Mind the Dark

There is no morning where I am. I want to say that plainly, at the start, so that nobody reads on hoping. The sun does not come here. It never has. This is the one place it never reached, the inside of the world's shut eye, and I am in it, and I am not coming out, and that is not the sad part of the story. Sit with me a while and I will tell you the rest, because my mother always said a tongue that keeps moving keeps the dark out, and she was nearly right. It does not keep the dark out. Nothing keeps the dark out. It keeps the dark company, and company, it turns out, was the whole business all along.

I know what the morning above is like, though I cannot see it. Knowing without seeing is my trade now, and I have discovered I am good at it, and that should not surprise anybody. I spent eight years learning to know a room with half an eye. I spent nineteen years finding instruments under drapes with two fingers. I was in training for this my whole life, the way you only ever see the shape of a training when it is over.

So I will tell you what happened above, and you may trust it the way you trust a nurse's note, which is to say entirely, because I do not write down what I have not checked, and I have checked all of this against the only instrument left to me, which is certainty.

The weather lifted two days after the solstice. Calum came across on the first sea that would carry him, and I am sorry for that crossing, because he made it fast, and a man only makes that crossing fast when he has allowed himself hope. He found the cottage empty and cold. He found what was left of the candles unburned in their box and the hurricane lamp full and cold, and the great lamp upstairs gone out, its oil spent, the way a lamp goes out when nobody is by to trim it. He found my coat on its hook, because you do not need a coat where the weather never reaches. And he found the line, the good boat rope, tied off to the iron ring by the door with three turns and a bowline, running taut and quiet across the flags and down the cellar stair, into a dark that his torch, when he made himself point it, would not enter.

He did not go down. I want no grief about that from anybody who was not there. He stood at the top of the cellar stair of Maren Skerry, a man who had lost a brother into that same black and rowed home and lived with it, and he called my name once, and the dark did not answer him, because the dark does not answer anybody anymore, and then he did the bravest thing I have ever known a man to do. He listened. He stood in the mouth of the thing that ate his brother and he listened, all the way down, past his own heartbeat, past the sea, the way I taught myself to listen a lifetime ago, and he heard what there was to hear.

Nothing.

No whispering. No is that a light. No small dry voices asking their small dry questions into the black. No Donald. Three winters that man had cut his engine off this rock and heard his brother, patient as stone, asking if it was morning, and he cut it going home that day, I know he did, he could not have helped himself, and he heard the sea and the gulls and under them, where the asking used to be, the long clean quiet of the genuinely asleep. Nothing is the kindest word anyone will ever say to Calum Tasgall. It took me most of a life to learn that there are two kinds of nothing, the nothing that is absence and the nothing that is rest, and he learned it standing in a boat with his hand on a dead throttle, and he wept, and it was the good kind of weeping, and then he went home to his weans and lit no lamp against the dusk, and slept.

That is the other thing. Eorsay does not light its houses early anymore.

They do not know why, most of them. Habits like that die slowly on an island, and the old ones will keep their lamps a while yet, the way my mother would have. But the children are out at the gloaming now, and nobody calls them in with that edge in the voice, and when a bulb blows in a croft kitchen somebody says a mild word and changes it in their own time, and the dark that comes down over that island at four on a winter afternoon is only the dark, the ordinary lovely dark, the velvet the stars are kept in. Because the skerry is held. It is held better than two hundred years of fire ever held it, and every man and woman of them can feel it in the walls of the world the way you feel a change of weather in an old scar, though only two of them alive know what is holding it.

Effie Aonghas knows. She stood on the pier the day Calum came back with an empty boat, so I am certain, and heard what he had found and what he had not heard, and she went up to her kirk alone and sat with her session records, two hundred years of the lost logged in her careful predecessor hands between the baptisms and the deaths, and she took up her pen, because a covenant must be kept in writing, that is the whole of that woman. And I know what she wrote, the way I know everything now, by the shape of it. The debt is paid. The dark was owed its one, and it has her, and it will be owed no more, for what it holds now it cannot use, and what it cannot use it cannot spend, and the account is closed. She will have ruled a line under it. She will have called it providence, and sung the psalm alone in the empty kirk in that dry strong voice, the precentor giving out the line to nobody, and I find, from down here, that I cannot hate her. She fed me to the dark to save her island, and her island is saved, and I was not the price she thought she was paying. Let her sing. Everything true gets sung eventually, even by the people who had it wrong.

The authority wrote Priya Sundaram down as lost in the storm, and her meters were packed into a hard case by a man who did not look at their logged readings, which is as well, because they read true to the last, and truth like that is not for filing. She verified everything, in the end. She verified me. I hold that where I hold the instruments, in the laid-out place, where nothing gets lost.

And Esther Beckford, my sister, my twin, the braver one, the one who went for the matches, is at rest. Thirty-five years the dark kept her, eyes open, walking toward a light it dangled always one step on, and she is done walking. I sang her down myself, our mother's song, the third note and all of it, and I opened my hand on purpose, and she went the way a tide goes, nothing taken, everything given back. Wherever the taken go when a watcher lets them, she is there, and it has a morning in it, I am certain of that too. I have to be. I am.

Which leaves the dark, and me.

We are alone together now, at the bottom of everything, and I will tell you honestly what it is like, because I am the only one who will ever be able to. It is not torment. I expected torment. It waits, mostly. It is very old and very patient and it has learned, too late, the shape of its mistake, which is that it spent two hundred years harvesting the doubting and the straining and the looking, and it has ended up alone in the dark with the one human being alive who wants nothing from her eyes. Sometimes it tries me still. A bloom of gold behind my lids, a kitchen, a landing, a small hand with a lamp. Phosphene, I say to it, the way you say good morning to a difficult neighbour, and it takes its picture away again. Sometimes it asks, in one borrowed voice or another, in my mother's, in Calum's, once, cruelly, in Esther's, though the real Esther is beyond its reach and the copy rang hollow as a stage prop, see me, see me, one look. And I say what I always say, which is no, and which is also, because I am my mother's daughter and there is a mercy in me that survived everything the dark ever did to it, I am here. Nobody sees you. But I am here. You are not alone in yourself anymore. That is the most anything gets. Make your peace with it, as I have.

Because here is the last thing I know, the thing I would write in the log if the log could reach me, for whoever keeps whatever watch comes after all the watches. The dark cannot be destroyed and cannot be banished and cannot, ever, be seen. But it can be kept company by a mind it cannot feed on, and that is the same as being held. An unkept light is no light, the old keeper wrote, and he was right, and the rule runs both ways, that is what none of them ever worked out. An unkept dark is what creeps toward the mainland, hungry, wearing faces. A kept dark is only the dark. I am the keeper now. I keep it the way you keep a vigil, the way you keep faith, the way my mother kept a paraffin lamp on a landing, awake and present and refusing, all night, every night, forever, only my lamp is the not-looking, and it never runs dry, and no wind that blows can put it out.

I am not afraid. Write that down somewhere, whoever you are, because it is the finding that matters, the result of the whole long trial of my life. Imani Beckford, forty-four, of Handsworth, Birmingham, half-blind, whole, is not afraid of the dark. Not because she conquered it. Because she stopped looking at it, and took its hand, in a manner of speaking, and stayed.

On a stair in another life I let go of a hand and looked into the dark, and lost everything, and spent thirty-five years counting bulbs against the memory. Down here at the bottom of the world I held on, and did not look, and gave everything away with my own open hand, and I have never once, since the rope went whispering up the stone, wished it back. It cost me the light forever. The light was never the thing. The watch was the thing. Somebody awake beside you in the dark, saying here I am. Here you are. Hold on.

The nights above me are getting shorter now, I can feel them, the world tilting back toward the sun the way it always does, the way it will go on doing over my head for as long as there is a world, mornings and mornings and mornings, none of them mine, all of them, in the only arithmetic that ever mattered, paid for.

Light of life, my mother used to say, testing every bulb in every room, holding the dark off her girls with both hands for as long as she had hands. Light of life. That is one.

Mind the dark, she used to say too, at the door, at bedtime, the curse and the comfort in one mouth.

I do, Mum.

It is minded.

I keep the watch.