English F

The lighthouse at Kerrow Point had not been lit for forty years, but Nan still walked out to it every evening as though the lamp might one day flare again. I went with her that summer because Mum said the sea air would do me good, and because there was nobody else to go. The path ran along the cliff edge, narrow and chalky, with the gorse snagging at our ankles. Nan walked it without looking down. She had been a keeper's daughter here, before the automatic beacon out on the shoal made the tower useless, and her feet remembered every loose stone. Mine did not. I picked my way behind her, watching the grey water heave itself against the rocks far below. 'They say it's haunted,' I told her, mostly to fill the silence. Nan laughed, a short dry sound like a gull. 'A building can't be haunted by people who were happy in it,' she said. 'Only by the ones who left things unfinished.' She did not explain what she meant, and I did not ask, because by then we had reached the door and she was fishing in her cardigan for the iron key she was not supposed to still have. Inside, the tower smelled of salt and old rope and something sweeter underneath, like the ghost of a flower. We climbed the spiral stair, Nan counting under her breath the way she always did, until we came out at the lamp room. The great lens sat there cold and blind, a thousand glass prisms furred with dust, and for a moment I thought I understood why she came. From up here you could see the whole curve of the coast, the town lights coming on one by one, and far out, the steady blink of the beacon that had made all of this unnecessary. 'I used to think,' Nan said quietly, 'that if I kept the glass clean, somebody might come back and need it.' She ran one finger down a prism, leaving a bright clean line in the grey. 'Forty years I've kept it clean.' I did not say anything. But the next evening, without being asked, I brought a cloth of my own.