Read Online Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson - Free Book Online Page A

take away the only thing we had left?
    ‘Progress,’ said Miss Pinch. ‘We are not removing the light. We are removing Mr Pew. That is quite different.’
    ‘He is the light.’
    ‘Don’t be silly.’
    I saw Pew raise his head, listening to me.
    ‘One day the ships will have no crew, and the aeroplanes will have no pilots, and the factories will be run by robots, and computers will answer the telephone, and what will happen to the people?’
    ‘If ships had had no crew when your father came to call, your mother would have not have been a disgrace.’
    ‘And I would not have been born.’
    ‘You would not have been an orphan.’
    ‘If I hadn’t been an orphan, I would never have known Pew.’
    ‘What possible difference could that have made?’
    ‘The difference that love makes.’
    Miss Pinch said nothing. She got up from the one comfortable chair where she always sat when she visited us, and swept down the spiral stairs like a hailstorm. Pew looked up, as he heard her leave – metal-capped heels, keys jangling, ferrule of her umbrella drilling every step of the stone, until she was gone in a shatter of slamming doors, and clatter of bicycle across the jetty.
    ‘You’ve offended her,’ said Pew.
    ‘I offended her by being born.’
    ‘Well, and that can’t be held as your fault. It’s no child’s fault to be born.’
    ‘Is it a misfortune?’
    ‘Don’t regret your life, child. It will pass soon enough.’
    Pew got up and went to tend the light. When the men with computers came to automate it, it would flash every four seconds as it always did, but there would be no one to tend it, and no stories to tell. When the ships came past, no one would be saying, ‘Old Pew’s in there, lying his head off with his stories.’
    Take the life away and only the shell is left.
    I went down to my eight-legged bed. Every time I had grown, we had just stuck an extension on the bed I had, so four legs had become six, and lately, six had become eight. My dog still had his original number.
    I lay there, stretched out, looking at the one star visible through the tiny window of the room. Only connect. How can you do that when the connections are broken?
    ‘That’s your job,’ Pew had said. ‘These lights connect the whole world.’

Tell me a story, Pew.
    What story, child?
    One that begins again.
    That’s the story of life.
    But is it the story of my life?
    Only if you tell it.

Dark was walking his dog along the cliff path
    when the dog sheared off in a plunging of fur and loud barking. He shouted to the dog, but the dog had a seagull in his sights. The man was angry. He was trying to concentrate on the problem in his mind: his Sunday sermon for Pentecost.
    Suddenly the dog disappeared, and he heard it yelping in the distance. He sensed that something was wrong, and ran along the headland, his boots crushing the stone.
    The dog had fallen over the cliff onto a ledge about twenty feet down. It was whining piteously, and holding up its paw, The man looked; there seemed to be no way down, but to fall. He couldn’t climb down, and he couldn’t pull the dog up.
    He told the dog to stay – it could hardly do anything else, but the command gave the chaos a kind of order. It told the dog that his master was still in charge. It helped the man to believe he was still in charge.
    ‘Stay!’ he shouted. ‘Lie down!’ Whimpering a little, with its hurt foot, the dog did as he was told, and the man began to walk quickly back to the Manse to fetch a rope.
    There was no one about at home. His wife was out. His son was at school. The cook was sleeping before the Bishop came to dinner. He was glad there was no need to explain, no need to get exasperated. A problem shared was a problem doubled, he thought. People tried to help, but all they did was interfere. Better to keep trouble contained, like a mad dog. Then he remembered his dog, and pushed aside other, more difficult thoughts. They were his thoughts. He wouldn’t tell