Darkhouse. Alex Barclay

cake was a nightmare,’ she said. ‘Your father hovering over me the whole time, making sure it was anatomically correct.’

      ‘That cake was awesome,’ said Shaun. ‘But I’ll go with the GI shot. Cute, but politically incorrect. Like me. The secret bug life might be a bit much.’

      ‘What’s it for?’ asked Anna.

      ‘Our school website,’ said Shaun. ‘St Declan’s is actually getting a site. We have this computer teacher, Mr Russell, who was in some massive software firm in the nineties, but burnt out and went into teaching. Anyway, he’s cool. He wants every kid in fifth year to have something posted on the site with a biography. So we all have to bring in photos, kind of like before and afters. From geek to chic.’

      Anna laughed. ‘Well, there’s nothing geeky about my little clean-cut army boy,’ she said, looking at the photo. ‘Maybe you could be the chic to geek guy,’ she said, eyeing his jeans.

      ‘Mom, you don’t know the meaning of geek.’

      ‘Well, what is it, then? Boys in sloppy jeans with shirts down to their knees?’

      ‘No. That’s someone cool. A geek is a nerd. Think of Dad.’

      She hit him with her diary. Joe laughed. Shaun finished his breakfast, grabbed his school bag and ran.

      ‘See you at the show tonight,’ he called, and the door slammed behind him.

      Anna turned to Joe and pointed at him. ‘Call your father.’

      ‘OK, I’ll call my fazzer,’ he said. Her English was almost perfect, but ‘ths’ still got the better of her. She gave him a look.

      ‘You’re so exotic, Annabel,’ he said, lingering on the ‘1’. She gave him another look.

      Sam Tallon stood in the service room on the second level of the lighthouse, shaking his head. He was a short man with a doughy chubbiness.

      ‘My God, this brings back memories,’ he said. ‘The keeper would be sitting at this desk, filling out his reports …’ He stopped and pointed. ‘You’ll have to get a scraper to the paint on the treads of that ladder.’ Sam was Anna’s restoration expert, a former engineer with the Commissioners of Irish Lights. He was sixty-eight years old and she had just made him walk up a narrow spiral staircase.

      ‘Right,’ he said and grabbed on, heaving himself up the rungs of a second ladder, then pushing through a cast-iron trap door into the lantern house. His laugh echoed down to her. When she climbed up, he let out a whistle.

      ‘You’ve got a job on your hands here.’

      ‘I thought so,’ said Anna, looking around at the cracked, rusty walls.

      ‘You’ll have to strip that right back,’ said Sam. ‘There’s layers and layers of enamel there. It’ll be rock hard.’

      At the centre of the room was a pedestal holding a vat of mercury that supported the five-ton weight of the lighthouse lens. Only its base could be seen from the lantern house – most of it filled the gallery above. Sam checked the gauge at the side of the vat.

      ‘Well, the mercury level has dropped a small bit. So the rollers underneath the lens are probably taking a little more weight than they’re supposed to. But it’s not a big problem, especially if the light’s not going to be on all the time.’

      ‘I’m just hoping I’ll be able to light it at all.’

      ‘Ah, you should be fine,’ said Sam. ‘I’d say they’ll make you agree to light it only at a certain time and to have the beam travel inland.’

      Anna held her breath as Sam studied the base of the lens, checking the clockwork mechanism that rotated it.

      ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Sam eventually. ‘I think it’s all right. After nearly forty years. We’ll need to get the weights moving, but I think you’re in luck.’

      ‘Thank God,’ said Anna.

      ‘A mantle, like the wick of a candle, burns inside that,’ he said, back to the lens. ‘If you didn’t have a mantle, there’d be no light. And it’s only a little silk thing you could fit in your pocket.’ He chuckled. ‘Anyway, the prisms in the lens refract the light, the lens rotates and there you have your lovely lighthouse beam.’ Sam climbed the ladder inside the lens, breaking cobwebs as he went.

      ‘It’s filthy,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to get at this later, probably after you strip the walls. And you’ll need to get your hands on some new mantles, by the way – 55mm.’

      They moved back down through the lighthouse and out through the old doors.

      ‘You’ll need to replace them too,’ said Sam.

      ‘They’re on their way,’ said Anna. He was impressed.

      ‘Now, what I’ll do,’ said Sam, ‘is clean the rollers and check the pressure in the kerosene pumps. I’ll leave you to clean the lens and the brass.’ He smiled.

      ‘OK,’ said Anna.

      ‘Then we can give it a run-through, see if it’s all still in working order,’ said Sam.

      ‘Maybe not right away,’ she said. ‘I’ll let you know when’s a good time.’

      ‘No problem at all.’

      The last ripples of conversation died and the audience turned to the stage. Haunting music filled the room. Katie Lawson stepped forward and began to sing. Shaun smiled. Here was his beautiful girlfriend, stunning the audience into silence with the sweetest voice he’d ever heard. She had changed his life. He had come to Ireland reluctantly, miserably, desperately missing baseball, cable, twenty-four-hour everything. And then came Katie. On the first day in his new school, she was all he saw. She was bent forward on her desk, slapping it with her fist, bursting with her contagious, singsong laugh. Then she sat back, pushing her dark hair off her face and wiping tears from her eyes. Shaun’s heart flipped as he walked towards her. She had the cutest smile and it lit up her whole face. She was all natural: glowing skin, fresh cheeks, sparkling brown eyes. Once they locked onto his, he was gone.

      Katie left the stage to sit beside him, her head bowed, embarrassed by the applause.

      ‘Wow,’ Shaun whispered to her. ‘You were amazing. You blew everyone away.’

      Katie blushed. ‘No, I didn’t,’ she said, shaking her head.

      ‘Shut up,’ said Shaun. ‘You rocked.’

      Ali Danaher, Katie’s best friend, came next, with a poem she had written herself. Shaun was smiling before she even started because he knew it would be black and heavy, like her clothes and her eye shadow. Ali had dry bottle-blond hair and if she pulled her sleeves up too high, skinny razor marks on her arms – for effect. She never admitted she came from a happy comfortable home, because her art would suffer. She finished the poem solemnly:

      ‘… rotten core

      Seeping through, finally breaking the ivory surface

      A tarnished history

      No longer hidden, too late to hide.’

      Shaun and Katie cheered over the parents’ polite applause. Ed Danaher rolled his eyes at his wife, but was the last one to stop clapping.

      When it was over, Shaun took Katie’s hand and guided her through the hall.

      Joe kissed Anna goodbye and left with Ed for Danaher’s. She turned away, still smiling, and saw Petey Grant, the school caretaker, loping towards her. Petey had sallow skin and dark brown hair cut tight before it started to curl. Under thick eyebrows, his almond-shaped eyes were a soft blue and rarely made contact with anyone else’s. When he spoke, he leaned to one side, holding his big hands in front of him, moving his slender fingers in and out as if he was about to catch or pass a basketball.

      ‘Hello,