Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery (33 page)

Polly made up what she reasonably could for the next day, knowing on some level that she had to tell Huckle about the bullying, but not wanting to use emotional blackmail to bring him home, especially given what Clemmie was going through. She sighed. How could someone hate her that much? It was a horrible feeling.

She sat in front of the lighthouse window. The clouds really were the oddest colour, a kind of heavy mustard, with a purplish tint. It was an ugly colour, like something you’d see in the picture of an alien land, and it made Polly very uneasy. The sun did still burst through the clouds though, and the pleasure boats were all still bobbing about. The fishing boats on the other hand were safely moored to the side. Archie would get a good night’s sleep tonight.

She dozed off in the chair into an odd dream of Tarnie swimming in the water; he kept surfacing and calling for Selina, but only Polly was there to hear him. She found herself telling him, no, it’s not me you want, it’s not me, but he couldn’t hear her, just kept reaching out his long brown arms; his hair, longer now, entwined with seaweed; his blue eyes beseeching her, telling her he was confused between the deep and the world; begging her to hear him. She could not hear him. And then he SHOUTED!

 

 

She jumped up, startled, as the second gigantic clap of thunder rattled the lighthouse doors; the noise was extraordinary. It must be very close, the storm. Just as she was thinking this, a huge bolt of lightning shot across the sky in front of her eyes, illuminating the purple sea. The clouds were racing now, faster and faster; it was not yet night-time, but it was as dark as night. The waves were moving in jagged, fearsome points, this way and that, the dips between them growing deeper and deeper. Somewhere in the lighthouse there was another huge bang. She jumped in alarm – she had left one of the windows open (she always did, in case Neil came home, even if it did occasionally soak her bathroom floor) – and started downstairs, slightly anxious, with the strange clammy foreboding that comes from waking from a deep sleep and a bad dream, to close it.

As she did so, there was another bolt of lightning, an extraordinary clap of thunder, and all the lights in the lighthouse went out.

 

 

Trapped in the dark of the circular stairway, Polly swore and hung close to the wall till she could feel her way down. Sure enough, it was the downstairs bathroom window that was open. She moved over carefully, shut the window and peered out.

This side of the lighthouse looked towards the town. But now there was no town to see: all the electricity had been knocked out. Thank God the lighthouse lamp had its own separate back-up generator that kept its beam rolling around the darkened rock of Mount Polbearne.

The little cottages looked like they were huddling together, turning their eyes away from the onslaught of the storm, trying desperately to escape attention. The cracking noise in the sky was ear-splitting. From the window Polly saw the rain fling itself furiously against the rocks – then realised it was no longer rain, but great big hailstones, sweeping in and hurling themselves crazily against anything they could find.

‘Oh lord,’ said Polly out loud, suddenly frightened. She heard, somewhere, the tinkle of glass – was it upstairs? Had a particularly large hailstone hit a window somewhere? There was another tinkle, and another. Polly suddenly found herself gulping a little, fearful. She wished more than ever that someone else was here; she desperately missed Huckle’s large, comforting presence.

She found herself worrying about old Mrs Brodie and Mrs Carter up in those badly insulated cottages right at the very top of the town. Mind you, they and their families had been living through storms without electricity for generations, she supposed. It was unlikely this would bother them much; they’d probably be miles better off than she was, living ludicrously exposed like this. For a start they wouldn’t be crashing around trying to find the last remnants of those tea lights Huckle had lit for her the night he’d built the bath. She managed to find a long book of matches and light a couple of candles. It was reassuring to have some illumination, however feeble, until she caught sight of a terrifying witchy apparition appearing out of nowhere in the cloudy bathroom mirror, and screamed, the sound vanishing into the howling wind, crashing hail and another clap of thunder.

Bollocks, said Polly to herself. Bollocks bollocks bollocks. She realised she was shaking, and tried telling herself not to be so silly. It was a storm. She lived on a rocky outcrop in the middle of the sea. Storms were in essence what happened.

She was suddenly so grateful for Archie’s caution and wisdom. If the fleet had been out on the waves tonight, it would have been unbearable for everyone. Thank God they were all safe.

Sleep, though – as the lighthouse creaked, the tower pushing this way and that in the wind – would surely be impossible.

Some nights Polly could sleep through a storm if she was tired enough; she would feel warm and cosy in her bed, safe under the blankets. But tonight was nothing like that at all. This was torn from a different world, and she felt for her funny old home, worrying about the harbour wall and the old church at the top of the island losing chunks here and there, falling further into disrepair. It was a struggle to persuade the local council to come and empty the bins, never mind invest in a crumbling infrastructure that was falling into the sea slowly but surely, and the storm would only make things worse.

She took a candle and carefully inched her way up the stairs to the sitting room, where she could see more from the window and had less chance of being literally scared by her own reflection. Even so, her shadow advancing up the tall stairwell walls was like something from a children’s story.

‘That’s it,’ she grumbled. ‘I am definitely getting a dog.’

Once at the sitting room window, up high, she picked up her mobile, but of course there was nothing, and the ancient old landline phone that had been left behind when they moved in, with its big old buttons, wasn’t working either.

Had she not been so frightened, the sight from the windows would have been oddly thrilling. Under the ripping sky, there were tiny pinpoints of light here and there, scattered about on the island: candles in windows; one or two bobbing up against the wind, obviously people going to check on their neighbours; here and there a brighter torch. It was, bar the sweep of the lighthouse every twenty seconds, very much how it must have been a hundred years ago, thought Polly. Two hundred. More.

She gazed out, the noise still crashing in her ears even though the sitting room windows were closed, hypnotised, entranced by the sense of looking back into a dark world where the only light was fire, where you were indeed an island, reliant on everyone around you to get by: not the council, not the government, not ASOS or the Looe supermarket. That this was all there was, all of them in it together.

She glanced at the boats in the harbour; although kept apart by tyres to stop them bumping into each other too aggressively, they were still jostling. The waves were shooting high above the harbour walls. She remembered how some nights the water would hit the windows of the flat. This was definitely one of those nights: the tide was as high as any she could remember. It was beyond wild: not a night to be out in, not at all.

She stared at the tiny candlelit village: occasionally a shadow passing here and there; a dark figure, moving quickly. Nobody was asleep tonight. She thought of all the people of Polbearne past, their names repeated so often in the graveyard above the town: the Brodies, the Tarnsforths, the Manses: all the lives – hard, dangerous lives, when things were tougher than they were now – that had gone on here, in unheated homes, dependent on a good wind and a good catch, or worse, bounty washed up from the sea.

It was this that made her love Mount Polbearne: the sense that its beauty was borrowed, temporary; that it had a hard edge too: the work and the pain that underpinned what it had always taken to live here. It had never been a home for the rich.

Until now, she supposed, with the weekenders and their second homes, and their nice fish restaurant and their loud, unabashed voices. But really, Mount Polbearne belonged to its people, the people who’d been raised here and had families here, and who had stayed through the bad times and the good.

Polly was lost in her reverie when she slowly began to realise something, then jumped up in horror. The town was dark, the world was dark; only the flashing of the lightning forking the sky illuminated them. The lighthouse had gone out.

‘What if the lighthouse goes out?’ she had asked her solicitor, who was, she remembered, the absolute cheapest one they could find at the time. He had looked a bit uncomfortable and said, ‘Well, you ring the coastguard,’ and Huckle had sniggered and said, ‘Polly, just take a really big torch up there and whizz round and round,’ and Polly had said, ‘That’s not very funny, it could be dangerous,’ and Lance, the young estate agent, had said he couldn’t remember ever hearing of the lighthouse going out, and then he had paused and said, well, you know, except in the daytime, obviously, and Huckle had giggled again and Polly had accused him of not taking this seriously and he had given her a big kiss on the cheek and said, ‘May I remind you, madam, that you are the one buying a four-storey house with one room per floor and a big electric hat, which is just about the least serious thing I have ever heard of,’ and the solicitor had rather peevishly looked at his watch and said, ‘Is this bird normally allowed to walk over important paperwork?’ and that had kind of been the end of that conversation.

There had been a storm before. A terrible storm that had rocked Mount Polbearne, that had destroyed half of its fishing fleet and taken one of its best men. They were only just recovering. That storm, Polly had slept through; had not realised what was happening; how serious and awful things could be.

This time, she did. And this time, she was right at the heart of it.

Now Polly deeply regretted her glibness and foolishness; she had to call the coastguard, but all the lines were down and all the mobile phones knocked out. This was a freak storm – it had come from nowhere – but the fact remained that she didn’t have any way of getting in touch with someone who could make things better.

Surely they’d notice, she thought. Surely people would notice there was no lighthouse. They’d send someone straight away. It would be obvious.

Although how would they get here? The causeway was of course completely impassable, and how on earth you’d launch a boat in this… Nobody would, she thought, apart from the RNLI. Nobody would ever be out in a boat in this, it would be completely crazy.

She pulled a blanket around her shoulders, for the night was very chilly, and went back down to the bathroom.

 

 

Thank God for
IKEA
, Polly thought. It was… well, it was unutterably useless, but it was better than nothing. Okay, better than absolutely nothing. She had eighty-five tea lights, more or less. She gathered them up in a pillowcase and took them upstairs, all the way to the very top, to the door that led to the outside of the lighthouse.

So. The mains electricity had failed, and the back-up generator too. This was the full extent of her technical knowledge on the subject. Huckle would have known what to do. He would have kick-started it like his bloody motorbike, it would be easy for him. But she didn’t have a clue.

And thank God, she’d forgotten, but here it was: a vast old torch, hanging off the nail next to the key. She checked: it worked fine. She breathed a huge sigh of relief, then, with some trepidation, unlocked the door leading on to the walkway steps.

At first, she thought she hadn’t managed to unlock the door at all, that it was jammed: the wind was pressed against it so hard, she couldn’t open it. The storm showed absolutely no signs of subsiding. The hail had stopped, but in its place was a heavy, solid rain that drenched her as soon as she managed to finally force the door open. It banged hard against the metal stairwell, and she took a step out, carefully, on to the walkway.

The breath was stolen from her lungs; she couldn’t breathe. The water poured down on her. The lightning crackled and buzzed all the way across the sky, now on this side, now the other, racking up the pounding waves. The thunder felt as if it was directly above her head, as if someone was throwing wardrobes across the sky. She clung to the metal balustrade, convinced that at any moment she would slip and tumble down, down down the side of the lighthouse and land in a crumpled heap at the bottom. Perhaps, she thought, they would bury her in Nan the Van. She choked back a sob and tried to stop her hands from shaking, but she was utterly frozen with nerves. It took every ounce of grit and courage she had not to turn and step back into the shelter of the lighthouse and close the door, and nobody would have blamed her if she’d done exactly that.

But she did not. Whimpering just a little, in a voice that couldn’t be heard at all above the storm, she inched forward, tiny bit by tiny bit, to put her hands on the opposite balustrade. The old iron wobbled precariously in the wind, so that she thought she was going to catapult straight over the fragile guard rail. She thought, ruefully, of sunnier times, when they had run lithely up and down these stairs as if it were nothing at all. If she got out of this, she told herself, she was going to move to a bungalow. In a desert.

She set one foot on the ladder, then the other. I can do this, she told herself. I can do this. But that was before she put her head above the bulk of the building, into the little gap between the lighthouse tower and the metal scaffold of the light itself, sitting in its own cage high, high up in the air. At once, the wind smacked her in the face; it was as if it was deliberately trying to take her head off. She was utterly blinded by the rain, which fell straight into her open mouth until she was gasping. Her hair was plastered to her head; her clothes were soaked through.

Truthfully Polly couldn’t quite remember how she made it: not just the last few steps on the ladder, but the perilous, slippery walkway round to the lighthouse casing door. Grabbing the balustrades with both hands, she pushed herself on, one foot in front of the other. At one point she nearly lost her footing. Her ankle went under and she howled and swore at the pain, hopping up again, her heart in full panic mode. The torch was swinging from her mouth, her teeth clenched on the end of it, as she could not hold it and balance at the same time. It took everything she had to slowly push herself forward again one more time, and onwards.

Finally she reached the plain door at the back of the lighthouse. She had to fumble for the key in the howling wind, trying with all her might not to let go of the torch, sobbing a little from the pain in her ankle, and terrified that she would drop the key through the grating and it would tumble down the lighthouse, lost.

Eventually she managed to still her trembling hands long enough to turn the key. She fell into the lamp room, her heart pounding, and forced the door shut behind her. And then, although it was still loud outside, it felt in that darkened room that everything was still. The roaring in Polly’s ears abated to manageable levels. A couple of the smaller panes on the underside of the lighthouse construction had shattered, but the main casing was thick and intact.

But outside, oh lord, what a sight. There were no birds in the air, certainly no moon or stars, just a great boiling vat of clouds and angry water, hurtling through the sky, through the sea, until there was barely any difference between the two. And the noise, oh, the noise was unbearable even inside, because it spoke of fear, and the very real knowledge of what a storm could do to people who didn’t live soft and comfortable on the mainland.

Polly let her pillowcase full of tea lights drop, and turned on her torch, shining the light around the heavy machinery, noting the great bulb no longer rotating in its winch. She found a fuse box, but looking in it couldn’t see anything that might help, even when she flicked the switches up and down. Anyway, the entire region’s power was out, and this didn’t charge the secondary generator, so it was useless anyway.

She swallowed hard and went towards the box that said ‘Generator’ on it. She had never opened it before – legally speaking, this wasn’t even her property; it belonged to Trinity House, and she had simply signed over access rights in return for owning the space. She didn’t have the faintest clue what to do; she only knew that this was an incredibly rare occurrence.

Sure enough, once she’d found the Allen key that unlocked the panel, she found herself staring at a mass of electrical wiring. There was nothing here she could manage at all. She swore at the panel, which didn’t help, but bending down, she did notice something against the wall: a huge, old-fashioned square fog lantern with a large battery inside it.

With trembling fingers she reached out and switched it on, and to her massive relief, it shone out: shone out so strongly, in fact, that it blinded her completely and she had to jump back.

As soon as her eyelids stopped dazzling, she moved forward again to pick it up carefully from behind. Then, pulling her damp blanket a little closer around her shoulders – it was freezing up in the big light tower without the main light on – she moved towards the window and shone the big beam out into the night.

It wasn’t much; it hardly penetrated more than twenty metres into the howling dark. But it wasn’t about what
she
could see, Polly reasoned. It was about, hopefully, allowing other people to see the lighthouse. Not that anyone could possibly be out there, could they? Not at sea. They
could
n’t
be. She toyed with the idea of walking around the room to give the illusion of the light moving, but decided this wasn’t necessarily helpful, and she had absolutely no idea how long the battery would last, and how long it would take the emergency services to get here. So instead she stood and shone it out of the window, as close as she could get to the sea. Mount Polbearne was hardly visible from up here, nothing more than ghostly wisps of light through the hazy tumbling rain. Come on, thought Polly. Come on, storm. Blow yourself out. Move on to a place where people will just lose a couple of roof tiles.

There was a sudden screeching noise behind her. Polly jumped up in the air.

‘Christ,’ she said, as it came again: a kind of feedbacky noise. She turned her head to see what the hell had made it. Somewhere on the other side of the room a red light was blinking. She headed towards it. The noise went off again.

Frowning, Polly put the big lamp down on a stool by the window and turned towards the dark room to investigate.

She saw as she came closer that it was a walkie-talkie, and her heart leapt. The outside world! Thank God!

She picked it up and fiddled with various buttons. It had obviously been plugged in and was charged.

‘Polly? Polly? Over. Polly? Polly? Over,’ came a distorted voice.

She pressed the answer button.

‘Jayden, is that you?’

There was a long pause.

‘Jayden?’

‘No.’ The voice was recognisable now. It was Selina.

‘Hey,’ said Polly. She had forgotten about Selina’s strange behaviour from earlier. ‘Are the boys there?’

‘No,’ said Selina again. And indeed, there were fewer lights out in the streets. ‘They’ve all gone over to the beach. The RNLI picked them up and they launched from there. All down the coast it’s ruinous, apparently. Mount Polbearne is the only place the boats stayed beached.’

‘Because we know,’ said Polly, pounding her fist on the old desk unit. ‘Oh God. We know.’

She took a deep breath.

‘Can you see me?’ she said.

‘Only a glimmer,’ said Selina. ‘I’m upstairs, though. If I was down at boat level… well, I don’t know. Is that all the light you have?’

‘No,’ said Polly patiently. ‘Actually the light is working, I just thought it would be funnier to leave it off.’

‘What was it like getting up there?’ said Selina.

‘Grim,’ said Polly.

There was a pause.

‘All the men out there again,’ said Polly quietly, as they both thought of another storm.

‘Archie said there were holidaymakers out there. People fiddling about in boats.’

Polly instantly remembered how beautiful the afternoon had been: all those jolly sails bobbing their way to the horizon.

‘Oh my God,’ she said. And she peered out, trying desperately to see through the maelstrom, tilting the light down to try and break through. The storm would pass, it would soon be over, and everything would be all right. All she had to do was keep tilting the light down.