by Emma Stonex
There was more than what the families were told. Work Trident did afterwards, under the radar – fingerprinting, psychological evaluations, and the crucial discovery of the weather log. Those things threw up a different perpetrator. One keeper had touched all those items last. That same keeper completed the logbook erroneously and was appraised by experts as harbouring a personality disorder in line with post-traumatic stress and depression. They believe he killed the others in a fit of temper.
Trident have never wanted to reveal this because they valued Arthur Black. He was well regarded, a badge of honour for the Institution in showing how they looked after people for life. Principal Keepers are golden to Trident: the Fellows won’t appoint a man to PK unless they hold him in the highest regard. To admit he was to blame is a shameful reflection on what’s thought of today as a romantic way of life.
Investigators had two theories about why Arthur did it. One was concerned with the SAK: that Vincent Bourne had hidden money on the tower; Arthur discovered it, planned to steal it, rid himself of the other two, then make his escape. Does that sound far-fetched? Perhaps, but no more than the myriad other guesses hazarded down the years. The second was that Bill Walker had been engaged in a love affair with Arthur’s wife, Helen. You don’t need to look far for a motivation in that.
I’ve never been convinced of either of these, though. I think the lighthouse life simply got the better of Arthur. I couldn’t do that job. Could you?
I hope the above proves helpful to your research, and I trust you to preserve my anonymity in this matter.
Sincerely,
[Signature]
47
THE SIGNAL
I met a man beside the sea,
He was looking out and he said to me,
Can you see it; can you see it true?
And I saw it – a black fire burning blue.
My heart is lost, he said to me,
It’s lost out there upon the sea,
Will you find it; will you bring it back?
I cannot go for what I lack.
The more I swam, the keener the light,
The more it called, a fire upright,
But when I turned and saw the shore
The man I’d met was there no more.
I found his heart and in it slipped,
The brine was rising; the tidal tip,
It tipped and fell and drew me on
To where the keeper’s soul had gone.
There you are, the blazing flame,
It was you all along – I know your name,
The light, the light, it burns for us;
His ghost, and mine, dissolved in dust.
XI
1972
The Keepers of the Deep-Sea Light
48
He went to visit the birds on Friday, every Friday, before the sun came up. He climbed the hill, it was difficult in the dark, and unlatched the gate. The sound of the gate as it unlatched – click – was like a match being struck, and that’s how the sun knew when to come up. The sun would say, Arthur’s here, he’s lit the candle: it’s time.
It was a hostile path if you didn’t know it well. Divots and grooves lay in wait; tufts of overgrown grass, bleached and dried during the long hot summer, scratched his bare legs. He’d sooner have worn trousers, but it was time and motion, his father said; he had to be dressed for school.
When he got there, Mrs McDermott would make an example of him: ‘The state of you, Arthur Black; you look as though you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards.’ Sometimes in the rush down to the primary his laces unravelled, he tripped and scuffed his knee, or a tree branch snagged his blazer. There’d be a splash of bird shit on his shoe. The children called him Bird Boy. He didn’t mind. Being high above the sea, the gulls cooing and warbling in the soft shadows of the rafters, was all he desired, the kind of contentment that sat in his hand like a paperweight.
At lunch, when the other boys were flicking custard at each other and slipping baked beans up their noses, Arthur thought of the birds. On the sports field when Rodney Carver thrust into him with a rugby ball and hissed, ‘Go on then, you scrawny-arsed girl,’ he’d have visions of their wings diving down from the hillside, a cloud descending on Rodney and the despotic PE teacher, whose pale, freckled, hairless legs visited Arthur in dreams like the left-behind pork rind of his mother’s Sunday roast.
With the birds he wasn’t lonely. Sometimes he sketched them, watching their bodies shuffle awkwardly over each other, feathers shivering, pellets of crap splashing on wood. The smell was of deep, unused cupboards and the faint tang of meat paste.
When his father had first shown him the coop – ‘Come on, Tuppence, do you want to see something clever?’ – Arthur had staggered with him up the hill. ‘They get better,’ he’d said, ‘then they fly away.’ Nobody knew why the birds fell from the sky. Arthur found them outside the front door or among the yew berries in the garden, their wings slapping the ground. His father woke him in the night: ‘Look, lad, quiet now, gently now, see . . .’ The twilight mystery of his father’s cupped palms and the quivering body inside; its heart thrumming, exquisitely vulnerable and soft.
Loneliness hardened in Arthur’s stomach. At home each room was silence except for the ticking of a mantel clock. His mother drifted about half asleep while her husband tinkered with watches in a back room, slowly growing myopic. He couldn’t recall what his father had been like before the war – lighter in the shoulders, softer in his smile; now his old claws scratched, leaving blood on the bed sheets. The house woke at four in the morning to a sharp cry, like a chair being scraped from a table.
Frequently he could feel his loneliness: he could locate it with his fingers and if he pushed too hard, it hurt. If he ate quickly, it hurt. He drank a lot of water, to flush it out, but it never came. He kept expecting to see it after he’d visited the lavatory. Small and blue. Afraid. He did not know what he would do with it. He did not know what he would do without it.
The sun arrived as a smelted line, fierce orange, throwing kindling across the sea. Arthur detected the lighthouse from here, a yellow eye peeling soundlessly open.
At school he learned about the tower. He found it incredible that men lived on there, a family of three, and this seemed to him the answer for he’d never be lonely again, then, with two others who couldn’t get off. While the boys in class put up their hands to answer questions about shipwrecks and the engineer Stevensons, melancholy sanded a nook in his heart. The lighthouse reached for him in a way that was indescribable, yearning, as if it was sad and it needed him.
He learned about sailors drowning on tooth-sharp rocks, swaying masts by the hunter’s moon, the metallic chime of a death bell, vomit spraying, shit stinking, merchants’ bellows as their stocks sank and those on land waited for riches to drift into shore. He read Treasure Island and thought it marvellous that a storyteller and a lighthouse builder could be part of the same family. He learned about the men who erected the sea towers, how a lot of them died, how they worked on half-sunk slabs miles from land, blown sideways by cross-winds, their hands salt-splintered, fixing blocks to watch them wash away, or, once finished, to witness years of toil topple on a high sea. Nobody ever admired their work because nobody ever went there.
On his eleventh birthday, he saw the white bird. It was larger than the rest. It flew in off the sea, as pure as snow, and looked at him with a pinkish eye.
Later, he asked his father, who said, a dove? Arthur said, no, not a dove. What then? I don’t know. His father went to look. When he came back, he told Arthur that there was no white bird, what a bloody imagination, you don’t get birds like that out here. But I saw it. Course you did. Now go get me my matches, there’s a good lad.
49
I explained to you about light and how it works. How it isn’t just a question of light and dark, there are spaces in between, and those spaces, the shape and size of them, matter more. Your mother wasn’t listening. She stood at the sink, her h
ands in the washing-up, limp on the surface in their rubber gloves like daffodils with the heads hanging off.
Night drew in and we went outside. I kept you warm in my coat; the crown of your head, your hair freshly washed, gleamed in the moonlight. I put the palm of my hand across it to see how neatly those two shapes fitted. Parts of the body slot together when two bodies belong; a chin for a hand, the crook of an elbow a home for a head.
We went to the shore where we could hear the waves and jostling shingle. I passed you the torch. My coat was big on you, the sleeves covering your fingers. We rolled up one of the sleeves and the wrist that protruded was like a bone discovered in soil, shocking white. The torchlight cut a path through the sea, bright close to shore then conceding defeat as it chased the night further than was safe to go.
The character of the Maiden is fixed. Its beam is constant. I showed you how to keep the torch still and steady, shining it back, as the Maiden did for those ships at sea.
‘The keepers will be able to see your light,’ I said. ‘Just as you can see theirs.’ You said it was funny to think that your light could be seen miles away, but that was the thing about light, I said, you don’t need a lot of it. The other way round, a sliver of dark in a sunny garden, you’d never spot it, the light’s stronger and quicker and the eye goes looking for it. If you think of the world like that, it doesn’t seem as bad a place.
We switched the light off and with it the sea.
On again and the sea returned.
The moon was waning gibbous, a mint half sucked. The night seemed gentle to me then, with you by my side. First, we made the light periods short and the dark periods long, on for three seconds, off for nine, that was called a flashing. Then if you reversed it and made the light last longer than the dark, that was called occulting.
You enjoyed those words and repeated them. I told you some people say ‘occulting’ with the emphasis on the ‘occ’ and others say it with the emphasis on the ‘ult’. If I were out on the tower now, I said, I’d be able to see your light, sending out a signal from here on land, fixed then flashing, then occulting, then fixed.
I’d know it was you from every single thing about it, I’d just know it was your light, I would. You made being ashore good. There wasn’t much else about it, but you.
Arthur woke with a start, the black night close. Thick wafts of dream floated dumbly to the surface. Only it wasn’t night, it was morning. Eight thirty. It was the curtain that made it dark. He drew it and saw Bill in the bunk opposite. Christmas Eve.
He held his hands in front of him, palms turned upwards, as if in offering for his life, something loaf-sized, a newborn baby. Memories or inventions, he could no longer tell them apart. When he shut his eyes, visions of Tommy remained. Hazel eyes. An outstretched hand. Where did his boy go in these halfway hours?
Frequently, when alone, he heard it. A tap of footsteps. A rustle in a dark corner. A scrape down deep in the store when the others were asleep, but when Arthur reached it, he could only stand there confused, like an elderly man at a bus shelter.
Vince was at the window, looking back to shore.
‘What are you waiting for?’
‘Nothing.’
Arthur judged how the young man’s size and strength compared with his own, the long legs, the wide back, but there must be a weak point, if nothing more than the element of surprise. He put the television on; there was a piece on the one o’clock news about Ghaffar Khan. When Arthur moved, when he talked, it was as though in the strangle of a deep sleep. He felt inexpressibly heavy and withdrawn.
‘What’d you be doing at home?’ asked Vince.
‘Wrapping presents. Carols from King’s. It isn’t what it used to be.’
‘No. Course not. Sorry. I was forgetting.’
‘I don’t expect you to remember.’
‘But I should.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t. Anything else on?’
‘Some Davy Crockett pile o’ shite. Tea?’
‘I’m going fishing.’
‘Fishing?’ said Vince. ‘It’s freezing.’
‘Christmas tradition,’ Arthur said. Not that it was or would ever be.
The point was not to catch anything, the point was to sit and look. Ripples lapped beneath the dog steps. A chill darted into his coat. Shapes curled out of the mist, distorted and divided. He could feel the thing looking back at him now, intently, invisibly. It could come at him from anywhere, across the water or down from the sky. He didn’t know when that would be.
The sea smouldered, grey wisps playing over the surface. Looking up, he saw the tower was decapitated at the kitchen, with the fog gun sounding in the cloud.
Arthur heard a patter behind him, of lightly running footsteps, as in a game of hide and seek. Patpatpatpatpat.
He turned. Nobody there.
He was imagining too much these days.
The footsteps came again. Patpatpatpatpat.
A tinkle of laughter: a child.
Arthur put down his line and followed the curve of the set-off, right the way round until he was back where he started. The laughter skipped in and out of the mist, muted one second then ringing the next. A giggle.
Wait, he said, light-headed. Round and round. The fishing line dissolved and so did the door, nothing to mark where the circle was complete, and it occurred to Arthur that a circle had no start or finish, of course it didn’t, it just went on forever. One hand on the tower, the other in front, thinking at any moment he’d touch it.
What? A shirt collar. An elbow. Skin.
Wait, he said. Wait.
He stopped and listened, so the footsteps could catch up with him. Unsure which of them was running to find and which to escape. He advanced, the steps seeming by now too fast altogether, too fast to be contained on the warp of the set-off, too fast not to have come up on him already and rushed straight past. He tripped and fell and caught hold of an eyebolt, legs thrown and dangling over the sea. The gun blasted, high above. No one would hear him.
He felt for the safety line and dragged himself up.
Laughter pealed, tantalizingly near.
Hey!
A dry cough. A cat with a hairball.
Hey!
Arthur blinked.
He hauled himself to sitting and held the fishing rod. Immediately there was a tug: a youngster pulling a lock of hair. It tugged again, jerking him forward.
The line was taut. He drove his weight against it; it was heavy and grew heavier with every wrench, the line stretched to snapping but now he was bringing it up, and for a second it felt as though he was winning because there it was, a shape floating to the surface of an uncertain, mist-bathed sea, just as his dream had that morning, a shape horribly familiar to him and yet unknown. It was a shark, after all – but the dreadfulness of it was distorted by the mist and of course it was not a shark, and he wished to drop his line but a grim compulsion made this impossible, rooting him to the spot only to sit and see, as he had come out here to do, his eyes flinching from the sight but retained by the force of malign curiosity.
I’ve caught not a fish but my boy.
I’ve hooked him in his cheek.
The line broke. The boy took it with him, down, and disappeared in the murk; the surface parted and came together and all that was left was the mirror madness of the father’s desperation, looking down, his face twisted and strange.
50
The Spirit of Ynys had brought a turkey crown from the mainland and a bottle of red wine, which did along with tinned vegetables and a jug of Bisto gravy. No Christmas pudding, instead a can of spotted dick. Bill was cook. He chain-smoked over the pans.
Arthur pushed his food away. The more he watched Bill through the curling smoke, the louder it got: the sound of fingernails on plaster. Sometimes the scratching sounded very close to him, as if it could be on him or inside him.
‘Can you hear that?’
‘Hear what?’ said Vince.
Afterwards, in the living
room, Vince found an Old Grey Whistle Test. Four men in a band called Focus, one on a keyboard singing in a high-pitched voice. At the end they sang ‘Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year’.
They watched the Queen’s Speech. Twenty-five years married to Philip; Britain about to join the Economic Community; the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Patience and tolerance were more vital now than ever, she said, in families as well as nations.
Arthur judged his nation of three. Private thoughts infected him. He wondered that it was possible to be so full of something that was not apparent to other people.
The others claimed the forecast was wrong. There was no storm on the way: Bill was going to be fine for his relief. Arthur’s head hurt. It had hurt for a week. It was hard to remember things he had done and things he had said. Not being able to worried him.
The mist had lifted. Through his binoculars, he saw land in the distance, boats, smudges of houses. He thought his wife could be staring back; they’d be signalling to each other without ever knowing.
He hoped Helen was happy; he hoped she found happiness.
It hadn’t been fair to marry her. He shouldn’t have married anyone.
He went down to the kitchen because if he was away, it might come. It might come when his back was turned, as it had in the fog, when he wasn’t paying attention, just as he hadn’t been paying attention on the day he had lost his boy.
Arthur filled a cup with water then ascended to the bedroom, where Bill and Vince were sleeping. He stood for a minute, maybe longer, in the doorway. He held the water like someone who had been asked to bring it, but who hovered, uncertain, until invited to come forward.
The pain in his head was sharp. Piano keys played in the wrong order.