Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

— Stella?

— What?

Constance has put boots on and a polo-neck and the steam from her mug of tea is misting up her reading glasses.

— We need to go to the doctor’s this afternoon at four p.m., okay? she says.

Her mother puts down her mug and carries a large bag of grit over to Barnacle’s step. She tips it up and moves from left to right to distribute it evenly down his steps and all the way along the path to the car-park end and she does the same on the way back. She knocks on his door and he opens it and they nod and talk and laugh. Barnacle pats her mum on the arm and he points up at the mountain and she looks sad. Stella fixes her hat and her gloves, and checks that her phone is charged up enough — she has 60 per cent; it will do until she gets back. There is a haze in the upper part of the mountain and the trees along the bottom hills are mere outlines of white. Stella walks down the path with her bike and there is just the crunch of her boots, cold air on her face and her nose red and her breath unfurling like a spectre.

— Morning, Barnacle.

— Morning, young Stella.

— I’m going out now, Mum.

— You need to be back for three, okay?

— It’s not even ten yet.

— You won’t get far in this anyway. Why don’t you just walk?

— I’ll come back if I get stuck.

Stella stamps on the ground and her boots make footprints in the solid snow.

— They say the aurora is coming, young Stella, and that great big bloody iceberg has been seen as close as Tanby Island now — it’s definitely floating this way! Good morning, Dylan, Barnacle says across the path.

— Morning, Constance, Barnacle, Stella. The sun gods are hanging on a wee bit longer!

— Three suns! Barnacle whistles.

— See youz!

Stella hops on her bike and the pirate flag on the back flaps along. It’s best to stick between the tyre treads in the snow, which are flatter and more densely packed. She has to go slowly so as not to skid. Her iPhone has enough charge to take pictures. She has her journal. She has a new hat that her mum knitted, which has big mohawk spikes in multi-colours on the top, and she has a hood like an Eskimo child. Her fur-lined boots are waterproof with spiked soles. She grips the handlebars so hard her knuckles hurt under her gloves and she turns up her iPhone to full volume, and the gloves are so thick she has to jab at the screen until a death-metal track comes on full blast. She picks up speed. Faster. Faster. She pedals harder. Air stings her few inches of bare skin, so it is colder than ice-floes on the North Sea — or even right at the bottom of the ocean where the skeletons hold hands or do the jitterbug or bang their fists on a whole roof of ice forming overhead.

STELLA PEDALS faster, down the back of garages; she steers the bike between wide tractor treads and the back of her legs begin to ache even though she is strong and too muscular. The girls changing in the gym watched her from the other side of the room the first time she went in, and one of the nuns was sitting there as well, just because Stella was there. They took her into a meeting in school and she had to say in advance that she wasn’t a lesbian, or they wouldn’t have let her even try to use the girls’ changing room. They asked her if she was still a Christian. She explained that her family are not religious. They asked her what she knew of damnation. She asked them what they knew of autonomy. They asked her how she knew that word. She asked if they had met her mother. They said they would pray for her. She said it was not necessary. They asked if she might feel different in a few months, or if perhaps she should simply change for gym in the janitor’s cupboard. She said she’d felt like this her whole life and no amount of praying was going to change it and she could use the janitor’s cupboard to change, but she was a person, not a broom. They said she needed to find Jesus. She asked if that was like finding Wally? Only one nun knew what she meant. That little drawing in those old comic strips her mum had, when you look for the dweeby guy in the stripy hat. It took nearly a year for the nuns to let her use the girls’ changing room — so many meetings, all to put on white shorts and a white T-shirt and girls’ gym shoes instead of the boys’ blue ones. Eventually her mother said she was taking her out of school because the boys were all making Stella so self-conscious in their changing room when she took her shirt off and revealed her bra top. Her face burns even to think of Lewis and all the other boys mocking her — them sniggering, grabbing their crotches like rappers on bad videos, a horrible dark air that crept into her life that morning. Stella can’t even explain how much she has dreaded gym class after that. It’s worth going through an Ice Age just to not have to do that again. She could lie down in the snow like an angel and wait for winter to take her home.

At one of the meetings the Mother Superior asked her mother why her father wasn’t there. Constance said he was with his wife, and she could bring her other boyfriend in if it helped any? Stella sat and felt like she was making an inconvenient fuss about nothing. Just like they wanted her to feel. Constance was furious with the nuns. It wasn’t that Stella ever wanted to make anyone feel weird by being herself, but they did and ever since it has felt in school like every move she makes is exaggerated and observed and judged. It’s like judging others is the absolute favourite occupation for some people in this life. Always to find the other person short on something. Just for kicks. Like how she is muscular from chopping wood since she was seven. She should be embarrassed but she’s not. She wants to get some of the girls at school in a headlock sometimes — with their noses and their little mouths and their sports bras and all so lofty, yet not one of them can swing an axe. Stella can swing an axe on just the right side of freedom. That’s the key to swinging an axe. Hold it with a lightness — then let it drop — so the axe does the work for you — This is the best way to hold it; no, like this — and her mother in the back garden showing her how to split logs, then split them again. Her mum could cut logs in her sleep, she has cut logs in her sleep. Every year at school they have an extracurricular skills day. Stella is daring herself for the next one. Simply go up to the blackboard and explain that we are all born female. That every man has a penis that started out as a vagina. Sketch it out. Hand out a spreadsheet for the non-believers. Probably she won’t. Instead she could draw a diagram explaining that when logs are smaller, they don’t need to be so hot to burn. Best not take an axe into school, though.

Or she should go and see Alistair and ask him for something dead to go and skin in front of everyone, to show them where a brain is and a heart is and that a body is just a body and if it is dead the soul is gone, nothing more to know about it until you’re a spook — skulking around the living, hoping they will give you a smile. Touching them up in their bed at night. Hiding their keys. She could ask Alistair to take the body apart for her and ask him exactly why he has a problem with her being a female, when he clearly has devoted his adult life to having as many wives and girlfriends as he can manage? It was good to hang out with him, just once, or twice. She hates to even admit it. A few years ago Alistair showed her how to drain all the fluids out and take out the organs — why do you take out the organs? — and her mum pointing out odd things in jars then — eyeballs, hearts — showing her exactly how a heart works and this is the main aorta, the heart valve, and this is where blood comes in to feed it with oxygen , and our hearts not that different from squirrel hearts or our guts — not so different from hedgehog guts, and our brains not so different from eagles’. She found a hedgehog dead in the caravan park once — so dead and sad — its guts trailed around the caravan park for miles. Then he met his third wife. He married her in the same registry office where he wed the second one, but he didn’t tell her that until later.