Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

Dylan laughs.

— Stella’s not a bad kid, she’s starting a new political party, Dylan says.

— That girl is a diamond. What are her policies then?

— That every human vows to sign a contract as a temporary caretaker of the planet in their own lifetime, and the war against women ends.

— Well, that’s never going to fucking happen, is it? She’s as much chance of that as I do of walking upright again, Barnacle scorns.

— What would you put in place then?

— Free alcohol, he says.

— Interesting.

— Free prostitutes as well.

— I see. So, who will pay them, if they’re free?

— I didn’t think of that. Perhaps they could put it on our taxes; spend less on second homes for total cunts? Or maybe the women could just work for free?

— That’s called slavery.

— Yes, yes, of course, quite right. Well, we could take all the idiots and put them on another planet. Best place for them. Of course you might think I am one of those idiots, and I am, but we are all raised in madness. The people in control have police and armies with guns and tanks, all of them trained to kill or to imprison, to restrain, to caution, to make sure what the ruling parties say goes. But we’re free, right? Free to get shafted so far up the fucking arse we all just hobble our way to the shitting grave! That’s how fucking free we are.

The flames on the bonfire leap this way and that; people’s faces change in the firelight, they look happy one minute and sad the next. Kids race around the fire with sparklers.

— Have you been to the industrial park yet, Dylan?

— Not yet.

— There’s an Ikea there, lots of fast-food places, DIY stores. You will find everything you could possibly never need over there. Giant fold-out swimming pools, dubiously named paint, dogs, budgies, Japanese cars.

Barnacle glances up at him and taps his long feet. His one concession to fancy dress is a plastic Alice-band with two long prongs and lights on the end that flash different colours.

— Did you know the woman who owns your caravan, Dylan?

— My mother, Vivienne.

— Really? She was a looker — striking woman. We had a few gins one night, it was home-made stuff with wild water mint, fucking marvellous stuff.

— My Grandma Gunn’s home-brew.

— You should get the recipe for that, I’d buy it!

Gunn — distilling in their cellar. Bottles and a brass gin-still and selling it to the fancy hotel up the road for their cocktails. It is not a bad idea. He has been without a daily job for such a short time but it’s already making him feel weird. The still will arrive any day now.

— I offered your mother a glass of water once, she said she couldn’t possibly drink the stuff; when I asked her why, she said Fish fuck in it, darling!

They both laugh so loudly people look over — Barnacle stooped in his C-shape and Dylan with his head and shoulders above everyone else. Barnacle aims to slap Dylan on the back, but gets his arse instead and that sets the two of them off again. Dylan smiles over at Stella, who has stopped for a minute to watch them in mock-horror from the other side of the bonfire.

— He’s a good kid, Barnacle says.

— She’s a good kid.

— That’s what I said.

Dylan doesn’t say anything for a minute.

— Constance is a looker, isn’t she? She doesn’t take any shit. I pity the kid that picks on Stella, they’ll wake up to find their balls hanging from her Christmas tree. Your mother rented the caravan out to a woman called Ethel for a while, an ex-of-mine. She was an unusual woman, Ethel, like a rare, infertile peduncle. Quite unkissable, except in the right light. I knew her when she was younger. I had a Saab 900 and I’d drive back along the farm roads and there she’d be, and she was quite wonderful to look at then; and, well, something happened much more recently with her, not long before she left for a home actually. It quite freaked me out. She turned up at my caravan in the middle of the night — I never lock the door, you see — and I found her in the living room in her nightie with her pale, hairy legs quite on display, you know. I could see … all of heaven.

— Awkward!

— The bark, though. Where did it come from? Shameful. Barking at her. Bark, bark, bark. She scurried back over to her caravan and all her cats spilled out, to rub up and down her legs, and she slammed her door. I was furious with myself. I should have just lain down with her; should have held her and touched her cheek, and pushed her hair back off her face and told her she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen — should have tried to make her feel light and wanted and free, but I didn’t. She freaked-me-the-fuck-out and I barked at her like a rabid beast.

— I’m sure she understood.

— She didn’t. Not one bit.

— Do you know if the ferry at Fort Harbour goes as far as Orkney?

— You might need to take two ferries and a little plane. Not in these winds, though.

— I want to take my mother’s and grandmother’s ashes there.

— They are both gone? Dear boy, I am sorry. Did you know the women on the islands used to prepare the bodies of the dead? Aunts, sisters, mothers: they’d sing songs while they bathed their husbands or sons one last time — sing them right through to the Other Side. They had all kinds of great rituals. Like tipping the chairs over once the coffin was lifted, so the spirit of the dead couldn’t sit down, or throwing the windows open as soon as someone died, so their soul could leave, but snapping it shut again quickly in case they tried to get back in. They don’t do any of that now, as far as I know. You should take them both back up there for sure, young Dylan. What’s your family name?

— MacRae.

— Time to burn the guy! Ida shouts.

The guy has been made out of a one-armed mannequin with a Girls’ World head and a ginger afro; someone has made up the face with bright-blue eyeshadow and red lipstick and it is wearing a shell-suit.

— I can’t even remember how many years it is since I saw someone wearing a shell-suit, Dylan nods at the guy.

Barnacle stares up at it intently as it blows up in flames.

— Highly flammable, shell-suits, he says.

— I think that is why they dressed the guy in it.

— I once met an ex-girlfriend’s family who’d come up from some godforsaken shithole down south and we had to go into town and meet them. They drove up in a minibus and when I got there, they all got out, wearing matching shell-suits!

Dylan starts laughing.

— Matching?

— Identical and there was about fourteen of them — we had to take them all over the city like that. Absolutely mortified I was! Barnacle shakes his head.

Kids run around in the park with their faces bright in the firelight. Someone has set up a barbecue on the other side of the park and the smell of hamburgers wafts across the green and then sparklers — a burnt metal smell; it takes him back to being a kid and writing his name on a backdrop of night. The thrill of being able to make words and pictures on a black sky. She is on the other side of the fire. The light catches her eyes. Constance Fairbairn is a perfect wolf. The sky is clear. Two planets are outlined in a faint red. Barnacle turns his neck and looks up and the lights on the end of his Alice-band jiggle.

— Look, there’s Orion. Little Bear and Big Bear; that is the Plough, Jupiter and her moons. Outstanding! I have a telescope but you don’t need it here very often.

Barnacle points out constellations above them, without looking up. A star shoots straight across the sky. Constance circles around the other side of the fire. Her wolf-tail flicks behind her and Stella runs after a dalek and a clown. The kids are intimidating spirits — come to roar at the firelight, come to stamp their feet and gnash their teeth. More than a glint of red in each of their eyes. They race around in between dancers who are all variations of strange, and wholly unconcerned by it. A man pulls his wife in close to him, she has long red hair and he runs his hand down her side. The young satanist and his girlfriend stand at the edge of the fire; she is wearing contact lenses that make her eyes violet. He has a cat on a lead.