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Chapter One
The lamp room
= Maren climbs to the light the morning after the keeper goes.
{{pov: Maren}}
{{when: 14 March 1988}}
Maren climbed the stairs the way her father had, counting. Ninety-one steps, and the ninety-first always seemed to come late.
The lamp room was smaller than the stories. A brass burner, a cracked leather stool, a ledger in her father’s hand with the last line unfinished.
By dark she had learned the wick.
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Chapter Seven
Fog signal
{{pov: Maren}}
{{when: 25 March 1988}}
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11 Hollin harbour
Told out of order
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Maren climbed the stairs the way her father had, counting. She heard the wind find the gallery door and felt the whole tower lean into it, a slow and patient lean, and she noticed that her hands had gone to the rail before she told them to.
“You’ll want to keep the glass clean,” Ida whispered from the stair below, as if the lamp might hear her.
“I know,” Maren hissed. She did not know.
The room held a brass burner, a cracked leather stool, a ledger with her father’s hand on every line and the last line unfinished, and over all of it the great lens, which gathered the small light and made of it something that could be seen from the Hollin shore on a clear night, if anyone on the shore had been looking.
She wiped the glass. She wiped it again. The glass was clean, and she saw that she was still wiping it.
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Low water at Skerry
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Low Water at Skerry
Anna Halloran
Low Water at Skerry
Copyright © 2026 Anna Halloran
All rights reserved.
First edition
For whoever kept the light
Chapter One
The lamp room
Maren climbed the stairs the way her father had, counting. Ninety-one steps, and the ninety-first always seemed to come late. She heard the wind find the gallery door and felt the whole tower lean into it, a slow and patient lean, and she noticed that her hands had gone to the rail before she told them to.
“You’ll want to keep the glass clean,” Ida whispered from the stair below, as if the lamp might hear her.
“I know,” Maren said. She did not know. She had seen it done once, from the bottom of the tower, at the age of nine, with the whole of a long grey afternoon between her and any understanding of how a lamp is kept.
The lamp room was smaller than the stories. There was a brass burner, a cracked leather stool, a ledger in her father’s hand with the last line unfinished, and over all of it the great lens, which held the room’s small light and made of it something that could be seen from the Hollin shore on a clear night, if anyone on the Hollin shore had been looking, which she suspected no one ever was.
She wiped the glass. She wiped it again. The glass was clean, and she was still wiping it.
* * *
By dark she had learned the wick. It wanted trimming to the width of a fingernail, no more, and her father’s scissors, which hung on a nail by the door, had been sharpened so many times they had gone narrow and quick like something alive. Ida stood behind her and said nothing, which was how Maren knew she was being watched properly.
The paraffin came up from the cellar in a can with a spout like a heron’s neck. Maren filled the reservoir, spilled a little, and wiped the brass with her sleeve before she remembered the rag in her pocket. There was a way of lighting it, a slow tilt of the match and a held breath, and she did it wrong twice. The third time the flame stood up blue at the root and went gold, and the lens took it and threw it out across the water in a long clean arm.
“That’s it,” Ida said. “That’s all it is.”
It was not all it was. Maren knew that already, the way you know the depth of a pool by the colour of it. But she let the sentence stand. Below them the sea drew back off the rocks and showed the black weed, the iron ring where the relief boat tied up, the stump of the old jetty, all the small bones of the island that the tide kept covered most of the year.
Tobias would be somewhere on the Hollin side by now, counting the light’s flashes the way the keepers’ children always did, and she found she wanted him to get the count right. Eleven seconds, dark; two, bright. Her father had taught her that before he taught her anything else, and she said it over to herself now while the lamp turned, until the words wore smooth and stopped being words at all.
She had meant to sleep. There was a cot in the corner, made up with a grey blanket that smelled of other people’s winters, and Ida had pointed at it twice. But the lamp wanted watching, or Maren wanted to watch it, and the two had become the same thing somewhere around the second hour. She learned the sounds: the click of the clockwork, the long sigh of the mantle, the small tick of the brass as the night cooled it.
At ten she climbed down to the gallery and stood in the weather. The mainland showed as a low smear of lights, and one of them, she told herself, was the harbour office, and one of them was the kitchen where her mother would be sitting up. She counted the flashes until she lost her place and began again, and it did not feel like a task any longer, or not only.
By midnight the wind had dropped. Ida slept on the stool with her coat over her knees. Maren sat on the floor with the ledger open and her father’s last unfinished line in front of her, and she wrote the date under it, and the weather, and then, after a long time, her own name.
Chapter Two
Wick and paraffin
Nobody had told her how much of the work was waiting. There was the lamp, which asked for an hour at dusk and an hour at dawn, and there was everything else, which asked for nothing and took the day. She read the ledger front to back, her father’s small upright hand giving way, in the winters, to something looser and more tired. She swept the stair. She counted the tins in the store and counted them again, and the second count was never the first.
Ida came up at noon with bread and the news, which was that there was none. The boat would not run in this swell. The inquiry, if there was to be an inquiry, would keep. “You could write to them,” Ida said, and Maren said she could, and neither of them moved toward the paper.
That evening she trimmed the wick to the width of a fingernail and did not look at the clock. The lamp caught on the first match. She had begun, without deciding to, to hold her breath at the moment of lighting, and to let it go when the beam went out across the water; she thought her father must have done the same, and wondered whether he had known he did it.
The store was her next project. It ran along the north wall of the tower’s base, a room the shape of a coffin, shelved to the ceiling with tins of paraffin, coils of wick, brass fittings in boxes gone soft with damp. Someone had labelled the shelves in a careful hand, and then someone else, later, had labelled them again, differently, so that a single shelf now held two names for the same thing and disagreed with itself. She began to put them right. By the end of the afternoon she had made a third system, and could not remember what had been wrong with the first.
Ida, watching from the door, said that was how it always went on Skerry. Nothing was ever tidied; it was only, from time to time, renamed.
Chapter Two
Wick and paraffin
Nobody had told her how much of the work was waiting. There was the lamp, which asked for an hour at dusk and an hour at dawn, and there was everything else, which asked for nothing and took the day. She read the ledger front to back, her father’s small upright hand giving way, in the winters, to something looser and more tired. She swept the stair. She counted the tins in the store and counted them again, and the second count was never the first.
Ida came up at noon with bread and the news, which was that there was none. The boat would not run in this swell. The inquiry, if there was to be an inquiry, would keep. “You could write to them,” Ida said, and Maren said she could, and neither of them moved toward the paper.
That evening she trimmed the wick to the width of a fingernail and did not look at the clock. The lamp caught on the first match. She had begun, without deciding to, to hold her breath at the moment of lighting, and to let it go when the beam went out across the water; she thought her father must have done the same, and wondered whether he had known he did it.
The store was her next project. It ran along the north wall of the tower’s base, a room the shape of a coffin, shelved to the ceiling with tins of paraffin, coils of wick, brass fittings in boxes gone soft with damp. Someone had labelled the shelves in a careful hand, and then someone else, later, had labelled them again, differently, so that a single shelf now held two names for the same thing and disagreed with itself. She began to put them right. By the end of the afternoon she had made a third system, and could not remember what had been wrong with the first.
Ida, watching from the door, said that was how it always went on Skerry. Nothing was ever tidied; it was only, from time to time, renamed.
At the foot of the last shelf she found a tin she had not counted, small and flat and sealed with wax. Inside was a bundle of letters tied with fishing line, and on the top one, in her father’s hand, a single word she did not at first recognise as her own name. She sat down on the cold floor of the store with the tin in her lap and the door open to the dusk, and did not read them, and did not put them back.
Whatever was in the letters, it could wait for morning. She put the tin on the highest shelf, behind the wicks, where nobody would think to count it, and went up to trim the lamp for the night.
Ida had gone down at first light to see to the hens, and came back up with an egg in each pocket and the look of someone who has been thinking. “You’ll want to answer them,” she said, “whatever’s in the tin. Better sooner. It only grows.” Maren said she knew. Ida said that was what she was afraid of.
They ate the eggs standing, out of the pan, because the table was covered in ledgers. The sea had gone the flat bright grey of a tin tray, and the wind that had pushed at the tower for three days had dropped to a breath. From the gallery the Hollin shore looked near enough to touch, a pale line with a white speck on it that might have been the school, or a gull, or nothing at all.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to the first readers, and to everyone who has kept a light.
About the author
Anna Halloran writes about islands and the people left to keep them.
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Low Water at Skerry
by
Anna Halloran
Halloran / LOW WATER AT SKERRY / 12
Maren climbed the stairs the way her father had, counting. Ninety-one steps, and the ninety-first always seemed to come late.
The lamp room was smaller than the stories.
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