Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

— I don’t fancy it, she says.

This is harder than he thought.

— After tripping about as far out as a person can, it creates a really, really long, slow, hideous painful death.

He’s pretty sure his skin is white and he flexes his knuckles, and this bedroom is too small for a giant, this whole caravan is. It’s kind of ridiculous, he’s going to start scouting around for disused barns or old wrecked bothies. Constance looks up at him and rests her hand on his chest.

— Vivienne?

— Gunn.

— Why did she take it?

— The story goes, I have since found, detailed in my mother’s sketchbook, she drew pictures and she has left these little notes and— He stops.

— You don’t need to say anything, she says.

— I know.

— I sat and had a few gins with Vivienne, one night, she says.

— Did she mention her sketchbook?

Constance appears to be studying the roof in his bedroom.

— I found out a few things, he says. The first was that Gunn arrived in Babylon seven months pregnant, after prising the keys to the place from a corpse’s fist — it was some aristocrat that owned it and he had a heart attack during a game of poker and, other than him being dead, she swore she won it fair and square. She didn’t really have to prise the keys because rigor mortis hadn’t set in, but it felt, you know — wrong. She went to a phone box and called someone for back-up in the islands who was working in the meat trade and he said it was best, under those circumstances, to get rid of the corpse. He picked it up in his van and took it to Dead Man’s Wharf, weighted it down, slid it in. Babylon had been used for orgies, politicians, underage kids — that’s what we heard much later, but she was earning a living from it by then. She brought her daughter up knowing how to run it by the time she was a teenager. Vivienne had me when she was seventeen and they taught me the business when I was a kid, but Gunn apparently said it was borrowed time. She said one day the devil would come to collect his dues and she’d take the consequences on herself. She’d take it so it didn’t get passed down to us, so she reckoned the worse it was, the more she’d know we were in the clear so to speak. The day she got ill, Vivienne swore blind the devil came to the back door and asked for Gunn.

— That’s fucked-up.

— I know; thing is, I think Gunn was expecting him.

— Why?

— She was religious really, she thought the devil was coming to collect his fee for her sins.

— Maybe they weren’t her sins?

Dylan looks at Constance and wonders for a minute if she knows about the family tree, about him and Alistair, that a whole community and family forced Gunn out and never spoke to her again and she hadn’t done anything wrong, so there had to be a reason for it.

— This was just six months ago? Constance asks.

— Aye. Gunn had convulsions for days, she was seeing things everywhere, under her skin, on the walls; all her organs shut down one by one — it was hideous and it was even worse, you know, because she was so lovely and hard-as-nails, and she always put me and Vivienne first.

— Did they do an autopsy?

— They said there was enough in her body to kill a very tall man, or ten. Then the night before my mother died, quite peacefully, in her sleep, she told me quite clearly at the kitchen table that she would never, ever forgive me!

— For what?

— Well, they were both pretty psychic, so I reckon …

Dylan points outside, where patchy areas of grey snow lie all around the porch and down the garden path. She gets up with the duvet wrapped around her and he pulls on a T-shirt, thinks about making coffee. The door lets in an icy air, which feels nice for a minute. The two of them huddle there in the doorway, his arm around her.

— This would have been right up there on Vivienne’s list of fucking no-nos! he says.

— Not the way she wanted to go.

— Not really.

Barnacle’s door clicks open and he comes out onto his little porch steps and looks across to see them both sniggering helplessly at Dylan’s front door.

— Been on the weed again? You bloody reprobates! Get a life! Grow up!! You’ve got a child in there, he shouts.

He slams the door and eventually they stop giggling.

Dylan offers her a roll-up and she takes it. He goes inside and comes back out with another glass of wine and a throw, which he wraps around her shoulders. He is wearing her wolf-cape and the ears stick up, making him look even taller. She giggles again. He catches her glancing at him. His wrists, the tattoos, his Chelsea boots, she isn’t impressed by any of it; what she is drawn to is something else.

— My mother never had it in her to work out who she was, she says.

— Where does she live?

— She’s down south. She did every job as a wife exactly right — she went above and beyond, but he just picked at her and picked at her and picked at her until she didn’t even look the same, or act the same, and he did it with us too. It’s like she wasn’t there in the end. It was like she never had been there. She was going through the motions. Making beds perfectly.

— The first time I saw you, you were polishing the moon.

— What?

Dylan tips her chin up and kisses her on the doorstep, where anyone could walk past and see them, and the shock of their tongues, the heat against this freezing cold, and they are apart just as quickly and he flicks one of the long wolf-legs back over his shoulder.

STELLA HAS five empty clear plastic bottles in the bedroom. She has cut the top off each of them and filled them with water. She drops in dried flowers and acorns and berries and mistletoe. They will freeze outside in no time and she can take the plastic off and they will be great ice-sculptures. When you scatter people’s mothers into slushy mush, then the only answer is to make some art. It appears to be becoming her answer to everything. She has cleaned the house. She made some soup. She sent Vito a whole load of songs from YouTube as a mix-tape. She has cleaned her ice-grips. She cleaned the grate for the fire. She visited Barnacle and slid all the way down his path.

— It’s an ice-wonderland today, she tells her mother.

— I’m going to go to the shops, Stella.

— Can you bring me back bananas?

— Yes.

— And chocolate?

— Yes.

— Is Dylan still angry at me?

— He wasn’t angry.

— He was , for fuck’s sake! Stella huffs.

— When did we give up on the swear jar? Constance demands.

— When the world threatened to end each day, and when it got so dark that it made everyone in Clachan Fells crazy. Did you see the satanist putting up pictures of pentagrams and all that weird shit all over his windows? He reckons Satan is going to rise for the second coming of evil, or some shit.

— I didn’t see that, no.

— He freaks me out. I bet he’ll behead his girlfriend or something.

— Don’t say that!

— Oh, come on, Mum, you know Incomers can’t handle the bloody darkness here, and this winter is going to be the longest, darkest, freakiest, possibly most never-ending one we’ll ever have!

— It will end!

— I know: in human extinction.

— No, Stella, it will end in spring. Stop watching the bloody news!

Stella switches her laptop on and off again. Constance leaves to go to the shop. There is no Internet signal. None at all. She switches the router on and off but there isn’t anything, then she picks up the phone and the line is dead too. No Internet on her phone. The telly is working but the picture is fuzzy. She waits until her mother reaches the end of the path and then she takes out the packet in her pocket. Today is the day. She didn’t want to do it like this. She waited and waited for a letter about her appointment to see the gender specialist, but it didn’t come. The fluff around her lip is getting dark. She will start with two. She swallows down the tablets without a drink and one lodges in her throat and, after she has managed to swallow it down, she wonders what is really in it? It came in an unmarked envelope. There is no little list of potential side-effects; just a stupid bottle on the table and it doesn’t even say hormone-blockers on it. She found the tablets on a site where you can buy all kinds of drugs and hormones on the Dark Web. She should tell somebody this is what she is doing, but not Constance or Dylan. Maybe Vito. Lewis was in the park yesterday. He looked cute.