The Lamplighters

by Emma Stonex

  —Then where is he?

  —Beats me. It’s between them three t’ know and that’s it. But Vinny had people who could’ve helped him do it and cover it up, and make it seem like one thing when it was another.

  The man smiled, as if what she’d said had satisfied him.

  —Take that bloke that was on there with ’em. The mechanic.

  The smile dropped.

  —There wasn’t a mechanic.

  —That fisherman that went out there said there was.

  —Mike Senner’s account is flawed and therefore not a line of inquiry.

  —Says who?

  —Trident House. Every investigator we’ve got working on this.

  —Bloody hell, you lot ’aven’t a clue, ’ave you?

  —It’s the law of reason, Ms Morrell. There isn’t any such thing as an unauthorized landing on the Maiden Rock Lighthouse, especially in adverse weather. The Institution knows everything that happens on their towers.

  —They don’t know what happened on this one, do they?

  —We’re unprepared to waste resources on an unreliable witness.

  —What if he’s right?

  —No mechanic was sent. No boat left the harbour. No boatman did the job. No one saw this individual, in Mortehaven or anywhere else.

  —Don’t ask me for answers, mate. You’re the ones s’posed to have those. I don’t s’pose it matters anyway, seeing as all it does is proves my point. That mechanic or whoever he was, he had t’ be one o’ Vinny’s lot. An’ if my heart were in better shape that sorry bleedin’ tyke of a nephew might get a piece of it. Bloody weird business, ain’t it? Erica said t’ me before I came down here, she said Vinny had one hope in his life and that was t’ make a clean break from all the people that knew him and start over, where there weren’t those same faces lurking round the next corner. Vinny said he’d make his getaway one of these days. And what do you know? The little sod only went and did it.

  IX

  1972

  36

  ARTHUR

  Machines

  Helen,

  I saw him today. You think I never tell you things. Your face, right now, reading this. That’s why I don’t.

  I remind myself, sometimes, of my father. Shocked by bombs and blasts. When I look in the mirror, I see a dead man. Shouts in the night. My head shot to pieces.

  Thirty-eight days on the tower

  The fog’s still on, a cloth stuffed into a mouth. It’s sometime after five when Vince gets up.

  ‘Who’s this?’ says Vince, and Sid says, ‘Don’t ye know, matey? They didn’t send me out here for shits and giggles.’ Vince is weaker than I’ve seen him; I tell him to eat but he says he can’t, he’ll only chuck it back up. I slice bread anyway and we’re out of butter so I use a knob of the crystallized fat we got off a beef joint three weeks ago.

  Bill smokes and smokes. He’s got his drill on the table and a shell he’s given up on. The drill bit is thin and incisive.

  This afternoon I found him searching in the bedroom, rooting through the trousers I borrowed and put back, pulling out the pockets.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He shoved the trousers back in his cubby and pushed past me down the stairs.

  Is that how he’d appear if I discovered them together? Red-faced, red-handed.

  Vince sinks into a chair. ‘What day is it?’

  I don’t know what day it is. Only that it was two moons ago that I saw your boat: the vessel with the torn sail and the waving hand. You’re coming for me. That’s why I called off the help. I didn’t want them interfering, sending someone out here who’d frighten you away.

  Sid blows out a stream of smoke. He eyes Vince coldly, unblinking, reptilian. ‘Ye’ve got a look like a lad I know,’ he says. ‘Not got family up north, ’ave ye?’

  ‘No,’ says Vince, picking at the bread.

  ‘P’haps it’s somewhere else I know ye from.’

  Vince shivers. ‘I can’t see,’ he says. ‘I can’t hardly see your faces.’

  ‘Eat,’ I tell him. ‘Then go back to bed.’

  ‘I need a bucket.’

  ‘I’ll bring one up.’

  ‘To throw up in.’

  ‘I know.’

  Suppertime. The stranger watches me over his plate, his eyes silver-blue, a thin crust of ice on the windscreen in January.

  Sid came the sunrise after I saw your boat. Two things arriving at the same time, unrelated but related – there’s a book about that, The Collision of Entities. I read it in the lantern on a perfect spring day when the dawn refracted through the lenses so radiant that the light turned to purple and green, orange and pink, a psychedelic kaleidoscope. It might take days, years, millennia: a shout from the stars received aeons later on the ground. I haven’t told anyone about you. You’re shy, you have to trust me. Did you trust me? I let you down.

  I want to tell you I’m sorry.

  ‘Who’s chef?’ asks Sid.

  I put my knife and fork together, line up the ends. ‘Me.’

  ‘Ye could do wi’ gettin’ some more air in your batter. Toad’s a bit flat.’

  ‘The toad’s the sausage.’

  ‘No, it ain’t. The toad’s the batter.’

  ‘You make a hole in the batter then put the sausage in.’

  ‘Those sausages look like holes. They’re the holes; that’s why it’s called it.’

  ‘It’s out of a fucking can,’ cuts in Bill. ‘Call it what you want.’

  Bill collects his plate to take up to the lantern, to keep the fog gun firing. His mouth is pinched. Maybe he’s caught what Vince has got. I have the thought we all get it and by morning we’re dead.

  Sid eats more. I hear his tongue on the yellow batter. When Bill’s gone, somebody says, ‘He’s afraid of me.’ Did Sid say that, or did I?

  ‘It’s food poisoning.’ The stranger wipes his fingers on a sheet of kitchen roll. ‘Yer other man. Gone and eaten what he shouldn’t.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The chocs were meant for Bill. Only he didn’t ’ave ’em.’

  He smiles, and an idea slips into place. Silky and quick, like an otter off a riverbank.

  ‘Ye can work it out,’ says Sid. ‘But ye’ve worked it all out already, old-timer, ’aven’t ye? Fine mind like yours. It’ll be a shame when they don’t need keepers like ye no more. What’ll ye do then, eh? Thirty years is a long time for a man with nothing to live for ’cept his pretty wife. Bet ye wonder from time to time what ye’d do without her.’

  To look at him is to stand on the edge. To walk into a room I’m not meant to be in. I can’t un-see what my eyes show me. The gloom is on us, inside us, the cloth stuffed tighter.

  ‘Who are you?’

  The silence is studded by booms from above, the fog gun’s lonely call, like whales moaning to each other through folds of black water. Questions echoed with no answer.

  ‘I’ll be gone in the morning, pal. Don’t worry yerself about it.’ Then he turns to the wall clock and says, ‘Quarter t’ nine. That’s me t’ bed.’

  ‘Quarter to nine,’ I repeat.

  ‘That’s me time to go to sleep and that’s me time to wake up.’ He leans in. Those teeth. ‘Always has been, always will be. Day in, day out, end o’ the day, start o’ the day. That way I don’t even have to think about it.’

  When I get up to the midnight lantern, Bill’s inside with his thumb on the plunger. His head is slumped forward on his chest. He doesn’t hear me coming. I can get right up behind him, close enough to see the pink strip of skin behind his ears that Helen’s fingertips have touched. I want to ask him how he thought he could get away with it.

  Blood fills me; it fills my organs, my heart, my veins, a bag full of blood.

  ‘Bill.’

  He startles; the detonator blasts, involuntarily.

  BURRRRRRRRR.

  ‘Shit. What?’

  ‘You were asleep.’

&nbs
p; ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You’re no fucking good to me if you’re asleep on your watch.’

  I could grab him now. But there’s you.

  ‘What time is it?’

  He stands. Nearly falls over. He’s useless, a mole clambering out of the ground.

  ‘Something wrong? You’re awfully pale, Bill.’

  He won’t look at me straight.

  ‘Just tired.’

  ‘Never mind, eh. You’ll be away soon. You’ll be getting ashore before the rest of us and you’ll be looking forward to that, won’t you, mate. Tell Helen I’ll be with her soon, will you? Tell her that for me.’

  I see him consider saying it then, almost open his mouth to say it: unspeakable words that could so easily be spoken.

  ‘Come on, Arthur,’ he says, and I can’t tell what he’s asking of me.

  ‘Fuck off downstairs.’

  He does as he’s told. I flick out my cigarette.

  Thirty-nine days on the tower

  At two a.m. I check the light, examine her burner, reload the charges, record the visibility and wind direction, which I’m certain is east-southeasterly but I use the compass card to be sure. Straight after I joined the service, I liked getting back to old ways and the skills worth having. We learned proper jobs like how to hang a door or sew a button on, how to bake bread, fix electrics, cook a meal or light a fire. All worth knowing but those men ashore wouldn’t be able to do half of it, the sewing and cooking parts anyway. Then there was the instruction to do with the illumination, how it worked and how to mend it if something went wrong. It all struck me as helpful and useful – there was no vanity to it, nothing self-seeking, nothing materialistic or extraneous. I felt I could make a good fist out of living if I ever had to do it on my own. Helen’s never been one to think she was put here to look after me, it’s against her nature to think a woman’s in the least bit responsible for that, but all the same I’m not sure she likes it – that I don’t need her in any practical way.

  I wish she knew the other ways I needed her.

  Invisible ways. Important ways.

  I could have told her all these years, but I never did. Why didn’t I? If she were here, I’d be able to tell her things I could never tell her ashore. Sorry, and it will all work out, and if only we could go back to the start.

  I worry about the day we won’t need keepers any more. Who am I without the lights, without this world, without my wife? When automation comes, we’ll die out. I’m hearing about it happening already, up and down the country they’re getting ready for it – progress, they say, and Godrevy’s done it that way since the war. Soon, and I don’t like to think about when, there’ll be a machine doing my job. That machine won’t need the tower like I do; it won’t love it like I do. The technology can turn the light on and sound the fog gun, but it can’t look after the lighthouse, and lighthouses need looking after, the materials of them, the souls of them. The tower will be empty, mourning the companionship and brotherliness of decades past, the kitchen cigarettes, the gatherings round the telly, the friendship and confidence that once prospered in them, and man won’t ever have this place to be again.

  Later, much later, sometime after my watch, deep night tipping into gloaming dawn. In the bedroom, I misjudge the distance between the door and the weight tube, knocking it with my hip. Vince is snoring. He’s too long for his bunk so his feet skew off the end, twitching occasionally, like the wing of an Outer Hebridean tern, injured on a beach and trying to take flight. I press my palm to his forehead. The snoring stops, momentarily. Vince opens an eye, a liquid glimmer like a seal’s.

  Through the window, miles away, the sea dries up and the land hulks on.

  There’s a light flickering there, or is it on the water?

  When they built these towers, they made sure our bedrooms faced the coast. A lighthouse keeper retires to his bed feeling his beacon settle on home, and they want your beacon there, they don’t want you getting ideas about the sea beneath you, quieter and deeper than it’s safe to know. When a keeper’s in his bed that’s when his memories grow bigger than he is, and he needs the land, to be sure it’s there, the way a child listens for his father’s footsteps in the middle of the night.

  We’re all tied to the land, ever since we were tongue-rough shapes creeping out of the water and our flippers first slapped against sand and our gills gasped for air.

  The light ashore twitches coyly, then all of a sudden it’s brighter, sparking, wanting, and I know it’s you. I know you’re there and talking to me. I understand what you’re telling me. What I must do.

  I smell your hair and feel the soft shape of the back of your neck, and eventually, eventually, that’s how I fall asleep, with your light behind my eyes.

  37

  BILL

  The Briefcase

  I was seven when I found out I killed her. My brother kicked a football at my head and said, ‘Don’t be a cry baby, Billy-boy; murderers can’t cry.’ When I asked the old man what that meant he looked up from his plate of fried eggs and told me I might as well know, I was grown-up enough now; it was my being born that had slaughtered her.

  The word brought to mind sheep’s eyes rolling, shrieks in a gas chamber, blood spattered on an abattoir wall. I’d had my suspicions before the football. The looks I got from teachers and the parents of my friends, of pity and disgust. The whispers about the incident, what a poor boy I was, how kind she’d been, too kind to have deserved that wasteful end. A waste: nothing good to have come of it. The foot-high photograph that sat on the break-front in the hall at home, like a shrine. It was never explained to me why my mother wasn’t here. I was expected, still, to love her, and to feel sorry, even if I didn’t know why, and to think twice before I let myself laugh or be happy because this came at a cost too high to say out loud. The suggestion that the wrong one had been lost. I hadn’t been worth the trade.

  That was the only picture I had of my mother. It was how she stayed in my mind, over the years, frozen in a gently smiling pose. I had never seen what she looked like angry, or sad, or hysterical at a joke – just that gracious, patient face gazing out at me when I came in from school or having been beaten up by my brothers.

  Nobody else forgave me. Only her.

  The moment I met Helen Black, she reminded me of that image. But this time I could talk to her, touch her skin; I could hold her hand.

  I wanted to tell her about all she had missed, my father and his punishments, how he used to come into my room with his belt in his hands and sit on my bed, and how she might have saved me if she’d been there, glowing in the landing light. About the cousin who lived in Dorset, and the sea I hated but knew was my destiny. About having to make up for the fact of my living by doing what was asked of me, always, without question. And that’s what brought me to the lighthouses, to a life I can’t escape.

  Fifty-five days on the tower

  When I wake in the morning, the bedroom is quiet. Weak light leaches through a crack in the curtain. The room is empty.

  I check above me. The mechanic’s bunk is made like no one slept in it. Vince has gone. I have a panicked feeling, as if a very long time has passed while I’ve been sleeping, and everyone’s died, or left me behind.

  Three days until I’m ashore. She won’t have to lie to him now, or to me, or to herself. Not now Arthur knows the truth.

  Course he knows, ye idiot.

  Arthur found the chain I stole from Admiral, one afternoon when Jenny was in town. If anyone asked, I’d dropped into her cottage to fix a shelf. I hadn’t intended to take anything, just wanted to be able to smell her awhile – her scarves, her perfume, her nightclothes. The necklace was gone from where I kept it, in the pair of trousers I was wearing when she kissed me. The same pair he borrowed without asking.

  That’s a man with nothing to lose.

  Maybe I always meant Arthur to discover it. He’d bring it on himself, then.

  I crouch to my hollow, hunting for smokes. Inside, at the back
, my hand touches a brittle paper bag. For a moment, I’m puzzled. Then the penny drops. They’re the chocolates my wife sent. It seems so long that I’ve been here. I pull them out: they smell floral and deep, but changed from how they did three weeks ago.

  I think about eating one. To be honest with her, for the last time: Yes, I tried them. They were very nice, thank you.

  Instead I go down to the kitchen and put them in the bin.

  Arthur is at the Formica with a book.

  ‘Fog’s cleared,’ I say, standing at the sink, careful to keep my back to him. ‘Where’s Vince?’

  ‘Upstairs.’

  The drinking water tastes of salt and seaweed. ‘Sid?’

  Arthur says he left already; he must have got on an early boat.

  I turn off the tap. It carries on dripping. ‘Who was on the winch?’ I ask.

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘Vince, then.’

  ‘No.’

  This is all the PK is going to say. The Arthur of old would have pushed it: about Sid’s arrival in solid mist, about how he behaved and the things he said. Instead no words come, and this blackout forms the last understanding he and I will ever have.

  Vince has got the weather log open in front of him. I think he’s going to ask me about Sid, and I haven’t decided yet what I’ll say, how far I’ll go, but I don’t need to worry because his attention is elsewhere.

  ‘You should look at this, Bill.’

  The lantern lenses blink. I step closer.

  ‘Come here,’ he says. ‘See.’

  I peer over his shoulder to the pages on the desk.

  ‘I thought this has got to be last year’s,’ says Vince, unsteadily. ‘That’s what I thought when I saw it. This can’t be right. There’s some mistake’s been made. It’s an old log; the PK must’ve got mixed up. But this is now, Bill. It’s this month.’