You, Me & the Sea

by Elizabeth Haynes

  ‘I’ll give you a call, shall I?’ Craig asks him.

  ‘Aye, or I could leave it here.’ He’s talking about the quad. ‘You know how to use it?’

  Rachel thinks for a moment he’s asking her, but he’s talking to Craig.

  ‘Aye, right enough. I’ll see you, then,’ Craig says, and shakes Fraser’s hand.

  And Fraser walks off in the direction of the lighthouse without so much as a glance in her direction. The dog stays a moment longer, looking from Rachel to Fraser’s retreating back as if it’s thinking of staying, then it takes off after him.

  ‘What’s the dog called?’ she asks.

  ‘Don’t know,’ he says. ‘Come inside, hen.’

  How many times must he have been here, and he’s never once asked about Fraser’s dog?

  The boxes have been stacked in a large, open-plan room. An unattractive kitchen is at one end: badly fitted cupboards, a laminate worktop warped and lifting at the edges, revealing the chipboard beneath. The rest of it is a sitting room with various mismatched chairs and sofas, and an ugly stained-pine dining table, marked with several overlapping rings where people have put mugs down without coasters. Bare wooden benches sit either side of it. The breeze-block walls are decorated with posters of birds and pictures of Highland scenery, and one framed picture of Anstruther harbour with the Island Princess moored in the foreground, the whole thing faded where it’s been in the sun. There is a large, squat woodburner at the far end, and a vast stack of random bits of wood inside a frame which seems to be made out of pallets, nailed together.

  The place smells damp, and over the top of that Rachel can still detect the undeniable whiff of shit from the septic tanks.

  ‘I’ll give you the tour,’ Craig says nervously, perhaps worried by the expression on her face. Although there’s not a lot more to see.

  There are three bedrooms: a double, a twin, and the smallest room, which has two bunk beds in it. There is a chilly, cheaply tiled bathroom without a bath – just a shower, a toilet and a sink. There is also a separate toilet next door to it. It feels very much like the sort of hostel you’d stay in when your budget amounted to the next step up from free, and her heart sinks. None of the beds are made. There’s her first task.

  ‘Right,’ she says. ‘Am I in the double?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Craig answers, confused.

  They stare at each other, then he seems to follow her train of thought.

  ‘Oh! No, hen, you’ve a room in the lighthouse.’ He chortles with laughter – how hilarious that she thought she was staying in the bird observatory! Nobody had actually said anything about where she was going to sleep. She had just made that assumption.

  ‘With … Fraser?’

  ‘Aye, with Fraser. Much nicer up there, there’s a telly an’ everything. Did you think you were down here, on your own?’

  Rachel feels something like the beginnings of panic. ‘You want me to share with a man I’ve only just met?’

  She has a particular voice that emerges when things go wrong. It comes from nowhere and it’s a bit high-pitched, not her usual voice at all. It says things, before she has time to think that saying them out loud is probably not a good idea.

  Craig looks slightly horrified. ‘Ah,’ he says, lamely, ‘Fraser’s all right once you know him.’

  ‘But I don’t know him,’ she squeaks. ‘That’s the point.’

  For a moment they stare at each other, until she realises that she has no choice. What’s she going to do? What can she do? Run? Get back on the boat?

  ‘There are other buildings …’ he says. ‘There’s the old lightkeeper’s cottages, the ones we’re thinking of making into holiday lets. Maybe you could look, see if you’d rather stay there. But it’s a lot of work, so for now you’ll have to stay in the lighthouse. And you don’t really want to be all on your own. This is a lonely enough place without making it more so.’

  They unpack the plastic crates. Craig unloads everything directly on to the counter, as if he’s in a hurry to get away as quickly as he can. Rachel starts to put things away, but the cupboards are already occupied: ratty cardboard, cobwebs, a packet of porridge oats with a hole in it, its contents scattered. Everything needs cleaning.

  As the plastic crates are emptied they are nested neatly inside each other. Rachel had taken her backpack out of the quad’s trailer but now she puts it back in for Craig to cart on to the lighthouse, along with the empty crates, which are going back with the boat.

  The birdwatchers have very basic needs when it comes to catering. They’ll do their own breakfasts, and there will be bread and ham and cheese and tinned soups and beans for them to make lunch with. Rachel’s catering role comes in the evenings, when she will dish up something simple and hearty. Lasagne. Shepherd’s pie. Tuna pasta bake. Stew. In between groups of visitors, she will change the beds, clean, and do the laundry. Other than that, there is an extensive list of small but important jobs including checking the level of water in the well which provides the bird observatory with water (a dry spell might mean showers are rationed), making sure the generators are stocked with fuel, collecting driftwood for the woodburner when walking on the beach, litter-picking on the beach (apparently plastic items are washed up constantly; there are two huge metal bins by the jetty which are collected every once in a while and taken to the recycling centre on the mainland), and keeping birds out of the bird observatory. It seems they have a tendency to wander in, if the door’s left open. ‘Helping the warden as required’ is also on there.

  She had asked Craig about that over breakfast, scanning through the list and barely taking it in. ‘What sort of things will he need help with?’

  ‘Counting birds, most likely. Ringing and netting. Taking pictures. General maintenance.’

  All of these things are whirling around Rachel’s mind, twisting themselves around the notion that she’s sharing a house with a man she’s only just met. A man who, she now realises, reminds her of Captain Haddock from Tintin, if Captain Haddock had been six foot five and built like a wall.

  There is a pile of plastic-wrapped duvets and pillows that were in several of the largest crates.

  ‘You’ll need one set for your bed, hen,’ Craig tells her. She counts them out. There are two double duvets, so she takes one of those and a pack of pillows and separates it from the rest.

  They have finished unloading all the boxes and Craig has shown her the outhouse with the generator, and the washing machine, and the heavy iron grating that covers the well. They are back at the quad.

  ‘Backsies?’ he asks warily.

  Really she would prefer not to have to hold on to him, but it’s a fair walk back to the lighthouse and she’s tired now, still tired from yesterday’s long journey. She throws the duvet and pillows into the trailer along with her backpack, clambers on to the back of the quad and he fires it up, lurching off down the hill and up the other side, nearly tipping her off the back of it. She squeals and grabs at his waist, thinking about helmets and people who’ve suffered brain injuries following quad accidents, never mind miles out in the North Sea; but, by the time she has opened her eyes and looked at the grey-green landscape bumping past, the lighthouse is looming large ahead of them.

  He stops the quad outside the lighthouse and kills the engine. Rachel collects her backpack from the trailer, eases it on to both shoulders. Duvet in one hand, pillow in the other.

  ‘Call me if you have any problems,’ he says in a tone that suggests he might even answer.

  He manages an awkward jog down the hill to the harbour. The Island Princess is waiting for him, rising and falling next to the jetty, ready to head back to May to pick up the tourists.

  Already thirty-six hours have passed since she left Lucy in the station car park. It feels like a lifetime ago.

  Fraser

  Fraser is no more keen to share the lighthouse than Rachel is. He has lived here for the past four years, and the way of life has suited him just fine. He isn’t suppose
d to be on his own, there is supposed to be an assistant, but whoever they were they never appeared and he never bothered to ask, because the answer would have been ‘funding issues’, as it always was. And he’s glad, under the circumstances, to be left to his own devices here. Fraser is not a man who plays by the rules. And, so far, he has been able to do things his way.

  Now, thanks to the arrival of a new manager – Marion Scargill – they have this grand scheme in place to earn money from the island. There have always been birdwatchers, scientists, coming and going and staying in the bird observatory for the odd week at a time. They brought sleeping bags and tins of food and they managed well enough with the list of instructions for how to work the generator and how to check the water levels. They paid a nominal sum towards the island’s Trust and that was fine, everything was fine. And the island wasn’t paying its way; it isn’t exciting or pretty like the Isle of May, or dramatic and close enough to see from the shore, like the Bass Rock – it’s just another island with puffins and shags and razorbills the same as you get everywhere else, only without the scenery or a visitor centre with a working toilet.

  ‘We were thinking holiday cottages,’ Marion says.

  It’s January. Raining and blowing up a storm outside, and he’s at the head office of the Trust, which sounds as though it should be grander than two scruffy offices in a shared building, a bank of mailboxes in the hallway, frayed carpet on the stairs, loose carpet tiles in here. A radiator on full blast, ticking and gurgling.

  He stares at her. ‘Oh, aye?’ he says, thinking, here we go. He has heard this before. Marion, the new broom, all teeth and big hair and a suit that doesn’t really fit her. He has nothing against her, right up to the point at which she interferes in the way he manages things.

  ‘We were hoping to get them up and running in time for the season …’

  ‘The season?’

  ‘April to November … or maybe all through the winter, too, if there’s the demand.’

  November, he thinks, good luck with that. And why the fuck would anyone want to come and stay on an island that has, quite literally, nothing but birds to look at? There’s no shop, no beach to speak of, not that anyone would want to paddle in the fucking North Sea. Birders, they’re one thing – you can trust them to keep to the paths and not trample on ground-nesting birds. They’re generally good at clearing up after themselves, and can be called upon to help with the ringing and the counts. But holidaymakers? With poorly trained dogs and kids and … toddlers? With unfenced cliffs round most of the island?

  Not to mention the idea that he is fucking busy enough with his job the way it is. Not to mention that he likes his privacy.

  He doesn’t say any of this. Sits and listens and works the muscles in his jaw, hands balled into fists, tucked into his armpits where she can’t see them.

  ‘You don’t need to worry,’ she says, clearly misreading his silence. ‘We’re going to employ someone to manage it. Starting with the bird observatory.’

  He doesn’t want to just keep repeating her words back to her, and he cannot quite trust himself to speak at all in any case, so he stares until she carries on.

  ‘We’re going to smarten things up at the observatory – sheets and duvets. And we’ll cater for them – hearty meals in the evening so they don’t have to cook when they’re all tired and cold.’

  ‘Yum,’ he says, a lemon-slice of sarcasm in his voice.

  ‘It’ll be a long process, of course. We’ll have to get the lighthouse cottages refurbished gradually, but hopefully the new person will manage that as well as catering for our first guests. We’ll aim to have the first cottage bookings by, say, the beginning of July. The bird observatory bookings will pay for it, and then after that it’ll be a healthy profit.’

  He almost laughs out loud, but his gritted teeth prevent it. Firstly, she has grossly overestimated the condition of the lightkeeper’s cottages. He can almost smell them now – decades of damp, the mess left by marauding birds, the smashed windows with mouldy chipboard covering them, the old flagstone floors mossy and uneven. No plumbing, no electricity. She will have to get planning permission, and, however much she might want it to happen, that could take a long time. Other people have tried to do things with the cottages before – although not, as far as he could recall, anything as profoundly stupid as converting them to holiday cottages – and so far each scheme has been abandoned. Not cost-effective, especially when you have to get all the materials and the construction workers over to the island on a boat. And where are they going to stay, while they’re refurbishing?

  Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, there is the issue of Someone being employed to manage the bird observatory, as well as this proposed refurbishment. While he is not against this in principle – lord knows he certainly isn’t about to start catering for fucking ornithologists, he has more than enough to do – it’s more a question of who this person is going to be, and where they are going to be living.

  He asks Marion, as politely as he possibly can.

  ‘Oh, in the lighthouse, of course,’ she says brightly, and he wants to smash his fist into the wall behind her.

  ‘I live in the lighthouse,’ he seethes.

  ‘Aye, you do, you live there rent-free as an employee of the Trust, and your colleague will be similarly employed and accommodated. The lighthouse has – what is it? Three bedrooms? Or four?’

  There is nothing he can say. Yes, there are fucking four bedrooms, if you count the one with the sloping floorboards and the huge damp patch on the ceiling from the broken tiles on the roof. That one’s not what you would call habitable – and the other two are sparsely furnished and chilly, with mattresses that have definitely seen better days. Better decades. Centuries, even.

  What Marion has failed to understand is that he has a certain way of life on the island, that he is used to managing on his own. Most of the time there are no birders. They certainly don’t come every week.

  There are things he has thus far been able to take for granted. Privacy. Peace. Being in control of things. Miles of rough sea between you and the land, like the widest moat you can imagine, and no drawbridge.

  The other islands have webcams that people online can view and control. So far the Isle of Must has resisted this intrusion, or has been overlooked, to be more accurate. Everything he does on the island, he does without anyone watching. Without interference. Without comment.

  He is used to things the way they are. How is he going to manage, having some guy leaving shavings in the sink, drinking his coffee? What about his vegetable garden? What about the chickens?

  He talks himself down from near-raging internal hysteria. None of this, of course, is going to actually happen. The birders he’s met and grudgingly interacted with are not the sort who particularly want to be catered for. By the look of them, they probably spend the entire year sleeping in those grubby-looking sleeping bags, moving from one bird hide to another, following migrations and breeding seasons around the coast. They’re not going to want duvets and carpets and a lasagne with garlic bread. They’re used to eating own-brand baked beans cold out of the tin. And they spend their money on fucking binoculars and camera lenses, from what he can tell – and travelling, probably – not on cosy weeks in ‘luxury guest accommodation’.

  Marion is talking out of her arse. As usual.

  ‘Of course,’ she adds, smiling acidly, ‘you could consider managing the bird observatory yourself, as we’ve discussed previously?’

  She sees his face. Allows herself a smirk.

  ‘I thought not.’

  By the time she stops talking about recruitment and timescales ‘moving forward’, he’s almost smiling. It’ll be fucking hilarious to watch all of this go tits-up, he thinks. As it inevitably will.

  And now it’s April, and Marion’s plans have been set in motion. And this replacement woman has turned up, in a brand new waterproof jacket that swamps her, and boots that have barely had the labels taken off, look
ing as if a strong gust of wind might blow her off the cliff. He thinks she looks pissed off already. He thinks the big cheery hello and the handshake is all a big fucking act.

  Rachel.

  Rachel

  Yesterday morning Rachel had said goodbye to Lucy and Emily. Ian had had to stay overnight in London for a meeting, so he wasn’t there – and she hadn’t been surprised, or disappointed. She had liked Ian when Lucy first got together with him, but then gradually over the six – no, almost seven – years they’ve been together she has decided he is a bit of an arse, and over the past eighteen months this has festered into genuine dislike. It’s probably mutual.

  She’s got worse at hiding it, though. It was something that had been on her mind in the past few weeks, one of the list of things she had been musing over, during the long hours of darkness spent trying to sleep.

  How it feels to be childless.

  The fact that islands aren’t really islands, it’s only the sea that defines them. They’re land, connected to land seamlessly, it’s just that water is over the top.

  Things that can only be defined in the presence of another thing.

  Mothers are only mothers because they’ve given birth, only then sometimes they’re not.

  Lucy cried in the station car park. By rights she should have been at home in a fleecy dressing gown still, because it was early and she had a baby and who could expect anyone to look glamorous at six in the morning when they’d been up most of the night? But Lucy was up and dressed, in snug Boden jeans. She was even wearing a jacket, wheat-coloured linen, artfully creased. She had offered to drive Rachel to the station and Rachel had had no intention of turning that offer down, having spent most of her money on the train tickets. Tears were streaking her make-up and Rachel had looked at her with one raised eyebrow, thinking, who the fuck puts make-up on to say goodbye to their sister at six in the morning?