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Ben got up gracefully from his position with one push and went over to run his hands on the rough stone. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Neither do I.’
Aleksey pushed to his feet and joined Ben by the tower. He put his hand on it, too. The stone was warm under his skin.
He pulled Ben into his arms and kissed him, then pushed him back against the stone and kissed him some more. He had given sacrifice, and they’d been favoured of the gods.
But he thought love was probably a better offering.
By the end of their second week, they were entirely lost to the island. They woke when the dawn light roused them. They slept when it was dark. They ate what the place gave them in abundance and healed, their skin turning deeply brown, Aleksey’s hair white blond, his beard entirely grey. They were both extremely thin, but a rangy lean that didn’t lack for energy or strength.
On the first day of their third week, Aleksey finally gave into Ben’s silent, utterly unmentioned desire to attempt to climb the lighthouse. After all, he could try too, and together they might just do it.
They hefted the remains of the rope Ben had bought on St Mary’s onto their shoulders and headed back to the headland again. Hitler was looking a little worse for wear, so they shoved a stake of wood up his bottom to perk him up a bit. He was wearing one of the hats they’d found, which they had now realised were Austrian, but its little feather was looking a bit bedraggled.
They dropped the rope and circled the light.
They had planned to tie something to one end and throw it up, hoping to snag the gantry, but they didn’t even try. Once they were there, with the rope, they could see this was a very forlorn hope. It was far too high.
Ben then attempted his banana-tree climb, but slipped and collapsed in very un-Ben-like girlish giggles every time he tried. Aleksey tried, but only half-heartedly. If Ben didn’t have the strength for something, then he obviously didn’t.
They were at something of an impasse.
What had been merely a frustration, an embuggerance, now became something of an obsession for Aleksey. It was his fucking lighthouse, but he could not get into it.
A small occurrence at dawn the following day did nothing for his mounting fixation with this black tower. He was walking with Radulf to the headland to survey their domain with the telescope, when the old dog’s hackles rose. It was sudden and unexpected, but Aleksey didn’t give it too much attention. Radulf’s new mission in life, apparently, was to rid his island of orange tree rats and whenever he scented one, the muzzle rose, which, Aleksey was privately convinced, produced a great deal of hilarity in the squirrel population of Light Island.
When they got to Ben’s Bottom, Radulf stopped entirely and stared blindly up towards the light.
Aleksey, annoyed, wanting to check for dawn invasions, glanced up, clicking his fingers to get him moving, and that’s when he saw a figure standing on the edge of the cliff.
His body flooded with adrenalin, and he shouted, ‘Hey!’ and began to run, but he had to befucking cautiousbecause the hillside was covered in rabbit warrens and holes and he couldn’t risk his leg again, he justcouldn’t, and so when he reached the lighthouse, panting, there was no one but Hitler. He’d blown off the bonfire completely, and the stake had caught on the coiled rope they’d left there, and that’s what he must have seen. He checked over the cliff and the bridge, just in case, but there was nothing but white and birds and the never-ceasing crash of the waves below.
Aleksey stood at the edge of the headland, naked but for tattered shorts, and narrowed his scope to the glass dome of the tower.
He’d had the strangest thought as he’d watched Radulf nosing around the base, as he’d tied their guy back in place: if the house were an old man, or rather, if the spirit of the island was an old man with stories to tell, then maybe, just maybe, this manifestation lived in the…
He lowered the instrument and decided he was just missing chocolate.
He clicked once more for the dog, coiled and picked up the rope, and they returned to Guillemot and to Ben.
In the middle of their last week, they turned the rope into a swing on a monkey puzzle tree growing on a small headland enclosing one of the sheltered inlets. If they ran, grabbed it, and swung, they could launch themselves out into the deep translucent waters of the cove.
That night, their twentieth day since their return, a storm rolled in from the west. It seemed to carry not just natural booming thunder and vast streaks of lightning, but also echoes of explosion and breaking apart, screaming and death. They sat together calming the dogs until the rain began. Then, in the sub-tropical downpour that followed this awesome display of true power, they ran, all four, to the sunken lawn and spun around whooping and hollering, the dogs howling and jumping and twisting in circles and dashing through the flooding and flowing streams.
The next day, which they expected to start their countdown to rescue, they woke to an after-the-storm day so perfect that it seemed to them that the first days of the world must have looked like this. The colours of the flowers were so sharp and clear they hurt the eyes. The lawn was lush and green. The very pebbles on the beach glistened, washed clean and shining fresh. The sea was welcoming and warm and calm, and once more Aleksey heard its siren call, and he answered, swimming from PB’s Beach around to the bay, hauling himself out onto the dock to bask naked in the sun, where Ben joined him with some food and a book.
They knew they didn’t have long. A few days at the most.
There was so much they still wanted to do.
That night they dragged tarps and blankets and two reluctant dogs to Coronation Cove and set up camp.
As they sat by their fire on the sandy bank under the trees, steaming mussels, roasting rabbit and frying some fish for a feast, they glanced out to sea to find it glowing unearthly, icy-neon blue. It was as if Light Island had finally come to life.
As one they rose to their feet.
‘Am I entirely mad, min skat?’Am I actually dead and this is my heaven?
