I am the Sea Read online

  The whistle was still sounding. I climbed the five sets of stairs to the light-room and arrived quite out of breath.

  Principal Bartholomew was standing and staring fixedly at his pocket watch. He said nothing, looking at my crumpled uniform with a downturned mouth. I had not changed into my everyday clothes. He, too, remained in uniform, even to his cap, but this was clearly his choice.

  “Forgive me, sir. I… It will not happen again.”

  “I assure you it will not, Mister Meakes.”

  Though it was still bright outside, twilight was approaching. The ritual of lighting the lamp for the first time lay before me – something that had attained the status of a great mystery in my imagination. It was initiation into the Eleusinian Rites or entry into the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem. Fewer men had ignited and maintained the beam of a first-order rock lighthouse than had been accepted into the secret ranks of the Masonic Temple.

  “Very well, let us ascend to the lamp,” said the principal.

  I followed him up the metal spiral, my own shoes clanging as his trod noiselessly. Truly, he was a spirit haunting this house.

  Inside the crystal oval of the lens, his gaze took on the watery transparency of the glass. He gestured to the lamp and I saw that it was different.

  “Note, Mister Meakes, the exact position of the lamp. You see that the lead plumbet hanging above the wick denotes that the lamp is in the exact centre of the lens. Likewise, you see that the bubble in the circular spirit level resting upon the wick is absolutely central, denoting absolute levelness in every azimuth.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “These tools are used to reposition the lamp each morning after cleaning. I have placed them here now only for your tuition. We may now remove them.” He put the tools in his jacket pocket. “Now observe.”

  He turned a brass screw and the four concentric circular wicks raised smoothly as one. He turned the knob on the fuel inlet and I watched the colza oil rise and brim around the wicks. It was mere science, but seemed alchemy to me.

  Next, he lighted the wicks and a weak but pure flame rose straight up – a timid thing that cowered uncertainly. How could this small candle throw a brilliant beam to all horizons?

  The principal then took the glass chimney from where it rested on the floor, inserted it partially into the sheet-iron chimney above, then gently over the lamp itself, so that the flame was protected from any breeze or accidental contact. A low, echoing moan now began as the hot breath of the lamp passed up though the cupola and out through the cowl.

  “Watch carefully how the damper works,” he said, reaching for a cord that was attached to a weighted lever higher up in the metal chimney. Restricting the air-flow through the ventilator caused the flame to shrink but increase in brilliance. Opening the vent stretched the flame but reddened it. Evidently, a delicate equilibrium was required to feed the light.

  “In twenty minutes, the flame will be at full strength: four inches high. Then we will increase the flow of oil so that it floods the wicks and stops them from carbonising. Thereafter, we check periodically that the oil supply remains constant. A valve may fail in the pump and need replacing. Do you have any questions?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Very well. Tomorrow, you will do it. Accompany me below.”

  We descended the stairs and he indicated a latch in the clockwork mechanism below the great black pillar supporting the lens frame. He unlocked the latch and wheels started to move, gears intermeshing with a low murmur. A bell began to ring at the same moment: a constant high-pitched trilling.

  “Now the lens is turning,” said the principal, “driven by the weight of a chain through the mechanism. Four beams of light are shining forth from the lantern, flashing a light every thirty seconds at all points for twenty nautical miles. The lamp is lighted.”

  I heard the pride in his voice, as if he himself had built this wonder of the modern age. No doubt he understands it all as well as its own creators do. But unlike them, he has cleaned it daily, fed it with oil, nursed it when its pump valves coughed or dribbled, oiled its parts and loved it with linen rag and chamois cloth.

  The lamp is lighted. Fiat lux. On land and out amid the stalking waves, our point of light protects from peril. Is our beam also visible to other shore houses, rock houses, lightships and light buoys, so that an illuminating ring passes all around these isles as signal fires were once lit from peak to peak in eons past? But those flames prefigured invasion and imminent destruction. Ours is pale like the moon, like the stars. A singular constellation.

  “Mister Meakes – are you listening?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then come here. Note the barometer and thermometer. We log the readings in this book at the beginning and end of each man’s watch – more regularly if the weather is changing rapidly. During the day, I take all measurements myself.”

  “And this device, sir? This glass tube?”

  Principal Bartholomew smiled for the first time since I had arrived. “It is a storm-glass – an instrument of my own. The white substance lying dormant at the bottom is a mixture of camphor, nitrate of potassium and muriate of ammonia partially dissolved in alcohol and with some water. As the weather changes, so the substance metamorphoses. You will see. For now, the weather is calm, but look here at the mercury in the barometer. Do you see how the upper limit is concave? That suggests an imminent drop in pressure, though nothing has been registered today.”

  Weather, then, was his whisky while on the rock. Its changes. Its varieties. Its subtleties. Its sleights of hand. Here in the light-room, he had his own laboratory of wind and rain and temperature. In place of emotion, he had barometric pressure, velocity and hydrography. His pulse was the waves.

  We ascended again the spiral staircase to raise the wicks, and I experienced the lens moving around us, its prismatic glints winking and swooping through circular sections. The lamp itself was not the blinding white light I had imagined but rather the kind of illumination that a handful of candles might collectively produce. Only outside the slowly circling lens would the beam be something brilliant, its light magnified and focused on the distant sea. I hoped to experience it later, but the principal had not finished his instruction.

  He showed me the various telescopes in their stand: the long and heavy night telescope, the Dollond achromatic for viewing the shore, and another whose function I cannot currently recall. Any ships seen from the house must be recorded in the log without fail because these figures serve to show and justify the Commission’s work.

  There was also the watch journal in which each keeper on duty would record anything of note. I could not imagine anything of note occurring, save perhaps an accident or some dramatic weather event.

  And thus my first watch began. It consisted simply of sitting in the light-room, listening to the drone of the mechanism, the moan of the ventilator and the maddening trilling of the bell that indicates all is well, while also being an insistent preventative against sleep.

  In such ways, I thought, does the Commission’s lack of faith extend itself across the waters. The engineers could have built a mechanism that chimed only if it stopped, but that might have led to lassitude or complacency. Clearly, the too-mortal keeper cannot be trusted to remain awake by his own diligence. He must be tortured into wakefulness by the constant supervision of the bell. Even holy monks are jarred from contemplation only every two or three hours by the ringing of matins, lauds, prime, terce, vespers, compline.

  So we sat with nothing more to do than wait for Keeper Adamson to relieve us, standing occasionally to look through the four windows for any ship or notable occurrence. Principal Bartholomew had brought a book with him and commenced to read it by lamplight, as if I did not exist.

  I looked at the clock: four hours more of simply sitting with nothing but the prison of one’s own mind to occupy. I realised I was cold despite my watch-cloak. The iron stove was cold and empty and I did not yet feel bold enough to ask why. All of the w
indows were open because air must rise through the metal mesh ceiling to ensure that no condensation forms upon the lantern panes or lens. How ironic to be seated in a light-room that in fact was as dim as any cellar. The lantern was heaven; the keepers were sooty demons hunched below.

  I watched Principal Bartholomew reading – an absurdity in itself. Like watching a man thinking. His eyes followed lines across the page. His lips moved almost imperceptibly. He was in another place.

  I thought about raising the subject of Keeper Spencer and his cause of death. Spencer, who had sat in this very same chamber and in this same seat for hours on end. I weighed possible phrases that I might use insouciantly. A pity about Mister Spencer… Did you know Mister Spencer well?… I hear that a number of keepers have unfortunately…

  But I said nothing. Sometimes, it is necessary to wait for the opportune moment. Perhaps Spencer’s death was still a grievous sorrow in this house. Perhaps there was some aspect of lighthouse lore that forbade mention of a colleague’s death. I resigned myself to more hours of nothingness and worried at the prospect.

  But something did happen.

  Initially, I thought the principal had coughed gently, but the sound repeated itself as I was watching him: reverberating soft thuds as if tiny hands were patting at the panes above us. Sometimes there was a sharp tap, like an ember cracking in a fire.

  “Ascend,” said the principal without looking up from his book. “See for yourself what it is.”

  I took the staircase with trepidation as the sounds continued. All was well inside the lens, but when I passed into the area around it – the metal grille floor that circled the lantern – I saw the reason for the morbid percussion.

  A hundred birds were wheeling and swooping about the false sun of the house, maddened by the beam and drawn to it by fatal instinct: flitting black-and-white sparks darting though the light. I saw them in flashes, momentarily illuminated: crows, magpies, larks, blackbirds, ducks, a raven, petrels, ptarmigans, terns and herring gulls. All were orbiting insensate.

  Every few minutes, a land bird would overcome its better impulse and hit a pane with feathery thud or splintered beak. Some dropped immediately to lie still or twitching on the lantern parapet. Others returned dazed to the air and began their hectic charge until exhaustion or further impact killed them. The seabirds were more intelligent, however, swooping close but ever dubious. I caught their piercing garnet and citrine eyes staring at me: a human shadow within the infernal tower.

  And I could not help but reflect that man, too, is often like these poor deluded birds: drawn inexorably to what destroys him, though it looks like justice or virtue or light. Some rush willingly to immolation; others do so unwittingly; others retain some innate sense that tells them to beware. I am sure Plato was not the first to think that not every light is as true as the sun.

  “Mister Adamson makes them into pies or stews.”

  I jerked in surprise at Principal Bartholomew beside me. The man moved like a phantasm about this space.

  “Pies, sir?”

  “Indeed. He collects the bodies from the balcony, plucks them and cooks them. Duck and magpie are his favourites.”

  “And it is like this every night? With the birds?”

  “Every night. There may be more or fewer depending on the season. Tomorrow morning, it will be your task to clean their bodies from the parapet and balcony. If not, they will accumulate and putrefy.”

  As the body of Keeper Spencer had threatened to putrefy?

  The thought of venturing out on that naked parapet to sweep bloody feathers from the metal was something that would not let me sleep. I thought about it until Principal Bartholomew looked up at the clock and closed his book. He stood and went, tutting, to the wall-mounted whistle near the weather instruments. Evidently, Mr Adamson was running late.

  Three minutes later, Mr Adamson ascended into the light-room. He appeared tired and sluggish. He did not look at or speak to me, or the principal, but went directly up to the lantern to begin his watch. It occurred to me only then I had not seen either of the men exchange a word since I had arrived.

  The principal went directly to his bedroom, but I – remembering Mr Adamson’s advice – continued my descent towards the privy in the lowermost chamber of the lighthouse.

  It was warmer down there because the coal stove had been ignited. Red embers gleamed through its cast-iron doors. A pair of candles were the only illumination, throwing distorting shadows and dark reflections among the water tanks.

  I sat there on the cold copper seat and I could hear the sea swirling at the tower’s flared foot, hissing over Ripsaw Reef. Indeed, I fancied could feel the pressure of the high tide even through seven feet of solid interlocking granite. I looked to the twin doors and imagined a colossal billow filling the corridor with its green-glass immensity. Would I be smashed against the water talks, or lifted like a cork to the higher storerooms?

  The darkness became suddenly oppressive and I finished my business in haste. It was as I was rising to leave that I saw the tiny words scratched into the stonework by the privy:

  “Lord, deliver me from this windowless pit.”

  FIVE

  I write at the small table in the bedroom, having barely slept a wink and yet having suffered all the same from tormenting dreams. I dreamed of suffocation, my face muffled in some feather mass, my arms lashed tightly across my chest. I was absolutely certain at one moment that water was slowly dripping, one drop at a time, on to my forehead but I could not raise my hand to cover or to wipe that spot. Pain burned in my shoulders and in my elbows. It seemed that I had been bound like Keeper Spencer, mummy-like, from head to foot and could only wriggle.

  Later, I heard the wind around the lighthouse. Perhaps there was a window ajar, or perhaps air was rising up the great stone flue of the house – I am not yet accustomed to its sounds – but I thought I heard voices whispering, weeping, shouting, keening. The words were indistinct and the voices many. I tried to concentrate on just one to make sense of the cacophony, but they wove and blended and evaded my interpretation in the moment when I thought some sense was present.

  I believe that during some brief tatter of sleep I was woken momentarily by a tremendous impact. It seemed to make the entire tower quiver. Some vast black leviathan colliding with the pedestal? A monstrous gust of wind? A giant billow slapping at the granite column? I told myself, full-drowsed with sleep, that it must have been the burly form of Mr Adamson moving in the bunk above me.

  I was woken once again as dawn was breaking by the rattle of the lens-rotating chain being winched up link by link. The seabirds were already screaming at that moment, but I was so fatigued I must have fallen back to sleep.

  Incredible as it may seem, I was finally jarred awake by the sea itself. Salt spray speckled my face from the nearest open window, though the bedroom must be seventy or eighty feet above the surface. I noted that Mr Adamson was not in his bunk as I went to the window in my nightshirt.

  What yesterday had been an undulating plate of grey is now a cauldron of angry surf that spits and boils about the reef. White-flecked waves are charging upon the house from all directions and dashing against it alarmingly, each impact a whump, a whump, a whump. Not the friendly rolling waves of yesterday, but jagged angles chipped from flint. The structure is definitely trembling. Spray strikes the glass, driven by the vaunting power of the surf and carried higher by the wind.

  I am afraid. I will go down to breakfast and speak with the other two.

  * * *

  Keeper Adamson was sitting alone at the kitchen table with his plate of bacon and eggs and his cup of coffee. He did not look at me when I entered and bade him a good morning.

  “You were mumbling in your sleep, Meakes. You kept me awake.”

  “Excuse me, but I am sure I was not.”

  “Babbling. Moaning. I know what I heard.”

  “I, too, heard voices. Perhaps—”

  “What voices? Bartholomew doesn’t speak
and I was the only other person in the room. You heard yourself.”

  His logic seemed incontestable. Or, more likely, he is accustomed to the sounds of the sea and of the house. He is clearly not a man of much imagination.

  “And it was your turn to make breakfast today,” he said. “I’ve made my own because I was hungry. There’s a list of duties on the cupboard there, see?”

  “I… Forgive me. I have not yet…”

  “You know that there’s a spare bedroom above Bartholomew’s? It’s for the commissioners when they visit once or twice a year. It’s locked, but I’ve seen inside. Carpets. Curtains. Mouldings. A regular boodour, it is. I could sleep there to escape your babbling, or the swinish snoring of Spencer, God rest his soul. But, no. It’s reserved. Not for the likes of us who sit here exposed to peril at every moment. We must make do with bare stone, wax-cloth floors and creaking bunks. There is an actual bed in the commissioners’ room. Can you imagine?”

  “I suppose they deserve their comforts.”

  “Deserve, you say? I know what they deserve, Poet. Well, I can’t take the commissioners’ room so you’ll need to stop your babbling. If not, I’ll have to report it to Bartholomew.”

  I went to the stove to pour myself coffee and was surprised to see the washbasin full of avian corpses. The feathers were silky black and chalk white: magpies, crows, possibly a blackbird – it was not easy to discern all types. There were only eyes and beaks and flecks of blood. Heads lolled on broken necks. Wings jutted at angles.

  “Principal Bartholomew told me that I should collect the birds this morning,” I said.

  “Aye, but have you seen the wind? I took them last night before it started gusting.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No. I did it because otherwise the wind would have carried the bodies off into the sea. I wanted another blackbird pie.”

  Spray lashed the kitchen window on the weather side and another whump reverberated up the tower. Cups and plates rattled in the cupboard. I glanced at Mr Adamson but he seemed not to have noticed. He was attempting to lick a drip of egg yolk from his chin with a grease-glistening tongue. It soured my stomach.