Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

His mouth is dry. Ida walks down the path with a client, both of them looking highly unsexual, all wrapped up in layers with balaclavas on. She has sent her kids to live with friends. The iceberg took some fucking insane detour, but it is almost back here now and everyone is worrying it will collide and create an avalanche. That won’t happen but there’s no telling the locals, once a rumour spreads. He peers in his still. There are two good-quality bottles of gin there, by the look of it, clearer and better measured than the last batch. He puts the stoppers into the tops of the bottles and picks up his mother’s sketchbook again.

All those little lies, left unsaid, in families; all the things that then become unsayable.

The selfish dead fuck off and leave us with half-truths and questions and random relations and bankruptcy and debt and bad hearts and questionable genetics and stupid habits and DNA codes for diseases and they never mention all the things that are coming — like a fight at a wedding, it just breaks out one day.

He can’t tell Stella because she’s still getting better after her hospital trip and he doesn’t want to go through this with Constance, not yet. Not when they keep saying the world is going to end in some frozen version of Pompeii. Does any of this even matter? He tries to imagine Gunn leaving the islands and deciding to never go back and being excommunicated by her family. Not one word of contact ever since. What horrible secret makes a family do that? What makes a pregnant teenager run away to another country where she doesn’t know a soul, and never return? He looks at the tree again. Olaf Balkie. Her brother. Dylan curses the dead their privilege of silence.

Alistair and Vivienne share the same grandparents, Dylan and Stella share the same great-grandparents. Gunn would have been Stella’s great-aunt. His brain-cogs process it bit by bit. Stella is his cousin and Vivienne’s half-niece. Why would Vivienne come up here and not say anything to Stella or Constance? Unless it was too much for her, so she bailed out and left it to him.

Which sounds right.

For his mother.

Absolutely.

Dylan puts some coal over the logs in his wood-stove.

He clicks the door shut.

He sits on an old chesterfield armchair donated by Barnacle. He feels weak and cold. He pulls a blanket around him, from Constance. Ida dropped off a slow cooker that she says she never uses. There is a gnome stolen by Stella although she will not say from where. The fire makes the room glow and his Hawaiian-lady lamp-base creates a mellow light in the caravan. Dylan takes out his original movie posters, 1968: 2001: A Space Odyssey and 1957: I Was a Teenage Werewolf . They were the last two he could have sold. He must have sold at least a thousand film reels and countless posters before he left Babylon. Perhaps the dead are entitled to their silence. It is not up to him to break it at all.

It is claustrophobic, all that whiteness outside his window, the incessant news. A month ago the army cleared the streets in Edinburgh so lorries could get in with supplies, but nobody can even manage that now. He is living on food from Constance’s apocalypse larder and he is angry because he cannot be the one to provide right now.

He opens his mother’s suitcase and finds the copy of Hustler he bought when he first got here. He walks through the caravan, checks himself out in the hall mirror. His beard is wide and round. It better suits his big squint-nose, he looks older and paler, thinner. He needs to buy some red meat. Dylan picks up a pair of scissors and holds his hair in a fist; he cuts it bluntly, then lets it fall back down so it is just below his ears. He keeps cutting until the hair on his head is a short, shaggy mess and his beard looks even better this way. It is years since he had short hair and now he doesn’t look like someone who might be half-covered in ink underneath his clothes. He looks like someone’s dad. Dylan opens the fridge. There is nothing in there but the growing realisation that Constance has been sleeping with two cousins.

This isn’t going to go down well.

Not at all.

All the times Gunn said she’d never go back home until she was on the Other Side — that is what she always said. It makes sense now. His mother not saying who her father was, just ‘someone’ from the islands, and Gunn not even naming him on the birth certificate. Dylan sits down on the flowery armchair. Constance and Stella have had enough reason to ignore the villagers and their judgement; he doesn’t see this should really matter to them either way, although he will tell them when this winter is over. A feeling skirting around him. A darkness like afternoon falling. That it wasn’t anything to do with love, that nineteen-year-old girl with a child in her belly leaving the island on a ferry, nobody to see her off at the shore and no one to meet her when she arrived where she was going. It was not a mistake she made, it was not her decision at all. Although he does not want to admit it, something in him knows it is true and that is why the chromosomes in his body keen whenever he sees Alistair, because he has half the blood of Gunn’s brother, and for something that wasn’t even her fault Gunn felt guilty and disconnected all her days. It is funny how he always thought she was a hero when he was a little boy, but he had no idea exactly how much that was true. He cries for Gunn, and his mum, who hadn’t done anything wrong in coming into the world; he cries and cries, he wants to let them know he loves them, to somehow make okay a fact of their life that they all lived within the shadow of and barely understood at all.

STELLA CLICKS off her phone and surveys the top of the farmer’s field. She is wearing a plastic flower ring under her gloves. Vito sent it at Christmas after she got out of hospital. Every year all the kids used to go out and show off their new toys when they were younger. This year she didn’t even want to see anybody, but enough is enough. Stella Fairbairn is the fastest stand-up sledger in Clachan Fells. She doesn’t care what Lewis Brown says. Or anyone else. She can see them all up there, a row of children silhouetted against the snowy sky behind them. Most of them are teenagers. There’s a few from Fort Hope, maybe even the boys she got in a fight with. She pulls her hat down over her ears and trudges up the hill, pulling her sledge.

— Stella?

A nod. That’s all she has to give them. She’s not here to make friends. There are nods from other kids — ones from her class, ones whose birthday parties she has been to, whom she sang carols with as a kid and went guising with — and a tiny bit of energy sparks along the line as people realise she is there. She is the fastest and most daring of all of them on a sledge. Every one of them knows it. They are all here for a serious reason. This is not a fuck-about.

She remembers when you used to go to somebody’s door and ask if they were coming out for a kick-about and then, when you were older, it was a fuck-about; and even when she was really little and Lewis came in for her, knocked on the door and she went out in jeans, when what she wanted was to wear a goth-skirt black tutu and braid her hair after growing it long. Everybody is here today and nobody mentions anything about how she looks now. A few raise a hand to say hello. Nobody says her old name. Nobody seems to remember passing a picture back in the village hall last year and, if someone mentions it, she will punch them on the nose.

Stella walks up to the top of the hill and takes her place right in the middle of a long line of kids. The sledges are all in a row. There are big plastic red ones and someone has a smooth big old tyre and there are two tin trays and a thick plastic sack. It’s going to be war. She claps her gloves together to get snow off them and cricks her fingers. Stella arranges her wooden bobsleigh. It was her mum’s first birthday present to her as a girl, and she restored the sledge and treated the wood and put new metal runners on the bottom and waxed them, and on the back of the wooden seat she painted one tiny star and painted Stella underneath it. It is amazing to think that was over a year ago now. Stella found her new sledge in the kitchen that birthday, with a note tied on the back from a bit cut off her Frosties box: For my darling Stella, ALL MY LOVE Mum x. Of all the sledges, this bobsleigh is the one most people are looking at. It is to be both admired and feared. It is the ultimate racer.