TURN AGAIN, O MY SWEETNESS

            The salt-crust melancholy of the keeper’s wife is more than he can bear and, as is his habit, he turns away. Unblinking, she watches his lumbering body from the kitchen window as he heads across the catwalk to his work shed, her crisp lines held as tightly as a well-rigged forestay. She puts a smouldering cigarette to her lips and takes a long drag down into her lungs. She waits a beat, and then blows it back out in a lazy ghost-ring that disperses hazily into the air around her. He hates it when she smokes, so she smokes more. Anything to antagonise. She used to dream of that big, heavy body pressing down on her, slick and hard inside of her, surrounding her, hands on her throat – too tight, gasping for breath, be careful what you wish for – but for a long time now she has been as miserable when he is close as when he turns his back. No, not miserable, not anymore. She has wondered countless times how he cannot know that she is numb, a shell of herself, bleached and fragile, looking to crumble. He cannot see how the endless days of yearning for what cannot be have hollowed her. The truth is that she no longer knows how to go on and so, instead, she haunts.

            Once he has disappeared from view, the keeper’s wife peers down at the ground outside, assessing. The fall won’t kill her, she is absolutely sure of that. In truth, it would be unlikely to kill anyone unless they fell the wrong way, of course, or landed on their head, or twisted funny somehow. There is a defiant mat of brittle-looking but thick grass around the base of the building – unusual because hardly any grows elsewhere on the entire rocky outcrop and she has not noticed it before – which would serve to cushion a fall at least somewhat. She’s not too worried about pain or injury; she has suffered worse and the lure of the fall is louder than either. It is not as though she actually intends to kill herself, but she has been thinking about throwing herself out of the window at least a dozen times a day for as long as she can remember. Of course, if she could get right to the top of the lighthouse, get out and over the railing, then death would be assured. It’s funny, although she has dreamed many times about just that, the high fall, descent, she has never once dreamed of dying that way. She takes comfort in the omission, believes it means something important. Something good. These are the only straws she has left to clutch at, after all. The trouble is her loving husband has forbidden her those heights. It is not for women, he has told her, and of course that makes her want it even more. However, while she champs at his restrictions, she knows it would be useless to argue with the stubborn ass and, besides, while she is not sure of her ultimate intention it would be foolish to go too far too soon. She must wait to make further plans, see how things unfold. For now, the kitchen window has to be enough, at least for this first time, because falling is all that matters.

            Occasionally she wonders where the urge comes from, and then she remembers her grandmother’s bedroom, where the old woman died. She wasn’t supposed to go out onto the balcony, her mother had told her it was an accident waiting to happen, and that had been enough to ensure she had escaped onto it at every opportunity. The thrill of the forbidden was one thing, naturally, but the space had made her breathless with anticipation from the moment she’d stepped out there. Her proximity to the void, to oblivion, had been velvet black and thick on her tongue, while her heart, lodged like a cliché in her throat, had drummed in tandem with the gloriously empty throb throb throb of it. The certain knowledge that just one step, one vault and she would be out there falling, free, had almost swallowed her whole. Even now, so many years later, she still pulses at the thrill of the so close, and the what if. Of course, she wouldn’t have been able to vault over anything with her small girl legs, wouldn’t be able to do it now most likely, let alone jump the railing at the top of the lighthouse, which comes to her waist, but at its heart the feeling is the same. Now, however, it is adult sized, mature. Deep down in her stomach, swirling around with the bile and the anxiety and the dreadful truth, there is an absolute certainty that falling is her destiny. It feels important. Her calling. An escape. She has been thinking on it constantly.

            The other women have been talking about it too; she’s far from alone. It’s what triggered the memory in the first place, the others. She listens to them as they whisper to each other at night, or as they walk up the winding stairs together, or when they’re in a corner and they think she cannot hear them. She can though, every word, and she doesn’t care that they don’t include her, have discarded her so easily, because she doesn’t need them, she doesn’t need anyone. She knows what they are, has named them but only to herself and, while she won’t dignify them with a reaction today any more than any other day, she still listens, always listens. It’s not like there’s much else for her to do. The radio broke weeks ago when she threw it at the wall and her husband had just shrugged, relieved he hadn’t been struck by it. He’d said that’s what happens when someone has idle hands and she should never have idle hands anyway because there’s always something to clean or polish, if nothing else, in a lighthouse.

            That said, he had tried to placate her after the last ill-fated pregnancy by buying the piano for her, probably so she would feel obliged to play and be forced to keep those nervous twisting hands of hers occupied, so he could finally stop being reminded and forget right along with the music. He would rather not remember, she knows this, has been told often enough to move on, to move past it. He hates dwelling on things, as he calls it, hates how she relives things over and over. The joke was on him though. She didn’t ask him to buy the bloody piano, had never so much as mentioned she played, and she certainly doesn’t know where he got the idea that she loved it enough to want her own instrument. She’d hated her lessons as a child, and the truth is she had only ever learned one song by heart, a song she doesn’t enjoy playing at all. She would rather have had a new radio. Still, he starts to get twitchy when she plays it now, so she makes sure she sits down to practice at least three times a day and, when he starts fidgeting in his chair or she sees him freeze outside in the yard at the sound of those first few familiar bars, his face growing more thunderous by the second, she carries on playing and then plays it again and again until he gets up and leaves the room, muttering under his breath as he goes, or heads for cover down at the small dock where the sound will not reach him. Other than re-reading the handful of books she brought with her, dog-eared and battered as they are, it really is the only genuine entertainment available to her. That and thinking about the window. About jumping through it. Out of it.

            Idly, she looks at the clock on the wall and realises it is already the middle of the afternoon. She doesn’t remember making lunch but, as she looks around the room, – the assorted carnage; a broken chair here, blood spilled there – she can see the remnants of the meal, bread crusts torn to pieces by his too large, milky front teeth, like a predator’s ripping at a carcass, and then discarded so carelessly once he was done. She shudders at the thought of his mouth. It happened slowly, this revulsion. She barely even noticed it at first, but before, when she did not know the grief she knows now, she had thought of nothing but his lips, of him kissing her, his large hands on her face, his warm breath against her skin, indeed she had yearned for little else. To be with him had been everything and now she can barely stand to look at him, to be near him, the whiskers of his beard like barbed wire against her skin, even the smell of his breath is enough to turn her stomach. They had waited so long for each other, through worlds, and now they are together, in the home where they were supposed to build a family and, really, she can hardly wonder where all that passion and intensity has gone. She certainly does not feel it, of course she feels hardly anything anymore, unchecked grief is such bitter ground, and he has barely touched her in weeks, not since he pressed his fingers to her stomach in tentative wonder and hope, “maybe this time”, he had said and she had wept – hands on her throat, tight on her windpipe, and she had wept then too – so she thinks it is safe to assume he feels, or not, as she does. Empty, gone.

            There are chores to be done, there are always chores to be done, like the man said, and she has a list longer than her arm, but the window calls and the women chatter and her cigarette must have all but burned down by now and she cannot seem to think of anything else anymore. She opens the window and takes a deep breath. The salt air is one of the best things about the island, and she could never tire of that at least. It gives her a sudden, much needed boost and before she knows she is going to, she has pulled a chair towards her and set it beneath the window. She steps up onto it without hesitation, holding onto the windowsill to keep steady for a moment. Once aboard, she realises how easy it will be to step onto the sill itself and so she does. The breeze tugs at her clothes as she stands in the frame of the window and the thrill of it is too much. She steps out.

            Pure elation, so white and clear and perfectly warm in its intensity, suffuses everything. In that moment, she knows with all certainty that this is what she has been searching for, that whatever comes next will be worth it. It is the exhilaration of absolute freedom; one endless instant where there is no gravity, no husband, no expectation, no chore, no hope, no despair, no women whispering – you’re not enough, you’re too much, you’re everything, you’re nothing – with naught but air beneath her and the breeze tugging tugging tugging. She feels as though she will ascend rather than fall, and her body strains towards the pure blue expanse of the heavens above… but what goes up must always come down, and then there is the grass and the rocks and even as she feels something that should snap in her ankle on impact, the memory of pain scissoring up through her leg like fire as she cries out instinctively, one arm crushed beneath her, and her hips mashed against the rocky ground, she knows she wants to do it again, will always want to do it again and again and again. It is forever and forgotten at the same time. She yearns to remember, to relive, even as she is saturated with recollection. She lays there stunned but euphoric, incandescent with that once most exquisite pain, a better pain, and barely a breath left in her lungs. She blinks and the brightest green grass she has ever seen shines right in her eyes, more tickles at her nose, and laughter starts to itch its way across from her hippocampus and down from her amygdala into the back of her throat, even as it bubbles its way up from her stomach and along her windpipe to meet in the middle and, her body throbbing, her heart soaring, her sudden roar scares a squabble of gulls into flight. The women watch her from the window and, for once, are silent.

            She laughs until her head spins, even lying there on the ground. She laughs as she rolls onto her back, watching as she slowly, infinitesimally, starts to come apart, atom by atom, cell by cell, bit by aching bit, sinking into the ground beneath her even as the rest of her disperses into the air as lazily as smoke rings. Notes of her laughter penetrate the rock and her voice slides after them like honey, the echo of her drip drip drip catching on the breeze and taking flight across to the mainland. Her hair sheds languidly from her scalp, strand by strand, weaving through the grass, rich auburn tangling, seguing into lushest green, emerald sparkling, spreading its carpet across earth and stone where only tufts had dwelt before. Skin rolls from flesh, muscle unknitting from bone, piece by piece, unravelling, liquefying into a pulsing viscosity that slips into and around the barren rocks and nourishes the turf. Colours flare in backlit rainbows, everything more vivid even as her eyes follow suit; cornea sliding from iris, deserting the lens, opening the vitreous chamber, the humour spilling out, particles floating into the sky even as the liquor she is already becoming trickles into the cracks in the paving slabs, winding her way down down down to the waiting sea. She reaches out her remaining hand before it is too late and, as the afternoon light hits it, it scatters too, like dandelion seeds, the fragments dancing into the air and away, taking her wishes across the water to lands she will never see but has dreamed of nonetheless. Her heart pumps slower and slower until it beats to a standstill, an echo of itself, a memory, and then it too is lost in the whip of the same wind that has carried the dust of her away.

            The wind pulls at the remains of her clothing, at the dwindling remnants of her flesh and, at its insistence, she leaps to take flight, her soul on fire as she wheels and circles in the sky at last, swooping and soaring even as tendrils of her are sinking to the roots and caverns below, all the way down to the darkened hollows of the deep. She races through the air, first climbing and then allowing herself to fall, over and over, down and up, up and down, peak after trough, trough after peak, and she lends her voice to the howl of the wind as it rolls and eddies around the lighthouse, embracing it, worshipping it as it stands fast against the elements. The women watching from inside, lined close to but not at the window she leapt from, wonder open-mouthed at her dance, their insubstantial hands clasped beneath their insubstantial chins.

            Her essence capers in this and that direction, at one with the sky even as it meshes with the darkness beneath, but as she strains to go higher, to go further, she cannot. There is a tether. She is not free. The call of the lighthouse is too loud, after all it is where this started and it is to where she must return. She is its captive, his captive, as surely as are the other women. The women, who wait and skulk and whisper. The women, who lurk in the shadows but never the light. The women, whose faces she knows so well. The women, whose hearts beat as hers does, has done, the same rhythm, the same muscle, and the same blood thundering through their veins. She cannot leave them behind; it is a betrayal she cannot make. Even if she wanted to, the lighthouse will not let her. She feels the pull and for one last, fruitless moment, she resists, straining against the trap, hopelessly defiant still… And then the collar tightens, choking her, jerking her back to the lighthouse, to where she must remain, to where she belongs until justice is done. The rush of matter and does-not-matter roars against the blue sky, echoing a protest, a fury, a wail of frustration that rings out right across the bay. It is the sound of gulls on the wing.

            Later, as night falls, folk on the mainland remark at how especially bright the lighthouse is as it blinks on, how warm its light seems this evening. It comforts them as it cuts through the darkening sky, and more than one of them think about the lighthouse keeper who tends to it, the big-bodied man who lives there all alone. He’s not much of a talker on the rare occasions he comes to town, but he’s strong and is passably handsome, some might and do say. Perhaps he is in want of a wife? They are surprised he has never married, had wondered if perhaps he had finally done the deed when the rumours of a piano were whirling around. It’s sad to think of him out there, playing the thing with no one to hear but the gulls and the fishes. Perhaps he needs some company? A man like that, all alone, it isn’t right. More than one of them will dream of him later still, when they are snug beneath their sheets. They will wonder at the shadows hovering at the edges of the dream even as they fall under his spell, but it will be a passing thought, no more. For now.

            On the island itself, those shadows are deeper than ever and the women huddle together in the kitchen, forlorn. The lighthouse keeper polishes his boots at the old wooden table by candlelight, the way his father and his grandfather did before him. He is whistling a happy, if discordant, tune as he goes. He is glad he kept to the plan again, finally, his father taught him well, just as his had once taught him. The time will come when he will need an heir, but now is not that time, no matter how close he has come these past few years. It was a sign, he can see that now; better late than not at all. He thinks of her smooth skin, its silken softness beneath the rough pads of his fingertips, of her beautiful blue eyes, like the sea on a clear summer’s day, of her salt-rich tears, and he winces at the ache of regret the memories conjure in the pit of his stomach, and forces himself to think of the song instead. Over and over, the same damned song. The piano will make good kindling at least. An expensive mistake that makes him angry when he thinks of the waste and the trouble it has likely created. The townsfolk will have talked, of course, wondered what a big clumsy man like him would want with such a thing. His consideration for the damned woman may have put him at risk. His fist clenches around the cloth in his hand.

            Good. Anger is good.

            Temper rising, his mind turns to the body, considers it with nothing at all like regret now. He will need to calculate how much to weight it so it will sink all the way down to the bottom of the sea, into the inky black deep. The water is calm tonight, the weather mild, so he should have no trouble. He will consider taking another companion again in due course, he thinks to himself, after all, it’s lonely out here and he is always glad of the company, at least for a while. Maybe this time she will understand her place. They will marry, as his family has always done, beneath the stars, within sight of the sea and away from the prying eyes of the town. The laws of men do not make such a union stronger or more valid. A marriage certificate is but a piece of paper after all, a meaningless bit of human bureaucracy. His family’s ways run deeper than that, older, at one with the ebb and flow of the tides, respectful of the briny sea that sustains all things, and much less traceable. At last he laughs to himself and shrugs off his mood, loosening shoulders he had not realised were quite so tense. It has been a long day and he still has much to do, but he is beginning to feel better.

            The women stare at him, his thoughts loud to them, although he does not know it, does not see them, never hears them. They have always waited because one day they believe he will, that he must. Tonight could be different; they can feel it.

            This time, buoyed beyond their past limits by the latest addition to their ranks, there is a faint rustling, audible beyond the shadows. The lighthouse keeper thinks it is perhaps a mouse and pays it no mind beyond a slight hesitation but, instead, she steps out from a dark corner to stand in front of the others, determined to bring about his reckoning this night. She can see the hairs on the back of his neck as they stand up, and she smiles. Raising the forever-smouldering cigarette to her lips, she musters every ounce of energy she can, reaches deep down into her fury, stretching into theirs. Although many of them have forgotten the worst of it, it is still clutched to their innards, a stain, a receipt of the worst kind, and she grabs it, grasping for everything and anything she can lay claim to, letting her sisters fuel her as, finally, she takes a long, slow drag, and then blows it out slowly but with such purpose the world seems to freeze. The candle on the table beside him flutters impossibly at her breath and all of the women hold theirs. The lighthouse keeper stops what he is doing and frowns at the flame, watching as it dances… for one long moment it flickers almost horizontally, pops blue… and then it rallies, pulsing even more brightly than before. He wipes his hand across the back of his neck, muttering something about the cooler evenings arriving earlier every year, and resumes his polishing. The women retreat into their shadows, defeated.

            For now.