Free The Keeper by Marguerite Poland Page A

sky.
    For Hannes the light was not to be challenged and rebelled against and cursed, as it was for Fred. It was a deep and comforting presence, protection from the wind, the storms, the crying birds. On one of its landings was a built-in cupboard curved to its inner wall. He would creep in there where Fred couldn’t find him, tuck his mother’s old shawl around him and lie down in the dark until he slept.
    Unlike Fred, who never spoke of home when he was at school – as if the fact of being a keeper’s son was suddenly shameful – Hannes longed for the island, a deep homesickness. He longed to crouch against the wall and feel the heartbeat of the light thrumming in his blood; to crawl into the cupboard on the landing or to eat a hard-boiled penguin egg and a piece of biscuit – a little feast, like his mother used to make for him with her careful fingers. When hecurled in the cupboard he was close to her. The wind coming up the stairwell was the flare of her skirt as she ascended the steps.
    The light was not the she-devil and bewitcher.
    The light was his mother.
    If Hannes did not know how his mother died, Fred did. When he was seventeen and had come home for the holidays, he often went fishing alone out towards the reefs, using the rowing boat, taking it sometimes without permission when their father was asleep and the assistant was on duty.
    When the tide was low he might go towards Black Rock or Seal Island, where the channels were shallower and reef fish shoaled. He liked to look at the seals on the rock, hear their bark despite the stench of dung, see them power down into the water and dive, surface, float, turn, watch him, almost human in their curiosity.
    Venturing out one day, he had come across the headman and a guano worker on the far side of an island. They were killing baby seals with a hook, heavily pronged and vengeful. The butt was used to bludgeon and stun, the prongs to kill, precisely skewering the underbelly. Fred heard the thump as each small body was tossed into the bottom of the boat that swung on its painter in the swell. The barks and calls of the adult seals, the disturbance of the water, the savage distress of mothers – all were deadened by the surge of the tide, obscured by the rock.
    Fred rested his oars, slowing, unsure of what to do. Sealing was forbidden to the guano workers – but his being out in the boat alone was forbidden too. If he reported the headman to his father, his father would know what he had done. The boat drifted on the tide. Fred glanced towards the rock again and saw the headman turn and gaze towards him, the great hook in his hand.
    Fred retreated, sliding his boat backwards out of view, and headed for the shore.
    He fished from the jetty instead, waiting. He saw the boat with the headman and the worker cross a silver sea as the late-afternoon sun lanced down towards the west, a black-plumed cormorant winging swift and low against a seam of surf. The boat made for an inlet further to the west, round the headland, away from the jetty, away from the light. When at last it came back, only the headman was pulling at the oars.
    He tied up the boat, hoisted himself on to the jetty – a large man, grizzled as a walrus, his hat dragged low on his head. He carried nothing, walked deliberately. Fred looked up from where he sat, line in the water, two elf lying at his side, shining dully.
    The headman said, ‘You speak of this and I will tell the world why your mother died.’
    ‘My mother?’ Fred’s heart began to thud, as if his blood were drawn up from his limbs, leaving them limp. ‘What are you talking about?’
    ‘Go and read in the Bible about the sins of the fathers.’
    And he went, looming up against the sky, leaving the smell of seal blood behind him.
    Fred watched him go, his fish forgotten, while the gannets, line on line, screamed their homecoming, plummeting down to nest.
    Fred found his father in the lantern room. He pulled himself through the hatch on to