The Light Keeper (ARC) Read online

  He contracts suddenly and curls up like an embryo, arms over his head, covering his face. The Guardian leans over and touches his shoulder, making soothing sounds.

  ‘Hey, Frank. Come on. Okay. You are in control. Your life, you choose. There is no need to suffer. No need to make Billy suffer, seeing you that way.’

  Frank goes limp at that. The Guardian gives him space. Frank uncurls, unfolds his body and rises, putting his hand out on the grass, then on the Guardian’s shoulder, until this skinny, trem-bling man with the pedal-pusher shorts flapping about his bare legs and the England football shirt hanging off his bony frame and the tears drying fast in the wind on his sharp face is standing up, breathing deeply, arms by his side, looking out to sea.

  ‘This is why I came. It’s for the best,’ he says and takes a step, then another. One more. Filling his lungs with the fresh sea air. ‘Thank you.’

  The Guardian’s eyes close. There’s a shuffling sound, a sigh lost in the wind; and when they open again there is a boat with a red sail out in the Channel, nosing through the waves. The hill is a peaceful, glorious place in a wash of sunshine.

  The Guardian walks away from the edge, as if Frank was never there.

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  Seventeen

  Now here’s Jack. Standing by the door of the lighthouse, twisting yellow flowers in his hands. ‘Are these yours? They were blowing away.’ The flowers have been shredded, by the wind or by him. Most of the heads have gone. ‘Were they for a friend? I’m sorry.’ ‘Go away,’ says the Keeper, exhausted and irritated and desper-ate to get indoors, but Jack is not going. Sorry for what, exactly? He looks as if he’s been mauled by a beast. This boy – he’s ten years younger, maybe – will keep coming back; the only thing to do is to let him in, let him look around, then get rid of him as

  quickly as possible.

  ‘I hear they call you the Keeper. That’s weird.’ ‘It’s a lighthouse.’

  The guest rooms are mostly in the outhouse, the square block that was built on to the side of the tower as accommodation for the old keepers. It leans into the hill, rising up through three sto-reys. The first guest room is just inside the door and he opens that first, for Jack to see. A table, a chair, a bed with the mattress on, still wrapped in clear, thick plastic for protection against the damp.

  ‘There are six of those. They are all like that. She’s not in there.’ Jack must believe it because he doesn’t ask to see the others.

  They go no further. The Keeper offers Jack the chair, and sits him-self on the edge of the bed, feeling the chill of the plastic beneath him. He breathes deeply, pausing in the moment to reflect that he doesn’t have to do this, he need not ask, he could just leave it and tell Jack to go, and return to his world of silence, but today is not working that way. Today, people keep putting themselves in his face. He doesn’t want to care, but here we go.

  ‘Why are you so sure she’s here?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Right. Wasn’t expecting that, to be honest. From your behaviour.’

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  ‘A feeling? I don’t know where else to look. What am I supposed to do? She’s not at the pub. I checked the hotels in the town, most of them, but there are so many. The police don’t care, they think she’s left me. I can’t raise her father, he’s away. Our friends . . .

  her friends haven’t heard from her. They want to come down, but that’s humiliating. I don’t want them here. I have to find her, talk to her. Magda – you know her, don’t you? I stayed there last night, she has rung some people.’

  ‘Did Magda say your wife . . .’

  ‘Sarah.’

  ‘Did she say Sarah might be here?’

  ‘There was something. When she talked about this place. About you.’

  ‘I see,’ he says, but he doesn’t.

  ‘They don’t know your name.’

  Jack’s fingers are drumming on the table, tapping like a tele-graph, while his eyes skitter over the walls, the door, out into the space beyond the windows.

  ‘Call for her. Go on, if you don’t believe me, call out. She’s not here.’

  ‘Sarah?’

  That’s really loud. The sound of her name makes the Keeper flinch. He wants to shout for Rí too, get the balance back. He should throw this boy out, but the restlessness, the panic, the fear is familiar. They’ve both been shredded, like the flowers.

  ‘Sorry about your eye,’ says Jack, noticing a cut and a yellow bruise. ‘I didn’t mean to. Well, I did, I meant to, sure, Jesus. I got you, didn’t I? Didn’t want to. Reflex action. You got my arm . . .

  yeah, well, anyway. We came here before, she loves it. She could do anything out here. I don’t know her any more. The drugs do things. She’s a danger to herself. We’re trying to have a baby.’

  Of course you are, thinks the Keeper.

  ‘That’s all she ever talks about. We’ve had our last go. I’ve got to find her because I know it won’t work, I know what that will do to her. She’s on her own. I don’t even know if I want a baby with her any more. It screws you up, this thing.’

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  ‘I know,’ says the Keeper, softly.

  ‘You do?’

  The floor needs a damn good sweep in here.

  ‘Yes. You didn’t hurt me. Not much. I’ve had worse.’ ‘Damn. I thought I had a good punch.’

  The Keeper looks up quickly enough to see the spark of a smile on Jack’s tired face, before it vanishes. Their eyes meet. ‘You should go home.’ He seems to be saying that a lot today. ‘She might turn up back there.’

  ‘She’s here. I can feel it.’

  ‘Not here,’ says the Keeper.

  ‘I mean, out there. Somewhere. Not far.’

  ‘I hope . . .’

  ‘Thank you.’

  But all the while he is listening to Jack, a question turns over in his mind. He tries to ignore it but the question won’t go away; it just keeps repeating as Jack goes on about his life in that nasal, fidgety way, like a comedian without any jokes. The story Jack tells is all about Jack, and why would it not be? He’s here, it’s him. Still, it is intensely irritating. What about Sarah?

  Slowly, the man they call the Keeper feels himself becoming what he was before he came here: the special correspondent, the man in the blue flak jacket seeking tears in the dust. A mildly famous face on the television news. The sympathetic one, the empathetic one who sat for hours with weeping, frightened people who had it far, far worse than Jack, in faraway places first – in bombed-out houses, in refugee camps, in boats smash-ing against the rocks – with a cameraman and kindness, nothing more. Then back in this country with the mothers and fathers of the disappeared. Milly. Shannon. Young girls, gone. Abducted. Murdered. Crime stories. He doesn’t want to remember. There are too many stories, locked away inside his chest. Too many to bear, as it turned out. They’re calling. He doesn’t want to hear them, doesn’t want to feel it all coming back, hates to find him-self listening like this again, biding his time, noting the ticks, the drumming, the tone of all Jack is saying. Waiting for the narrative

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  to be spent, for the moment to arrive – as it always does – when he can put the question that matters, the one that might unlock the story. Whatever that is this time.

  Then Jack stops talking. He has nothing more to say, and looks embarrassed, as if he has just woken up from a dream. There is nothing for it now, no choice but for the solitary lighthouse keeper who was once a coaxer of stories from the hurt and the angry, to remember how to do this.

  He leans forward a little on the bed, takes a deep breath, looks at Jack until their eyes meet and asks: ‘Tell me about her, will you? What about Sarah?’

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  Eighteen

  She was a miracle child. That is one of the many things Jack does not say. ‘You will not conceive,’ a doctor said regretfully, but Jasmine Jones smiled and told him she was already pregnant, thank you very much. ‘You wi
ll not survive,’ said a second doctor, but Jasmine gave birth, noisily, at the height of summer and lived to hear her baby cry. A third doctor warned her, ‘The child will not live long.’ But the child was a month old and unexpectedly healthy when the Reverend Robert Jones paused on the thresh-old of their tiny house in a suburb of Birmingham, beaming like the sunbeam Jesus had always wanted him for. In his arms was a Moses basket and in the basket was a baby girl.

  ‘You do know you’ll have to give in, don’t you?’ said his wife,

  her hand on the small of his back, as much to help her stand as to

  urge him forward.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I really do think so.’

  ‘Both names then? But mine first.’

  Jasmine Jones snorted a laugh, shaking her head in mock dis-may, spraying raindrops on the hallway’s old orange wallpaper. ‘You lovely, stubborn man.’

  Jasmine had been raised to know her own mind and to get her own way. Papa had spent a lot of money making sure that was the case, sending her down from the mountain to the fin-est school in Kingston, probably the whole of Jamaica, where she had learned far more than he knew. When Jasmine and her friends walked out through the town in their starched white uniforms on sunlit evenings in the seventies they were well aware of being watched by men in cars and sidewalk bars. They kicked their heels, showed their legs, threw back their heads and laughed because they felt a hunger too, but theirs was different.

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  Their lust, nurtured by their folks, was to Do Better. They were never meant to stay.

  So Jasmine left the island and went away to Oxford, where she met a man. ‘His face told me to trust him,’ she wrote to her mother long after meeting Robert in a coffee shop on a corner near her college. The letter was written a good six months after they met, but it was all news to her mother. By then they had studied together for their finals, the serious young ordinand and herself, a different kind of believer, working as hard as him but always trying to make it look easy. Sharing the same library table in silence, divinity and law books spread out side by side. ‘Tell Papa not to worry,’ she wrote, but she knew that was in vain. With the letter, she sent a wedding invitation. It was fast, too fast maybe, but it was also too late for Papa to stop her then, if he wanted to. So of course, both men were nervous when they met for the first time at the college chapel, on the night of the wed-ding rehearsal.

  ‘Look after her,’ said Papa, pulling back his shoulders and pumping the hand of the groom. It was what he had to say. He had prepared the words. His face was stern and his stare was fierce. For a moment, he was every disapproving father in history. Then a twitch on his lips became a smile, as his worried daughter watched. ‘Don’t worry!’

  Papa knew all about Robert Jones, she found out later. Papa had been to Oxford too, he still had friends from those days, only now those friends had influence and access. Questions had been asked, files checked, bishops consulted on the sly. This young priest was well thought of. He might not make a fortune, but he was a man of God.

  ‘I know you will look after my daughter, I can see that . . . my son.’

  ‘Done,’ said Jasmine to her husband, closing the door against the traffic that was swooshing its way through another miserable day. The child was home. Back in the sun, her aunts and uncles would be muttering over their tea cups about what a shame it all

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  was, how bright little Jasmine would probably never return to the law now, after all that money had been spent on her educa-tion. But Papa would be coming soon, to see his grand-daughter. Jasmine would tell him this was her home now and he was welcome. She would not say how little time there was left for her to live in it. She had neither the strength nor the will for a fight on the day her daughter came home, but she was sure this child, this miracle, should have a name as big as the wonder she inspired.

  ‘Both names,’ said Robert Jones as he bent to kiss the forehead of the sleeping child, who wriggled in her snug of pale pink terry cotton. ‘Your mother is crazy, but she is almost as lovely as you.’ Jasmine, who was about to draw the curtains, paused at the sight of her porridge-pale man and his lovely daughter. Her lovely daughter too, caught in a bar of swirling sunshine. One precious column of light had found a way through the rain clouds and smog, through the smudged window pane and thick house nets and was spending itself on them both. Let them be like this, she

  thought. Remember this, Jasmine. Remember.

  ‘I love you,’ she said, moving close to him, but he did not take his eyes off the baby. They both looked down and surprised them-selves by saying the first of her two given names together, softly. ‘Sarah . . .’

  She knew none of that, of course. Her eyes had yet to open. She was not told the story for a very long time, because for years she did not want to hear anything about it or about her mother. But there was one thing Sarah could never easily put out of her mind: her earliest memory, the blinding white light. She saw it when she was three years old and holding the hand of her grandmother, as they turned from a hospital corridor into the room where her mother lay. There, surrounded by a dazzling haze of light, was Mummy on the bed, strangely yellow between the sweetie pink of her nightie and the bone white of the linen sheet.

  ‘What is in your nose, Mummy?’

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  Sarah pulled herself up onto the bed by the green blanket, nearly kicking over a vase of daffodils on the bedside cabinet with her shiny patent shoe. She felt the hands of the nurse, a grip strong enough to lift her off.

  ‘Oh darling.’ The nurse’s uniform was dark blue, she was in charge. ‘Mummy is a little poorly just now, best not climb on her.’

  But Mummy spoke. She whispered. ‘Please. Let her.’

  The voice did not seem to come from her body but from the air, floating down like a feather, startling Sarah and making her want to cry. ‘Come here, my angel.’ Mummy reached out, trailing the tube attached to the bruised back of her hand. Sarah knelt on the bed and cool palms cupped her face; she was pulled in tight towards her mother’s lips, mouth to mouth, feeling and tasting tears. The tickle of eyelashes. She was too young to see the wild-ness in her mother’s eyes: the look of a woman trying to inhale her daughter’s energy, her love, her life, trying to suck up some-thing of Sarah to stay there with her, in that room, a little light to burn when the darkness came. Sarah just felt herself squeezed so tight she could hardly breathe, and heard her granny’s voice.

  ‘Come on, love. Let Mummy rest.’

  Not fair, thought Sarah, you are hurting me, Mummy. She wanted to say that, but she could not speak. Then the arms around her relaxed and fell away, back down to the bed, like the arms of a puppet whose strings had been cut. The arms of her mother, bare and motionless on the bed. The skin was pale, powdery, dry.

  ‘Goodbye, my precious.’

  Mummy hissed it, swallowing with great effort as if there was something dusty, spiky in her throat. She pursed her cracked lips in a dry kiss. ‘Be a good girl.’

  Why was Mummy angry? Sarah saw light blaze from her eyes and the room was crowded with whirling angels flapping fiery wings, and she was scared. She did not know that Jasmine Jones was raging, raging hard, but not with her tiny, precious daughter. Not at all. Jasmine did her best to smile, to fight it. To reassure. ‘See. You.’ She said it so quietly that Sarah could only just hear her. ‘Later. Angel. When. I get. Home. Yeah?’

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  No.

  No.

  No.

  She never did come home.

  75

  Nineteen

  This will pass, they said. Trust us. But Sarah called out for her mummy in her sleep and in her waking, and she ran down-stairs still befuddled from the tossing, turning night, shouting: ‘Mummy? Mummy? Where are you?’ There was only her father, a shadow in the doorway, bending down to pick her up. Sarah never cried, not even when he held her hard and pressed his face into her shoulder and her Little Princess jim
-jams grew wet there, where his eyes were. ‘Don’t cry, Daddy,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’

  She learned fast. She learned that some things hurt more than others; that the photographs of her mother, and her mother’s clothes, and the books that had once been read aloud – ‘all the better to eat you with’ – and the mug Mummy liked to drink from were like bits of broken glass scattered around the house that cut her when she was not looking. She learned to find other things to do when Daddy had pictures and papers spread all over the kitchen table and he was sorting them, flicking them, working through them fast as though he had lost something among them, or when the music in his bedroom was loud. She kept away.