TITLE: The Lantern Keeper's Inventory

SCENE 1. The lamp room of a lighthouse that no longer guides ships. Dusk.

(Shelves of lanterns, each with a paper tag. MARA, sixties, counts them aloud. TEO, her nephew, stands in the doorway with a clipboard he did not ask for.)

MARA: Forty-one, forty-two. The green one is forty-three, but it sulks, so I count it last.

TEO: Aunt Mara, the council wants a list, not a biography for every lamp.

MARA: A list is a biography with the good parts removed. Hand me the pencil.

TEO: They are sending an inspector on Thursday. He will want to know what is worth keeping and what can go to auction.

MARA: Everything here is worth keeping. That is the definition of an inventory.

TEO: That is the definition of a museum, and nobody has bought a ticket since nineteen eighty-two.

(MARA lifts a small brass lantern and turns it so the glass catches the last light.)

MARA: This one came off the ferry that sank in the January storm. The captain's daughter brought it up the stairs herself, still dripping.

TEO: Did the ferry sink, or did it run aground? Last year you said it ran aground.

MARA: It did both. It was a very determined ferry.

TEO: I will write "ferry, disputed."

MARA: Write "ferry, remembered." Disputed is for people who were not there.

SCENE 2. The same room, the next afternoon. Rain against the windows.

(ODILE, a retired harbour pilot, sits on an upturned crate polishing a lens. TEO reads from the clipboard.)

TEO: Item fifty. One storm lantern, red glass, cracked. Estimated value: sentimental.

ODILE: You cannot sell sentiment at auction. I have tried. They only take cash and furniture.

MARA: Odile kept that red lantern in her wheelhouse for thirty years. It saw more of the harbour than the harbour master did.

ODILE: The harbour master saw the harbour through the bottom of a glass. The lantern had better eyesight.

MARA: The council never asked the lantern. They asked the harbour master, and he told them the light was a luxury, and they believed him because he wore a hat with a badge on it.

ODILE: A badge is a very small lighthouse. It only shows people where you are standing, never where the rocks are.

TEO: I still need a number. The council form does not have a box for "better eyesight."

MARA: Then draw a box. You are the one holding the pencil.

(TEO hesitates, then draws a small square on the form and writes inside it.)

ODILE: What did you write?

TEO: "Ask Odile."

ODILE: Good boy. That is the most accurate valuation in the building.

MARA: He gets that from his mother. She never answered a question she could pass to someone wiser.

TEO: She also never climbed two hundred stairs to count lamps in the rain.

MARA: No. She sent you.

(A pause. The rain eases. ODILE holds the polished lens up to the window.)

ODILE: When the beam still turned, you could read a newspaper in the bay at midnight. Nobody did, of course. But you could.

TEO: Is that going on the form as well?

ODILE: Put it under remarks. Every form has a box for remarks, and nobody ever reads it, which makes it the safest place for the truth.


SCENE 3. Thursday morning. The lamp room is tidier than it has ever been.

(The INSPECTOR enters, out of breath, carrying a measuring tape and a folder. MARA, TEO and ODILE stand in a row as if for a photograph.)

INSPECTOR: Two hundred and four steps. Nobody told me there would be two hundred and four steps.

MARA: There used to be two hundred and five. One retired.

INSPECTOR: I am here to assess the collection for the regional heritage register. I was told there would be a list.

TEO: There is a list. It is ninety-one items long and some of them have opinions.

(TEO hands over the clipboard. The INSPECTOR reads, turning pages slowly.)

INSPECTOR: Item twelve, "brass lantern, ferry, remembered." Item fifty, "red storm lantern, ask Odile." Item sixty-three, "the green one, sulks."

ODILE: All accurate.

MARA: This is not a usual lighthouse. The light went out, but the keeping did not.

INSPECTOR: The register needs a single sentence describing the significance of the collection. One sentence. For the whole room.

(Silence. MARA looks at the shelves. TEO looks at MARA. ODILE puts down the lens.)

ODILE: Write that every lamp here came home with somebody.

INSPECTOR: That is a sentence I can file.

(The INSPECTOR writes. The iron key to the lamp room hangs on a nail by the door; MARA takes it down and gives it to TEO.)

MARA: You have the pencil and now you have the key. Do not let them auction the stairs.

TEO: I will count them every Thursday.

MARA: Count them when it rains. That is when they need it.

(Lights fade on the shelves, one lantern at a time, the green one last.)

(End of play.)
