Lighthousekeeping (11 page)

When I fell in love with you, I invited you to stay in a hut on the edge of a forest. Solitary, field-flung, perched over the earth, and hand-lit, it was the nearest thing I could get to a lighthouse.

Every new beginning prompts a return.

You were taking a boat, a plane, a train and a car to get this far from Hydra. Your exotic travel done, we were going to meet at a carwash near the station.

I tried to get everything ready for you – piled up the wood for the stove, found candles, made the bed with a new sheet I had bought, shelled beans into a pot, and put the steak under a cloth to keep the flies away. I had an old radio with me, because they were broadcasting
Tristan
that night, and I wanted to listen to it with you, drinking red wine and watching the night begin.

I was so early to meet you that I had to wash the car
twice, so that the suspicious Indian wouldn’t send me away. Maybe he thought I was dealing drugs; the car was silver, like me, and a bit flash, and obviously I had got it by being up to no good. I tried to be friendly to him and bought a Mars Bar, but he just sat behind the desk reading the price lists in
Auto Trader,
to see how much I was making from my life of crime.

I paced up and down, like people do in suspense movies. Where were you? The mini-cab bringing you from the station would be hard to spot. Every car that slowed down for the Drive-In Macdonald’s got the once-over twice over. I was like a Customs official. You were smuggled goods. I was supposed to be staying at the hut. You weren’t.

At last, when I had polished my car so shiny that signals from outer space were bouncing off the bonnet, I saw a maroon Rover slow down towards me. You got out of the back. I rushed to pay the driver, scattering £10 notes like breadcrumbs.

I was too shy to kiss you.

The hut was made of rough brown planks, bark-topped, that overlapped under a clay tile roof. It had no foundations; it stood two metres off the ground on a set of staddle stones. This kept the rats away, but the nighttime
creatures snuffled and shuffled underneath.

That first night, in the unsteady single bed, I lay awake while you slept. I was listening to the unfamiliar noises, and thinking about the miracle of the most unfamiliar of them all – you breathing next to me.

I had fried the steaks. You had opened the bottle of St Amour, and we drank it out of thick old-fashioned tooth glasses. We had the door open, and the fire in the stove was making patterns on the floor. Outside, the moon was shadowing the grass, and the first sounds of the night-forest were beginning.

I was hungry, but I was nervous too. You were so new and I didn’t want to frighten you away. I didn’t want to frighten myself away.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Your rhythm different to mine. Your body not mine; the celebrated strangeness of another. I put my head against your chest, and it must have been something to do with the vibrations of the hut, because underneath your breathing, or through it, I could hear a badger breathing too.

The hut was breath: the narrow air-flow of the stove where the low fire was burning down; the quiet hiss of
water heating in the big kettle on the stove’s top; the draught through the key-hole rattling the heavy bolt-chain; the wind like a mouth-organ.

I put my mouth on yours, and your breathing changed as you kissed me in your sleep. I lay down, my hand on your stomach, following the rise and fall of another land.

The following morning, I woke early, stiff and thirsty, because no one sleeps well in a small bed with a not so small lover. My bed at the lighthouse had been tiny, but I only had to share it with DogJim.

I think I had spent the night with you balanced in the six-inch gap between the edge of the bed and the tongue-and-groove wall. You were lying centre square, your head on both pillows, snoring. I didn’t want to wake you, so I just slid down the six-inch gap, and crawled out under the bed, bringing with me a very dusty almanac for 1932.

I pulled on a sweater and opened the door. The air was white and heavy. Everything was wet. There was a smell of ploughing. It was autumn and they were turning in the straw-stubble.

I looked back at you. These moments that are talismans and treasure. Cumulative deposits – our fossil record – and the beginnings of what happens next.
They are the beginning of a story, and the story we will always tell.

I tiptoed to the stove and took the heavy iron kettle outside. I poured some of it into a shallow bowl and mixed it with cold water from our plastic jerry can. I had a plant pot to hold my soap and shampoo, and I hung my towel on a useful hook gouged into one of the supporting posts of the hut. Then I took off all my clothes and started pouring water over my head. The water poured over me like sunlight. I thought of you in Hydra, strong as sunlight, and as free.

I dried myself on a rough blue towel. Clean, in clean clothes, with my lungs cleaned by the moist air, I woke you up to boiling coffee and bacon and eggs. You were sleepy and slow, and sat half-dozing in my dressing gown on the steps, shivering a bit in the late-year sun.

I love your skin; skin like breath, moving and sweet. When I touch you, your skin shivers twice, but not with this cold dawn.

You did the washing-up, singing, and then we went into town to buy chops and champagne. We were so happy that happiness went with us, and I charmed a toilet attendant into charging your mobile phone. We
bought him a big tin of Cadbury’s Roses, and he said he’d take them to his wife who had Alzheimer’s.

‘It was the aluminium saucepans,’ he said. ‘We didn’t know any better then.’

I was holding your hand while he talked. There is so little life, and it is fraught with chance. We meet, we don’t meet, we take the wrong turning, and still bump into each other. We conscientiously choose the ‘right road’ and it leads nowhere.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to him.

‘Thanks for these,’ he said, holding them up. ‘She’ll love these.’

We drove to Ironbridge – birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. The light was lengthening in soft lines along the river. Whether it was the quality of light, or the clarity of my feelings for you, I don’t know, but there was softness and no blurring. ‘This is not a lie,’ I said to myself. ‘It may not hold, but it is true.’

We stood on the bridge looking down the wide river. I imagined the iron coal-carts on their iron wheels running on a pulley up and down the iron rails, fuelling the steam-sheds and turning the pistons of the engines that were still beautiful as well as useful. The black sharp smell of oiled iron filled these sheds. The floor was thick with filings. The noise was deafening.

The river was past and future. It flowed the barges, carried the goods, provided water power and cooling power, dredged away the effluent with cheerful grace, and at night made a haunt for the manual workers turned fishermen, who stood half screened on the bank at the end of their shift.

Their clothes were heavy, their hands had torn and healed. They shared tobacco and passed round a stone bottle of homemade beer. They kept maggots in a worn washer tin. There were trout in the river if you knew where to wait.

You were walking ahead of me over the bridge. ‘Wait!’ I called, and you turned round, smiling, and bent your head to kiss me. I looked back, half sorry to leave my world of shadows, as real as the real world. Yes, the men were there all right, fishing, smoking, loosening their neck cloths to wipe their faces. The one they called George was quiet because his wife had got pregnant again. He couldn’t afford another child. But he could do an extra shift, if his body could stand it.

I felt his anxiety in the cold fog now beginning to rise from the river. So many lives – layered and layered, and easy to find, if you are quiet enough, and know where to wait, and coax them like trout.

I asked you to go over to the pub and see if they would sell us some ice for our champagne. You came back carrying a black bin liner with an Eskimo winter inside. ‘He dug it out of a walk-in freezer with a spade,’ you said, and then because my car had only two seats, you had to sit with it on your knee all the way back to the hut. ‘This is love,’ you said, and I know you were joking, but I hoped you meant it.

At the hut, I lit all the candles, then lay on the floor and blew air into the stove. You were chopping vegetables and telling me about a day in Thailand when you had seen turtles hatch in the sand. Not many of them make it to the sea, and once there, the sharks are waiting for them. Days disappear and get swallowed up much like that, but the ones like these, the ones that make it, swim out and return for the rest of your life.

Thank you for making me happy.

We were standing up in the near-dark. I had my hands on your hips, yours were on my shoulders. When we kiss, I stand on tiptoe. You are very good for my calves.

You slipped me out of my shirt, and began to touch my breasts through my bra, which is soft and tight over
my nipples. You said something about the bed, and we lay down, you kicking off your undone trainers and linen trousers, your legs brown and bare.

For a long time, we were side by side, stroking, not speaking, and then you ran your index finger down my nose, and into my mouth. You pushed me under you, kissing me, finding the channel of my body, finding me wet.

We were moving together; you turned me over, covering me from behind, craning your neck to reach round and kiss me, licking the sweat from my upper lip. I love the weight of you, and how you use it to pleasure me. I love your excitement. I love it that you don’t ask me or hesitate. At the last possible second, you lifted me right up and pushed between my legs.

Then you were down on me, your tongue in the folds of me, your hands over my breasts, making me arch to follow you, you following me, until I had come.

I couldn’t wait. I put you on your back, sitting across you, watching your eyes closed and your head turned to the side, your hands guiding me, and the movement of you so certain.

You are beautiful to feel. Beautiful inside me me inside you. Beautiful body making geometry out of our separate shapes.

We both love kissing. We do a lot of it. Lying together now, unable to part. I fell asleep breathing you.

Some time in the night, I heard a noise outside. I tried to pull myself out of the heavy sex-sleep, because someone was coming in at the door. You woke too, and we lay there, hearts beating, wondering, not knowing. Then I couldn’t stand the tension, so I just grabbed the dressing gown and opened the door.

On the steps that led up to the hut was the bin bag full of mostly melted ice and a floating bottle of champagne, like a relic from the
Titanic.
A baby badger had his head and body three-quarters of the way in the bag.

We helped him free and threw him a packet of biscuits, because badgers love biscuits, and then, because it seemed like an omen of celebration, we opened the champagne and got back into bed to drink it.

‘How long do you think we’ve got?’ you said.

‘What, before we make love again, before we finish the champagne or before it’s morning?’

I fell asleep, and dreamed of a door opening.

Doors opening into rooms that opened onto doors that opened into rooms. We burst through, panelled, baize, flush, glazed, steel, reinforced, safe doors, secret doors, double doors, trap doors. The forbidden door
that can only be opened with a small silver key. The door that is no door in Rapunzel’s lonely tower.

You are the door in the rock that finally swings free when moonlight shines on it. You are the door at the top of the stairs that only appears in dreams. You are the door that sets the prisoner free. You are the carved low door into the Chapel of the Grail. You are the door at the edge of the world. You are the door that opens onto a sea of stars.

Open me. Wide. Narrow. Pass through me, and whatever lies on the other side, could not be reached except by this. This you. This now. This caught moment opening into a lifetime.

Dark was walking on the headland. The light flashing every four seconds as it always had. His body was timed to it.

The sea and the sky were black, but the light opened the water like a fire was burning there.

‘You did that for me,’ he said, though there were no listeners, only bladderwrack and poppies. ‘You opened the water like a fire.’

He had been walking most of the night. If he didn’t walk, he lay awake. He preferred to walk.

That day in the lighthouse…and she had gone. Some weeks later a letter had arrived for him, and with the letter, a ruby and emerald pin. He knew he would never see her again.

All those years – all those years ago, and he had doubted her. Their child Susan was three before she
had told him that the man he believed to be her lover was her brother. A smuggler, a fugitive, but still her brother.

Why had he listened to Price? Why had he trusted a man who was a blackmailer and a thief?

But all that had been forgiven. He had betrayed her a second time.

He breathed in, wanting the cold night air, but it was salt water he breathed. His body was filled with salt water. He was drowned already. He no longer came up for air. He floated underneath the world and heard its voices strange and far-off. He rarely understood what people said. He was aware of vague shapes passing across him. Nothing more.

Then, sometimes, floating face up in his underwater cave, a memory so bright hit him, like the flat of a sword, that the water opened, and he felt his face rush up for air, and he gulped air, and in the night, all around him, were the stars lying on water. He kicked them with his upturned feet. He was patterned in stars.

The water poured off his face, his hair streamed back. He wasn’t dying any more. She was there. She had come back.

He had the seahorse in his pocket. Time’s frail hero. One more journey left to make.

They waded out, they swam, they swam into the cone of light, that sank down like a dropped star. The light shaft was deeper than he had expected, signalling the way to the bottom of the world. His body was weightless now. His mind was clear. He would find her.

He let the seahorse go. He held out his hands.