I am the Sea Read online

  Lord, deliver me from this windowless pit.

  It was not beyond presumption that Mr Adamson had scratched the words by the privy merely to unsettle me. For that reason alone I did not mention that I had seen them.

  “Have you prepared breakfast, Mister Meakes?”

  Principal Bartholomew’s face was red and his white hair had risen like a halo around his head. Evidently he had been out on the balcony. He was still in uniform.

  “Not yet, sir. I have just now been advised of the duty list by Mister Adamson.”

  “Very well. It will be buttered toast and porridge for me. Make a pot of good, strong tea.”

  Fortunately, I had spent time in the kitchen at Mr Jerrold’s house. I have no fear of the stove or the pan. I cut the bread into slices of equal thickness and put them in the tin toasting rack. I measured out the oats and added a proportional amount of water and sugar. I filled the copper kettle with cold water – noting how the condensation beaded on the metal – and set it to boil.

  All the while, I was aware that the two others were sitting behind me without exchanging a single word. The scrape of pan on stove and clanking spoon seemed greatly magnified in that small semi-circle of cupboards. Every now and then, the reef would spit at the window and a billow would boom.

  “The lighthouse quivers much during a storm,” I said.

  Both laughed. Mr Adamson’s was a derisive bark, Principal Bartholomew’s a dry chuckle.

  “A storm, Poet? You call this a storm? It’s not even a gale!”

  “Mister Meakes,” said the principal. “This is normal weather here at Ripsaw. You arrived during an unusual calm, hence the cutter coming out with supplies yesterday.”

  “A storm!” scoffed Mr Adamson. “How precious!”

  “When we have finished breakfast,” said the principal, “I will ask Mister Adamson to show you how to empty the ash bucket at the door.”

  “Sir? At the door below? But the waves are beating about the pedestal.”

  “Indeed. You need to lose your fear of the sea. It will do you good to make acquaintance with the reef when it is lively.”

  A whump. A splutter of spray at the window.

  “The toast is burning,” said Mr Adamson with some evident satisfaction.

  I turned and saw skeins of blue-grey smoke rising from the toaster. One side of the bread was quite blackened. I watched briefly fascinated as the smoke sought the kitchen door and rose suddenly towards the lantern, borne on the upward rush of air from the lowermost chambers.

  Principal Bartholomew said nothing but rose to close the kitchen door.

  “‘I wandered lonely as some toast,’” said Mr Adamson with exaggerated poetic projection.

  I threw the burned bread into the wastebasket and started again. That’s what Mr Fowler always used to tell me. Don’t worry. Start again. There is always another chance to get it right, to be good, to be better.

  * * *

  Mr Adamson later stood over me as I emptied ashes from each of the lighthouse stoves into the ash bucket. There is a grave necessity to do this slowly and carefully lest the particles fly into the air and rise up the house to contaminate the lens and its mechanism. Not even the merest speck must mar the immaculate transparency of the lantern’s eye.

  When the bucket was full, I closed its lid and followed Mr Adamson down the precipitous stairways, tremulous at the booming waves and the idea of opening the great door into such a maelstrom. By the time we had reached the water store, it was almost impossible to be heard with the constant buffeting of the waves. I could see through the window in the first door that the vestibule floor was wet. The sea was coming in. Perhaps the level of the water was midway up the door or even above it. Releasing the bolts now would allow tons of water to rush in.

  Mr Adamson appeared to relish my fear. He opened the first door and bade me follow him. Here in the vestibule the volume was something fearful: the detonating waves, the hissing reef, the gulp and spit of swirling eddies, the spatter of spray against the door. Beyond those four inches of iron-bound oak, a veritable tempest was raging, whatever they would have had me believe.

  He unloosed the copper bolts with a great show of trepidation and grasped the doorknob with a theatrical deep breath. He beckoned me closer, as if together we were to view a sleeping lion. He wanted me right by his side.

  He opened the door just a crack and peered out, waiting, I assumed, to see if the sea would inundate and sweep our feet away. But he had another plan: to startle me. He was waiting for the next wave to strike the weather side.

  At that moment, he swept open the door and simultaneously I felt the boom of the wave on the house’s opposite side. A great green claw of water curled around each side of the tower, almost at the upper lintel of the door, and seemed to hang there in all of its immense density before the two parts joined foaming fingers in the very air before us and vaporised with an explosion of spray. Miraculously, no water entered the house.

  The wind then carried tendrils and filaments horizontally, gasping and sighing from the stonework, but again, these did not enter. I understood why the door was on the lee side and how the circular surface of the lighthouse fools the waves, dividing them as a ship’s prow divides the water. A colossal billow may strike, but there is no flat surface to assail. The wave must fold, cleave in twain and meet upon the other side, surprised and frustrated, to destroy itself.

  I looked down and saw the sea convulsing and writhing about the rock like a man in the throes of a terrible fit. Lurching and charging, twisting and falling, it had worked itself into an exhausted lather of spume and spindrift but it would not cease. It could not. It was driven mad by wind and by eddies that tormented it without mercy. Further afield, the reef appeared to steam and boil, the waves breaking upon each other from all directions in their blind rage. And this was not a storm.

  It was a mesmerising sight. Waves charged at the house with seeming intent, offended by its stubborn strength. Their choking hands tried again and again to close around its pale throat, but all were blown to spray. Man’s ingenuity was imperious. Our science and engineering could mock the very fury of the ocean. For there we stood at the open door with barely a drop upon us.

  I cannot guess how long I gazed at it, but my reverie was halted quite suddenly when I felt Mr Adamson’s hand, firm and flat, between the shoulder blades.

  In that instant, the hairs bristled at my collar and I was seized with the certitude that he was about to push me from the parapet into the thrashing maw below. I believe I cried “No!” and thrust out my hands to the doorjambs left and right.

  He may have laughed (I could barely hear a thing with the roaring of the waters), but he removed his hand from my back and I turned to face him.

  “You tried to push me!”

  “Ha!”

  “I felt your hand! You were about to…”

  He was laughing. “Becalm yourself, Poet! I was not trying to push you. I told you that it was time to close the door, but you didn’t hear me. The sea has bewitched you. I’ve seen it before.”

  It was true I could see no malicious intent in his eyes, but I still remember the firmness of his hand. I feel it still, burning there between my shoulders. Had I not buttressed myself against the doorway, I feel sure he would have launched me from it. For what motive, I cannot say. I only know what I felt.

  He nodded towards the ash bucket by my side. “Well? Are you going to empty it? Or do you want me to take a few paces back lest I push you into the sea?”

  “I would prefer if you did step back.”

  His eyes changed then. He was no longer laughing at me. He took three or four exaggerated steps back and gave a mocking bow.

  I very quickly bent to the bucket, opened its lid and felt for the brass sole of the door without once taking my eyes from Mr Adamson. Holding tightly to the jamb, I emptied the ashes on to the parapet, rather than into the waves, knowing that this was very likely unacceptable to Principal Bartholomew.


  “Bolt the door!” shouted Mr Adamson, before turning and ascending the stone staircase without me. Was he going to report me for not disposing of the ashes correctly?

  I found that my legs were shaking. I closed both doors and paused briefly in the water store, where, despite my best efforts, I could not find the message I had seen scratched on the wall the previous night. Had Mr Adamson abraded it from the stone before I awoke?

  I had heard about this kind of thing from the men at the shore station: jokes played upon new keepers by experienced lighthouse-men. I had resolved to greet such attempts with good grace and humour, knowing that safety was the first rule in any house. I would be in no danger if I could merely tolerate these initial trials.

  But, still. A man died here not ten days ago.

  * * *

  Though I am excused from cleaning the lantern and light-room today because I made breakfast, I thought it a fine idea to volunteer my services to Principal Bartholomew all the same. Besides, the words of Mr Fowler are always with me, and his advice was constantly to occupy myself with mechanical or repetitive tasks.

  I found the principal in the light-room store, where he was using a funnel to fill two half-gallon canteens from a one-gallon canteen. Here are also stored spare lantern panes (each already mounted in its astragal), spare glass chimneys, oil for the revolving mechanism, coils of rope, a press for leathern valves, a box of medical supplies, and cloths and chamois rags for polishing. I also noticed a litter leaning against the wall, presumably for serious accidents. Every locker or shelf or can was clearly labelled.

  “Mister Meakes. How did you like the rock and the reef?”

  “It is fearsome and beautiful.”

  “Is it?”

  “You don’t think so, sir?”

  “It is a great body of water subject to tides, winds, pressure, temperature and the season. I will grant you that it may be perilous, but that is why we are here. We impose efficiency and order upon the deep.”

  “Yes, sir. To that end, I have come to help with the cleaning.”

  “Very good. Select two linen cloths, two chamois rags and some spirit of wine – the bottles are on that shelf. I have already carried the other materials aloft.”

  Before ascending, the principal noted precisely in the inventory log which supplies we were taking from the store, so that in one month, in six months, a clerk at the Commission offices can corroborate his columns and confirm that not a single rag nor drop of colza oil has been wasted or misappropriated on an isolated rock hundreds of miles distant. Efficiency and order.

  In the light-room, he showed me how to polish the brass and copper of the lamp to a flawless sheen, though to my eye it was already perfect. The lens we caressed with voluptuous and fragrant chamois, I within and he outside. I watched his silhouetted form rippling through the rings of glass, his torso curved, his limbs tentacular, his head variously deliquescent, variously convex through bulbous bullseyes. He seemed a shadow trapped inside the glass and swimming in its vitreous angles. No doubt I appeared just as strange to him, except that Principal Bartholomew is evidently not a man much given to fancy. For him, the lens is nothing but an instrument we serve as eunuchs serve a sultan or as monks preserve reliquaries of sacred bone.

  The lighting apparatus thus polished, he handed me the stiff-bristled broom and sent me to the balcony to sweep the droppings and the feathers that had accumulated overnight. The wind and rain would have scoured these in time, but a lighthouse does not function in such a way. A keeper must be occupied in almost every waking moment with the house’s constant maintenance, lest the tower act conductor for his thoughts and blast him with a bolt of emptiness.

  This Mr Fowler instilled in me. Work, work and work some more.

  Truly, it is invigorating to be upon the balcony and, like Hamlet, to contemplate the precipice. The very place puts toys of desperation / Without more motive, into every brain / That looks so many fathoms to the sea / And hears it roar beneath. The wind is brisk and tugs insistently at cloak and trouser leg, while all around the congregated waters whisper. Perhaps only they know what happened to Spencer. Perhaps they spoke with him as he nodded here inside his shroud.

  “Mister Meakes? That broom will not push itself.”

  I looked up and saw the principal on the narrow parapet that circled the lantern. He was holding on to a metal ring between the astragals and using his free hand to clean the glass of salt. A slip, a lapse of concentration, and he could tumble past me two hundred feet into the surf. What man could survive such a fall? If he was not pulverised by the rock, he would certainly be stunned by the sea’s slap and subsumed within its cold embrace.

  He was gazing at me quite fixedly. For how long had he been watching? I applied myself with fresh diligence to my sweeping.

  In the ceaseless washing of the reef, I could hear the words of Mr Fowler: “What shall we do with you, James? What shall we do with you?”

  SIX

  Mr Adamson served his blackbird pie for lunch in the kitchen.

  “Not every bird in it is a blackbird, but every bird in it was black,” was his apparent attempt at humour.

  The principal did not laugh. Indeed, I had overheard the two arguing about the pie earlier while I was in the bedroom. I listened only because it was the first time I had them converse at all. Mr Adamson had begun it.

  “Mister Bartholomew – may I have the key to the lock box? I need a little wine for the pie.”

  “No, Mister Adamson, but I will fetch a cup of it for you. How much do you need? Will a glassful be sufficient?”

  “I can’t say, sir. I don’t measure when I cook. I go by sight only.” (The word “sir” seemed like vinegar on the assistant keeper’s tongue).

  “Then you will make do with a glassful.”

  “You don’t trust me.”

  “Assuredly, I do not.”

  “And you are a paragon of sobriety, to stand in judgement of me?”

  “One more word of insubordination and I will write a report to the commissioners. You know what that will mean.”

  Mr Adamson murmured something I could not hear.

  The two now faced each other across the table and ate without exchanging looks. It was a very good pie and I marvel that such a thing is possible with the meagre larder of a lighthouse. I raised this question as we were finishing and Mr Adamson gave his derisive snort.

  “Aye, there’s onion and carrots now, but let’s see what you think of the fare in two or three weeks when the fresh produce has been exhausted and the supply boat can’t come out for weeks. I hope you like salt beef and hard-tack.”

  “We often catch fish, Mister Meakes,” said the principal. “The rock furnishes us with crab, lobster and mussels. With a line and rod, we may feed from the ocean each day the tide favours us.” He looked at the kitchen clock. “Why don’t you both go down to the rock this afternoon and see what you can catch for supper? The wind will have lessened by then.”

  “He’s afraid of the rock,” said Mr Adamson.

  “Then here is another opportunity to overcome that fear,” said Principal Bartholomew.

  He would soon be proved quite wrong about that.

  * * *

  “Don’t worry, I won’t push you,” said Mr Adamson, as we approached the main door. “If you prefer, I’ll go down first.”

  We were carrying a crab basket, a rod and a copper bucket for collecting cockles. The ebb tide had almost fully revealed the metal grille of the landing platform and a few metres of reef were exposed around.

  He descended the ladder and I lowered the equipment to him on a line before climbing down myself, gripping each wet rung with great concentration.

  The rock was still awash and pungent with the smells of the sea. Flaccid seaweed lolled in crevices and lapped at the lighthouse pedestal. Rock pools were dozens of tiny mirror shards that rippled or bubbled with life. I could hear the click and scuttle of shell and claw.

  Mr Adamson tied an avian corpse of white
-needle bones and purple flesh to the crab basket and tossed it into the sea, securing its cord to an outcrop.

  “To work, Poet!” He was grinning. “Fill your bucket with cockles and mussels and whatever else you can find. I will cast a line.”

  I believe it is the first time I have seen him contented. He is a man of the land in his soul.

  “And watch where you step!” he called. “You know what happens to keepers on this rock!”

  I moved with special care towards the reef’s black incisors, aware of the sea yawning all around us, licking impatiently at the edges of this sanctuary in anticipation of a slip, a fall. The tangle of glistening kelp, the bladderwrack’s obscene yellow eggs and the clinging dulse seemed almost to writhe about my feet, colluding with its briny master to trip me.

  I should not have been surprised by the amount of debris strewn about. So many ships have foundered here. Timber fragments, cordage, rusting nuggets of conglomerated nails. Sundry cargo semi-digested by the sea until barely distinguishable: scraps of cloth, a mass of jellied soap, a sodden hat. Even a cannonball turned red with flaking corruption. How does an iron cannonball arrive here when, all about, the abyss descends to twenty fathoms?

  I saw the body near the cannonball.

  It first appeared to be just a heap of kelp, but then I saw a pale upper arm and shoulder. An ear. I don’t know what made me think it could possibly be alive, but that’s what motivated my cry.

  “Mister Adamson! Help! Help! A body on the rock!”

  I was drawn to it despite my fear and revulsion. The corpse was quite naked, stripped by the interminable surf. Wet hair covered one eye, but the other was a mere ragged socket – victim first of crabs and then the fishes. The private parts, too. His limbs were all horribly broken and as twisted as the rubbery seaweed stripes around him. Skin had been abraded from knees, elbows, shoulders…

  “What have we here, then?” said Mr Adamson, now at my side. He appeared not remotely shocked or surprised.