Lighthouse by Alison Moore Page B

know,’ said his mother, ‘how much you bore me?’
    There was a pause and then his father quietly packed away the picnic. Snapping shut the cool-box lid, he stood and looked at his wife. Futh watched the gulls fighting over the remains of their lunch, and then he looked down at his hand and saw the glass vial broken in his palm, the fleshy pad beneath his thumb cut open. The volatile contents of the lighthouse soaked into his wound, stinging, and ran between his fingers, soaking his boots, and the scent of it rose from him like millions of tiny balloons escaping towards the sky.
    For a long time afterwards, he would lift the palm of his hand to his nose, searching for that scent of violets.
     
    He wakes on the bench with his chin on his chest, his neck aching as he lifts his head and looks around him. He stares for a while at the cloudless sky and then checks his watch and consults the route details and the map. Finally getting to his feet, he presses on towards a village. He is fiercely thirsty.
    The outlying houses are quiet. He pictures couples and families inside eating lunch together or slumbering afterwards while they wait for the heat of the day to subside. He envies them their dinners, their sofas, their cool interiors. He thinks about knocking on a door and asking for a glass of water, imagines being invited to step inside and sit down at a table on which lunch is still out. He chooses a garden gate which has been left ajar. He walks up the path to the door and knocks and waits, but nobody answers.
    Just beyond the houses is a shop, through whose windows he can see refrigerated drinks for sale. But the door is locked and there is no one behind the counter, and the sign on the door, he realises, says ‘ CLOSED ’.
    Further along, there is a pub, which is open, or at least the door is. He wanders inside. There is nobody in the place – no customers at the tables, no one behind the bar. There are drinks behind the bar – pumps full of cool beer, fridges full of cold bottles, ice buckets with chilled wine bottles in them. He stands there looking at the drinks he wants, calling out, ‘Hello?’ He calls in both English and German, ‘Hello? Hello?’ But nobody hears him, or at least they don’t come. He considers helping himself, leaving some money, but when he gets closer he sees that there is a dog in between himself and the bar, a big dog which Futh had not noticed at first, or perhaps he had, perhaps he just thought it was something else, a rug. The dog opens one eye.
    Futh leaves, going back out into the street, into the sun, walking on past the houses, and there is a man, he sees now, one man labouring in his garden. Futh stops and asks him for a glass of water. The man, seeing the map in Futh’s hand, asks him in English where he has come from and where he is going. Futh opens out his map and shows him. ‘Well,’ says the man, ‘you’re going in the right direction.’ Futh’s finger continues up and up on one side of the Rhine, and then, crossing the river, it slides back down over the squares of the map, to Hellhaus.
    ‘You’re staying at the hotel?’ asks the man.
    Futh says that he is. ‘It’s all right,’ he adds, ‘although my bedroom wasn’t entirely clean, and the bathroom was a bit poky, and I didn’t get my breakfast.’
    ‘Stay here,’ says the man. He takes off his gardening gloves and disappears into his house, coming out again with a child’s plastic cup half-full of tepid water which he hands to Futh. Futh drinks it and thanks the man, lingers a little longer and then walks on.
    In the middle of the afternoon, the heat begins to give a little. Futh, with his route details in his hand, pauses for a view of the river at its narrowest and deepest point where the currents are strong, looking for the siren, a vast nude cast in bronze. It is only then, when he is standing still, that he notices how much his feet hurt.
    He takes the last mile slowly. Reaching the town and that