Lighthousekeeping (10 page)

What story?

The story of how we met.

The boat was coming into the port at Athens.

It was the last boat, and already the lights were lit. I had been waiting for an hour or so, among the backpacks and ice-cream and endless cigarettes of the others like me who had an island to reach before dark.

The boat was vacuum-packed with Albanians, four generations to a family: great-grandmother, air-dried like a chilli pepper, deep red skin and a hot temper; grandmother, all sun-dried tomato, tough, chewy, skin split with the heat; getting the kids to rub olive oil into her arms; mother, moist as a purple fig, open everywhere – blouse, skirt, mouth, eyes, a wide-open woman, lips licking the salt spray flying from the open boat. Then there were the kids, aged four and six, a couple of squirts, zesty as lemons.

I sat on my luggage, fearing it would disappear inside their warehouse-loads of boxes and sacks, string-tied. When we reached the island, their men were waiting with their mules, and the whole family jumped onto the wooden saddles and rode barefoot up the ladder-steep alleyways, towards tiered white buildings that got darker and darker as we moved away from the lit-up holiday feel of the port, its coloured lights in swags around the harbour.

Hydra: a mule-backed, four-legged island, whose only wheels belong to the municipal dustcart.

I walked out onto the spur of the harbour, avoiding excitable restaurant owners waving lobsters, and attentive barman serving Pina Coladas in jugs the size of football trophies.

I was trying to find an address.

There was a security guard standing smartly by an anchored yacht whose owners had dressed for dinner and were eating it. Well, almost eating it – the women raising empty forks to glossy famished lips, and the men the colour of beef fillet, drinking goblets of Krug. I know it was Krug; I saw the bottle shape as the waiter poured it.

He shook his head when I showed him my address – he was only in town for the night. ‘You can stay with
me,’ he said, winking. ‘I got a nice berth and I can join you about 5 am, when you’ve had some rest.’

I liked him. I put down my bags. He gave me a beer. We started talking.

‘They’re a New Zealand family,’ he said. ‘They’re good employers. I’ve been all over the world. We’re heading down to Capri tomorrow. Ever been to Capri?’

I began to say something about a bird, and then I thought better of it, and asked him about himself.

‘Just drifting,’ he said, ‘if you’ll excuse the pun. I’ll do this for a couple of years and I might meet somebody, find a place I want to settle down – maybe run a boat business of my own – who knows – there’s plenty of time.’

‘Do you have to stand here all night?’

‘Yep, all night.’

‘What did you do before this?’

‘I was married. Then I wasn’t married any more. Tipped up, flung out, recognise that?’

I did.

‘End of story. Gotta start again. Gotta be positive. Gotta move on. Don’t look back. No regrets.’

That’s how he said it. He said it like a mantra. I wonder how many times a day he had to say it to make it true? It was a poultice over his heart.

I don’t know how to poultice my heart.

I thanked him for the beer, and picked up my bags.

‘You sure now about that 5 am?’

I was sure. This wasn’t the night for adventure. I wanted to get to the place, rented sight unseen, from a friend of a friend. I had the keys but no instructions – like life really – and as I toiled on foot up and up the steep whitewashed steps, the old Greek women sitting outside regarded me, and sometimes greeted me with a
Kalispera.

At last, sweat pouring off me, and my bags banging against my body, I found the heavy maroon door of my house. I pushed myself inside, startling a tiny cat that vanished like good luck, and in the flare of my matches I walked across the ghost-sheen of the white floor paint, trying to find the lights.

I couldn’t find them, so I dumped my bags, lit a candle, and pulled out the bottle of wine, and the bread and olive oil and sausage I had brought with me. I found a blunt knife (why are knives always blunt?) and a plate and a glass, and went and sat wearily on the flat roof that looked out and down towards the sea.

The night was very quiet; dogs barking and the scissor-sound of bats cutting the air, but no human noise, except for the television set, very faint from the
house behind, where I could see a crucifix on the wall, and an old woman putting on her nightdress.

I opened the wine. It was strong and good. I began to feel better.

The stones under my feet were warm. The old lady in the house behind came out to water her tomato plants. I could hear the hiss of the hose, and her sister talking to her from inside. Her sister had climbed into bed and was watching television and calling out the news. I could smell sardines grilling, and in the mountains the night-dogs were starting to bark – the concrete walls bouncing the woofs.

Woof, woof, woof, woof,
never quite sure where it’s coming from. Never quite sure where the noises in the night are coming from.

After the Talking Bird, the nice man at the Tavistock Clinic kept asking me why I stole books and birds, though I had only ever stolen one of each.

I told him it was about meaning, and he suggested, very politely, that might be a kind of psychosis.

‘You think meaning is psychosis?’

‘An obsession with meaning, at the expense of the ordinary shape of life, might be understood as psychosis, yes.’

‘I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or
that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.’

He twiddled his pencil. His nails were very clean.

‘I am only asking questions.’

‘So am I.’

There was a pause.

I said, ‘How would you define psychosis?’

He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil:
Psychosis: out of touch with reality.

Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.

Sleepy with travelling and the night and the wine, I went inside and lay down on the bare pink mattress. I should have been looking for linen, but I fell asleep, thinking about Babel Dark, and what it was like to be lost and alone a hundred and fifty years ago.

I dreamed of a door, and it was opening.

In the morning I was woken early by the chromatic bell of the Orthodox Church.

I unlatched the shutters. The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures
nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed by measurement. The world just pours it out.

I went outside, tripping over slabs of sunshine the size of towns. The sun was like a crowd of people, it was a party, it was music. The sun was blaring through the walls of the houses and beating down the steps. The sun was drumming time into the stone. The sun was rhythming the day.

‘Why are you afraid?’ I asked myself, because fear is at the bottom of everything, even love usually rests on fear. ‘Why are you afraid, when whatever you do you will die anyway?’

I decided to walk to the convent on the other side of the island.

It’s a steep climb, up a winding track of scrub and vipers, unshaded from the sun.

Nobody comes up here, and if they do, they mule-ride, side-saddle, the men with luxury moustaches and the women, heads covered, arms bare.

It is here that the one and only diesel dustcart deposits its foul load. There is a Dante’s Inferno of smouldering rubbish, with a stench that only humans can produce. I took off my T-shirt, wrapped it round my head, and ran till my lungs collapsed, but at least I was free of the worst of it.

Free, and climbing higher and higher, the island under me like a lover.

I felt I was being watched. The road was empty. My feet were dirty, my ankles were rimmed with dust. There was a bird of prey arcing the clouds – but nothing animal or human.

Then I saw it – about the size of a medium dog but looking like a cat, with bigger ears and frightening eyes. It was crouched on a rock outside a ruined monastery, like a John the Baptist refusing consolation.

It was a civet.

I went as close as I dared, and instead of turning tail, it threatened to spring.

We stared each other out – until it silently slunk backwards into a cave behind the rock.

I am part civet, part mouser.

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I
don’t want you to come too close.
I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights
. I don’t want to tell you where I am.
I want
to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me.
I want to be with you.

I used to be a hopeless romantic. I am still a hopeless romantic. I used to believe that love was the highest value. I still believe that love is the highest value. I don’t expect to be happy. I don’t imagine that I will find love, whatever that means, or that if I do find it, it will make me happy. I don’t think of love as the answer or the solution. I think of love as a force of nature – as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is life-giving. And when it burns out, the planet dies.

My little orbit of life circles love. I daren’t get any closer. I’m not a mystic seeking final communion. I don’t go out without SPF 15. I protect myself.

But today, when the sun is everywhere, and everything solid is nothing but its own shadow, I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love – all love – love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a cafe. Myself, even, which is the hardest thing of all to love, because love and selfishness are not the same thing. It is easy to be selfish. It is hard
to love who I am. No wonder I am surprised if you do.

But love it is that wins the day. On this burning road, fenced with barbed wire to keep the goats from straying, I find for a minute what I came here for, which is a sure sign that I will lose it again instantly.

I felt whole.

At the convent, I rang the bell, reading the notice to be patient.

Eventually, the door over the wooden grille opened and I saw the face of the nun. She slid back the bolts and ushered me in, speaking kindnesses I couldn’t understand. She untucked a cloth from her belt and wiped a chair already spotless with dusting. I sat down and she bowed and made a mime of drinking, so I nodded and smiled, and she brought me a tray of thick coffee, thin biscuits, and rose-petal jam from her garden.

There were two cups on the tray. I thought that the nun intended to join me, but she withdrew. I took out some money and went to the chapel to make an offering. There was a woman inside, kneeling in prayer.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude.’

You smiled, stood up, and came out into the sunshine. Perhaps it was the light on your face, but I thought I recognised you from somewhere a long way
down, somewhere at the bottom of the sea. Somewhere in me.

Sometimes the light is strong enough to reach to the bottom of the sea.

‘I think this is your coffee too,’ I said.

You sat down and I noticed your hands – long fingers, articulated at the joints; if you touched me, what would happen?

I am shy with strangers – all those years alone on the rock with Pew. Our only visitor was Miss Pinch, and she was unrepresentative of the human race.

So now, when I meet someone new, I do the only thing I know how to do:

Tell you a story.

and I were sitting on the floor in front of the wood-burning stove. We were oiling and cleaning the movable parts of the instruments. Pew had unscrewed the brass knobs and sliding plates, lifted out the glass, and detached the delicate hands that hovered over the rising and falling of the sea and the wind.

At the beginning of every winter, he opened all the instrument cases, and loosened the threads of the screws and bolts, so that he could apply a single drop of transparent oil to clean their workings.

He had never needed to see what he was doing. Pews knew, he said, like fish swim. Lighthousekeeping was what Pews were born to do, and lighthousekeeping is what they did.

It had come about strangely, as you might have guessed, when old Josiah Dark was looking for his first man.

Whenever old Dark was in a tight place, he defied it by taking a walk. He had a belief that one kind of motion might encourage another. So, that day in Salts, he walked and he walked, and sure enough he met a man who collected spiders’ webs.

The first thing Josiah noticed about the man was his fingers: long like a spider’s legs, and articulated at the joints. The man was lifting webs from the hedgerows and stretching them inside a frame he had cut from hedgerow timber. He had invented a way of preserving the webs, and he sold them for good money to sailors who wanted a curiosity for their women at home.

‘What’s your name?’ said Josiah.

‘Pew.’

‘Where’s your lodging?’

‘Here, there, not here and not there, and seasonally elsewhere.’

‘Have you a wife?’

‘Not that would know me in the daylight.’

So it was settled, and Pew, with his active fingers and quick ways, became the first lighthousekeeper at Cape Wrath.

‘He wasn’t blind though, Pew, was he?’

‘No he wasn’t, child, but that’s not the end of the story.’

‘Well then…’

‘Well then, long after Josiah was gone, and soon after Babel was dead, there was another visitor to Salts. Not Molly O’Rourke this time, but her first child, Susan Lux, the child born blind at birth.

‘Nobody knows why she came – but she never left again. She married Pew, in spite of their difference in age and upbringing – him all in the hedge, and her in a proper house, and him old enough to be her father, and her young enough to believe all the stories he told her. She had fingers quick as his, and soon his eyes were as blue and milky as hers. He became blind as he grew older, but they neither of them had any difficulty with that, what with senses as fine as a spider and hands that could hang a web.

‘Their child was the same. And every Pew since. One or many, as you like it. Blind Pew Lighthousekeeping.’

‘What about me?’

‘What about you?’

‘I’m not blind.’

‘You have the handicap of sight, it’s true.’

‘So how will I keep the light?’

Pew smiled as he slotted the glass back into the tight rim of the barometer.

‘Never rely on what you can see. Not everything can be seen.’

I looked out at the waves and the ships and the birds.

‘Now close your eyes,’ said Pew, who knew what I was
doing. I closed my eyes. He took my hand, his fingers curling round me like a net.

‘What can you see now?’

‘I can see Babel Dark coming towards the lighthouse.’

‘What else can you see?’

‘I can see me, but I look old.’

‘What else can you see?’

‘I can see you in a blue boat, but you look young.’

‘Open your eyes.’

I opened my eyes, and saw the waves and the ships and the birds. Pew let go of my hand. ‘Now you know what to do.’