Lighthouse by Alison Moore

tap and splashes his face, his bed-warmed and sleep-steeped skin shocked by the cold water. He drinks straight from the tap, daring to touch the end of it with his lips despite the germs which his Aunt Frieda has told him flourish on taps and drinking fountains. Without looking at himself in the mirror, he returns to the bedroom. Going to the window and opening the curtains, he is pleased to discover a dreary morning, an overcast sky, the prospect of a cooler day.
    He does not remember looking out of this window yesterday, either when he arrived or when he went to bed. He does not recall checking for an escape route. It is just as well, he thinks, because this room is on the third floor and there is nothing to climb out onto and nothing to break a fall. Had he realised this, he would have spent half the night worrying about it and the other half having bad dreams.
    He sits down on the bed, next to his suitcase. It was his honeymoon suitcase, a wedding present from his father, who was his best man.
    Futh had first asked a man at work, who turned him down. Gloria said, ‘Aren’t you going to ask Kenny?’ So Futh asked Kenny, who just laughed.
    Then he asked his father, who, shaking his head, said, ‘Have you got no one else?’ But he did it, and he took Futh out for a drink and said, raising his glass, that the French called this ‘l’enterrement de vie de garçon’. ‘The burial,’ he said, ‘of a boy’s life.’
    They held the wedding reception in the function room of a local pub. There was a dance floor on which his father slow-danced with Gloria, and onto which Angela’s mother kept trying to persuade Futh, and which Angela repeatedly refused to leave despite Futh’s preference for an early night. And there was a buffet which was drying out by the time Futh left Angela on the dance floor and went out into the corridor to get away from the disco’s noise and flashing lights.
    At the far end of the corridor, a back door was propped open and through it he could see one end of a patio in darkness and rain beginning to fall. He stepped outside and a security light came on, illuminating him on the empty slabs. There was a square of lawn, edged at his end by the patio and the wall to which the security light was attached. Running down one side of the lawn was the outside wall of the corridor, and on the opposite side a hedge screened the garden from the road. At the far end was the wall of the function room which he had just left, and above that the bedroom which he had booked for the night.
    He wandered onto the wet grass. Rain always reminded him of meeting Angela at the motorway service station, the smell of his wet coat in her car. He ambled down to the end of the garden. He reckoned that if he stood anywhere else he could be seen from the function room, but standing against its wall he could not. And moreover, the security light sensor apparently did not reach that far. The light went off and Futh stood in darkness outside the function room, in thick grass between patches of nettles, enjoying the rain smell and remembering Angela.
    ‘What you can smell,’ he had said to her on some rainy woodland walk, inhaling deeply, ‘is bacterial spores. They are stored in dried-out soil and released by rainfall and carried in the damp air to our noses.’
    When Futh began to feel really wet, he headed back inside. As he crossed the lawn, the security light snapped on again and he felt like an animal in headlights, about to be mown down.
    He did not go back into the function room but slipped past the open door and went straight upstairs to the bedroom. He heard the party continuing without him, and it sounded louder, he thought, than it had done when he was down there. He could hear the voices shrieking through the floorboards, feel the pulse of the disco music under his feet.
    He went to the window and peered out, looking for his escape route. The room had a view of the lawn, and the patio on the far side. It was a