The Lighthouse
A Willerby Story
Colin was a good man with a bad job, although he was not to know either of those things until a long time after his last visit to the Lighthouse.
He worked for a company in which bullying was so normalised nobody noticed it in the same way fish don’t notice water.
The air was a poison, corrupting even those who started kind, shrinking them and bringing them to their knees until they forgot they deserved more, trapping them in meanness and making them hate themselves for the cruelty they passed on.
It was everywhere.
Reviews in which disappointment was made very explicit; targets that were impossible to meet but could not be discussed; sexist and racist jokes; intimidation and power-plays; action plans; compulsory training; weekend-wrecker emails that arrived on a Friday scheduling Monday meetings to address non-specified concerns.
This and this and more and more.
It almost ended his marriage and broke his family because without knowing he was doing it he breathed second-hand hate over those he loved most.
He learned how to pack it all up and leave it all in a stinking bag on the desk of the cubby-hole office the evenings and weekend were better.
Even the commutes in during the summer became tolerable because the sunlight reminded him work wasn’t forever and there would be part of the day left for him after the hard hours were done.
But the worst time was when it rained in late September, when he began leaving Willerby before sunrise, when the whole dark winter lay before him like a terrible purgatory with an end too far away for him to believe was real.
He could never quite find the words to describe how awful settling into his car felt on those early dark mornings when all his family were still fast asleep – how to describe the feeling he was trapped in a cage, wasting years, creating and storing up future regrets.
At those times his daily coffee at the riverside lighthouse was more important to him than even he knew.
Red-and-white striped, it sat on a bluff on a flat spot overlooking the river by the weir where the rapids were fastest. It was cylindrical and tapered up to a great mirrored oil lantern hanging from a chain thirty feet above the ground that was motionless even in the strongest wind.
It had been built a hundred years ago on the command of the Great Empress, for the river-goblins who traded between the Willerby clans and the others that existed elsewhere in places like it.
Before it there had been terrible wrecks on the rapids and sometimes, Colin had heard, those wrecks weren’t always accidents; goblins, like humans, could be moved to murder out of both necessity and greed.
But now it was peaceful and the café and little shop and stove-warm chandlery below it was always open.
The first time Colin stopped there was because the house coffee jar was empty and facing the day was unthinkable without it.
He’d heard the coffee there was good but was still surprised by the modern shiny red and steel machine that took up most of the bar behind the old brass till.
Pot – who’d been passed the lighthouse by the retiring old keeper – looked up from his crossword, wiped his hands on his apron and met Colin’s eyes steadily.
“Ah, a big fellow,” he said, “and its your first time here.”
Colin nodded and smiled and after a few more moments of small talk, he asked for and got his flat white.
Colin stopped there the next day, and the one after that and the one after that and almost straight away it was a habit that was to last for years and years.
The shit; the shower; the teeth; the banana; the short drive; the smiles and small talk; the coffee; work.
Colin never mentioned it to anyone else.
To preserve the sense in the lighthouse he was in an apart place outside the cares of the world it felt important he did not.
He never told Pot how awful work was for him – about the fear of what others might to do him and the guilt about what he’d done to others or about how sometimes he’d hardly slept and was nauseous with worry.
But Pot must have picked up more than let on because on the last day Colin visited the lighthouse the goblin tilted his head, frowned and said, “You don’t have to go there. You don’t have to go ever again. I think you’ve forgotten nobody can make you. You could have another coffee and then go home.”
And that day, to everyone’s relief, that was what Colin did.
He never spoke to Pot again, but he was always grateful to him.
For all the rest of the sunny days of his life, whenever he went past the lighthouse, he wondered why it had taken him so long to come to his senses, but was glad he had.