The Lighthouse. Alison Moore

the pile of clothes and begins to leave. Halfway across the room, she hesitates, turns around and takes a step back towards the bed with her eye on the lighthouse. But she can hear him moving towards the bathroom door, still singing. She turns away again.

      When the bathroom door opens, she is out in the corridor, heading for the stairs, the door to room six closing slowly behind her.

      At the opposite end of the corridor, just past room ten, there is a door marked ‘private’, and it divides the guest rooms from those occupied by Ester and her husband.

      Bernard, coming through this door, sees his wife hurriedly leaving room six and heading downstairs. Moments later, a man appears in the doorway of the same room, leaning out and looking towards the stairs. The man is partially hidden behind the door, but Bernard sees a bare shoulder, the knobbles of the man’s spine, a white leg, a blue-veined foot on the hallway carpet. The man turns his head and sees Bernard and withdraws into his room looking embarrassed. The door clicks shut and a key is turned in the lock.

      In the night, there will be a storm. It will be brief, if a little violent, and hardly anyone will even realise it has occurred, although they might hear it raging, thundering, in their dreams.

      In the morning, by the time people are up and about, the sun will be out again, and the rain-soaked pavements will be dry, and there will be very little evidence of damage.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      Sun Cream

      In the small, low-ceilinged bathroom, Futh fills his tooth glass at the sink and takes big gulps before realising that he is drinking water from the hot tap. He has heard the stories about people finding dead pigeons in hot water tanks. He pours away what is left and refills his glass with cold water, which he still does not much like the taste of. He goes back to the bedroom. It is very early – he woke, thirsty, long before his alarm – but it is light and he could do with an early start anyway.

      The night before, his supper miraculously appeared in his room while he was taking a shower. He ate in his pyjamas, standing at the window, looking out at the river.

      He has got into the habit of always determining an escape route from a room in which he is staying, imagining emergency scenarios in which his exit is blocked by fire or a psychopath. This began, he thinks, when he was in his twenties and living in an attic flat. His Aunt Frieda, worrying about stair fires and burglars, gave him a rope ladder. It seems important that he should always know a way out.

      Putting down his supper plate, he opened the window – looking, in the dark, for a roof to climb on to, a pipe to hold on to, a soft landing – and a moth flew in. Underneath the window, there was pavement, and it looked a long way down. He wondered if it was possible to jump from such a height without breaking anything.

      Having finished his meal, he brushed and flossed his teeth and went straight to bed. Finding a mint on his pillow, he heard his Aunt Frieda in his head warning him about tooth decay, the dangers of sweets, but he ate it anyway, sucking it down to nothing.

      He opened a book and tried to read but could not concentrate, kept reading the same lines over and over and reaching the bottom of the first page without having taken it in. He was distracted by the moth flying at his lamp. He got out of bed again and opened the curtains and the window to let it out, knowing that this disoriented moth was really after the moon, its navigational aid, although Futh could not see the moon from where he was standing. Getting back into bed, he turned over his pillow to get the cool side and noticed the stain of a stranger’s mascara like a spider on his pillowcase. He resumed his reading and the moth flew away from the lamplight, the artificial light, towards the open window.

      Still his thoughts drifted, towards home and Angela and where he had gone wrong. She had always been irritated by his awkwardness around people, around women in particular. He knew her mother found him strange. He was introspective, insufficiently aware, Angela often said, of other people and how they might see things.

      The moth flew out of a fold in the curtains and back towards the lamplight, bumping and fluttering against the hot bulb. Futh shut his book and put it down on the bedside table. He got up to find the map he would need for the next day’s walk and lay down again to study his route. But he could not stop thinking about all the ways in which he had annoyed his wife during their marriage.

      He was a bad listener, apparently, bewilderingly incapable sometimes of following simple instructions. He was always late leaving the house, late arriving anywhere, even when he had to meet Angela. And he never apologised, even when he was clearly in the wrong. These were small things but he supposed they built up, amounted to something. He imagined things being different. He had a reverie in which he said and did the right thing and Angela did not leave him. But it was too late, it had already happened.

      Having nodded off with the light on, and having slept deeply before waking early with the map creased under his cheek, Futh now stands once more at the window looking down at the quiet street below. There is not yet anybody about and nothing is open. It is, he realises, not only early, it is also a Sunday.

      He turns away from the window and in the early morning light he notices the colour of the bedroom walls, which are painted a deep pink – the colour of rare meat, the colour of his sunburnt arm.