Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

— Me neither. Wait here, I’m going to do my nails in green as well.

Stella disappears back into the bathroom. Constance tears a bit of bread in two and they don’t look at each other this time. The clock ticks and the fire cracks and purrs. Wind whistles against the caravan and he can feel the thing move slightly. Her arms are bare. Her neck is perfect and pale as a swan, but her shoulders are broad. It’s like watching a silent-movie star. He takes three long drags of the joint and his spine moulds to the back of her chair. Light from the fire flickers on the walls. Along the other wall there are carved bookshelves, a birdcage filled with fairy lights and the skeleton of some bird with its wings flung right out.

— Is that a nest of tiny birds with yellow open beaks, sat in the middle of its feathered bird-gut?

— My ex is a taxidermist, she says.

— That explains it.

— He’s Stella’s father.

— I see.

— One of her exes; the other one went travelling, Stella says from down the hall.

Constance accepts the joint back from him and their fingers skim fractionally too close and dull-thud in his chest — like a pebble dropping down a well.

— Dylan doesn’t need to know this, thank you, Stella.

— Mum had two boyfriends for nearly twenty years.

— I’m sure lots of mums have more than one boyfriend, Dylan says.

Stella appears at the door.

— At the same time?

— Stella, let’s not go into this.

— Now she won’t speak to either of them. She’s single and sad and lonely!

— Stella! Stop it right now or you’re not going anywhere.

— Sorry!

— The three of us didn’t live together, ever. They didn’t speak to each other at all in fact. It was just one of those things that happened. It wasn’t a lifestyle choice, Constance says.

— Alistair and Caleb couldn’t stand each other, Mum, could they?

— Alistair got married but then they separated; we were together on and off. Then he married someone else, then we were together and he got divorced, then he married his third wife.

— You were still together through that one, Stella says.

— Thanks for that, Estelle.

— I’m just saying.

— Stella came out of one of those times. Then we were together, then he went back to his last wife, then left her again. I was still with Caleb — it was one of those things, we were open about it.

— You know what Alistair really didn’t like?

— What’s that, Stella?

— That you called me Cael when I was a baby and it sounds like Caleb, a bit.

— No, I suppose he didn’t.

— Alistair says when he dies he wants his bones ground down and made into a china teaset.

Constance and Dylan both just look at her.

— Yup!

He realises his mouth is really, really dry.

— So that is what I would inherit if he died, a bone china teaset.

— You’ll get the cottage, Constance says.

— I won’t. Christine won’t let that happen. The woman hates me, I won’t get a penny. Only a teaset. Made of bones. From a guy who has never even called me by my girl-name. I’ll smash it, she says.

Stella leans into her mum for a quick hug.

— He thinks if I get the teaset, I’ll sit with my own kids one day and pour a cup of builder’s tea into Granddad? Fucking lovely, ay?

— Swear jar!

Dylan tries to be subtle about watching Constance, but it is compulsive. It’s like watching a fire. She is the fire and her daughter the wind — howling along the rooftops, rattling at his windows all last night, warning him she could blow his house down and it is not a house, it is a caravan — d.e.n.i.a.l. It’s not a river in Egypt, that’s what the kid would say.

— Okay, I’ll give you a clue. Everyone has what I am, Stella gestures to her costume.

— Eyes, he says.

— I’m green, I’m all green; all the eyes are just, you know, to give it a fucking edge!

— Estelle! SWEAR JAR.

The girl shrugs and Constance shakes her head and puts her feet up on the bench beside Dylan. Her toenails are all even. Square-shaped and, like her fingernails, they’re unpainted.

— Something we all have?

— Aye.

— Are you a virus?

They both look at him.

— No, okay. Are you a fungus? A rare tree fungus, like the devil’s cigar fungus in where was it — come on — where was it?

— Where was what? Constance says.

— It was a fungus, it was shaped like a star, they called it the devil’s cigar cos it starts off as a capsule and then it opens, and it was in some humid tropical forest somewhere. It was an interesting fungus!

— As opposed to those less interesting fungi?

— I saw it on that documentary where the guy got wasted with tribes and they’d always have some shamanistic intervention, where the whole village would put on a performance to draw out his demons so he could be spiritually free!

— He got exorcised? Stella asks.

— Aye, actually I know a great preacher in Peckham who will drive the devil from your soul for a tenner, he says.

— I know a few people who could use that trick, Constance laughs.

— Never mind that, you’ve taken too long, Tit-head, look — I’m a bogey!

— Stella!

— Tit is not a swear word.

— Yes, it is — swear jar!

They both say the latter bit in unison. Stella is like the wind outside and Constance is the fire. The wind is gentle, blowing lightly to brighten the flames, to stop the fire going out. Stella picks up the remote control and slumps on the sofa, and her bogey costume swells out like it’s got wire in it to make her a rounder, fatter, more luscious bogey, and she puts the telly onto a music station and taps her feet and chair-dances — she is a chair-dancing bogey and they say the word like it is a bow-gay — a bow-gay — if he was a gay he’d be a bow-gay, not just a guy who’s had a few blow-jobs here and there over the years, slept with an old friend when they were drunk one night. He is in fact far too stoned right now to go outside and meet everyone else from this caravan park and his hands still keep twitching to clean a projector, stack reels, click on lights, take tickets, go back to his booth and switch the running time to On! Camera, action, soundtrack, titles!

Stella studies him, her eyeballs jiggle slightly.

— You make a majestic bogey, he says.

— Truth ( she nods ) truth, truth, truth.

SHE COMES dressed as a wolf. Through the bonfire he gets glimpses of her as she steps over the back of somebody’s fence. She has a wolf’s head and tail and she moves like a wolf. Constance’s eyes flash as a firework arcs up into the sky and cracks open into a waterfall of green and pink. She holds her girl’s hand and they move like one person — each a part of the other. All the trees are bowing to the left and nobody else seems concerned by the force of the wind.

— My name is Barnacle, we haven’t met.

— Dylan, pleased to meet you.

The man offers a soft paw. His back is curved and he is bent over so far he can only look up at Dylan with quick glances. The smell of grass and wood-smoke is strong. It is so cold it burns when he breathes. The mountains are dark and craggy and through the flames he can imagine people up there, naked fire-children, leaping around, half-human, half-stag, fornicating pagans offering up blood to their gods. He is getting lots of looks, standing here in his Chelsea boots and his deerstalker. He always was too tall to hide in a crowd.

— Are you a giant?

A kid runs by him, sniggers to his friend. Dylan resists an urge to knock the little shite’s clown-hat right off.

— Little bastards, can’t fucking stand them, Barnacle says, looking at the kids running off.