Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

Her pyjama top rides up and exposes each knot of her vertebra like a fine rope.

She is hoovering up the miles between herself and what?

Dylan looks around but nobody else is out. The sky is brighter than earlier but it is still dark — the woman aims a barefoot kick at the Hoover until it sputters out, leaving a mechanical hum on the air. She wraps the plug neatly around the handle. Her eyes have a small cat-flick or perhaps he is imagining it, her hair is neat and fine and tucked behind her ear. Her top lifts in the wind and there is a slight spit or promise of sleet.

She walks back up her pathway and puts the Hoover inside her caravan and disappears. Her door is still open. A light glares on in a caravan opposite him. There is swearing (a male voice), someone snaps open metal venetian blinds across the way, then they cling back shut and the light goes out. He’s in darkness again. The wind bites at his skin, his fingers are numb. He should close the woman’s door. Just go over there and push it gently shut so she doesn’t freeze while sleepwalking. He is about to do exactly that when she walks back onto her porch with a rag in her hand — she reaches a pale arm up into the sky and polishes the moon.

STELLA SCROLLS through her phone. The LED lights up her face as she watches the YouTube video of a goth-girl in New Orleans again. Nobody could tell to look at her. She has a year-long film of her transition and at the end of it she has black lips and long hair and she is hot. Stella switches her phone off and turns over on her bunk. She has a perfect view of Clachan Fells from here. Outside haar-frost glitters across the woodshed in their back garden. Mist trails down the valleys in thin rivers of grey; it’s snaking over the hills from Fort Harbour. It’s 6 a.m. Frosted leaf-shapes pattern the lower corner of the bedroom window, ice-crystals trail up, with each one infinitesimally smaller until they disappear. Icicles will elongate from the bedroom windowsill soon — it happens every year, but never this early. They haven’t even had Bonfire Night yet. Stella pulls her owl onesie-hood up so the beak slumps down over her forehead. If the temperature plummets quickly enough, school won’t reopen. This morning is the last assembly. Stella prays snow falls so fast and heavy that school will be locked, with empty classrooms for the whole winter. She reaches up to touch the curved metal ceiling above her and it is cold but she splays her fingers out; each nail is painted a different colour. Her mother lies on the wider platform bed below. She is still waiting for a response of some kind.

— It’s not like picking a football team, Stella whispers.

— I know.

Stella walks her feet up onto the ceiling roof above her head — she grips onto her toes. A girl is a girl, is a girl, is a girl. That’s all she has. Also, her obsession with Lewis is becoming creepy, she might do anything at this point — if he would kiss her again. Anything. She’d even beg. She’d take a kiss anywhere. Even on the elbow. He doesn’t know what to make of her, though, does he? She could ask him out on a date. She is not afflicted with her mother’s zealous self-reliance and totalitarian independence from state and fellow man — she isn’t scared to say she wants something. Constance is a survivalist, she’s getting more extreme each year — it’s not even a joke.

— I could see Mrs Jones’s brain cells grind to a halt when I explained it.

— I can’t believe that woman is even allowed to be a school counsellor.

— Why?

— She’s just so … Catholic.

— That doesn’t make someone a bad person, Mum.

The light outside grows brighter. Stella passes down the muted YouTube clip to her mum on the bunk below and Constance watches it for a minute.

— Gender is closer than anyone likes to think. Men won’t buy it because most of them are dickheads, she says.

— Is that the technical term, Mum?

— It is. We all share twenty-two identical chromosomes; the twenty-third is the sex chromosome and they don’t kick in for at least ten weeks. Everyone starts out female and they stay like that for months.

— What, even Dad?

— Even Jesus. Go tell that to the nuns. For some embryos the Y-chromosome creates testosterone and female organs change into male ones; about three months in, what starts out as a clitoris, in the XY gene, gets bigger until it becomes, you know, a dick.

— Mum! Can’t you say penis?

— It sounds so sterile.

— Why don’t they teach all of this stuff in Sex Ed?

— Gender indoctrination. It’s state-imposed. The male body still holds the memory of it — the line below a scrotum is called a raphe line, and without it you’d have a vagina; every embryo has an opening at the genitals and it becomes labia and a vagina or, when male hormones kick in, the tissue fuses together and it leaves a scar, which is the raphe line.

— So, its like a vagina line?

— It’s totally a vagina line.

— Fucking hell!

— Swear jar, Stella. There’s plenty male-and-females in one: snails, echinoderms; a cushion sea star spends its first three years female, then three years male. There’s twenty-one species of fish on the spectrum: angel fish, sea bass, snook, clown fish, wrasse — a female wrasse turns into a male if the dominant male dies. The prettiest is a butterfly, where the male side has big black wings and the female side has smaller purple wings. It’s a bilateral gynandromorph, male and female in one.

— You should go back to teaching, Mum.

— Fuck that! Kids are annoying little bastards, present company excluded.

— Swear jar!

— There is a half-female, half-male cardinal bird that is pure white down one side and bright red down the other! Google it. And survival techniques — there’s some great tips out there! I was chatting to a survivalist in rural Alabama, godly man but he is the-shit when it comes to foraging. I found a great website for survival skill tips — can waste hours there lately.

Stella grins.

— This sums up my entire childhood: clever shit and apocalypse-survival-skills.

— How many twelve-year-olds know how to start a fire with a battery?

— I dunno, Mum!

— You can take that in for ‘special skills day’ at school.

— Or I could borrow one of Alistair’s corpses and show them how to dissect a body.

— That would do it.

Stella runs her hand over her stomach and vows to look in the mirror later. She would have had a vagina if it hadn’t fused. She doesn’t mind not having one. It’s not about how they cut the meat. She should paint that on a T-shirt and wear it to church. In a minute she will get up. She will comb her hair. She will wear coconut lip gloss and drink coffee straight and black. She runs her hands over a flat, flat stomach. Stella pulls her hood up. She steps down from her bunk, imprinting her mother’s mattress for a fraction of a second before thudding to the floor.

The yellow beak sits above her forehead like a cap.

Her mother looks like winter.

Constance Fairbairn is possibly the most self-reliant person on the planet. The woman clearly doesn’t understand that she has to be at least half-human. Neither does her now ex-boyfriend, and soon he will be dead.

— Do you want coffee, Mum?

— Yes, please.

Constance is dozing already, drifting away with thoughts of dual-bodied butterflies and morphing fish. Her mother has fine, white hair, eyebrows so light they are barely there; her eyes are grey as late-winter skies, she looks nothing like Stella and it isn’t that her own body tells a story she didn’t choose. It isn’t that. Stella tucks her bobbed hair under her bird hood. It is silky and straight and just as black as her irises.