Lighthousekeeping

by Jeanette Winterson

‘Imagine it,’ said Pew, ‘the tempest buffeting you starboard, the rocks threatening your lees, and what saves you is a single light. The harbour light, or the warning light, it doesn’t matter which; you sail to safety. Day comes and you’re alive.’ ‘Will I learn to set the light?’ ‘Aye, and tend the light too.’ ‘I hear you talking to yourself.’ ‘I’m not talking to myself, child, I’m about my work.’ Pew straightened up and looked at me seriously. His eyes were milky blue like a kitten’s. No one knew whether or not he had always been blind, but he had spent his whole life in the lighthouse or on the mackerel boat, and his hands were his eyes. ‘A long time ago, in 1802 or 1892, you name your date, there’s most sailors could not read nor write. Their officers read the navy charts, but the sailors had their own way. When they came past Tarbert Ness or Cape Wrath or Bell Rock, they never thought of such places as positions on the map, they knew them as stories. Every lighthouse has a story to it—more than one, and if you sail from here to America, there’ll not be a light you pass where the keeper didn’t have a story for the seamen.

Pew was serious and silent, his eyes like a faraway ship. ‘I can teach you—yes, anybody—what the instruments are for, and the light will flash once every four seconds as it always does, but I must teach you how to keep the light. Do you know what that means?’ I didn’t. ‘The stories. That’s what you must learn. The ones I know and the ones I don’t know.’ ‘How can I learn the ones you don’t know?’ ‘Tell them yourself.’

‘Later, putting up at The Razorbill, and recovering, he told anyone who wanted to listen what he had told himself on those sea-soaked days and nights. Others joined in, and it was soon discovered that every light had a story—no, every light was a story, and the flashes themselves were the stories going out over the waves, as markers and guides and comfort and warning.’

I was quiet. Pew could hear me thinking. He touched my head, in that strange, light way of his, like a cobweb. ‘It’s the gift. If one thing is taken away, another will be found.’ ‘Miss Pinch doesn’t say that, Miss Pinch says Life is a Steady Darkening Towards Night. She’s embroidered it above her oven.’ ‘Well, she never was the optimistic kind.’

Tell me a story, Pew. What kind of story, child? A story with a happy ending. There’s no such thing in all the world. As a happy ending? As an ending.

He would have preferred coffee, but coffee was four times the price of tea. ‘We are not poor,’ he had said to his wife, who reminded him that they could give the money to a better cause than breakfast coffee. Could they? He was not so sure, and whenever he saw a deserving lady with a new bonnet, it seemed to smell, to him, steamingly aromatic.

He had no reason to hate his wife. She had no faults and no imagination. She never complained, and she was never pleased. She never asked for anything, and she never gave anything—except to the poor. She was modest, mild-mannered, obedient, and careful. She was as dull as a day at sea with no wind. In his becalmed life, Dark began to taunt his wife, not out of cruelty at first, but to test her, perhaps to find her. He wanted her secrets and her dreams. He was not a man of good mornings and good nights.

In the evenings she read to him from the Bible. She liked reading the miracles, which surprised him in someone whose nature was as unmiraculous as a bucket. She was a plain vessel who could carry things; tea trays, babies, a basket of apples for the poor.

I was given a packet of crisps on Saturday nights, even though Miss Pinch had warned that it might lead to trouble, though she did not say what kind of trouble. The trouble seemed to be me. I had met her earlier in the day, as I was pushing our sack truck along the pot-holed road to the town. Her hand hung over me like one of those mechanical grabbers in scrapyards. She said she was Disappointed that I hadn’t been to school, and that this would Hinder my Progress. Immediately I thought of a bright blue boat beaten back by the waves. How could I be both the boat and the waves? This was very deep. ‘You are not listening to me,’ she said. ‘I am. It was the storm. We couldn’t leave the lighthouse.’ ‘Captain Scott was not discouraged by the weather,’ said Miss Pinch. ‘He reached the South Pole in spite of the snow.’ ‘But he died in his tent!’ ‘Death, where is thy sting?’ I had no idea.

Pew—why didn’t my mother marry my father? She never had time. He came and went. Why didn’t Babel Dark marry Molly? He doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love. But they might not be telling you the truth. Never mind that. You tell them the truth. What do you mean? You can’t be another person’s honesty, child, but you can be your own. So what should I say? When? When I love someone? You should say it.

mystery of Pew was a mercury of fact. Try and put your finger on the solid thing and it scattered into separate worlds. He was just Pew; an old man with a bag of stories under his arm, and a way of cooking sausages so that the skin turned as thick as a bullet casing, and he was, too, a bright bridge that you could walk across, and look back and find it vanished. He was and he wasn’t—that was Pew.

Dark could feel the familiar pain behind his eyes. His eyes were bars, and behind them was a fierce, unfed animal. When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.

had never depended on him, but she had loved him, which was quite different. She had tried to absorb his anger and his uncertainty. She had used her body as a grounding rod. She had tried to earth him. Instead, she had split him.

Miss Pinch came visiting, and asked me what I intended to do with my Future. She spoke about it as though it were an incurable disease. ‘You have a future,’ she said. ‘We must take it into account.’ She suggested I try for a Junior Trainee Assistant Librarian Temporary Grade on a three-month work placement. She warned me that I shouldn’t be too ambitious—not suitable for Females, but that librarianship was suitable for Females. Miss Pinch always said Females, holding the word away from her by its tail.

My future had been the lighthouse. Without the lighthouse, I would have to begin again—again. ‘Isn’t there anything else I could do?’ I asked Miss Pinch. ‘Very unlikely.’ ‘I’d like to work on a ship.’ ‘That would be itinerant.’ ‘My father was crew on a ship.’ ‘And look what happened to him.’ ‘We don’t know what happened to him.’ ‘We know he was your father.’ ‘You mean I happened to him?’ ‘Exactly. And look how difficult that has been.’ Miss Pinch approved of automation. There was something about human beings that made her uncomfortable. She had refused to sign our petition. Salts, she said, must move with the times, which seemed odd to me, when Miss Pinch had never moved at all—not with the times nor with anything else.

Salts—boarded-up, sea-lashed, ship-empty, harbour-silted, and one bright light. Why take away the only thing we had left? ‘Progress,’ said Miss Pinch. ‘We are not removing the light. We are removing Mr Pew. That is quite different.’ ‘He is the li...

Fastened to the rock. That was the town crest here at Salts; a sea village, a fishing village, where every wife and sailor had to believe that the unpredictable waves could be calmed by a dependable god. Suppose the unpredictable wave was God?

New Planet This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.

There I am, edging along the rim of growing up, then the wind came and blew me away, and it was too late to shout for Pew, because he had been blown away too. I would have to grow up on my own. And I did, and the stories I want to tell you will light up part of my life, and leave the rest in darkness. You don’t need to know everything. There is no everything. The stories themselves make the meaning. The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark. When you look closely, the twenty-four hour day is framed into a moment; the still-life of the jerky amphetamine world.

Years ago in Railings Row, on two kitchen chairs pushed together, under Miss Pinch’s One Duck Eiderdown, I cried for a world that could be stable and sure. I didn’t want to start again. I was too small and too tired. Pew taught me that nothing is gone, that everything can be recovered, not as it was, but in its changing form. ‘Nothing keeps the same form forever, child, not even Pew.’

The boat was vacuum-packed with Albanians, four generations to a family: great-grandmother, air-dried like a chilli pepper, deep red skin and a hot temper; grandmother, all sun-dried tomato, tough, chewy, skin split with the heat; getting the kids to rub olive oil into her arms; mother, moist as a purple fig, open everywhere—blouse, skirt, mouth, eyes, a wide-open woman, lips licking the salt spray flying from the open boat. Then there were the kids, aged four and six, a couple of squirts, zesty as lemons.

‘What did you do before this?’ ‘I was married. Then I wasn’t married any more. Tipped up, flung out, recognise that?’ I did. ‘End of story. Gotta start again. Gotta be positive. Gotta move on. Don’t look back. No regrets.’ That’s how he said it. He said it like a mantra. I wonder how many times a day he had to say it to make it true? It was a poultice over his heart. I don’t know how to poultice my heart.

‘An obsession with meaning, at the expense of the ordinary shape of life, might be understood as psychosis, yes.’ ‘I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.’ He twiddled his pencil. His nails were very clean. ‘I am only asking questions.’ ‘So am I.’ There was a pause. I said, ‘How would you define psychosis?’ He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil: Psychosis: out of touch with reality. Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.

pours it out. I went outside, tripping over slabs of sunshine the size of towns. The sun was like a crowd of people, it was a party, it was music. The sun was blaring through the walls of the houses and beating down the steps. The sun was drumming time into the stone. The sun was rhythming the day.