The Light Keeper (ARC)

by Cole Moreton

  Jack did not follow. He knew she would walk for a bit and come to herself. This agitated, paranoid woman was not Sarah as he knew her, the Sarah he loved. The fertility drugs were strong, the mood swings brutal. He was willing to wait. He wasn’t expecting the doorman with an outstretched hand.

  ‘Excuse me, sir. Madam asked me to give you this.’

  A sheet of thick, creamy paper with ‘The Grand Hotel’ embossed in gold at the top of the page, and Sarah’s tight little

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  letters forming black words on a slight diagonal. ‘Jack,’ she had written. ‘Go home.’

  He found her on the promenade by a squat Napoleonic structure called the Wish Tower. Three wishes. One, for this to end. Two, for Sarah to return to him, the way she was. Three, for a baby. Or no baby. He didn’t care any more; he just wanted it over, one way or another. She was walking up and down the seafront, waiting for him to find her, sorry to have spoilt things. So as Jack searches for her again now, he wonders whether this is really the right place to look. It costs a fortune, but in her state of mind anything is possible.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he says to the under-manager. ‘You’ve got a guest here, Sarah Jones. Could you let her know I am here to see her please?’

  ‘Of course. Who shall I say is asking for her?’ ‘Her husband.’

  She frowns, just for the briefest moment, before professional-ism wipes it away.

  ‘Sir, are you sure?’

  ‘Please, tell her.’

  More guests arrive, with expensive luggage. They wear formal clothes, as if for a wedding. They need help with the revolving doors. An elegant elderly lady moves slowly across the reception area, immaculate in a navy suit, floral blouse and pearls. She must be ninety, at least. ‘Yes?’ She is speaking to him, in a thin, reedy voice. Her lipstick is bright red, her skin mottled, her hair a whis-per. ‘What is this? Young man? I am Sarah Jones . . .’

  And so, a few moments later, a retired judge is left standing in the lobby of the Grand Hotel, sincere in her hope that the anx-ious young American gentleman finds his wife very soon. At the police station, the detective in FCUK glasses is trying to imagine what Sarah is like as she dials her mobile number one more time and gets the answering message again. In another room, the big duty sergeant is thinking of Sarah too, as he finds her

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  profile on Facebook. Not much to go on, but a looker, certainly. He clicks on ‘send’ and a report makes its way to his colleagues in the Metropolitan Police. Another sergeant, seventy-five miles to the north, reads the name of Sarah Bramer and a description of her circumstances, and begins to formulate a response plan that will involve knocking at the door of her flat, speaking to her neighbours to see if there is a key, going to her place of work and calling her next-of-kin, who is listed as her father. A reverend.

  Meanwhile, Jack is in a taxi heading for the Downs. The officers who offered him a lift earlier are already there, taking one more slow drive out west along the coastal road to the Gap, where they will pull in to speak to Magda. They know her well. She is also thinking of Sarah, with little more than a name to go on, as she hoovers the bedroom at the pub, which has not had a guest for a while. In the bar, the coxswain of the local lifeboat is working his day job as a painter, stirring emulsion and wondering if his boat will be called out to recover another woman today, as it was yes-terday and a few days before. Something weird is going on. There are more people jumping than ever before. He hears the thrum of a helicopter and knows the pilot will be looking along the rocks or in the water. There’s an alert out, the police gave a name. All of these people are thinking of Sarah, wherever she may be.

  Sarah Bramer, formerly Jones, reported missing 18 April at 10.13 p.m. Female, 30 years old, born in Birmingham, United Kingdom. Address: 263 Francis Road, Leyton, London E10. Married to Jack Bramer, 30, of the same address. Ethnicity: M1, Scottish and Jamaican. Occupation: teacher at St Joseph’s Community School, Leyton. Height: 5ft 10ins. Hair: reddish brown curls. Distinguishing marks: birth mark on left breast, small tattoo of a soul bird on upper right buttock. Eyes: green like the sea on a hot day. Smile: intoxi-cating. Laugh: mesmerizing. Brightness: dazzling. Beauty: silencing. Mood swings: infuriating. Sadness: heartbreaking. Whereabouts: unknown.

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  Eleven

  She hangs in the morning air, caught between the sea, the earth and the sky. He has nothing but a thought, a feeling that Rí is out there, outside the lantern room, looking in through the glass. Watching him. It’s impossible. He is thirty feet above the ground at the top of the tower, more than four hundred feet above the sea. But he won’t look up from his work, in case the feeling goes. ‘I saw you on the hill today. I shouted out but it was someone I have never seen up here before.’ He could have sworn it was her, walking like an adventurer, striding out, head wrapped in a bright scarf with a long coat trailing behind. ‘Must have frightened the life out of her.’ The window frame rattles somewhere. His yawn is long and hard. The coat was the right shape, but it wasn’t made of patchwork, velvet and silk, fragments of colour and texture stitched together by a magpie mind like hers. It wasn’t the first time. What they don’t tell you, what the counsellor with her tis-sues doesn’t say, is that it all gets so bloody routine. After the adrenaline wears off, after the challenge of survival has been met, the grinding grief remains. The yawns never end.

  ‘I’m sick of it. This. Without you.’

  The Keeper is on his knees, digging into the soft wood of a rot-ten window ledge, causing the paint to buckle against the blade of his chisel. Clearing the bad from the good, dislodging flakes of wet, black-brown wood, spraying tiny splinters over his knuckles. Working away to the song of the wind, and talking as the red light of the mini-recorder glows by his side. If he sits and tries to talk, he can’t do what the counsellor asked; but if he works, he forgets himself. ‘In the morning . . . when I wake up . . . sometimes in that moment, before my eyes are fully open, you could be there.’ Beside him. Supple and close. Breathing lightly. She’s here now. ‘Your knees in my belly. Your hand over your eyes. Your pillow all scrunched up under your neck. I could reach out and smooth

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  your hair and kiss your neck and smell you, sweet and dark. But the moment I think of it, you’re gone.’

  His hands have stopped working. His eyes are closed.

  ‘Then I’m falling. It feels like I’m falling. My insides, my spirit, my person is still there, still up there with you, but my body is falling away, to the truth.’

  Just the dust, and the whisper on the wind. His voice is barely there.

  ‘I can’t breathe then, or move. I want to stay as I am, between the sleep and the dream.’

  He could sleep here and now. Why not? Who cares? He doesn’t sleep in the night time, so why not sleep in the day? For the same reason that he still gets dressed properly, still washes, still shaves. Still works. Whatever that is. He has to get up in the morning. Make a coffee. Turn on the radio.

  ‘Sometimes I turn it over because you like music in the morn-ing and the DJ is blethering on about some old nonsense, then he puts on a song and it’s one of your songs and I just can’t do it, I can’t do it . . .’

  Eyes open, seeing nothing. This is not the absence of feeling but the overwhelming presence of it: sorrow, grief, loss, confu-sion, pain, frustration, fear, all fighting for the air inside him. If he could open a door in his chest, it would be like a medieval paint-ing of hell in there. Bodies writhing. Open, screaming mouths. Wild animal panic. He does not dare open the door; that’s why the counselling had to stop. The effort of keeping the door closed exhausts him as it is.

  ‘I have to keep on. I don’t know why. Sometimes I’m dressing for the memory, like this . . .’ His fingers touch the piebald stone hanging from his neck. ‘I wouldn’t wear this. And then . . . and then . . . I have to start the day. Do the work. Make this place comfortable for people to come and stay, but I don’t want that to happen. I don�
�t want anyone to be here at all, except me and you. All I want is me and you, like it should be.’

  Rí knew this place as a ruin in her childhood, but someone had worked on it and built rooms, made it just about habitable, before

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  running out of money. This could be their place, she said. Their tower. He used his redundancy payment, along with what she had. Everything she had. When they got the keys it was cold and dark. They climbed the steps to the top and the lantern room, lit an old heater, spread a rug and lay down together in the glow of it, ignoring the heady stink of damp and paraffin. El fuego que cali-enta mi corazon. The fire that warms my heart. Maria had Spanish and Irish blood, the wildness was in her, she could speak both languages. The wild woman had shaved off all her raven hair and he was shocked by the pictures of her in the past, but she loved him to stroke that soft stubble, and her pale blue eyes would close in pleasure. They would flash open again quickly if he said the wrong thing, though.

  ‘You argued with everything,’ he says, softly.

  No I didn’t!

  A shadow shivers through the room. Outside, there’s a flash of bright colour, a half-moon of silk, a canopy gliding by the win-dow. Beneath it a figure in black. A parascender riding the ther-mals like the spirit woman in an old Irish song she used to sing. ‘I am come to you from among the waves, riding on the wind.’ And gone. She’s gone.

  He is as high as he can get, at the top of their tower, between the earth and the sky. She comes to him here, but when she leaves again like this, he cannot follow. He feels as though he’s falling, like the parascender, like Icarus with melted wings.

  ‘I ought to leave this place, Rí. I ought to go. I don’t know why I stay. Because I can’t go . . .’ The man they call the Keeper steadies himself with a hand on the window ledge and looks directly to the south, to the sea, to the light skittering off the water.

  ‘Where on earth would I go?’

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  Twelve

  The bell rings. A proper old ship’s bell hung on a rope, echoing up the steps. But that’s odd because it never rings, there’s never anybody at the door. Those who come to the cliffs look in or rest by the wall but then walk right past on their way to the Head or the Sisters; and those who lurk on the edge at dawn and dusk with thoughts of going over seem to avoid the grey stone tower. That’s the way he likes it. Until he’s stronger. No vacancies, no visitors. Nobody he has to speak to. The lighthouse keeper goes slowly down the spiral of steps, wondering. Down another level, past the desk that is meant to serve as a reception. One day. Maybe. Through the toughened, frosted glass of the new front door he sees a figure in silhouette like a scarecrow: dark, skinny, long-limbed, with a shock of dark, messy hair.

  ‘I’m looking for my wife.’

  It’s the boy from the pub. He doesn’t look drowned any more, but he hasn’t slept, that’s obvious. He’s looking in, trying to see through the darkness of the lighthouse. The boy hasn’t shaved for a while, thinks the Keeper, touching his own stubble. Ah. Yes.

  ‘You do bed and breakfast, don’t you? Is she staying here?’ He must take the sign down. It went up far too early.

  ‘Talk to me. What’s the matter with you? Are you shitting me? She’s in there, isn’t she? Sarah! Sarah! I’m here!’ Now he’s shout-ing. This could get out of hand. On a better day, the lighthouse keeper might have taken the boy in, offered him a cup of tea; but right now, his head is full of his lost love. That wasn’t the boy going past the window just now, was it, with a parachute? No, surely not.

  ‘Let me see her. Where is she?’

  This startling scarecrow tries to push into the lighthouse, and without thinking the Keeper steps across him, accidentally grind-ing his arm against the wall.

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  ‘Shit, what are you doing? Man! Jesus!’

  The boy throws a sudden punch, fist whipping in from nowhere, catching him on the eyebrow, stinging. Bad move. The old instincts kick in. Hostile environment training. He grabs the boy’s swinging arm and pulls him in close and tight, their faces almost touching. Hot breath, a fleck of saliva landing on his lip. There is no choice but to speak now. ‘Listen. Understand. She is not here. This place is closed. We’re not . . . I’m not . . .’

  The confusion in his voice gives the boy his cue to wriggle free, and he jumps back, bouncing on the step, waving his arms. ‘You hurt me! I’m getting the cops! Sarah? Sarah!’

  The Keeper stands with his arms by his sides, waiting for the manic young man to shout himself hoarse. Deep breaths. Some one has to be calm. ‘Please.’ He speaks very quietly, very matter of fact, as he learned to do from policemen and soldiers at crime scenes and in war zones. ‘Let’s start again. What is it that you want here?’

  ‘Jesus. I want my wife. Sarah. She’s missing. Don’t I know you? Is she in there? I’ve been walking, looking for her, I can’t find her. These hills are so steep. I’ve been walking and walking, she’s not here. I can’t see her, she must be there, inside your place; that’s the only place, there’s nowhere else she can be. Is she there?’

  ‘I’m on my own.’

  ‘Sure?’

  The lighthouse keeper does not answer but his eyes say yes, trust me.

  ‘Jack. I’m Jack.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know that? How? Shit! Get her, will you? Just let me talk to her.’

  The Keeper tries to fill the doorway. Of course he doesn’t know this person’s name, he was just responding. This is what always happens. Misunderstandings. He’d like to help this Jack, he’d like to help him look for this Sarah, he’d like her to be here . . . but his eyebrow smarts and his head is thumping and he just wants it over, to get this guy out of here, away. ‘Please, go.’

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  Surprisingly, Jack does. ‘Tell her. I’ll be back,’ he says, stumbling over the gravel, out of the gate, looking back over his shoulder, then disappearing behind a wall. Thank God. The glass is cool against the lighthouse keeper’s forehead. So one man stands in the darkness of his hallway, another slumps in the sunshine, his back against a drystone wall.

  Neither sees the other’s eyes filling up with tears.

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  Thirteen

  This is ridiculous. The boy has got to him. He’s been threatened by far more dangerous people than this, but his hands are trem-bling. He can’t stay here, he’s got to do something, so he chooses to run. He puts on his shorts, an old T-shirt, a thin Lycra hoodie, then his trainers – silver Nikes with a rip in the right toe, a bit battered like himself – and he finds his phone and earphones and runs down the steps, through the gate, along the path, in the opposite direction to the way the boy went.

  The air is heavy, the sun is still shining, but there’s a breeze blowing up from the valley, across his body, from land to sea. He presses play with his thumb and on it comes, the track that gets him going, the one he always runs to first: ‘Move On Up’ by Curtis Mayfield. His left foot goes down on the one, right foot on the two. His hips jolt as his feet find rabbit holes, and dusty chalk patches to slide on, but otherwise the ground is soft, springy, a wide carpet of flattened grass along the back of the hill with the drop on one side and a line of gorse bushes on the other.

  It’s a long, downhill slope towards the Gap and gravity drags him along faster, his pace getting ahead of the song; but as his shoulders shake down and his hands loosen at the wrist he begins to relax and let his breathing come naturally, listening to the scratchy guitar, the stabbing horns, the swooping strings and the rattling congas. As always, the memory comes. They were in the car, on a hot, sunny day. The soft top was down, the wind ruffling his hair. He had one hand on the steering wheel, the other reaching out along the top of Rí’s seat. Her bare feet were up on the dashboard, the summer dress riding up to the top of her legs where the last of her hidden stars were waiting. The tattooed stars that cascaded down one side of her body, spilling across her stomach, burning out on the soft, pale skin o
f her inner thigh.

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  ‘Hey, Jensen Button! Watch the road, will you?’ she said, laugh-ing, pinching the hem still further up, until he really did see stars. The country roads were winding, the Triumph Spitfire was on song for a change, he was steering into the turns, going much too fast, hoping there was nothing coming the other way. Knowing there wouldn’t be. The road stretched out ahead, appearing from behind trees and barns, towards their destination. The Gap. A birthday trip down South with a proper wicker picnic hamper and a coolbox of wine. That was the day she made him drive on to the lighthouse, marched him up the hill and said, ‘What do you think?’ As if it was a work of art, not an abandoned building. As if he should have been able to guess what she was thinking. How ridiculous.