She hangs in the morning air, caught between the sea, the earth and the sky. He has nothing but a thought, a feeling that Rí is out there, outside the lantern room, looking in through the glass. Watching him. It’s impossible. He is thirty feet above the ground at the top of the tower, more than four hundred feet above the sea. But he won’t look up from his work, in case the feeling goes. ‘I saw you on the hill today. I shouted out but it was someone I have never seen up here before.’ He could have sworn it was her, walking like an adventurer, striding out, head wrapped in a bright scarf with a long coat trailing behind. ‘Must have frightened the life out of her.’ The window frame rattles somewhere. His yawn is long and hard. The coat was the right shape, but it wasn’t made of patchwork, velvet and silk, fragments of colour and texture stitched together by a magpie mind like hers. It wasn’t the first time. What they don’t tell you, what the counsellor with her tissues doesn’t say, is that it all gets so bloody routine. After the adrenaline wears off, after the challenge of survival has been met, the grinding grief remains. The yawns never end.
‘I’m sick of it. This. Without you.’
The Keeper is on his knees, digging into the soft wood of a rotten window ledge, causing the paint to buckle against the blade of his chisel. Clearing the bad from the good, dislodging flakes of wet, black-brown wood, spraying tiny splinters over his knuckles. Working away to the song of the wind, and talking as the red light of the mini-recorder glows by his side. If he sits and tries to talk, he can’t do what the counsellor asked; but if he works, he forgets himself. ‘In the morning . . . when I wake up . . . sometimes in that moment, before my eyes are fully open, you could be there.’ Beside him. Supple and close. Breathing lightly. She’s here now. ‘Your knees in my belly. Your hand over your eyes. Your pillow all scrunched up under your neck. I could reach out and stroke your head and kiss your neck and smell you, sweet and dark. But the moment I think of it, you’re gone.’
His hands have stopped working. His eyes are closed.
‘Then I’m falling. It feels like I’m falling. My insides, my spirit, my person is still there, still up there with you, but my body is falling away, to the truth.’
Just the dust, and the whisper on the wind. His voice is barely there.
‘I can’t breathe then, or move. I want to stay as I am, between the sleep and the dream.’
He could sleep here and now. Why not? Who cares? He doesn’t sleep in the night time, so why not sleep in the day? For the same reason that he still gets dressed properly, still washes, still shaves. Still works. Whatever that is. He has to get up in the morning. Make a coffee. Turn on the radio.
‘Sometimes I turn it over because you like music in the morning and the DJ is blethering on about some old nonsense, then he puts on a song and it’s one of your songs and I just can’t do it, I can’t do it . . .’
Eyes open, seeing nothing. This is not the absence of feeling but the overwhelming presence of it: sorrow, grief, loss, confusion, pain, frustration, fear, all fighting for the air inside him. If he could open a door in his chest, it would be like a medieval painting of hell in there. Bodies writhing. Open, screaming mouths. Wild animal panic. He does not dare open the door; that’s why the counselling had to stop. The effort of keeping the door closed exhausts him as it is.
‘I have to keep on. I don’t know why. Sometimes I’m dressing for the memory, like this . . .’ His fingers touch the piebald stone hanging from his neck. ‘I wouldn’t wear this. And then . . . and then . . . I have to start the day. Do the work. Make this place comfortable for people to come and stay, but I don’t want that to happen. I don’t want anyone to be here at all, except me and you. All I want is me and you, like it should be.’
Rí knew this place as a ruin in her childhood, but someone had worked on it and built rooms, made it just about habitable, before running out of money. This could be their place, she said. Their tower. He used his redundancy payment, along with what she had. Everything she had. When they got the keys it was cold and dark. They climbed the steps to the top and the lantern room, lit an old heater, spread a rug and lay down together in the glow of it, ignoring the heady stink of damp and paraffin. El fuego que calienta mi corazon. The fire that warms my heart. Maria had Spanish and Irish blood, the wildness was in her, she could speak both languages. The wild woman had shaved off all her raven hair and he was shocked by the pictures of her in the past, but she loved him to stroke that soft stubble, and her pale blue eyes would close in pleasure. They would flash open again quickly if he said the wrong thing, though.
‘You argued with everything,’ he says, softly.
No I didn’t!
A shadow shivers through the room. Outside, there’s a flash of bright colour, a half-moon of silk, a canopy gliding by the window. Beneath it a figure in black. A parascender riding the thermals like the spirit woman in an old Irish song she used to sing. ‘I am come to you from among the waves, riding on the wind.’ And gone. She’s gone.
He is as high as he can get, at the top of their tower, between the earth and the sky. She comes to him here, but when she leaves again like this, he cannot follow. He feels as though he’s falling, like the parascender, like Icarus with melted wings.
‘I ought to leave this place, Rí. I ought to go. I don’t know why I stay. Because I can’t go . . .’ The man they call the Keeper steadies himself with a hand on the window ledge and looks directly to the south, to the sea, to the light skittering off the water.
‘Where on earth would I go?’