Lighthouse (2 page)

He lets himself in with his keycard and closes the door behind him, putting his overnight bag down on a seat just inside. He takes off his coat and hangs it on a hook on the back of the door just above the fire action notice. It is a small cabin with not much more than the seat and a desk, a cupboard, bunk beds on the far side, and a shower room. There is no window, no porthole. He looks inside the cupboard, half-expecting a trouser press or a little fridge or a safe, finding empty hangers. He does not need a trouser press but he would quite like a drink, a continental beer. He opens the door to the shower room and finds a plastic-wrapped cup by the sink. He fills the cup from the tap and takes his drink over to the bunk beds. Switching on the wall-mounted bedside lamp and turning off the overhead light, he sits down on the bottom bunk to take off his shoes.

Peeling off his socks, he massages his feet, which are sore from walking around the ferry and standing so long, braced, on the outer deck. He once knew a girl who did reflexology, who could press on the sole of his foot with her thumbs knowing that here was his heart and here was his pelvis and here was his spleen and so on.

Standing again, he takes a small, silver lighthouse out of his trouser pocket and places it in a side pocket of his overnight bag where it will not roll around and get lost. He locates his travel clock, takes off his watch, and undresses. He has new pyjamas and buries his nose in the fabric, in the ‘new clothes’ smell of formaldehyde, before putting them on. Taking out his wash bag, he goes into the shower room.

He watches himself brushing his teeth in the mirror over the sink. He looks tired and pale. He has been drinking too much and not eating enough and sleeping badly. He cups his hands beneath the cold running water, rinses out his mouth and washes his face. When he straightens up again, reaching for a towel, water drips down the front of his pyjamas.

He imagines coming home, his reflection in the mirror on the return journey, his refreshed and tanned self after a week of walking and fresh air and sunshine, a week of good sausage and deep sleep.

Back in the bedroom, he climbs the little ladder up to the top bunk, gets in between the sheets and switches off the lamp. He lies on his back with the ceiling inches from his face and tries to think about something other than the rolling motion of the ferry. The mattress seems to swell and shift beneath him like a living creature. There is a vent in the ceiling, from which cold, stale air leaks. He turns onto his side, trying not to think about Angela, who is perhaps even now going through his things and putting them in boxes, sorting out what to keep and what to throw away. The ferry ploughs on across the North Sea, and home gets further and further away. The cold air from the vent seeps down the neck of his pyjama top and he turns over again. His heart feels like the raw meat it is. It feels like something peeled and bleeding. It feels the way it felt when his mother left.

‘I’m going home,’ she said, meaning New York, meaning three thousand miles away. It was only after she had gone that Futh realised she had not left an address. He looked on the pin board in the kitchen but all he found was the start of a shopping list, her handwriting an almost flat line, a dash of Biro, indecipherable.

He looked in the library for pictures of New York, finding skyscrapers with suns rising and setting in their mirrored windows and all lit up at night, the light reflected in the river.

On his father’s side, there was German, although his father had never been to Germany until they went there together when Futh was twelve. Futh’s granddad had left home young, could not get away quickly enough. He settled in England and did not see his parents or his brother again.

‘He never went home for a visit?’ asked Futh.

‘No,’ said his father. ‘He thought about it a lot, but he never made it home.’

Futh did not like to think that someone would just leave, and so abruptly, and never see their family again.

Abandoning the top bunk, Futh feels his way down the ladder to the bed underneath, and the cold air follows him.

He woke in the night and his mother was there, her round face above him, lit by the moon through a gap in the curtains. When she left his room he was alone in the dark with her scent – the smell of violets – and the sound of her footsteps going down the stairs.

By breakfast time, she was gone, and his father was already drunk. Before she left, his father never hit him. Afterwards, when he did, it was without warning, or nothing Futh noticed in time. It was like when birds flew into windows with a sudden sickening thud, and then having to look at the bird lying terribly still on the ground outside, perhaps only dazed but probably hurt or broken in some way.

Futh tried not to get under his father’s feet. Sometimes he stayed outside, sitting on top of his climbing frame until it was so dark he could not see the ground underneath, and the lawn could have been an ink-black lake or just a big nothing into which, jumping down, he would drop. He was safe out there – but in the darkness he could always see the bright square of the kitchen window.

Watching his father wandering around the kitchen, picking things out of the fridge and sniffing them, looking in the cupboards and opening a tin, lighting a hob, Futh would know when it was time to go in for supper. If he waited too long, the supper would go cold and everything would be spoilt. Or, watching his father sitting alone at a bare table, he would know to wait until his father went out before going in and putting himself to bed.

In the other direction, over the fence at the bottom of the garden, was Gloria’s house. Futh had been friends with Gloria’s son Kenny since the first year of junior school, even though they had little in common. Futh was not really a people person, while Kenny always had girls or a gang of boys around him. Kenny played football and army while Futh was in the school library waiting for breaktime to end. Kenny went orienteering with his father, and could build a bike from scratch. When Futh took his own bike apart and could not put it back together again his father refused to help. In the end, Futh put all the bits – the gears and the chain and the pedals and so on – into a box in the shed and kept them there thinking that one day he would know how to do it.

Kenny and Futh used to stand at their bedroom windows at lights out, facing one another across their back gardens, each with a torch, flashing messages through the darkness. It was like Morse code except that it didn’t mean anything. Kenny would flash-flash-flash and Futh would flash-flash-flash back; Kenny would flash-pause-flash and Futh would send it back. Eventually, the game would stop. It was, for Futh, like looking at a lighthouse on the horizon at night. There was this flashing of light and then nothing, and you waited for the next flash, looking at where the light had been and where it would be again but you were looking at darkness.

When eventually no flash of light interrupted the darkness, it meant that Kenny was in bed, and then Futh got into bed too. In later years he would take the torch under the covers with him and read the sometime banned literature from his mother’s bookshelves.

Halfway through junior school, Kenny left – his father moved out and Kenny went with him. It happened suddenly, with nobody telling Futh that Kenny was going or that he had gone, and Futh spent some nights at his bedroom window waiting to see Kenny’s torch, wielding his own, flash-flash-flash, like a mating signal, receiving no reply.

Futh did not see Kenny again until Christmas. They met at the butcher’s. Gloria, coming into the shop and standing in line behind Futh and his mother, said hello. Kenny had already gone to wait outside and Futh joined him. Futh asked Kenny why he had left, and Kenny looked at him as if he were stupid and said, ‘I went with my dad.’

‘But why did your dad leave?’ asked Futh.

‘Well, he couldn’t stay,’ said Kenny, ‘knowing about the affair, could he?’

When primary school ended and Futh’s mother left and Futh began to spend his free time sitting on his climbing frame in the dark, he found himself thinking about Kenny, whom he had not seen in the two years since their meeting at the butcher’s. He looked at Kenny’s empty bedroom window, underneath which Gloria ate her supper alone in the kitchen.

She never seemed to have friends over, female friends like his mother had, who used to gather in the living room or on the patio in good weather, and sometimes his mother played a favourite song, her favourite singer, and started dancing, while he played by himself nearby, told to stay out of the way, getting as close as he dared, mesmerised by the noise and the perfume and the minidressed legs of his mother’s friends. Gloria had not been one of them.

He got to know Gloria’s habits. When she came into the kitchen to prepare her evening meal, she would turn on the radio. She would open the back door to call in the cat and feed it titbits from her plate while she was eating. When she finished, she would clear up and then, leaving the radio on, she would go upstairs to take a shower or a bath, and he would see her, the vague pinkness of her, fragmented by the bathroom window’s bobbled glass. She would come back down in her nightie, sit at the kitchen table and have a drink or two. She would feed the cat again, maybe take out the rubbish, or, in that summer of drought, soak her garden with the hosepipe in the dark. Alone in a street full of parched and pale lawns, while neighbours’ plants wilted and died, Gloria’s garden was lush.

The back door opened and Gloria appeared on her doorstep with a rubbish bag, but instead of going to the bins she walked onto the lawn, coming his way in her nightie, bringing the rubbish bag with her.

Leaning against the fence, she said, ‘All on your lonesome?’

Not knowing what to say, Futh said nothing.

‘Me too,’ she said, twirling the rubbish bag in her hand. ‘I could do with some company.’

‘I’ve got to go in soon,’ said Futh.

Gloria looked over Futh’s shoulder at the house, at the lit kitchen window. ‘What you and your daddy need now,’ she said, ‘is a nice holiday. That’s what I did when my husband left me. I went off on holiday. After a fortnight of sunshine and cocktails, I wasn’t even thinking about him.’

Futh, hearing his father calling him, turned around and was beckoned inside. When Futh turned back, Gloria was already walking away with her rubbish bag.

‘What did she want?’ asked his father, as Futh stepped into the kitchen.

‘She just came over to talk to me,’ said Futh.

‘What did she say?’

‘She said she was lonely.’

‘I don’t want you talking to her,’ said his father.

There were bowls of oxtail soup on the table. They sat down and ate, and Futh, through the curtainless window and across the dark back gardens, saw Gloria’s kitchen light and all her downstairs lights go off. A minute later, he saw her bathroom light go on again.

There was a curtain rail there, above the kitchen window. When they moved into this house, when Futh was seven, his mother had measured up for curtains, but she never got round to making them before she left. She had planned to paint the house from top to bottom, but had only done the landing when she stopped and did no more. Most of the pictures she brought from the old house were never hung, and the flowerbeds were planted but then grew wild.

His father, polishing off his oxtail soup, standing and reaching for his slip-on shoes, said, ‘I’m going out. Finish up, it’s your bedtime.’ When he opened the kitchen door, the cold night air came in and stayed when he was gone.

Gloria’s bathroom light went off and Futh saw Gloria coming into her bedroom. He shovelled his soup, chasing the last bits of meat around the bottom of the bowl. He saw her in front of her dressing table mirror, checking the look of herself in her nightie, touching her hair. She went back out onto the landing. A moment later, the light in the downstairs hallway went on, and when it went off again Futh stood quickly, put his empty soup bowl in the sink and went to bed.

He wakes in darkness. He can’t see a thing and doesn’t know where he is.

‘Where am I?’ he asks, before grasping that he is alone. He thinks he must be in the spare room, but everything feels wrong. Then he thinks he might be in his second-hand bed at the new flat but that does not seem right either. Finally he realises that he is on the ferry. He is on holiday, he thinks, that’s all, he is going on holiday, and he goes back to sleep.

He and his father had a daytime crossing to Europe. As well as taking him to the cinema and letting him have popcorn, his father bought him sweets in a mug from the duty-free shop and too many packets of peanuts at the bar and Futh felt sick in the car all the way from the ferry to their hotel in Germany.

Their hotel room had two single beds and a small bathroom. At bedtime, when Futh wanted a night light, his father put the bathroom light on and left the door ajar, and then said, ‘Go to sleep now.’ But Futh lay awake, turned towards that crack of light, watching in the big mirror behind the sink as his father changed his shirt and combed his hair and brushed his teeth and then – Futh quickly closing his eyes and trying to breathe like someone sleeping – he left, the door clicking shut behind him.

In the morning, his father would be there, in the other single bed, dozing with his mouth open, the odour of alcohol seeping out. When Futh got out of bed to go to the bathroom, his father would stir, asking, with eyes narrowed against the daylight, what time it was. Futh would tell him, and his father would be surprised by how late it was. He would say to Futh, ‘You slept well.’ And Futh would say nothing about when, disturbed in the early hours, he saw the bedroom door opening, the light coming in from the corridor, his father returning with a woman, a different woman every night. When the door shut behind them, his father and these women felt their way through the bedroom still dimly lit by the light from the bathroom into which his father took them, the bathroom light briefly flooding the bedroom before the door was again closed leaving only the narrow gap through which Futh watched them in the mirror. And Futh, who had not slept well, stood in the bathroom in the morning, not wanting to touch the sink area, not wanting to look in the mirror.