Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

— They say three suns in the sky heralds the start of a great storm.

— Judging by the snowfall, they’re right on cue, Dylan says.

Her mum brings down the axe again, cracking into a log where it juts out at an angle. There is snow everywhere. Piles and piles and piles of it. Smooth valleys up on the mountains that sparkle, totally untouched by anything. Constance unfolds a blue tarpaulin and fixes it over the stack of firewood to try and keep it dry. Dylan shields his eyes and stands on the other side of Stella, scanning the landscape. The seven sisters radiate! He looks up at the suns again.

— They call them sun dogs, he says.

— Why?

— I don’t know.

— I met someone once who told me you can drink energy from the sun, store it in your cells so you grow strong. She said we should all do it. It’s like a back-up store of it in our cells; she said there were sunlight pilgrims doing it all the time — it’s how they get through the dark, by stashing up as much light as they can, Stella says.

Dylan turns to look at her.

— Who told you that?

— Just some woman I saw in the caravan park.

— My gran said those words, pretty much exactly like that, he says.

— Did she?

The two of them stare at each other and Stella notices for the first time that the shape of Dylan’s eyes is exactly like Alistair’s, and her heartbeat skips a little and picks up and she digs the toe of her boot into a pile of snow. Somewhere far away she can hear the motorway hum and she tries to imagine it is the sound of waves like the seashore at Fort Hope, and they need to go down there soon, to hear the boats click-clack at night and ask the fishermen when this iceberg is going to appear.

— Gunn told me there was an island close to Norway, but still part of the archipelago, that was home to a bunch of monks they called the sunlight pilgrims. All they had to eat was gannets and one year they all went mad, threw themselves off the cliffs, about seventy of them. Nobody knows what did it, but they were totally isolated from the mainland and they had one boat but they couldn’t go for help until spring. They all died apart from one. They found him on the mountaintop naked, sitting in lotus, drinking light — orange to grey. That’s how he said it. He said you just drink it. He said it keeps humans right. Guy claimed he hadn’t eaten for weeks and the devil had taken his brothers, but he was okay, he said he got everything he needed from the sun. Apparently all the bones of the monks are still there on the island, Dylan says.

— I’d like to go there, Stella says.

— Which island is it? Constance asks.

— I don’t know. It’s not on the map, though; you can only get out there from spring to summer, because the sea is too rough the rest of the time. Fishermen say it moves too, sometimes it’s there, other times it’s not, that’s how Gunn told it.

— They should have had a nuclear larder, Constance says.

— We have enough food in our apocalypse larder to be able to live solely off tins and rice and pasta for about what: six months, Mum?

— You won’t be taking the piss when you don’t have to eat gannets, Stella.

— It would be seagulls here, and deer.

Stella takes out her mobile and snaps a picture of the suns. She touches a tiny bit of soft down at the corner of her mouth. It’s how a duckling’s belly might feel. Smooth and silky but it won’t stay like that. It wasn’t there a month ago. Her voice is sending her odd notes. Her body is becoming a strange instrument. Her normal tone rises and dips and falls a little and nobody else has noticed yet, but any day now a tiny man is going to set up a loudspeaker in her throat and his voice will make declarations in a baritone and everyone will think it is her speaking, but it won’t be. She will have to become a mute. She will carry pictures around of what she needs and point to things, or get a download where she can type words and a sexy girl-robot voice reads it all out for her. She can get the sexy girl-robot voice to say things like arse and armpit and she will call her robot the sunlight pilgrim too. She didn’t think getting hair on her face or her voice changing would freak her out so deeply, but she feels like sprinting away from herself. She’s just a girl who might grow a boy’s face and voice, then every time she looks in the mirror who she is and who she sees won’t even vaguely match — like if a big man took over her mum’s body and started marching her around.

It’s claustrophobic even thinking about it, and all around them winter is looking for victims and everyone is getting crazy. The darkness comes hunting an hour after lunchtime and by 3 p.m. they are plunged into twelve hours of night.

— Have you set up your gin-still? Constance asks.

— Doing it today, I’ll bring you a bottle for Christmas.

— What are you going to call your gin?

— Dylan’s Gin? he suggests.

— That’s shit, she says.

— Call it Procrastinator’s Idle, Stella mutters.

— What’s in the new recipe? Constance asks.

— That would be telling!

The two of them are irritating the shit out of her. They’re avoiding the issue. Even she knows it’s clearly going to end with sex. Stella is not going to do that until she is at least eighteen and probably older, and she doesn’t even know how it will work. She keeps trying to work it out. She’s watched the porn but that’s not real life and she can’t get her head around anything other than kissing and holding hands, and if she thinks of anything more she begins to panic. Really, really panic so bad that her skin gets clammy; she really doesn’t have the first clue what to do. She knows she only likes boys. That’s all she knows. Stella isn’t going to drink or smoke weed or do anything to stop her brain being as sharp and switched on as it can possibly be. She feels like there will be a day when she needs her wits even more than now.

The three suns rise higher in the sky.

Caravan doors open.

Neighbours come out onto their porches.

Birds on the mountains are calling. Hundreds of them lifting up as one. They swoop over the valley, the whites of their tummies flashing in the sun, and nobody speaks as the suns reach their highest point. The seven sisters’ white snow-covered peaks turn yellow and colour fills the entire valley — it runs across forests, growing deeper in shade; it highlights a train track that curves out from the trees and the old Fort Hope Railway steam train motoring down the hill; smoke billows up, whitehouses turn yellow, dotted along the farmland, waterfalls glitter and even the scarecrows are momentarily cast in gold.

— There are no cows out, Stella says.

— They’ve been in the shed for weeks, Stella. They found two calfs frozen on the top field.

— To death?

— Yes! The farmer has taken four deer out of the forest like that already, too. I have no idea where the sheep are — they might have been taken over to Fort Hope to go into pens for the winter.

— It’s deadly out there just now, Dylan says.

— Beautiful, though, Constance nods.

Stella has four layers on, thermal long-johns from head to toe, then leggings and a thin polo-neck, then a jumper and fleecy-lined waterproofs, then a jacket and her hat.

Everything settles.

Her heart.

Cells.

Breathing it in, feeling the sun on her face despite it being the coldest it has ever been in Clachan Fells. For the tiniest second the parhelia send light all the way down inside her — where even the wild things won’t go.

Right down there in the darkest cells. Tiny dots of light!

Like little lanterns inside her veins.

Or glow-worms curling up to sleep. In the most secret part of her — a place where she will go and sip tea one day — and to get there she’ll have to go through the darkest parts of herself — between the pulsing aorta with its rivers of blood — to her heart, where there is a tiny little door to for ever.