Augustus dreams of her face every night.
He can see it so clearly that he can almost touch it. Her hair over her eyes. Her soft cheek. The tiny hairs on it, like down.
Then he whacks the dream with his stick and it bursts apart.
He wakes up, full of regret and gasping for air. Every single morning.
Augustus squeezes his eyes shut to block out the light and listens to the thoughts racing through his head. Thoughts about what he should never have done, about what he should do now, about what he would always do from now on – if he only had the chance. Which he knows will never happen. And that is his own fault.
He cannot drown his thoughts, as there is no drink in the house and the door is nailed shut.
Everything he could break is already broken.
Every insult he could hurl at himself has been said a hundred times. Bungling fool. Good-for-nothing. Failure.
Failed as a man, as a sailor, as a father. Failed as a lighthouse keeper.
Although perhaps that last one is not entirely true. There is still something he can do to make up for his failure, just a little. Not for himself – he does not care about that. No. For Lampie.
So he hauls himself upstairs, every afternoon, step by step, on one leg and a stump. It takes half an hour. Sometimes longer. He makes light in the darkness, and stands and watches as it glides across the black water.
Swish on, swish off, swish on. It is there and then it is gone, as if no light had ever shone.
Swish on, swish off. Swish light, swish dark. First you have a wife, swish, and a child, swish, a job, a leg. And then you have nothing. As if they had never been there.
At daybreak, he extinguishes the light and stares out across the sea at that rock. That damned rock.
Usually he stays up there all day long. He watches the sun move across the sky above him, sees the shadow of the tower growing shorter and then longer. Until it is time to light the lamp again.
In the evening, a neighbour brings him a pan of food. An iron pan, one that cannot break. But not for want of trying.
She has to walk all the way along that slippery sea path, so he always says politely, “Thank you.”
“I hope you enjoy it,” she replies, and that is it. She is not a good cook.