by Emma Stonex
Thank you, Vince. Best wishes to the group, Hart Point over and out.
Sixteen days
I pinched a couple of the chocolates Bill’s wife sent him. Had a chance to last night while Bill was watching telly. I’ll admit I take a peek in their stores from time to time to see if there’s anything I fancy, and if there’s enough, it’s finders keepers. Even if Bill noticed, I don’t think he’d mind. He doesn’t talk about his wife with much affection.
‘Wait till you’re married half your life,’ he says, whenever I mention Michelle. ‘It’s not the same once you get that ring on her finger.’
Out on the set-off with my fishing line; unlikely I’ll hook much but you never know, pollock or mackerel, that’d be nice, bit of garlic rubbed in like Bill showed me and some dried parsley. Might have a lemon still knocking about. My fingers sticking out of my gloves are stiff with cold so it’s a pain to get the chocs out but worth it.
Dark coating, lilac cream inside, salty on the tongue after I’ve swallowed. I wonder if I’ll ever have a woman who makes me things like this, just cos she can, just cos she wants to. Before I went off, Michelle and me talked about how we’d stay together and not have anyone else on the scene. I think about it more than she does cos what exactly am I getting up to on this sorry rock with two other blokes? It’s her who’s back in town with the nightclubs and those eyelashes. When I play ‘Waterloo Sunset’ I see us walking over Waterloo Bridge and her turning to me and saying, ‘I never knew a man so well that I didn’t know at all.’ She shouldn’t mind about that. No one knows. Not even the PK and Bill and I’m with them every day. That’s all right. What I show people and what I am – those are two separate things. Isn’t it the same for everyone?
Fishing’s as much about sitting there as it is about getting a tug on the line, even in the bitter cold with my coat pulled up to my eyebrows and my balls frozen solid. I feel like the most minuscule person when I’m surrounded by so much sea. I used to fantasize about water while I was locked up, not baths or drizzly rain but Olympic-sized pools of it, and oceans that stretched on for miles. When you can’t have it, you want it.
Better not let the PK see me without the safety line attached, but honestly, it’s a faff, and then you have to sit with this knot under your arse and it hurts like buggery. Every PK’s got his way of operating depending on what he thinks is going to be a risk to his station: Arthur says we’ve got to have the line reeved cos there was that time he nearly got swept off the Eddystone, and if he hadn’t had Lady Luck smiling down on him, he’d never be here to tell the story.
Whatever happens on a lighthouse falls back on the PK. Arthur told me about a young keeper who got lost that way off the Scottish coast, one of those that gets passed down as a warning but if the same thing happened on the Eddystone then there’s no reason why it couldn’t here. The PK in charge on that tower never got over it. It went that this young keeper fancied doing some fishing one day and the weather was fine, not a cloud in the sky and the sea was as calm as you like. He told the Assistant he was off to do just that, and the Assistant says, ‘Right you are, bring me back a catch for my tea.’ Meanwhile the PK’s fast asleep in his bunk, none the wiser, so this keeper goes down to where I am now, sitting here like I am with his legs dangling down off the set-off and that’s the last we know of him. When the Assistant goes to fetch him a while later there’s nobody there. Course they’re all bamboozled. The Assistant didn’t hear anything, nobody shouting for help, and it seemed that even if this bloke had fallen in, he’d still be there in the water, calling for them. But he isn’t. He’s just gone, fishing line and all. It was only the PK’s and the Assistant’s word that each other hadn’t been to blame.
The PK in charge took responsibility. The way he saw it, it was his to bear. Then the Landmark Board found these books in the keeper’s bunk, about the devil and the occult, all sorts of spooky shit you don’t want to be getting near. Black magic marks scratched across the bedroom, pentagrams and horned hands; symbols picked into the walls. Sends a shiver down my spine just thinking about it.
I bring up the line and go back inside.
As I do, I see a shape on the water, bobbing away from me. I squint; it isn’t driftwood, or a buoy or a bird; it’s a shoal of tuna near the surface or a plastic bag, a few plastic bags, billowed out. Or is it bigger than that, more solid, the size and shape of a man – is he face-down, face-up, arms out? Not sure. The water vibrates. I can’t be certain whether I’ve seen it at all and even though I’m trying I can’t catch it any longer.
‘What’s for lunch, then?’ Bill’s doing the brass between the kitchen and the bedroom. This is the only bit that ever needs doing: we must get grubby hands from smoking or checkers, then we’re too tired going upstairs to bed so we forget ourselves.
‘A bit of seaweed and a crisp packet, if you want it.’
‘Bloody hell.’
He’s scrubbing viciously, even though the rails are clean as new pennies. When I said to Arthur yesterday that Bill looked ready to get gone, he gave me one of his sideways looks and said, down in his throat, ‘You’re right about that.’
‘I think I saw a body,’ I tell him.
Bill stops polishing. ‘What?’
‘Just now.’
‘Where?’
‘Where d’you bloody think? In the sea.’
Bill wipes his hands, slowly. ‘Who was it?’
‘I don’t know. Some swimmer.’
‘You sure?’
‘No.’
Course, when we get outside, there’s nothing to be found – it was gone anyway before I said anything to Bill and I don’t know for certain what I saw, only that it’s put me on edge. I want to ask the PK what to do but Bill says don’t bother, the PK’s up in his bunk, he’s not had any rest and it’s starting to turn against him. Arthur’s showing the strain – haven’t I noticed? He doesn’t need this.
‘He had goggles on,’ I say.
‘Who?’
‘The swimmer. Red ones.’
‘Get on the R/T,’ says Bill. ‘They can deal with it if they want. Bugger’ll be long dead anyway. He was dead, wasn’t he?’
‘I don’t know. Don’t want to make a song out of it. It could’ve been a seal.’
‘In goggles?’
‘I don’t know if it had goggles on.’
‘You don’t know much, do you?’
I think about the gun hidden under the kitchen sink. Thankful it’s there. Just in case we’re not alone.
Up to the kitchen and Bill makes tea, strong, two sugars, which get dumped in with a tablespoon so it’s actually more like six. All this sea makes you see things that aren’t there. The PK told me that. If you look at the same picture for long enough, the mind comes up with an object to disrupt it, to test if you’re concentrating. Desert mirages, you get the same on the sea. Colours like you wouldn’t believe; splashes and whirlpools; shapes on the surface that flitter and vanish. Even on a flat sea the water gets chopped about and broken, black and shivering up close like a bag of rubbish left out overnight. You could peel a hole in the sky and stick your finger through, to touch whatever’s behind. It would feel soft and needing. It wouldn’t want to let you go.
When you’re with the sea every day, it takes whatever’s inside you and shines it back. Blood and fur, a child’s high scream: and my friend in my arms, grown cold.
‘Drink up,’ says Bill.
The hot, sweet tea makes me sick. Or it’s the body.
‘Arthur ever tell you about the sailor up north?’ Bill clicks his lighter, singeing the end of his fag. I say no, go on. ‘Bugger’s boat got wrecked on the rocks round the light. Everyone on it drowned; the shipment was lost. This sailor blamed Arthur. Said it was the fault of the lighthouse. His crew’d been out at sea for so long, looking at a bloody great horizon with nothing on it that when they finally saw the beam, they couldn’t tell how far away it was. Distances change.’ He taps his temple with the butt of the smoke. ‘You think
an object’s further than it is, then all of a sudden you’re on it.’
‘You think I made it up?’
‘No. Just you can’t always trust what’s real.’
‘The PK’s seen it all.’
Bill sucks long on the stick. ‘Arthur isn’t who he used to be.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s not the same person.’
‘I didn’t think you knew him before.’
‘I didn’t. Helen told me.’
I say, ‘He can’t be chipper all the time. Would you be, after . . .?’
‘It’s not that,’ says Bill. ‘It’s when people go wrong and you don’t recognize them any more. That’s what Helen says. It comes up on you like the bloody lighthouse on that shipwreck, all of a sudden you haven’t a fucking idea who you married.’
In the afternoon it starts to snow. Snow on a tower’s weird because there isn’t anything to give you bearings. You don’t see it piling up on the roof of a car or covering a farmer’s field, so you can’t guess how much of it’s fallen, just that it keeps coming from the sky and the sky’s the colour of bone. The sea accepts it quietly. Water, way below, metal-dull and motionless. Before I worked on a lighthouse, I thought the sea was always the same colour, didn’t think much beyond it being blue or green but actually it’s hardly ever blue or green. It’s a whole load of colours and they’re mostly black or brown, yellow, gold, sometimes pink if it’s churning.
Up in the lantern I put my entry in the weather log, sign my initials then leave it on the desk for the next watchman. The PK’s taught me all sorts about how the sea works and what the weather does to make it a certain way on some days and not others. S for snow, O for overcast, P for passing showers. The pages before are a whole alphabet of letters. It’ll never not strike me as magic how the weather changes in no time at all. It’s like a person who shouts and then sleeps, and the snow is its dreaming.
Letters to Denote the State of the Weather. Drizzling. Gloomy. Lightning. Squall. Thunder. Wet dew. Haze. I like the feel and look of them, how some of them feel how they sound. Thunder sounds like a boulder rolling towards you. Haze is slow and lazy. Squall’s like you’re thrown in a tizz. Same as the names of the things that live in the sea, which sound like pebbles clinking on the beach. Periwinkle, mussel, sea squirt, whelk. Every few months we get a pile of books brought out that we share with the other lighthouses in the group, a travelling library. I read the lot.
I had a foster mum who was big on books. About the only one who was. She’d make a point of reading to us and it was down to those words sounding different from the words I knew in my life. The words that made up my life were short, hard words like oi and fuck and you cunt, bricks for bashing you over the head.
Every time I heard a word I liked, that I felt something for, I memorized it. It felt like the more I read, the more free I was in my mind, and if you’re free in your mind then it doesn’t matter what else is going on. In prison I got a dictionary and found odd little words that I thought were terrific. Birds, there are lots of those. Kittiwakes and cormorants. Curlews. Pipits. Sound like they’ve got the wind running right through them. I copied words down and learned that when you put them together and messed around with them a bit you could get something new out of it again.
But I’m still stumped when I’m writing my letter to Michelle, propped up in my bunk when my watch is done, notepad on my blanket, pen in my hand, figuring out how to put it all down and I don’t know where to begin. A is for apology. D is for deceit.
It’s time to tell her the truth.
I see her in her London flat, toes grazing her calf as she opens the envelope.
VI
1992
24
HELEN
The cathedral was the place to meet, being large and anonymous. In pews, in cloisters, in the red velvet seats up by where the boys’ chapel sang, whispers had steeped the rank stone for centuries. Now theirs, hers and Michelle’s, could join them without remark.
‘Roger and the girls are in a cafe round the corner,’ said Michelle. ‘I can’t be long. I didn’t mean to bring them. They wanted to come. I mean, he did.’
‘Where does he think you are?’
‘Buying a birthday present. For him. I’ll have to go to Debenhams after, pick out a tie or something.’
Helen suspected this was how things were for people who had shared calamity: they got to the heart of it immediately, doing away with niceties and preludes about the traffic. She and Michelle hadn’t known each other before. They had met after the event, at the funeral Trident House put on – a ‘farewell service’, they’d called it, and it had been more for the newspapers than for any of them. In the years since, they made contact when they could, if one or other woman happened to be passing that part of the country. They would send letters whenever the sadness of that winter got the better of them, and the urge hit to express it to someone who understood: letters that were sometimes answered, sometimes not, but the comfort was in writing them.
‘Thank you for coming,’ said Michelle. ‘Thank you for calling.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘I wasn’t sure if you would.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Michelle. ‘Jenny never gets back to me.’
‘She doesn’t get back to me either.’
Michelle unzipped her handbag and took out a tube of Polos. Inside the foil, the sweets were cracked into pieces, all down the length of the tube. Helen could picture her dropping them at the village store while her daughters selected packets of fruit gums and cola bottles. How old would the girls be now? Eight and four, about that. Helen didn’t know how it would be to watch a child of hers thrive, healthy and sturdy, little limbs fattening, hair growing, suddenly as tall as you.
Michelle offered them, despite the bits.
‘Thanks,’ said Helen.
‘Please stop talking to Dan Sharp.’
She was taken aback. ‘That’s what you came here to say?’
An elderly couple came to sit on the pew in front of them. The man lowered his head. Michelle moved close enough that Helen could smell her shampoo.
‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘Do you even know who he is?’
‘Not really. He writes about boats and bombs.’
‘Under a fake name.’
Helen crunched the Polo. ‘I’m not surprised about that.’
The woman in front turned round and shot them a glare. Helen thought she had a bob like a motorcycle helmet.
Michelle whispered: ‘Why does a novelist want to write about us?’
‘I don’t know. Why does anyone write about anything?’
‘There must be a reason.’
‘He likes the sea, he said.’
‘Then he should go on holiday.’
Helen felt unsure why she was having to defend a man she hardly knew; why she wanted to. ‘He’s looking for the truth. He cares about it.’
Michelle put the sweets back in her bag and zipped it shut.
‘Shh!’ The woman threw them daggers.
Michelle signalled they move across the aisle. When they were sitting again, she looked up at the altar. Helen noticed she’d had her ears pierced once.
‘Do you believe in Him?’ Michelle asked.
Christ’s feet were crossed at their bridges: an eruption of coagulated blood. It was a particularly gruesome one, Helen thought. Whoever had modelled it had driven the thorns in with unnecessary force.
‘I’ve tried.’
‘Me too.’ Michelle rotated her wedding band. ‘I feel jealous when I see people coming in here and they just know, don’t they? They know it’s going to be all right.’
‘They believe. Which isn’t the same.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I know Vinny didn’t hurt the others,’ said Michelle.
‘I know Arthur didn’t.’
‘But we don’t know, do we?’
‘If it matters, I never thought of Vince as the villain.’
Michelle took her hand briefly, then let it go.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You were the only one.’
Helen saw she’d been picking her fingernails, which were painted red but bitten short. She was taken back twenty years, to the anxious teenager Michelle had been, trembling at the farewell service, during questioning or when pinioned by journalists in the street. People didn’t change that much. Jenny would assume the same of her.
‘Aren’t you afraid of what Trident will say when they find out?’
‘I don’t care what they say,’ said Helen.
‘They’ll stop your money.’
‘So?’
‘It’s different for me,’ said Michelle. ‘I’ve got people to look after. A family.’ She stopped herself. ‘I didn’t mean—’
‘That’s OK.’
‘Just that they’re young still—’
‘I understand.’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve never felt scared of them? All that about not talking to anyone or giving away their private business. There was always a threat in there, never said outright but it was obvious what they meant.’
‘If that’s true,’ said Helen, ‘then I think talking to Sharp is our best chance at honesty. It’s always suited Trident to blame it on Vince, you know that. It’s never been fair. He went to prison; he was thought of as a bad lot, so it was easy. People could get their heads around it. All they had to do was admit they got it wrong in giving him a job; they never should have done it; let that be a lesson learned. But it matters, doesn’t it? To say what he was really like. I’d have thought it matters to you.’
Michelle closed her eyes.
‘Why are we really here?’ asked Helen.
After a moment, Michelle said, ‘Vinny wrote me a letter. Right before they disappeared. One of the tripper boats picked it up. He told me what he’d been in prison for. The final time. I never told anyone about it.’
‘All right.’