The Lighthouse Keeper – Part 1: The Storm

“The boat won’t come back for three days,” said the lighthouse keeper.

Elliot Hart looked out of the window of the tiny stone kitchen. The Atlantic was grey and white and furious, throwing itself against the rocks forty metres below. Rain came sideways. The boat that had brought him out that morning was already a speck heading back toward the mainland, bouncing wildly on the waves.

“Three days,” Elliot repeated.

“If you’re lucky.” The keeper put a kettle on the old range. “Could be five.”

“I have a deadline.”

“The sea doesn’t,” said Liam Gallagher, and that was apparently the end of the conversation.

---

Elliot had come for an article. The Last Lighthouse Keepers of Ireland, eight pages for a glossy travel magazine in London. Most lighthouses were automatic now. This one, on a black rock called Inis Dorcha, nine miles off the coast of Mayo, still had a man living in it. One man, alone, for six years.

The editor had said: Get a photo of him looking moody. Readers love a lonely man.

Liam Gallagher was certainly moody. He was tall and broad, with dark hair going grey at the edges and a beard he clearly trimmed himself with whatever was to hand. He wore a thick fisherman’s jumper with a hole in one elbow. He had said, so far, about forty words.

He handed Elliot a mug of tea so strong it was nearly black.

“There’s one bed,” he said. “You have it. I’ll take the chair.”

“I can’t take your bed.”

“You’re a guest.” Liam looked at him. His eyes were grey, the same grey as the sea. “And you’re shaking.”

Elliot looked down. He was. He had been soaked through on the boat and hadn’t noticed.

“Dry clothes in the chest upstairs,” said Liam. “Go.”

---

The lighthouse was a tall white tower with a small stone cottage attached at its base. Inside, everything was old and worn and spotless. Brass that had been polished for a hundred years. Books, hundreds of them, stacked along every wall. A radio that crackled weather reports in Irish. A wood stove, always burning.

At the top of the tower, up a spiral staircase of a hundred and twelve steps, was the lamp room.

Liam took him up at dusk.

The room was all glass, round, with the great lens in the centre, taller than both of them, glittering like a cut diamond. Outside, the storm was a wall of darkness and rain. When Liam flicked a switch, the lamp began to turn, and a beam of white light swept out across the black water, and kept sweeping, every ten seconds, around and around.

“It’s beautiful,” said Elliot, and meant it completely.

Liam didn’t say anything. But Elliot saw something soften in his face, very slightly, in the passing light.

“My grandfather kept this light,” Liam said, after a long time. “Then my father. Then me.”

“And after you?”

Liam looked out at the dark.

“After me,” he said, “it goes automatic. Nobody needs a keeper anymore.”

---

On the second day, the storm got worse.

They spent it in the kitchen by the stove, because there was nowhere else to go. Elliot tried to interview him. Liam answered in single words. So Elliot gave up and just talked, about London, about the places he had written about, about the boyfriend who had left him eight months ago because Elliot was never home.

“You’re running,” said Liam suddenly.

Elliot stopped. “Sorry?”

“Travel writer. Never home. You’re running from something.” Liam turned his mug slowly on the table. “I know what it looks like. I came out here to run.”

“From what?”

Liam was quiet for a very long time. The wind howled. The radio crackled.

“From a town that knew too much about me,” he said finally. “Small place. Everyone knew everyone. And everyone knew I wasn’t going to marry a nice girl from the parish.” He shrugged. “So I took the one job in Ireland where there’s nobody to judge you.”

Elliot looked at him across the table. At the hole in the elbow of the jumper. At the books, hundreds of them, all read, all alone.

“That’s a long time to be alone,” he said quietly.

“Six years,” said Liam. “I stopped counting the days. Started counting the books.”

---

That night, Elliot couldn’t sleep.

He lay in Liam’s narrow bed, under three heavy wool blankets, listening to the storm, watching the beam of the lighthouse sweep across the ceiling every ten seconds. He thought about a man who had been alone on a rock for six years because there was nowhere on land he could be himself.

At two in the morning, he got up and went downstairs.

Liam was in the armchair by the stove, wrapped in a blanket, not sleeping either. He looked up when Elliot came in.

“Can’t sleep?” Liam asked.

“The bed’s too big,” Elliot said. “For one.”

The fire crackled. Outside, the storm roared.

Liam looked at him for a very long time.

“That’s a bad line,” he said finally.

“I know,” Elliot said. “I’m a writer. We’re terrible at saying things out loud.”

Liam stood up. The blanket fell from his shoulders. In the firelight, his face was very serious and very uncertain, like a man standing at the edge of very cold water.

“It’s been a long time,” he said. “I don’t,” he stopped. “I don’t know if I remember how.”

Elliot crossed the kitchen and stopped in front of him.

“Then we’ll go slow,” he said.

---

Next: Part 2, The Lamp Room. The storm breaks, the boat comes, and one of them has to decide whether to leave.