Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

— To winter and all who sail in her! Barnacle says.

They raise their glasses (apple juice for Stella). Dylan is sure he can hear something creaking, like the sea as if it was frozen and going to crack, as if the snow around them is shifting.

— Have you seen Dylan’s tattoos, Barnacle?

— Not really, Stella, no.

— A smile around the edges of Constance’s eyes.

— The wind has just dropped, we are not going to be out here for long, Stella, okay?

— Do you have a lot of friends down south then? Barnacle asks.

— Nope.

— Lone wolf?

— Little bit.

— So’s our Constance, he says.

— What would you do if you didn’t have any friends, Mum?

— You only need one or two good ones.

— But if you didn’t have any.

— If I needed to, I’d go out and make some. Plenty of people out there, she says.

— I had friends from the theatres around Soho. I’ve not seen most of them for years — they all ended up scattered across the globe. I was the last one left at home, Dylan says.

— I love the theatre. I always fall asleep, though, in the box, and sometimes at the Lyceum in Edinburgh there’s this same homeless guy who turns up, and he has a big rucksack with all his stuff in it and he queues up because they give out four free tickets for each preview. He gets in the circle and sleeps, all warm, for the whole thing. I love that: a theatre where a homeless man can sleep whilst listening to Faust. A good fisting from the devil, ay—

— Barnacle! Constance warns him.

— Most of the homeless are dying in doorways, Stella says.

— True. If the site rates go up next year, I’ll be joining them. I can’t see me fitting a rucksack on this back, though.

— Dylan is trying not to watch Constance as she smokes. A thin stream of smoke curls out of her mouth and it gives him a hard-on. He looks away from her, back to the sky. Stella wears her brightly coloured mohawk hat and gloves and she is holding her mum’s hand.

— I have mulled wine up on the roof, heating up on the little chimenea stove. We’d best get up there before the alcohol burns off? Constance says.

— I’m a bit scared about getting up there, Barnacle says.

— Don’t worry, Mum will bring the Bentley round.

— Constance runs down the path, then rumbles back along the salted gap in the snow, in a little forklift with a big wooden board over the front two prongs.

— I’ve never seen a wolf drive a forklift before! Dylan says.

— You do see strange things around these parts, Barnacle says.

— Where did she get that?

— Borrowed it from the storeroom. She used it to get up on top of the roof and tarmac it a few months ago as well — the woman’s a tomboy.

She reverses the forklift down the side of her caravan and the satanist kid up at the end is standing at his door drinking a beer. She raises her wolf-paw and the kid raises his back. Stella helps Barnacle climb onto the platform at the bottom of the lift and he grips on, chortling loudly as the machine buzz-whirrs up. There’s an almighty clunking noise, then Constance is neatly turning the forklift at the top to slide Barnacle right onto her roof.

— Come on then, Incomer, he calls down.

Dylan climbs up the ladder at the back of the caravan with Stella in front of him. The roof is a perfect viewing platform. The chimenea burns. There are four deckchairs around it and a blanket in each and cushions and a telescope set up on its own.

Barnacle places another log on and a spray of sparks come out as he puts the lid back down. There is a small pot next to the chimenea and it looks like a black cauldron with a single gas flame underneath it and the smell of cloves and cinnamon and red wine and orange spices. Two wolf-ears appear at the edge of the roof and then two paws and Constance climbs up, and he pours some wine out with a ladle and everyone gets a glass to warm them, even Estelle. The moon is a perfect half and each crater is dark and grey. An owl twit-twoos. Dylan tilts his head back to see cream-and-brown feathers in a flurry going past in the dark, and the light of the chimenea catches the owl’s eyes. It sits in the holly tree, which has inches of white on each sprig. Stella is wearing brand-new moccasin boots, which she admires.

— Where did you get those?

— She glances at her mum.

— Alistair.

— You finally opened his Christmas box?

— I was bored.

— No tartan shirts. Shame, you can never have too many of those! Barnacle says.

Stella looks at her mum and giggles.

The light is changing each of their faces from one moment to the next, and the colours, energy flowing over them, stars sending light from years and years ago and only reaching them now and a feeling that it is all just how it was meant to be. Dylan takes another glass of wine, wanting to drink, to drink for the sake of warmth, and the owl turns its neck all the way round and blinks. There are tufts of feathers on top of pointed ears and then it spies something in the field and swoops.

— Did you see that?

— What?

Stella turns round.

Barnacle is sitting in his deckchair, looking the other way to the mountains, and the forests are white but the thick dark fir trees still stand out in layers all the way to the top. To the right of the biggest mountain is a smaller one and there are willow trees bent under the weight of snow. Constance stands on the front of the roof with her feet placed wide and lights a cigarette. Spirals of light unravel across the sky until they are sweeping arcs of green and purple.

— It’s the aurora! Stella squeaks.

Circles of green light are shot through with white dashes — horizontal iridescence shoots down in zigs and zags from somewhere above the sky. Stars sparkle through a moving river of light and colour and it turns the tips of Constance’s wolf-ears green, and she turns her face to the side so he can see her silhouetted — with the universe spreading out behind her.

Those great hulks of stone and tree and bark and soil and clods of earth and the deer up there, and the wildcat he likes to imagine is up there, and the farmers’ dogs barking in the night — all of it is so cleanly real.

— The sky is my wife, Barnacle says.

— And how spectacular she is, Constance says.

At Barnacle’s feet there are three old rear-view mirrors, so when it hurts his neck too much to look up and out he can still see everything by looking down. Stella dances up and down the rooftop and Constance taps her on the shoulder to stop, lest she fall off. And the girl stands with her hands stretched up into the sky above her and she is radiant.

— I always wanted a wife that was the sky, so I could admire her every day of her life, so she’d never stay the same and I’d always be watching for the changes, Barnacle says.

Dylan sits down next to Barnacle in a big stripy deckchair and lets the old astronomer refill his wine glass with a ladle. If he had to grade life on the best days and the worst, he’d say seeing his grandmother on devil’s snare was the worst, and this — the best seat in the house to watch the universe unfold, with a woman he loves, and a kid he loves too and a neighbour who is affable and a tin box for home — is as good as it gets.

The aurora unfolds, it moves, it’s never still. The light alters each second and it appears as a being, an entity older than they themselves will ever be. Down below them caravans are lit up, lights in windows; nobody is out, why would they come out? — they wouldn’t and even Ida has gone back inside. The caravan rooftops and the mountain are eerily lit by green light and the faint river of purple moving through it now, and a silhouette appears on the mountaintop — of a sole stag.