Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

— Which service do you require?

— I have found a body frozen in the snow, it’s my neighbour.

Dylan gets a feeling of motion, all the mountains blurring slightly around him until he kneels down, tears again, brushing them off his face, furious with everything.

— I am sorry to hear that, sir. We do have a designated service for these calls now sadly, please hold!

He keeps checking behind him, hoping Stella won’t appear and see Barnacle sitting here like this, his hands held out before him like two dinosaur claws.

— Hello, can we help you, sir?

— Yeah, I found a body.

Barnacle is leaning right back, so he is still in a C-shape but he is able to look up, he has gone like that — lying there watching the stars, watching night turn to morning and waiting for the sky — his wife.

THE LANDSCAPE is brilliantly lit, flawless — the mountains look like somebody has cut them out of the sky. The skies are clear and blue, but the wind still bites and nips at any exposed inch of skin. Each of them wears snow-goggles so their eyelashes don’t get frosty, and balaclavas pulled up right up over their face and nose. The cold is clangorous. It vibrates. Shrill and deadly. They argued about it for two weeks before coming out to do this. Constance has enough food to get by for two days, a shelter in her backpack. They have three charged phones. They were going stir-crazy in the caravan. Stella is just behind him now and there is the crunch of their feet on soft powdered snow over the hard-packed ice layer below it. They wear ice-grips over their boots, and gloves and scarves like they are moon travellers setting out into this landscape alone.

— How old are the polar ice-caps?

— Up to fifteen million years old, Dylan says.

Stella stops and looks at him, he puts out his hand to help her up the slope and they walk on.

— So this winter has happened really because of water melting from the ice-caps, which means this winter started out, in a way, about fifteen million years ago? This is all sort of time-travel! We’ve kind of gone back in time — this was fifteen million years in the making. Stella gestures around them.

— Shouldn’t you be playing with My Little Ponies or something? Dylan snaps.

— Is my existential goth-angst bothering you, Dylan?

— No.

— Is.

— Is not.

— Mum, can you see the iceberg now?

— You couldn’t miss it!

Constance calls out from the top of the mountain, where she is looking down on the other side. She has begun to wear lots of thermodynamic layers, so she can still move pretty quickly. She is adjusting to conditions. Fluid. Sinewy. Wolflike. The elbows of her old ski-jacket are patched over with gaffer tape. She lifts up his old binoculars and sweeps across the entire landscape.

— Why don’t you want to scatter Gunn in the islands any more? Stella asks.

— I just don’t.

— Do you think someone ever collected Barnacle’s ashes?

— There probably weren’t any ashes; he would simply have been chucked in with some other people. I am sorry, Stella, I know it isn’t nice! He would have been, though. I mean, I don’t even know if this really is Gunn in here. It’s probably the ashes from forty different Londoners who died on the same day. I’m probably scattering the ashes of a whole crew of Russian gangsters who got shot at point-blank range, he says.

— That’s pretty cool, Stella says.

— I have no interest in your opinion on ashes, child!

— Child! You’re the one who was watching cartoons when I got up this morning! Anyway. What did they do with Barnacle’s body when they got to the morgue?

— It takes weeks to defrost a fully grown man, Stella. It’s best not to think about it, Constance says.

— How do you know that? Dylan asks.

— She slept with a mortician, Stella mutters.

— Is nothing sacred or secret in my life any more?

Constance stands at the top of the slope ahead of them, with the sky as her backdrop.

— It is so hard to walk in all these layers, Mum, can I take my coat off, or just the balaclava?

— No, you can’t. No! You’ll freeze — we’re not stopping here for long, Stella, we need to keep moving!

— Okay, Mum, don’t get hysterical.

Dylan tests the ground ahead of Stella with a ski-pole to make sure they won’t fall into deeper snow. Words are like crystal when it is like this; they hang on the air, it carries them up to the trees on the mountaintop, all those frozen willows he can’t help but see in the shape of a C, their long arms frozen. And somewhere in the cherry blossoms away down on the farm lane there are the tiny buds just waiting for a thaw that might never come round.

— Come on, keep going. Wait until you see this! Constance calls.

— Is the iceberg as big as they said it was? Dylan asks.

— Absolutely! That’s not all, though, you are going to love this!

— What?

— Hurry up and you’ll see.

She turns away, looking back out over the mountains and down over the coastline. Stella reminds him of Gunn more and more lately. He doesn’t know how he didn’t even notice that she looks like Gunn. He has to stop his tall frame taking bigger steps up the mountain, slowing down so Stella doesn’t have to hurry to catch up, and as they reach the top the whole landscape emits an ungodly silence. The silence hollers! Stella steps onto the ridge and her voice trails away to nothing. He has never seen anything like this in his life. The breath is gone from him for a second. He reaches out for Constance’s hand and the three of them are on the top of the smallest seventh sister, looking out across thousands of penitentes; the tall, peaked snow-figures all march down the mountain toward Fort Harbour where the sea is iced over as far as the eye can see, and almost touching the harbour wall there is a great hulk of iceberg wider and taller than he could ever have imagined seeing in real life — he accepts the binoculars from Constance and stares at it; his eyes can’t take it in yet.

Dylan’s throat burns from the icy air.

His eyes water behind his sunglasses.

Constance turns to him and he can see himself, bearded and bespectacled in polarised lenses, and up behind her the trees have spears of ice jagging down from each bough.

Blood pulses in his veins.

All those years in Babylon watching life instead of living it.

Light trails across his cornea.

There is the dull thud of his heart, in his ears.

A want for her that won’t dissipate.

All those peaked figures of ice, like all of their ancestors have been caught by the elements on the long walk home, their souls captured by ice and snow, and below them the North Sea cracks and groans as ice-floes creak and collide.

— They call them penitentes, don’t they, Dylan? There must be thousands of them! Constance says.

For that second she looks just like she must have done as a girl.

Stella puts her arm around her mother’s waist.

A bird of prey soars down from the sky in slow circles and alights on a tree beside them. It is shocking to see one, when they haven’t seen any birds for months, but this one is massive, his wings could easily be a yard wide each. The feathers are brown, but it looks bigger than a hawk. Its claws are like human hands, four long digits with a sharp, pointed talon on each one. They curve around the bough, gripping it steadily. It must be a sign. They can’t feel it, but perhaps the thaw is finally on the way somewhere in the world, a tiny shoot of green way down in the soil somewhere, ready to reach its way up toward the light. Behind them they are sheltered by forest and tall pines, and the smell of clean sap rises from pine needles and underneath that the clean pure smell of snow, always at the edges of every smell now, and under that there is the faintest hint of eucalyptus.