141 lighthouse keeper au…walk with me through this one
you’d stumbled upon a tiktok about the scottish highlands. vast, open, windy, cold. grey and bleak and empty. rolling hills and crashing waves. tiny cottages scattered like snow before it gets chance to lay proper. it’s perfect.
you’ve been needing an escape for a while, somewhere to run off to and live out your sense and sensibility, pride and prejudice (2005) keira knightley fantasy. cooped up in a stone and mortar cottage on a storm beaten cliff and just exist. wander on the vast moors and skim stones across unsettled waters. light a fire in the huge stone hearth and curl up with a penguin classic and a bowl of soup with homemade bread each night. drift off to the sound of rain pelting on the shuttered windows.
so you book it. take a leap of faith and think- why the fuck not?
the man who greets you at the cottage is unlike what you expected. you’d talked to him briefly over text message to confirm the booking and payment details, few and far between messages that were scant of any personality, gruff and blunt. so you’d assumed this man- john price so the site claimed- was a weathered old man leasing out his old fishing cottage. some pensioner who was spending the rest of his days with his grandchildren. you didn’t expect this.
shoulders so broad the rolled up sleeves of his jacket strained with each movement. a thick salt and pepper beard, matching locks tucked under a woollen beanie. calloused hands flecked with faint scratches and wire-wool hairs. a cigar-gruffened voice with a slight scouse inflection. this john price was not the john price you’d anticipated.
but you weren’t complaining.
as per his (rather vague and unexplained) instructions, you’d met him in the nearest town to the cottage, from which you’d gathered the actual road to the house was far too hard to traverse for someone so inexperienced with country lanes.
sat in the passenger seat of his mudded up green land rover, the fawn seats cracked and riddled with marks, an old black ice little tree hanging limply from the rearview mirror, john’s scent of pine and sea-salt and something distinctly male- heady and musky, sweat from a hard days work, motor oil, the smell of rain on the air- flooded the car and your nose. a forgotten radio station droned quietly, filling the long gaps between the small talk you attempted, most of your questions being met by a monotone grunt- two words if he was being generous. the drive to the house must’ve only been twenty minutes, with you sneaking glimpses of the older man in the driver’s seat the whole way. watching with dilated pupils how he used his right wrist to steer, hand hanging despondently off the wheel, tapping a mindless beat on the dashboard, his other hand settled lackadaisically on the gearstick.
pulling up in the makeshift gravel drive, john hops out of the car without waiting for you, rounding to the boot to retrieve your singular suitcase and somehow meeting you at your own door to open it and give you a hand jumping down. a grumbling bear of a gentleman.
he gives you the world’s fastest run through of the house (considering it’s really only one big room with the bathroom the only separate space, it’s not too much of a feat) and saunters to the door, heavy boots resounding through the cozy space. turns back to you once he props open the front door, “d’keep this locked pet. hate for ‘nythin’ ta happen ta ya,”
with that, he takes his leave, as you stand slightly horny and slightly more confused in the open yet cozy space of the cottage you’re calling home for the next few weeks.
several days pass in the cottage, and you begin to form somewhat of a routine. you’ve scoped some of the most scenic trails, catalogued the bookshelf selection and unpacked your own, scanned the vhs tapes stored in the heavy wooden television unit propping up a mammoth brick of a tv, even taking a whole day to complete the walk to and from the town you’d arrive in to pick up some essentials.
yet you still can’t shake the feeling of john price. his energy, his smell, his voice. his hands.
it’s on your sixth day that you decide to try a different trail. this one is less sign-posted, the road less taken if the lack of a foot beaten trail is anything to go by. but you trust your nose, your senses. you’ll keep walking until it feels right, maybe go some more after that.
you don’t expect to end up on the very point of the island, jutting rocks and cliffs being pounded by heavy, frothing waves. gulls swooping and slashing through the air to fight for the fish bubbling to the surface of the maelstromous water.
a proud lighthouse emerging from the seafront.
glorious white, well-kept. foreboding, grandiose, leering and snarling and surrounded by the full forces of mother nature. crowned by a halo of a spinning bulb, its frothy and milky wings emerging each time the waves crest up to cliff height.
and then you spot him. john price, in all his glory. beanie still tucked to his ears, moustache thick and framing a slight snarl. watching you from the gallery, both hands gripping the railing in front of him and skulking down at you. it’s in the same moment you realise his stare is pointed at you that you realise he isn’t alone.
three men come to join him, resting against the chipped railing to peer down at you. three men. just as big. just as surly.
four great beasts of burden. with hunting eyes locked on their target. you.
