Dear Mr Straker,
I was surprised to receive your letter out of the blue as it were. My poor Felicity (Fliss, as I liked to call her) has been dead for nearly 25 years and not a day goes by without me thinking of her. We was very close. There was a train crash. You might remember it was a London to Birmingham train. 78 dead but only one close to my heart.
She was a lovely girl. I don’t know if someone like you in your profession as it were would remember seeing her photo in the Sun and the Mirror and the Evening Mail. Maybe they didn’t put her photo in The Times which you probably read. Anyway she was going to be the model for Parrot, I think they call it The Face, but they only had a few pictures from the photoshoot and they used them all for a bit then found another girl. You might remember her, Lucy Something and she was in all the pictures after Fliss. Black girl.
Anyway, I expect you know Fliss (Felicity) and I lived apart, but she wrote to me all the time and we was like real mates. Her Mum (Rita) died of cancer and Fliss nursed her on her deathbed, like the good girl she was, but I’m her next of kin, there isn’t anyone else.
Of course it grieves my heart to accept a legacy that was meant for my darling Fliss (Felicity) but I think she’d like it that way. We was very close. She told me about her American cousins lots of times.
Anyway you can contact me at the address above.
Yours Truly
Jack Tilly
78 = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 11 + 12. A beautiful number. As if Straker had planned it. Each one an individual, each number irreplaceable. You can’t take any one of them away, because forgetting would be as great a crime as killing.
At first, they were only numbers. Nameless, anonymous, hammering through his mind, inanimate as nails, kept at bay with other numbers. Twelve years ago, they changed, or he changed. He kept dreaming about them, a crowd of strangers, a turmoil of spinning legs and arms, faces without features. He wanted to know their names, and then the numbers became a list. A silent roll-call that echoed through his mind all day and night. Two years ago, he changed again. He wanted to know who they were.
He’s found plenty of excuses to contact them. He’s writing a book; he runs a firm that investigates unclaimed inheritance; he’s a journalist researching an article.
Now when they come into his dreams, chattering, arguing, being ordinary, his mind becomes full of them all, bursting with their problems. They are rich and alive, their thoughts pouring out of them, frantic in their desire not to get lost. Sometimes he can’t cope. His brain isn’t big enough, his shoulders not broad enough. He wants to live their lives for them, carrying on where they left off. But he can’t do it. He hasn’t the strength or the ability.
The voices stay with him long after he wakes up. He carries them round with him like a tape recorder that switches itself back on when he’s not looking, so their conversations echo through his mind at unexpected moments.
Sangita: ‘Rob Willow was doing a concert in Birmingham. I had to go.’ Her voice is gentle, diffident.
I have a photograph sent by her mother. Young and sweet, a darker, more demure version of Felicity, in a pink sari with a single gold chain round her neck. A long black plait. ‘Who was Rob Willow?’
‘Rob Willow? Who was he? You don’t know?’
‘I don’t know anything.’
‘Well said, Straker.’
‘Thank you, Maggie.’
Sangita: ‘Rob Willow was gorgeous, the most handsome man in the world.’
‘What did you want from him?’
‘Want?’ Her voice crumples, uncertain. ‘I don’t know. I just wanted to be near him.’
So she didn’t know him. She was just a fan.
‘What happened to him?’ Her voice is shy, hesitant. ‘Does he still perform?’
‘I have no idea.’ I don’t read newspapers, watch the television, listen to the radio. How would I know if he’s still around?
She’s crying, softly but desperately.
‘But he wasn’t real. He was just a distant figure you imagined you knew.’
The weeping gets stronger, more desperate.
‘Shut up, Straker. You’re just making it worse.’
Maggie, who, as always, knows the right thing to do.
When he wakes, it’s with a painful jolt, as if he’s gone down a step that’s steeper than he expected. He lies, panicking, for a long time, his heart beating aggressively, Sangita’s face in front of his eyes. He doesn’t want to see her once he’s awake, but she’s so real that he finds himself looking for her in the curved walls of the lighthouse. Surely he can still see an echo of her pink sari, hidden behind the table, a flick of the fat black plait swinging out of sight up the stairs to the light room.
He’s so exhausted he can’t move. He’s only pretending to be alive. All his energy is used up by the seventy-eight. And his investigations of the last two years take him back to a dangerous time. They’re opening up the scars, tearing through hidden tissues that were pretending to be healed.
He should never have started. They were all safely stored away, wrapped up, concealed in a drawer. A mass of bodies, victims, a collective tragedy. Why had he let them out? But if he had left them there, he would never have known Maggie. There would be no one to argue with him, nag him, make him think.
It was the poster that changed everything. He was going to Sainsbury’s one day, and there was Felicity on the advertising board outside the car park. Four times larger than life, tattered rags of material substituting for clothes, her eyes luminous and innocent. The multi-coloured parrot on her shoulder blended with the green and purple wisps of hair on her almost shaved head.
‘FELICITY TILLY,’ it said. ‘THE TRAGIC FASHION OF 1979.’
The poster was advertising a television programme about changing fashions, but it was some time before that became clear. What he saw was Felicity Tilly, alive, looking directly at him, accusing him. He forgot the shopping. He abandoned his routines without being aware of it. He returned, over and over again, spending most of the week on the opposite pavement, staring at her, unable to reconcile her vitality, her aliveness, with his special knowledge about her death. He wanted to know her, understand who she had been, what she thought.
When they replaced the poster with another about yoghurts, he was bereft.
So it had started there. He opened up files for all of the seventy-eight and found he was hungry, starving, desperate to know them, speak to them, longing to bring them back to life.
He keeps thinking about Miss Doody, the way everything is absorbed by her anger. It comes and goes, like a lightbulb. On, off, on. Does she do the switching consciously? Does she like it?
He’s managed to avoid people for years. Why should she come along like that and force him to pay attention to her? She’s not one of the seventy-eight. There isn’t room in his mind for anyone else. So why has she begun to edge her way in?
She frightens him. He needs to find a way of switching that light off, so he can eliminate her from his mind, go back to where he was, leave her as she was before he met her.
On Sunday, the day after her accident, he should be working on his garden for the whole day. The carrots are coming through nicely, he needs to thin out the new lettuces, and there is plenty of weeding to do, but instead, he finds himself preparing to go into the village again. He stands in front of the only mirror in the keeper’s cottage and examines his Aran jumper and black trousers, although the mirror is small and he can’t see his face without bending his knees—which he seldom does.
A strange plan is forming in his mind, but he can’t think about it too closely without a thread of panic worming its way into his stomach.
He goes to the edge of the headland before leaving. The wind is fresher than yesterday. Foam touches the tips of the waves as they race cheerfully towards him, leaping over each other, recklessly hurling themselves against the cliff. There’s so much energy here, the will to go on indefinitely. How easy it all looks, so inevitable and perpetual. Most things that are left alone for long enough will crumble and decay, like the lighthouse, so why is everything around him so alive, so furious? The wind, the sea, the grass, Imogen Doody?
He turns away and fetches his bicycle. From a distance he can see two coaches stopping for the view, and he hesitates before mounting it. Will they see him and laugh? Will he appear in their photographs of Beckingham lighthouse as a dot, a smudge, an insignificant blur? The more he thinks about it, the less likely it seems that he would appear at all. A non-person lost in the landscape of sea and sky and lighthouse. Just as he would like it.
When he reaches the pier again, there’s no sign of the boys who were fishing for crabs yesterday. The sailing people have come down to catch the rising tide, and he has to moor quickly to get out of the way. They launch themselves with dedication. People who don’t see him, who look past him because he doesn’t count. Their faces are brown and healthy from sailing and living. They wear life-jackets, yellow, blue, orange, and the wind whips through their hair as they rush to get their dinghies into the water. With every gust, the cord on the flag at the end of the pier cracks against its pole. There’s going to be a race. Two men are standing by the flagpole waiting to fire the starting gun. There’s a distant crack and Straker senses the panic of the last few boats to get launched.
‘Come on, Tara. Get in and I’ll shove off.’
‘What about Sam?’
‘Leave her. We can’t wait any longer. It’s just you and me.’
Straker doesn’t look at them, just lets their voices wash past him like a current, until they are drops of water in the wind. When he first came here, it was mainly fishermen sailing out on the tide, returning hours later, their motors chugging tiredly and weakly. They were part of the pattern of the weather. Now they have been replaced by these confident, brightly coloured young people who appear to be having fun.
He goes to the back of the boathouse, ignores his shopping trolley and crouches down beside the old dinghy. He examines the crumpled plastic sails, separating them from the tangle of ropes, smoothing them out so that he can see their shape. He produces a Stanley knife from his pocket and starts cutting them away from the ropes, listening intently. His ears strain with the effort, as he half expects someone to come striding in with authority, ready to accuse him of stealing.
Nothing happens. The three old men outside have their backs to him, watching the race. If they know he’s here, they make no acknowledgement.
He cuts through the last rope and sits back for a few seconds to ease his hand. Outside, the folded sails of the unused boats pulled up into the harbour clatter urgently in the brisk wind, their tarpaulins tugging against their restraints.
There are two sails, and he takes them both. They’re cumbersome and difficult to fold, but he manages to cram them into the shopping trolley. The three men won’t hear him, because their ears are deadened by the wind. The sailing club has a new clubhouse, further round on the coast, and he has seen the recreational sailors meeting there, happy with their bar, their retired admirals, their trophies in a glass case. They don’t waste time thinking about this dilapidated old boathouse with a corrugated iron roof that leaks, where heaps of red sandstone crumble down from the cliff at the back. Would he have been one of the sailors once, if things had gone differently?
He walks up the road to the village and stops at the corner of Miss Doody’s house. It looks the same as yesterday. The path through the long grass to the front door is still visible, and the area round the hawthorn bushes where she had her accident looks well flattened. There’s no sign that she’s returned today, but there wouldn’t be. A twisted ankle needs rest, and she’ll be restricted for a while, unable to get on a bus, or climb ladders.
He pushes the trolley through the gate and shuts it behind him, standing still and listening for sounds that might tell him he’s doing something wrong. Nothing changes. The dandelions and rosebay willowherb rustle in the wind and a branch from the lilac tree taps gently against an upstairs window. He looks up at the roof and tries to estimate its size. It’s not enormous. The two sails together may not be quite big enough, but they’ll certainly make a difference.
He takes a deep breath. He laughed here for the first time in years. Something crept inside him and ran its fingers over his nerve ends, played them like a harp so they became suddenly alive. Something strong and powerful.
Of course it all went away afterwards, but now, standing inside the gate, he has a hint of it again, like an unfamiliar smell, new and dangerous. He stands looking up at the roof for so long that his neck starts to ache.
He remembers a time, long ago, at a fair with his father. They stood together looking up at a big dipper, huge and brilliantly lit, painted in vivid, exciting colours. The boats were rocking gently as people boarded them, and they moved up slowly, higher and higher, waiting for the moment when the fun would begin.
‘Look at them, Pete,’ said his dad. ‘That’s where we’re going. Right to the top.’
They stood side by side, Pete’s left shoulder touching his dad’s right wrist. He was a huge man. Gulliver in Lilliput. Physically big, mentally big, and ambitiously big.
Pete had no ambition to be up in the sky then. That would come to him later. What he did see was their two shadows, stretching out before them in the late-afternoon sun. His father’s was so long that you couldn’t see the end and his own appeared tiny beside it. He thought that he would never be as tall as him, that however much he exercised, ran, ate, he would never catch up. As his shadow stretched, his father’s would always reach further. But he felt safe next to him. Nobody was as big as his dad, and nobody ever would be.
‘Come on, Pete. Let’s have a ride.’
Pete was terrified, but pretended not to be. The man taking the money put him up against a chart on a wall, and said, ‘Sorry, mate, he’s too small. Can’t do it. Too dangerous.’
‘I’ll pay double,’ said his dad. ‘More.’ He waved a five-pound note at him.
‘Sorry,’ said the man. ‘I’d lose my job.’
His dad was furious and Pete pretended he was furious too, to please him. He was secretly relieved.
In the end, they gave up and went to the shooting gallery instead, where they shot ducks and won a goldfish in a plastic bag. But his father was still annoyed and gave him all the good reasons why they shouldn’t have been turned away.
He was like that, his dad. He wouldn’t leave anything alone.
Straker uses the lilac tree to climb on to the roof. The ladder is just inside the front door, and it would take ten seconds to break the lock, but he decides not to do this. Miss Doody will feel safer if the door’s still locked when she comes back.
There are two separate ridges—the long one that travels the length of the cottage and a smaller one at right angles that comes out over the front door. He’s not sure how he’s going to fix the sails. He’s brought a hammer and nails, but the wood doesn’t look sound enough to accept them. It may be possible to anchor down the edges with something heavy, so he goes back down and looks around for any stones or rocks he could use. He shuffles his feet through the long grass round the side of the cottage and almost bumps into an old, gently collapsing outhouse. It’s barely visible, smothered by a web of ivy and periwinkles that have spread up, round and through it, until it’s just part of a group of overgrown trees. The roof must have caved in many years ago, and crumbling bricks are scattered haphazardly around in the undergrowth. Delighted with his find, he carries several to the base of the lilac tree.
He starts work immediately, hauling up the sails and spreading them across the top of the ridge. He nails where he can, and goes up and down for bricks to make them secure. His knees creak alarmingly, but he likes the rhythm of climbing, making an easy route for himself through the lilac. He may be slowly disintegrating as he grows older, but he’s more viable than the outhouse.
He’s crawling across the roof, holding one end of a sail and trying to pull it smooth, when he hears music. He stops immediately and listens, but there’s no sound except the wind. He moves again, and the music comes back, like something you glimpse out of the corner of your eye. He stops and starts several times, puzzled that he can’t always hear it. It takes another five minutes before he realises that he’s making the music. He’s whistling as he works.
He feels useful and capable, and finds himself calculating what to do next. He could go to the B&Q store, next to Sainsbury’s, and get extra polythene for the small ridge. He could buy some new beams, balance them on the trolley, put them in before she returns.
As he climbs down the lilac for the last time, he hears the church clock striking and counts the chimes. Two o’clock. Where did the morning go? The weeds are growing frenetically in his absence. He shouldn’t have neglected them this morning—he’ll never catch up. The number seventy-eight has been missing for four hours. He’s rushed past it, ignored it, forgotten it. But they’re still there, waiting for him—1 + 2 + 3…
Standing near the gate, he looks up at the roof. The sails are ruffling gently in the wind, but apparently secure. He starts to worry about Imogen Doody again, a jittery fear creeping through him. Will she be pleased, or will she be annoyed at his interference? Should he have done it? Has he implied that she’s incapable of doing it herself?
Should he take it down again? He walks back to the house, comes away again, unable to think. Cars are rushing past the gate on the corner, and there seem to be hundreds of them, the entire population of Hillingham wanting to spy on him. Can they see him? Will they tell her it was him?
He picks up his rope and hammer and nails, and retreats. He doesn’t want to be seen, for people to make a connection between him and her roof.
As he hovers, he goes over the events of the previous day in his mind. Was it really his fault that she fell? What did he do? He stood at the gate for a few minutes. Nothing more. But even now, he can feel the urgency of her shouting, and worries again about the roof. Her presence is so powerful, so electric, that she can make him nervous without even being there.
He decides he shouldn’t be there. It’s not his property. He pushes the trolley to the gate, opens it and leaves quickly, before he can be seen. There’s a group of smartly dressed women approaching from the village, their mouths moving up and down passionately, all talking at the same time. He looks at the ground and lets them divide and flow round him. He’s completely invisible. All is well.
Maggie: ‘Why didn’t you find out about Felicity earlier? All those pictures in the newspapers, the magazines. I’d have done her first.’
‘I didn’t know until I saw that poster two years ago. It was the first time I’d seen her.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘I don’t look at newspapers. They’re too violent.’
‘Are you really the best person to make judgements about violence?’
‘Leave me alone, Maggie.’
‘Absolutely not, Straker.’
‘Do you know what happened to my mother?’ Felicity is growing stronger in my mind, coming in without any nervousness. More real. She can join the others who are queuing up to have their say.
‘Well, I think she died.’
‘I know that. She had cancer, and I shouldn’t have gone to the audition. The nurse wasn’t very pleased with me, but Mum said I should go. She’d spent years working for it. Did she know about the crash?’
‘How could I know that?’
‘You could find out for me.’
‘How? Who would know?’
Maggie in her gentle mode, the motherly voice, the caring grandmother: ‘Some things you never find out, Felicity.’
‘What a waste of time.’ Felicity’s voice is losing its naïvety, becoming high-pitched, almost strident. ‘My mum never told me she was ill until she went into hospital. She made all those sacrifices for me. I need to know. You owe it to me to find out.’
‘I’ve only just started. I expect in time I’ll get some idea—’
Maggie, sharp and hard again: ‘Don’t flatter yourself, Straker. You can’t play at being a miracle-worker. Your miracles will have negative equity.’
‘I know.’
The rain wakes him as it dashes against the window, hard and angry in the dark. Suleiman and Magnificent are lying at the end of his mattress, curled up inside one another, not yet disturbed by the storm.
The tiny room is suddenly and briefly lit, frozen by a flash into a photograph in time. Then vast claps of thunder burst out above them, rolling loosely around the sky, powerful and uncontained. The cats wake with a jump and howl in harmony with each other, their heads up, their tails straight and upright with terror.
He gets out of bed and pulls waterproofs over his pyjamas. He buttons the jacket, puts on boots and a sou’-wester, then climbs up to the light room. Outside, the world is disintegrating. He fights to open the door on to the outside balcony, pushing against the wind. He reaches for the handrail, and edges his way out, testing his strength, determined to take part in this battle of wills. The rain is a solid sheet, buffeted by wind, sometimes vertical, sometimes parallel. The waves, heaving, crashing monsters, hurl themselves against the cliff and rise up towards him, finally dashing against the lighthouse in an unassuageable rage.
He steadies himself against the wind, braces his legs, and fights to stay there. The wind pins him against the lens and he’s unable to move.
‘Come and get me!’ he shouts. ‘Now’s your chance. Pick me up, throw me over the cliff.’
His voice makes no sound. It doesn’t exist in this chaotic world. He remains stationary and powerless.
‘Here I am. You want a sacrifice? I’m your sacrifice. I’m available. Forget everyone else and come for me!’
The wind screams, the rain pours past him and the waves leap into darkness. He’s invisible. He stands there for a long time, until he’s frozen and drenched and deafened. The thunder moves on and he can see the lightning out at sea—a beacon to guide ships on to the rocks. The new lighthouse flashes with minute precision at the correct intervals. Smug, secure in its superiority.
He and his lighthouse are nothing. Washed up, abandoned, useless.
He pushes his way back inside and undresses. The cats have moved up the bed in his absence, found the warmth that he left and snuggled down under the blankets. He removes them one at a time. Suleiman comes easily and he puts him into the cat basket at the foot of his bed. He purrs briefly and vaguely. Magnificent is more unwilling. He snaps at Straker as he tries to pick him up, so he taps his head firmly and lifts him. Then he crawls into bed. The cats leave the basket and climb back onto the end of the mattress. He feels them on his legs and looks up. Their eyes light up indignantly with every flash of lightning.
He shuts his eyes. The wind and rain continue to hurl themselves against the side of the lighthouse.
You could go quietly mad in a lighthouse when your only companions are cats.
A thin, reedy voice burrows deep into my head, half waking me, but not quite. It’s one of the children, crying.
Maggie is here, ready before me. ‘Now, now. There’s no need for tears. We can’t change anything.’ When she tries, she projects an extraordinary warmth, and it hurts me—actually makes a physical pain in my chest—that I can’t be the recipient of any of it.
I try to speak, but my throat has seized up in my sleep, and no sound comes out.
‘Tell me what the matter is, Wayne.’
Did my mother talk to me like that?
‘I can’t find my mummy. She’s gone away and I want her to come back.’
‘No, no, no. Your mummy never left you. You left her and she just went on without you. But she misses you.’
The wailing eases and stops. ‘Why?’
Maggie pauses. ‘Why anything, Wayne? It just is.’ Maggie, the great philosopher, the oracle, the source of all wisdom.
‘Straker!’ she says sharply. ‘I know you’re listening. What do you think I should say to Wayne?’
I don’t know. I don’t know.
‘Come on, don’t you have anything to say?’
The pain in my chest is growing. I can’t stop it. I can’t speak. It presses against me, pushing, suffocating.
The next morning is breezy but quiet. The violence and the rage have been hidden away, swept under the table, and he’s presented with a false serenity. Hypocrite, he thinks, looking at the smug, shining sea.
How many times has he gone up there in a storm and offered himself to the elements? He can’t understand why he’s constantly rejected. He wants to jump, to leap out into this cauldron of energy and fly through the air for a few seconds. The thought of this brief flight has sustained him for years. He could loose himself from the tight grasp of the seventy-eight, soar freely into a silence in his head before he surrenders and joins them. To expect a little helping hand from the weather doesn’t seem unreasonable, but he survives every time.
He takes his breakfast of two stale doughnuts up to the light room and goes out on the balcony to eat, squeezing his legs against the iron railings. It’s impossible to reconcile the sea of today with the sea of last night. Despite all the time he’s been watching, it can still surprise him.
Suleiman follows him on to the balcony and stretches out in a patch of sun, purring to himself. He looks at Straker affectionately, narrowing his eyes, half asleep before he’s finished washing. Straker puts out his hand to rub his ears and the cat pushes his head up against him.
Magnificent never comes up here, but Straker knows exactly where he is. Further back on the headland, he’ll be sitting on a grassy mound, silent, alert, watching. Waiting for the first twitch of a mouse’s tail. Magnificent is the great survivor. Part of him will be hunting and sustaining himself long after Straker’s generation goes.
Straker enjoys the solid texture of the doughnuts, the way the jam oozes as stickily as when it is fresh. Something about it reminds him of his childhood. Every time he takes a first bite, he’s eight again, watching his mother’s face as the sugar coats his chin and the jam spurts out on to his cheeks. He buys fourteen every Saturday and they usually last all week. If mould appears, he throws them away, but that only happens in summer. The cold preserves them through the winter.
He sits down on the floor next to Suleiman and shuts his eyes, feeling the sun against his eyelids, making calculations. He spends a few minutes every day memorising the tide tables so that he can carry them around in his head. He needs the structure in advance so that he can organise his thoughts into compartments—a way to force time to pass. He started this process long ago, once he had recognised that he would have to go on living. The routine of the calculations, the predictability, was soothing. He began to like the tides and the moons, the position of the sun, the hours of daylight, the shape of the day. There are charts on his walls—hours, days of the week, months, years. His mind walks down orderly pathways where the edges are laid out—neat, predictable, reliable. The hedges alongside are clipped and immaculate; the angle to each new path is precise, ninety perfect degrees. He likes right angles. The square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the two opposite sides. He has a feel for Pythagoras, convinced that their minds are similar. But Pythagoras was ready to take risks, leap into the dark, think the unknown.
Not Straker. He never strays, never thinks the unknown. His mind never moves beyond seventy-eight.
His day is mapped out before him. He has a timetable that he makes out every week, and he sticks to it rigidly. Parcels of time, manageable periods, attainable tasks. Breakfast; working on the garden of the keeper’s cottage, growing food that he often never eats; doing his laundry—a little every day—and hanging it out to flap in the wind behind the keeper’s cottage; rowing across to Hillingham; shopping; going to the library; writing letters.
Today he’s going to break out of his routine again so that he can check on Miss Doody’s roof. It makes him nervous, but he needs to know that the sails are still in place after the storm. He won’t stop. He’ll just pause at the gate, then go away again. When he returns he’ll revert to the timetable and write some letters, in an attempt to find more information on the school-children. The list of names doesn’t give him enough information. He has to know them. They cannot remain as a block of anonymous children. They were real too, just as much as Maggie, Felicity—
As he goes downstairs and opens the door, Magnificent slips past with a friendly chirrup and runs up the stairs to the food bowls. Straker walks to the edge of the cliff and examines it. There are clear signs of another fall, the edges sharp and irregular, the sandstone bright and exposed.
Returning to the lighthouse, he counts his strides. His instincts were correct. A further two feet of the cliff have disappeared.