Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

— There isn’t much light, she says.

— Those clouds will clear in a minute, Stella says.

The woman taps where an old heart beats under thin skin.

— You have two spirits, she smiles.

— No, I don’t, Stella says.

The woman is wearing a thick donkey-jacket and even from here she smells like pickles. Behind her the mountains bathe in light as white cloud shifts and rays of sun spill out. The woman tips her head back and stares at the sun, so her eyes light up and her face softens its craggy lines and her white hair is haloed.

— Are you staring right at the sun? Stella asks.

— I’m staring right under it.

— You’ll go blind.

— No, I won’t. I was taught how to by the sunlight pilgrims, they’re from the islands furthest north. You can drink light right down into your chromosomes, then in the darkest minutes of winter, when there is a total absence of it, you will glow and glow and glow. I do, she says.

— You glow?

— Like a fucking angel, she says.

Stella turns around to look behind her.

A gate clacks in the wind.

Dogs bark further down the caravan park.

The woman is gone.

Away over on the furthest hills the wind farm’s nacelle rotate and the big white tripod legs supporting some of them look like they could just start marching toward the caravan park and trample all their homes. Like that time when the mine shafts were swallowing up caravans right into the ground and everyone was trying to move out. Pit-bulls begin to scratch at the satanists’ kitchen window. He sticks his head up between the curtains and scowls at Stella, points toward his dogs as if she is waking them up, and he is sweaty like he has been shagging his satanist girlfriend.

— Sorry!

— Do you know what fucking time it is? he muffles.

— Fucking sue me, she says.

Stella hurries back to her caravan and clicks the door shut. Leans against it. For a fraction of a heartbeat she gets the creepiest feeling that old pickly lady was Gunn. The air feels like glue. Like it is too thick. Like breathing is something she has to consciously invest her time and effort to do. By the kitchen are her mother’s latest stacks of tins and rice and soy sauce for their apocalypse cupboard. There are four whole crates of wine. Stella picks up the box that Alistair left and she takes it into the living room and places it on the table and then, on an urge, she decides to hide it. She places it to the side of the sofa. It isn’t quite hidden enough, so she drags it behind the sofa and chucks a woollen throw over it. She tidies her mum’s records away.

— Mum, how many times have you played Neil Young this week?

— At least thirty.

— He’s depressing.

— He’s a genius.

— So, what’s he so fucking depressed for then?

Stella’s fingers are numb, it is too, too cold. It’s the kind of biting nip that gets into your bones and the only way to get warm again is to lie in a hot bath, and they don’t have one of those.

— Stella, who was at the door earlier?

— Nobody. I was looking to see how much stuff was over on the green for Bonfire Night.

Lies come so easily. Like her tongue is built for untruths. She would be a lethal spy. Stella snaps open the back air vent on the wood-stove, just enough so the paper and kindling will catch. The trick is to snap it shut before the backdraught and smoor make her throat raw. She peels newspaper pages off and wrings each into a long twisted snake, lines up ten twists and ties each one into a doughnut shape and throws them on the bottom of the grate, then she builds kindling around them in a teepee shape. As the match strikes there is a flare and the smell of sulphur as paper catches. She closes the grate, her fingers black with soot. The faded old bullet caravan next door sags. Behind Dylan’s caravan there is the car park and garages and Blackfoot Burn with its sinking sand, then fields rise up toward forests and steely crags on the mountains. Winter stretches out ahead of them, a straight road with only ice and snow and one man walking along it and no other people, just that one person. It is something she saw in a horror film in a tent in the back of the white trash kids’ caravan, where there were about eleven of them in one tiny skinny caravan. They made her smoke a cigarette when she was six. They all sat in this tent watching horror movies and she was so frightened she couldn’t move. One came on where a girl slept in her bedroom and there were thousands and thousands of dolls in there and she put down her cigarette and it all went on fire and the dolls were alive, each and every one of them watching her as flames licked up around the room. Then they played a movie where a man walked along on an endless road. The trees were bare and the sky was white and birds were circling. He walked like that for about an hour. It was terrifying. Stella gets this horrible feeling when winter is coming in. Clachan Fells gets the deepest snow of anywhere in the region but it’s not even that. Dark is following them. It’s coming to cloak everything. Each day it will eat a little more light until they will wake up one morning to find the sun won’t rise again. Stella feels like she is standing on the beginning of that long road and everybody is gone. The whole world frozen and nobody left but her and birds circling above her. What then? Stella looks up at the seven sisters. The tallest one has the best views. From up there you can see the whole world. Except of course you can’t. But it feels like you could. On the mountain that everyone calls the fifth sister there is a long procession of willow trees, they look like Victorian women with wide bustles all setting off on a long journey.

— Go back to bed for a little while, Stella, we can leave in half an hour.

— I’m just sitting here.

— Doing what?

— Thinking.

Her mother doesn’t say anything, the fire catches, it pops and crackles into flame.

THERE IS a message. It blinks in the bottom of the screen. Stella sits at the table with her fingers in a steeple. Wind whistles around and — even though the cavity under their caravan is weighted with scree and pebbles from the shore and its haunches are set in blocks of concrete — it feels like they will whirl away. Snowfall has been steady for twenty minutes. She clicks onto the message. Who would have thought he’d e-mail back. There is just a row of emojis: a smiley face, clapping hands, a heart.

It would be easier to be with a boy like him.

He understands.

On the lower part of the e-mail she had told him she’d be true to who she is, but she still won’t be able to go to high school without being bullied. Stella glances over to the photograph of her mum with a little baby and even there she didn’t look like a boy. Sometimes she catches Constance looking at her as if she’s scanning her face for a sign of him. Cael Fairbairn has ceased to exist. Thirteen months ago the girl that wore his body got up and told everyone to quit calling her by the wrong pronoun. She ditched her old wardrobe in a wheelie bin. Her mother faltered for a day, then got on board. They changed Stella’s name on everything and when she goes to high school people that didn’t know her before would not be able to tell, except this is Clachan Fells where everybody knows what is going on with everyone else. Stella turns the photograph away because looking at it makes her feel uneasy. If she gets bullied at school and can’t stop them, she’ll drop out. She is not killing herself to sit a few exams in four years’ time. Constance is cleverer than most of the teachers anyway. She could probably do her exams a year early and go straight to university and work so hard that one of those big old farmhouses up on the mountain, the old ones in ruins, one of those will be hers and she won’t even tell her mum she bought it; she’ll get it all done up and just give her the keys for Christmas because while everyone else in the world is odder than an odd thing, her mum is, in all truth, the coolest person she knows. Stella types back to the guy in Italy. Clicks Send . The temperature gauge on the wall now reads minus four. It is warmer than earlier. The man from no. 6 (who tells everyone his name is Alan when they all know it is Tim) walks past with a huge bag of salt for his path and marches up to his alien caravan. Ida told her that he is building a spaceship in the bay window, complete with controls and knobs, and he reckons he’s going to fly right up there when the aliens come. It is one of those mornings when time elongates. One minute is an aeon all on its own. The fire crackles. A clock ticks. In the bathroom Constance brushes her teeth, spits, turns off the tap, she comes through and pours coffee. Her face is clean and bare. She never wanted a daughter, what she wanted was a son. Alistair told Stella that, the last time she spoke to him. Her mother drinks the coffee down straight and black. She wears thick fisherman’s socks and tight jeans and a blue polo-neck with two long-sleeved thermal tops underneath. Wind keens down the chimney and the wood-burner glows. Stella pulls on two pairs of socks and laces her boots, and her mother soaks the porridge bowls and gets her coat on and they are both out the door without a word.