Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

— I bet you that’s the giant red. Barnacle sits up a bit.

— Three hundred pounds and nine feet tall, the giant red doesn’t exist, Constance says.

— Are the farmers out tonight? Stella asks.

— Better hope not, cos they’d shoot that one, Constance says.

The sky above them is opening — that’s what it is — the sky is opening and they are looking out and the lights of little cottages up on the mountains glow orange.

— Can you see it? Barnacle whispers.

They follow his arm, which is pointing over to the nearest peak of the mountain, and his head glancing up, glancing, glancing, and they are all following his directions and it is there — silhouetted — a green sky behind it and around it and somehow below it: on the closest peak of the mountain a second stag with his antlers wide and curved round and just a silhouette.

— Is it the white one?

— I don’t know — get the telescope.

Stella takes the little lid off and places it down at eye height for Barnacle and he is looking, looking. Constance claps her hands together because the temperature is dropping further. They can’t stay up here much longer.

— I can’t tell if it is the white one because it looks purple from the reflection of the sky, Barnacle says.

Dylan can see the shape and it looks like it is white — then another appears and the two stags face each other, right up on the peak, with the aurora around them as if it’s radiating out from behind them and even from here: the size of them!

— This qualifies as the best aurora party ever, Constance murmurs.

It is like the caravan is in motion — like they are sailing into skies of purple and green — like this is their spaceship boat — and there are a few figures out now, in other gardens across the caravan park, all different people looking up.

— It reminds me of Iceland, Barnacle says.

— Do you get polar bears in Iceland? Stella asks.

— One swam two hundred miles to get there not long ago; they shot it when it arrived.

— Why? Stella asks.

— They’ve got a policy. They won’t let them be reintroduced again.

Barnacle has somehow reclined in his lounger in a way that makes it easier for him to look round, his back still bent, but he seems more comfortable and the colours of the sky intensify like it has an energy of its own. Treetops across the forests jut up into the purple aurora and behind it a cluster of shooting stars.

— Did you tell them about Coatlicue, Dylan? Stella asks.

Barnacle tilts his head as the Milky Way snakes right above them, so many stars. Dylan couldn’t even imagine seeing quite so many stars so clearly ever in his life.

— Nope.

— Who’s Coatlicue? Barnacle asks.

— Soul-collector, Dylan says.

— Sounds like my first wife, but she went after bank accounts too, Barnacle says.

— She gave birth to the stars and the comets. From the moment they appear, the death-wish comets are on a trajectory to complete self-destruction; they burn so fast through the universe so that they can return to the nothing they came from — they want to go back there and see what nothing is made of, so they burn, and burn, and burn, using up all the energy they can as fast as they can. Coatlicue has snakes in her hair and her skirt is a ballgown made out of skulls; they are tiny little skulls at the top and they get bigger all the way down, and when she walks across the universe they move out around her and talk to each other in whispers, and she collects souls that have been lost out there and puts them back in the river of Lethe so they can return. They say out there somewhere there is a bar beyond the veil where they siphon off the souls of humans. Funny thing is, when I first got here and I was up on the mountain a cloud drifted up over where I was standing and I had this feeling of being right on the edge of the other side of life, you know, and it was littered with these hideous, long-toothed skinny creatures who wanted to suck up the last bit of humans’ soul energy — you know, siphon off any goodness they had left and send it up into the universe to give it more energy for stuff like that! Dylan points up.

— And I thought I was the goth, Stella says.

— She sounds hot — she can collect my soul any time, Barnacle says.

— You won’t die for years, Stella says.

— Why not?

— You eat too much frozen food. The additives are preserving you.

— I don’t believe in holding on. I want to be like an old Eskimo, just go out in the snow one night and fall asleep. Wouldn’t that be peaceful?

— Peaceful like drowning? Stella asks.

— How does anybody really know if drowning is peaceful? Constance asks.

— Because they record the brainwaves afterwards or something, Barnacle says.

— Bollocks! she says.

— That is the brightest half-moon I have ever seen, it is so pretty!

Constance gazes up to where her child is looking. Stella stands up on her tiptoes at the front of the caravan and holds her hands above her head in a curved steeple until it looks like an earth-child has captured the moon.

Barnacle has gone back through to his caravan to bed. Dylan carries Stella over to the bedroom and lays her on the bunk, tucks her in. He looks at her for a minute in the dark. They share ancestors. They both love her mother. Somewhere in the park he can hear someone blaring dance music and there were two fights earlier. People are going cabin-crazy. It would take police hours to get out here and they are unlikely to turn up for anything small; Clachan Fells is more lawless by the day. Stella’s mouth is squint and plump and childlike, as if her dreams take her right back to a place ruled by the innocent and the free.

— The plates and cups and ashtray and everything are still up on the roof. I should go up and get them, Constance whispers at the door.

— Get them in the morning, he says.

They step outside and she leans in as he lights a cigarette for her, and she looks at him with her white hair and her grey eyes with their orange rim, which is now always going to remind him of the parhelia. She takes his hand and they just stand there, neither of them feeling even the remotest need to begin speaking.

STELLA GOES over to their sun mirror and combs her black hair so it shines. She braids each side neatly and puts on a tiny slick of lip gloss. Her tiny wax strips are in a pouch in the bathroom and she’s been using one each week, even when she can’t see any hair on her upper lip. She pulls up her polo-neck under her chin and buttons her cardigan over the top.

— Winter is proving to be the worst that has been seen in the UK in living memory, generating unseen conditions across the whole of Europe and indeed many countries worldwide. We will take you across the map now. Russia, as we can see here, is at an utter standstill, fatalities in rural areas and cities have reached a crisis point. Nobody is able to get in or out on the roads and a main cause of death is cold and hunger. Chicago is on city-lockdown; we saw a forty-car pile-up in Chicago due to black ice on the road only few weeks ago; there have been riots across parts of the city, with widespread looting and violent crime; there are reports of home owners shooting anyone who enters their home without cause, and police are no longer intervening in these cases because there are just so many. Morocco is under twenty feet of snow this morning; we saw a demonstration against local government for the number of street children and families who are literally being left to freeze unless someone takes them in, and many ordinary people are opening their homes to others if they can do so. The northern British Isles are mainly frozen over, with icebergs at the furthest tip of the Orkney Islands; another iceberg — the biggest ever recorded outside the Arctic — has entered an area of Scotland called Clachan Fells; whale-pods are migrating through the Atlantic at vast rates, birds are changing route and in fact in the UK there have barely been any bird sightings for weeks now. Those that are in nests have just frozen. Rivers are frozen. Blackouts across the grid can be seen lit up here, here and here. We are not sure how many fatalities this harsh weather will create, but thousands and thousands of people are dying due to dangerous conditions, and this is only the beginning. We can confirm the weather in the UK will be minus fifty before the next few weeks are through. The whole of Europe has come to a standstill. The entire planet is being impacted upon by the collapse of intricate weather systems that are vital to survival, just a few degrees lower than is manageable for human habitation, and we could be plunging into an Ice Age.