Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

— What was with the nose-flick? she asks.

— I’m really … I don’t know.

— You’ll be Stella’s hero for ever now. Her smile flashes for a second and is gone.

— We’ll find her. Stella knows Clachan Fells better than anyone.

He gets a shot of fear that Stella’s seen the sketchbook.

— The boys at the village hall drew a picture of Stella last month and she looked all girly, except for a pair of scissors in her hand and a dick cut off. It was at her feet, like she has to get a sex change to be a girl or she has to get it cut off, or even that they are thinking about that!

— Do you want me to go round to their houses?

— And what: flick their noses?

— Seriously, I will.

— No, I just thought they were nicer kids than that.

— It was only one who drew it?

— It was only one who drew the bit where she was … cut. If one of them hurt her like that, I swear to God I would track them down and kill them with my bare hands, each and every fucking one, no hesitation at all!

He looks at her.

— You might be better trying a good nose-flick, he suggests.

Constance stands with her hand on the axe, unsmiling.

— We’ll drop off this wardrobe, so I can get some cash, and come back round the other side of the mountain. She was on the farm road, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s headed for the lower forest, or she’ll be on the middle sister, sheltering there.

— The what?

— We call Clachan Fells mountains the ‘seven sisters’ — did nobody tell you that yet?

Constance pulls the edge of the tarpaulin and a pile of snow slides off onto the ground and she glances over at the caravan, wrinkles her nose.

— She’ll be fine.

— It doesn’t always work out like that, though, does it? I’ve been on the trans websites. I’ve seen the stats. Anyway, if more of this kind of weather comes down, we’ll end up snowed in for months. It sounds bad but at least I’d know she’s safe for a while, have time to work things out. Or if it gets worse than that, if it doesn’t even stop snowing — you know, if the temperature just keeps dropping.

She’s brittle. Moving quickly in front of him. Not meeting his eyes.

— This wardrobe is going to a farmhouse near Fort Harbour. They’ve bought loads of stuff from me and she wants this to put in her new garage extension. They’ve built a wee flat above their garage, which is easily bigger than both of our places put together.

For some reason this highly unfunny truth has them snorting and giggling and avoiding each other’s eyes even more and there is a lightness now as they move around one other. Constance lifts her side of the wardrobe and he takes the other end. It’s heavy, but they walk down the path with it and slide it into the back of the ambulance. She lies the wardrobe on top of an old duvet and throws some covers over the top, then uses climbing hooks to secure the rope holding it in place. Dylan climbs into her ambulance and there’s a hole in the floor right through to the ground. It smells of paint in here, and oil, and her — which is a clean thing like unscented soap and hair that has the faintest tinge of wood-smoke. The passenger seat is inches lower than it should be because it’s obviously been pulled out of some other car.

— She’s still not answered my texts. I fucking told her not to go out!

She turns the key and pushes the clutch. The engine catches and she drives slowly. She ceaselessly scans the landscape. He touches her hand for a fraction of a second and the silence between them deepens. They are complicit. Pretending, like neither of them notices. They drive past the industrial site and a Japanese car showroom where there is some event on, people drinking wine in the brightly lit display room, and metallic red and blue balloons filled with helium are beginning to droop under the falling snow outside. They drive past the industrial estate and round a big roundabout and up a hill toward the other side of the village. She switches on the radio.

— I mean, I don’t have a problem with people eating meat, but what I do have a problem with is them telling us it’s pig when it is potentially another animal or something genetically modified or even worse — what else are they putting into the food chain now? There were even rumours of — [Bleep. Cough.]

— Listeners, we lost Jane from Milton Keynes, but let me ask: are you feeling the pinch, are you able to afford groceries? How are you going to get by this winter? We’re expecting whole communities, whole cities in fact, to be snowed in. In Yorkshire there have been ploughs out, trying to get cars out of traffic jams, and in Aberdeen one man drove around in a snowstorm for nearly two days. Angus, a residential careworker from Scotland who said he got so lost, he had no satnav, no phone. People: you have to be safe out there; take satnav, take phones, make sure they are charged, have supplies in your car, prepare your homes for the greatest snow we are ever going to see in Britain. Keep sending in your photos of snowmen. We love them. We’ve put them up on the website, and will announce a competition winner for the best snowman of the 2020 deep freeze at the end of this week. Please do phone into VfR.556 and let us know how you’re getting along out there. We’re turning up the heating and getting our thickest socks on: now there’s an image for you listeners! This is Nico’s classic radio bringing you the news from around Britain.

— Sounds like we’ll have to resort to Stella’s plan soon, Constance says.

— What’s that?

— Drinking light.

You’d be the last monk on the island, Constance! You’d be shooting down gannets with a home-made bow and arrow, taking solar shots with the foxes. You’d be a survivalist pilgrim.

She’s laughing then, that low timbre.

— There’s no telling Stella. She made me vow to become a sunlight pilgrim before I got out of bed this morning, and I was so hungover. My lips are still almost black!

— Where were you last night?

— I ended up at the miners’ club, drinking with Ida, then Alistair turned up. That’s why he is sniffing around here this morning.

— Are you back with him?

— Does it matter?

— It matters to Stella.

— I wasn’t asking that.

— Your lips are reddish-black.

— They’re normally about as pale as the rest of me, she says.

Constance leans over him to take a piece of cloth from the dashboard to wipe the window, and he has that drop kick in the aortal region as blood rushes to a hard-on. She rubs at the window and blasts the air conditioner and the engine dies. She pats the dashboard.

— Come on, you old relic — just one more trip.

Cars pull out around them and everyone is driving slowly today. The engine catches and Constance is elated and humming under her breath and they fly down the motorway with the ambulance roaring and clunking.

— I know how to butcher animals if we need to go hunting, he says.

— Or people?

— I don’t know why I said that.

— It might come to it: cannibalism for the last few survivors in the winter wilderness that is Clachan Fells. Who would you eat first? She grins.

— It wouldn’t be you, or Stella, he says.

— So sweet, and considerate.

— You’re both too skinny, he says.

— I’m not skinny — it’s sheer muscle on these legs, she says, slapping one.

Dylan resists asking her to do that again; he has to rein in his impulse control somewhere this afternoon, so he looks away from her upper thighs, slim under her jeans, and fixes his gaze out of the window.

— I learnt to butcher because Gunn had a sideline going for a while. Babylon is under the arches, where the railways used to run, and they all had these big storage cellars underneath. Anyway, I came home one day when I was twelve and found a few dead calves being rolled down the beer-hatch. It completely freaked me out. They were long-lashed things with unpliant lips and hooves clattering off stone, and she was hoisting them behind barrels of ale like it was the most ordinary thing to be doing. See here, Dylan, you insert the knife to the side of the windpipe with the back of the blade against the breastbone. Press toward the spine, three inches or so; now cut through the carotid arteries and watch out for the jugular veins. Now cut the hide around each foot, that’s it, then a long slit down the middle of each leg like this and a longer cut from tail to throat and then work through the membrane. Then you can peel the skin off in one go and let gravity help you. Come closer, Dylan, hold that shoulder. Now look, here’s the liver; this is the heart; follow the rump; cut with one motion !