Lampie and the Children of the Sea

by Annet Schaap

  Miss Amalia straightens the dress. It almost reaches Lampie’s ankles. “Very nice, even though I do say so myself. Well? There aren’t any monsters, are there? Admit it.”

  “I, um…” begins Lampie.

  Martha slams the kettle onto the stove. “Coffee. I’m going to make coffee.”

  “Isn’t that a job for Emilia?”

  “I make my own coffee,” says Martha, with her back towards the woman. “Lampie, show the lady out, will you?”

  “So kind of you to offer,” says Miss Amalia. “But I never drink coffee.” She takes one last look around the messy kitchen. “So now you have no need for concern about Emilia’s clothing. Which will give you more time for… other necessary tasks. I’ll be sure to visit again. Good day to you.”

  Martha mutters something that does not sound very much like “good day” at all.

  Lampie realizes that walking is not very easy in her new dress. The heavy fabric wraps around her legs and the sleeves have slipped back down and are swishing to and fro as she walks.

  Halfway down the corridor, Miss Amalia stops.

  “However…” she says, “in spite of…” She waves her hand around, at the cracked tiles and the cobwebs in the corners. “I still think I’ve found a good place for you. Of course you were only at school for a very short time. But long enough to see that it wasn’t really for you, hm? Eh? Writing. Reading.”

  “Oh,” says Lampie. “But that was because… I had to leave because my mother…”

  “Learning is not for every child. That is just the way of the world.”

  Lampie stands a little straighter. “But someone in the house wants to teach me how to do all that. How to read and write, and everything.” It popped out before she even realized, and she really hopes Miss Amalia is not going to say, “Oh, yes? And who might that be?”

  But Miss Amalia’s laughter fills the entire corridor. “Oh, Emilia! Don’t get ideas above your station! It’ll only end in disappointment.” Then she turns on her heels and walks to the front door.

  Lampie is so angry that she can see spots before her eyes. She wants to run down the long corridor and kick the schoolteacher’s legs, as hard as she can, but it is as if the stiff, stifling dress is holding her back. It probably would not be a good idea anyway. So she stays where she is and just glares at the tall woman, who by now is almost at the front door, still shaking her head at the girl’s impertinence – and then Lampie remembers something. Something much more important.

  “Wait!” As quickly as she can in her dark-brown straitjacket, she runs after Miss Amalia. “My father!” she calls. “How is?… Where is?… Do you know how my father is?” Now she could almost kick herself. That was the first thing she had wanted to ask. The only thing.

  Miss Amalia pauses on the doormat. “Oh,” she says. “Really? You want me to tell you that now?”

  “Yes,” pants Lampie. “Yes, I do.”

  THE MOUTH OF THE NIGHT

  Her head heavy with thoughts, Lampie walks back to the kitchen, with the dress chafing her legs. She does not think she has ever disliked anything quite so much as the schoolteacher and her gift. What she really wants to do now is to run upstairs. She wants to look out the window, whether that boy likes it or not. But first she has to face Martha. Who must be angry with her.

  Martha is sitting at the dirty kitchen table with her coffee. When she sees Lampie, she shakes her head, but then she starts to laugh. Really loud.

  “My goodness, child, what an awful dress that is. You look like a nun. Please, just take the thing off!”

  She throws Lampie’s old dress to her. “Another couple of evenings and you’ll have a new one from me. I’m sure madam will have all kinds of comments to make, but let her.”

  Relieved, Lampie drops the heavy dark dress onto the floor and pulls her dirty, soft, old one back over her head. Then she looks at Martha.

  “I wasn’t really trying to run away,” she says shyly. “Or, well, um… I don’t know, it was all suddenly so… I’m sorry.”

  “No need.” Martha pushes a cup over to her and pours some milk into it. “I’d leave too if I could. But that’s not an option.”

  “Isn’t it?” asks Lampie.

  “With Lenny? Where would we go?” She looks at the girl. “Is it so bad upstairs? Does he?… What does he do?”

  “Oh, nothing,” says Lampie. “It’s actually fine. Mostly.”

  “What if I, um… took a turn going up there now and then?”

  “No need.” Lampie thinks it is kind of Martha to offer though. She knows just how much the housekeeper does not want to go upstairs.

  “Fine. Would you just go and call Lenny?” says Martha. “He’s been shaking in the pantry for an hour.”

  Lampie opens the door and the dogs storm in, barking, with a scared-looking Lenny peering after them.

  “She’s gone now, Lenny. You can come on in.” The boy lumbers into the room, nervously sits down at the table and picks up his scissors.

  “I’m going to pop upstairs,” says Lampie when they have finished eating.

  “What? Now?” asks Martha.

  “Yes,” says Lampie. “Just for a minute.”

  She thunders up the stairs, barely even knocks on the door and doesn’t wait for an answer before running into the room, heading straight behind the curtain and looking out.

  It is twilight, and the darkness is slowly creeping up out of the sea. The mouth of the night – that is what her mother always used to call it. As she is looking, there, in the distance, a light goes on. It grows brighter and slowly starts to turn. That is where he is, she knows that now. He is not allowed to leave. He might not have enough food and he certainly does not have anything to drink. Perhaps he is cursing everyone, her most of all, but that light – it is her father. He was the one who lit it.

  “What are you doing?” The voice that comes from under the bed is grumpy and sleepy, as if she has just woken him up. “I told you that you’re not allowed to look out of that window. But you’re still doing it anyway. And where were you today? I haven’t had my bath. Don’t you know what happens if I don’t—”

  “Tomorrow,” says Lampie. She stays behind the curtain for a little longer, watching. “First thing tomorrow morning. I promise.”

  “But it always has to be—”

  “And do you know something, Fish?”

  “Edward.”

  “Do you know what you’re going to do after that?”

  “What?”

  Lampie jumps off the window sill. There he is, lying on the floor, half under the bed, the thin white little creature with the head that is too big. She can’t help but smile.

  “What?” he says again, angrily.

  “You’re going to teach me how to read.” She nods because she is suddenly absolutely certain about it. “How to read and write.”

  Part Four

  SUMMER

  SORRY

  Augustus dreams of her face every night.

  He can see it so clearly that he can almost touch it. Her hair over her eyes. Her soft cheek. The tiny hairs on it, like down.

  Then he whacks the dream with his stick and it bursts apart.

  He wakes up, full of regret and gasping for air. Every single morning.

  Augustus squeezes his eyes shut to block out the light and listens to the thoughts racing through his head. Thoughts about what he should never have done, about what he should do now, about what he would always do from now on – if he only had the chance. Which he knows will never happen. And that is his own fault.

  He cannot drown his thoughts, as there is no drink in the house and the door is nailed shut.

  Everything he could break is already broken.

  Every insult he could hurl at himself has been said a hundred times. Bungling fool. Good-for-nothing. Failure.

  Failed as a man, as a sailor, as a father. Failed as a lighthouse keeper.

  Although perhaps that last one is not entirely true. There is still someth
ing he can do to make up for his failure, just a little. Not for himself – he does not care about that. No. For Lampie.

  So he hauls himself upstairs, every afternoon, step by step, on one leg and a stump. It takes half an hour. Sometimes longer. He makes light in the darkness, and stands and watches as it glides across the black water.

  Swish on, swish off, swish on. It is there and then it is gone, as if no light had ever shone.

  Swish on, swish off. Swish light, swish dark. First you have a wife, swish, and a child, swish, a job, a leg. And then you have nothing. As if they had never been there.

  At daybreak, he extinguishes the light and stares out across the sea at that rock. That damned rock.

  Usually he stays up there all day long. He watches the sun move across the sky above him, sees the shadow of the tower growing shorter and then longer. Until it is time to light the lamp again.

  In the evening, a neighbour brings him a pan of food. An iron pan, one that cannot break. But not for want of trying.

  She has to walk all the way along that slippery sea path, so he always says politely, “Thank you.”

  “I hope you enjoy it,” she replies, and that is it. She is not a good cook.

  C-A-T

  As she climbs upstairs the next morning, Lampie does not feel quite as certain as she did last night. When she gets to the room, she puts down the tray of food on the floor in front of the bed.

  “Breakfast,” she says. She sits in the chair to wait until he is ready.

  Behind her, on the shelves, are the books with their brown spines. She can hear them quietly shuffling around. They are clearly nudging one another and whispering about her.

  Her? That child with the mop? She’s going to learn how to read? They rustle their pages, chuckling at her. Whatever is she thinking? She’ll never be able to learn. As if! Can you imagine?

  Lampie sighs and looks at the floor. Maybe they’re right, she thinks. She will just have to wait and see.

  I’ll just have to wait and see, thinks Edward as he crawls out from under the bed, if I’ll ever be able to teach her something, that stupid child. He has laid out some things on his desk: paper, ink and a book with strips of paper marking the easy sections. But then he sees her sitting there, dangling her legs, in Joseph’s chair.

  “Not in that chair!” he shouts. “Get up! This instant!” She must not sit there, absolutely not.

  Shocked, Lampie jumps up and sits on the floor. With her legs crossed, and her arms too. Then she puts one finger up to her lips.

  “What are you doing?”

  “That’s what you have to do at school, isn’t it?” she says. “That’s how you’re always supposed to sit.”

  “Oh.” He has no idea. “Right, then. We’ll start with… Um, you were at school for two weeks. So what do you already know?”

  She puts her hand in the air and points a finger at the ceiling.

  He looks up.

  “What? What’s up there?”

  “If you want to say something, you have to raise your hand.”

  “There’s no need to do that. You can just speak to me.”

  “E.”

  “E?”

  “Yes,” says Lampie. “The letter E.”

  “You went to school for two weeks and you can read the letter E. What else?”

  She shrugs. “That’s it.”

  “Fine, the letter E.” He writes an elegant flowing letter on a sheet of paper and holds it up. “The letter E is the fifth letter of the alphabet. Our alphabet, the Latin alphabet, is based on the ancient Phoenician script, which in turn developed from…”

  She puts her hand up.

  “What?”

  “That isn’t the letter E.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Isn’t. The E is made out of lines.” She draws in the air with her finger.

  “Ah,” says Edward, nodding. “You’re talking about the capital letter, the upper-case E.”

  “The what?”

  “This is the small letter, the lower-case version. But it is most definitely an E.”

  “Oh,” Lampie says. “But…”

  “It’s very simple,” Edward explains. “Every letter of the alphabet can be written in two ways, depending on its function in the sentence. If it’s at the beginning, then…” He is starting to enjoy himself a little now.

  She whispers something.

  “What did you say?”

  “Never mind,” says Lampie. “Doesn’t matter.”

  The books on the shelves are helpless with laughter. It’s difficult, isn’t it, little girl? they giggle. Oh yes, reading’s not for everyone, you know. It takes years and years of study. Look at her, that little mop girl who thought she could learn how to read and write in no time. Whatever was she thinking? Don’t get ideas above your station…

  She stands up.

  “Where are you going?” shouts Edward. “We’re not finished yet!”

  “Downstairs. To help Martha in the kitchen or something. To mop the floor.”

  “But I was going to teach you to read.”

  “Forget about it. There’s no need.” She is already at the door. “I’m too stupid anyway.”

  Edward throws his pen down. “Good grief!” he says. “You coward. You… defeatist! No wonder they threw you out of school.”

  “They didn’t throw me out.”

  “No? So why did you leave?”

  Lampie stops, but she does not turn around. “Because… because I had to look after my mother.”

  “Oh,” says Edward. “What about after that?”

  “She died.”

  “Well, then you could have gone—”

  “And then I had to help my father. And then… then something happened and I came to live here. And now I have to take care of you.”

  Edward sits up straight. “You don’t have to take care of me. No one has—”

  “Oh really?” Now Lampie turns around. “No one has to take care of you? So are you going to do everything for yourself from now on? Fetch your food, your water, get yourself into the bath, out of the bath, count to one hundred and whatever—”

  “One hundred and thirty-five.”

  “Yes, I’ve actually got the hang of that now! Do you think I enjoy doing it? Getting bitten and shouted at by a… by a… nasty reptile!” She knows she should not be saying it, but right now she does not care.

  “And do you think, do you think?…” the boy begins. He is stumbling over his words, almost spitting because he is so angry. “Do you think I like to have you doing all those things? A brainless bumpkin like you? Who doesn’t know anything, who can’t even read?”

  “Well, teach me then!” yells Lampie.

  “That’s what I’m trying to do!”

  “But I’m too stupid, eh?”

  “Maybe,” says Edward. He looks at her with his pitch-black eyes. “But maybe not.”

  He stares at her as she stands there in the doorway. At her ragged dress and that wispy hair, at the bruise on her cheek, which has almost faded away, the bandage on her wrist. Then he turns to look at the chair, the desk stacked with books. That chair is where Joseph sat. That book, The Three Musketeers, is one that Joseph often read aloud to him – Edward knew it almost by heart, but that was what made it so good. That atlas, too, had given them hours of pleasure – leafing through it, tracing maps and tracking his father’s travels, with neat dotted lines and crosses to mark the harbours. There is the book about birds and the one about flowers, full of dried petals and leaves that the old man brought for him. Exactly the right flower on exactly the right page. It is nowhere near full. It probably never will be complete now.

  He takes a sheet of paper from the desk and draws two lines on it. A horizontal one and a vertical one.

  “Let’s just start again. I’ll make it easier.” He points. “Look, child. This is a T.”

  “My name is Emilia,” says Lampie. “And you’re a child yourself.”

  “Emilia, then.”


  “But you can call me Lampie too. That’s what they—”

  “Look at the letter!”

  Lampie looks. “Er. Eh?” she says.

  “No, T,” says Edward. “This is an A.” He takes another sheet of paper and draws a shape on it. He makes the sound of the letter. “A. That is the letter A.”

  “Mm,” says Lampie thoughtfully.

  “Excellent. We can do that one too!” He takes a third sheet of paper.

  Four lines with two points at the top. “Mm. That’s the sound of the letter M. Look. Let’s start with those letters, shall we?”

  He places the three sheets of paper on the desk, on top of Alexandre Dumas. They will not be getting around to that book for a while.

  “So we have a T, an A and an M.”

  Lampie shrugs. If he says so. She still has not stepped back into the room.

  “So what does this say?” asks Edward.

  “I don’t know,” says Lampie. “They’re just letters.”

  “M-A-T,” says Edward slowly. “What does that spell?”

  “No idea.”

  “Just look at the letters.”

  “But I’m too stupid.”

  “No, you’re not. Read it. M-A-T. What does that say?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Go on. What does it say?”

  “I DON’T KNOW!” yells Lampie. “Mat or something!”

  “Exactly,” he says. “Mat.”

  “Really?” She comes closer to the desk and takes another look. M-A-T. She feels quite lightheaded. She understands. She can read a word!

  Lampie is speechless. Mat. She thinks of all the mats she has ever walked on or swept or beaten… There are so many mats in the world, and now she can read all of them. M-A-T. This is easy!

  “And now let’s continue,” says Edward in a very important voice. “We’ll take another letter. This is the letter C. You see? It’s a C. And I’ll take away the M and put down the C instead. Now what does it say?”