The Lightkeeper's Daughter by Iain Lawrence Page B

teeth together, “the point, Hannah, is that you shouldn’t have told them what you did.”
    “They have to know,” she said.
    “But not yet. They’re not old enough.”
    “Oh, Murray, they’re nearly grown up,” she said.
    He couldn’t see it himself, but they were far beyond their years. They were adults really, in children’s bodies, and what wonder was that with only adults for models? Only once had they seen a child, when a technician came in late July to work on the radio beacon and brought his son along for the flight, on a gray and overcast day.
    The boy’s name was Todd. He was six, just a year less than Squid. He came out of the helicopter holding his father’s hand.
    “Look at that!” cried Alastair. “There’s a baby on the chopper!”
    The technician was tall and thin, big-headed, dressed in green oilskins with a yellow rain hat. He looked like a daffodil as he swayed and nodded toward them, the boy’s fist in one hand, an enormous case in the other. He bent himself double to talk to his son. “Daddy has to work,” he said. “Why don’t you go play with the kids?”
    Kids! How she bristled at the sound of that. “Kids are goats,” Murray had told her, years before, and she had never used the word again.
    “Go play with the kids,” the technician said. And Squid looked up at him.
    “Actually,” she said, “we wanted to watch you work on the transmitter.” And Alastair asked, “Have you got an oscilloscope in there?”
    Hannah intervened. “Todd is your guest,” she said. “Show him around the station. Maybe he’d like to see the tower.”
    “Now there’s an idea,” the technician said. He grinned at his boy. “Would you like to see a lighthouse, Todd?”
    “I’ll show him how I dangle from the top,” said Squid.
    Hannah grimaced. “Oh, no you won’t.”
    The three of them went off, poor Todd glancing back. He looked like an explorer being led away by cannibals, and she didn’t see them for nearly four hours, until the helicopter was due to leave. Then only Alastair and Todd came out from the forest, covered with burrs, coated with mud from their feet to their knees, from their hands to their elbows. Their faces were smeared with black.
    “Where’s Squid?” asked Hannah.
    “She’s coming,” said Alastair.
    “We went digging in the mizzens,” said Todd. “I found a bit of bone that’s a thousand years old!” He held it up, a tiny shard. “It’s part of a skeleton, see?”
    Squid came a hundred yards behind them, muttering to herself, slashing at the grass with a crooked stick. She didn’t realize she’d caught up to the others until she was right among them. Then she looked up, startled. She flung the stick away and, crossing her arms, sat down on the lawn.
    It was time for Todd to go. He went with his father, babbling all the way. “There’s mizzens all over the island,” he said.
    “Middens!” shouted Squid. “They’re
middens,
you stupid nut.”
    Hannah laughs now. She wonders what stories the technicians took away to tell to their city wives in their city houses. Did they tell them about children who chattered like adults? About Murray and his strange, rumpled ways, his set of ideas that he ranted about? “Have you had any burglaries?” he would always ask. “Any muggings this morning?” He was obsessed with crime in the city, though “the city” was only little Prince Rupert, with fewer than twelve thousand people. And what did they say, those technicians, about Hannah herself? Did they think
she
was odd? She liked long, heavy dresses, and scarves that blew in the wind like the pennants of ships. On a breezy day a sound went with her, a thrumming of cloth, a tramping of Murray-sized boots.
    She’s standing by the fridge, the door open and all the eggs in their cups, when Murray comes back to the kitchen with his shoes in his hand.
    “Tatiana’s only three,” she tells him.
    “What?” asks Murray.
    “There’s nothing wrong with Tat.