The Lamplighters

by Emma Stonex

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Time to get ready.’

  On the drive to Monday Club the radio played James Taylor’s ‘Fire and Rain’. Michelle thought about the night she had met Vinny, of his lips when he smoked.

  With both girls dropped off, she drove to Sainsbury’s even though she didn’t need anything. She put her head on the steering wheel.

  The song made her ache.

  February ’72. She had only gone to the party because Erica made her. There’d been nothing to wear so she’d gone through the laundry basket and found a pair of flares which she’d doused in her mum’s Rive Gauche. She’d been dumped a week ago and wasn’t in the mood. ‘Come on; it’ll be fun,’ said Erica. When they arrived, she thought, I’ve seen too many scenes like this. A girl was being sick into a flowerpot outside and the end of her plait kept getting caught in her mouth.

  ‘This is Vinny.’

  Michelle had heard about Erica’s jailbird cousin. She wondered then why she hadn’t listened harder. Vinny had a head on everyone else, with dark hair and slightly uneven teeth. She could look at him only when he wasn’t looking at her. Meeting his eye gave her a humiliated sort of shock.

  With Erica gone, he said: ‘Michelle . . . Makes me think of that Beatles song.’

  ‘Do you dig The Beatles?’

  ‘More of a Stones man.’

  ‘I never liked my name,’ admitted Michelle. ‘It reminds me of the sea. It’s the shell part. The sea scares me a little. Too deep, maybe.’ She was talking too much.

  Vinny had a nice smile, warm and sincere, and it travelled up to fill his eyes.

  ‘Do you want to celebrate with me?’ he asked.

  ‘What are you celebrating?’

  He picked up a bottle of Babycham. ‘Come on.’

  It was fresher outside on the steps, once the girl and her plaits had gone in.

  ‘I got a job today,’ he said. ‘As a lighthouse keeper.’

  She could see his eyelashes in the dark. ‘I’ve never met a lighthouse keeper.’

  ‘Now you have.’

  ‘And there was I talking about the sea.’

  ‘That’s how I knew you’d be the one to celebrate with.’

  She smiled. The drink tasted sweet. ‘Do you have a smoke?’ she asked.

  Vinny fished around in his jacket. ‘It’s grass.’ When he struck the match, she glimpsed the insides of his hands, which seemed an intimate part of him to see.

  ‘It doesn’t sound like a real job,’ she said, wanting to stay out here with him.

  ‘What’s a real job?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She passed him the joint. ‘One where you don’t get lonely.’

  ‘I won’t be any lonelier than I am now.’

  ‘Do you feel lonely now?’

  He smiled back at her. ‘Not exactly.’

  Michelle thought, there’ll always be a bit of me that gets drawn to the wrong one. Maybe there’s a bit of that in every woman.

  In the car park at Sainsbury’s, a VW’s horn beeped behind her. The driver wound her window down. ‘Are you going?’ she said impatiently. ‘I’ve got two kids in the back.’

  Michelle remembered she was parked in a mother and baby space.

  ‘Sorry. Yes. I am.’ She reversed and drove out of the car park the wrong way down a one-way route, prompting a cyclist to shout that she was a blind bloody cow. Indicating left at the roundabout, she saw the bird again, sitting on the island in the middle, on its own, staring at her.

  She was woken in the night. Her toes were cold. Two thirty-three a.m.

  Roger’s bulk was soothing next to her, his fleshy back rising and falling on a snore. She got up and put on her dressing gown, which felt stiff because she’d dried it on the washing line and the sun had cooked it.

  Downstairs, in his study, she reached for the file hidden under the desk. Roger had encouraged her to throw it away: ‘What do you want to keep that crap for?’ He’d called it junk that was taking up much-needed space, an objection he did not throw at the arrangement of chrome ‘stress-relievers’ scattered across the veneer.

  Michelle sat in his chair and opened the folder. Letters from Trident, all variations on a theme: Our deepest condolences . . . shocked and bewildered . . . if there’s anything we can do. Then the Bereavement Allowance that was better read as hush money: cash for keeping quiet and they’d keep her in exchange.

  Finally, their verdict: We’ve investigated all we reasonably can . . . Prison changes people . . . the isolation . . . not the best place for Vincent to have been, in his state of mind.

  State of mind? To this day Vinny had the finest mind she had come across.

  Interviews: 1973.

  Michelle leaned over in the queasy glow of the overhead and ran her nail around the lip of the file. When the inquiries were happening, Helen Black had insisted on getting copies of everything. Trident hadn’t a leg to stand on: the last thing they needed was a stricken relative going to the press.

  She reread the transcripts now, words spoken twenty years ago but still alive on the page. Though she knew the text well, her head hurt and her heart hurt more.

  She wished that she had been the one to talk about Vinny. Instead it had been Pearl, his aunt, the woman who had raised him. Michelle could have told them what Vinny had really been like, not these lies. Painting him as a thug and a down-and-out. To have it documented, all the lovely things about him, would have meant something.

  Most of Pearl’s account she could dismiss, but one part was difficult. She reached it now and lingered there, going over the words until their meaning broke apart. Mike Senner’s claim troubled her. It always had. The fisherman swore he’d been out to the tower the week before it was discovered empty; he said he’d gone to fill up the water storage tanks and had spoken to Bill and Vince. They had told him about an unexpected visitor.

  Why hadn’t the investigators pursued that claim? It fitted. And it proved what happened, surely it did.

  The clock on Roger’s desk said five to four. Her eyes were closing; it would be morning soon.

  Upstairs, she climbed into bed, careful not to disturb her husband. A shadow moved across the wall, the fingertips of trees reaching through the curtains. She could feel the weight of the man she’d loved, loved him still, the ghost of him, sitting next to her, reassuring as a dog, and how that lightened then left as she tripped over into sleep.

  VII

  1972

  30

  ARTHUR

  The Boat

  Helen,

  I never write to you. Never have, don’t know how. Lighthouse letters – did you find a book about those once? Some soft romance you picked up in a train station waiting room, back in the days before we started on the life. Keepers writing letters to their girls. Absence making the heart grow fonder. It’s not like that. You said when you finished, ‘I doubt it’s like that,’ and you were right, it’s not, for us. Would you rather I had written? Would that have stopped you? What’s in my head doesn’t come out right, most of the time. I want to tell you, darling. There’s so much I want to tell you.

  Postcards never finished; postcards never sent. I tear them up and drop them into the sea so I can watch them float away. In another life, a lucky one, I see the pieces washing onto shore. She’ll find them, gather them to her, put them back together. It will all make sense.

  Thirty-six days on the tower

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Bill says to Vince over Wednesday’s lunch of chicken soup and days-old bread, which is starting to harden and mould. The soup’s canned, jellied on top, but once it’s heated and thickened up it’s OK. ‘You look sick as a dog.’

  ‘Something I ate. Feel like bloody death warmed up.’

  Bill smokes and grins at me, like it’s all a fucking joke.

  ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘Nothing. Christ, someone’s got to keep their pecker up.’

  Vince stirs his soup without appetite. I can’t blame him; I’m craving fresh meat now, fr
esh anything. On the rocks up north, we used to keep chickens – the good ones gave us eggs our whole stay and those that didn’t wound up in a stew. We’d look at the fowl when we got there and hope at least one of them was getting henpecked for the sake of our stomachs.

  ‘My guts,’ complains Vince. ‘They’re wrung out.’

  Bill says, ‘We’ll get you off before the weather turns, eh, Arthur?’

  I scrape my chin, running a thumbnail along the spines growing there. I see Helen, looking at me with tenderness, or what I mistook for tenderness but was more likely disdain. What are you doing with a beard, Arthur Black? You’ve never had a beard in all the time I’ve known you, and it isn’t you, it isn’t you at all.

  There was a time when she didn’t know me, and it might be me, after all.

  ‘Just that it’d be you and me then, Bill.’

  He flicks his fag ash into the soup bowl.

  ‘Wouldn’t be for long,’ he says. ‘They’d bring someone else.’

  Right now, looking at my Assistant, I think I’d like to sweep the cups and plates from the table, send the whole mess flying as I launch myself against him and wipe that stupid fucking grin off his treacherous face.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘It wouldn’t be long.’

  Vince glances between us.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ I ask him.

  ‘I’ll be right,’ he says, shoving the food away. ‘Rather not haul some poor bugger off right before Christmas.’

  Bill says, ‘I’m not doing your fucking watch for you if that’s what you’re after.’

  ‘Thanks for the sympathy, man.’

  ‘You’ll get plenty of that ashore, from the doctor.’

  ‘Anyone’d think you wanted me gone, you bastard.’

  Bill shrugs. ‘Just don’t want your lurgy, mate. The thunder bucket’s under enough strain as it is.’

  Vince puts his head in his hands. ‘Could’ve been my cooking,’ he groans.

  ‘If it was anyone’s . . .’ says Bill.

  ‘I thought if we all had it—’

  ‘Which we soon bloody will—’

  ‘I’ll give it a day,’ says Vince. ‘See if it passes.’

  ‘I’ll do your watch,’ I tell him. ‘Go back to bed.’

  When he’s gone, Bill says, ‘Get a boat out, Arthur. He looks like shit.’

  ‘That’s my decision. It’ll be over tomorrow.’

  ‘If it isn’t?’

  ‘Then we call in.’

  ‘Not if there’s a bloody great sea on.’

  ‘There won’t be.’

  ‘Not what the forecast says,’ says Bill.

  I light a cigarette. ‘The forecast isn’t always right.’

  ‘And you are?’

  When the time came for those hens up north, my PK showed me how. He held her upside down and told me to slit her throat. One clean slice from left to right.

  ‘What are you getting at, Bill?’

  He looks at me for a moment.

  ‘Fuck it,’ he says eventually. ‘You’re the PK, not me. Do what you want.’

  I gathered these dolostones at Flamborough Head. My PK back then took me aside on a quiet day and said, ‘Here’s a penny, lad, and some vinegar, now go see what you make of it.’ The rocks with calcium in them fizzed with the acid; I learned how to classify their hardness on a scale of one to ten, scratching the hardest with a coin. He gave me his pad and guidebook with all his jottings inside: he’d taken up painting by then and that was him saying, this is yours now, have this for a while then pass it on.

  For Helen, the stones are morbid. For me, it’s the opposite. When you’re touching a rock that’s been here thousands of years, you’re holding hands with history.

  She says I’m more comfortable on the tower than I am on land and maybe that’s right. Life ashore feels wrong to me. I’m thrown about by the unsteadiness of it all. Telephones ring unexpectedly. Local shops sell two types of milk and I can’t decide which to buy. People tell me their news in detail, in shops or at the bus stop: ‘Morning, Arthur, back so soon? Doesn’t seem like yesterday since I last saw you. Did Helen tell you Laura’s Stan’s finally had his bladder stones removed?’ They’ll talk about next week or some date in July that I know I won’t be here for, but I’ll nod along with it, knowing it won’t make the slightest bit of difference to me. In that way it’s only ever a halfway house, the land life, in that I’m there but not there, like going to a party full of people I’ve never met, ignorant of the dress code and having to leave before midnight.

  When I’m ashore I have to pretend to be a man I’m not, part of something I’m not part of. It’s difficult to explain it to normal people. They wouldn’t have an interest in the endless quiet stillness of the morning watch, or in how the cooking of a good braise can occupy one’s thoughts all day and the day after. Lighthouse worlds are small. Slow. That’s what other people can’t do: they can’t do things slowly and with meaning.

  My brain works differently here. Ashore it sort of goes to sleep; it isn’t as sharp as it is now. Take when I’m going off on the relief, I’ll know exactly how much my bag of tricks should weigh with all the bits and pieces inside – slippers, underpants, towels, comb, handkerchiefs, facecloth, working trousers, comfortable trousers, pullovers, sponge bag, fags, shaving soap. That’s to do with my lighthouse life, so I’ll know how heavy each item is on its own and all together, and if something’s missing I’ll be able to say without thinking too hard what that is. Before now I’ve stopped Helen on the jetty to tell her I’ve left my nail clippers in the cupboard in the bathroom. In ordinary life, I lose all that. There’s too much to bother with and no point anyway because it’s always changing. So, while it might seem like the tower demands less of me, or it’s here I go into a switched-off state, that’d be wrong.

  Helen will confuse me even more when I go back. She’ll want to talk to me on some nights and not on others. She’ll go out and I won’t know where.

  Though I could guess now, where. Bill mightn’t be it. She could have plenty, poking fun behind my back, calling me the fool, the man who can’t hold on to his wife.

  I can’t rest for thoughts of them together. How could she? And him, whom I took under my wing when he got here, showing him the ropes and showing him friendship; calming him after the fright and sickness of the crossing, and all along – how long? – he wasn’t the person I thought.

  I can’t rest for thoughts of you.

  Sleep is the refuge, but it won’t let me close. In my bunk I get hot then cold, sweat then shiver, it’s night then it’s dawn and I can’t remember any time in between.

  One of our generators has packed up. I radio the mainland for assistance and they say they’ll send a man out. But really, I don’t want him here. Don’t want anybody new. Anybody at all.

  By four o’clock a stiff fog advances over the sea: they’ve missed their chance. I go up to the gallery to load the jib. It’s freezing outside, unnaturally quiet.

  There’s a smudge on the gallery, a single footprint.

  Small. I blink. It’s gone.

  Fog does this. Makes everything muffled and still. I wouldn’t be the first keeper to attribute a temperament to the elements, seeing as they become as close companions to us as our mates indoors, but there is a particular quality to fog. It smothers light and sound, shrinking the world until the spot you’re in is the only one left.

  December sun is weak at the best of times. Now it’s lemonish, cream on the turn. Families ashore will be setting up their Christmas trees and decorating their homes with ribbons and candles. Helen and I used to make the effort, but we don’t these days. We’ll always have the teatime angel chimes because those were the ones she grew up with, and a length of tinsel wrapped around the mirror. I’m rarely there for Christmas. There’s no point in her doing it alone.

  I enter F and G into the weather log – G denoting ‘gloomy’ – then read the thermometer and record the visibility, which is barely a stone’s throw
from the tower.

  I spend a long time doing it, longer than the others. They don’t inscribe much – dates, symbols, at the required three hours, nothing that belongs to them truly. I don’t know why I’m writing or what I’m writing especially. Perhaps I’m writing to you. It’s the fog or the hours or the endlessness of everything.

  Outside, I pick up a feather from when Vince shovelled his birds. Vince says, ‘Stop calling them my birds, they’re not my bloody birds,’ but they are in the way I think of them, because he was the one that found them. I steady the feather before releasing it. It hovers for a moment, held by the clotted air, then disappears. It doesn’t drop, or fall, or flip away as it would on a breeze. It vanishes.

  When I stand, it’s to see a shape on the sea, out in the distance, emerging from the fog. So Trident did send someone. Only the boat’s coming from the wrong direction, from the open water. It can’t be maintenance, after all. I squint, uncertain if it’s a quirk of the weather, but my binoculars confirm the boat is coming in fast. Without hesitation I wind the jib and press the plunger to fire the gun. It sounds deafeningly, splitting the smoke. The clock’s on for five minutes but I fire another immediately, before winding the jib again to reload.

  The boat seems not to hear. It hastens to the tower, oblivious to the explosions and to my now waving arms, hollering at it to steer clear.

  Through the binoculars, my target appears faintly. The boat’s mast is tall but the vessel itself is compact. I see a head piloting it and decide that if I can see him, he must be able to see me, so I call again, ‘Hard to starboard, hard to starboard!’

  The gun explodes. Why does he advance? Can he not detect my light?

  Now I can make out his torn sail, with no more movement inside it than a sock on a line on a still day. He’s coming in for help; he doesn’t want to go around. I shout that I’ll prepare the winch and he doesn’t respond so I use the flag semaphore. At last, he lifts an arm.

  ‘Hello!’ I call. ‘I see you!’