Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

Constance comes out of the bedroom and takes the joint off him and stands just — that close. She takes two or three drags, waves the smoke out of the window and hands it back to him. The wind howls over her roof and the caravan moves slightly. He can’t work out what is worse: wanting a kiss and not getting one, or getting one and never getting another. She makes him feel like a teenager.

— Mum!

— I’m coming.

— Did you get the wardrobe out of the tip totally by yourself? Did you use a roller to get it into the ambulance?

Stella is asking her mother this and she’s saying Yes; she’s saying Lift your feet up; no, stop wriggling, turn around, that’s it — you look beautiful; okay, not beautiful, you look repugnant, yup, utterly foul!

— Dylan?

— Yes, Stella.

— Our thermometer says it is minus ten, she calls through.

— Fresh, he says.

— Did they just mention that iceberg again on the radio?

— Yeah.

She is still bumping about next door, opening her bathroom cabinet, finishing things. Flames leap this way and that on her woodstove, and he wants to lie down with Constance and listen to her heartbeat. Not say a word to each other all night. Just sip wine and watch snow falling outside the window — hold hands in the dark.

CONSTANCE STANDS in the doorway watching him. He’s not sure how long she has been there and a frown flashes across her, making her look older. They assess each other formally — a contract — a measuring up.

— Don’t Bogart that joint, she says.

— You know, Dennis Hopper wanted that on the soundtrack to Easy Rider.

— Riveting! she grins.

— You remind me of my gran, he says.

— That’s a new one, she says.

— If you knew my gran, you’d take it as a compliment. Anyway, you do furniture restoration?

— Oh, shabby-shit the-pipes-the-pipes-are-c-a-l-l-ing! Stella bellows from the next room.

— Chic, shabby- fucking- chic!

Constance takes a bottle of beer out of the crate on her front porch and opens it and has a long swig and then holds one out for him. She glances at a photograph he is looking at, of her and Stella who is about six years old, dressed in a Spiderman outfit; and there is another one of her dressed as a little boy, all in blue; and a handprint in a tiny frame and the name Cael written underneath it. Constance takes a long drag and looks at him.

— Is that Stella when she was little?

She nods and neither of them say anything. They make more sense to him now. Constance’s vague air of melancholy and sex — there is something of both about her; he couldn’t place it before but she’s in mourning too, for a little boy that used to be her baby.

— She made the transition thirteen months ago.

— Did you expect it?

— Not really.

— Has she been okay?

— No, she’s not. You weren’t what I expected, when Stella said she’d invited a pal over.

— What were you expecting?

— Someone shorter.

— Most people expect someone shorter, he says.

— And less hairy.

— You have something against hair?

They grin at each other, a quick flash and it’s sealed then. She knows he likes her. Her eyes are grey with a rim around the iris in orange or gold.

— What’s with the plastic birds outside Rose Cottage? he says.

Dylan squints out of her window, looking down the pathway at shadowy shapes.

— Pink flamingoes, Constance says.

— Have you seen the film?

— Aye, I have actually, I took an ex-boyfriend to see it for a midnight screening at the art-house cinema on a trip to Edinburgh once; we stayed in a hotel, went out for a meal — the whole thing. At the movie there was a guy in the row behind us, doing a lot of jerking around all the way through the film. I don’t think he was epileptic.

— How did the date go after that?

— Didn’t see him again. I chatted to Vivienne a few times — interesting woman.

— Oh yeah, what was she saying?

Constance is looking at him, head tilted.

— She didn’t tell you she’d been here at all?

— No, she wanted to take my gran’s ashes up to the islands and scatter them, but she never told me she’d visited Scotland. My gran was Gunn MacRae, she came from Orkney.

— Stella’s dad’s family are from up there.

— He might know them?

— Maybe, there’s a lot of islands.

She looks down so her eyelashes create a slight shadow on her cheek in this light. She has no marks on her skin, no moles, no freckles; under her eyes there are lines where she has not slept and two furrows between pale brows where she frowns too much. She smiles and her eyes flash slightly luminous. They are too close to each other to be comfortable.

Stella walks in and stands at the door. She has eight bulging eyeballs sticking out from her costume, they are green and round, and her hair is a big backcombed halo, black as night. She wears a dash of pink lipstick and her chin is pointier than he ever noticed and she is exceptionally pleased with herself. She is probably the coolest kid he’s met — not that he has met many. Dylan tries to focus on Stella. He tries not to appear like he thinks Constance Fairbairn is the most fuckable woman he has ever met in his entire life.

— Do you like the costume? Stella asks him.

— You look scarier than a scary thing!

— Truth, Stella says.

Constance grins at him. That urge in him to lie with her in the dark and hold her. To drink wine and read books and ignore each other, but her foot just by his, her legs, her mouth. There are herbs hanging from the kitchenette ceiling. The wooden shutters around each window are painted blue. On the wall above there’s a picture of a purple dog. Stella’s paintings are cool: long men with even longer arms and gadgets hanging off them, and dinosaur-heads and dog-tails.

— Your costume looks great, he says.

— You don’t know what I am, though — do you?

— No.

He feels like he wants to look after the kid, and he knows she wants him here because when she asked him to come for dinner she said, please. Please come for tea.

— I like your caravan, he says.

— You’d never know that all of our furniture comes from the dump and dead people’s houses, would you? My mum can make anything look expensive. It’s a skill.

Constance uncorks a bottle and pours two large glasses of red wine.

— Cheers to that! she says.

— Do you know Lewis Brown? Stella asks.

— No, Dylan says.

— You will: he lives at the first caravan on Larch Lane with his sister and nan and their lodger, their mum and also his brother. Anyway, his uncle and granddad are in the jail and the women pad over to the phone box in their pyjamas with fags hanging out, to phone them, and who uses phone boxes anyway? They have mobile contracts, though, they just put their SIM card in and talk. We used to be best friends but we’re not any more.

There is a tenseness around Constance’s features.

— Lewis Brown has all the latest computer games delivered straight from Japan, but since the post only comes sometimes now, he’s hardly had any, which is giving him withdrawals, cos he needs to be distracted from anything real. He can’t take it. Especially in winter. He can’t take the grey. Some people can’t take the grey but I can — I’m built for it; it doesn’t scare me but it gets so grey here in January and February especially, it makes your eyes grow tired and then your soul too, then your only choice is to get drunk, or die, or eat chocolate.

— Stella!

— Or stoned, or simply give up.

— I’d never give up, Dylan says.