Emma Stonex - The Lamplighters

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.

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 hands 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.’