I pulled on a sweater and opened the door. The air was white and heavy. Everything was wet. There was a smell of ploughing. It was autumn and they were turning in the straw-stubble.
I looked back at you. These moments that are talismans and treasure. Cumulative deposits – our fossil record – and the beginnings of what happens next. They are the beginning of a story, and the story we will always tell.
I tiptoed to the stove and took the heavy iron kettle outside. I poured some of it into a shallow bowl and mixed it with cold water from our plastic jerry can. I had a plant pot to hold my soap and shampoo, and I hung my towel on a useful hook gouged into one of the supporting posts of the hut. Then I took off all my clothes and started pouring water over my head. The water poured over me like sunlight. I thought of you in Hydra, strong as sunlight, and as free.
I dried myself on a rough blue towel. Clean, in clean clothes, with my lungs cleaned by the moist air, I woke you up to boiling coffee and bacon and eggs. You were sleepy and slow, and sat half-dozing in my dressing gown on the steps, shivering a bit in the late-year sun.
I love your skin; skin like breath, moving and sweet. When I touch you, your skin shivers twice, but not with this cold dawn.
You did the washing-up, singing, and then we went into town to buy chops and champagne. We were so happy that happiness went with us, and I charmed a toilet attendant into charging your mobile phone. We bought him a big tin of Cadbury’s Roses, and he said he’d take them to his wife who had Alzheimer’s.
‘It was the aluminium saucepans,’ he said. ‘We didn’t know any better then.’
I was holding your hand while he talked. There is so little life, and it is fraught with chance. We meet, we don’t meet, we take the wrong turning, and still bump into each other. We conscientiously choose the ‘right road’ and it leads nowhere.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to him.
‘Thanks for these,’ he said, holding them up. ‘She’ll love these.’
We drove to Ironbridge – birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. The light was lengthening in soft lines along the river. Whether it was the quality of light, or the clarity of my feelings for you, I don’t know, but there was softness and no blurring. ‘This is not a lie,’ I said to myself. ‘It may not hold, but it is true.’
We stood on the bridge looking down the wide river. I imagined the iron coal-carts on their iron wheels running on a pulley up and down the iron rails, fuelling the steam-sheds and turning the pistons of the engines that were still beautiful as well as useful. The black sharp smell of oiled iron filled these sheds. The floor was thick with filings. The noise was deafening.
The river was past and future. It flowed the barges, carried the goods, provided water power and cooling power, dredged away the effluent with cheerful grace, and at night made a haunt for the manual workers turned fishermen, who stood half screened on the bank at the end of their shift.
Their clothes were heavy, their hands had torn and healed. They shared tobacco and passed round a stone bottle of homemade beer. They kept maggots in a worn washer tin. There were trout in the river if you knew where to wait.
You were walking ahead of me over the bridge. ‘Wait!’ I called, and you turned round, smiling, and bent your head to kiss me. I looked back, half sorry to leave my world of shadows, as real as the real world. Yes, the men were there all right, fishing, smoking, loosening their neck cloths to wipe their faces. The one they called George was quiet because his wife had got pregnant again. He couldn’t afford another child. But he could do an extra shift, if his body could stand it.
I felt his anxiety in the cold fog now beginning to rise from the river. So many lives – layered and layered, and easy to find, if you are quiet enough, and know where to wait, and coax them like trout.
I asked you to go over to the pub and see if they would sell us some ice for our champagne. You came back carrying a black bin liner with an Eskimo winter inside. ‘He dug it out of a walk-in freezer with a spade,’ you said, and then because my car had only two seats, you had to sit with it on your knee all the way back to the hut. ‘This is love,’ you said, and I know you were joking, but I hoped you meant it.
At the hut, I lit all the candles, then lay on the floor and blew air into the stove. You were chopping vegetables and telling me about a day in Thailand when you had seen turtles hatch in the sand. Not many of them make it to the sea, and once there, the sharks are waiting for them. Days disappear and get swallowed up much like that, but the ones like these, the ones that make it, swim out and return for the rest of your life.
Thank you for making me happy.
We were standing up in the near-dark. I had my hands on your hips, yours were on my shoulders. When we kiss, I stand on tiptoe. You are very good for my calves.
You slipped me out of my shirt, and began to touch my breasts through my bra, which is soft and tight over my nipples. You said something about the bed, and we lay down, you kicking off your undone trainers and linen trousers, your legs brown and bare.
For a long time, we were side by side, stroking, not speaking, and then you ran your index finger down my nose, and into my mouth. You pushed me under you, kissing me, finding the channel of my body, finding me wet.
We were moving together; you turned me over, covering me from behind, craning your neck to reach round and kiss me, licking the sweat from my upper lip. I love the weight of you, and how you use it to pleasure me. I love your excitement. I love it that you don’t ask me or hesitate. At the last possible second, you lifted me right up and pushed between my legs.
Then you were down on me, your tongue in the folds of me, your hands over my breasts, making me arch to follow you, you following me, until I had come.
I couldn’t wait. I put you on your back, sitting across you, watching your eyes closed and your head turned to the side, your hands guiding me, and the movement of you so certain.
You are beautiful to feel. Beautiful inside me me inside you. Beautiful body making geometry out of our separate shapes.
We both love kissing. We do a lot of it. Lying together now, unable to part. I fell asleep breathing you.
Some time in the night, I heard a noise outside. I tried to pull myself out of the heavy sex-sleep, because someone was coming in at the door. You woke too, and we lay there, hearts beating, wondering, not knowing. Then I couldn’t stand the tension, so I just grabbed the dressing gown and opened the door.
On the steps that led up to the hut was the bin bag full of mostly melted ice and a floating bottle of champagne, like a relic from the Titanic. A baby badger had his head and body three-quarters of the way in the bag.
We helped him free and threw him a packet of biscuits, because badgers love biscuits, and then, because it seemed like an omen of celebration, we opened the champagne and got back into bed to drink it.
‘How long do you think we’ve got?’ you said.
‘What, before we make love again, before we finish the champagne or before it’s morning?’
I fell asleep, and dreamed of a door opening.
Doors opening into rooms that opened onto doors that opened into rooms. We burst through, panelled, baize, flush, glazed, steel, reinforced, safe doors, secret doors, double doors, trap doors. The forbidden door that can only be opened with a small silver key. The door that is no door in Rapunzel’s lonely tower.
You are the door in the rock that finally swings free when moonlight shines on it. You are the door at the top of the stairs that only appears in dreams. You are the door that sets the prisoner free. You are the carved low door into the Chapel of the Grail. You are the door at the edge of the world. You are the door that opens onto a sea of stars.
Open me. Wide. Narrow. Pass through me, and whatever lies on the other side, could not be reached except by this. This you. This now. This caught moment opening into a lifetime.
His heart was beating like light.
Dark was walking on the headland. The light flashing every four seconds as it a
lways had. His body was timed to it.
The sea and the sky were black, but the light opened the water like a fire was burning there.
‘You did that for me,’ he said, though there were no listeners, only bladderwrack and poppies. ‘You opened the water like a fire.’
He had been walking most of the night. If he didn’t walk, he lay awake. He preferred to walk.
That day in the lighthouse…and she had gone. Some weeks later a letter had arrived for him, and with the letter, a ruby and emerald pin. He knew he would never see her again.
All those years – all those years ago, and he had doubted her. Their child Susan was three before she had told him that the man he believed to be her lover was her brother. A smuggler, a fugitive, but still her brother.
Why had he listened to Price? Why had he trusted a man who was a blackmailer and a thief?
But all that had been forgiven. He had betrayed her a second time.
He breathed in, wanting the cold night air, but it was salt water he breathed. His body was filled with salt water. He was drowned already. He no longer came up for air. He floated underneath the world and heard its voices strange and far-off. He rarely understood what people said. He was aware of vague shapes passing across him. Nothing more.
Then, sometimes, floating face up in his underwater cave, a memory so bright hit him, like the flat of a sword, that the water opened, and he felt his face rush up for air, and he gulped air, and in the night, all around him, were the stars lying on water. He kicked them with his upturned feet. He was patterned in stars.
The water poured off his face, his hair streamed back. He wasn’t dying any more. She was there. She had come back.
He had the seahorse in his pocket. Time’s frail hero. One more journey left to make.
They waded out, they swam, they swam into the cone of light, that sank down like a dropped star. The light shaft was deeper than he had expected, signalling the way to the bottom of the world. His body was weightless now. His mind was clear. He would find her.
He let the seahorse go. He held out his hands.
Tell me a story, Silver.
What story?
This one.
Part broken part whole, you begin again.
The tour was filing dutifully down the stairs. The guide looked back to make sure we were all following, and at the moment he turned forward, I took out my little silver key and opened the door into our kitchen.
Silently, I closed it and locked myself in. Far away, I heard the guide shutting up the lighthouse.
We had been allowed to peer in, one by one, to the makeshift kitchen where Pew and I had eaten herds of sausages. The dented brass kettle was unpolished on the wood-burning stove. The comb-backed Windsor chair, where Pew used to sit, was in the corner. My stool was neat against the wall.
‘It was a hard and lonely life,’ the guide had said, ‘with few comforts.’
‘How did they cook on that thing?’ asked one of the tour.
‘A microwave is not a passport to happiness,’ I said, snappish.
Everyone glared at me.
I didn’t care. I had made my plan.
The lighthouse was open to the public twice a year. Finally, not knowing what I did, I had come back.
Now, listening to the diesel-drone of the tour bus pulling away, I was alone. I half expected DogJim to come trotting through the door.
I pulled out the stool and sat down. How quiet it was without the clock ticking. I got up, opened the drawer under the clock-face, took out the key and wound the spring. Tick, tick, tick. Better – much better. Time had begun again.
The stove had rusted red round the handle. I forced it free and looked inside. Twenty years ago I had left in the early morning and laid a fire, because that’s what I always did. The fire was still there, unlit, but still there. I knocked back the spigot that opened the tin vent of the flue. A shower of dust and rust fell down, but I could feel from the rush of air that the vent was clear. I put a match to the dry kindling and paper. The fire roared up. I grabbed the kettle as the condensation began to mist on it in the heat. I swilled it out with water, filled it up, and made myself a twenty-year-old pot of tea. Full Strength Samson.
The light was thinning, losing colour, turning transparent. The day had worn through and the stars were showing.
I took my mug of tea and climbed up past Pew’s room to the control room, and out onto the deck that ran all the way round the Light.
I leaned on the rail and looked out. Every four minutes the light flashed in a single clear beam, visible across the sea and across the sea of time too. I had often seen this light. Inland, land-locked, sailing my years, uncertain of my position, the light had been what Pew had promised – marker, guide, comfort and warning.
Then I saw him. Pew in the blue boat.
‘Pew!’ Pew!’
He lifted his hand, and I ran down the steps and out onto the jetty, and there he was tying the painter as he always did, his shapeless hat pulled over his eyes.
‘I wondered when you’d get here,’ he said.
Pew: Unicorn. Mercury. Lenses. Levers. Stories. Light.
There has always been a Pew at Cape Wrath. But not the same Pew?
We talked all night, as though we had never gone away, as though that broken day had been hinged onto this one, and the two folded together, back to back, Pew and Silver, then and now.
‘Tell me a story,’ said Pew.
‘A book, a bird, an island, a hut, a small bed, a badger, a beginning…’
‘And did you tell that person what I told you?’ said Pew.
‘When you love someone you should say it.’
‘That’s right, child.’
‘I did what you told me.’
‘Well, well, that’s good.’
‘I love you, Pew.’
‘What’s that, child?’
‘I love you.’
He smiled, his eyes like a faraway ship. ‘I’ve a story for you too’
‘What?’
‘It was Miss Pinch who was the orphan.’
‘Miss Pinch!’
‘Never was a descendant of Babel Dark. Never forgave any of us for that.’
And I was back in Railings Row under the One-Duck Eiderdown, duck feathers, duck feet, duck bill, glassy duck eyes, and snooked duck tail, waiting for daylight.
We are lucky, even the worst of us, because daylight comes.
The fire was burning down, and there was a strange silence outside, as if the sea had stopped moving. Then we heard a dog barking.
‘That’s DogJim,’ said Pew. ‘Hark him.’
‘Is he still alive?’
‘He’s still barking,’
Pew stood up. ‘It will soon be daylight, Silver, and time to go.’
‘Where are you going?’
Pew shrugged. ‘Here, there, not here, not there, and seasonally elsewhere.’
‘Will I see you again?’
‘There’s always been a Pew at Cape Wrath.’
I watched him get into the boat and align the tiller. DogJim was sitting up in the prow, wagging his tail. Pew began to row off the rocks, and at that moment the sun lifted, and shone through Pew and the boat. The light was so intense that I had to shade my eyes, and when I looked again, Pew and the boat were gone.
I stayed at the lighthouse until the day was done. As I left, the sun was setting, and the full moon was rising on the other side of the sky. I stretched out my hands, holding the falling sun in one hand, and the climbing moon in the other, my silver and gold, my gift from life. My gift of life.
My life is a hesitation in time. An opening in a cave. A gap for a word.
These were my stories – flashes across time.
I’ll call you, and we’ll light a fire, and drink some wine, and recognise each other in the place that is ours. Don’t wait, Don’t tell the story later.
Life is so short. This stretch of sea and sand, this walk on the shore, before the tide covers everything we hav
e done.
I love you.
The three most difficult words in the world.
But what else can I say?
P.S.
Ideas, interviews & features…
About the author
From Innocence to Experience
Louise Tucker talks to Jeanette Winterson
OTHER WRITERS ARE referenced throughout Lighthousekeeping, as they often are in your work. Why is intertextuality so important to your writing?
Books speak to other books; they are always in dialogue. Books that we have now affect the way we read books that were written earlier, at any other period, because books are a continual commentary on themselves. This is one of the reasons why the process is always dynamic, not static, why it moves, why it’s exciting for the reader and for the writer. I think everyone has the experience of building a private library, not just on the shelves but in their minds, where they’re always comparing and contrasting new books that they’ve read with classics that they loved. For a writer that process is even sharper because you’re dealing with words all the time and you are aware that you write within a continuum, that the books themselves suggest ideas to you which you might not otherwise have had.
I’ve always liked to work with existing texts. I like to do cover versions of stories that we know very well, whether it’s Lancelot and Guinevere or Tristan and Isolde. It’s a way of rewriting what we know, but in the rewriting we find new angles, new possibilities, and the rewriting itself demands an injection of fresh material into what already exists, so the story changes. The thing is kept alive by the retelling, by the changing. It’s a way of making an oral tradition out of a literary tradition so that the thing is continuously in the mouth. I think words ought to be in the mouth; it’s where they belong. The spoken language is just as important as the written language; the two depend on one another. I think of it not as a literary game, nor as an exercise, but as a necessary nourishment from one text to another.