KNOWN POINT IN THE DARKNESS

LIGHTHOUSEKEEPING

by JEANETTE WINTERSON

FOR DEBORAH WARNER

'REMEMBER YOU MUST DIE'

MURIEL SPARK

'REMEMBER YOU MUST LIVE'

ALI SMITH

TWO ATLANTICS

My mother called me Silver. I was born part

precious metal part pirate.

I have no father. There's nothing unusual about

that, even children who do have fathers are often

surprised to see them. My own father came out

of the sea and went back that way. He was crew

on a fishing boat that harboured with us one

night when the waves were crashing like dark

glass. His splintered hull shored him for long

enough to drop anchor inside my mother.

Shoals of babies vied for life.

I won.

I lived in a house cut steep into the bank. The

chairs had to be nailed to the floor, and we were

never allowed to eat spaghetti. We ate food that

stuck to the plate -shepherd's pie, goulash,

risotto, scrambled egg. We tried peas once -

what a disaster - and sometimes we still find

them, dusty and green in the corners of the

room.

Some people are raised on a hill, others in the

valley. Most of us are brought up on the flat. I

came at life at an angle, and that's how I've lived

ever since.

At night my mother tucked me into a hammock

slung cross-wise against the slope. In the gentle

sway of the night, I dreamed of a place where I

wouldn't be fighting gravity with my own body

weight. My mother and I had to rope us together

like a pair of climbers, just to achieve our own

front door. One slip, and we'd be on the railway

line with the rabbits.

'You're not an outgoing type,' she said to me,

though this may have had much to do with the

fact that going out was such a struggle. While

other children were bid farewell with a casual,

'Have you remembered your gloves?' I got, 'Did

you do up all the buckles on your safety

harness?'

Why didn't we move house?

My mother was a single parent and she had

conceived out of wedlock. There had been no

lock on her door that night when my father came

to call. So she was sent up the hill, away from

the town, with the curious result that she looked

down on it.

Salts. My home town. A sea-flung, rock-bitten,

sand-edged shell of a town. Oh, and a

lighthouse.

They say you can tell something of a person's life

by observing their body. This is certainly true of

my dog. My dog has back legs shorter than his

front legs, on account of always digging in at one

end, and always scrambling up at the other. On

ground level he walks with a kind of bounce that

adds to his cheerfulness. He doesn't know that

other dogs' legs are the same length all the way

round. If he thinks at all, he thinks that every dog

is like him, and so he suffers none of the morbid

introspection of the human race, which notes

every curve from the norm with fear or

punishment.

'You're not like other children,' said my mother.

'And if you can't survive in this world, you had

better make a world of your own.'

The eccentricities she described as mine were

really her own. She was the one who hated going

out. She was the one who couldn't live in the

world she had been given. She longed for me to

be free, and did everything she could to make

sure it never happened.

We were strapped together like it or not. We

were climbing partners. And then she fell.

This is what happened.

The wind was strong enough to blow the fins off

a fish. It was Shrove Tuesday, and we had been

out to buy flour and eggs to make pancakes. At

one time we kept our own hens, but the eggs

rolled away, and we had the only hens in the

world who had to hang on by their beaks while

they tried to lay.

I was excited that day, because tossing

pancakes was something you could do really well

in our house - the steep slope under the oven

turned the ritual of loosening and tossing into a

kind of jazz. My mother danced while she cooked

because she said it helped her to keep her

balance.

Up she went, carrying the shopping, and pulling

me behind her like an after-thought. Then some

new thought must have clouded her mind,

because she suddenly stopped and half-turned,

and in that moment the wind blew like a shriek,

and her own shriek was lost as she slipped.

In a minute she had dropped past me, and I was

hanging on to one of our spiny shrubs -

escallonia, I think it was, a salty shrub that could

withstand the sea and the blast. I could feel its

roots slowly lifting like a grave opening. I kicked

the toes of my shoes into the sandy bank, but the

ground wouldn't give. We were both going to fall,

falling away from the cliff face to a blacked-out

world.

I couldn't hang on any longer. My fingers were

bleeding. Then, as I closed my eyes, ready to

drop and drop, all the weight behind me seemed

to lift. The bush stopped moving. I pulled myself

up on it and scrambled behind it.

I looked down.

My mother had gone. The rope was idling

against the rock. I pulled it towards me over my

arm, shouting, 'Mummy! Mummy!'

The rope came faster and faster, burning the top

of my wrist as I coiled it next to me. Then the

double buckle came. Then the harness. She had

undone the harness to save me.

Ten years before I had pitched through space to

find the channel of her body and come to earth.

Now she had pitched through her own space,

and I couldn't follow her.

She was gone.

Salts has its own customs. When it was

discovered that my mother was dead and I was

alone, there was talk of what to do with me. I had

no relatives and no father. I had no money left to

me, and nothing to call my own but a sideways

house and a skew-legged dog.

It was agreed by vote that the schoolteacher,

Miss Pinch, would take charge of matters. She

was used to dealing with children.

On my first dismal day by myself, Miss Pinch

went with me to collect my things from the house.

There wasn't much - mainly dog bowls and dog

biscuits and a Collins World Atlas. I wanted to

take some of my mother's things too, but Miss

Pinch thought it unwise, though she did not say

why it was unwise, or why being wise would

make anything better. Then she locked the door

behind us, and dropped the key into her coffinshaped

handbag.

'It will be returned to you when you are twentyone,'

she said. She always spoke like an

Insurance Policy.

'Where am I going to live until then?'

ʻI shall make enquiries,' said Miss Pinch. 'You

may spend tonight with me at Railings Row.'

Railings Row was a terrace of houses set back

from the road. They reared up, black-bricked and

salt-stained, their paint peeling, their brass

green. They had once been the houses of

prosperous tradesmen, but it was a long time

since anybody had prospered in Salts, and now

all the houses were boarded up.

Miss Pinch's house was boarded up too,

because she said she didn't want to attract

burglars.

She dragged open the rain-soaked marine-ply

that was hinged over the front door, and undid

the triple locks that secured the main door. Then

she let us in to a gloomy hallway, and bolted and

barred the door behind her.

We went into her kitchen, and without asking me

if I wanted to eat, she put a plate of pickled

herrings in front of me, while she fried herself an

egg. We ate in complete silence.

'Sleep here,' she said, when the meal was done.

She placed two kitchen chairs end to end, with a

cushion on one of them. Then she got an

eiderdown out of the cupboard - one of those

eiderdowns that have more feathers on the

outside than on the inside, and one of those

eiderdowns that were only stuffed with one duck.

This one had the whole duck in there I think,

judging from the lumps.

So I lay down under the duck feathers and duck

feet and duck bill and glassy duck eyes and

snooked duck tail, and waited for daylight.

We are lucky, even the worst of us, because

daylight comes.

The only thing for it was to advertise.

Miss Pinch wrote out all my details on a big piece

of paper, and put it up on the Parish notice

board. I was free to any caring owner, whose

good credentials would be carefully vetted by the

Parish Council.

I went to read the notice. It was raining, and

there was nobody about. There was nothing on

the notice about my dog, so I wrote a description

of my own, and pinned it underneath:

ONE DOG. BROWN AND WHITE ROUGH

COATED TERRIER. FRONT LEGS 8 INCHES

LONG. BACK LEGS 6 INCHES LONG.

CANNOT BE SEPARATED.

Then I worried in case a person might mistake it

was the dog's legs that could not be separated,

instead of him and me.

'You can't force that dog on anybody,' said Miss

Pinch, standing behind me, her long body folded

like an umbrella.

'He's my dog,'

'Yes, but whose are you? That we don't know,

and not everybody likes dogs.'

Miss Pinch was a direct descendent of the

Reverend Dark. There were two Darks - the one

who lived here, that was the Reverend, and the

one who would rather be dead than live here,

that was his father. Here you meet the first one,

and the second one will come along in a minute.

Reverend Dark was the most famous person

ever to come out of Salts. In 1859, a hundred

years before I was born, Charles Darwin

published his Origin of Species, and came to

Salts to visit Dark. It was a long story, and like

most of the stories in the world, never finished.

There was an ending - there always is - but the

story went on past the ending - it always does.

I suppose the story starts in 1814, when the

Northern Lighthouse Board was given authority

by an Act of Parliament to 'erect and maintain

such additional lighthouses upon such parts of

the coast and islands of Scotland as they shall

deem necessary'.

At the north-western tip of the Scottish mainland

is a wild, empty place, called in Gaelic Am Parbh

- the Turning Point. What it turns towards, or

away from, is unclear, or perhaps it is many

things, including a man's destiny.

The Pentland Firth meets the Minch, and the Isle

of Lewis can be seen to the west, the Orkneys to

the east, but northwards there is only the Atlantic

Ocean. I say only, but what does that mean?

Many things, including a man's destiny.

The story begins now - or perhaps it begins in

1802 when a terrible shipwreck lobbed men like

shuttlecocks into the sea. For a while, they

floated cork up, their heads just visible above the

water line, but soon they sank bloated like cork,

their rich cargo as useless to life as their prayers.

The sun came up the next day and shone on the

wreck of the ship.

England was a maritime nation, and powerful

business interests in London, Liverpool and

Bristol demanded that a lighthouse be built here.

But the cost and the scale were enormous. To

protect the Turning Point, a light needed to be

built at Cape Wrath.

Cape Wrath. Position on the nautical chart, 58°

37.5° N, 5°W.

Look at it - the headland is 368 feet high, wild,

grand, impossible. Home to gulls and dreams.

There was a man called Josiah Dark - here he is

- a Bristol merchant of money and fame. Dark

was a small, active, peppery man, who had

never visited Salts in his life, and on the day that

he did he vowed never to return. He preferred

the coffee-houses and conversation of easy,

wealthy Bristol. But Salts was the place that

would provide the food and the fuel for the

lighthousekeeper and his family, and Salts would

have to provide the labour to build it.

So with much complaining and more reluctance,

Dark bedded for a week at the only inn, The

Razorbill.

It was an uncomfortable place; the wind

screeched at the windows, a hammock was half

the price of a bed, and a bed was twice the price

of a good night's sleep. The food was mountain

mutton that tasted like fencing, or hen tough as a

carpet, that came flying in, all a-squawk behind

the cook, who smartly broke its neck.

Every morning Josiah drank his beer, for they

had no coffee in this wild place, and then he

wrapped himself tight as a secret, and went up

onto Cape Wrath.

Kittiwakes, guillemots, fulmars and puffins

covered the headland, and the Clo Mor cliffs

beyond. He thought of his ship, the proud vessel

sinking under the black sea, and he remembered

again that he had no heir. He and his wife had

produced no children and the doctors regretted

they never would. But he longed for a son, as he

had once longed to be rich. Why was money

worth everything when you had none of it, and

nothing when you had too much?

So, the story begins in 1802, or does it really

begin in 1789, when a young man, as fiery as he

was small, smuggled muskets across the Bristol

Channel to Lundy Island, where supporters of the

Revolution in France could collect them.

He had believed in it all, somewhere he did still,

but his idealism had made him rich, which was

not what he intended. He had intended to escape

to France with his mistress and live in the new

free republic. They would be rich because

everyone in France was going to be rich.

When the slaughtering started, he was sickened.

He was not timid of war, but the tall talk and the

high hearts had not been for this, this roaring sea

of blood.

To escape his own feelings, he joined a ship

bound for the West Indies and returned with a

10% share in the treasure. After that, everything

he did increased his wealth.

Now he had the best house in Bristol and a

lovely wife and no children.

As he stood still as a stone pillar, an immense

black gull landed on his shoulder, its feet gripping

his wool coat. The man dared not move. He

thought, wildly, that the bird would carry him off

like the legend of the eagle and child. Suddenly,

the bird spread its huge wings and flew straight

out over the sea, its feet pointed behind it.

When the man got to the inn, he was very quiet

at his dinner, so much so that the wife of the

establishment began to question him. He told her

about the bird, and she said to him, 'The bird is

an omen. You must build your lighthouse here as

other men would build a church.'

But first there was the Act of Parliament to be

got, then his wife died, then he took sail for two

years to repair his heart, then he met a young

woman and loved her, and so much time passed

that it was twenty-six years before the stones

were laid and done.

The lighthouse was completed in 1828, the same

year as Josiah Dark's second wife gave birth to

their first child.

Well, to tell you the truth, it was the same day.

The white tower of hand-dressed stone and

granite was 66 feet tall, and 523 feet above the

sea at Cape Wrath. It had cost £14,000.

'To my son!' said Josiah Dark, as the light was lit

for the first time, and at that moment Mrs Dark,

down in Bristol, felt her waters break, and out

rushed a blue boy with eyes as black as a gull.

They called him Babel, after the first tower that

ever was, though some said it was a strange

name for a child.

The Pews have been lighthousekeepers at Cape

Wrath since the day of the birth. The job was

passed down generation to generation, though

the present Mr Pew has the look of being there

forever. He is as old as a unicorn, and people are

frightened of him because he isn't like them. Like

and like go together. Likeness is liking, whatever

they say about opposites.

But some people are different, that's all.

I look like my dog. I have a pointy nose and curly

hair. My front legs - that is, my arms, are shorter

than my back legs - that is, my legs, which

makes a symmetry with my dog, who is just the

same, but the other way round.

His name's Dogjim.

I put up a photo of him next to mine on the notice

board, and I hid behind a bush while they all

came by and read our particulars. They were all

sorry, but they all shook their heads and said,

'Well, what could we do with her?'

It seemed that nobody could think of a use for

me, and when I went back to the notice board to

add something encouraging, I found I couldn't

think of a use for myself.

Feeling dejected, I took the dog and went

walking, walking, walking along the cliff headland

towards the lighthouse.

Miss Pinch was a great one for geography - even

though she had never left Salts in her whole life.

The way she described the world, you wouldn't

want to visit it anyway. I recited to myself what

she had taught us about the Atlantic Ocean ...

The Atlantic is a dangerous and unpredictable

ocean. It is the second largest ocean in the

world, extending in an S shape from the Arctic to

the Antarctic regions, bounded by North and

South America in the West, and Europe and

Africa in the East.

The North Atlantic is divided from the South

Atlantic by the equatorial counter-current. At the

Grand Bank off Newfoundland, heavy fogs form

where the warm Gulf Stream meets the cold

Labrador Current. In the North Western Ocean,

icebergs are a threat from May to December.

Dangerous. Unpredictable. Threat.

The world according to Miss Pinch.

But, on the coasts and outcrops of this

treacherous ocean, a string of lights was built

over 300 years.

Look at this one. Made of granite, as hard and

unchanging as the sea is fluid and volatile. The

sea moves constantly, the lighthouse, never.

There is no sway, no rocking, none of the motion

of ships and ocean.

Pew was staring out of the rain-battered glass; a

silent taciturn clamp of a man.

Some days later, as we were eating breakfast in

Railings Row - me, toast without butter, Miss

Pinch, kippers and tea - Miss Pinch told me to

wash and dress quickly and be ready with all my

things.

'Am I going home?'

'Of course not - you have no home.'

'But I'm not staying here?'

'No. My house is not suitable for children.'

You had to respect Miss Pinch - she never lied.

'Then what is going to happen to me?'

'Mr Pew has put in a proposal. He will apprentice

you to lighthousekeeping.'

'What will I have to do?'

'I have no idea.'

'If I don't like it, can I come back?'

'No.'

'Can I take Dogjim?'

'Yes.'

She hated saying yes. She was of those people

for whom yes is always an admission of guilt or

failure. No was power.

A few hours later, I was standing on the

windblown jetty, waiting for Pew to collect me in

his patched and tarred mackerel boat. I had

never been inside the lighthouse before, and I

had only seen Pew when he stumped up the

path to collect his supplies. The town didn't have

much to do with the lighthouse any more. Salts

was no longer a seaman's port, with ships and

sailors docking for fire and food and company.

Salts had become a hollow town, its life scraped

out. It had its rituals and its customs and its past,

but nothing left in it was alive. Years ago, Charles

Darwin had called it Fossil-Town, but for different

reasons. Fossil it was, salted and preserved by

the sea that had destroyed it too.

Pew came near in his boat. His shapeless hat

was pulled over his face. His mouth was a slot of

teeth. His hands were bare and purple. Nothing

else could be seen. He was the rough shape of

human.

Dogjim growled. Pew grabbed him by the scruff

and threw him into the boat, then he motioned for

me to throw in my bag and follow.

The little outboard motor bounced us over the

green waves. Behind me, smaller and smaller,

was my tipped-up house that had flung us out,

my mother and I, perhaps because we were

never wanted there. I couldn't go back. There

was only forward, northwards into the sea. To the

lighthouse.

Pew and I climbed slowly up the spiral stairs to

our quarters below the Light. Nothing about the

lighthouse had been changed since the day it

was built. There were candleholders in every

room, and the Bibles put there by Josiah Dark. I

was given a tiny room with a tiny window, and a

bed the size of a drawer. As I was not much

longer than my socks, this didn't matter. Dogjim

would have to sleep where he could.

Above me was the kitchen where Pew cooked

sausages on an open cast-iron stove. Above the

kitchen was the light itself, a great glass eye with

a Cyclops stare.

Our business was light, but we lived in darkness.

The light had to be kept going, but there was no

need to illuminate the rest. Darkness came with

everything. It was standard. My clothes were

trimmed with dark. When I put on a sou'wester,

the brim left a dark shadow over my face. When I

stood to bathe in the little galvanised cubicle Pew

had rigged for me, I soaped my body in

darkness. Put your hand in a drawer, and it was

darkness you felt first, as you fumbled for a

spoon. Go to the cupboards to find the tea caddy

of Full Strength Samson, and the hole was as

black as the tea itself.

The darkness had to be brushed away or parted

before we could sit down. Darkness squatted on

the chairs and hung like a curtain across the

stairway. Sometimes it took on the shapes of the

things we wanted: a pan, a bed, a book.

Sometimes I saw my mother, dark and silent,

falling towards me.

Darkness was a presence. I learned to see in it, I

learned to see through it, and I learned to see the

darkness of my own.

Pew did not speak. I didn't know if he was kind or

unkind, or what he intended to do with me. He

had lived alone all his life.

That first night, Pew cooked the sausages in

darkness. No, Pew cooked the sausages with

darkness. It was the kind of dark you can taste.

That's what we ate: sausages and darkness.

I was cold and tired and my neck ached. I

wanted to sleep and sleep and never wake up. I

had lost the few things I knew, and what was

here belonged to somebody else. Perhaps that

would have been all right if what was inside me

was my own, but there was no place to anchor.

There were two Atlantics; one outside the

lighthouse, and one inside me.

The one inside me had no string of guiding lights.

A beginning, a middle and an end is the proper

way to tell a story. But I have difficulty with that

method.

Already I could choose the year of my birth -

1959. Or I could choose the year of the

lighthouse at Cape Wrath, and the birth of Babel

Dark - 1828. Then there was the year Josiah

Dark first visited Salts - 1802. Or the year Josiah

Dark shipped firearms to Lundy Island -1789.

And what about the year I went to live in the

lighthouse - 1969, also the year that Apollo

landed on the moon?

I have a lot of sympathy with that date because it

felt like my own moon landing; this unknown

barren rock that shines at night.

There's a man on the moon. There's a baby on

earth. Every baby plants a flag here for the first

time.

So there's my flag - 1959, the day gravity sucked

me out of the mother-ship. My mother had been

in labour for eight hours, legs apart in the air, like

she was skiing through time. I had been drifting

through the unmarked months, turning slowly in

my weightless world. It was the light that woke

me; light very different to the soft silver and nightred

I knew. The light called me out -1 remember

it as a cry, though you will say that was mine,

and perhaps it was, because a baby knows no

separation between itself and life. The light was

life. And what light is to plants and rivers and

animals and seasons and the turning earth, the

light was to me.

When we buried my mother, some of the light

went out of me, and it seemed proper that I

should go and live in a place where all the light

shone outwards and none of it was there for us.

Pew was blind, so it didn't matter to him. I was

lost, so it didn't matter to me.

Where to begin? Difficult at the best of times,

harder when you have to begin again.

Close your eyes and pick another date: 1

February 1811.

This was the day when a young engineer called

Robert Stevenson completed work on the

lighthouse at Bell Rock. This was more than the

start of a lighthouse; it was the beginning of a

dynasty. For 'lighthouse' read 'Stevenson'. They

built scores of them until 1934 and the whole

family was involved, brothers, sons, nephews,

cousins. When one retired, another was

immediately appointed. They were the Borgias of

lighthouse-keeping.

When Josiah Dark went to Salts in 1802, he had

a dream but no one to build it. Stevenson was

still an apprentice - lobbying, passionate, but

without any power and with no record of success.

He started out on Bell Rock as an assistant, and

gradually took over the project that was hailed as

one of the 'modern wonders of the world'. After

that, everybody wanted him to build their

lighthouses, even where there was no sea. He

became fashionable and famous. It helps.

Josiah Dark had found his man. Robert

Stevenson would build Cape Wrath.

There are twists and turns in any life, and though

all of the Stevensons should have built

lighthouses, one escaped, and that was the one

who was born at the moment Josiah Dark's son,

Babel, made a strange reverse pilgrimage and

became Minister of Salts.

1850 - Babel Dark arrives in Salts for the first

time.

1850 - Robert Louis Stevenson is born into a

family of prosperous civil engineers - so say the

innocent annotated biographical details - and

goes on to write Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The Stevensons and the Darks were almost

related, in fact they were related, not through

blood but through the restless longing that marks

some individuals from others. And they were

related because of a building. Robert Louis came

here, as he came to all his family lighthouses. He

once said, 'Whenever I smell salt water, I know I

am not far from one of the works of my

ancestors.'

In 1886, when Robert Louis Stevenson came to

Salts and Cape Wrath, he met Babel Dark, just

before his death, and some say it was Dark, and

the rumour that hung about him, that led

Stevenson to brood on the story of Jekyll and

Hyde.

'What was he like, Pew?'

'Who, child?'

'Babel Dark.'

Pew sucked on his pipe. For Pew, anything to do

with thinking had first to be sucked in through his

pipe. He sucked in words, the way other people

blow out bubbles.

'He was a pillar of the community.'

'What does that mean?'

'You know the Bible story of Samson.'

'No, I don't.'

'Then you've had no right education.'

'Why can't you just tell me the story without

starting with another story?'

'Because there's no story that's the start of itself,

any more than a child comes into the world

without parents.'

'I had no father.'

'You've no mother now neither.'

I started to cry and Pew heard me and was sorry

for what he had said, because he touched my

face and felt the tears.

'That's another story yet,' he said, 'and if you tell

yourself like a story, it doesn't seem so bad.'

'Tell me a story and I won't be lonely. Tell me

about Babel Dark.'

'It starts with Samson,' said Pew, who wouldn't

be put off, 'because Samson was the strongest

man in the world and a woman brought him

down, then when he was beaten and blinded and

shorn like a ram he stood between two pillars

and used the last of his strength to bring them

crashing down. You could say that Samson was

two pillars of the community, because anyone

who sets himself up is always brought down, and

that's what happened to Dark.

'The story starts in Bristol in 1848 when Babel

Dark was twenty years old and as rich and fine

as any gentleman of the town. He was a ladies'

man, for all that he was studying Theology at

Cambridge, and everyone said he would marry

an heiress from the Colonies and take up his

father's business in ships and trade.

'It was set fair to be so.

'There was a pretty girl lived in Bristol and all the

town knew her for her red hair and green eyes.

Her father was a shopkeeper, and Babel Dark

used to visit the shop to buy buttons and braids

and soft gloves and neckties, because I have

said, haven't I, that he was a bit of a dandy?

'One day - a day like this, yes just like this, with

the sun shining, and the town bustling, and the

air itself like a good drink - Babel walked into

Molly's shop, and spent ten minutes examining

cloth for riding breeches, while he watched out of

the corner of his eye until she had finished

serving one of the Jessop girls with a pair of

gloves.

'As soon as the shop was empty, Babel swung

over to the counter and asked for enough braid

to rig a ship, and when he had bought all of it, he

pushed it back towards Molly, kissed her direct

on the lips, and asked her to a dance.

'She was a shy girl, and Babel was certainly the

handsomest and the richest young man that

paraded the waterfront. At first she said no, and

then she said yes, and then she said no again,

and when all the yeas and nays had been

bagged and counted, it was unanimous by a

short margin, that she was going to the dance.

'His father didn't disapprove, because old Josiah

was no snob, and his own first love had been a

jetty girl, back in the days of the French

Revolution.'

'What's a jetty girl?'

'She helps with the nets and the catch and

luggage and travellers and so on, and in the

winter she scrapes the boats clean of barnacles

and marks the splinters for tarring by the men.

Well, as I was saying, there were no obstacles to

the pair meeting when they liked, and the thing

continued, and then, they say, and this is all

rumour and never proved, but they say that Molly

found herself having a child, and no legal

wedded father.'

'Like me?'

'Yes, the same.'

'It must have been Babel Dark.'

'That's what they all said, and Molly too, but Dark

said not. Said he wouldn't and couldn't have

done such a thing. Her family asked him to marry

her, and even Josiah took him aside and told him

not to be a panicky fool, but to own up and marry

the girl. Josiah was all for buying them a smart

house and setting up his son straight away, but

Dark refused it all.

'He went back to Cambridge that September, and

when he came home at Christmas time, he

announced his intention of going into the Church.

He was dressed all in grey, and there was no

sign of his bright waistcoats and red top boots.

The only thing he still wore from his former days

was a ruby and emerald pin that he had bought

very expensive when he first took up with Molly

O'Rourke. He'd given her one just like it for her

dress.

'His father was upset and didn't believe for a

minute that he had got to the bottom of the story,

but he tried to make the best of it, and even

invited the Bishop to dinner, to try and get a good

appointment for his son.

'Dark would have none of it. He was going to

Salts.

"Salts?" said his father. "That God-forsaken seaclaimed

rock?'

'But Babel thought of the rock as his beginning,

and it was true that as a child his favourite

pastime when it rained was to turn over the book

of drawings that Robert Stevenson had made, of

the foundations, the column, the keeper's

quarters, and especially the prismatic diagrams

of the light itself. His father had never taken him

there, and now he regretted it. One week at The

Razorbill would surely have been enough for life.

'Well, it was a wet and wild and woebegone

January when Babel Dark loaded two trunks onto

a clipper bound seaward from Bristol and out

past Cape Wrath.

'There were plenty of good folks to see him go,

but Molly O'Rourke wasn't amongst them

because she had gone to Bath to give birth to her

child.

'The sea smashed at the ship like a warning, but

she made good headway, and began to blur from

view, as we watched Babel Dark, standing

wrapped in black, looking at his past as he sailed

away from it forever.'

'Did he live in Salts all his life?'

'You could say yes, and you could say no.'

'Could you?'

'You could, depending on what story you were

telling.'

'Tell me!'

'I'll tell you this - what do you think they found in

his drawer, after he was dead?'

'Tell me!'

'Two emerald and ruby pins. Not one - two.'

'How did he get Molly O'Rourke's pin?'

'Nobody knows.'

'Babel Dark killed her!'

'That was the rumour, yes, and more.'

'What more?'

Pew leaned close, the brim of his sou'wester

touching mine. I felt his words on my face.

'That Dark never stopped seeing her. That he

married her in secret and visited her hidden and

apart under another name for both of them. That

one day, when their secret would have been told,

he killed her and others besides.'

'But why didn't he marry her?'

'Nobody knows. There are stories, oh yes, but

nobody knows. Now off to bed while I tend the

light.'

Pew always said 'tend the light', as though it

were his child he was settling for the night. I

watched him moving round the brass

instruments, knowing everything by touch, and

listening to the clicks on the dials to tell him the

character of the light.

'Pew?'

'Go to bed.'

'What do you think happened to the baby?'

'Who knows? It was a child born of chance.'

'Like me?'

'Yes, like you.'

I went quietly to bed, Dogjim at my feet because

there was nowhere else for him. I curled up to

keep warm, my knees under my chin, and hands

holding my toes. I was back in the womb. Back in

the safe space before the questions start. I

thought about Babel Dark, and about my own

father, as red as a herring. That's all I know about

him - he had red hair like me.

A child born of chance might imagine that

Chance was its father, in the way that gods

fathered children, and then abandoned them,

without a backward glance, but with one small

gift. I wondered if a gift had been left for me. I

had no idea where to look, or what I was looking

for, but I know now that all the important journeys

start that way.

KNOWN POINT IN THE DARKNESS

As an apprentice to lighthouse-keeping my duties

were as follows:

Brew a pot of Full Strength Samson and take it to

Pew.

8 am. Take Dogjim for a walk.

9 am. Cook bacon.

10 am. Sluice the stairs.

11 am. More tea.

Noon. Polish the instruments.

1 pm. Chops and tomato sauce.

2 pm. Lesson - History of Lighthouses.

3 pm. Wash our socks etc.

4 pm. More tea,

5 pm. Walk the dog and collect supplies.

6 pm. Pew cooks supper.

7 pm. Pew sets the light. I watch.

8 pm. Pew tells me a story.

9 pm. Pew tends the light. Bed.

Numbers 3, 6, 7, 8 and 14 were the best times of

the day. I still get homesick when I smell bacon

and Brasso.

Pew told me about Salts years ago, when

wreckers lured ships onto the rocks to steal the

cargo. The weary seamen were desperate for

any light, but if the light is a lie, everything is lost.

The new lighthouses were built to prevent this

confusion of light. Some of them lit great fires on

their platforms, and burned out to sea like a

dropped star. Others had only twenty-five

candles, standing in the domed glass like a

saint's shrine, but for the first time, the

lighthouses were mapped. Safety and danger

were charted. Unroll the paper, set the compass,

and if your course is straight, the lights will be

there. What flickers elsewhere is a trap or a lure.

The lighthouse is a known point in the darkness.

'Imagine it,' said Pew, 'the tempest buffeting you

starboard, the rocks threatening your lees, and

what saves you is a single light. The harbour

light, or the warning light, it doesn't matter which;

you sail to safety. Day comes and you're alive.'

'Will I learn to set the light?'

'Aye, and tend the light too.'

ʻI hear you talking to yourself.'

'I'm not talking to myself, child, I'm about my

work.' Pew straightened up and looked at me

seriously. His eyes were milky blue like a kitten's.

No one knew whether or not he had always been

blind, but he had spent his whole life in the

lighthouse or on the mackerel boat, and his

hands were his eyes.

'A long time ago, in 1802 or 1892, you name your

date, there's most sailors could not read nor

write. Their officers read the navy charts, but the

sailors had their own way. When they came past

Tarbert Ness or Cape Wrath or Bell Rock, they

never thought of such places as positions on the

map, they knew them as stories. Every

lighthouse has a story to it - more than one, and

if you sail from here to America, there'll not be a

light you pass where the keeper didn't have a

story for the seamen.

In those days the seamen came ashore as often

as they could, and when they put up at the inn,

and they had eaten their chops and lit their pipes

and passed the rum, they wanted a story, and it

was always the lighthousekeeper who told it,

while his Second or his wife stayed with the light.

These stories went from man to man, generation

to generation, hooped the sea-bound world and

sailed back again, different decked maybe, but

the same story. And when the lightkeeper had

told his story, the sailors would tell their own,

from other lights. A good keeper was one who

knew more stories than the sailors. Sometimes

there'd be a competition, and a salty dog would

shout out "Lundy" or "Calf of Man" and you'd

have to answer, "The Flying Dutchman " or "

Twenty Bars of Gold ".'

Pew was serious and silent, his eyes like a

faraway ship.

'I can teach you - yes, anybody - what the

instruments are for, and the light will flash once

every four seconds as it always does, but I must

teach you how to keep the light. Do you know

what that means?'

I didn't.

'The stories. That's what you must learn. The

ones I know and the ones I don't know.'

'How can I learn the ones you don't know?'

'Tell them yourself.'

Then Pew began to say of all the sailors riding

the waves who had sunk up to their necks in

death and found one last air pocket, reciting the

story like a prayer.

'There was a man close by here, lashed himself

to a spar as his ship went down, and for seven

days and seven nights he was on the sea, and

what kept him alive while others drowned was

telling himself stories like a madman, so that as

one ended another began. On the seventh day

he had told all the stories he knew and that was

when he began to tell himself as if he were a

story* from his earliest beginnings to his green

and deep misfortune. The story he told was of a

man lost and found, not once, but many times, as

he choked his way out of the waves. And when

night fell, he saw the Cape Wrath light, only lit a

week it was, but it was, and he knew that if he

became the story of the light, he might be saved.

With his last strength he began to paddle

towards it, arms on either side of the spar, and in

his mind the light became a shining rope, pulling

him in. He took hold of it, tied it round his waist,

and at that moment, the keeper saw him, and ran

for the rescue boat.

'Later, putting up at The Razorbill, and

recovering, he told anyone who wanted to listen

what he had told himself on those sea-soaked

days and nights. Others joined in, and it was

soon discovered that every light had a story - no,

every light was a story, and the flashes

themselves were the stories going out over the

waves, as markers and guides and comfort and

warning.'

Cliff-perched, wind-cleft, the church seated 250,

and was almost full at 243 souls, the entire

population of Salts.

On 2 February 1850, Babel Dark preached his

first sermon.

His text was this: 'Remember the rock whence ye

are hewn, and the pit whence ye are digged.'

The innkeeper at The Razorbill was so struck by

this sermon and its memorable text that he

changed the name of his establishment. From

that day forth, he was no longer landlord of The

Razorbill, but keeper of The Rock and Pit.

Sailors, being what they are, still called it by its

former name for a good sixty years or more, but

The Rock and Pit it was, and is still, with much

the same low-beamed, inward-turned, net-hung,

salt-dashed, seaweed feel of forsakenness that it

always had.

Babel Dark used his private fortune to build

himself a fine house and a walled garden and to

equip himself comfortably there. He was soon

seen in earnest Biblical discussion with the one

lady of good blood in the place - a cousin of the

Duke of Argyll, a Campbell in exile, out of poverty

and some other secret. She was no beauty, but

she read German fluently and knew something of

Greek.

They were married in 1851, the year of the Great

Exhibition, and Dark took his new wife to London

for her honeymoon, and thereafter he never took

her anywhere again, not even to Edinburgh.

Wherever he went, riding alone on a black mare,

no one was told, and no one followed.

There were disturbances at night, sometimes,

and the Manse windows all flamed up, and

shouts and hurlings of furniture or heavy objects,

but question Dark, as few did, and he would say

it was his soul in peril, and he fought for it, as

every man must.

His wife said nothing, and if her husband was

gone for days at a time, or seen wandering in his

black clothes over the high rocks, then let him

be, for he was a Man of God, and he accepted

no judge but God himself.

One day, Dark saddled his horse and

disappeared.

He was gone a month, and when he returned, he

was softer, easier, but with plain sadness on his

face.

After that, the month-long absences happened

twice a year, but no one knew where he went,

until a Bristol man put up at The Razorbill, that is

to say The Rock and Pit.

He was a close-guarded man, eyes as near

together as to be always spying on one another,

and a way of tapping his finger and thumb, very

rapid, when he spoke. His name was Price.

One Sunday, after Price had been to church, he

was sitting over the fire with a puzzlement on his

face, and it was finally got out of him that if he

hadn't seen Babel Dark before and just recently,

then the man had the devil's imprint down in

Bristol.

Price claimed that he had seen Dark, wearing

very different clothes, visiting a house in the

Clifton area outside Bristol. He took note of him

for his height -tall, and his bearing - very haughty.

He had never seen him with anyone, always

alone, but he would swear on his tattoo that this

was the same one.

'He's a smuggler,' said one of us.

'He's got a mistress,' said another.

'It's none of our business,' said a third. 'He does

his duties here and he pays his bills and

handsomely. What else he does is between him

and God.'

The rest of us were not so sure, but as nobody

had the money to follow him, none of us could

know whether Price's story was true or not. But

Price promised to keep a look out, and to send

word, if he ever saw Dark or his like again.

'And did he?'

'Oh yes, indeed he did, but that didn't help us to

know what Dark was about, or why.'

'You weren't there then. You weren't born.'

'There's always been a Pew in the lighthouse at

Cape Wrath.'

'But not the same Pew.'

Pew said nothing. He put on his radio

headphones, and motioned me to look out to

sea. 'The McClouds out there,' he said.

I got the binoculars and trained them on a

handsome cargo ship, white on the straight line

of the horizon. 'She's the most haunted vessel

you'll ever see.'

'What haunts her?'

'The past,' said Pew. 'There was a brig called the

McCloud built two hundred years ago, and that

was as wicked a ship as sailed. When the King's

navy scuttled her, her Captain swore an oath that

he and his ship would someday return. Nothing

happened until they built the new McCloud, and

on the day they launched her, everyone on the

dock saw the broken sails and ruined keel of the

old McCloud rise up in the body of the ship.

There's a ship within a ship and that's fact.'

'It's not a fact'

'It's as true as day'

I looked at the McCloud, fast, turbined, sleek,

computer-controlled. How could she carry in her

body the trace-winds of the past?

'Like a Russian doll, she is,' said Pew, 'one ship

inside another, and on a stormy night you can

see the old McCloud hanging like a gauze on the

upper deck.'

'Have you seen her?'

'Sailed in her and seen her,' said Pew.

'When did you board the new McCloud? Was she

in dry dock at Glasgow?'

'I never said anything about the new McCloud,'

said Pew.

'Pew, you are not two hundred years old.'

'And that's a fact,' said Pew, blinking like a kitten.

'Oh yes, a fact.'

'Miss Pinch says I shouldn't listen to your stories.'

'She doesn't have the gift, that's why.'

'What gift?'

'The gift of Second Sight, given to me on the day

I went blind.'

'What day was that?'

'Long before you were born, though I saw you

coming by sea.'

'Did you know it would be me, me myself as I am,

me?'

Pew laughed. 'As sure as I knew Babel Dark - or

someone very like me knew someone very like

him.'

I was quiet. Pew could hear me thinking. He

touched my head, in that strange, light way of

his, like a cobweb.

'It's the gift. If one thing is taken away, another

will be found.'

'Miss Pinch doesn't say that, Miss Pinch says

Life is a Steady Darkening Towards Night. She's

embroidered it above her oven.'

'Well, she never was the optimistic kind.'

'What can you see with your Second Sight?'

'The past and the future. Only the present is

dark.'

'But that's where we live.'

'Not Pew, child. A wave breaks, another follows.'

'Where's the present?'

'For you, child, all around, like the sea. For me,

the sea is never still, she's always changing. I've

never lived on land and I can't say what's this or

that. I can only say what's ebbing and what's

becoming.'

'What's ebbing?'

'My life.'

'What's becoming?'

'Your life. You'll be the keeper after me.'

Tell me a story, Pew.

What kind of story, child?

A story with a happy ending.

There's no such thing in all the world.

As a happy ending?

As an ending.

To make an end of it Dark had decided to marry.

His new wife was gentle, well read, unassuming,

and in love with him. He was not in the least in

love with her, but that, he felt, was an advantage.

They would both work hard in a parish that fed

on oatmeal and haddock. He would hew his path,

and if his hands bled, so much the better.

They were married without ceremony in the

church at Salts, and Dark immediately fell ill. The

honeymoon had to be postponed, but his new

wife, all tenderness and care, made him

breakfast every day with her own hands, though

she had a maid to do it for her.

He grew to dread the hesitant tread on the stairs

to his room that overlooked the sea. She carried

the tray so slowly that by the time she reached

his room the tea had gone cold, and every day

she apologised, and every day he told her to

think nothing of it, and swallowed a sip or two of

the pale liquid. She was trying to be economical

with the tea leaves.

That morning, he lay in bed and heard the

clinking of the cups on the tray, as she came

slowly towards him. It would be porridge, he

thought, heavy as a mistake, and muffins

studded with raisins that accused him as he ate

them. The new cook - her appointment - baked

bread plain, and disapproved of 'fanciness' as

she called it, though what was fancy about a

raisin, he did not know.

He would have preferred coffee, but coffee was

four times the price of tea.

'We are not poor,' he had said to his wife, who

reminded him that they could give the money to a

better cause than breakfast coffee.

Could they? He was not so sure, and whenever

he saw a deserving lady with a new bonnet, it

seemed to smell, to him, steamingly aromatic.

The door opened, she smiled - not at him, at the

tray - because she was concentrating. He

thought, irritably, that a tightrope walker he had

seen on the docks would have carried this tray

with more grace and skill, even on a line strung

between two masts.

She set it down, with her usual air of

achievement and sacrifice.

'I hope you will enjoy it, Babel,' she said, as she

always did.

He smiled and took the cold tea.

Always. They had not been married long enough

for there to be an always.

They were new, virgin, fresh, without habits. Why

did he feel that he had lain in this bed forever,

slowly filling up with cold tea?

Till death us do part.

He shivered.

'You are cold, Babel,' she said.

'No, only the tea.'

She looked hurt, rebuked.

ʻI make the tea before I toast the muffins.'

'Perhaps you should do it afterwards.'

'Then the muffins would be cold.'

'They are cold.'

She picked up the tray. 'I will make us a second

breakfast.'

It was as cold as the first. He did not speak of it

again.

He had no reason to hate his wife. She had no

faults and no imagination. She never

complained, and she was never pleased. She

never asked for anything, and she never gave

anything - except to the poor. She was modest,

mild-mannered, obedient, and careful. She was

as dull as a day at sea with no wind.

In his becalmed life, Dark began to taunt his wife,

not out of cruelty at first, but to test her, perhaps

to find her. He wanted her secrets and her

dreams. He was not a man of good mornings

and good nights.

When they went out riding, he would sometimes

thrash her pony with a clean sing of his whip, and

the beast would gallop off, his wife grabbing the

mane because she was an uncertain

horsewoman. He liked the pure fear in her face -

a feeling at last, he thought.

He took her sailing on days when Pew would

have been a brave man to take out his rescue

boat. Dark liked to watch her, drenched and

vomiting, begging him to steer home and when

they got the boat back, half capsized with water,

he'd declare it a fine day's sailing, and make her

walk to the house holding his hand.

In the bedroom, he turned her face down, one

hand against her neck, the other bringing himself

stiff, then he knocked himself into her in one swift

move, like a wooden peg into the tap-hole of a

barrel. His fingermarks were on her neck when

he had finished. He never kissed her.

When he wanted her, which was never as

herself, but sometimes, because he was a young

man, he trod slowly up the stairs to her room,

imagining he was carrying a tray of greasy

muffins and a pot of cold tea. He opened the

door, smiling, but not at her.

When he had finished with her, he sat across her,

keeping her there, the way he would keep his

dog down when he went out shooting. In the

chilly bedroom - she never lit a fire - he let his

semen go cold on her before he let her get up.

Then he went and sat in his study, legs flung up

on the desk, thinking of nothing. He had trained

himself to think of absolutely nothing.

On Wednesday afternoons, they visited the poor.

He loathed it; the low houses, mended furniture,

women patching clothes and nets with the same

needle and the same coarse twine. The houses

smelled of herrings and smoke. He did not

understand how any person could live in such

wretchedness. He would rather have ended his

life.

His wife sat sympathetically listening to stories of

no wood, no eggs, sore gums, dead sheep, sick

children, and always she turned to him as he

stood brooding out of the window, and said, 'The

pastor will offer you a word of comfort.'

He would not turn round. He murmured

something about Jesus's love and left a shilling

on the table.

'You were hard, Babel,' his wife said as they

walked away.

'Shall I be a hypocrite, like you?'

That was the first time he hit her. Not once, but

again and again and again, shouting, 'You stupid

slut, you stupid slut, you stupid slut.' Then he left

her swollen and bleeding on the cliff path and ran

back to the Manse and into the scullery, where

he knocked the lid off the copper and plunged

both his hands up to their elbows in the boiling

water.

He held them there, crying out, as the skin

reddened and began to peel, then with the skin

white and bubbled on his fingers and palms, he

went outside and began to chop wood until his

wounds bled.

For several weeks, he avoided his wife. He

wanted to say he was sorry, and he was sorry,

but he knew he would do it again. Not today or

tomorrow, but it would break out of him, how

much he loathed her, how much he loathed

himself.

In the evenings she read to him from the Bible.

She liked reading the miracles, which surprised

him in someone whose nature was as

unmiraculous as a bucket. She was a plain

vessel who could carry things; tea trays, babies,

a basket of apples for the poor.

'What apples?' he asked

She had broken off reading and was talking

about apples.

'The ones you brought with you wrapped in

newspaper. It is time they were eaten up. I will

stew them, and take them to the poor.'

'No.'

'What is the reason?'

'They are from my father's tree.'

'The tree will fruit again.'

'No. It never will.'

His wife paused a moment. She could see his

agitation, but she did not understand it. She

began to speak, then left off, and took up her

magnifying glass and began to read the story of

Lazarus.

Dark wondered what it must be like to lie in the

tomb, airless and silent, without light, hearing

voices far off.

'Like this,' he thought.

How can a man become his own death, choose

it, take it, have no one to blame but himself? He

had refused life. Well then, he would have to

make what he could of this death.

The next day he began to write it all down. He

kept two journals; the first, a mild and scholarly

account of a clergyman's life in Scotland. The

second, a wild and torn folder of scattered pages,

disordered, unnumbered, punctured where his

nib had bitten the paper.

He taught himself to wait until he had finished his

sermon, and then he took out the leather folder

and the stained pages, and wrote his life. It was

not a life that anyone around him would have

recognised. As time passed, he no longer

recognised himself. Free me, he wrote one night,

but to whom?

Then, hardly knowing what he did, he decided to

take his wife to London for the Great Exhibition.

She had no wish to go, but she thought it better

not to cross him.

TENANT OF THE SUN

The moon shone the night white.

Pew and I were sitting in The Razorbill, that is to

say, The Rock and Pit.

There was nobody else there. Pew had a key to

The Rock and Pit, and he liked to go drinking on

Saturday night, because, he said, that's what

Pews had always done. Until I came to live with

him, he had let himself in, and drunk alone from

a barrel of rum behind the bar so thick with dust

that if you stood a glass on the top of it, the glass

sank like a ghost ship in the fog.

I was given a packet of crisps on Saturday

nights, even though Miss Pinch had warned that

it might lead to trouble, though she did not say

what kind of trouble. The trouble seemed to be

me.

I had met her earlier in the day, as I was pushing

our sack truck along the pot-holed road to the

town. Her hand hung over me like one of those

mechanical grabbers in scrapyards. She said she

was Disappointed that I hadn't been to school,

and that this would Hinder my Progress.

Immediately I thought of a bright blue boat

beaten back by the waves. How could I be both

the boat and the waves? This was very deep.

'You are not listening to me,' she said.

'I am. It was the storm. We couldn't leave the

lighthouse.'

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 895