The Lamplighters

by Emma Stonex

  He shows me a jumble of letters and numbers, scrawled in the PK’s black pen, loops and forms that dwindle to spider scratches, so hard in places he’s torn the page: Broken and tumbling. Chaotic. Spindrift. Violent storm turning to hurricane . . .

  ‘Force ten, eleven, twelve,’ says Vince. ‘We’ve never had a fucking twelve. This isn’t real. None of it happened.’

  It’s then I see the bag. It’s sitting on the first step of the short flight leading up to the illumination: small, square, not something you’d notice right away, and Vince hasn’t yet. It’s not a kitbag like you’d expect a mechanic to have, but a briefcase. Sleek, compact; shiny as a cat when it comes in out of the rain.

  ‘Bill,’ says Vince. ‘What do we do?’

  The bag’s the same colour as Sid. That indescribable colour.

  This is our understanding. Arthur knows it and so do I.

  That the mechanic isn’t a mechanic, after all. That no ordinary person flees a tower on his own, leaving no trace of himself. Just as a silver man who steps out of a hedge in front of a Sunbeam-Talbot in 1951, one of him after another.

  ‘What the fuck, man?’ Vince closes the log. ‘Don’t you care about this?’

  I think about my brother’s fag stash in the cabinet at home. Smoking in the porch, in the shadows, waiting for them to come back, the muggy-metal smell of the rain.

  Run.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asks, turning to see what I’m looking at.

  I go to the briefcase, kneel down, click the latches and am surprised when they open.

  ‘Bill—’ His tone is urgent. ‘What’s in it? Let me see.’

  I look. I can’t.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say, snapping it shut. ‘It’s empty.’

  Sometimes at home Jenny catches a spider under a glass. Because she doesn’t like spiders, she does it quickly, as if she can’t think about it or see it, just covers it, catches it, takes it away. I pick up the briefcase like this, without thinking about it, and take it out to the gallery and lob it up and over the rail and far out to sea.

  38

  VINCE

  Tender

  My first day on the training, I heard he was the best. Arthur Black, they said, now he’s the fellow you want. Normally PKs weren’t talked about. Notoriety wasn’t a good thing. Take the PK in charge at Skerries, who spent his time there stark naked, presumably cos he could, cos his wife didn’t allow him to at home. The man would perform every job with nothing on, from changing the mantle to washing the floors, and only when he was chef did he make himself wear a pinny. Everybody dreaded his cooking and any occasion you had to follow him up the stairs. But to know someone’s name for the right reasons, that was rare. The day I started with Arthur Black, with his quiet pride and good heart and sensible head, I knew I’d never find a better one.

  Going back days and days when all we’ve had is fog – but that’s not what he wrote.

  Arthur isn’t who he used to be. Not the same person.

  Something’s happened. I don’t know what.

  My PK’s gone strange. Stranger. What I read in that record doesn’t make sense. I’ve turned it all the ways I can think of, but it always ends up the same.

  Arthur’s old. He got it wrong.

  It isn’t anything worse than that and I won’t let my head suspect otherwise.

  Twenty days on the tower

  The sea’s a watercolour painting, shot through with lemon-coloured light. On my watch but it’s not the ocean I’m watching, it’s the shore. Patrol the distant landline through my binoculars, eye out for Eddie’s man cos I bet he’ll come back, he will, whatever his real name is. He’ll be reporting to the boss by now; they’ll be working out the best way to do it, sketching it like any professional would. The boat setting out from the quayside, a dot swelling to a thumbprint, coming in fast, today, tomorrow . . .

  Knock-knock.

  I know who.

  Try to take my mind off it in the making and mending. My shirts stink and my socks need a stitch but I quite like the fixing, don’t mind it too much: the activity takes me into a calm sort of place where I’m thinking about what I’m doing, and now I’ve stopped feeling rough, now I feel human again, there’s a real clean pleasure in being here to do it.

  I check the binoculars.

  When I met Michelle I thought, that’s what’ll happen. Erica’ll tell her what I did and that’ll be the end of it. Erica’ll let me get close then she’ll snatch it away, cos that was the way of it growing up, every family they’d expect me to feel something for but after six or eight you just can’t do it no more. Then you get told you’re cold and strange and no one wants you; there’s something the matter with you.

  But Erica didn’t tell. And now I can believe in our lives in the cottages for the first time, Michelle and me, a future for us. Sometimes I think she’s like the lighthouses and that’s why I got drawn to her in the first place, or why I got drawn to them: out in the dark, swilling about, then all of a sudden there’s a fire burning brighter than any you’ve seen, and you’ve no choice but to go towards it and hope it takes you in.

  I won’t let that light go out. Not for Eddie. Not for anyone.

  Down in the kitchen, I snake my arm into the cranny under the sink. It’s just about brick-sized; if you’ve a narrow wrist like mine, you can curve your arm round the wall inside. For a second I panic, thinking Eddie’s man found it – but no, it’s there.

  I draw out the pistol and check it’s loaded.

  And when I think on what was in that weather log, in case I’m wrong and Bill’s right, I know there’s only one thing for it. Myself. Just me. I’ll look after my interests.

  Things turn rotten after a while on a tower. That’s what they said to me at the depot, watch out for the towers, they can turn you loopy, and I’m sorry for the PK and Bill if Sid comes back, if he brings Eddie with him. I’m sorry for that, I am.

  Late in the afternoon, the Trident tender comes to fill up the water storage tanks. Some of the rock stations have ways of filtering rain, and we get enough of that out here to keep us going for months, but being so remote and with little space we have to get the fresh pumped in. The boat’s called Spirit of Ynys, whatever that means; Arthur said it’s to do with a Welsh wizard, but who knows, boats get called all sorts.

  ‘Mike, that you?’ calls Bill from the set-off.

  ‘Hullo, Bill. Anything you want to get ashore?’

  ‘Not apart from me.’

  ‘You’ll not be long off now, mate,’ says the fisherman. ‘How many days?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Best keep your fingers crossed. Forecast says we’re in for a storm. Meant to be a big one.’

  ‘We had Sid out fixing the generator,’ says Bill, suddenly. ‘D’you know him?’

  ‘Who’s Sid?’

  ‘Big bloke. Stayed a couple of nights.’

  Mike Senner shakes his head. ‘Ashore they said your PK called it off.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Whenever it was your generator was broke.’ Mike puts his hand across his forehead, squinting up at the set-off. ‘I’ll tell ’em to look into it.’

  ‘They definitely didn’t send anyone?’

  I say, ‘Leave it, Bill.’

  ‘No one’s taken a boat out here in ages,’ puts in Mike. ‘You couldn’t, what with the weather. If there’d been a man cracked enough to try, we’d know about it.’

  ‘No one’s seen him ashore?’

  ‘’Fraid not.’

  Bill’s shook. But I know. Eddie’s got men practised in the art of not being seen.

  ‘I’ll put it to them,’ says Mike, ‘if that makes you feel better. But I don’t think they’ll believe it, Bill. That you had someone on here without them knowing. They’ll say, “No soul could do that, Mike, you old dog; you know no living soul could do that.”’

  X

  1992

  39

  16 Myrtle Rise

  West Hill

  Bath


  Rabbit’s Foot Press

  Tandem Publishers

  110 Bridge Street

  London

  26 August 1992

  Dear Sirs,

  I am currently assisting your author Dan Sharp in his study of the Maiden Rock Vanishing. I understand the novels he has published with you are written under a pseudonym and would be grateful if you could please tell me his real name.

  I look forward to hearing from you.

  Yours faithfully,

  Helen Black

  40

  HELEN

  She got there early and could have gone in and waited for him. Instead, she stayed outside, despite the rain, and watched the entrance to the cafe from the other side of the road. After a while, he appeared – he was early too, but just by a minute – with his hair wet, beads clinging to his pea coat. His walk, the shape of his head, was so familiar; why hadn’t she noticed it before? She couldn’t believe she had missed it. Michelle had been right. When Dan Sharp embarked on the project, he’d told the papers it was nostalgia for the event plus an affection for the sea that had spurred him. Helen didn’t doubt this, but he hadn’t been honest about the rest.

  She decided, after he’d gone inside, that she would leave him to get dry and organize his notes. She was ready, now, for the last confession. Now she knew who he was.

  She had told him everything except this, the most important thing – and even then, she hadn’t lied about it, she just hadn’t revealed the full picture.

  Before, she had felt a disconnect. How could he understand? He of pirate kidnaps and ocean jeopardy. But she recognized him now, as someone like her.

  In the end, she couldn’t bear the idea that he would hear it from somebody else: that he would put it in his book using another person’s words when she had spent decades finding words that were in some way acceptable to her. It was relevant to the story. It was relevant to Arthur and who he was, and what he might have done.

  She put up the hood of her coat and crossed the road.

  41

  HELEN

  It’s nice to sit down. The bus dropped me miles off – my fault, you’d think I’d be able to tell them apart by now, but I can never remember which ones come all the way in and which ones don’t. Yes, all right. A pot of tea, please.

  I’ll begin at the beginning; it’s as good a place as any. Only memory doesn’t work like that, does it? It’s lots of little bursts of moments all popping up in a funny order. You can recall the oddest things, such as the couple we rented the summerhouse off. It always stuck with me that the man who owned it refused to work on Mondays. He never had and he never would, he told me; he’d let them know at job interviews – that he didn’t like to work on Mondays – because he didn’t want to have that Sunday-night feeling, you know, when you’re getting ready to go back to work and things seem, how should I put it? Off-kilter. I think the bigger the trauma that happens to you, the more your mind grasps on to frivolous things. It makes it more manageable. In a way, I owe a lot to that man who didn’t work on Mondays.

  Our son’s name was Tommy. So, of course, the summerhouse wasn’t where it began. It began six years before, when I found out I was pregnant. It was a shock, at first. I don’t mind admitting the idea of it took some getting used to. It wasn’t that I didn’t want a child. It was just that I didn’t see having a child as the be all and end all of everything: I was quite comfortable with myself without having to be a mother.

  Before Tommy died, I didn’t mind thinking that his conception had been an accident, but now I can’t say it. It makes me feel as if I made his death happen by imagining he wasn’t meant to be. He was always meant to be, and that’s why the surprise I got when I discovered I was carrying him seems a miracle to me now. We hadn’t planned him, but he was never an accident.

  Arthur and I didn’t know how we’d manage, or what kind of parents we’d be, but nobody knows those things. All you can do is go into it and do your best.

  Tommy was a lovely baby. I was no expert in what was normal for babies in those days, but compared with what Jenny went on to deal with next door he was a delight. He slept for me and he ate well, he was crawling at seven months and walking at fifteen, and, goodness, it’s sad what you forget. You think you’ll memorize every tiny thing because every tiny bit about it consumes you – what they eat, the noises they make, the balled-up fists and flapping arms, the wispy hair at the back of the neck and the soft, rounded shoulders at bath-time . . . But you don’t. You can’t. Every week your child gets replaced by a new one, a bigger, more advanced one, and I don’t think it’s possible to retain all the personalities faithfully. It’s like knowing ten different people in the space of two years. But we had something, Tommy and I: we liked each other. We were friends. Right from when he was a newborn, he had a smile that was just for me.

  You look sad. You don’t have children? Well, that’ll make it easier. It’s easier for me to talk to you about it, too. With parents you feel contagious, as if they’re looking at you and worrying that this specific, unthinkable misfortune is going to infect them as well. Or you get the sense they’re hearing your story but not really listening to it, because they’re too busy thinking, thank God it wasn’t us.

  When people ask me if I have children, it’s up to me what I say. Sometimes I say no, which is technically the truth: no, I do not have a child. Other times I say yes, I had a son, but he died. And do you know what I wish they’d ask me? His name. I wish they’d ask me his name. But they shake their heads and say, I’m sorry, that must be awful, and I nod and say, yes, yes, it was, it is.

  Hardly anyone asks me his name. In death, he’s anonymous. He can’t have been a real child. He can’t have been Tommy, because that means it could happen to any of us and none of us is immune.

  I do consider myself a mother, yes: a mother who loses her baby as soon as it’s born, or before it’s born, is still a mother. The mothers like me, the ones who’ve lost a child, always ask me his name. That’s how you can tell. For a long time after Tommy died, I hid from people – no one could understand the frame of mind I was in – but then I joined a bereavement group and it did bring me comfort. Grief can be incredibly lonely. Before you know it, you’ve gone inside yourself and it’s not so much as you can’t get back, it’s that you don’t want to.

  Those mothers brought me back. I wish I could say it was Arthur who did that, but it wasn’t. Those of us in the group used to call the children ‘the gang’, and we’d celebrate their birthdays, not in a morbid way, just to acknowledge it. That was all I wanted: acknowledgement. Arthur never talked about Tommy. After the funeral, I don’t think his name ever passed my husband’s lips. He didn’t want to see photographs or share memories. Whereas I needed those things to keep Tommy with me. I couldn’t pretend he’d never happened.

  I did pretend with you, yes. Aren’t you going to ask why? Maybe there are things you’ve pretended about with me, because that’s what people do. It’s easier than being what we are, all the things we can’t escape. You’ll know that it’s very forceful, sorrow. I cried and cried and thought I would never stop. For weeks I lay in the dark in bed, shivering and thinking I could hear his voice, a little whisper: ‘Mummy.’ That went on for months. Grief got me behind the legs. It still does, but now I sense it coming so I stay on my feet. Early on it caught me, a kick to the knees. I’d smell Tommy’s clothes and it didn’t seem real he’d gone. How could his smell still be there when he wasn’t? All his things waiting for him, but he was never coming back. You can understand why I kept it to myself.

  Arthur returned to the Maiden straight after Tommy died. I thought we were going to leave the service and put each other first, but we didn’t. When he was off on the light, I’d be alone in the cottage, cutting crusts off toast by mistake and buying milk for bedtime that no one was going to drink. The bottles stayed in the fridge for days until I peeled their tops away and the stench of cheese came out, so I poured them down the sink.

 
Arthur and I grew further apart. I had never got on with the tower, but I despised her then. Whenever I saw her, I’d think what a monster she was, rearing up out of the sea. I was craving his comfort, but instead he gave it to her, or she to him, and that sounds doolally but that’s how it felt. I knew Tommy’s death had prompted it, but possibly he’d had it in him all along – this distance. Arthur told me that no man in his right mind would want to be a lighthouse keeper. I remembered that a lot in those days.

  I knew he’d loved Tommy, so much. That was why he hadn’t dealt with it. Well, faced it, perhaps that’s better. Looked it in the eye, as you must do with these things, or they’ll chase you around the house for the rest of your life and kick you behind the knees.

  Many times, I wished I never had to see my husband again. So, when they disappeared, I feared I had made it happen, by wishing it. Then I wouldn’t have to be part of the lighthouse service any longer. I could move away from the sea. I wouldn’t have to sit in our kitchen, in Admiral, listening to Arthur sorting his rocks or his pencil scratching the crossword puzzle and not understanding why he couldn’t just put his arms around me and tell me he thought about our son as much as I did.

  Now I understand that Tommy wanted his father back. He needed Arthur more than I did, and that’s right, that’s how it should be. It was the sea that took Arthur, because that’s the place we lost our boy. Sometimes I consider the sea to be like a great big tongue, licking up the people around me, and if I get too close to it, it’ll lick me up too and swallow me down to the bottom. That’s why I live here.

  Tommy had just turned five. The summerhouse was a lovely place; it didn’t deserve it. The people who let us stay, the man who didn’t work on Mondays, didn’t deserve it. Things happen in life and they hit you out of the blue, on an unremarkable Thursday when you’re getting out of the bath. There isn’t any warning. Those things you spend time worrying about never happen. At least not in the way you think.