by Emma Stonex
The first memory I have is to do with wet hair. My mother towelling my head dry with no-nonsense strokes, the rough practicality with which mothers spit on their fingers to wipe dirty mouths, impatient and concerned. Later on, she did it for my dad. He was a child by then, so I stopped being one. I grew up, grew past him.
It’s a heft to lift the bucket through the wall cavity and empty it out the window, so I go up to the gallery and do it off there, only once I’m tipping it over the rails a northwesterly comes out of nowhere and gusts me aside. I almost lose my grip, which would have had me grovelling to the others all over Christmas – sorry, lads, no bathroom facilities, I’m afraid – but I manage to hold on and get drenched for my efforts. My trousers are soaked and the belly part of my pullover.
The wind’s freezing, my knuckles pink and cracked on the rim of the pail. Quickly I go inside and down to the bedroom, dropping the bucket back first, to get changed.
Bill’s asleep in there. His curtain’s open; he’s on his side so I can make out the line of his ear and the thick muscle of his shoulder. I’ve always thought of Bill as slight – small and flighty, like a thief on the Underground. Recently he’s bulked up. Or has he always been like this? Sometimes, when you look at a man, you see him afresh: proximity cheated you into thinking he’s someone he’s not.
He’s snoring, gently. Occasionally it strikes me how much time I spend with men I’d otherwise have nothing to do with. At home, I don’t make friends easily. I don’t have the knack. People come and go; there’s no time; I can’t find a way in. Here, it isn’t a choice. We learn to live together in a narrow column with no way out. Men become friends and friends become brothers. For only children, this is as good as it gets. When I was a boy, I heard it as ‘lonely children’; I thought it was that through to when I was fourteen and saw the right thing printed on a medical pamphlet.
Moving quietly, I take a jumper from my locker, but that pair of trousers was my last, so I reckon Bill won’t mind if I steal a pair of his. We’re about the same size if I don’t wear a belt. Mine will be ages drying and the Rayburn’s all we’ve got for that.
Once I’ve got the trousers on, it’s force of habit to feel in the pockets. When I do, my hand meets a familiar object. I’m not sure at first in what way it’s familiar – what it is, exactly, I’m feeling, just that it’s known to me.
When I asked Helen to marry me, I couldn’t afford a ring. At least not the one she deserved, a sapphire from Hatton Garden, set between two diamonds. It was another five years and a sizeable bank loan before I could give her that. But weeks before, we’d taken a trip out of town and she’d seen a necklace she liked on a bric-a-brac stall. It was nothing special. A plain silver chain with a pendant in the shape of an anchor. It had cost me ten pounds. Even though the ring she wears now is worth more than that, it’s this chain that always meant the most.
Helen thinks I haven’t noticed that she’s stopped wearing it. But I notice everything about her, all that’s changed when I go ashore.
I should have sent a boat for her, I think, the anchor chain running through my fingers in the final moments of a life that’s mine and a wife I recognize; I should have sent a boat for her with a message shouted from the front. So she knew.
On the stairs, in the dank daylight, I take the necklace out of Bill’s trouser pocket and look at it, then in at him, trying to fathom what to any other man would be obvious but to me is an impossible hiding, a lie too devastating, the series of events that must have unfolded to which I’ve been ignorant.
Constellations changed. The sky fell. The man I thought was my friend.
22
BILL
Silver Man
Sharks are blank. That’s why they frighten. They’re cool torpedoes of blubber, sliced at the gills, equipped with teeth. Fat and teeth, that’s the thing. Needles in a bowl of curd.
I saw one once. Sitting there fishing when all of a sudden there he was, a big grey lozenge coming at me through the water, like one of the pills Jenny gives me when I can’t sleep. I got my line up quick, but all he did was circle the tower a couple of times then swim away. I’d thought him a basker, but Arthur said a great white. Arthur knows better. There’d been sightings on our neighbour lights too.
When I came ashore and told Jenny, she grabbed me, her breath sharp with wine, and said, ‘Bill, promise me you’ll never go fishing off that set-off again.’ Then at night she tried for me with her eyes full of sorry and why not.
I didn’t tell her it wasn’t fear I’d felt for that shark but admiration. If he had a family, he’d left them behind. If he had a wife, he’d eaten her by now.
Forty-five days on the tower
The gale hits us mid-week. Sometimes I can see the heavy weather coming in, hulking clouds marching on the tower and the sea getting ready to do its thing, but other times the rain and wind attack us out of nowhere. Before I know it, I’m eating breakfast in the kitchen with the spray smacking the window.
‘Fuck,’ says Vince, who normally acts unconcerned, but I’ve noticed he’s smoking his next fag off his last. Even with the shutters closed, the noise is off the scale. Rain rinses the glass and the sea’s gone sickly like someone put too much milk in it. The tower shakes, vibrating from bottom to top, a queer feeling as if we’re caught in an electrical current, rippling from the base through the soles of our feet, out the tops of our heads and up. Boulders slam in at fifty miles an hour. I can’t believe we’ll stay standing.
Arthur’s reading an old copy of National Geographic. He isn’t worried. What happened to him makes it unlikely he’d be afraid of much, in the long run. That’s why I don’t feel guilty. Helen shouldn’t either. He’s already been through the worst.
Usually in the weather Arthur will have his reassuring words to say, such as everything those engineers learned from Smeaton’s stump, and all the lighthouses over hundreds of years that were built and fell and built and fell until they learned how to do it properly, with dovetails and metal joints and granite dug into the bedrock.
All it does is talk down to me. Makes me feel like the novice he hauled onto the set-off that day. Arthur knows best. What do I know?
Today, though, he doesn’t speak. He carries on reading National Geographic, looking up once at Vince to say yes please to a cup of tea. The magazine must be from back in ’65, at least. The clock keeps ticking. Four minutes past eleven. The fags get smoked and on it goes.
Midday. Up to the PK, the afternoon watchman. The fog gun’s deafening. It’s a rum job operating the jib; you’d think it would be a break in the monotony but all it is is sitting inside the doorway pressing a plunger and what could be more monotonous than that? In low visibility, whoever’s watch it is has to sit pressing that bloody plunger every five minutes for hours at a time. The rest of us have to listen to it, have our meals or try to sleep, all with these blasts ringing out twelve times an hour. Trident give us earplugs for it, same as they do for families on rock or shore lights, but that’s a bastard in itself. You can’t do anything with it going off. You can’t think straight.
The action comes when I’ve got to get back out on the gallery, wind down the jib and reload the charges. I don’t like being out there with the sea chucking itself about and the wind shrilling so sharp it gives me earache. When I’m ashore I can still hear that wind tunnelling through my head, sighing and creaking on a fair day or whining in a squall. Arthur likes it. He likes being out on the gallery, seeing it in motion. He’s in the lantern now on one of the kitchen chairs, his thumb on the trigger.
‘All right, Bill?’
The horn blasts. BURRRRRRRRR.
‘Brought you tea,’ I say, putting the cup by his feet. He isn’t wearing shoes and his socks don’t match. He doesn’t say thank you. Just goes on staring at the sea.
‘What’s for supper?’ he says after a minute.
I stop at the stairs. Put my hands in my pockets.
‘Steak and kidney.’
‘Good day
for it.’
‘Ashore’d be better.’
Arthur lights a cigarette. ‘Not long now for you, matey.’
‘Thirteen days.’
Thirteen days until I see her again. The smell of her hair, like cloves. The first time her lips met mine, a snowflake passing through the light beam.
‘What’ll you do when you get back?’ he asks.
‘Have a beer. Sleep in a proper bed.’
BURRRRRRRRR.
‘Say hello to Helen for me, won’t you?’
‘Always do.’
The PK runs his thumb around the plunger. ‘What was in the parcel?’
‘What?’
‘Jenny’s, what Vince brought off.’
‘Usual. Letter. Chocs.’
I could smoke but I haven’t got my fags and Arthur isn’t in a sharing mood. He gets this way, in the weather. Dazed. Half here. Like the old man he is.
‘Makes me guilty,’ I say. ‘That’s why she does it.’
‘Jenny’s a good wife. Helen would never do that.’
BURRRRRRRRR.
‘Do what?’
I know all the things Helen does. Or that I’d like her to do, and that she will do for me, sometime soon, when she accepts she doesn’t owe him a thing.
‘The good wife,’ says Arthur. ‘Not for me.’
He might see now if he looks at me, but he doesn’t look.
Helen says he never looks at her. If she were mine, I would never take my eyes off her. I already do that. Quietly. When Jenny can’t see. I watch for the front door to Admiral to open and for Helen to step out and pat her handbag for the house keys. Her eyes cross the glass; she’s saying hello and she hasn’t forgotten, she’s thinking about me just as much as I’m thinking about her; she wants us to be together, as quickly as we can. Then Jenny yells at me from the kitchen for not checking on the baby, who’s gone and dropped his scrambled egg on the floor.
In the time Arthur’s been my Principal Keeper, it’s been right here in front of him. Helen said they don’t touch. Don’t talk. Still, he’s never suspected a thing.
Some feelings you can’t help. I said that to Helen the first time, when she stood at the washing machine before we said goodbye, I said, I just can’t help it. It isn’t to do with Arthur and if he weren’t married to her there’d never be a problem. But he is. They were married while I was still in short trousers having my dad sit on the end of my bed and run his belt across his palm.
‘Jenny could be more independent-minded,’ I say. ‘Like Helen.’
It’s a dare to say her name out loud, in front of him. I want to keep saying it.
‘You like independent women, Bill?’
‘Better than the alternative.’
‘Is it?’
‘That time we went out in Mortehaven.’ I’m pushing it – just to see. ‘It was Helen’s birthday. She wore that blue dress she’d bought up in London. We got a sitter and went to the Seven Sisters and shared that fish platter.’
‘I bought that dress for her.’
‘It suited her.’
‘Still does.’
‘Helen complained about the wine. Didn’t put Jenny off drinking it. When we came home, Jenny was crying over me. Said she felt ugly and stupid next to Helen. I said if she hadn’t drunk so much, she mightn’t be feeling so bad about it.’
‘She’s protective.’
‘She’s drunk.’
‘Why does she drink?’
‘Fucked if I know. Whatever it is, she’s an incoming missile. When I get ashore, I don’t know what I’m going to get.’
‘Neither does she,’ says Arthur.
‘What?’
‘Helen told me once it was like a stranger coming back.’
‘With me?’
Arthur meets my eye, at last. He’s smoking down into the filter, the gritty bit, the sour bit. ‘No,’ he says. ‘With me.’
BURRRRRRRRR.
‘Tea’s getting cold,’ I say, backing away.
‘Get some sleep, Bill.’ He puts out the fag and goes to reload the charges.
Forty-six days
Two hours to go till my watch. Got that feeling in my stomach, or is it just a deeper version of what’s already there, the queasiness that puts me in the in-between place? Not on land or sea, not at home and not away, in between but I don’t know where, just floating. Helen tells me not to think about the bad places. Sometimes I can’t help it.
I tell her things I’ve never told my wife.
How I was twelve when I saw him. I was in the passenger seat of my neighbour’s car, Mrs E; her boy was in my class, a little shit if ever I knew one. My hair was still wet from swimming. I was thinking about the brass tin where my brother hid the smokes, in the old man’s gun chest. I’d nick one, smoke it under the porch before they got back.
At the bottom of the hill, there was a sharp bend going down into Mortehaven. Mrs E slowed the car almost to a stop, and as she did a man crossed the road in front of us. He was so strange-looking, I soaked up every detail about him. He had silver hair and carried a briefcase. He wore sunglasses, even though it was February and freezing. It struck me that none of his outfit fitted the time. This was the start of the fifties, and the styling of the suit, as silver as the hair, was, even to what the old man called my ‘dumb boy’s brain’, from another decade, the twenties maybe. He looked relaxed but purposeful, like he was expected somewhere but was comfortably on time.
The man went down a side street. We moved on. Mrs E drove the Sunbeam like a ninety-year-old, blinking and twitching, her nose pressed up to the windscreen. Five minutes passed, which is a fair distance when you’re travelling by car, so I couldn’t believe it when we came down past the Post Office and the same man crossed the road ahead of us. Again, from left to right. Again, the weird hair and suit, the sunglasses and briefcase. He stepped right out of the hedge, right out of nowhere, so Mrs E had to swerve onto the verge and the horn blared, pointlessly. He didn’t see us. Didn’t see the car, or the fact he’d nearly been hit. Didn’t seem to notice us at all.
It wasn’t possible he’d arrived there before we did. Even if he’d come by car or bus or bike, he couldn’t have overtaken us – nothing had overtaken us – and there was no other road into Mortehaven. He couldn’t have walked; he’d barely have got past the mount. Unless he had a twin, dressed the same way, who moved identically, there was that – but I knew in my gut that wasn’t the point. The point was we had seen not just the same man but the same moment: his crossing from left to right, the angle of his head, the swing of the briefcase, the winter sun glancing off his eyewear, even the number of steps he took, as if it wasn’t a road he was on but another, invisible surface, transposed over the top of the high street like a badly developed photograph.
Mrs E turned to me and said, ‘What in God’s name was that?’
That. Not he.
To this day, I don’t have an answer to her question.
I never told the old man about it. Never told my brothers. Through the weeks that came after, the stranger with the briefcase faded slowly from my mind. I didn’t even speak about it when Mrs E died, unexpectedly, when she was out one morning buying her husband’s Valley Echo. The newsagent said she’d come over curious, seen someone she recognized through the window. The paper fell to the floor.
Only now, twenty-three years later, as I’m sitting on a tower lighthouse with Coronation Street on the telly and Vince boiling some godawful-smelling cauliflower stew two floors down, I’m thinking about him again. Too much time out here for thinking – that’s what the old man didn’t reckon on. It depends who you are, if you let your mind get one over on you. Hauntings that won’t let you go.
Weak boy, wet boy; the sooner you get on the lighthouses the better.
The moon pale-eyed through the window. Weird moon. Weird thoughts. Moons out here so bright it hurts. Against everything else they’re brighter than they should be. Imagining the moon is the sun and the whole world turned inside out.
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This time I’m the one in the silver suit. I’m the one stepping into the road; I can feel the curves of the case, the weight of mysterious things inside, and I look over at the car, the boy in the passenger seat of a Sunbeam-Talbot, and I say to him,
Run.
‘Bill?’
Arthur’s at the door. There’s a knife from the kitchen in his hand.
‘Sorry. I fell asleep. Fuck. What time is it?’
‘Seven.’ He points the blade at me. It glints. ‘You can help me if you like.’
23
VINCE
Black Magic Marks
Fifteen days on the tower
Coastguard Hart Point calling the group, how do you read me, please, over?
Hart Point, Tango, going down. Hart Point, Foxtrot, going down. Hart Point, Lima, going down. Hart Point, Whiskey, going down. Hart Point, Yankee, going down.
Tango, Tango, hello from Hart Point, how do you receive me, please, over?
Hart Point, Tango replying, receiving you loud and clear and a fine afternoon it is too, are you receiving me, over?
Hearing you well, Tango, thank you and it is indeed a fine day. Hart Point to Foxtrot, Hart Point to Foxtrot; good afternoon, are you receiving me, over?
Foxtrot, Foxtrot to Hart Point, afternoon from us all, receiving you clearly, over.
Roger that, Foxtrot. This is Hart Point to Lima, how do you hear me, over?
Lima to Hart Point, hearing you loud and clear, hello to the group, this is Lima to Hart Point, nothing else to report, thank you, over.
Thank you, Lima. Whiskey, this is Hart Point to Whiskey, are you reading me?
Whiskey, Whiskey to Hart Point, reading you fine, Steve, over.
Thanks, Ron. Hart Point to Yankee, Hart Point to Yankee; are you receiving me, please, over?
Yankee, Yankee to Hart Point, Vince here, happy to hear your voices, reception good on both wavelengths, hearing you well, thanks, over.