by Emma Stonex
You’re right that I’m Christian, but I think the more you understand religion, the more you see it’s part and parcel of the same thing. Heaven and hell – that’s supernatural, isn’t it? Angels and devils. Bushes on fire. Seas split in two. If you trust God, you should be broadminded about the possibilities in His universe.
There’s more than what the textbooks tell you. It’s not like science for all its cleverness gets the answers. Take that about Creation. Science goes back with its theories about the Big Bang, but then it can’t get any further because there’s no reason why any of the stuff that was needed for the Big Bang to happen was there in the first place. All these particles and atoms or whatever was meant to go bang, they don’t come out of nowhere, do they? Bill said that’s why a lot of scientists believe. They know better than anyone that you can’t get something out of nothing.
My mum believed in both. Growing up, we had crosses and psalms all over the house; everywhere you looked there was the Baby Jesus, you couldn’t get away from Him. Mum lit candles and kept the curtains closed so it was like a chapel inside, but we also had wind chimes and dream catchers, and she saw shamans sometimes. One of them was called Kestrel. He came round and put his hand on Mum’s head and spoke gobbledygook then they went upstairs. I remember he had a big ink of two crossed feathers at the top of his back. I saw it one morning when I came into the kitchen in my nightie and there he was, making toast like he lived with us.
When I was nine, the Virgin Mary turned up in our garden. She arrived one day lying face-down by the shed, in between the fridge and the pile of bin bags. Mum said she’d fallen out the back of a van at church, so she’d brought her home to watch over us – because we needed watching over, Carol and me. The fact she’d fallen out the back of a van, now I think of it that’s just a turn of phrase, not actually what happened, but in those days I had an image in my head of the van doors coming open and a life-sized Madonna smacking her face on the pavement. You could see where she’d smacked it; her cheek was chipped on one side. Mum had this plan to bring her in and clean her up, but she never did, so I went out there and put her upright. From then on, every night I made myself open my bedroom curtains and see her standing there like a real person. I’d scare myself into thinking she moved, from one side of the garden to the other, then towards me, nearer each day.
Even though Mum said she was religious, she must have sworn by a different God to mine. Let’s just say the plaster Mary wasn’t the only one who got a smacking.
Living with her made me understand the difference between good and bad. How you can’t always see the difference with your eyes – you have to feel it, you know, here. The way I look at it is there’s light and dark in the world and that’s what the whole world revolves around. There has to be light in order for there to be dark and the same the other way. It’s like a set of weighing scales, up at one end, down at the other. It depends which there’s more of – the more light you have, the harder it is for the dark to get in. The thing about God’s light is it’s easy; it’s not hard to find. There might be moments in your life where you get a little bit of light, say if you have good news or a nice thing happens to you, and I think that’s like flicking a torch on. It’s bright while it lasts but it doesn’t last forever. God’s light lasts.
Bill was the only person I confided in, about that and lots of things. When we got engaged, Mum told him she was glad he was taking me off her hands because she’d had about as much as she could stand. Apart from that I don’t think she ever spoke a word to him. At my wedding reception, she locked herself upstairs at the pub with a bottle of Jameson’s, crying about how I was leaving her.
I did leave her, in the end. She fell asleep in the WC and I left her there, with her head on the toilet-roll dispenser. I haven’t spoken to her since. I don’t know if she’s dead or alive. I don’t waste time thinking about it. After Bill went, she didn’t try to contact me, even though it was all over the papers so it wouldn’t have been hard. I didn’t want her to find me anyway. I’m better off without her. It takes a lot to say you’re better off without your mother, but that’s the fact of it for me.
I’ll never have my girls hate me like I hate my mother. I’ll never be a mother like that. Not really a mother – that’s a holy word and she wasn’t a holy woman, just a person who put me in this world then washed her hands of me.
It was fate I found Bill. I’d be in a shelter, or homeless, if it weren’t for Bill and the lighthouse service. Now do you see why he would never have left that tower of his own accord? We’d come so far for what we had. That’s how I know it was something else that went on.
I could tell when his bad feeling got one over on him. He’d stop eating or sleeping. He’d wake at five o’clock in the morning; I could hear him swallowing in the dark. He’d lie there so still. If I said anything, if I said, ‘Bill, love, are you awake?’ he wouldn’t answer, and that’s when I knew he was under one of his clouds.
When he did talk to me, which wasn’t often, I always listened. He’d never had that. His dad and brothers were always making fun of him and if there’s anything Bill hates, it’s being made fun of. He’d be another man, if he’d had his mum. Then again, I wouldn’t have wanted another man, so that’s a problem it’s best if I don’t think too long on.
Do you believe in coincidences? You must. You’ve got a big fat one at the end of Neptune’s Bow with those two characters of yours walking into the same hotel. What are the chances of that? You could’ve found another way round it, but you didn’t. Maybe you and me aren’t so different after all.
Well, here’s another one for you. You’ll know the light was burning the night before Bill disappeared – the night of the twenty-ninth. The papers made a lot of that at the time, because it means that whatever happened must have happened the next morning, before Jory Martin’s boat went out. It means there was someone there, at least one of them, at least someone, putting the light in and tending it through the night – and it just so happens they vanish right before the relief gets there?
I don’t think coincidences like that happen without there being more to it. It makes us think if only that relief had got out there sooner, if only the boatman had gone against the weather, and it just seems extra cruel that way. But that’s what it boils down to: whether you think coincidences exist. Is it just the way the world has of working, or is it something else? For me, it’s clear which one it is.
Anyone who knows the first thing about tower reliefs knows that when relief day comes, everyone’s on the radio transmission, anxious the landing should happen and talking about whether or not it’s going ahead. But that day, they couldn’t get through. Ashore they were ringing in, but no one was picking up. The engineer wrote up storm damage, but I don’t accept it for a second. A transmitter going just as three men vanish off the face of the earth? You’d have to be a fool.
At the end of the day, people wouldn’t keep talking about the Maiden Rock if there was nothing strange about it. Nothing supernatural. They wouldn’t if it was the sea, like Helen says, or the Supernumerary losing the plot.
There’ve been people who said they saw lights in the sky the night before Bill disappeared. Red ones that hovered over the tower then darted away. Or the captains on ships who say they’ve seen a keeper waving at them from the balcony rail, when there hasn’t been anyone living there for years. Or the birds – you’ll have heard about them. Fishermen who swear they’ve seen three white birds, perched on the rocks at low tide or flying round the lamp when it’s rough. The maintenance mechanics who go out there now say so too. They’ve put a helipad on top of the lantern, to stop them having to try and land the traditional way. The birds are sat right there waiting for them; they’re not fussed by the rotors or the noise, they’re just staring straight at them.
That’s why the thing about the mechanic bothered me. Everyone says it didn’t happen – that there was no one out there but them. Trident threw it out with the rest of the hearsay. They s
aid it was as unbelievable as those captains saying they’d seen a ghost. But it depends what you believe. I said to you before, I believe in what if.
It was Bill’s bad feeling. It was the lights in the sky, the birds, the transmitter, the coincidence. Maybe it was something I haven’t thought about yet because like my mum said, I don’t know anything. All I know is I don’t know anything at all.
20
8 Church Road
Towcester
Northants
Helen Black
16 Myrtle Rise
West Hill
Bath
18 July 1992
Dear Helen,
Can we meet? It’s important. My new telephone number is below. I need to talk to you in person. It’s about Vince and what happened. Call me if you can. Please.
Michelle
V
1972
21
ARTHUR
Sad Song
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 s
ervice, 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.