Lighthouse by Alison Moore Page A

hair, his skin already salmon pink and tender. Rubbing the residue into his hands, he sees on his palm the inch-long scar, now thin and pale.
    He got the scar in Cornwall. He was up on the cliffs with his parents. It was the start of the holidays, the summer between primary and secondary school, the summer of the heatwave. They were spending the week in a caravan and someone had told them that the way to stop it turning into an oven was to keep the windows closed and the blinds down. They would come out of the midday sun into the relative cool of the darkened caravan and then there might be lunch and a siesta before Futh could escape again into the blazing day.
    Despite the incredible heat, up on the cliffs there was a breeze and one could burn unexpectedly. They had eaten a picnic. His mother had made sandwiches and he and his father had shared a savoury pasty in a paper bag. His father had opened a bottle of Pomagne but no one else wanted any. There were oranges but only his mother had bothered with one. Afterwards, she lay on her back on the grass and closed her eyes. Her port-wine stain was visible beneath the strap of her bikini top. She smelt of sun cream.
    His father was holding forth on the subject of the lighthouse and eighteenth-century shipwrecks. ‘Of course,’ his father said, ‘there were still shipwrecks after the lighthouse was built.’ He talked about the plundering of the wrecks, and the bodies which were washed ashore and buried, he said, until the early nineteenth century, namelessly in the dunes, in unconsecrated land.
    He talked about flash patterns. ‘The light,’ he said, gazing fixedly at the hazy horizon, ‘flashes every three seconds and can be seen from thirty miles away. In fog, the foghorn is used.’ And Futh, looking at the lighthouse, wondered how this could happen – how there could be this constant warning of danger, the taking of all these precautions, and yet still there was all this wreckage.
    His father went on.
    Futh, standing, stretching his legs, wandered away over the bone-dry grass, searching for shade although there was none, hoping for more of a breeze, and wanting just to keep moving. In his hand was his mother’s perfume case, a silver-plated lighthouse, which he had taken out of her handbag. It was an antique, an heirloom acquired from his father’s German grandmother.
    Futh took the glass vial out of its case. He wanted to smell the contents, his mother’s scent, but he was not allowed to remove the stopper.
    He remembered the visit to his widower granddad’s flat in London, during which the lighthouse had been given to Futh’s father. The whole time they were there, his granddad had been toying with it, this little silver novelty, occasionally putting it away in the pocket of his pyjama top only to get it straight out again. He seemed to be dwelling on something. Finally he said, ‘You’ve never met Ernst, my brother, have you?’ He was speaking really to his son.
    ‘No,’ said Futh’s father, ‘I haven’t.’
    ‘He might still be alive, I suppose.’
    ‘He could be.’
    Futh’s granddad held out his hand, this exquisite silver lighthouse lying across his palm. ‘This was my mother’s,’ he said. ‘You need to return it to Ernst.’ He held it out until Futh’s father took it from him, and then, seeming exhausted, Futh’s granddad closed his eyes.
    Outside, in the car, Futh’s father gave the lighthouse to Futh’s mother, who admired the case and the vial inside, approved the scent and put some on her wrists and her throat. The car, not yet out of sight of the house, filled with the smell of violets.
    Futh, up on the cliffs in Cornwall with the silver lighthouse in one hand and the stoppered glass vial in the other, wandered back to his parents. His mother was still lying with her eyes closed, her face turned to the sun. His father was looking out to sea and then Futh heard him say, ‘The foghorn blasts every thirty seconds.’
    ‘Do you