Lighthouse (16 page)

Now it is just the two of them in the quietly rising lift. ‘If there’s anything you need,’ she says, ‘just let me know.’

She carries his rucksack down the corridor to the end room and waits while he fumbles the key into the lock and opens the door. She takes his rucksack inside and puts it down on the bed. Knocking on the wall just above his headboard, she says, ‘If you need anything at all.’

‘I won’t bother you,’ he says. He has not yet come into the room. He is standing by the door, holding it open.

‘You wouldn’t be bothering anyone,’ she says. ‘My husband’s away.’

He nods, and when still she remains with one hand on his rucksack, he says, ‘Oh, right,’ and puts his hand in his trouser pocket. Finding a note of the lowest denomination, he holds it out.

She moves away from the bed then and comes towards him. Passing him in the doorway, she says, ‘Goodnight,’ and leaves him with the money still in his hand.

Back downstairs, she eats the boy’s leftovers for her supper. She usually goes to bed before the bar closes. If there are no customers and Bernard is away she sometimes tells the new girl to call it a night and get off home. The place is empty tonight, but when the girl suggests closing early, Ester says no, they should stay open, someone might still come in. She stays perched on her bar stool, watching the girl, who has nothing to do. Not until the big clock says it is closing time does Ester say, ‘All right then. Go home.’ The girl lifts the stools up onto the tables and fetches her coat and bag, and Ester, on her way to bed now, says to the girl, ‘Lock the door on your way out.’

Ester has a quick bubble bath before getting into bed. She drops off quickly before being woken by a gentle tapping sound which builds to frenetic hammering against the partition wall.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Cigarette Smoke

It looks as if it is going to be a warm day. Futh is wearing his sandals again but without the socks, and his naked feet glow white between the straps. Even at nine o’clock in the morning the sun is quite strong. He feels it warming the back of his neck above his collar, and the backs of his knees beneath his shorts, as he walks to the outskirts of the town.

Passing a postbox, he drops in the cards he wrote the evening before. He will, he thinks, be seeing his father and Aunt Frieda and Angela before their postcards reach them, but still, this is the sort of thing one does on holiday. He has included Gloria on his father’s card but he has not written to Kenny.

Even after Futh’s father moved in with Gloria, Futh did not see much of Kenny, who generally avoided their family get-togethers, never attending his mother’s soirées or coming for the Sunday dinners Futh’s father cooked. But then Kenny, even in his twenties, had his own family, children, and Futh, as it was pointed out, did not.

But when Futh was visiting his father, he always found an excuse to get out of the house for an hour, and seeing as Gloria lived near Kenny, Futh did see him from time to time.

On one occasion, Futh was in the supermarket buying meat and potatoes and bottles of wine for his father’s Sunday lunch. Following the piped fresh bread smell to the bakery section, he came across Kenny selecting bread rolls, squeezing them and then putting them back.

‘How are you?’ asked Futh.

‘Hungry,’ said Kenny, picking up an iced bun with his oil-stained hand and replacing it with his thumbprint in the icing. ‘You?’

‘I’m seeing someone,’ said Futh. ‘In fact, you’ve met her. She was at that university open day – the girl I knew from school.’

Kenny investigated a cake, put his finger in the buttercream and licked it off. ‘The girl who didn’t remember you,’ he said. ‘You’re seeing her?’

‘I bumped into her again,’ said Futh.

While Kenny was picking through the gingerbread men, Futh asked after his wife and children and Kenny pointed out a woman in the biscuit aisle with twin boys who looked just like Kenny.

Futh, meanwhile, had put three iced buns in a bag and it was only as he was walking away that he realised he had got the one on which Kenny had left his thumbprint. He felt awkward about going back and swapping it in front of Kenny, so he just carried on to the checkout, knowing that he would have to eat that one.

He saw Kenny again on a nearby industrial estate where there was a store selling camping and outdoor equipment. Futh liked to browse in this sort of place and think about taking up climbing or kayaking, imagining trekking alone in the mountains or riding the rapids in a one-man canoe. This was before he was married to Angela. He looked at the tents, and sometimes he bought something small – gloves or a torch. He also bought all kinds of guidebooks and manuals. On this particular day, he had, amongst his purchases, a five hundred page hardback on ice climbing and a last-minute addition of a guide to self rescue, some big batteries and a spork. Walking away from the store, he passed a parked car and saw Kenny in the passenger seat. He went closer to the side window to catch Kenny’s attention but paused before knocking. There was a woman in the driver’s seat, but he couldn’t tell whether it was Kenny’s wife. She had her hands over her face and was partially obscured by Kenny who had his arm around her. She was upset but Kenny was saying something which seemed to help. The window was open a crack and Futh caught the smell of Kenny’s cigarettes. The woman dropped her hands, reaching into her bag for a tissue, and Futh, not wanting to disturb them, continued on his way, walking the mile back to the flat with the handles of his carrier bag cutting into the palms of his hands.

He wonders what Angela is doing at this moment, then he realises that at just after nine on a Thursday morning she will be working. She will not be thinking of him.

Angela, having considered science at the local university, studied English for one term at another institution. Then she switched again and went back to biology, ending up in publishing, in the editorial office of a scientific journal. It has never really suited her. She has always complained about it. Sometimes she has specific grievances and sometimes she is just generally dissatisfied. She has always kept an eye on the vacancies in the paper, circling some of them, rather randomly, it seems to Futh. He has never really known what she wants.

On the honeymoon, when the hire car broke down, they opened up the bonnet and stood in the pouring rain looking despairingly at the lifeless engine, and Angela said, ‘I wanted to go somewhere hot.’

‘You should have said so,’ said Futh. ‘You told me you’d be happy with anything.’

‘But not this,’ she said.

Futh went to the glove compartment and found Angela’s manual and the page which depicted the engine. He went back to the front of the car and stood there for a long time looking mostly at the diagram, peering warily at the engine itself from time to time.

Angela said, ‘We need Kenny.’

Futh unscrewed an oily cap. He had a good look at it and at the thing he had taken it off and then screwed it back on again, his hands dirty now.

‘We don’t need Kenny,’ he said.

Angela did not look so sure.

When Futh finally learnt to drive, in the last year of his marriage, he bought a second-hand car through the classified ads in the local paper. Gloria said he ought to have taken Kenny with him, to check the car over before he bought it. Kenny might have spotted the various faults which the car turned out to have.

The very first time Futh tried to drive it to work he had barely gone a mile before he realised that he had a flat tyre. He wondered whether he had bought a car with a slow puncture. He had never had to change a tyre before but he was determined to do it himself. He took out his spare and the jack and with the help of the manual he managed it. He put the tools and the flat away in the boot of the car, feeling very pleased with himself. He was filthy though. He had oil and grime on his hands, under his fingernails, and on his clothes. He decided to go home and shower and change before going on to work.

He parked in a space near his house. As he turned off the engine, he was surprised to see his front door opening. Angela ought to have left for work soon after him, but she was pregnant again and he wondered if she had felt unwell. He was just about to open the car door and get out when he saw that it was not Angela coming out of the house but Kenny, smoking a cigarette. Kenny seemed to look right at him through the windscreen and Futh felt a reflexive desire to hide. Then Kenny turned away, closing the front door behind him and dropping the stub of his cigarette onto the doorstep, and Futh wondered whether the sun was glaring off the windscreen so that Kenny could not see him after all. Without looking again in Futh’s direction, Kenny checked his fly and walked away.

After a minute, Futh got out of his car. Glancing at the still-smouldering fag end on his doorstep, he let himself into his house. He stood unmoving in the smoky hallway for a while and then went upstairs. The bedroom door was wide open. Angela was dressing, and he watched her, looking at her body become strange.

When she noticed him, she jumped and said, ‘What are you doing here?’ Glancing at the untidy bed, she did not wait for a reply before saying, ‘I’ve only just got up. I wasn’t feeling well. It’s morning sickness, I suppose.’

The bedroom smelt of cigarette smoke and he said so. ‘I wish you wouldn’t smoke,’ he told her, coming into the room to straighten the covers on the bed.

It was Angela who, not long after this visit of Kenny’s and in the run-up to Christmas, said to Futh that she thought they should separate, and Futh was astonished. Later, though, he thought about how often he had caught her rolling her eyes or sighing, and he thought that perhaps, having seen all this before, he should have seen it coming.

His father and Gloria said, ‘But what about the baby?’ and Futh said that they had lost it, a phrase which did, he supposed, suggest some degree of culpability; perhaps it was like losing a ship which failed to face down some natural or man-made disaster.

It was agreed that Futh would be the one to move out, but he did nothing about it for months on end. It was Angela who finally found him a flat to move into and packed up his belongings and arranged for a removal firm to come and take them away.

He applies some sun cream to his neck and his legs, and then, with the sense that it is all downhill from here, he shoulders his rucksack again and sets off.

He is not carrying any lunch. He did not pocket anything at breakfast that morning, having eaten in a small, quiet dining room under the gaze of the proprietor. He is not aware of having passed a bakery on his way out of town and does not want to turn back and walk any further than he has to looking for one. The day’s hike is a relatively easy one. He expects to be at his next stop by mid-afternoon when, he decides, he will eat a late lunch and enjoy a rest.

He is nearing the end of his circular walk now. Tomorrow he will be back at Hellhaus and then he will be going home. Except that he will not be going home, he will be going to his new flat. He thinks of the big front door shared by all the tenants, and the hallway, the concrete floor onto which the bills and circulars drop. He thinks about the buzzers and pigeonholes with these strangers’ names written underneath them on little slips of paper. The name on his, he thinks, will be missing, or somebody else’s name will be there instead. He thinks about his unknown predecessor, and the bed whose mattress is stained by and sags from the weight of the strangers who have been there before him. At least the flat is furnished. There are cupboards and drawers into which he will put his belongings which, at present, are wrapped and packed into boxes which Angela has labelled. There are carpets and curtains but no lightshades. There is a sofa but there are no cushions. There is a kettle and a microwave oven but no washing machine. There is a television and a phone line but no phone.

It reminds him of his first student flat, except that he did not live alone there.

He thinks of the things he needs to do. He needs to buy plates and cups and cutlery, although he could make do, at first, with paper plates and plastic cutlery, disposable things. He needs cushions and bedding, lightshades and lightbulbs. Perhaps, he thinks, he ought to have wine glasses and coffee-table books. He needs to get a phone connected, and to write his name on little bits of paper and put them on his buzzer and his pigeonhole.

By midday, the heat is quite fierce. There is not a single cloud in the blue sky. Futh puts sun cream on his already peeling skin – on his face and up beyond the receding line of his thinning hair. His father, who is now almost eighty, still has pretty much a full head of hair. Futh wonders whether he takes after his granddad, the one who never made it home. Ernst said that he did. Futh only remembers his granddad as a balding man close to death.