I am the Sea Read online

  I AM THE SEA

  Matt Stanley

  Legend Press Ltd, 51 Gower Street, London, WC1E 6HJ

  [email protected] | www.legendpress.co.uk

  Contents © Matt Stanley 2021

  The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

  Print ISBN 978-1-80031-0-056

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-80031-0-063

  Set in Times. Printing managed by Jellyfish Solutions Ltd

  Cover design by Sarah Whittaker | www.whittakerbookdesign.com

  All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Matt Stanley was born in Sheffield and achieved a first-class degree in English and American Literature from the University of East Anglia. He is the author of a number of detective novels for Macmillan and has previously taught an MA in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. I Am the Sea is Matt’s eleventh novel.

  For Javier Mustieles Renales,

  unexpected son

  For now I stand as one upon a rock

  Environ’d with a wilderness of sea

  Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave

  Expecting ever when some envious surge

  Will in his brinish bowels swallow him

  Titus Andronicus

  ONE

  The corpse has been tied to the balcony railing for five days, enshrouded in a bed-sheet cerement. Five days and five nights out in the sea air, dampened by drizzle and spray, soiled by seabirds, lit intermittently by a beam that could not ignite life even as it prevents death. Gust buffeted. They say the torso rocked in the gale of the second day, as if the thing was struggling, Lazarus-like, to escape its wrappings.

  I have watched it through the telescope these last two days from the shore station but it hasn’t moved for me. I don’t know why I gaze at it so. Perhaps because that pale pupal form, limbless, faceless, has altered my fate. But for this death, my first posting would have been some other house than Ripsaw Reef.

  Spencer was his name. There’s no notion, as yet, of how he died – only that Principle Bartholomew and Assistant Keeper Adamson were seen lashing him to the bars on the day they signalled for aid.

  I understand it is not official Commission practice to expose the body in this way. Nor is it a simple matter to hoist a deadweight vertically up the tower. But keepers around these isles have learned that a cadaver soon becomes noisome if confined, and accusations of foul play may be avoided only if the dead man is available for autopsy. He cannot simply be tossed into the sea with the day’s ashes. Better that the gulls settle on him, not knowing that a skull sits beneath their delicate webbed feet. There’s no ignominy in it. The hero Lord Nelson bears the same fate with equanimity in Trafalgar Square – he, too, supported on an imperious column almost the same height as Ripsaw.

  I feel no dread or repulsion – only curiosity. Still, the station officers here have tried to frighten me with tales of the perils faced by keepers on a rock house like Ripsaw. They say there was a fellow at Bell Rock or Haulbowline who, through unbearable monotony or vertigo of the abyss, stabbed himself in the breast rather than tolerate another day. He couldn’t be taken off the rock for two days due to the weather. He died on shore.

  Then there was the new keeper at Longships or Skerryvore whose hair went completely white during his first storm. He was offered a generous pension but elected to stay on the rock. The keeper before Adamson was washed off the rock while emptying the ash bucket. Three months previous to that sorry occurrence, another man simply disappeared, either swept from the balcony in a gale or sucked from the doorway by some immense billow. No trace of either was found. Ripsaw, so they tell me with exaggerated gargoyle contortions, is the “most fatal” house run by the Commission.

  I’ve read that the keepers in France live with their families so that the desolation is mollified by the comforts of a common hearth, by the sound of childish laughter, and by love. No such sentiment for the Commission. Men alone is their approach. Emotion stays on shore.

  * * *

  On the sixth day, the tides and winds were judged propitious and we finally departed for Ripsaw in the cutter. I myself saw little difference in the weather. To the naked eye, the lighthouse remained a pale finger bisecting a plumbeous sky and a sea of slate. Even through the telescope, the waves about the reef had no fearful aspect. Their silent white was merely hoar frost or lichen on the sea’s surface.

  My uniform was still stiff with newness. Drizzle and spray beaded on the woollen greatcoat and I worried that the salt would ruin its smart brass buttons. With my cap and my epaulettes, I felt more like an actor about to walk on stage than an apprentice keeper about to take his first position. The cork lifebelt was my Yorick’s skull or my papier-mâché helmet.

  I expected that the sailors – rough sorts and vulgar – would snigger or mock, but rather they deferred to my tall black figure as if I were a policeman or curate. The trip is but twenty miles, but the men were as sombre as Magellan’s setting sail for the Horn. Perhaps because they knew they had to bring a body back, rather than for some other subtle augury.

  Perspective is distorted at water level. For the first hour, it seemed that the lighthouse was no closer, forever distant as the moon. But as the tide ebbed, it grew larger, its dark pedestal of rock emerging so that the column stood naked but unashamed above the waterline – an elegant and fragile figure amid the brute elements.

  Waves that had seemed so flatly passive from ashore were heaving hills of glass afloat. I confess I was weak with nausea. Midway between station and lighthouse, there was a moment when I measured the scale of our tiny vessel against the blackness below, the chiaroscuro vault above, the horizon’s hard demarcation and the scrap of coast blurred imaginary by mist and spray, and I gripped the gunwale for the consolation of something physical and solid. It was a moment only. A brief and fleeting moment only.

  Some miles later, I sensed the place. First, the rushing reef: the skirring plash and suck of boiling spray across the thousand feet of jagged saw-tooth gneiss around the lighthouse. Then the screams and shrieks of circling birds around the lantern. Then the salty iodine tang of gurgling, molluscous nooks and cavities. It was not land. It was not sea.

  Out here among the furious eddies, between the twenty-fathom abyss and the limitless sky, man had built this adamantine tower of granite – totally solid for its first thirty-five feet of interlocking, double-dovetailed, masonry – as an imposition of light and order on chaos. The waters were perpetually about its throat like strangulating hands but the structure stood tall.

  And suddenly we were at the foot of the monument, whose exposed rock was choked with swaying henware and bladderwrack. A long gunmetal ladder descended some fifteen feet from the doorway to a small patch of rock where a metal grille formed a rudimentary landing platform. The tower’s weather side was green with algae and speckled with barnacles to a surprising height, while the lee side was as pristine as the day it was built. I squinted up its tapering immensity, at the windows, at the balcony’s curled lip, above which poor dead Spencer was lashed.

  All was now activity on the cutter as we c
ame around to the landing stage. Ropes were readied. Tarpaulins were hauled from barrels and chests. Sails were reefed. Close to the rock, the waves seemed even greater. The little vessel tipped and rocked as if in a tempest and it seemed inconceivable that any person or thing could be landed from such instability.

  A beam emerged from an aperture above the great iron-bound door – the lighthouse crane. Then the door itself opened and I saw for the first time my new colleagues, Principal Bartholomew and Keeper Adamson, both in uniform.

  My impressions from a distance: Principle Bartholomew looked like an elderly clergyman with his white mutton-chop whiskers and his pale, ascetic countenance. Mr Adamson was shorter and more muscular, resembling a coal-heaver to my mind rather than an officer of the Commission. His uniform seemed not to fit him. It was he who carefully descended the ladder to receive and secure ropes thrown from astern and from the bow. He appeared not to notice me. Rather, he ascended to help with the resupply.

  I held tightly to a beam and tried not to slip on the wet rope matting as the sailors prepared the supplies for the crane, swinging them out over the waves and up to Principal Bartholomew at the doorway. Oatmeal, small beer, butter, beef. Newspapers. My own trunk of clothes and few possessions. My journal was safe inside my greatcoat.

  When all had been winched to the house, the body of Spencer was swung out from the beam and swayed precariously above the depths as it approached the cutter. The sailors were efficient but subdued, not wanting the bad luck of a body on-board. In its gull-stained shroud, it was a disturbing, amorphous chrysalis, its head lolling oddly as if the neck were broken.

  Finally, it was my turn – I, the least important item of cargo.

  “What’s it to be, then: rope or jump?” said one of the sailors.

  My choice: be attached to the same rope that had just delivered the corpse and be hoisted, pendulous, fifteen feet above the hungry sea, or jump from the madly tilting bow to a slippery platform. I saw that Keeper Adamson was descending the ladder once again to loose the ropes. I decided to show my valour.

  They positioned me at the prow, which was plunging and soaring and twisting to be free of its restraint. The platform seemed both too far and too low to permit a safe leap. A slip or a mistiming and I’d simply topple into the water where it churned against the rock. My heavy greatcoat would soak in a fatal embrace and the weight of it would draw me down to darkness.

  Ropes were tugged. The boat was brought about.

  “Keep hold of the stake! Jump only when you’re told!”

  I bent my knees and gripped the stake until my fingers ached. Each jerking prow rise threatened to toss me. Each complementary fall made me almost weightless. Keeper Adamson was watching keenly and I saw in his eyes that he was hoping for a slip, a fall.

  “Now!”

  The prow was in a trough, about to rise. I allowed my hand to ungrip the stake and fall forwards, springing my knees as if I were to vault the tower itself. The deck raised beneath my soles, lifting me through the air, over the void and on to the metal grillwork. I landed squarely, my boots clanging on the metal. I flexed my legs to minimise the force and held out my arms for balance. Perfect athleticism.

  Mr Adamson merely nodded and set about casting off the ropes. I turned to look back at the boat and noticed one of the sailors looking furtively up at the door as if to check whether Principal Bartholomew was watching. On verifying his chance, he whistled to Adamson and tossed a package.

  The assistant keeper snatched it from the air and thrust it inside his coat before throwing back the last coil of rope. He glanced at me and saw that I had seen.

  “Newspapers,” he said. “Come on. The tide.”

  I followed him to the foot of the ladder and climbed the cold, wet rungs until the rock and the sea seemed very far below us. A fall from here could be fatal, though at high tide half of the ladder would be submerged.

  Principal Bartholomew was waiting with a dry hand to draw me level with the doorway. The supplies were stacked behind him, just inside the brass threshold, and would need to be taken within for safe storage. He looked at me critically, as if assessing a slender walking cane that he feared may not take his weight.

  “Welcome to Ripsaw,” he said. “Meakes, is it?”

  “Yes, sir. James Meakes, sir.”

  He nodded. The conversation was over. He gestured to the supplies.

  I caught just a brief glimpse of the departing cutter before the great oaken door swung closed and its copper bolts were shot. Perhaps my eyes had not adjusted, but everything within seemed darkness.

  TWO

  Moving the supplies within was accomplished in no time, though they would be further distributed later to their respective stores. The barrels were rolled and the boxes or bags carried by Mr Adamson or me, or by both together if the weight warranted. Principal Bartholomew directed us where and in what order to carry the things and I was soon perspiring inside my greatcoat.

  “Leave your trunk here,” said the principal, finally. “You can collect it later. Accompany me now directly to the lantern.”

  We were in the windowless and lamp-lit lower storeroom, where four enormous cast-iron water cisterns followed the circle of the walls. The air was damp and smelled of stone, rust and the privy located there. It was like a castle dungeon, with granite walls seven feet thick. A second door with a thick glass pane closed the vestibule to the great exterior door.

  The ascent was a rush of impressions and sensations. Though I had studied the construction of lighthouses and the minutiae of their operation, this was my very first experience inside one, and I felt the urgent excitement that a historian must feel when he closes his book and enters the actual tumbled temples of antiquity where orators and philosophers once congregated.

  We passed first up a stone spiral staircase with a smart brass handrail to another store, whose strange perfume was like a steamship engine room. In the dim light of two windows, I saw glinting copper containers and the glisten of accumulated coal.

  The next staircase was of wood and at an angle almost vertical, so that one had to hug close to the steps in order not to fall and so that one could pass through the narrow manhole hatch into the next chamber. There, I saw baskets, more shelves, and the japanned metal lockers that stored food and drink away from the chill damp of the lowermost chamber and the oleaginous odour of the other.

  The staircases continued thus through hatches, past the kitchen with its smell of fried bacon and baking bread, past a number of bedrooms behind wainscot partitions and a library whose doors were closed. I saw the sea recede ever lower through windows in the stairwells and I fancied I could feel air rushing silently about the house, imagining myself not so much in an earth-bound building as in a vivid dream.

  The light-room was a bare and utilitarian space with a ceiling of metal mesh rather than vaulted stone. Here was the mechanism that turned the light and the great cast-metal column that supported its weight. Here were the logbooks and the weather instruments, an iron stove, a solid oaken table and three telescopes stored in a rack.

  The principal did not stop but continued up a gunmetal spiral staircase that led into the lantern: the altar where the enormous lens was enthroned. We rose into the very lens itself and I admit I could not breathe for the beauty and the majesty of it.

  Twice the height of a man, this crown-glass jewel fully enveloped us in multiplicitous blue-green rings of prism and lenticular bullseye magnification. Spectral sparks glinted red and violet among the annular sections. Sea and sky and light itself were here concentrated. It was a wonder of science and modernity, true, with its collective genesis in the brilliant minds of Faraday, Newton, Argand, Teulère and Fresnel. But it was more than optics, more than mere refraction. So much more. The diagonal black astragals of the lantern panes were warped and crazed by the distorting lens, as was the horizon, as were the flitting sparks of gulls about the dome. Rigid linearity was but a myth inside this divine kaleidoscope.

  And there
was the noise of the ventilator, the tower’s glass and metal throat that conveyed all effluvia to the upper atmosphere, even as the outside air enviously attempted entry. It was a deep, low moan, interrupted by pneumonic coughs and gasps. A consumptive deity rising in the morning.

  And there was the lamp itself, extinguished now, its circular maze of wicks, its network of brass tubing, its elegant glass chimney protecting pristine perfection like a museum display case. I was like a child wanting to touch every gleaming surface.

  Principal Bartholomew, guardian of this sacred light, was observing my awe. In the limpid illumination of the lantern, I could see that his eyes were a smoky blue and that his pale skin had a luminous quality that, with his white whiskers, made him almost an apparition trapped inside an exquisite jar.

  He saw that he had my attention. “Very well, Mister Meakes. Do you have something for me?”

  “Sir? Oh, yes, sir.”

  I took the letter of presentation from inside my greatcoat and handed it to him. He appeared to read it all, though he must have seen the same thing many times.

  “Hmm. All is in order. I welcome you officially to the first-order dioptric lighthouse of Ripsaw Reef. You will spend the first six weeks of your apprenticeship here and learn the duties of a keeper. If your conduct is satisfactory, you will move on for a further six weeks at a catoptric house before receiving your certificate of satisfaction and being added to the expectant list. Thereafter, you will be assigned a lighthouse according to availability and necessity.”

  “Yes, sir. These things have been explained to—”

  “Your duties. You will be instructed in the full duties of the light-room, lantern and other parts of the house. You will learn to light the lamp, trim the wicks, replace valves, clean the lens, replenish oil and maintain the lantern glass. When on duty, you will record relevant information in the ship log, the daily log and the weather log, using the barometer, thermometer and rain gauge. If your watch finishes in the morning, you will raise the signal ball between the hours of eight o’clock and ten o’clock to assure the shore station that all is well. You will also write a monthly report. Until I am assured that you have learned and executed these duties well, you will not be permitted to be alone in the light-room during any night watch. Either I or Keeper Adamson will accompany you.