Alison Moore - The Lighthouse

He walks slowly and has to go further than he intended, but he eventually finds what appears to be the right stop about a mile from the centre, near the river. He deciphers the timetable and discovers that there are three direct buses to Hellhaus each weekday — one in the morning, one in the early afternoon and one in the evening. He could catch the first one after breakfast.

Feeling pleased, he returns to his room and makes himself one more cup of coffee to see him through. He packs his suitcase, zips it up and puts it by the door. He will collect it after breakfast. With a little bit of time still on his hands, he makes the bed even though he knows it will only be unmade, stripped, when he is gone. Taking one last look around the room, he spots his watch on the bedside table and straps it onto his wrist. He is ready to go.

He heads downstairs, taking his rucksack with him. While he fills a plate from the breakfast buffet, he stashes in the pockets of his rucksack a few snacks for the bus ride.

He sits down. He is trembling slightly, perhaps from drinking so much caffeine on an empty stomach, but when the hostess offers to bring him a pot of coffee, he accepts. It is good, strong, fresh coffee and the smell brings to mind his mother’s grinder, the coffee beans poured into the top and crushed with a turn of the handle.

She always used nice china cups and hot milk poured from a little pan. She used to drink her coffee standing up, looking out of the window. Sometimes an aeroplane would fly overhead and she would watch it, following it across the otherwise empty sky, gazing after it even when it was too small to see and all that remained were the slowly vanishing contrails, lost in a world of her own, as if she were already gone, her coffee cup cold in her hand.

That was how it was when he came downstairs the morning after their return from Cornwall. The kitchen smelt of coffee and she was standing at the window. She was wearing a pink, summery dress which, after looking at her for a while, he recognised from his parents’ honeymoon photos — it was her going-away dress. By the back door he saw the garish suitcase from under the bed. His father was still upstairs. And then everything happened in a rush — her kissing him and taking her suitcase and leaving. It happened so quickly that when he picked up her coffee cup in the suddenly empty kitchen, he found that it was still warm.

Leaving the breakfast room, he finds himself shaking so badly that he needs to sit down. He cannot even contemplate climbing the stairs to his room. Being right by the lounge, he goes in. There is a television in the corner showing the news with no sound, and there are two sofas, neither of them occupied. He lies down on one and closes his eyes and, despite all the caffeine, drifts into a weird sleep.

He wakes feeling anxious. He looks at his watch and is disappointed to see that he has missed the first bus to Hellhaus. He will have to catch the second one after lunch. He will not be in Utrecht, then, before the end of the afternoon, but, he thinks, he is sure to be there in time for his dinner. He rouses himself and goes upstairs to his room.

When he sees that his suitcase has gone, he realises that it must have been taken for transit while he was asleep. He goes back downstairs and asks the proprietor about it and is assured that his suitcase is already on its way to Hellhaus. Well, thinks Futh, if it is already on its way perhaps it will arrive before him. So he will, after all, have to go to the hotel to ask for it and explain what he is doing but that is all right. He might not even have bothered if it had not been for the fact that the silver lighthouse is in it.

He leaves the hotel with some time to kill before catching the afternoon bus. He goes into a shop, thinking of buying a newspaper. He has not looked at one all week and is feeling somewhat detached from reality. The shop has only German papers and Futh, testing his understanding of written German, which is better than his understanding of spoken German, looks through a few but, not making much sense of them, leaves without buying one.

He walks down to the river and sits alone under some trees, appreciating the cool breeze coming off the rushing water. Closing his eyes, he consciously notes the smells around him, the smell of the outdoors, so that he will be able to return later, in his mind, to this oasis.

He has often wondered what it would be like to have an impaired sense of smell. He loves to wake to the smell of fresh coffee, but when Angela was pregnant she became suddenly unable to bear the stink, she said, of the coffee machine, and of Futh unwashed first thing in the morning, for the brief duration of each of her pregnancies. He thinks about things he would prefer not to be able to smell, like alcohol on other people, and he thinks about the potential dangers of being unable to detect certain things, like gas or bad food. Some people cannot smell cyanide. Some people can simply not recognise smells, smelling one thing and interpreting it as something else entirely. It is possible to imagine a smell. He himself, recently, suffering from the flu, found himself smelling coffee which was not there.

He takes out his snacks and eats them for lunch. Seeing some ducks, he breaks up a bread roll and throws the pieces into the water, but the ducks don’t notice and the bits of bread are carried away by the current.

When he stands up and leaves his quiet spot between the trees, there is plenty of time to get to the bus stop. His ruined feet go slowly but still he arrives in time and sits down, expecting to see the bus soon.

The minutes go by and he assumes at first that the bus is running late. Then he wonders whether he is standing at the wrong stop, and wanders to the stops either side to have a look at their timetables. Thinking that he might have read the time wrong, or got the wrong day, he looks again at the first timetable, but if he has made a mistake he does not see it. After almost an hour, he decides that either the bus just is not coming or that he arrived a fraction too late — perhaps his watch is a little slow — and the bus had already been and gone by the time he got to the stop.

There is a third and final bus leaving in the evening. He considers whether it will still be possible to go to Utrecht. His hosts, who would not be expecting him, would have had their dinner by the time he got there, although he should not be too late for some supper. He thinks about hitchhiking. He goes to the kerb and stands there for a while with his thumb out, but no one stops. He has not seen a taxi either, and Futh does not really want to walk all the way back into town to try to find one, and besides, it would be expensive, an extravagance for which he has not budgeted. The next bus will be along in a few hours and he decides to wait.

He waits near the bus stop, wishing that he had bought a newspaper after all or that he had not taken the novel out of his bag. He finds some shade, although it moves. He strays into the full heat of the day only when he feels the need to go back to the bus stop and check the timetable again. He catches the evening bus and sits near the back feeling pleased, watching the world go by.

Getting off at what turns out to be the wrong stop, he has a little walking to do before he finally gets into Hellhaus. He sights the hotel from behind as the sun is going down, the sunset blazing on its whitewashed wall, glaring from the windows. It is dazzling, almost painful to look at, but he cannot take his eyes off it.

Before going to the hotel to ask about his suitcase, he goes to check his car. He finds it just where he left it, but it has a flat tyre. Crouching down to investigate, he sees the broken glass in the gutter. Perhaps, he thinks, the glass was already there when he arrived and he parked without noticing it. But, feeling practical now, knowing that he can change a tyre, he opens his boot. Expecting to see his spare, he is dismayed to find instead an old, flat tyre, the same one he removed by the side of the road before driving home to find Kenny coming out of his house.