by Emma Stonex
When they come for me, that’s when I’ll know. What I’m made of. What I’ve got. What I’m willing to do.
My secret in the kitchen under the sink. Like the PK and his stones, that private pleasure. I imagine the weight of the gun, its curves as smooth as hers.
Hours I’ve been floating. Dimly aware of the PK coming into the bedroom, the creak of a bunk and the swish of a curtain in the deep, deep dark, then a whisper,
‘Vince, can you hear me? Not long now, mate.’
Drifting in that darkness, enough to lift my thoughts up to the top of the tower, part of the sky or part of the sea, or else I’m lost somewhere on land, searching for that unknowable, unreachable light, feeling I’ve died.
Nineteen days
A time I remember, some day in the middle of a million days when we ran out of fags. Patting a pocket like a slack-skinned cheek, realizing, shit, we’ve smoked them all. Three keepers legging it between floors, raiding coats and shirts, every nook where an in-case-of-emergency fag might once have been stowed. Shaking every box and tin, thinking of that mate that gave me one once and then I went and hid it and I can’t remember where. The mission for butts tossed in bins, twisting the nubs to get the innards out and rolling them into a smokable flute. One or two puffs but worth it.
Smoking on a light’s more than habit. Two and a half minutes of being in the time that you’re in. Quiet heart, quiet soul. Then what? Waiting for a boat to pass by, putting in an ask for a crew to come but that could be days, and the hours stretch on and on and the sea makes fun of us, tiny men with tiny desires.
Then Arthur found a pack. If it were Bill, he’d have kept it. Fags aren’t like tins of sardines and they don’t have to be shared. But the PK put a smoke by each of our places – one a day, no more for him, no less for us, and that fag was anticipated to the point of something divine. The three of us smoking after dinner in silence, warm crackle of paper, the soft pup of our lips. Nothing before or since ever tasted as good.
A nightmare jolts me, or it could be the sheets, which are wet with sweat and tangled between my legs. I was climbing then my muscles gave out and I fell and I woke up.
Someone else, knock-knock – there’s talk in the background, in the distance, above or below I can’t tell, but someone else is here cos Bill and the PK use their smarter voices then, better and clearer instead of the grunts and swears.
I try to sit. My back peels off the wrinkled sheet. Blood rushes to my head. It hurts; I lie down.
Belly empty but to think about food makes me sick. To think about the chocolates Bill’s wife sent over makes me sick. Sockets hurt, sockets all over, those points in the body where round things go in round-shaped holes. There’s a bucket on the floor. I don’t know when I last used it or it was cleared away.
They’ve brought a doctor, that’s it. I want a doctor. But it isn’t a doctor, it isn’t anyone; I’m dreaming of going on the gallery for the fresh air and to let the wind blast it out of me but I’ll never get up there, I’ll never get up, and it feels like thirst, actual thirst, the need to get out, a drink I have to have or I’ll die. What if I die?
When I wake again it’s freezing cold. The wall is freezing damp. I pull the sheet and blanket and they’re freezing too.
Brackish dreams I wade through up to my knees, coating my tongue in bitter liquor. Back there again, walking, the block of flats up ahead. I saw it not as it had been in real life but changed. Crooked. My mate Reg behind me, the others too: I didn’t see them but I felt them, heard the shift of their jackets as they moved . . .
Let’s go back. Let’s not do this.
But the dream carried on as if it never heard and the dog was barking now. I saw its teeth. Its veined black gums and the scab that oozed when it snarled.
Blood and fur, a child’s high scream. My friend grown cold in my arms.
The window outside the bedroom is an opaque square. I think of F for fog.
Three voices.
I need water. I expect to come to the kitchen and see myself there, with the others, the PK, Bill and me, sitting round smoking over a game of cards, and it’s my own voice I’ve been hearing, and the standing version, the one thinking this, isn’t involved at all. He’s invisible. Dead. He died somewhere back there in his dreams.
But when I make it downstairs, it isn’t me I see.
It’s a big, silver-haired bloke.
Arthur says, ‘About time.’
The big, silver-haired bloke doesn’t say anything, but he looks at me, and smiles.
VIII
Interviews: 1973
33
HELEN
—I can bear it. Whatever it is. If they’re dead, I can bear it. I can bear that over not knowing. You’d tell us, wouldn’t you? If you found out, you’d tell us?
—We know how upsetting this is for you, Helen.
She wished they would not say that. They could not possibly know. The idea she would never see Arthur again was bottomless and strange, a book of empty pages, a shunt off the side of a train, the stair you thought was there in the dark but wasn’t.
The second of January. Tuesday morning. Eleven forty-five.
Four days they had been gone. When Helen saw the Maiden Rock through her living-room window, she had the uncanny sensation of watching a car drive by with no one at the wheel.
—Do you have a view as to what’s happened to your husband?
The investigators sat opposite her, the bearers of bad news, of no news, of nothing. At times it struck her as inconceivable, an elaborate game played through mischief or boredom to see how it shook things up ashore, how long it would be before those clod-footed land people found them, the lizards, clinging slyly to a rock.
—I don’t know. It makes no sense. People don’t just disappear, do they?
—Not typically.
—You think they’re dead.
—It’s too early to draw conclusions.
—But you’re thinking it. Aren’t you? I am.
—Let’s go back a little, if we can. The last communication we received from Arthur was his cancelling a request for a mechanic to come to fix the generator.
—Yes.
—Why do you think Arthur cancelled the request, Helen?
—The generator was mended.
—Yet Trident hadn’t dispatched anyone.
—One of them must have fixed it. Arthur could have done it. Or Bill.
The man scribbled on his notepad. There were too many questions – all of them time-wasting, from people who didn’t know the first thing about lighthouses, what it meant to be involved in a lighthouse with someone who was on a lighthouse.
—Was Arthur behaving in any way abnormally the last time you saw him?
—No.
—Did he talk about anyone in particular, any name that was new or unusual?
—I don’t think so.
—We’re looking to rule out that Arthur and the others weren’t picked up from the tower by a third party. Someone with a boat. Is that the kind of thing he’d do?
Helen shook her head. Arthur was pragmatic and sensible; he had a mind like an index. On their first outing as a couple, he’d told her the names of the stars. It wasn’t even a romantic thing; it was just that he knew. Betelgeuse. Cassiopeia. Names like marbles in a glass bowl. He took clocks apart and put them back together again, to see how they dismantled and then how they worked, the elegance of the mechanism. He did jigsaws awash with sea and sky because being a keeper he’d learned to notice the defining detail where she saw only grey. She had always thought he had the finest set of shoulders she had seen on a man, an odd thing to be captivated by but there it was. Previously she’d been out with someone who had no shoulders to speak of and whose clothes had seemed in constant danger of dropping away, like a shirt on a hanger that was too small. By contrast, she could have steadied two baskets on Arthur’s. She had been ready, then, to marry and start a family.
—Was Arthur depressed at all?
&n
bsp; —What do you mean ‘at all’? Either you are or you aren’t.
—Did he ever say he felt down? Did you observe a loss of appetite, or that he slept more than usual or stopped engaging with people?
—Arthur rarely engaged with people.
—So, he might have suffered with depression.
—I don’t think so. We never talked about that.
Helen thought of her husband in this kitchen weeks before, standing by the oven, right there, right there, his back to her, and the memory was close enough to touch. He’d spread jam on bread, and she had felt irritated at how, before he ate the bread, he’d washed the knife, dried it and put it away, and only then did he sit down to eat. She’d said nothing because a long marriage had taught her that if you didn’t have nice words to say then it was better to say nothing at all. She could have things how she preferred when he was off; when he came back, she could feel irritated and say nothing, because that was marriage, a lot of the time.
—Can I ask what you did before enrolling with Trident?
—I had a job in London. As a sales clerk.
—Quite a contrast as a way of life, then.
—I suppose so. I’ve been involved with the Institution over half my years, but I still think about that time and how different it is for me now and has been for so long.
—Do you like living here on your own? It’s very remote.
—I don’t think too much about it.
—It’s, what, four miles into Mortehaven?
—Arthur said it was as if Trident didn’t want us to get out.
—Isolation can be harmful, Helen. We have to consider that not just for the men but for their families too. If Arthur was depressed . . .
—I never said he was depressed.
—But it would stand to reason he might have been.
—Why?
The investigators watched her sympathetically.
—Seclusion can be very damaging to a person. Especially if they’re in an existing vulnerable state.
—What are you suggesting?
—It’s too soon to suggest anything. We’re looking at several prospects.
She had already considered the prospects. Bill had told Arthur. He’d lied about Helen’s feelings and how long it had gone on: a schoolboy in knee socks prodding the nest. The thought that Arthur had believed it made something crumple inside her.
—The effects of being quarantined are serious. It isn’t a normal state for a person. Were you aware that Mr Walker had trouble with it? Or Mr Bourne?
—I don’t know either of them very well.
—But living next door to Mr Walker, you must have been familiar with him.
—Not really.
—Are you friendly with his wife, Jenny? How long have they been here?
—A couple of years.
—And there’ve never been any arguments in the cottages, any fallings out?
—No.
—I should think you and she have been a comfort to each other.
Helen focused on the oilcloth covering the table. Jenny had given it to her for her birthday last year, salmon-hued drawings of rural Devon interspersed with recipes for soup and cockle pie. Jenny was a passionate cook. She cooked fatty terrines and treacle sponges; delicacies for Bill to take off with him to the tower. Jenny prided herself on her cooking, her homeliness, her motherliness, all the things Helen was not.
When Bill was off, she sometimes invited Helen for a home-cooked meal. Helen accepted her invitations uneasily. During the meal she talked to the little ones while Jenny ladled food into bowls, then sloshed out wine, then cleared it away, with dozens of dialogues started and not a single one finished. Helen insisted on doing the washing-up and then there was something about the position of two women at a kitchen sink – one washing, one drying, the radio murmuring – that engendered confidence.
Forgive me, Jenny. I was alone, and lonely.
—There’ll be provisions for her, as a single mother. And for you, Helen. Trident House is clear about that. Whatever it takes, you’ll be looked after.
—It might not come to that. They could still come back.
But it had already come to that. On Saturday morning when Trident’s people had rolled up in a pair of Vauxhall Victors, winding down the narrow track to the compound. Jenny and the children had been expecting Bill home. The officers came to the door, and Helen, watching from her window, had known straight away. The stiff shoulders, the bowed heads, the caps dutifully removed as soon as the door was opened. Jenny had fallen to the step.
Helen knew how it felt to have the life go out of her but she had never seen it in another person, and found she was unable to see it then because Jenny’s pain required that she turn her head at the final moment, like passing a road accident and sensing its need for privacy.
Bill must have had a heart attack, she thought, or gone over the side of the boat and drowned. She accepted it quite readily. Her first, selfish emotion was relief.
When the officers looked towards her own cottage, there was an instant in which everything around her had stilled: the ticking clock, the hum of the fridge, the rumble of the kettle in the kitchen reaching a boil. Later, after she was told, part of her questioned if she had willed it to happen, a change or revelation, and it had.
—Are you all right, Helen? Can we carry on?
—Will you excuse me; I need some fresh air.
Outside the wind was wailing, the brown sea choppy and frothing white crests. Wave clouds raced across the sky. Helen didn’t have a coat, but the slicing cold felt necessary, the wind battering her dress. She could just see the Maiden, a remote vertical housing its emergency contingent. Trident thought that lodging them here where they could see the faintest smidgen of that ugly tower made them feel closer to their husbands, but it only made it worse. The men couldn’t see them. As far as Arthur was concerned, his life ashore ceased to exist, but still she was able to look at him, and every day it bothered her. She would rather not see it at all.
Come back to me, she thought.
The tower faced her, unyielding. All towers were proud, but the Maiden was in particular. It was proud of taking Arthur. It was his secret place, away from her, and it liked that. She thought of the rocks he had collected from the island stations, noting their parallels and discrepancies when she’d wanted to hit him and cry, Look at me, you stupid man, look at me; can’t you see how much I need you?
She couldn’t remember starting to love him, because it seemed she had loved him her whole life, with no clear place where that started or finished. But in the end the Maiden’s solace, the lighthouse herself, had offered him what she could not. After the hardship they had tried to face together but that had left her with nothing to give.
The tears came hotly but froze in her eyes. She told herself she’d known worse than this, but in that silent moment of captive weeping it didn’t feel as if she had.
There was no point explaining it to those people indoors. How were they to see the most basic complaint she had, the hardest, most bitter complaint she harboured against her husband and that she never found the words to talk to him about because his silence would leave her more gagged than ever. That she hadn’t been the only one who looked elsewhere. There had been another woman. A love she couldn’t come close to, or hope to match up against. Who had taken Arthur away from her, whom he thought about when they were together and longed for whenever they touched.
34
JENNY
—I’m out of milk or else I’d make you a cup of tea. Only I can’t go out and get some, can I, because I’m not leaving this house till Bill comes home. I’m not leaving till he walks in through that door and we see it’s all been a big mistake because he’ll come home any minute now, I’m telling you, and I have to be here, waiting for him.
Jenny sat back and tried to stop herself shaking. The interrogation wasn’t as she had imagined from police dramas on television. They weren’t at a police station, for starters. T
hey were in her home, Masters, carrying now the faint smell of sausage rolls. All morning she had watched strangers come into the cottage, the normal lines that separated private from public – her front door, the threshold to her bedroom – briskly overstepped. The investigators were pitying but thought it acceptable to eat at a time like this, and somehow acceptable to bring crinkly paper nests into her house, flecked with pastry and wedges of hot meat.
—We appreciate you talking to us, Jenny.
The baby started crying. In the hall, her sister flitted past to collect him. The front door opened. She startled: it was Bill. No, it wasn’t.
—I don’t mind talking so long as you stop making out like he’s gone. Like he’s dead. He’s not dead. It’s just we’ve got to wait a bit longer, that’s all.
Paper streamers drooped from the living-room ceiling, weary after holding their smile since the twelfth. The angel on top of the tree closed one eye, unwilling to look. They had argued about the angel because he hadn’t wanted an angel, he’d wanted a star, and she had gone at him since all he did was criticize her, whatever she did, however hard she tried, and couldn’t he just let her have what she liked? He knew how much Christmas meant to her. Jenny decorated every year whether Bill was at home or not. On Christmas morning she would picture him on the Maiden with the cards and presents she had packed back in November, ready for him to open. The children shouted carols from the table in the garden, loud as they could so he could hear. If the wind was right, maybe he did.
—Where do you think Bill is, Jenny?
The man’s voice was gentle, as if he was about to do something to her that hurt.
—I think he’s out there right now, safe and warm on a boat.
—The first twenty-four hours after a report of missing persons are critical. We’re now at ninety-six . . .