Lighthousekeeping Read Online Free Page A

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.

As an apprentice to lighthousekeeping my duties were as follows:
    1) Brew a pot of Full Strength Samson and take it to Pew.
    2) 8 am. Take DogJim for a walk.
    3) 9 am. Cook bacon.
    4) 10 am. Sluice the stairs.
    5) 11 am. More tea.
    6) Noon. Polish the instruments.
    7) 1 pm. Chops and tomato sauce.
    8) 2 pm. Lesson – History of Lighthouses.
    9) 3 pm. Wash our socks etc.
    10) 4 pm. More tea.
    11) 5 pm. Walk the dog and collect supplies.
    12) 6 pm. Pew cooks supper.
    13) 7 pm. Pew sets the light. I watch.
    14) 8 pm. Pew tells me a story.
    15) 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.’
    ‘I 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. Hiseyes 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