Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

Constance won’t ever marry him really, but he’ll propose each morning over coffee all the same, twice on Sundays, once at Easter. He’ll have to tell them about the sketchbook and the news, but not today. He might wrestle Alistair to impress her. He could wrestle that grey-haired fox right into fucking oblivion!

He stares at the mountains.

This place is nothing like even his most beloved or favourite open space in London — it’s not a park with brightly coloured parakeets screeching in the treetops all summer, flying in twos and threes and sometimes in packs of ten or twenty — or Soho, where he would go to see a single heron — something about seeing that single heron standing in a park in the middle of the city, it always did astound him. He goes back inside and puts his coat on. He needs a Twix. It is imperative. He marches through the snow to the site office, stoating a little to the left the whole time. And a Pot Noodle. How many years is it since he ate a Pot Noooodle? Nobody is out. Since it hit minus twenty, nobody comes outside much at all. Dylan goes into the big barn store that’s also the site manager’s office. The storeroom is made of corrugated sheets of iron. It has a tractor casually parked in the corner. He loves that. Excuse me, you at the crisps, while I drive behind you and casually park my great-big-fuck-off-tractor! Steel shelves are fixed all the way up to the roof. How has it come to be that his mother — a woman who loathed grass and flowers and all things natural and earthly — has become just a dirty grey smudge in a ratty garden, while he is in a cowshed in the middle of fuck knows where, looking at copies of Hustler on the top, top shelf? He wonders for a minute if his mother was always so sad because she knew? Something in her knew what her mother had gone through to bring her into the world?

Fucking Hustler !

How many years has it been since anyone got their porn from magazines? It must be a niche market. He is tall enough that he can reach them without moving along the ladder that sits at the front of the rails. Height has its advantages — peeeeple. It has its GAINS! He can’t imagine this set-up passing for health-and-safety anywhere: customers climbing a ladder for a tin of macaroni cheese or a copy of Asian Babes ?

Who still buys porn on the page?

The site manager sits at the till, smoking a cigarette. She taps things into an old computer keyboard in front of a bulky PC screen. She clicks on a kettle beside her and tips a sachet of Cup-a-Soup into it. She has a bulbous nose and she has absolutely no interest in him whatsoever. Dylan stops in front of a plastic container with curry-flavoured noodles and beside them there is a packet of fortune cookies, with a dragon on a shiny wrapper. Chinatown this is not! As a boy he used to walk past all those glistening ducks roasting in windows and smart young men sitting outside bars, and other men who wore lipstick and shops that sold dirty books and women that looked like plastic dolls, but he still thought they were pretty. One of the guys on their street took him into his first dirty movie when he was seventeen. All these guys sat around in this cinema wanking. He let the guy he was with stick his hand down his trousers. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t amazing. He was almost legal. It was something to try.

Dylan walks along an aisle stacked with microwave meals.

There are spare plugs for sinks.

Tins, tins, tins.

Ida waddles by the big open door and she must have a client in today because she has her schoolgirl shirt open, her gargantuan tits spilling out, a school skirt on and long white socks, gym shoes; her hair is tied up in bunches. Over all of that she has a fur coat draped around her shoulders. He watches her for a good long minute. She must have got out of a client’s car and is just about to go into her house and jump in a hot shower. Dylan grabs the first Hustler at the top and two packets of bacon and (it looks like a large old pickle jar) what claims to be cloudy cider. The bottles of cloudy cider come in three strengths: mellow, biting, blows-your-brains-out. He reaches out and grabs two Twixes as well. The woman rings up his purchases and has the decorum not to look at him while he waits for his change. He strides back up the park. The snow is so high that all the gnomes he saw on his first night here are now faint hillocky bumps in people’s gardens. Constance appears behind him, trudging through the snow in her big welly boots trying to keep up. She is wearing her wolf-cape and her ears and nose glow in the moonlight.

— Don’t comment. It keeps me warmer than any of the hats!

Dylan turns round and looks at her, with snow all around so cold he can smell it, and street lights glow orange on the path and those mountains behind them climb up into the black sky, so there is no knowing where rock ends and sky begins until the stars come out. This is the wrong time to have a hard-on and want to take Constance to bed. He doesn’t want to speak. He is done with talking. There is an older one and a younger one, but right now there is just her and him and that is how it is. He is glad the Hustler is tucked at the back of his bag. They’re not at that stage yet. If they get to the porn stage they’ll use a laptop. All he needs right now is her. He takes her hand and they walk up onto Ash Lane. She grips his hand back as he walks up to his door, getting more sober by the minute — a perk of being a giant: can get pissed and unpissed if you don’t go too far down the bottle. He avoids looking toward the grey patches of snow — he turns the key and they fall into the hallway.

The door flies shut behind them, caught by the wind. It howls over the caravan roof while she shrugs off the wolf-cape and slips it over the back of a chair in his lounge. She pulls off her boots, taking two steps down the hall as he pulls his jumper off — his hands are freezing on her skin, sliding under her top, finding her nipples, her breath ragged; she undoes his belt buckle — shoves him hard onto the bed and a bite as she wriggles out of her jeans, pulling him onto her, and she’s wet so he pushes straight in. She grips her knees into a lock around him, taking him in deeper, until they are just tongues and sweat, and pushing and pulling and biting and tasting and touching and holding and getting tired and slowing down and starting again and forgetting that there is anything outside this bed.

Afterwards they lie in the dark not talking.

She traces his arm lightly.

A bed as an altar. A bed as respite. A bed that smells of sex. Sex is better than prayer, better than talking. They’ve said everything they need to now. He kisses her neck and it is cold and she smells like snow.

THEY LIE in the dark for hours. At one point he goes and pours them each a glass of wine. She smokes a cigarette. The duvet only reaches round under her arms and so he puts on the little portable three-bar fire and it glows in the corner and smells like chemicals.

— Would Vivienne have found this funny?

— Not in the fucking slightest.

— I suppose not.

— I’m just glad it’s not Gunn; she had a weird enough death and life, it turns out, and he shakes his head.

— You didn’t mention that before?

Her skin is alabaster in the dim light. Her fingers are long and with rough calluses where she has been chopping wood and smoothing down furniture and building things. Just to hold hands. Such a simple easy thing. To lie like this. Let the snow fall out there. There is an ordinariness to their strange. Like they could outlast a lot more than this first bit.

— Devil’s snare — it’s a fatal hallucinogen. They call it other things as well: the angel’s trumpet, jimson weed. Devil’s snare creates an agonising trip that never ends if you take too much, which is exceptionally easy to do, apparently.