Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

What kind of last words are those, exactly?

He crumples the Post-it note, drops it in the bin. It’s typically Vivienne — his mother: the moirologist, every sentence delivered like a eulogy. The woman wore winkle-pickers all her days and swore the purest form of water was gin; her finger would trail along their huge medical encyclopaedia (their family bible) hoping to find a rare, incurable disease, something to penetrate her to the bone and never leave her.

There was less than six months between one passing and the next.

Gunn went first.

Then Vivienne.

Now he knows something he did not know before — there is a totality to silence.

It makes his bones ache.

His body has its habits. It is trained to listen for footsteps on the attic stairs each morning. His eyes stray toward the draining board, expecting to find mismatched mugs. The fridge probably still has sliced lemon in Tupperware boxes for a late-night session on the gin. He fills the kettle up enough for three mugs. A stack of records next to Gunn’s gramophone have still not been put back in their sleeves. Their cigarette ends (or Vivienne’s at least) are still in the ashtray. It’s almost like he had thought if he didn’t tidy the place for long enough they’d come back, out of sheer fucking irritation at him.

There is an impenetrability to absence.

He feels slighted, as if some wider trick has been played. Inconclusivity — rattles! He is a child questioning a magician’s trick. Where is the rabbit? Where is her voice? Where is their laughter? How come their voices were here and now they are not? It’s a basic question. Where exactly have they gone? They have made the ultimate disappearing act. Exit Stage Left — then the curtains of the magician’s tent flounce shut and a Closed sign is placed right in front of it so the living cannot follow.

This is only grief — it will not bring them home.

He presses his fists into his eyes and swallows down hard. Repossessors will clamp metal shutters over the foyer doors in about ten hours and he will not be here to watch them. No doubt it will only be a matter of months before wealthy city types move into a well-designed property with great original features right in the middle of Soho. They’re doing it to all the businesses that go bust. He picks up a glass, wanting to hurl it with enough force that it could spin all the way through to the future — while the new residents walk around wearing unsubtle signifiers of wealth, the woman (in another room) would just hear a definite clunk one day as her other half took a tumbler to the head and slid perplexed, eyes glazed, down the wall.

If he is here when the repossessors arrive with cutters.

It won’t end well.

Dylan’s footsteps echo in the empty building. He strides along corridors that hold memories from his childhood in each and every nook. It’s all borrowed: bricks; bodies; breathing — it’s all on loan! Eighty years on the planet if you’re lucky; why do they say if you’re lucky ? Eighty years and people trying to get permanent bits of stone before they go, as if permanence were a real thing. Everyone has been taken hostage. Bankers and big-business are tyrannical demigods. Where is the comeback? There is no comeback because they own the people who have the guns who are there to keep the people (bankers and big-business and governments) fucking safe and now they’re saying on the news it is too little, too late. The temperature is plummeting. Four scientists murdered at the Arctic. By whom?

Vast amounts of fresh water are flooding into the ocean from melting polar caps.

Environmentalists have been campaigning outside Westminster for weeks.

Nobody wants to have sex with him (he hasn’t tried, really).

He can’t be bothered breathing any more.

The debt collectors have been to the door twice today. There was a minor scuffle. They said, quite seriously, they’ll take the lot by force if necessary, and they seemed hopeful for that possibility; they quite fancied battering a giant bearded weirdo, just for kicks, perk of the job, a wee added bonus for them. They are gnarly, violent-looking Serbians — if he had a cat they’d likely behead the thing, spike its head on the gates of the city so it could grin at passers-by.

London is not lined with lollipops.

Businesses are closing — everywhere.

He should: TAKE THE KEYS TO THE BAILIFFS IMMEDIATELY. This is written in RED CAPITAL LETTERS. That’s not going to happen. If they want his family’s home then they can break in. He’s not handing it to them. Banks are doing this up and down the country; any hint of weakness (which they generate by wrecking the economy) and they swoop in, put great big metal shutters right across the doors, do it up and sell it for a profit. They’ll make a bomb. In all truth, he can’t be in this cinema without his mother and grandmother. This was their place. Everywhere he looks another part of him hurts.

Nobody told him grief would be so physical.

Adrenaline.

Sitting down.

Each muscle aching like he has been beaten from head to toe. Grief is in his marrow. It is in his brain. It has even slowed the way he washes his hands. Dylan enters their only auditorium and presses a button on the wall. Red curtains whirr toward each other, they trail across the stage like a dancer’s ballgown in an old film, and he turns on star lights so they glide across the ceiling. He will leave Cinema 1 like this. It’s only right. For the first time in over sixty years there will not be a MacRae in ownership at 345a Fat Boy Lane, Soho. Babylon (the smallest art-house cinema in all of Europe) will no longer glow from the foyer chandelier as people hurry by in the rain.

Dylan pulls on socks, boots, grabs a scarf.

He packs Vivienne’s old suitcase.

Art-deco ashtrays.

Clothes.

Two cinema reels.

The urns are on the popcorn stand and he tries to fit them into the suitcase but it won’t close. He begins to sweat and rummages behind the counter for a plastic bag but there aren’t any. He yanks open cupboards and the box-office till, he looks in the bin, wrenches open the dishwasher — there is an old ice-cream tub and a Tupperware container.

He takes them out.

Places the urns on the counter.

Gunn should go in the ice-cream tub. It’s bigger. Not that she is likely to have more ashes but she would be less bothered about being in an ice-cream tub than Vivienne. Vivienne would be mighty fucking pissed off about travelling anywhere in an ice-cream tub. His grandmother wouldn’t give much of a shit. Dylan wishes (not for the first time today) that he had drunk a little less last night. He picks up one urn, then puts it back down again, beginning slightly to panic. He unscrews Gunn’s urn and tips the ashes into the ice-cream tub. Some fall onto the floor and he automatically rubs at them with his boot, then looks up and mouths the word Sorry . He lobs that empty urn into the sink and unscrews the other one. He tips Vivienne into the Tupperware container but it fills to the brim too quickly — he can’t fit all of her ashes in there.

— Fuck’s sake!

Dylan slams drawers and finds a spoon and carefully pats his mother’s ashes down until there is a half-inch of space on top. They have to fit in. He can’t take her in two different containers. It wouldn’t be right and anyway there’s only popcorn boxes left and they have no lids! His hands are shaky. He is too hungover for this shit. He needs sugar. Coffee. A wank. More sleep. None of these things are going to happen. He pours in the rest of his mother’s ashes and pats them down, pours the last bit and smoothes them down as well; a cold slick of sweat trickles right down his back as he tries to snap on the lid. He never could get Tupperware container lids on easily. It’s a skill he doesn’t possess.