Natural Flights of the Human Mind

He dreams of skulls. Seventy-eight of them—factors 1, 2, 3, 13 and 78. While the rest of the world conjures up sheep, he counts skulls, hoping that the number is smaller, that someone made a mistake, that the missing ones are really alive somewhere in the world after all. Once or twice, he only manages to reach sixty-eight, but he can’t turn away and be satisfied. He has to count again and bring himself to the same degree of culpability as before. Sometimes there are more than seventy-eight and he feels the sweat in his bed, the heat of his fear, and wakes up abruptly.

He knows there are seventy-eight. Why does his mind play tricks on him? Why does he count at all when he knows the answer before he begins?

He lies completely still and waits for the physical manifestations of his fear to ease. If he doesn’t move, the heat will go, the sweat will dry and it will be just him, Peter Straker, no skulls, alone in his lighthouse in Devon, living with the shriek of the gulls and the frenetic howl of the wind.

Once a week, Straker goes shopping. He starts his day by going down to one of the three keepers’ cottages and boiling up a saucepan of water, then washes meticulously. Cleanliness is important to him—it’s the last barrier between the uncertainty of his precarious existence and barbarity. He selects a white shirt, a silk tie—pale blue with jagged dark blue patterns down it—and the navy pin-striped suit that he’s worn once a week for twenty-four years. He takes it to the dry cleaner’s on
the first Wednesday of every month. He can’t find a matching pair of socks, so he puts on one brown and one green. Then he pulls on his yellow oilskins and boots.

As he walks down the stairs, he passes Suleiman and Magnificent. They usually sit on a windowsill, almost on top of each other, their long Siamese faces turning together to watch him pass. They spend most of their time on this windowsill, dozing comfortably, sitting up every now and again to watch the gulls soaring outside, their ears twitching as they remember their younger glory days, a time when they were more interested in chasing birds than keeping warm.

Straker stops to stroke them and they push their heads towards him. Under my chin, says Suleiman. Top of my head, says Magnificent. They know they have to purr loudly to shut out the seagulls and the sea and the wind. When he stops stroking them and starts to descend, they watch him with a resigned disappointment, but he can’t stay there for ever. He has other things to do.

He carries on down, and opens the door to the cliff-head, stopping, as always, to fight for a breath, and calculate the energy required to stay upright. The short blades of grass have surrendered to the constant gales, tugged mercilessly to one side, their shiny blades rippling in the occasional sunshine. He leans in the opposite direction to the wind, not bothering to lock the door behind him. There’s nothing of value in the lighthouse, and people don’t come out here, miles from human habitation. They do occasionally pause in the middle of coach-trips, which incorporate all the local sights (the cottage where the Beatles once stayed when they were first famous, Beckingham Manor, Hillingham Gardens with a funfair for all the family), but the road runs a mile from here, and there aren’t any guided tours round the lighthouse. No souvenir shop, no cream teas. On a fine day, they might get out and walk a bit closer, cameras to their faces, inappropriately using the flash. When it’s a tour
for pensioners, they often wave like children, but Straker doesn’t wave back. He pretends they’re not there.

‘Why can’t you just leave me alone?’ The voice of Felicity, eighteen years old. Slightly high-pitched, and vulnerable, the trace of a Black Country accent still there, behind her elocution lessons
.

‘Because I have to know.’

‘Know what?’

‘You can’t stop him.’ Maggie. Older, confident, motherly. She was there at the beginning, a voice without a background. Once she’d arrived, she invaded all my dreams and stayed. ‘He does it to all of us.’

‘Well, I have to know you. You have to be real.’

Felicity: ‘You keep waking me up. I was dreaming about marshmallows. It’s all too long ago.’

‘Rubbish. Twenty-four years is nothing. You haven’t even started.’

‘Go away, Maggie. Stop taking over my conversations.’

‘I will never go away, Straker. Depend on it.’

‘I know.’

Thirty yards from the front door, the cliff ends abruptly and there’s a precipice of a hundred feet. Straker likes to stand close to the edge, rocking in the wind, testing his balance, feeling his centre of gravity. He sees it as a daily test. Is he still here? What roots him to one spot? Can the wind catch him out? He waits for the moment, the final battle, but it never comes. He remains hovering above the precipice, never quite certain why he continues to survive. The waves roar through the rocks below, pounding against the cliff, challenging the wind to a contest of sound. Raging, shrieking, howling, buffeting. There’s no clear winner, just a meeting of currents
below the cliff, thirty-foot-high waves regularly crashing against each other, the spray nearly reaching him. Since he’s been here, ten feet of the cliff have fallen. That averages out at half a foot per year. But it doesn’t work like that. The closer it gets to the lighthouse, the quicker it goes. The elements will win in the end.

He once met a young man up here who wanted to commit suicide. Most potential suicides go to the next headland where the new lighthouse is automated, so there’s no one to watch them, but there hasn’t been a very high success rate. It’s tricky calculating the energy required to push yourself over the edge. You tend to get blown off-course by the wind, and end up further back than where you started.

This young man collided with Straker as he came out of the door of the lighthouse. The stranger had his head down (gelled black hair parted in the middle) and his arms wrapped tightly round his quilted anorak, which nevertheless ballooned out like a crimson bubble.

He jumped when he saw Straker. ‘Get away from me,’ he shouted.

Straker stepped back into the doorway, shocked by his presence. Who was he? Where had he come from? Nobody ever walked out here.

But the young man stopped unexpectedly and lifted his head. ‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘I can’t go on.’

He didn’t go on. He stood against the wind, desperate, his eyes bloodshot and red-rimmed. He looked about fifteen. Straker didn’t know what to do, so he said nothing and watched him.

‘I loved her. I really, really loved her. She said—university—house—lots of children—’

Straker listened to him, although he lost some of the words in the wind and didn’t think he could ask him to repeat anything. He could feel the girlfriend’s betrayal, the hopelessness of it all.

‘She gave it back to me,
Great Expectations
—really, really expensive—hard-backed—lovely smell—What am I supposed to do with it now?’

He produced it from an inside pocket and held it for a while, fingering the cover, unable to turn the pages in the wind.

They stood there together, the wind pulling at their hair, rocking them, changing direction unexpectedly so that they nearly fell over, while they looked at
Great Expectations
. Tears were pouring out of the young man’s eyes, but they were swept away before they could run down his cheeks.

I should do something, thought Straker, but he didn’t know what. There wasn’t a telephone in the lighthouse. The best he could do was leap on to his bicycle and pedal to the village, five miles away. It would all be a bit late.

Suddenly, in a brief lull, the young man leaned back and looked as if he were going to race to the edge. Straker reached out an arm to stop him, but the young man pushed him aside and ran. At the last minute, he veered to one side and threw the book through the air instead, over the side of the cliff. A perfectly judged moment when the wind was at its weakest. He must have been a cricket player. A powerful right arm.

Straker walked to the edge of the cliff to join him and they looked down. The waves were having a good day, colliding and merging, the spray almost reaching the top. There was no sign of
Great Expectations
.

The young man grabbed Straker by the hand. ‘Thanks,’ he shouted. ‘You’ve been a real help.’

Then he sprinted back along the cliff towards the road.

Straker wondered if he would be allowed to subtract him from the seventy-eight. Seventy-seven. A good number, only four factors, 1, 7, 11 and 77. Much more satisfying.

The lighthouse is not functional. In 1970, Trinity House decommissioned it and the keepers left. Their three cottages
lie abandoned at its base, the walls crumbling, all traces of the original human habitation blown away into the wind. There’s a smaller lighthouse now, built on the next headland, full of switches and control panels, run by electricity and solar power. But what about power cuts, what if the sun fails to appear, the ships’ radar breaks down? What then? One day the experts will regret this. They’ll search out the old keepers in their retirement homes, and try to lure them back with money. But they will be too old, their knowledge slipping out of their Alzheimer brains.

Straker’s lighthouse is little more than a folly, a rocket pointing defiantly at the stars, waiting for take-off, destined for great things, but unfairly abandoned. Part of the flotsam and jetsam stranded on the high-tide mark, in the right place at the wrong time. Straker understands its redundancy.
I and the lighthouse. The lighthouse and me
.

Straker keeps his bicycle in the old lounge of a keeper’s cottage. It’s dry and he can mend the punctures here, oil the brakes, pump the tyres. He slept in this room, on the bare floor, twenty-four years ago when he first came. There was a bed in another room—‘It’s fully furnished,’ his father had said, before driving away—but he couldn’t make it to the bedroom. He lay there for ten days, shaking with cold, feverish nightmares, pain and fear, only moving to drink water out of the dirty tap in the kitchen. When he finally went out, looked at the lighthouse and ate some of the food his father had left him, the fear wouldn’t go away. It was like contemplating a blank cavernous opening that he had to enter, knowing there was no choice. The bridges behind him were smouldering ashes.

Finally, he discovered, the only way for him was into the lighthouse and up. He could find a counterfeit safety there that would hold him together. He watched the sea and the sky from
the outside balcony, where the keepers used to clean the light, and taught himself to breathe again. Eventually, he carried furniture up into the service room, below the light. One at a time, a chair, a mattress, a table, very slowly, round the corkscrew steps, thinking of the old keepers bringing up their daily supplies of oil. Every few minutes, the furniture stuck, but he worried away at it, an inch at a time, leaning it over, forcing it two steps up, one step back until he reached the right floor.

Much later, once he’d learned to numb the fear with numbers, he took up an electric fire, then the cooker. He has them arranged neatly in a circle on the floor round the central column on two floors. The cats arrived, one day, unannounced, and he waited for a week, expecting them to melt into the wind as naturally as they had come. When they didn’t, he cut a cat-flap into the lighthouse door.

This morning is unusually calm. A May blue sky, a thin mist drifting in muslin swathes above the water. Straker stands for a while on the edge of the precipice and watches the water lapping and curling against the base of the cliff, still active, still destructive, but less wild than usual.

He could cycle all the way to the village, pulling his cart behind him for the shopping. But it’s a long way, much of it on an uneven path. On a good day, he prefers to go by a more direct route. He cycles only half a mile along the headland. Then, as the land becomes lower and more sheltered from the wind, he stops and gets off his bicycle. He leaves it chained to a rusty iron railing that was put up years ago to prevent people falling over the side of the cliff. Most of it has been wrenched away by the wind and the storms, twisted into sad, abandoned shapes, overwhelmed by creeping ivy, but it’s strong enough to secure a chain. He then climbs down the side of the cliff, making steps from the roots of trees that jut out of the crumbling sandstone.

His dinghy is anchored as far back into the cliffs as possible,
and only floats in the highest tides. Today he crunches through the shingle, over the dried seaweed, which pops and crackles in protest, avoiding the patches of tar that regularly appear. Nobody comes here. It’s a tiny secluded beach on a bay that is nearly always calm, sheltered from the weather by two headlands.

Straker drags the dinghy across the shingle, through the low-tide mud and into the sea. The boat rocks gently, water gurgling and slapping against its sides, and he steadies it with his hands before climbing in. He sits down, balances himself and puts the oars in the rowlocks. It’s only a short row on a good day. He’s fit and strong, and runs up and down the lighthouse steps ten times every morning. He’s fifty-three, and as strong now as he was at eighteen. His father had been a scrapyard millionaire, who had expected his sons to shift cars from the age of fourteen.

‘You’ll go far, Pete,’ his father used to say. ‘You’ll always find work with muscles like that.’

He went further than his father anticipated. He’d had no idea.

On a low tide, he can do fifteen minutes, forty-five seconds. He sets the stopwatch, and goes, straining to beat his last efforts. On a high tide, twenty-five minutes, thirty-two seconds. The records are complicated and need careful calculation. Stage of the tide, time of day, weight of the shopping. He writes it down when he reaches the other side, but waits till he’s back in the lighthouse to work it all out. If he’s within two per cent of his personal best, he gives the cats gourmet tins of fish (52p each) and cooks himself some salmon. (Two fillets—£3.45. Unsalted.)

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