Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

— There’s an iceberg coming from Norway. Bloody Ice Age, that’s what it’s going to be, another says.

They all stare at the television.

— Big bloody iceberg, bigger than the Wishbone Hotel.

— It’s not an iceberg, you idiot, it’s sea-ice. It’s not coming from Norway either, it’s coming from the Atlantic, Toothy says.

— It’s a bloody iceberg.

— It’s sea-ice from the ATLANTIC.

— What do you know about the Atlantic?

— I know it’s not fucking Norway, Toothy responds.

— Well, what’s the ocean around Norway then?

— It’s the Norwegian Sea. I was a good sailor. Toothy adjusts her pink top.

— I don’t think lying on your back constitutes sailing, the tired woman says.

— It’s polar caps melting, it’s cooling all the air over the sea. The Gulf Stream can’t warm up any more, Stella says.

— Oh, it’s not that nonsense, sweetheart, Toothy says.

— What is it then?

— It’s old Mother Frost. She wants her wolves back.

Constance looks across at her and then back up at the telly.

— Fry me up two eggs, will you, Morag? I don’t want to have to go across the road to the stinky cafe! Toothy says.

The tearoom owner sighs, cracks two eggs into an orange pan and they sizzle away. She wipes fat off her fingers onto her apron, spreads butter onto white bread and drops teabags into mismatched mugs.

— It’s going to arrive here, this iceberg, at Clachan Fells? Constance asks.

Stella gets butterflies listening to her mother’s tone and the news — like this is real, not just something else that is awful that they see on the news, or every time she turns on her laptop and it is all so ridiculous, it makes her teeth ache.

— That iceberg will arrive down the coast in a few weeks.

— What’s to stop it crashing into land? That’s what I want to know, the owner says as she places mugs down.

Stella picks through a bowl of wooden Christmas-tree decorations and little clay hearts. She turns them over and they have Clachan Fells Pottery stamped on one side. Alistair made them. He is useless. Not one thing in there that makes up a father at all. If he wants a boy so badly, he can make one. He probably doesn’t even have that in him, now he’s so old. All he’s good for is embalming roadkill and baking clay fucking hearts. She puts the little heart back down and leans against her mother and just then Lewis walks by the window.

— Mum, can we go outside?

— Wait a minute.

— I’d write to my MSP but her office is closed, the smallest woman says.

— Can we go?

She tugs at her mother’s sleeve.

— Wait a minute, Stella.

The oldest woman spreads butter on her scone and then jam and takes a large bite.

— What can I get you, love?

— Two teas, milk and one sugar.

— You’re a nice girl, you’ll be fine, mark my words, Toothy says.

Stella does not know what to say, so she nods and tries not to blush. She wants to walk outside and see Lewis and ask him why, when the other boys turned up to Ellie’s Hole that night and left her with a scar on her head, why he stayed at home. They are his friends and once they were her friends, but it was always her and Lewis kicking about when they were kids, they were always together. Now he goes everywhere that they do. He kissed her! Now, when he sees her he tenses up and then laughs a bit louder and he always ignores her in class, even if she is paired up with him. It is highly irritating that he is possibly the most beautiful boy on earth, even with his big chin and his skinny legs. She wouldn’t say that to him. She’d tell him he was the best gamer on the planet. They’d hold hands in a cinema and her heart would beat right through her chest like one of those pottery monstrosities. Two years ago they played football together and wore the same school strip and kicked about over at the dump, and now he doesn’t know what to think when he looks at her. When he leant in and kissed her two months ago, he pushed his whole body against her and she could feel it through his trousers. He likes her just like this. Constance looks at the blueberry muffins and then into her purse and shakes her head and simply pays for the tea. Stella is hungry. It feels like ages until lunch. They wait for the owner to put their tea into styrofoam cups, while traffic outside the windows moves along, all smudged colours and a dull-muted hum.

STELLA AND Constance stand side-by-side at the entrance to the city dump. They scan the horizon. A doorway stands alone. Mattresses. Jagged piles of electrical goods, their wires spilled out like the entrails of hedgehogs at Alistair’s, the one time he showed her how to embalm. There is a wall of fridges. A shop mannequin stands on one leg and holds her arm up like she is waiting to ask a question. The tip isn’t any better than dead people’s houses but at least their stuff is contained in rooms and spaces that make sense. The longer you stand in the tip, the stranger it gets. It’s like the guts of the whole world have been thrown up. A mound of plastic in all different colours blurs in front of her eyes and she has to look away or it will give her a headache. They’re not looking for any of this stuff. They need to get over to the other side where furniture gets dropped off. Diggers nudge in toward valleys at the north side of the tip. It smells like the end of the world. There are no lorries arriving to make drop-offs, so the two of them stand there motionless for a few more seconds.

Constance lifts up the wire fence and Stella slips under.

They head for the far side, heads down, hoods up.

It is automatic to scrutinise the ground ceaselessly for wet concrete, or needles, or medication, or knives, or broken glass. All of people’s lives are here. Their bills. Letters. Even their blood on bits of tissue or sanitary pads. The boys in the caravan park pointed that out to her one time when she still played with them. You can even find DNA in this place. That’s what one of them said.

Her mother is wearing soft old jeans and faded leather gloves. They pause for a minute as the diggers change direction. It’s always like this. The strangest game of musical statues in the world. Here I am — playing still behind a mound of several thousand tyres! Stella looks down at her boots. They are almost the same size as Constance’s now. Their four boots are black, scuffed, standing in a row pointing straight ahead, steel-toe caps, boots from dead soldiers. They are the only kind her mother has ever bought her, apart from wellies.

— Come on, let’s move, Constance says.

She trudges along behind her mother, the sky white and the land-gulls spiralling. That woman from Rio had the most beautiful shoes, so elegant and tall, and they made her legs look even slimmer and prettier. Stella will wear shoes like that. One day her mother will despair. On the other side of the dump, diggers roll forward. Orange warning lights blare on top of cabins. They turn west, forks raised, and plunge into waste. Whenever they pass a decent piece of furniture her mother inspects it quickly, then she leaves a little bright-coloured flag on the top so they can find it later.

Stella follows her mother, keeping up the pace, and she is warm by the time they get to the other side. If Lewis stayed home on the day she got beaten up at Ellie’s Hole, then it was because he didn’t want to hit her, and he didn’t want to see his friends hit her either; and at one time she was pals with them all too and, when they got her on the ground, one was shouting that she’d always be a boy and not to look at him like that, cos he’d never hit a girl. They were so angry because they’d told her all their boy-secrets when they thought she was just like them and she’d slept over at Lewis’s a million times and they’d eaten crisps and watched anime and played computer games and talked about girls. He knew. If he’s honest about it. He liked her even then. If he would kiss her again, it would be enough to keep her happy for the rest of her life. Except that isn’t true. Kissing must be like smoking. If you like it, you always want another.