Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

— I will not be happy until we are together again, the man said.

Another man exposed himself to lorries in lay-bys on the motorway while their drivers slept. A young architect fell in love with the Taj Mahal; he said her beauty was unparalleled, every stone of her palace built from grief and devotion.

Birds fly up through the branches.

Dylan’s heart races.

He is so high up now, he crosses over a burn and a trickle of water joins the rough swish of his jeans and a crunch of frosted pine needles as he walks. There is a new track at the bottom of the mountain and a post with a blue square on it and a green square to indicate the beginning of a heritage trail. He turns and looks back down the mountain and the landscape spreads out, vertiginous.

IT HAS been nearly two hours’ walking already. From up here you can see the caravan site is made up of rows of vans in different shapes and sizes. Ash Lane is right at the back, it is almost separate from the rest of the park entirely. There are only ten caravans there and they are identical, all with a single, long, same-size garden space around them. To the entrance of the caravan park there is a road and a row of old miners’ cottages. Up here on the mountain he is fairly close to the back garden of a traditional wee croft house and from here he can see a man skinning some kind of animal. The man looks up the mountain toward him and raises his hand. Dylan nods and turns to move on. Something about that guy is familiar. He climbs faster to see if he can make it a little higher before turning around; this is the most wintry weather he has ever felt in his life. He wants to put a kettle on to boil, make something hot to drink, toast and butter, soup. His stomach growls.

He walks up through a second, thinner layer of forest and there is a sign from the Forestry Commission. It describes all of the trees that are natural to this region. Pine, fir and larch. The sky whitens ominously and he can hear the sea but he can’t see it. A steady whoosh — like bristles of the old sweeping brush across the cinema stage — that pauses just before another wave comes in — the call of a bird high up above — smaller voices of other birds below and a stillness to the air — like the land around him is waiting — ready — preparing — for winter to come. Pine. Wood-smoke. Clean air. Earth. His pores open to release alcohol from the day before yesterday and his heart thuds. He has to push his muscles to keep going until they burn and his throat aches and he has too much saliva in his mouth. He is not used to this.

He stops and spits.

There is a sense of disconnection, a nothingness and a hard-on. He heads up the next slope. His boots slip on wet bark and frosted stones. His toes are numb and so are his fingers. Then he is in a clearing with massive boulders and blackened earth where people have built fires. It begins to sleet, the cold sheets of icy pellets drive him down the mountain a few steps. He puts his head down and steps forward into the driving cold. Now would be the time to turn around, but he laughs and can’t seem to stop, awed by the sheer lunacy of this weather as it beats him back. It gets wilder and he ducks his head to keep going and then he’s on the ground — an awkward slip and a shooting pain through his elbow, the sleeve of his coat wet and muddy, his knee fucking hurts, the shock of it but he is up already. The sleet drives harder and faster — tells him to quit it — to get real — to go home with his stupid shoes, and that doesn’t mean the caravan — it means — take a train — wait until they’ve put the city together after this winter and start applying for jobs in every cinema in London — get back in a burrow — where ineptitudes like you belong.

— Fuck you!

He shouts it into the wind and the sleet is furious now. His hands are red and wet and if winter was a mistress she’d be a cold, violent bitch. His jeans stick to his legs. Heavy. Awkward. He finds footholds in crags of rock, stretches an arm up, pulls himself over a hulk of stone to find a welcome canopy of trees. Dylan re-enters the forest and these boughs are thicker, more jagged — giant pines sway wildly, obliterating all but the most abstract shapes of sky. His breathing is ragged and each muscle aches. He stops and checks for his tobacco and he still has it. It’s sealed enough to be good for a roll-up at the top. It shouldn’t get dark until 3 p.m. but if it does, he can probably guide himself back by the lights of the motorway.

Just a little further.

He has been saying that for hours now. Isn’t it always the way? Just a little further than before. Just a little more. Just one more drink. Just one more song. Down the slope twig-sculptures hang from branches, they bob and pirouette in the breeze. He takes another photograph. They’re sinister. Who has been putting them all here? Maybe the man who was skinning an animal? Maybe the satanists? Or the druid with a sex room. He laughs to himself. And he’d thought Soho was full of its fair share of weird. He steps over a stile that is half-broken, the wood swollen by years of rain and snow; it crumbles beneath his weight and woodlice spill out onto the forest floor, all black scaly armour and hundreds of wriggling legs. Dylan walks along another path until he is going up the mountain vertically and, as he turns around, the view unfolds in every direction — look at that!

Layers of landscape settle everywhere.

There are trails of white and red lights in the distance: cars emerging from a foggy sleet, and mountains below and jutting crags behind him, and down to the left valleys and peaks and a glimpse of blue further even than waves. A bank of white cloud is drifting up the hillside. It moves quickly. He stops still. Is it dangerous? What are you meant to do when a humongous cloud is coming toward you on a sheer mountain drop? He lifts his phone and there are no bars, he can’t even google it. Two eagles spiral out of the cloud, calling out to each other, and one has something small gripped in its claws. They coast on the wind — each wingspan must be about three feet — and they appear almost still. The tips of their wings flutter as the wind carries them forward before they plummet back down through whiteness.

Cloud unfurls — it steals fields and trees and rocks.

Dylan sticks his hands in his pockets.

Fuck it!

It’s a cloud.

What can it do?

He cricks his neck. Squares his shoulders. Plants his feet wide. The path below him is gone now and the treetops disappear; a few of the tallest Scots pines stick out, then they are gone. When the cloud reaches him the temperature drops even further and his breath is vapour on the air. Dylan sticks one hand into the cloud. It disappears. He sticks a foot out and it is gone too. The cloud goes through him — through his heart and his lungs, his ribcage, the pulse in his veins, his brain. He holds his arms out but he can’t see them any more — he can’t even see his jacket — when he looks down it is just a collar and his nose and his hair — then they gone.

This is a kind of flying.

Arms right out.

He is bodyless and travelling at great speed.

The cloud is so dense he could be upside down — falling off the earth — this is what it means to be chilled-to-the-bone. Anything could come at him through this. The first girl he ever kissed, with her brown eyes and upturned nose and stripy socks. A Yeti looking for a husband — ready to drag him home and tell him to put up her broken shelves or rear her Yeti children.

It. Isn’t. Passing.

If anything the cloud’s getting thicker.

Disoriented, he peers forward.

An endless white tunnel and if he steps into it, he will see what?

Vivienne and Gunn?

It makes him think of the magician’s curtain between life and death; any minute now it will open onto an endless bar where rows of creatures with long, narrow teeth hand out cocktails, and when people sip from each straw they are actually siphoning off the last vestiges of their own humanity — the Other Side doing a great trade in soul-mining — and the lizardic bar-staff smile and nod as all that energy is siphoned down into the cellar. Sent out into the universe. Where some monstrous source of life feeds on it.