Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

— What’s the fucking deal with this bollocks!

The roaring and shaking his fist and stamping his feet doesn’t help, so he stands on it and the Tupperware lid clicks. He gets a bit of gaffer tape and wraps it around just to make sure. He picks them up. What if he forgets which one is which? He could text himself a note: Grandma’s in the ice-cream tub, Mum’s in the sandwich box. Instead he rummages around until he finds a roll of stickers and uses a ballpoint to scrawl Gunn on one, then Vivienne with a smiley face on another. Sometimes he has no idea how he made it to thirty-eight. He is always running late, for a start, as if time is the main problem in his life. It seems pretty much all the things people are supposed to have done by his age have passed him by, while he did nothing but develop an encyclopaedic knowledge of obscure cinema and the rudimentary skills of distilling gin.

That was fine when he was helping to keep the family business afloat.

It’s unlikely to impress the job centre.

Dylan places the containers side-by-side. They fit neatly into the suitcase now — it’s not the most elegant way to take his mum and grandma back to their homeland but it will do the job. He places a photograph of Gunn, Vivienne and himself as a baby on top and clicks the suitcase shut. Dylan reassures himself that this must be the worst hangover he has ever had in his life and his brain will return to optimum (average) functioning by tomorrow, or the day after at a push. He has at least twelve hours to be vacant on the mega-bus journey. That thought is soothing. Although the megabus is no doubt a shit-fest of body odour and claustrophobia and every bit of public transport is overcrowded with people panicking, but not so many will be going north like him. There is a hard knot of muscle in his shoulder. He looks for a piece of A4 paper but there isn’t any in the printer, so he grabs a flyer: Les Français vus par (The French As Seen By), 13 minutes long, W. Herzog . He writes carefully on the back and takes it out to place in the Upcoming Screenings sign; the bailiffs won’t cover that up with metal boards:

On behalf of Gunn and Vivienne MacRae, I want to say a huge thank you to all of our faithful customers — it was my family’s privilege to shine a light in the dark here for over sixty years and there is nothing we would rather have done. Running such an extraordinary cinema would not have been possible without all of you. Babylon was our family business but it was also our home. May the film reels (somewhere, for all of us) play on!

With Gratitude ,

Dylan MacRae

Lights flash outside the peep-show next door. He puts his hand on the glass foyer door and steps back into the dim. Dylan has an image of his mother in his head — she is sitting in the front row wearing a miner’s hat with a lamp on the front, reading in a circle of light but keeping the darkness always close enough to touch. They keep playing. These little film reels in his brain. He wants to go upstairs and find her jumper and put it on, so he can smell her and sit down in the front row and drink all the gin left in the cellar, but he’s sure that would be a bit Bundy or some other random psychopath who had issues with their mother. He has no issues, he just misses them both more than he can take. He picks up the deeds for the caravan, the address, his bus ticket. He grabs her suitcase and pulls the old Exit door closed behind him.

It is so cold on the city streets that his skin stings and reddens; he needs to buy warmer clothes, some kind of winter boots. His throat is so tight and constricted it is hard to swallow. He checks his watch and there is still over an hour before the bus leaves, so he heads for the river — he wants to see it before he goes. Red lights flash on and off, lighting up the pavement as he walks away from Babylon. He wants to turn around, but for the very first time in his life there is absolutely nowhere to go back to. With each step forward the road behind him disappears. That’s what it feels like. Just one step back and it would be an endless plummet. His shoes click on the wet pavement. His breath curls on the air. He is going to go along by the river even though it takes longer because for once in his life he has left with time to spare. Ornate lamp posts with wrought-iron fish at the bottom of them sparkle with frost. It is way too early in the year for it to be as Baltic as this, they’ve only just hit November. He cannot remember it ever being this bad and they are saying this is barely the beginning. He turns onto the main street, then heads along by the river toward Victoria. Bridges are lit all the way along the Thames and four naval ships sluice through black water. He runs down steps and stands at the edge of the water. He holds the key to Babylon out and drops it into the river. Somewhere nearby a busker plays the trombone and he walks quickly back into the city and he doesn’t stop until he emerges up into Victoria: news-stands are covered in headlines: Maunder Minimum / European Financial Collapse / Ice Age / Gunman at London Zoo / The Big Chill — a group of drunk hens queue to top up their Oyster cards and they shiver, barely dressed. Dylan heads through the forecourt and out to the bus station; he boards his coach as the doors hiss closed. He sidles along the aisle, stooping as low as he can to avoid banging his head and shoulders on the bus ceiling. It is hot. Damp. Smelly. Passengers swerve out of his way. A little boy stares at him, quite clearly afraid. Dylan is grateful to spy two empty seats at the back; he takes the aisle seat so he can at least stretch his legs out. The door to the toilet cubicle behind him has a red Engaged sign and there is a sound of vomiting, and in between retching a man repeats the same two words.

— I die, I die, I die!

It appears to be the only words of English he knows. Dylan shrugs off his coat and puts it in the overhead storage space, glad that it is warm in here. The bus speeds up — it whirrs along, ribbons of light blur past the window: hundreds of cars, snitches-of-snatches; fat arms wearing gold bracelets; a jeep blares its horn; a woman smears on lipstick; her dog barks at the back window; four soldiers nod their heads to music. All these people on the move in a strange corporeality. A man appears in front of Dylan and he has to stand, let him into the window seat, settle himself back down. There is an unwelcome particularity to the man’s odour (camphor, stale sweat, cheap deodorant) as he rummages around and finds a giant bag of Thai chilli crisps. He offers one to Dylan.

A shake of the head.

— Did you see the news today, mate? Crisp-Man asks.

— Economic collapse?

— Nah.

— Gunman at London zoo?

— Not that one.

— Sinkholes?

— Nope, though one opened up in Yarmouth yesterday.

— Did someone finally take out a contract on all the paedos in Parliament?

— No, it’s an idea though, innit?

— Was it a video of a tiny baby horse? Seriously cute? I saw that one, it was amazing!

— Are you taking the piss?

Dylan grins, oddly cheery now he is on the road and going somewhere new.

— It’s only a bloody Ice Age, mate, that’s the front-page news today!

— Yeah, I did see that, Dylan nods.

Crisp-Man glances behind them, then leans in toward him and lowers his voice. He uses a crisp to punctuate each point and his nose has two lumps where it’s been broken.

— The earth strikes back!

— The Empire Strikes Back?

— No, the fucking empire has always struck back, now it’s the earth’s go. It’s had enough of our bullshit, we’re broken. All the way down to the bone. If human bones were rock, that’s what it would say right through the middle — broke-as-fuck-idiot-cunts-exterminate-exterminate. Only civilised thing we can do is nuke ourselves.