24. Dec, 2020

'The Old Lighthouse'

Those boys had stayed here before but in the summer.  What were they doing here in winter when everything was closed?  Henry stared at them in resentment.  He had watched them, those boys, back then.   Adolescent slim and streamlined in their black wetsuits, they had gone diving over and over from below the closed lighthouse on the harbour’s old fish quay which nobody was supposed to go on to, the walkways down to it unsafe due to erosion.

Henry, while of similar age, had felt every day that he looked stupid and clumsy compared to them, togged out daily for the fishing boat as he was in bib and brace storm proofs, great thick rubber things in yokel yellow, clumsy and baggy over his own clothes.  He would be working in the harbour as he was now, slinging up boxes of fish from boat to land, the stink of them growing in his nose, and he felt a far lesser being than those lordly striplings parading their skills right opposite him, sleek as they poured themselves into the water.  Unlike him, they were richly at leisure, on holiday.  Now, they were back.  They were standing in the same spot today, assessing the grey harbour waters. On the small boat with his father and uncle, making ready to go out for the winter cod fishing, Henry stared over.   The holiday cottages on the cliffside behind them, so pink and white in sunshine, were dull now, lost in drifts of rain or sea mists most days. 

When they chugged past on the boat from the harbour out to the choppy waters of the North Sea,  Henry stood posing upright on the deck, legs apart, hands on hips, looking directly at the three boys and they looked back, seeing him, perhaps, for the first time.  Something, Henry felt, seemed to pass between them.  The old lighthouse, a dead beacon which had weathered many storms, stood up impassively behind their black clad figures.  That’s right, Henry thought. 

‘You can see I belong on this sea, not you’. 

They should be snorkelling like children where the water was as clear as glass and fish were just tiny jewels over coral sands, not diving here, where the waves were rooted in the deep by muscle and sinew, rising up to pull you down.  If they knew what skill it took to fish on that surface, in danger of being turned over and caught up in sea storms, the life dashed out of you by a cold drowning, well, they’d respect him then.

The fishing boat had been out for some time and made a decent haul when the fret came down, the onshore foghorn blaring out its mournful warning from the cliff top headland as a signal to head back towards it.  The sea mist made wraiths in the boat’s headlamps as they turned to go home.  On the two ends of the harbour mouth, old stone quay and the newer railed pier with its wooden boardwalk stretching out, green lights were markers to steer by, phantom beams.  It was daytime but in this white, bone cold silence, like the middle of the night.  As they slid by back into the harbour, Henry thought he saw three long black forms dive in smooth sequence into the water, right by the old lighthouse pillar looming darker behind them.  He peered in disbelief.  Surely, they were not diving now?

Once the boat had been tied up, its catch in ice water hauled up on the quay, he asked to be let go. His father and Uncle Rod said they would finish off. 

“Did you see?” he asked them while they were busy with winding machinery on board to do with nets.  “Those boys?” but they hadn’t seen anything.

A few hardy winter walkers were gliding out across the longer, newer pier, looking like ghosts walking on the water in the eeriness of the sea mist.  The fog horn’s warning still blared out.  Henry pulled off the hateful yellow rubber overalls and left them in the boat.  Hunched in his Winter jacket, he went over the swing bridge to the opposite side of the harbour.  Crossing the shingle beach, he swung himself up on to the old fish quay from the remains of the wooden steps and rail, climbing through the roping off chains covered in rust and the stench of old seaweed.   His mind was a confusion of wanting to challenge them and show off his own superiority.  The local boy they didn’t even notice was the one who had had to come out for them like a manly lifeboat dragged out to rescue a child’s blow up dinghy.  Henry made his way carefully down the centre of the ancient stone jetty, for there were no barriers at the sides.  The lighthouse loomed at the end and the fog surged across.  He was a mortal angel walking through cold clouds.   Cries and noise came to him through the sea fret, a desolation emanating from the lighthouse which resonated with the wrecks it had witnessed, the deaths in the sea its beam had once looked over.  Henry had heard this before in sea fogs, especially in winter when so many had foundered on the rocks in storms, although nobody else admitted to hearing it when he was out on the boat with his father and uncle.  Henry shivered as the fog damped through him.  Where were they, those boys? 

“Hello!” he called, his voice not carrying, swamped in the fog and by the foghorn’s long, gloomy notes.

He came to the rough, weathered pillar of the lighthouse itself.  Suddenly, running feet slapped past him and a shape arced briefly in the fog before disappearing down into the harbour.  His ears were still distracted by the cries of the long since dead, beamed out even more loudly now he was so close to their source.

“What are you doing?  Hello!  It’s not safe!  Stay out of the water, you idiots!” he cried.

He spoke with angry contempt as much as from anxiety.  They had no right to be here doing this!  Local people here had to put their own lives in danger all the time rescuing selfish fools in the sea! 

Among the noises of the dead, he thought he heard a living laugh, young and mischievous, nearby.  Following round the stone base, mist smoking round him and sinking in through his coat, the form of the sea risen up, he came to the lighthouse doorway.  It was a square of darkness into the curving stairwell.  The wooden door’s padlock must have been forced by these devil may care visitors.  A dimness of eerie daylight through the fog made the steps barely visible and for a moment he thought he saw a form at the bottom but stepping forward, realised it was just the strange shadows.  It made him think of the tale of the old lighthouse keeper who had come out here in the thick of a terrible storm to light his lantern and, the steps wet from his own boots, had fallen down the stairs to his death.  Henry could still hear the screams in the sea beamed out from the lighthouse stones, perhaps the old lighthouse man’s too.  Just echoes, he told himself firmly.  You’ve heard the same thing over and again at this time of year when the disturbance is worse.  He stepped through the doorway.

“Hello!  Come down, you stupid idiots!” he called up.

Again, came that taunting laughter, now from above him.  Henry started up the spiral staircase.  It had been a very long time since anyone had climbed these stone steps, too dangerous even for tourist trips in the Summer now.  It was much higher than he thought, winding up further and further and taking him more and more time to catch up with that laughter he could hear right at the top, he thought. 

“Hey, guys!” he shouted.   “You shouldn’t be up here, you know!”

Finally, he came out into an observation area, still glassed in with thickly opaque panes.  There was nobody there.  The fog was beginning to lift now, a wind blowing it free.  It keened around the top of the lighthouse.  He could see black cloud towered up over the inland hills, heading out to bring heavy rains.  Below, on the quay, just at the lighthouse base, he could see the three wet suited figures lined up against the edge, shoulders hunched and ready to dive.  How on earth were they down there?   The thick, cold stones of the lighthouse surrounded him now, trapping him inside with its old stories.  Feelings of fear and panic which were not his own swept through him and mingled with the sense of urgency he felt himself, sending him plunging recklessly back down the spiral stairs to the rescue.  Those boys would drown without him!  It got darker and darker, so that he had to feel his way down when there was a turn without a window slit and at the bottom, the door was shut, a solid blockade on which he pounded with his fists and boots for release, yelling,

“Let me out!  Let me out!  I’m in here!  Let me out!”

Inside the lighthouse, his own words repeated and echoed and blended in with those terrible cries it already signalled out.  Henry kept beating on the door and shouting.  The door fell open suddenly and he blundered outside.  Another of those arcing forms swooped into the water before him and then the next careened into him, carrying him with it.  The harbour water was freezing, churning, and clogged with muddy sand and silt.  Henry struggled, gulping water, and tried to fight his way up to the surface.

A pair of sinewy arms grappled round him, pulling.  One of the boys was saving him!  If he hadn’t been half drowning, he would have laughed at the irony of it.  The current was strong, but the tide was coming in, sucking round the base of the pier.  Henry was a strong swimmer himself and he twisted to help pull them up, as he did so coming opposite the goggled face of the diving boy.  There was no face, only palest bone.  The arms gripping him were pulling him down, not up and the water around was filled with other bodies, sea rotted.  Dead people - men, women, and children - churned over in the waves tumbled like stones, their bones wearing smooth, the tatters of long dresses and waterlogged rags keeping them down.  Henry kicked and punched, pushing away from the old lighthouse towards the new pier.  If he didn’t get away from it, he would be added to its requiem repeat.  As he forced himself away, the arms’ grip loosened and all at once he was free, fighting across the narrowest part of the harbour mouth to the bottom pier on the other side, the tide fortunately in his favour. 

He was carried near enough to the pier to drag himself, exhausted, on to the rank concrete base, washed over with sea water, that anglers fished from on better days.  There was nobody standing on it now.  Salt water burned in his eyes and throat, the foghorn still sounding out across the clearing sea.  On the east pier, where the lighthouse stood lost in its old deaths, three huge black cormorants, ancient looking and intent, were poised by its base on the edge, ready to dive.  Henry dashed the water from his eyes to see better.  He could see no boys, only those creatures there.  The final swirls of the sea fret vanished as he rolled over on to his back, safe on the other side and the rain came, pouring on to the long boardwalk above him.  He struggled up, saturated and chilled right through, and went to make his way back down the harbour side in the downpour towards the fishing boat, his father, his uncle, and safety.  The fog had cleared away and he could no longer hear the foghorn or the distress calls from the tall stone lighthouse stranded in the desertion of its own shut down past.  The wind coming off the land with the rain had carried it all back out to the drowning sea.