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She pulls at me like the sea. That’s how I know when there will be a storm.’
    I was thinking of Captain Scott, lying in his snowy ocean waste, the white moon on his face, and if he dreamed of being there – a place as cold as this, as remote, as beautiful, as unlikely.
    Not earth-bound any more, he could wing the dogs in a wind-ruff of fur, husky-haloed through two miles or so of gravity, then out, free, barking at the moon, half-wolf, half-tame, going home to the white planet he had seen shining in their orange eyes, paws hock-deep in snow.
    No one knows what happens at the end of the journey. No one knows where the dead go.
    Pew and I had gone inside, and we were sitting side by side as we always did, staring straight ahead, as we always did. The electricity had long since been disconnected. You might think it a grave of a place, but not Pew.
    ‘Every table was full,’ said Pew, ‘and the men were three-deep at the bar.
    ‘Some nights, Dark himself would come in, and the men made room for him to sit alone, where we sit now, and then the talk would dry up like a harbour at low tide, although Dark looked at no man and spoke to no man.
    ‘He brought his Bible with him, and it was always his own story he read – not that you would know it, being so poorly brought up – but the story he read was of the first Tower of Babel in the book of Genesis.
    ‘That tower was built as high as the moon, so that the people who built it could climb up and be like God. When it came shattering down, the people were scattered to the ends of the earth, and they no more understood each other’s language than they understood the language of fishes and birds.
    ‘I said to him one day, “Why do you read that story, Minister?” He said to me, “Pew, I have become a stranger in my own life.”’
    ‘Did he say that, Pew?’
    ‘He did, child, certain as you and I sit here tonight.’
    ‘You weren’t born then.’
    ‘Was I not?’
    ‘And you couldn’t see his Bible because you are blind.’
    Logic never had any effect on Pew.
    ‘A stranger in his own life, he said, and the fire blazing up, and the men with their backs to him like a sea wall, and a mist outside the place, a mist thick as doubt, and the moon hidden, for all that she was full. He loved the moon, did Babel Dark. My barren rock, he called her, and said sometimes that he would be happy there, pale tenant of the sun.’
    ‘Did he say that?’
    ‘Pale tenant of the sun. I never forgot.’
    ‘How old are you, Pew?’
    Pew said nothing. Drank up his rum and said nothing. Then we carefully washed that one remaining glass under the one remaining cold tap, put the glass back on the one remaining woodworm-eaten shelf, and left it there, gleaming in the moonlight that shone through the window, before we walked slowly down the cinder-track to the lighthouse.

The door was his body.
    Dark woke out of his sleeping nightmare and into his waking nightmare.
    He had dreamed of a door closing and closing.
    He woke, his hand on his stomach, his fingers aware of the tip of his erection. He moved his hand outside of the sheets.
    It was early. He could hear someone downstairs cleaning out a fire-grate.
    He let his mind drift out to sea, imagining Molly lying next to him. In Bristol, he had always woken first; he had trained himself to wake first, so that he could have the first moment of the day looking at her as she slept. He liked to draw his hand out from under the warm sheet, and into the cold air of the bedroom. Then he would hover his hand over the outline of her face, never touching her, but sensing with wonder, always with wonder, how his hand in the cold air could feelthe warmth coming off her face.
    Sometimes she opened her mouth to breathe, and he felt the breath of her on him, the way Adam must have felt God breathing first life into his sleeping body.
    But she was the one who slept. In the little death, he bent to kiss her and wake her, waking her with a kiss, so that her