Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

That’s what he needs.

She finds them right at the bottom of the bag, which is wet with ice and snow, and she places the buttons down the middle of his open suit jacket and now he is sharp. He is super-smart. She can see herself in the reflection of the binoculars and she looks like a radiant elf. Stella checks out her snowman one last time and he is solid. She’ll bring Mum down to see him later. She wades back across the fields toward the gap in the fence where she can squeeze back onto the caravan-site road and Lewis Brown has been standing at the back of his caravan watching her. She gets the feeling he has been there the whole time. He raises his hand. She pretends not to notice, so he climbs across his fence and wades toward her.

— Stella!

— Lewis.

— You didn’t answer my e-mails, he says.

— You didn’t turn up at Fort Hope when I got a kicking-in from all those guys you like over there. What was the matter: couldn’t face it? she says.

— I couldn’t stop them, he says.

She pulls up her hat and parts her hair and points out the scar going up into her head.

— You are a coward, Lewis Brown!

He watches her wading through the snow away from him. She turns around and he is frowning, all that snow around him, but just as handsome as he ever was.

— I’ll call you! he says.

— Oh, fuck off, she calls back.

It was a good day until she saw his face. She hopes he freezes out there in the field, with nobody to watch him die but her snowman.

THE MAN on the tannoy says something while big televisions play news footage on repeat and everyone in here is glued to them — cannot stop watching, cannot look away, only getting up to get food or go to the toilet. The snowfall is heavy outside and people text anxiously. Even in here it’s Baltic. There’s a tired guy on the tannoy talking about the medi-aid in Bargain Corner and free soup up at the cafeteria. They’ve opened Ikea as a place for the community to get medical aid and shelter, buy food, get heat. He is curiously exhilarated to be sitting here looking at meatballs and fries and gravy and extra cranberry sauce. The tannoy person starts speaking in depressed tones again.

— You are welcome to stay in-store until further notice. We will bring you weather updates throughout the day and you can see news footage on televisions throughout the store. The food in our restaurant and the shop downstairs has been reduced, to help those who are unable to attend jobs at this time. There will be songs, sung by the staff each day at 1 p.m.

The tannoy boy clicks up and goes off somewhere to commit suicide.

Dylan feels better walking around here with all this space. The caravan is giving him cabin-fever — that and the snow and Vivienne’s sketchbook and feeling guilty whenever Constance lies in his arms and he doesn’t say anything. He goes over to the condiments and stuffs packets of sauce, vinegar and sugar into his big pockets. He gets a tray and goes over to the hot plates. What to have now? The ciabatta with bacon? He has sold four bottles of gin this week, so he can afford this. There are always ways to make cash and the more this temperature drops and the higher the snow stacks up along the roads, the more people want to drink. It’s an ideal beginning for his brewing empire. On the way out of here he will buy as much food as he can for Constance’s larder. The guy further up Ash Lane, with his alien badges, gave Dylan a lift all this way and is off to get himself a new office desk-type thing to put his new alien transceiver box on; he zapped Dylan this morning on Ash Lane and Dylan staggered back a few steps. That’s what nailed him the lift.

He pushes a little metal trolley ahead of himself with two trays on it, and the hot counter is bright and the boy with his yellow uniform stands there with his badge, which says Happy to Help!

— I’ll take a cooked breakfast, please.

The boy has a white hat on and he scoops up beans; he uses tongs to add two sausages, mushrooms, potato scone, hash brown, bacon, a little folded-up yellow thing that appears to be masquerading as a miniature omelette. Two brown rolls. Dylan slides his bank card in with the faintest hesitation — what if there’s nothing in there? He is relieved when the guy hands him a receipt.

Dylan pushes his trolley over to a table at the quiet area around the corner, where big windows look down on the store so that customers can admire fake flowers and brightly coloured plastic chairs. They have pinned up banners of material around the walls in all different colours. There is a green sheet covered in third eyes: two smaller eyes on either side, then a big one in the middle looking right at him. The pattern repeats throughout the open-plan area below. He soaks up bean sauce with a buttered roll. The sausage tastes dreadful and there is a completely fake feeling to the egg omelette, but the tattie scones are delicious. Gunn loathed this place. Wholly detested it. It was Vivienne who used to make him drive her all the way out to Croydon and, when they had lunch, she’d always get one of those little bottles of white wine and a Dime-bar cake. Then another bottle of wine. He smiles to himself. Dylan dunks a chunk of sausage in brown sauce. It’s edible. Needs sauce, though, and that egg thing. Like a yellow brain. Airport food on an Ikea plate. That’s what it is. Dylan pushes the food away and it is uncomfortable to sit for too long. He goes over to the big window where the mountains and caravans are all covered in snow. If snow keeps falling, it will soften noise across the whole world and everyone will have to pipe down a while, put down their weapons, stay home, make soup, talk quietly.

Over in the farmer’s field there is the most amazing snowman. It’s tall and wide and dressed with a suit coat and a tie and suit trousers and scuffed trainers and a big tummy and buttons, and a coloured-in deodorant can for his nose and binoculars that look familiar. Cheap Japanese binoculars for watching black-and-white films. Stella must have pinched them from his caravan! He needs to watch that girl. He taps his boots on the ground and behind him a woman is crying to her friend and the people going downstairs to the market hall all looked pinched and haunted. Constance is sleeping a lot this week too. He’ll get back, soon, but first he will find a living-room area to read a paper, one with a working lamp and a blanket and a footstool. It is so good to walk around somewhere that seems even vaguely normal for a while. Dylan makes his way out of the cafeteria and begins to follow the arrows and he is tempted to steal a teapot for Constance. How clever of this store to stay open in these conditions. Great for community relations: it says We are here to support your family through the fucking apocalypse, people — come back here for the rest of your life to buy corner sofas and clever Scandi kitchenware; we are all the extended human race: you, me, everybody!

Outside the window a digger rolls through the snow.

For a minute he gets an image of Stella on her bicycle, an imprint of light behind his eyes. She is standing on his pathway, holding a gobstopper aloft like a poisoned apple.

THERE ARE still no e-mails from Vito. He has been eaten by the snow. Northern Italy is a white mass and when she looks at their news everyone is scared, and they look like that in the village at Clachan Fells this week too. Perhaps Vito has had enough and he is living with a piccolo player in Azerbaijan. She dreamt of Gunn MacRae last night. The woman came right into the caravan and took a bottle of Dylan’s home-made gin.

— He got it wrong on the mint, Gunn said.

She screwed up her face and drank three shots in a row.