The Light Keeper (ARC) Read online

  Jack crunches the gears and accelerates into the blackness. Rolling his shoulders like she taught him, to ease the tension. Feeling sick. Where is she? Please God she watched the sunset, as she loves to do, got some peace from it then turned away, back from the edge, to find some pub or a bed for the night. Or home, even. Please let that be true and not the other. How did she get

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  there anyway, without the car? Why hasn’t she called? Has she called? He fumbles on the seat where the phone was but isn’t now; it’s down the side or somewhere and it’s too dark to see and he would have heard it anyway.

  The half-blind headlamps peer at grasping branches and sudden level crossings as Jack slows and speeds, slows and speeds, until the land rises, to say here we are, this is the Downs at last. The wind quickens against the side of the car as it climbs on a winding road and the door trembles against his thigh. He forgets to change gear and the elderly engine rises in pitch to meet the song in the speak-ers: the shimmering, enchanted Jeff Buckley version of ‘Hallelujah’. And the world is only the music and the arc of light beyond the bonnet, white lines streaming through it, the empty eyes of a hare quickly gone and the orange numbers on the dashboard. A sign looms out of the darkness, saying ‘You Are Not Alone’. There’s a number for the Samaritans. He remembers it from when they came before, together, in much happier times. They made a joke. This is it then. Gravel under the tyres. Right. He will get out of the car, and cross this car park, and walk in the moonlight over to the edge of the cliff and she will be there and he will hold her and she will be glad and he will take her home. Now. Go.

  The wind and the waves and the blood all rush in his ears in a monster roar. It’s cold out here and the rain stings and he’s shoul-der to shoulder with the blasts coming over the edge as he climbs, beyond the car park, up a steep slope on a path that cheats his feet and has him stumbling, tripping, down on one knee. Agony. Maybe a stone has sliced through his jeans to the ligament, it hurts that much . . . But no, he can get up. Get up there, Jack. Find her.

  ‘Sarah?’

  The moon is bright in a halo of cloud, and the night is not as dark as it was just now. He can see the glitter on the sea far away and the lantern of a fishing boat flashing and dying who knows how far out. The edge is hard to see and he could walk right over it. Stay away, he tells himself. Keep your eye on the glitter but look up too, look ahead, for a movement in the dark, for a sign.

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  ‘Sarah!’

  She’s here, she must be. Why would she be here in the dark? She must be though. There! A shift in the shadows, a long shape form-ing into a body, gliding, merging with the ground, getting closer to where the glitter starts.

  ‘Sarah! Babe!’

  The head turns. The shape shifts again and the whites of her eyes come to him through the darkness, and it’s her and he’s found her and . . .

  ‘Get lost!’

  It’s a stranger, weird and angry, turning his back and walking into the black, gone. And in that moment, the moon succumbs to the cloud. The stars fade, the glitter goes. The cliff is the edge is the sea is the sky, and Jack stumbles again. He’s on his knees on the sodden sodding grass with sheep shit oozing between his fin-gers, and he can’t get up this time. He wants to lay down and hug the earth and say, ‘Keep her, keep her close, will you? Don’t let her go. Don’t let her fall. Love her. Sarah. My Sarah . . .’

  But Sarah is lost. And so is he.

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  Five

  The nights were black and impenetrable when they first came to live in the tower. She would stand in the doorway talking ten to the dozen about the view but he could see nothing, as if there was a hand over his face. Tight. It was that dark. Rí was frightened by the darkness – that was why she burbled away – but he was fright-ened of it too in this place, for the first time in his life. He knew that about her, she knew it about him. They knew each other. Now there is nothing to know but a man on the same step in the same broken-down fairytale tower, in the absence of a princess. A lighthouse keeper without a light.

  At least his eyes have become accustomed now, so he can see the night sky as she did: rich in billowing shades of blue, cut through with black. Ahead are the blinking lights of freighters in the Channel. Far away to his right, down the long slope for a mile or more, is the little settlement of Birling Gap, with a coastguard hut, a telephone, a few cottages and a very tired pub. Beyond that there is a gate opening onto a path that leads over the backs of the Seven Sisters: seven hills rising and falling with their flat white faces to the sea. There are no roads that way; you can only walk over them or not go at all. And way beyond the line of darkness is an orange glow, low in the sky. The city of Brighton.

  That’s what the Great Fire of London must have looked like. ‘Maria . . .’

  Rí to rhyme with free.

  Is he making it up, her voice? He hopes not, but then he doesn’t really care, as long as she is there. The voice comes and goes like the French radio stations that blow over the Channel and fade away again. Down in the sweep of the valley where the sheep wait out the night in folds of downland, there used to be a secret lis-tening post. An underground bunker, where some poor soul had to sit in darkness through the Battle of Britain, listening to the

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  crackle of words as men high above him were dancing, diving, spiralling for their lives in the bright blue sky. Roger that, Tango Charlie.

  You should eat better.

  He looks down into the gloom. Sausages and beans glowing faintly, melted cheese reforming into a lump. ‘At least it’s not out of the tin this time.’ There’s a hunk of crusty bread in the crook of his spoon hand, a mug of tea chilling fast on the step in the dark with the frost coming. ‘It’s not bad.’ He can see her sceptical smile, the tilt of her head, as if she is there. ‘I didn’t say it was good.’

  Be kind to yourself.

  He gives up and puts the bowl down. The mess is cold. There’s a sound beyond the wind, beyond the sea, and it’s growing louder.

  ‘Really? Again?’

  Now it’s loud: not the sing-song sound of a Spitfire but the ugly, insistent chukka-chukka of a helicopter flying low overhead – too low, it will take out the lantern room. He braces himself, but does not duck any more. There have been six searches like this in just the last week; there seems to be more people going over than before. The searchlight is blinding for a moment then sweeps away, falling down through the dark. The chopper turns over the sea and comes back, blind red eyes blinking, downdraught whip-ping up an invisible spiral of dust, dirt and gravel, and he throws his filthy bread away and covers his face and curses, then it’s gone.

  The coastguards are looking for someone. The helicopter is off to his left, a couple of miles away, hovering over the next great hulking headland. That’s the place they all go, the lost and the lonely, the despondent and the suicidal. Beachy Head. The place where lives are ended. That’s where the drop is highest. You can be sure of death there, or so they say. He has heard of one young man who survived somehow and who is completely paralysed now, his mind in more torment than before he jumped. That is a kind of hell. He prefers not to think about it and to keep his distance from the Head, stay up here on his own hill where jump-ers seldom come. The old lighthouse puts them off, they don’t want to be watched by anyone, and he is glad of that. He came

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  here for the beauty, not the misery. For a new life, together in their tower. Just the two of them under the huge sky, with the sea spread out before them as a feast for the eyes and the dark earth at their backs. Elemental. They loved the landscape and she felt a powerful sense of belonging, so strong that it moved him to be here too. They had no desire to disturb the life or even death of anyone else; this was to be their sanctuary.

  Now it feels like his prison tower sometimes, as if the light-house is keeping him and not the other way round. It’s a strange thing to be, a lighthouse keeper, when nobody is paying you a
nd there is no light to shine. It’s so hard to be here without her, but he can’t leave, because she is still here, at least in his head. His heart. Her things in the tower, the art she made. Her voice on the wind. Soon the helicopter will be back, with a searchlight and a device that can spot the heat of a body that is still alive, or at least has not been dead for too long.

  ‘Lord have mercy,’ he says, a remembered prayer. The last one he has left, for a god he has never trusted. ‘Christ have mercy.’ It’s what he used to say, back in the day, in those moments before the medics came in their Chinooks. ‘Lord have mercy. Be with them, whoever they are.’

  The first room he has tried to make his own in this mighty, empty building is the kitchen. There’s a good, solid pine table bearing the marks of life and a wood-burning stove, which should be warmer than it is. A pair of half-spent church candles, waiting to be lit. Copper pans that might glow like a page in Country Life, if he could be bothered to polish them. A big fridge with hardly anything in it, and no booze. He will never drink at home again. If this is home. It has to be home. God though, he needs a drink. On a good night, with the moon lighting the way, he can walk down towards the Gap for a pint. The back of the hill is broad and flat with a carpet of grass; it’s an easy walk if you avoid the rabbit holes, but this is not a good night. There is no moon, and no stars now the clouds have closed over, and no way of knowing how far you are from the edge. It would be safer to stay indoors, but he

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  needs that drink, he needs some company more like, so he finds the car keys and walks out over the gravel to his old red sports car, the Triumph Spitfire with the soft top that lets in the rain, and the suspension that sends every bump and shudder through the base of his spine. She starts at the second attempt and noses out through the gate and down the hill. There’s a metal track half buried in the grass, then he finds the road at the bottom and turns, accelerating past the copse at the back of the hill. The road winds round to the Gap and what he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt, after exhaustive research, to be the worst pub in the world.

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  Six

  ‘Pint of best, please, Magda.’

  ‘Good evening to you, too! How are you?’ He doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t expect him to.

  The beer tastes of mulchy leaves and bonfires and nothing much else at all, really. They have watered it down again, or else he has a cold coming on. The sad, cracked voice of Bob Dylan is singing about being on the dark side of the road, and not for the first time he wonders where the speakers in this place are hidden. The keeper of a lighthouse without a light picks up his change from a puddle of beer and nods to the only other customer, a very old man sitting close to the window, taking his time between sips, fingers twisted like wildwood around an almost-empty pint glass. For more than seventy years, apparently, this lobsterman has woken to the same view of the sea and the sky and nothing more. Except, of course, that he sees everything. He knows every tide, can name every bird, has met the skipper of every inshore boat that passes. His name is Tommy Quick and in his day there was nothing ironic about that. He tells his tales when he drinks too much, but otherwise says little. So Magda fills the silence, standing there at the bar.

  ‘Tomorrow is the day I came to this country. Ten years ago.’ This much the lighthouse owner knows. He listens anyway,

  taking sips from his pint. He’s a good listener – that was always his gift. Listen, let them speak. He already knows there is a man who climbs a tower in the church in the main square of the city of Krakow, where Magda was born, to play a trumpet every hour. He knows the tune is never finished, in honour of some lost watch-man of the past who blew his horn to warn of invaders on the plain. He knows the watchman was stopped by an arrow in the throat, so even now, on the hour, the tune is always strangled to com-memorate that loss. Except on the night that Poland joined the

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  European Union, when the trumpeter did not stop. Instead of strangling the note, he played Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’. Teenagers hugged each other with tears in their eyes. ‘Hello, European!’ It was a lovely thing to see. He knows all this because he was actually there, on assignment. But he has never told Magda that.

  ‘History begins again! The next morning, I am on the plane.’ She could have gone anywhere in pursuit of the European Dream. She came first to Redhill, to wipe old people’s arses. A man in Krakow who brokered the job said it was the way to the new life. Then on to London, which she was supposed to love but

  hated.

  ‘I think the men will look like James Bond,’ she says, puffing out her cheeks at the obvious idiocy of that thought. Fate brought her under the protection of Chopper Tony, who ran the Eagle pub on the City Road and was no Bond. More like Oddjob. He’d take troublemakers into the yard and give them a beating with his great big hands, chopping away. He bought this place at the Gap for peanuts because of the risk it would fall over the cliff, and came here to hide, to ride out the storm of a failed marriage, cheating the till, drinking the stock. Offering Magda escape, or so it seemed to her then. They’ll get him one day.

  ‘I know who you are,’ Tony said to his customer one night in the bar, and Magda took a silent interest as she arranged the crisps. ‘Seen you around. Back then.’

  The man from the lighthouse said nothing, but he reached out for his pint in a slow, deliberate motion that looked very much like a karate chop. Tony thought about that for a long while, before the edges of his mouth twitched into what might have been a grin. ‘I get you. Keep it to ourselves. Keep schtum, Mr Lighthouse Keeper.’ He looked very pleased with himself. ‘You’d say he was a keeper, wouldn’t you, Mags? A right keeper. I bet you would.’ She turned her back to him, keeping very still over the crisps. ‘All right, fella. No names, no pack drill. Keeper. That’s what we’ll call you.’

  The stories we tell about each other are what define us, but the stories change depending on where you tell them from. Tony told the walking guides who came into the pub that the man who kept

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  the lighthouse was a mysterious figure known only as the Keeper; they liked that and they passed it on to their groups, and the light-house man heard them talking by the wall, up by the tower, saying that name on the wind. The Keeper. Nice and anonymous. Tony finds comfort in their shared secret too. He thinks it protects him from the unwanted questions of a reporter who already knows too much. But the Keeper has no further questions for anyone. Those days are gone. Listening to Magda’s stories is a way of not having to talk. There is something about him he has never dared analyse – a look, perhaps, the sound of his voice – that makes people want to talk. So she tells him that her name means ‘high tower’ in Polish.

  ‘Like your tower. It is the place for me, maybe?’

  She likes him, this lean man with the hair like straw and the face that is both battered and kind, but his pale eyes are elsewhere, always. His woman has gone. Magda does not ask where, because she knows he would not answer. He is restoring the lighthouse on his own, she assumes for bed and breakfast, which is fine by her because there is only one room at the pub and it is not advertised. She keeps it for people in need, of which there are many.

  Magda is one of the Guardians, a group of volunteers who patrol the coastline from Beachy Head to the Gap three miles away, where she is standing now. They wear bright red fleeces with the word ‘Guardian’ written on the chest in gold, looking out for people who seem suicidal. They have torches, drive around in customized Land Rovers with powerful searchlights and work with the police and the Coastguard. They patrol because they are good people who want to help. That is what Magda says and she is right. They save lives.

  She would like to know when the lighthouse will be ready for guests, and when they will start to come down the hill to eat and drink at her pub – or when the Keeper will look up and see how she feels and invite her to live with him in the tower, away from Tony – but she will not put those questions today. Poor man.
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  ‘So there we are. How are you?’

  ‘Fine. Thank you,’ he says.

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  Her eyes follow as he takes his pint and a small packet of pea-nuts over to a table in the corner by the fire. He has a book to read. This is how it often is at the Gap: Magda behind the bar, Tony out the back watching football, Tommy on one side of the room, the Keeper on the other. And sometimes, in winter, not another living soul.

  ‘We’ve got to find her, you’ve got to help me find her, come on!’ There’s a boy in the open doorway, shouting as if the place is full, with the night whirling behind him. The draught blows over a lamp that rolls around loudly on the slab stone floor, alarming Magda.