by Emma Stonex
His muscles seized. His ears rang. The tower was gone; how could it be that he’d just been standing there, and now it was beyond reach?
All he could think of was Michelle. Her mouth, her arms, how it felt to go into them and rest his face in the soft, sweet hollow of her neck.
He lost the strength in his legs and the sea was pushing him further out.
Bill was shouting. Vince shouted back but he didn’t know what he was shouting, if they were words he was using or a different noise he had never made before.
57
Bill drank his tea, sitting in the PK’s chair. It wasn’t that he had disliked Vince. Liking had nothing to do with it. It had simply been too good a chance to pass up, so he hadn’t. Vince’s death was an exit sign. A way out. A parachute in a nosedive.
What he’d told Arthur was true. He had tried. When he had seen Vince in the waves, he’d thrown a rope across the water. It had been a weak throw, admittedly – too far for the Supernumerary to be able to catch it. Then it had dawned on him that he didn’t have to throw very well. Not if he didn’t want to.
Vince had fought awhile and it was then that Bill had decided, as coolly and evenly as he decided to get rid of one of his shells. When he knew it was one he could do without. He dropped the rope into the sea and stood, impassive, watching his comrade drown.
Tomorrow the men who came would say, yes, we see it now, oh hell, what an unfortunate business. But Trident House would choose to keep it quiet. They would award Bill a prize for his bravery, promoting him quickly to another light.
Months on, he would leave the service and take Helen with him. He would marry her. They would move away from the sea.
Possibly he would tell her the truth, one day. Possibly he wouldn’t. It depended how upset she was; how pleased she was that he was the one who had lived.
58
A noise from downstairs made him startle.
Bill doubted whether he had heard it, but then it came again:
Patpatpatpatpat.
Far below, way below.
He took a hardback from the living-room bookcase – Prehistoric Man by J. Augusta and another faded name. The PK would be addled; that ought to do it.
You’re a stupid boy, he heard his father say. Check, don’t assume. I knew you’d cock this up.
Bill went down to the bedroom, his back to the wall, round and down, but when he reached the kitchen Arthur was lying exactly where he’d left him.
Hey!
He turned. ‘Who’s there?’
His voice echoed down the spiral.
‘Who’s there?’
Patpatpatpatpat.
He descended, the book held high, telling himself it was the wind. When he reached the entrance level, he felt reassured. The door was closed as it had been.
The only person on this tower was him.
Still, he checked the gunmetal and shook the bolts across as far as they would go, before securing the locking bar. He resolved not to open it again until there was somebody living on the other side.
Evening arrived though it was close after four. The day swam beyond the horizon.
In spite of what happened, the light was put in as it always was.
Bill was the last man alive. Sometimes, on middle watch, he would pretend this was true. That everyone on the planet had perished. He would turn the transmitter off so he could no longer hear the ships talking to each other and he’d sit with his back to the shore lights.
The Maiden glowed steadily, a head torch in a mysterious cave. Bill had been caving once, at school, and recalled the tight passages and claustrophobia. They had been roped to each other’s waists, slithering through oily warrens like babies about to be born. The caves had seemed organic, like intestines. All it took was for one of them to lose his head. He’d banged his shoulder, fear surging, thinking he could neither breathe nor move, before a shove from behind splurged him into an echoless chamber and the worst was in knowing the only way out was back the way they’d come.
Rigor set in and Arthur’s corpse stiffened; hauling it up four floors nearly finished him.
Next to Bill in the lantern, the Principal Keeper’s body was a shadow bulk, mountains at dusk in winter. It was fitting to keep a companion for these last hours, before doing what had to be done. By the time morning came, Bill would be shaken but coherent. He had never been creative – an unimaginative boy – but this wouldn’t take much elaboration.
First, he would show them the clocks. The meal for the dead son. Then he would show them the log. Years, Arthur had been living and dying out here on this rock, slowly losing his mind. It was bound to get to a bloke, after all. Couldn’t put up with it, sick and tired of it, sick to death of it, the lights, the bloody lights.
Ashore, they would marvel at how Bill had survived.
What a tale it would be, and Bill Walker its hero; it would be passed down through generations like the tale of the keepers at Smalls.
Through the night he polished every surface, as if preparing the tower for burial. He scrubbed and scoured each step between the kitchen and the lantern, every inch that Arthur’s body had touched. No mark or blemish escaped the scrutiny that only lighthouse-keeping had taught him. Bill left no trace.
Downstairs, he worked swiftly; he did not like to linger long in that underbelly, soft with shadows and the mystical shapes of dinghy and rope. He did not like to think of the noises he had heard or the laughter, the whispers that circled, imagined, just imagined, a product of the task and the aloneness. He could not open that door.
From Arthur’s cabinet, he collected the rocks. Many times, he had seen the PK lean over them. It seemed fitting that their weight should now carry him down.
Bill took a dozen and left the rest. Nestled among the ones he’d chosen was Helen’s silver anchor. There it was, then. Arthur had claimed it back for himself. Bill smiled, fastening the chain around his neck.
59
Tonight, the light burned beautiful. Across the sea the Maiden lantern dispatched her beam, smoothing a path through which ships could pass without fear.
It was difficult getting Arthur into the overcoat, the arms locked, his joints dense and awkward to manipulate. Bill rested the Principal Keeper on the gallery rail. He packed his four pockets with stones.
One push would be all it took. Bill thought of Helen at home, going to bed, unaware that in the morning her life would begin again.
He drove his weight against the man on the bar and leaned as hard as he could.
Hey!
Running footsteps, a child’s laughter.
Patpatpatpatpat.
A jolt from behind. Bill grunted, knocked off balance. Footsteps came at him from every direction. Whispers. A whistle. Then another blow, shunting him forward.
Alarmed, Bill gripped Arthur’s body. Horror stole his breath, and whether it was that alone that joined them or a thing he could not name, he had no time to think, for next the weight of the dead man dropped, and dragged him over the rail.
White wall sped past, ghostly, everlasting. Arthur’s body fused to his and together they smashed into the cold, liquid dark.
Briefly Bill lost consciousness; he sliced his leg and hit his head. His ears were flooded with blood and terror and water. Over and over, he thought, no, this isn’t it, pointlessly, over and over. Arthur’s mass drew him down, while Bill rolled in a surfeit of fear, his legs thrashing and fighting, and the more he thrashed and fought, the more the sea engulfed him. Blood filled his nose and mouth; it seemed to fill his head.
In desperation, in shock and regret, he gripped the keeper who kept him. Arthur was Bill’s guardian, the man he had always wanted to be.
In the dark, in the dim, from a distance the scuffle resembled a flock of gannets, scrapping over fish entrails. Agitation on the surface, a few muffled cries. Nothing to hear but seals calling sadly for each other.
Through the mist of Bill’s drowning, there came a boat, its captain leaning over, his hand outstretc
hed.
In a glow it arrived, a lamp-bearing wanderer down a long tunnel. Its sail was windless and torn. The hand that came to them was small.
Arthur’s touch left him and the cold bit him like an apple. The boat took Arthur in, warm, home; Bill clawed for it, but it had not come for him.
On the lighthouse gallery, a hundred feet up, the metal door blew closed. A white bird circled the top of the tower before heading out to sea.
XII
End Point
60
HELEN, 1992
After Christmas was done with, she travelled down to Cornwall for the anniversary.
It was an English afternoon, the sky the colour of Tupperware and the sea mixed up in greys and browns. Rain fell steadily, soaking ditches that were thick and mucky from autumn’s slip into winter, steeped in leaf mould and blackened wood. She’d brought the dog this time, who sniffed earnestly for foxholes. Drops spat on the shell of her umbrella. In the trees, abandoned doves’ nests fell apart, shards of ghostly eggshell glimmering among the moss.
Helen felt her bones inside her these days, aware of them as she started up the hill towards Mortehaven Cemetery – interlocking, blunt-white, her rib cage like something prehistoric. The dog stayed close to her side, sensing her need for company.
How much longer could she make this trip? This could be the last. Twenty years was an arbitrary milestone anyway. It wasn’t as though her husband would decide, it’s been long enough now, that’s a good round number; I ought to go home.
But still she came, just in case.
In case what?
The thirtieth of December, every year, she had to set eyes on the Maiden Rock, her partner in this peculiar birthday. Perhaps it was akin to keeping a wild animal in her living room, opening the door on it each day to make sure it knew she was still there. To leave it only bolstered its spars and gave it more strength than it deserved.
She doubted Jenny would come. At the ten-year mark, Helen had seen her from a distance, standing with the children, looking out to sea. She had thought about going over, but in the end had lost her nerve. Michelle hadn’t appeared for that one or any of them, she didn’t see the point and she wouldn’t today. She would call Helen next week with the excuse that her husband hadn’t wanted her to make the trip.
As they arrived at the cemetery, the wind filled her umbrella. She could hear the Atlantic Ocean as it crashed and spumed against mussel-crusted rocks, chucking up gusts of salt.
Helen knew where she was going, a headstone close to her husband’s memorial bench. The epitaph on the grave was stippled with lichen:
JORY FREDERICK MARTIN, B.1921
CROSSED THE BAR 1990, DEARLY MISSED
She stood for several minutes, until the rain stopped.
Yellow bruises tinged the clouds, the sunshine weak but willing. She put down her umbrella. Two years ago, then, Jory had died. Helen hadn’t known. In the time since the vanishing, the boatman had dipped in and out of her mind. Even though they’d been close in age, she had always felt towards him a motherly sort of gratitude. She supposed it was that he had been the first on the scene. He’d called for the lost keepers; later, he’d mourned them. Jory had been the longed-for relief, the rescuer who hadn’t been able to rescue, the shout in the wind that never found a reply.
The dog went off, following a scent between gravestones. She felt someone come up behind her, and was so confident in who this was that she could have greeted him without turning, but she wanted to see his face.
‘Hello,’ she said. She felt suddenly glad to be with another person.
The writer was wearing a red anorak and jeans, and shoes that had soaked up the rain. He had a canvas bag over his shoulder. His expression was chastened, a little apprehensive, as it dawned on him that she knew. It made sense to her now why he wasn’t suited and polished. He was a boatman’s son, had grown up tangled in nets.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asked.
Dan Martin held a stone in his hand, smooth and pearlescent, with a white band across it, as fine as a cotton thread. He placed it on his father’s grave.
‘Dad thought for a long time it was his fault,’ he said. ‘That he should have done more for them. Got there quicker. Defied the weather. He couldn’t have, but still.’
‘You should have told me.’
‘I thought you might blame him too.’
‘It never crossed my mind.’
He put his hands in his pockets. ‘I’m sorry, Helen. I wanted you to talk to me without knowing who I was. Without changing what you told me or how you told it. As if I had nothing to do with it. I thought that would make it easier for you.’
A moment passed between them so warm and close that she had to glance away, remembering all he knew about her that no one else did.
‘I should have been honest,’ he admitted. ‘How did you find out?’
‘You’re not the only one interested in the truth.’
He returned her smile.
‘I couldn’t pursue the story while Dad was alive. Entertained him instead with books about guns and frigates. I think he’d be pleased, though. He wanted to talk to you himself.’
Helen searched the horizon for the Maiden Rock, disguised by mist but intermittently reflecting a shy gleam of light.
‘Twenty years,’ she said. ‘It feels different this time.’
‘How?’
‘I’m not sure. It might be me who feels different. All this talk, I’m glad it’s come out. I don’t know if Jenny feels the same, or Michelle – she told me she’d decided to meet you in the end. But it’s a curious thing. It brings that time back, but it also pushes it further out. It makes me see how many years have passed and what’s changed in my life. I’m not the woman I was. People think I should be looking back with sadness, and I do have sadness and I always will. But it’s long ago. It doesn’t hurt as much now.’
Dan hesitated. ‘I always pressed my father to talk about it,’ he said. ‘But he never did. It’s one of those things: nobody knows what words to use.’
‘Any are better than nothing.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you do.’
‘What?’
‘You know the words to use.’
He faced her. His low, straight brow; his seafarer’s eyes. He was so like his father.
‘It was always inside me to write about Arthur and the others,’ he said. ‘The day they disappeared was the day my life changed. My family changed, too. Dad never got over it. Neither did I. When I grew up, I tried to get a grip on the sea by putting it in my stories, but I never managed it because this was the one that kept asking to be told. Mortehaven was never the same after they vanished. No one knew about our town before. No one associated us with loss, or haunting. Children had happy childhoods, then they grew up and moved away and brought their own children back in the holidays to see the boats, and the Maiden Rock, and go crabbing on the quay. Afterwards, they didn’t.’
‘You couldn’t accept there being no answer,’ said Helen.
‘No. I couldn’t.’
‘But there isn’t one.’
He unzipped his bag. ‘It hasn’t stopped me searching. Over the years, I’ve asked anyone who’ll listen. I’ve given the riddle: three keepers go missing off a lighthouse, what do you think happened to them?’
‘What do you think happened to them?’
He pulled out a block of pages encased in a plastic sleeve, tied twice with rubber bands, intersecting in a cross.
‘This is it,’ he said. ‘Your book.’
‘Mine?’
‘And you were right, by the way. It didn’t end up being the project I thought it was going to be.’
‘You’re disappointed.’
‘No,’ he told her. ‘The opposite.’
He peeled off the bands.
‘It’s strange to think there’s no one out there.’ He walked over the stones to the edge of the headland. ‘That they’re all automated. No more keepers. No
reliefs, no overdues. I got near her again a while back. We had the weather for it, so I thought, all right, Dad, just for you. There’s an odd feeling about it now. There must be around all lighthouses, but in particular the towers. It’s in knowing they’re deserted. All that stonework, all that way away, with no one inside. It’s an eerie atmosphere. You’d think it held on to something, wouldn’t you? When I went out there, it seemed like it did. Like it might.’
‘That Arthur could be there on the set-off,’ said Helen, ‘waving at you.’
‘There are people who still think they’ll come back.’
‘I hope you’re not one of them.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s unrealistic.’
‘The subject itself is unrealistic.’
‘Even so.’
‘To think that they lived?’
‘To think that they’d turn up after all this time.’ Helen stood next to him. ‘Arthur’s gone. He’s not coming back. You say you need answers, but I don’t. I’m not sure I ever did. I need acceptance. Peace. Hope. It’s taken twenty years, but I’m close.’
He passed her the book. ‘Here.’
It was heavy. ‘That’s a lot of work.’
‘Yes,’ said Dan, ‘it was. I finished it. I know more than I did before. But as for knowing what happened on that tower, Helen, I’ll never be certain of that. I’m not foolish enough to think that I might. There are a hundred endings, maybe there are more.’
Helen looked down at his soggy shoes, at the rain-spattered manuscript, and it was on the tip of her tongue to thank him. She had said sorry to Arthur and that she loved him. She always had, through the worst of it, right to the end. Even if he never heard it, it was out there now and that seemed the most important thing of all.
‘The truth is theirs,’ Dan said. ‘And yours. It isn’t mine or anyone else’s.’