Max watched the boy through the telescope for over an hour. Thanks to some collusion between evening sunlight and prisms, the boy’s skin looked like mercury under liquid honey… it poured through the tamarisk shadows, breached the white stone walls, ran up to the top of the lighthouse where it seeped out through the eyepiece and ran, warm, down Max’s chest.
Max had seen the boy slamming the door of a white van parked on the headland, walking away, flinging words over thin shoulders. Hiding until the van drove off in a spit of gravel, a thick-fingered V sign waving out of the window.
Finally, the boy came to the lighthouse.
“Can I use your phone?” he said.
Max leaned against the doorframe. “Sure. Need the phonebook?”
“No. Ringing my step-dad’s mobile, in the caravan.”
He brushed past Max, picked up the phone. “Thanks.” He paused, “You live here?” he said, looking at the cheap wardrobe, the bed against the wall, the open suitcase, paperbacks. The door to the spiral staircase, ajar.
“No. Holiday.”
“You sell books?”
Max smiled. “No. Read them.”
“Huh. You a teacher or something?”
Max stopped smiling.
“I was.”
“Oh, right.” He dialled. Then, “His phone’s off. Nemmind. I’ll walk.” His shoulders relaxed.
Max breathed deeply. “It’s getting dark,” he said.
He could walk down the track behind the boy, past the sign that said, Private. Lighthouse not open to the public, watching the tendons behind the boy’s knees.
The boy hesitated. “You could help me do a project on lighthouses,” he said.
***
The boy stood under the huge Victorian glass prisms which striped his face and shoulders with dying sunlight. He could have been looking in at Max through bars.
He moved. Put one hand up to the telescope. “What do you watch?” he said. Then answered himself. “Birds. I was down there, wasn’t I?”
“Were you?” Max said, remembering the boy’s trainers skittering among the tamarisk roots like dirty white mice.
The boy, on tiptoe, squinted into the eyepiece. “Do you watch those white birds on the cliff? Up on the ledges?”
His eyelashes were dark. There were tiny hairs on his forearms. Every hair had a minute shadow. Max shut his eyes. The boy stayed imprinted on his retina like a sepia photograph, a small striped jungle animal, taut, ready to run.
But he was still talking. “Why don’t those birds fall off those ledges when they are asleep?” A tooth caught on his lip, and the tip of his tongue flicked out, bright with spittle.
Max held on to the mahogany surround that enclosed the prisms like a dark fist.
“Things are what they are,” he said. “Seabirds fly, even in their sleep.”
The boy turned to look at him. “Does this lighthouse still work?”
“It would. All it needs is someone to throw the switch.”
Max looked out at the horizon, a bright smouldering fuse where the sun was soundlessly setting the sea on fire.