Lightbulbs for lighthouses

Father Christmas was coming to town. Always Father Christmas, never Santa Claus, which was an Americanism, commercialism, Dad said.

A sack the shape and size of a big boot: furry black velvet and a fluffy white trim hung limply from the wooden bedpost at the end of Leo’s Spiderman duvet, a nightly reminder the big day was only a few sleeps away. Two, or three more? Days of the week became blurred once school finished for two whole weeks and nights took forever to end. If only he could get to sleep, Christmas Eve would arrive faster. Re-reading The Demon Headmaster hadn’t helped his eyes grow weary tonight.

Most of the tiny square doors on his advent calendar were open, propped up against his Commodore 64 on the school desk in the corner where the wallpaper, sky blue with white seahorses, peeled from the wall. Karate Champ was the first item he’d written on his wish list. He deserved a new computer game for being so well behaved, as much as any nine year old could be, for weeks, months; since after half term when days turned dark not long after school finished for the day and the Christmas countdown began.

Leo pictured the sack bulging on Christmas morning, all sorts of shapes and sizes sticking out: a Rubik’s Cube, a Wordsearch book, a telescope maybe, books and comics for sure, pyjamas to fit his lengthening legs and arms, not like the ones he had on: tiny red Spidermen on white cotton, fading with every wash Mum said, two Spidey face buttons missing from the shirt, exposing his whitish vest. There’d be whiter ones in his sack for sure, a selection box, too: bars of Mars, Bounty, Milky Way, Picnic, and his favourite, a finger of Fudge – all eaten before it was time for a turkey sandwich supper.

Don’t count your chickens, Dad said, whatever that meant. But it wouldn’t be Christmas without getting a lot of chocolate. How easily and quickly something so anticipated – so longed for – could disappear. Leo shivered in anticipation at the days to come; Mum’s final dash to the shops, the local market and Christingle service part of the staple diet in the final hours before Father Christmas ‘showed’ up.

This silent night was shattered when the phone rang downstairs in the hall. Leo sat up in bed. A call at this time meant only one thing. Within two rings Dad started talking, quickly, abruptly, loudly; always Dad, never Mum who answered the night phone.

A minute later the front door banged shut. Tomorrow morning would be almost as exciting as Christmas morning now. The chance to listen eagerly, like he always did, to Dad’s adventure the night before while Mum hurried about the kitchen making breakfast for the guests, Dad saying sorry for any late night disruption. But tomorrow would be different, a chance to enjoy Dad’s company more, for longer, for there would be no guests, not at this time of year, the best thing about Christmas, even better than presents and chocolate – time with Dad. A morning on the seafront searching for fossils to add to his growing collection, afternoons in the park, a drive along the coast, a fishing trip.

Leo rolled on to his side, plumped his pillow, and fell asleep.

He woke to the doorbell echo through the house. On his bedside table, the hands on his clock, a model of Big Ben, the height of his school ruler, bought on his class trip to London that summer, read two minutes shy of midnight. Nobody came to the house this late, phone call or no phone call. Voices downstairs, mumbled, gurgled, like they were under water, reminded him of the teacher from Charlie Brown and Snoopy, who spoke but was never seen. None of the voices were Dad’s. Leo wanted to climb out of bed and creep onto the landing to hear, maybe see, what was happening. But that would get him into trouble and that meant Father Christmas wouldn’t come.

He tried to fall asleep again, but could only think about who was downstairs. And why. He waited for the front door to open and close, for Dad to arrive home. Maybe someone wanted a bed for the night and ignored the ‘No Vacancies’ sign in the window, needed somewhere to stay, like Mary and Joseph in the school nativity Leo sang in, one of the three wise men a week ago.

The phone rang. Nobody called twice at night. Mum answered after just one ring. It would be Dad on the other end, doing his other job. Mum talked the way she did when she was in a hurry, like when she shouted at Imogen to get out of bed, or for him to get his Wellies on faster, to clean his room this minute. It was tidy now. Father Christmas-ready tidy. Mum banged the receiver down so hard the clunk carried all the way up the stairs into his room. Had Immy heard? Little woke her from her room at the back of the house.

Leo closed his eyes and counted sheep jumping a farm fence, like Dad told him to do when he couldn’t sleep. One baa, two baa… he got to twenty-five when the kettle whistled from the kitchen and he lost count. He pictured the steam snaking around the ceiling trying to escape. Why wasn’t the kitchen door shut like normal to avoid waking anyone? And was that the biscuit tin being opened, the clang of the Quality Street box lid, the shape of a fifty-pence piece, from last Christmas? Like stuffing his face with the purple wrapper chocolates again and again, Leo couldn’t resist…

Climbing out of bed, he tip-toed to the door and slid through the gap, narrow enough to ensure his room had enough landing light so it wasn’t totally dark but didn’t keep him awake. Open it any wider and the hinges creaked, then the game would be up. Busted! No visit from Father Christmas. No Karate Champ. No finger of fudge. The soft carpet beneath his bare feet made no sound; only the top stair creaked if he stepped on it.

Leo reached for the top of the banister and peered over as far as possible, to the hallway beneath, lit by fairy lights. Shaped like little lighthouses, Dad said, their twisty green cable hung from the net curtain wire in the front window next to the door, held in place by multi-coloured plastic clothes pegs from the washing line. Three bulbs were broken at Leo’s last count. A new torch might be in this year’s stocking. New batteries couldn’t fix last year’s one after it fell from the tree house that summer.

Leo sat softly on the top stair and tried as hard as he could to listen to what was being said in the kitchen, counting at least three different voices. Two were men’s. Peter Fisher from the butcher’s by the sound of it, one of Dad’s ‘crew’, but the talk was barely a mumble. Leo wanted to wake Immy and tell her what was going on, tell her something she didn’t know for a change, but he’d been banned from going anywhere near her room or she’d tell Mum, and Father Christmas would find out.

Toes turning cold, Leo wanted to fetch his Spiderman slippers, as blue as the sea, with Spidey’s pillar-box red face on each one, a birthday present from Auntie Annie. His favouritest superhero from his favouritest aunt. What would she’d buy him this Christmas…new slippers? He got new school shoes just weeks ago, his feet growing faster than his hair, Mum said. He didn’t move for fear he might miss something important to tell Immy later.

Dad was his real hero, Leo listening eagerly for his key in the door. Dad was a hero to everyone in Littlemeed, the whole crew were. Kids at school said so. Told Luke Fisher too. And Davey Higgins, whose Dad ran the seafood stall on the beachfront, dressed from head to foot in white overalls and black boots as big as the stocking at the end of Leo’s bed. Told Kelly Thomson as well, who Leo once kissed on the cheek in the playground then ran away. Her dad was a lawyer, which sounded like liar, ‘whose pants were on fire’, he’d tell Dad. Four dads who were more important than any others in town. Now Leo thought about it, the other voice sounded like Mr Thomson’s: posh, or ‘expensive’, as Dad would say.

The voices got louder and shadows appeared on the hallway carpet. Leo tried desperately not to make a sound as he stood and hid behind the tall, thin landing lampstand, as high as him.

‘I’ll call you as soon as we hear anything,’ said one man. Posho Thomson?

Mum whimpered.

‘It’ll be OK,’ the same voice said.

The front door opened and closed.

‘I’ll stay with you, Mags,’ said the other man.

He sounded like nobody Leo knew, the voice trailing away as they walked into the front room.

The cold air from opening the door reached Leo on the landing. He shivered and wanted his warm bed, creeping back through the gap in the door, climbing under the duvet and curling up in a ball, like the hamster they had in class.

What would be OK, and why was the man staying with Mum?

Leo tried to keep his eyes open, yawn after yawn, but fell fast asleep.

+

Leo woke next morning and pulled open his stripy curtains: blue, red and white, the colours of the Aquafresh toothpaste, according to Dad, twice-daily reminders when he opened or closed them, to brush his teeth. Drips dribbled down the window, the radiators had been on all night. Why hadn’t Dad turned them off before he went to bed, like he always did? Mini Big Ben read just before a quarter past seven.

He walked to his bedroom chair, pulled on his Scooby-Doo dressing gown, brown and furry like Scooby, and stepped into his slippers. On the landing he peered around the corner of the wall and down the corridor to see if Immy was up, fat chance of that, then went downstairs.

The fairy lights in the window were still on; Dad wouldn’t like that. Why hadn’t he turned them off too? The living room door was shut tight. Leo almost dared not open it, but pulled the handle down slowly, poked his head round, and saw a flurry of activity as Mr Thomson and a man he didn’t know jumped up from the sofa, like a jack-in-the-box. Mum sat on her chair, opposite Dad’s, which was empty. She wasn’t wearing her glasses and was dressed the same as yesterday in a thick pink jumper and navy-blue jeans. Maybe Father Christmas would bring her new clothes too. She hurried to hide her face behind a crumpled white hanky and blew her nose like a foghorn, her eyes bleary like the last time she cried, when she and Dad argued about getting the garden fence fixed.

‘Hello there,’ Mr Thomson said, dressed head to foot in boat clothes. The other man, Leo hadn’t seen him before, wearing an orange bib over a blue uniform, wished Scooby good morning. Mum blew her nose again, a giant swirly M stitched into one corner of her hanky, Immy’s Mother’s Day present. Leo thought it boring, not like the sunflower plant he’d bought with three weeks’ pocket money, shooting up in the garden faster than him, Mum said.

‘Mum?’

She stood.

‘Let me fix you some breakfast, my sweet. Boiled egg and soldiers?’

‘Mum, why are you crying? Where’s Dad? The Christmas lights are on.’

Mr Thomson said something. Mr Fisher looked like he didn’t know what to say, or do. Mum blubbed. She’d run out of clean hanky soon. She ran to the kitchen.

+

Immy squeezed Leo’s hand as they walked down the short flight of steps from their house to the street, his green mitten inside her pink, fingerless glove, patches of black varnish, like blots of ink, on her chewed nails. He protested he was too old to hold hands with anyone, but she told him to be quiet. Mum wasn’t there to complain to, she left a short time ago with Mr Thomson and the other man with the official-sounding name. Mum told them not to leave the house under any circumstances, but Leo didn’t need to be asked twice when Immy said to get his coat on – that they were ‘going to find Dad’.

‘Keep shtum and keep beside me,’ she said. They passed parked cars along the street, frost on the windows, the sun hiding behind the wintry grey sky. Trees looked like they’d been dusted in icing sugar from mum’s mince pies, the pond at the end of the street frozen over.

Around the corner, on to the pier road, the fish ’n’ chip shop, fishing store and Chinese takeaway were shut, just a few hundred feet from Dad’s other work, though it was hard to see that far in the fog. Not even the lighthouse was visible. Seagulls squawked above, flying over a small trawler chugging into view, making its way through the grey along the inlet, creating waves that made a light lapping sound against the pebbled shore. Leo’s bones shivered in the cold sea breeze, spray sprinkling his face.

The pair made their way down the cobbled street in front of houses not even the Thomsons had enough money to live in, with the best view of the sea in Littlemeed, Dad said. Not today, the sea and sky seemed almost one; Leo had never seen fog this thick before. He wished he’d fastened the top button of his Paddington Bear duffle coat, but there was no time, Immy walked faster than his legs could keep up with.

Littlemeed Lifeboat Station, tucked into the corner of town where the sea started and ended, not far from where the railway line began and finished, wasn’t like normal. The metal shutter was up and the orange nose of the life raft stuck out from the shed, surrounded by people. Leo felt instantly warmer about the thought of seeing Dad, drinking a mug of hot tea, cleaning the boat, or doing a safety check.

Immy squeezed Leo’s hand tighter as they got closer to where the ramp outside the station stretched from the street down to the sea: steep, like the one on his model racetrack Dad helped build, only longer and wider. Leo watched in excitement whenever he was allowed to see Dad zoom down the ramp at zip-wire speed, crashing and splashing into the water, only ever in rehearsal. He never saw the boat come back. And yet it must do, because Dad always came back from the sea.

‘Quick, hide,’ Immy whispered.

The seagulls squawked louder.

‘Why?’

‘So nobody sees us, dummy.’

They ducked behind the stone wall of the end house, not far from the station. Leo could just about see over as the trawler stopped and people in the shed ran about in anticipation. The captain, wearing a bright red lifejacket, threw a rope to someone on the shore. Peter Fisher was among the men helping. So, too, Davey Higgins’s Dad. And there was Mum! Walking from the shed. She stopped, her arm wrapped inside Mr Thomson’s, no longer using her hanky to stem the tide of tears that flowed freely down her face.

‘I can’t see Dad,’ Leo said.

Immy shuddered so hard it went up Leo's arm, making him shake too. She squeezed his hand so hard he yelped. Immy let go, raising her hand to her mouth, the other one to cover Leo’s eyes.

He pushed it away but she pulled him closer, standing in front of him to block his view. Wriggling free he stood on tiptoes, jumping up to see the activity on and around the boat.

Nobody spoke, the seagulls didn’t squawk, men in thick clothing and orange overcoats struggled with a bag, three times as big as the sack at the end of Leo’s bed. It was black, too, and lumpy bits stuck out in the way he hoped his Christmas sack would. There must have been ten men to collect it, like it was a net full of fish. They lifted it high on their shoulders and carried it towards the shed, carefully, slowly, silently, reminding Leo of when the men in black suits and black ties lifted Grandpa Bert, in the long brown box he went to sleep in and never woke up from.