The Houses Light Early

Daylight came late and left early, and what there was of it had no warmth in it, only a thin grey honesty that let me see how small the rock was and how much sea there was around it. I stood at the kitchen window with my second cup of tea going cold in my hands and I watched the light come up over the water the way you watch a kettle, willing it, and when it was finally up I said out loud, the way I do, well, there you are, took your time. The sound of my own voice in the cold kitchen was a comfort and an embarrassment both. Nineteen years in a theatre full of machines that beep, and now I talk to the weather.

I had not slept. After the torch by my bed turned cold and dead in my hand in the small hours, after the certainty in the blind half of my right eye that something stood in the room and was patient about it, I had lit every candle I owned and sat up with my back to the wall until the window went from black to the colour of dishwater. I am a sensible woman. I know what a starved retina does in the dark. I told myself the lecture I have given a hundred frightened patients, about rods and cones and the brain inventing pattern where it is given none, about how the eye in the dark is a liar and the more you look the more it lies, and I believed about three quarters of it, which on Maren Skerry in December counted as faith.

By nine the radio crackled with Calum's voice, flat and Hebridean and careful, saying he had a window in the weather and was coming across with the rest of my stores, and would I have the slip clear. I had the slip clear. I had been ready since first light.

I heard the boat before I saw it, the low patient knock of the diesel coming round the north side where the swell breaks, and I went down to the slip and caught the rope he threw me without either of us saying anything. He passed the boxes up to me one at a time, paraffin and diesel and bread and a sack of coal and, I noticed, more candles than I had asked for, three boxes, household ones and church ones both, the tall white kind, and a packet of long matches, and I said, "You have given me enough candles for a cathedral, Calum," and he did not laugh.

"You keep them by you," he said. He had a kind ruined face, weathered the colour of the rock, and big slow hands, and when he handed up the last box his eyes went past me and up the granite tower to the lamp room at the top, the way a man's eyes go to a thing he is trying not to look at, and came back down.

I asked him would he come up for a cup of tea. There was a window, he had said so himself, an hour at least before the next front. He looked at the cottage and he looked at the sky and he looked at his boots, and he said he would take the tea on the slip if it was all the same to me, he did not like to leave her, meaning the boat, on a day like this. So I made it in two mugs and brought it down and we sat on the cold stone with the sea going on and on around us, and I tried.

I am good at trying with quiet men. Years of pre-op patients who would not say they were terrified taught me how to come at a thing sideways. So I did not ask him what was wrong with the rock. I asked him about the lamp, the old lamp, the great dark lens at the top that the authority had switched off, and whether it had been a fine thing to see when it was lit. And his face did something complicated, and he said, "Aye, it was a fine thing. You could see it from Eorsay every night of your life," and then a long while when nobody said anything, and then, lower, "You do not know what it is, having it dark over there. You do not know what we lost when they put it out."

The sentence sat on the stone between us. I waited the way I have learned to wait. The sea filled the silence the way it fills everything here, so that you can never quite hear what is behind you, and I had begun to hate it for that.

He drank his tea. Then he said, not looking at me, "You keep a light burning all night, every night. You hear me. Not the beacon, the beacon does its own thing, I mean inside, in the cottage, where you are. A lamp, a candle, the hurricane lamp I gave you, anything, and you stay by it. You do not let yourself be in the dark, not for a minute, not to save the paraffin, not for anything."

A cold went through me that was not the wind. My stomach dropped the way it does on a lift. I gripped the mug harder and felt the heat of it, real, present, and I thought, very clearly, he is telling me what my mother told me, word for word, a man on a Scottish rock who never met her, and I made my voice come out level, which is a thing I am also good at, and I said, "Why."

He stood up. He poured the last of his tea out onto the stone, a small brown stain that the next wave would take, and he said, "And there is another thing, and you will think I am an old fool, but you will mind me anyway. If you ever see a light you did not light, you do not go to it. A lamp, a window, a torch coming over the rock, a face, anything, anything at all out there in the dark with a light to it, you do not go to it and you do not follow it and you do not let it call you. You stay by your own light, the one you lit with your own hand, and you do not move."

"A face," I said. My voice did not come out level that time.

He looked at me then, properly, and something in him wanted to say more, I could see it, the way you see a word a patient is swallowing, and then the wind shifted and he felt it on the back of his neck the way these men do and he turned to the boat. "The window's closing," he said. "I have to go." And then, with his back to me, stepping down into her, almost to himself, he said a thing I have turned over every night since. "The light keeps it off the mainland. As long as somebody is keeping the light. That is all the keeping there is."

And he started the engine and was gone round the north side before I could ask him what it was the light kept off, and I stood on the slip with two empty mugs and watched the boat get small and the grey day get smaller and I said to the rock, out loud, "All right. All right," and went back up.

I will tell you what I did with the rest of that thin daylight, because it was a sensible thing, and I was still, that day, a sensible woman. I took the spare bulbs Calum had brought, and the toolbox, and I went to deal with the cellar.

The cellar stair was off the back passage, behind a plank door with a black iron latch worn smooth, and from the top of it the cold came up at you like the cold off a chest freezer, only older, a cold with a smell in it, wet stone and salt and underneath that something I knew and could not place, the way you cannot place a smell from before you had words. The bulb at the top of the stair was the one that would not light, the one that on my first night had stayed dead through every switch and every test while the torch beam, when I shone it down the steps, simply stopped halfway, as though the dark below had a skin the light could not break.

In daylight I told myself a story about old wiring and a corroded holder and a beam that looked like it stopped because the steps turned, and I half believed that one too. I unscrewed the dead bulb in the daylight that reached the top three steps and I screwed in a fresh one and I flicked the switch and nothing happened, and I was almost glad, because a dead bulb is a thing you fix. I took out the holder, I cleaned the contacts, I checked the wire back to the junction, all of it good, all of it sound, and I put it back together and I flicked the switch.

The bulb lit.

It lit for perhaps a second and a half, a hard white domestic light, and the whole cellar came up out of the dark all at once, and I saw it.

It was a small space, cut into the living rock, low, with a packed earth and stone floor that ran away into a black throat at the far end where the rock had never been finished, and the walls were wet. Not damp. Wet, running wet, beaded and streaming as if the stone itself were sweating, and the wet caught the light and threw it back at me in a thousand small bright points so that the cellar glittered, and the cold off it hit me in the face, and the smell came up clear at last and I knew it, I knew it, it was the smell of the landing in our house in Handsworth the winter I was nine, paraffin gone cold and stone and the particular dead-air smell of a house with the power off, and my legs understood it before my mind did and I took a step back up, my pulse knocking in my ears like a fist on a door, and I thought, I have not smelled that smell in thirty-five years, and I made myself look, because looking is my trade, because I have looked into the open eye of a stranger in a cone of light and not flinched, and I looked at the wet far wall in the second and a half the bulb gave me.

And the bulb died.

It did not flicker. It did not dim. It went out the way a match goes out, all at once and complete, and the dark came back up the stair at me like water finding its level, and I was standing in the back passage of a cottage on a rock in the sea with a screwdriver in my hand and a fresh dead bulb at the bottom of a stair, and I could not move for a moment, and then I did the only thing there was to do, which was reach for the wind-up torch in my coat pocket and wind it, the small dry ratchet of it loud as a clock, and point it down.

The beam stopped halfway down the steps. Of course it did.

But I had seen. In that second and a half of hard white light I had seen the wet wall, and I had seen what was on it, and my mind had taken the photograph before my mind was ready, and now, in the dark, with the torch beam stopping where it always stopped, the photograph developed itself behind my eyes whether I wanted it or not.

There were marks on the wet wall. At the bottom of the stair, on the left, low down, at the height a child would reach if a child stood at the foot of those steps and put up a hand, the stone was scratched. Not the scratch of a tool. The scratch of fingernails, many of them, the way you would score a wall in the dark if you could not see and needed to be sure your hand had touched something solid, the way a person scores the days on a cell. Letters. Words. The same words, again and again, dug into the running stone at a child's height, fresh scratches over old ones over older ones still, a thing scored a thousand times by a hand that could not see what it was writing and wrote it anyway, into the dark, hoping.

IS THAT YOU.

IS THAT YOU.

IS THAT YOU.

I stood at the top of the cellar stair with the cold coming up at me and the smell of my childhood landing in my throat, and I heard myself answer it before I knew I was going to, the way you answer a thing in a dream, the way my mouth has always been quicker than my sense. I said, into the dark below where my torch would not reach, where the wet wall waited with its question scored a thousand times into the stone, I said, in a voice I did not recognise as mine, small and nine years old and thirty-five years too late.

I said, Esther.