Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

Vito is her only real friend, though.

And Dylan.

Except she scattered his mother across the lawn.

In their kitchen there is a pine fir tree and tonight they will decorate it with baubles from a box Mum keeps under the caravan. They will thread tinsel around it and there are even decorations she made when she was a little kid that her mum has kept all these years. She won’t even open the box that arrived addressed to her from Alistair. It can go to the charity shop. She curls up on her side in bed. She feels a bit ill, now she has taken the pills. Her heart is beating in a fast, light way and fear shoots up her spine. Her skin is slick in a cold sweat. She reaches for the bottle and knocks it over. She just didn’t want to have hair on her face. Outside snow won’t stop falling and she is feeling really scared now, because her heart is beginning to hammer and her skin is hot. A hard shot of fear. Panic that her mother is going to find her on the floor, dead. Reaching for her phone, blurry and wanting to stand up, texting Dylan first because he can explain it to Constance later and she probably can’t even get out to the hospital in this. Feeling desperate now, her heart pounding even more and the world feeling far away, like somewhere she might not be again.

DYLAN MEASURES 70cl of base-spirit out and tips it into the pot. He has found exactly the right blend of lemon and sugar to make a solid base-spirit this time; just a touch of tomato purée seemed to help and he let it cool to 23ºC before he stirred the baker’s yeast in. This batch has sat on a shelf above his wood-stove for seven days and even though the fermenter is airlocked, he is sure it picks up a hint of wood-smoke in the flavour. Dylan pours the mixture through the still for a stripping run. He turns the boiler on full power. It will take fifteen minutes before the next stage and he has already weighed out juniper berries, wild water mint, a few slices of cucumber, grains of paradise, bitter almond, lemon peel, orris-root powder. He pounds the botanicals down using a stone pestle in a mortar.

He has been avoiding Vivienne’s sketchbook all Christmas and New Year.

It sits on the table.

Last time he looked at it he was so drunk he wasn’t sure he understood what he’d found there. He picks it up and on the first page there is him as a little boy in their attic kitchen, rain behind him on the Velux window, a single flower in a vase.

There is a heron at their local park.

Her old boyfriend, Jed the Herring.

Him asleep.

Him kicking a football down the hall in Babylon.

Babylon’s foyer chandelier.

Sketches of posters, of movie stars: there is Audrey Hepburn, there is Joan Crawford.

Seven pages of shoes.

Gunn MacRae dressed up like she did when she was going to greet guests for Saturday night at the movies. She’d still wear her bovver boots but she’d match them up with a twinset and pearls. His grandma was the original grunge-woman. There is a sketch of her down in the cellar drinking a cup of tea, next to the head of a calf. There is her gin-still. Her brewing, just like he is now. Their kitchen. The old cream oven, all tatty; and then lots and lots of sketches of his mum’s winkle-pickers, his old Chelsea boots, him laughing at something in the foyer, a massive poster of Godzilla behind him and he can remember her watching him — never saying anything much — sitting at night, sipping wine, and the sound of her pencil as she made sketches of their life.

He flicks through pages curled and bent from where she left the sketchbook out when she was cooking, or drinking, or smoking. On one page there are red smudges and they could be pasta sauce or it could have been red wine. Between two pages she has pressed a flower and it has been there for so long it is as thin as paper; he leaves it like that, too scared to pick it up in case it disintegrates. On the very back page, on the hard-cover insert — she has drawn a family tree.

He takes the book over to the window.

At the top of the page are Håvid and Bitta, his great-grandparents. They are drawn beside an outline of a fairly remote island in Orkney, a man and a woman holding hands outside a croft with a child — an arrow points down to: Gunn MacRae, and beside her there is a brother. He realises, peering at it this time, that the last name Gunn had for her whole life since she moved to London was actually taken from Bitta’s maiden name. His grandmother did not keep the same surname as the rest of her family. She changed it when she left.

He peers at the page as the sound of the still bubbles in his kitchen. It reminds him of Gunn; she never talked about a brother, but there he is — Olaf Balkie — and his arrow runs along to a wife called Astrid.

Below they have an arrow that runs to their child.

A son.

Alistair Balkie.

Another line runs from Olaf back along to Gunn, and below them it points down to a child, his mother, Vivienne MacRae. There is a loop from Vivienne to Alistair to show they are half-siblings. Alistair’s line then runs along to his first wife Christine, then his second wife Morag; it then turns away from his wife and goes left to the mother of Alistair’s only child — Constance Fairbairn.

Below an arrow points to their son, Cael Fairbairn.

The name Cael has been scored out and his mother’s tiny spidery handwriting has replaced it with the name Estelle.

He puts the book down.

All the sadness in her makes sense to him now: his mother and Gunn, bickering their way around Babylon at three in the morning; the brittle way they had with each other, and how Gunn always seemed to love him so much more easily than her own child.

Why wouldn’t she just tell him?

He feels bad for the dead and their secret squirrel routine.

It’s not like it was her fault.

Was it that Vivienne was born of love, or something worse? Either way, they would have thought incest was the devil’s work on a tiny religious Scottish island all those years ago. He strides through to the kitchen, trying to get rid of tears. He doesn’t know what they are good for. A stream is coming from the output pipe on the still now. He collects the first 100ml in an old milk container; this first bit has all the methanol and acetone in it, so he uses it as a cleaning product like Gunn used to do.

Dylan pours out the rest of the brewed mixture into 2.5-litre bottles until the mixture begins to look cloudy. His hands are a little shaky. He leaves the rest of the mixture in the boiler and turns it off. Outside his window there are no birds. The body has its habits. He listens for birds each day, but he hasn’t seen or heard any for weeks now. They are frozen in trees or they have flown as far south as they can for winter. Only the bigger birds will remain and they are probably nesting in caves up on the mountains.

He looks at the family tree again. He feels dumb as a kakapo. He once had sex with a woman who tracked kakapos in the wild and she said that they walk on the ground, instead of flying, and if a predator comes they scurry up a tree, then fall out into a pathetic lump on the deck and then if you’re female — even if you’re human — they will try and have sex with you. The woman told him about this at her sister’s party in Brighton on a day when he had consumed so much MDMA he wasn’t sure if anything was real any more and he remembers a similar grind to his brain — an inability to grasp things — like how to walk up and down steps or drink a pint, and now he knows for sure that Vivienne did not buy this ratty-tin-bullet for any random reason. Why couldn’t the woman ever just use words?

What the fuck was wrong with her?

How about: Hello, Dylan, you have a second cousin, a child; a first cousin once removed who is also a half-uncle. They live in Scotland if you wish to meet them; no, your gran didn’t ever want to talk about it again, she would tell me about it when she was drunk, then the next day she’d be ashamed as if I was evidence of her life as a sinner, as if my personality was proof that a brother should never lie with a sister, no matter what the circumstance. She thought I was off like curdled milk from the day I was born, a bitterness in my mouth from her milk, a poison in me that only deepened over the years. All my love, Mum xx.