at dawn, to sleep and be awake, talk and be silent, live and die, all on our islands, couldn’t we avoid the rest?
Instead I tell him, ‘You’ve got to keep the peace if you can.’ And hope I can do that on this particular spell.
But Vince’s talk of spaceships reminds me of a time years ago. It was dawn at Beachy Head and I was alone in the lantern, about to let the sun step in, when I saw an object fall into the sea. It was a soft, foggy morning, early enough for lingering stars left behind, a morning so beautiful you wonder that heaven isn’t already here if only we took the time to look up and see, and then there it was, shimmering metal, shot out of nowhere, digested by the water and leaving no trace of itself. I couldn’t know its size or how far away it was because the sea looks eternal from way up there.
I did see it and I couldn’t explain it. A piece of aircraft, a flap or spoiler, that’s the explanation, I know, I do know that; but there was something in the way it moved, some dynamic in its falling that had more grace and purpose than I can describe. I told no one, not the men I was with and not Helen. But I thought it was you.
Such a precious gift that you gave me and I thank you for that.
The bedroom’s kept dark because there’s usually someone asleep in there, or trying to sleep, at any time of the day or night. In winter the constant dark is disorientating, our single window indicating dawn as easily as dusk. When I close the door my hand rests there, soft-edged, inanimate, and it looks as if this hand doesn’t belong to me but to a younger man, who might in another universe be opening a door, not closing it.
The book I’m reading is called Obelisk and Hourglass, about the history of time. I found it in the Oxfam charity shop on Mortehaven high street. I have this idea that later on I’ll see the things in person that I’ve read about: the Egyptian pyramids, the temples of South America, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. When I’d do it doesn’t matter; it’s holding the possibility in my mind that’s the important thing.
After we were married, Helen and I travelled to Venice. We spent a week eating oily bread and ham as pink and thin as tissue paper. We wandered through dank passages and under bridges that smelled of eggs and salt. It seems unreal to me now, a sunken world of shadows and water, ringing bells and roofs of gold.
The Obelisk paperback is soft, with a sundial on the front. On the tower, we measure our time in days: how far each of us is into his eight-week spell. Helen says it’s like prisoners chalking the walls and maybe it is a little like that. In ancient China they had a way of telling the hours with a candle. They marked the wax with lines and saw how much of it had melted, and in that way the hours never got lost. You could collect the wax and remould it and relight it if you wanted. Have that time all over again.
Helen doesn’t know and I would never tell her. I would never speak about you. Some things are off
limits and you are such a thing. But I wonder about the candle and about time burned through; and if hours, when they pass, are gone permanently, or if there is a way of bringing them back. What if I can get you back?
I’ve been out here too long. Lonely nights and reels of dark, spooling and unravelling to the black sea, the sky blacker still. Put a man, the most cynical of men, on morning watch when the sun comes up and the bloodshot sky bursts orange and have him tell me this is all there is. This isn’t all there is.
In the screen behind my closed eyes, a throbbing flashlight occults from the shore. It calls from the darkness, shining, shining, insisting that I turn and see.
12
BILL
Crossing
Thirty-five days on the tower
How many times have I put in this light? Eight months of the year, every year, give or take an overdue, so that’s two hundred and forty days; multiply that by the number of years I’ve been in the service and that’s getting on for fifteen, which makes it three thousand six hundred times that I’ve lit this light or some version of it. As for the number of hours I’ve spent on a lighthouse in all that time, I’d rather not know.
Brew the meths, warm the vapour, turn the tap and set a match to the mantle. I could do this blindfolded, though I doubt Trident would allow it. The flames flap in their glass cage. On the Maiden the illumination itself doesn’t move; instead the lenses around it rotate, magnifying the beam across the sea.
It’s eight o’clock. I’m off at midnight. In having the ‘all night in’ I’m able to sleep the hours that ashore would make up a normal night. Between now and then I’ll watch for the burner getting bunged or the pressure dropping; I’ll log the weather, temperature, visibility, barometric pressure and wind force. Aside from that, and those aren’t things I need to pay attention to any more, I’ll sit and think about how a man could shake up his life if he was unhappy with his lot. There are plenty of hours to do that. When I’m putting in my lights and extinguishing my lights, the whole world relies on me. Dawn and dusk are mine alone, to do with as I please. It’s a powerful feeling.
Vince brought back a parcel from Jenny. If I don’t read her letter now it’ll hang over me, watching me in the same way as if she were here. Sometimes up top with the light you can feel another person, if you try. You can feel they’re here with you whether you like that idea or not. They could be sitting right next to you; you start to feel it in the hairs on your arms. Or they’re behind you, looking at the back of your head, thinking all sorts of thoughts about you that you’d rather they didn’t have. You turn to check and there’s no one there, the lantern’s empty, just you. But you checked.
She’s put in the usual box of homemade chocolates. I see her spooning each one into its paper case, The Archers on in the background. Jenny Heaton. The first time I saw her coming out of school with her hair in plaits and her skirt hanging over her knees. Jenny’s never liked her knees; she says they’re lumpy. Her sister told her they looked like Cornish pasties and she never got over it. A bit like when I went out with the girl who lived next door, Susan Price, and months down the line she broke up with me, saying, ‘You’re too short, Bill Walker, I need someone taller.’
It wasn’t bad with Jenny at first. We’d lie in bed at her mum’s house, her mum pie-eyed on the sofa downstairs, Jenny’s cold fingers gripping mine. I could feel her knees under the quilt, told her I liked them, there was nothing the matter with them, why didn’t she let me kiss her again? We didn’t talk much. I’ve never been a talker and she didn’t mind that; I thought that was a good thing about her, different to other girls. Then one time she whispered, in the dark, ‘You’re just like me, Bill,’ and I lay there till morning, worried. The main thing had been to go to bed with a girl, so I could tell my brothers I had. Now I felt this neediness creeping up on me. The key in the lock.
Jenny’s written the letter on the paper she nicked from the fancy hotel in Brighton where we stayed on our honeymoon.
Bill, love, I miss you. It’s been more than a month. The house feels so empty without you in it. I wish you could come home and be with us. The children ask me every day when you’re coming back (which has made me even more upset!). I’m crying all the time. So is the baby, all through the night. I try to be strong, but it’s hard. I feel hopeless that I won’t see you for such a long time and we are only halfway through our time apart. I’m not doing anything until you get back. I don’t want to go anywhere or see anyone. If I do, I’ll only cry, and it takes me such an effort not to cry.
I feel her fingers in mine, in that bed.
Other people don’t understand it, do they, Bill? How much I need you and miss you. It’s a pain to be on my own, an actual pain in my heart. I was sick after you left this time. Hannah heard. I lied and said it was the meatballs we had for tea, but it wasn’t. I have to lie to everyone when you are away. I’m not myself, Bill. Are you?
Down in the kitchen I make toast with the processed white bread Vince delivered. Mother’s Pride’s a family, a family of bread. You can’t make toast with the loaves we bake, which half the time come out like crumpets and the other like scones. The grill burns the edges, but I prefer that, and someone once said charcoal was good for you, didn’t they, just a bit because of the carbon. I cover it in Marmite so you can’t tell. When I bite the toast the sound it makes reminds me of sticks on a bonfire, cracking.
There’re only so many excuses a man can make for himself. I’m a coward. Must be. When I was ten, my dad found me reading by torchlight in my bedroom. He boxed me on the ears and said, ‘You’ll go blind squinting like that; the service won’t look twice at you in glasses.’ I trusted him about the glasses and that being on a lighthouse was the only thing I’d be good at, so I had better bloody manage it otherwise what else would I do? The old man got ill years after and took to his bed, where he grew thinner and thinner until one day he disappeared, apart from the sour hole where his mouth used to be, rasping, ‘It was your fault.’ And it was. I’d come out upside down and twisted round, like a kitten in a drowning sack.
The sea infected us all. We couldn’t get away from it, even in death. The old man had a cousin in Dorset who lived in a flat overlooking West Bay. Inside she had paintings of the sea, Old Testament ones of violent skies and frothing waves; ships flung to and fro on slinging seas. I hated going there, the whirling pools and battle scenes, cannons firing, red flags on masts slapped by the bitter wind. The place smelled of dry sherry and the flaky shortbread biscuits she baked and stored in plastic. When she died, we took a boat out from Lyme and scattered her ashes on the water. A lot of it blew back in my face and I thought, then, I’ll never get away from this bloody sea.
It didn’t matter that I never learned to swim. Dad said, you don’t need to swim to sit on a light. In lessons the teacher threw in a brick; I struggled at the surface with my eyes closed and my nose held, the children’s taunts echoing in my blocked ears.
Up top, the hours creep round. Time passes, invisibly. Hours get lost and even though I’m paid to be awake and to all intents and purposes I am awake, there’s no doubting I go into a semi-sleep state because when I’m up in the lantern on my own all sorts of weird ideas go through my head and I can only say they’re part of my dreams. Jenny ashore with the baby crying and the girls fighting; toys on the carpet, a Sindy undressed, her head turned on its shoulders so the breasts are at the back because Jenny won’t buy them the male version on account of they’ll soon be getting up to all sorts. Screaming at teatime, over fishcakes. How would it be to never go back?
My wife counting the days to the relief and when it comes the boat sets out and the weather’s good so she’s getting excited, getting the bits in that she always gets, food and drink I liked ages ago but don’t any more. Only I don’t go back. I don’t know where I go or how this happens, but that’s the good part, not knowing. Just happens.
Before midnight I fetch Vince from the bedroom. I jog him awake with the heel of my hand and the
usual greeting – ‘Come on, you lazy shit, time to get up’ – before going down to the kitchen to make our tray. Vince needs that first nudge and then another after I’ve made the drinks and then finally he’ll get his arse up to the light.
I’d never bother putting biscuits on crockery at home and God knows why I do here. Two fat wedges of the old Davidstow, which is growing waxy at the edges, speckled white, meaning we’d better eat it quick.
Vince is up there already, surprising me; he’s got a leather jacket thrown over his pyjamas. He and Arthur are poles apart, Arthur dressing for duty like he’s anticipating the Trident inspectors any minute, bristles shaved, hair combed, shoes shined, while Vince loafs about in BHS bedwear and a pair of slippers approximating dog fur.
With keepers you’ve worked with, you soon get accustomed to their pattern of doing things. Vince hasn’t been out here a year yet, and what with the chopping and changing of who’s on with who, I’ve only spent a short time in his company. But a month on the tower is a decade ashore for how well you get to know someone. Vince’ll drink his tea straight down before he says much, and when he does it won’t be a pleasantry about the weather or the state of the light or anything else that’s happened that day. In this crossover hour, the rules go out the window. Rules about what you can and can’t do. What you can and can’t say. This is when Vince told me what he got locked up for. Not the old, petty stuff. I mean the bad time.