The Light Keeper (ARC)

by Cole Moreton

  ‘Ah. We are back to that again! I’m sorry. I needed to know.’ ‘The doors are locked, but the keys are on the table. Take them.

  You can go at any time.’

  ‘Out there? I would go the wrong way in the dark.’ ‘I can take you anywhere. The car—’ ‘Is a death trap, by the look of it.’

  ‘Sarah—’

  ‘I know. You said. It must seem strange. You can’t understand. It’s simple, in my mind. If there is a line, there will be a child. I will stay with him, with my life. If there is no line, and this is what I know will happen, then my decision is made. The life I have must end. I have known this for a long time. This pain must stop.’

  ‘The pain will pass . . .’

  ‘Seven years, Gabe. Prodding. Poking. Knives. Drugs. Hope, despair, hope, despair, hope, that is the worst of it. Hope rising when you wish it would not, because you know it will die, more painfully every time. It is a kind of torture. Now it will end, all that. Either way. I am too tired for anything else. What you’re talking about would only be a step from one state to another, any-way. Step outside the capsule of the lantern room and float free, like a space walk. Like ashes in the wind. Like gravity. It’s natural.’

  ‘How can you talk about it like that?’

  ‘I’ve thought about it more often than you.’

  ‘How do you know? I have seen what is left behind.’

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  She smiles to herself, strangely. ‘But anyway, no need to worry. It’s not your fault. What will be will be. Tomorrow.’ Sarah looks at her watch. ‘Today, in fact. When the sun comes up. Will you let me stay here until then?’

  He can’t. His heart is breaking again. It is obscene. She’s so young, so lovely, how dare she do this? How can he help her?

  You must, Gabe. You must.

  You had no choice, Rí. She has a choice.

  Help her make one. Help her.

  Saying nothing, he moves to the seat where Sarah has sat down again, and puts his arm along the wooden curve behind her. She shifts up into him, and leans so that her head is resting on him and she can feel his breath on her forehead and his arm around her, close.

  ‘I will,’ he says. ‘God help us both.’

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  Forty Four

  They can’t sit like that for ever. Perhaps it would be better if they could, now that a balance has been reached between them, but the balance cannot last. There must be a tipping point, after which things begin to slide, one way or another. Sometimes in life it is a kiss, but not now. Sarah needs more than a physical gesture to rescue her. Gabe is sitting there with her scent in his nostrils, her hair almost in his mouth, the softness of a breast against his arm, a nod away from kissing her forehead then her face then her lips, but he knows that would be a betrayal. He is not about to risk Rí’s wrath, even as he knows very well that there is no wrath. There is no Rí except in his heart, his mind, on his skin. The sadness is always there – he wades through it waist deep every moment of every day, lies down with it lapping at his mouth at night. He wants to be furious with Sarah for being ready to throw every-thing she has away, and all the hurt it will cause, but what is the point? He feels for her. He knows what grief can do, even if it is grief for a life that has not yet begun. So he offers her the one thing he can. His only love.

  ‘She went away on a summer’s day,’ he says quietly, hoping Sarah’s slow and deep breathing means she is asleep. ‘It was quick, at least. We knew it was coming some time, but not when. They said it could be years, a whole lifetime. It was inoperable, sitting in her brain, waiting. No need to shave her head then. Live every day as if it is your last. We had three years, eight months, four days and eleven hours together, from the moment outside the bar when she kissed me to the moment in the garden here when she turned to say the honeysuckle was in bloom and she fell . . .’

  Turning, like a dancer. Falling, like a sleeper.

  ‘I went to her and held her and she was warm, breathing. I shook her and hugged her and kissed her, but she would not speak and she lay there in the chalk with dust on her clothes.

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  I couldn’t phone. There was no signal. I pulled her into the car and drove down to the town, to the hospital, as fast as I could. Took the wing off on a bollard. The police stopped me and I said help me, there is something wrong, and they did and she was gone and the ambulance came, but she was gone, there was noth-ing they could do they said, she was gone, just gone . . .’

  Always and for ever.

  The noise he makes is pitiful. The anger left him long ago. Regret is all, now. The keeper of the light with no light left to keep. The man who cannot leave, however much it hurts to stay. This is home, she said, and he has had no other. This tower on a windy hill is where she wanted to be with him and where she is now. This is where he let her go on a sharpening day in late summer, raising a fist and opening his fingers, because he had to. Letting go of the ashes that vanished in a moment like a twist of smoke. Now she hangs in the air between the sky and the sea, like the spirit woman in the song she used to sing, and she leaves her lover grounded, unable to lift his feet from the earth, always sensing her just out of reach, seeing her face in the shifting clouds.

  Always. And for ever.

  Sarah is not asleep, she heard it all. Reaching up above her head, she finds his jaw with her cool fingers and without turning around, says, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Of course. That’s what they all say, when they say anything at all. At first there was astonishment among the friends they had left in London, and endlessly painful discussions about how it awful it was, how she had never been ill, how cruel it was to take somebody like that so unexpectedly. They had not known. That was her plan. There was a lot of sympathy, a crushing weight of goodwill, but one man’s grief is another man’s boredom in the end. So after the memorial service, after the weeping, drunken friends, he came back here to hide himself away in the tower, with only Maria.

  ‘Really, I am sorry,’ says Sarah. ‘You must think me selfish.’ ‘You have a choice. That’s all. She didn’t.’

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  ‘Would you be angry with me if I did what you think I want to do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s that over there?’ Sarah’s looking at a pile of white feathers on the floor, beside the end of the semi-circular sofa bench. There’s another by the pile of wood and another a few feet away and they are all connected somehow, like someone has rolled up wings and put them away for another day. ‘Is it all the same thing?’

  Now Gabe knows he is encircled. There are three of them in this room. ‘It’s an angel,’ he says, and Sarah laughs. ‘Really. She made it. The last thing. For in here. An installation. It hung from there . . .’ He looks to the circle at the centre of the ceiling, where a hook hangs from the lead cross in the middle of the stained-glass compass. ‘It was beautiful. He or she, you never know with angels, was going to fly.’

  Sarah shifts on the sofa, pulls herself away, sits up. ‘How?’ ‘Like a kite. I’m not sure. There is no weight to it. She made it to

  fly away on the thermals and to be biodegradable, so that it could do no harm.’

  ‘Can I see?’ Sarah is up and moving towards the feathers. ‘No! Don’t touch it!’

  ‘Wow. I’m sorry.’ She backs away.

  Okay, Gabe. Okay. Easy. Empty. His eyes close. She says nothing. Good. So that’s it. She’ll go. No point even apologizing. Stupid, but what does she expect, coming in here? Who the hell is she anyway?

  Then he feels a hand on his head, in his hair, running through his hair, and the other on his cheek again. He’s so tired. Her touch is refreshing, water in the desert. He opens his eyes to her but Sarah is nowhere near him; it wasn’t her, she’s on the other side of the room, bending down, lifting the angel. Carefully. She does it so carefully, as if lifting a child. Feathers cascade over her arm. She’s having difficulty. Gabe is afraid she will tear the wing, so he goes to her and takes
the next part and the next, until the soft, weightless silk and paper and feather angel is in both their

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  arms. And without saying anything, without even saying how she knows what to do, Sarah finds the head of the angel with golden eyes looking upwards and moves a chair across with her foot and stands on the chair and lifts the angel up towards the hook and tries to put him back where he – or she – belongs.

  ‘I tore it down,’ says Gabe, swallowing the pain in his

  throat. ‘I fixed the hook when . . . but I didn’t put it back up.

  Why are you doing this?’

  ‘I don’t know. Help me.’

  He finds the long pole they bought for opening higher win-dows, with a boat hook and spike on the end. She offers a loop of thread at the back of the angel’s head and he lifts it into place on the ceiling hook.

  ‘Where do these go?’

  Together they unfold the wings and the arms that run through them and fix the frame of the featherweight angel so that he or she is in the room, filling the room, the angel of the south with arms wide open. The uplights illuminate the wings. The man and the woman caught in the shimmering light of the angel’s embrace. Sarah’s legs shake and the chair wobbles and she seems about to fall, but Gabe grabs her waist and holds her there steady and safe, his head against her belly.

  That is what Magda sees, as she stands outside the tower in the half-dark, looking up at the lantern room. A shimmering light and the Keeper and the beautiful stranger in a loving embrace. Now she knows why the Lord made her sleepless, why she was called from her bed to climb the hill in the moonlight. She had thought it was to make a deal, silence for silence – no police, no accusations on either side – but instead it was to do this, to be a witness, which is God’s work. Magda takes a photograph with the camera on her phone. Then she hurries away through the cold, waking dawn, back to the pub and Jack.

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  Forty Five

  The day is coming. The moon has slid away but there are stars above, around and beneath them still, falling through time and bouncing upwards again on the mirror of the sea. Far away to the east there is a low glow, a promise. The air is unusually calm, the almost-morning wind feathers their faces as they stand on the balcony outside the lantern room, with their backs to the glass and the angel inside. Shoulder to shoulder, hands side by side on the rail, not quite touching, when he speaks.

  ‘I don’t blame you. I’ve thought about it many times. Of course I have, living here. It would be so easy, look.’

  They are thirty feet from the ground, although it feels like more, and below them on this side of the tower is only a precariously narrow ledge, pockmarked and filled in with pools of builder’s gravel to make a way around the building for those who dare, but no more than ten feet wide before it falls away to the rocks. It looks narrower. Much narrower. Four seconds on from there, the outcome would be certain.

  ‘I’m not trying to tell you what to do.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Well, okay.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she says.

  ‘I get that. I’m trying to stay calm, Sarah, doing my best. Will you let me try and say something? I need to get this off my chest. For my own sake. I could have gone over that day, when I let her ashes go. I wanted to. I understand that desire to be with your mum – you can’t know how much. I’m a coward, maybe. It’s a long way down. I have seen the bodies, I know what happens to them. That’s not it, though. Rí didn’t want me to go. She didn’t want that.’

  The wind hides Sarah’s face in a wrap of hair.

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  ‘I heard her voice that day. She said no. Don’t do it. Maybe I’m mad. I hear voices. Her voice. No others, just Rí. She talks to me. I don’t know what it is, Sarah, but it sounds like her. She says the things she used to say, and that day she said no. Live. Breathe. Seize the day, bite the head off life – that was one of her favourites – and chew it until the juices run down your chin. Be alive!’

  ‘Did you talk back?’

  ‘I do. I told her: “That’s easy to say when you’re dead!”’ Sarah’s hand goes to her mouth to stifle a laugh through her

  hair. He puts his hand on hers and returns it to the rail. ‘Hold on. It’s okay, I was trying to be funny. You’re different, you know that?’

  ‘To her? Thanks for that.’

  ‘No. I mean different to when you came here. You would not have laughed. You would have given me that face.’

  ‘What face?’

  ‘This one.’ He tries to do a deadpan stare, and turns down the corners of his mouth with his fingers, but cracks up.

  ‘Are you laughing at me?’

  ‘No, no. Yes. Maybe. A bit. Sorry. I don’t get much company up here.’

  ‘I can see why.’

  ‘You don’t have to go. Did I just say that? Oh God. Sorry.’

  ‘I do, Gabe. One way or another. Not long now.’ She looks towards the dawn. A crowbar of light is pushing a space between the weight of dark clouds and black sea. ‘Almost time.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Sarah!’ His voice flies out over the edge, dying into the drop. ‘Look, hang on, I’m sorry, Rí is right. There is too much beauty to see, too much to enjoy, too much life to live; you can’t just throw it away. You have to swallow the bitter and taste the sweet. You have to go on because there is no choice, this is what we have. This is what we do. It’s a privilege, Sarah, a priv ilege. You’ve made me see that, coming in here where nobody asked you, filling the place up with yourself. I didn’t want you here, but you came anyway and you’re waking me up, making me

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  feel. I don’t want to feel, I want it to stop. I want to sleep, but you won’t let me and Rí won’t let me and you’re both bloody right. This life is a wonderful thing. Look. The sea never stops shifting, shining even in the night; that sun coming up over there won’t be stopped whether I’m here or not, but I want to be here because even when it hurts, so much, the pain is life and life is right. Live every moment. She had it stolen from her. She had no choice, do you see that? No choice. You have. You’re making the wrong one! Come on, Sarah . . . get a grip!’

  He’s gone way too far. Sarah recoils, he can see her pained face in the light from the room, and now she is moving towards him with a weird, open smile, and maybe this is it, maybe he can stop her, because Rí would want that, because it would matter. Sarah’s hand is on his neck, she is leaning in close and her lips brush his cheek in a kiss and she whispers something in his ear. He feels the warmth of her breath and the shudder of arousal before he realizes what she has said.

  ‘You know nothing.’

  Nothing, she thinks, running down the stairs. Nothing, she thinks, striding down the big steps and over the gravel on the land side of the tower.

  ‘Nothing!’

  Nothing about the grief, the pain that never goes away, the throbbing, constant pain in her head, in her body – the doctors say it does not exist, but it is everywhere, always, now and all the time – he knows nothing about that or the coldness, the chill, the emptiness in her like a dead thing. ‘I am dead already,’ she says, stumbling over the ground beyond the lighthouse wall, where there is only deeper shadow and her feet are unsure. The ground is blue, her feet are blue, her clothes and hands are blue, the sea is blue and the sky is a deep, dark, mournful, moody black and blue. He knows nothing about her, nothing about the way Jack comes at her, nothing about the way he leaves her when he has done what he needs to do, nothing about the nothingness inside her. There is nothing. No feeling, no hope, no humour, no laughter, no light. She is all shut down. So let it stop now,

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  this morning. Let it cease. Let there be an end to all this and let her go.

  She feels her way along the wall to where it breaks down, to where she knows there is a little wooden stake driven into the ground, near the edge. Here it is. She plants her feet wide and opens her arms as if to pl
ead for mercy, but it is far too late for that. The test will be negative, she knows that. She looks down and sees the blue ground give way to the rumpled blue sea just in front of her feet and knows she need only take a step to end her life now. You don’t jump, you walk. One step at a time. Just one. The little fire in the east makes her think of her mother in the hospital and the blinding white light. She opens her arms wide and feels the wind take her. This is the way they go. She is going.

  She is dying for a wee.

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