Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

Stella flicks the temperature gauge on the wall.

— Mum, it’s minus six. How cold is it going to get this winter, exactly?

— Nobody knows. They say there might be icebergs.

— That’s not reassuring.

— Don’t worry, you can always show the other kids how to start a fire with a battery.

— I am trying to fit in, Mum!

— Sounds tedious.

Outside there is a blue, blue sky and frost has dusted the Clachan Fells mountains silver. Stella Fairbairn feels like she is going to cry, and nobody is even up yet. She is a swan wrapped in cellophane and everyone can see through her skin. Lewis will never kiss her again. She might as well forget it. She isn’t pretty, and she’s angular, and she has a penis. As tick boxes go for the most popular boy in school, those attributes are probably not high on his list. He did kiss her, though, and the only two people that know about it are her and him. He won’t kiss her again in case any of his friends find out and think he’s weird — that is why he won’t do it again. Or because he already knows he’d like it. He wants to, though. He wants to even more than she does. That feeling. A light flutter in her chest. It squeezes in. Her ribs are embracing each other. The light outside is so bright now it almost feels sinister. Clenching her teeth. Hoping someone will want her one day. If Lewis tries to kiss her again she’ll shoot him down, because he’s too ashamed to do it in public. Lately, fear is following her. It is two tiny pit-a-pat feet always skittering behind her. When she turns there is nothing there, just the faintest imprint of footprints in the snow.

DYLAN STEPS outside. His boots crunch on the light frost that is dusting everything. He needs to trample down these thistles first, so he can go in and clear all the shit he doesn’t need out of the caravan. He might not go right away, he might stay for the winter and it’s nothing to do with a moon-polisher. Not in the slightest. He cranes his neck to see if she is in her caravan but there’s no movement next door. He begins to trample down shoulder-high thistles. First he has to aim a kick to get them flatter — then trample. It’s an ungainly but efficient system. If he can clear the garden and throw out the stuff he doesn’t want, he can take it over to the big bonfire stack in the park on the other side of the lane. It says it is a park, but there are no swings or flowers in it. Just a big pile of stuff for burning. If he can do that this morning then he can sort the caravan out a bit, make it more liveable, create some space for his projector and gin-still when they arrive. It’s freezing but he had no idea that Clachan Fells would be as utterly beautiful as this — an arc of mountains surrounds the whole area.

— How tall are you?

The girl from the caravan next door is standing on her BMX bike at the end of the path; she balances on it, then sits down and rests one foot on his gate. She has a gobstopper held aloft in one hand like a poison apple and she is pretty with almost-black eyes.

— Taller than most.

— That’s not very exact.

— I’m six feet seven inches — how tall are you?

— I’m five feet four inches, which is tall for a girl, and I’m only twelve. I’ll be thirteen soon.

— You might end up taller than me!

— I fucking hope not.

— Does your mum know you swear?

— Aye.

The girl has different-coloured nails and she rolls the front wheel of her bike back and forward. She watches him as he walks down the path with fake-wood cladding he pulled off the lounge walls earlier; he broke it apart so he could get it out the caravan and, whenever he picks up a panel, the nails get caught on his jumper.

— You’re not making a very good job of that, she says.

— I know!

— I live next door, my name’s Stella.

— Dylan.

He sticks out his hand and she shakes it solemnly, then glances at his arms where his sleeves are pushed up.

— Do you have tattoos everywhere?

— Not on my toes, he says.

— I want a tattoo when I’m bigger, but my mum would hate it — she hates tattoos, Stella says.

His heart sinks a little. The moon-polisher is her mother and she doesn’t like tattoos. That’s not great but it is winter. He can wear a lot of jumpers. By the time she is bowled over with … what? … his knowledge of cinema? Yeah. He should probably go to Vietnam. Dylan looks at this kid and wonders for a second if his entire existence is utterly aimless.

— Where are you from?

— London, Soho, but my gran was from the Orkneys. They’re that way!

Dylan points toward the mountains, then the sea, then the motorway; he is not sure quite which way they are at all and he feels stupid before he has even finished, because of course she has heard of them and after this it is definitely time for him to have breakfast and coffee and sit down and stare at a wall until he feels better.

— You are over two hundred miles away from the islands. I’ve not been to all of them because there are seventy, but I’ve been to most of the bigger ones and Papa Westray. I saw a pod of killer whales off the coast of Mull last year in September; minke whales too, porpoises and crabs, corncrakes and lots of seals, and on the last day we even got to see some sharks. They were great long things and we had to go out on a boat that went really, really fast, like really far out to sea to get to see them.

— That sounds like quite something, he says quietly.

— Your mum was called Vivienne, wasn’t she?

Dylan stops trampling down thistles.

— How do you know?

— She asked about the caravans: how easy they were to heat, all that kind of stuff. She said her kid would probably come here at some point and that you were basically a giant.

— I was born in the wrong body, he says.

— No shit! she says.

— So you live with just your mum?

— Yup.

— Does she work around here?

— She works in our back garden mostly, and she keeps stuff down in a lock-up at the garages. She does shabby-shit — that’s what we call it, cos we think it’s funny, but officially it’s called ‘shabby chic’. We take furniture from dead people’s houses or the city dump and she restores it. She knows a lot about furniture and beeswax and French polish and stuff. She sells it to people in the big houses. We don’t tell them where we get it from.

He goes back into his caravan to get his lighter and she peers in the window at him.

— Nice suitcase, she says.

Dylan moves the suitcase into a cupboard and rolls another cigarette and looks at her through the window and she is not in the least bit embarrassed, nor does she appear to be going anywhere.

— You shouldn’t go into a stranger’s house, he says.

— I am not going into a stranger’s house, and anyway it’s a caravan. D.e.n.i.a.l. much?

Dylan steps back out onto the porch.

— It was Vivienne’s suitcase, he says.

— Did you live in a caravan in London?

— No, I lived in a cinema.

— Nobody lives in a cinema.

— I did.

— It’s where I grew up. My family had a little flat above it, it was my mum’s — Vivienne, who you met — and also my gran’s. It’s a tiny art-house place called Babylon. So, your dad doesn’t live with you?

— Nope, Alistair lives with his current wife.

— How many wives has he had?

— Three.

Stella scuffs her foot on the path.

— He’s a commercial taxidermist — I don’t like him. He’s an arsehole!

She points at a tattoo on his forearm of an elaborate snake-headed lady.

— Who’s that?

— Coatlicue, Aztec goddess of creation. See, she has skulls for a skirt, a great big ballgown made up of skulls — tiny ones on the belt, see there, and they get bigger and bigger all the way down and they mutter to each other. The skulls belong to the dead who couldn’t escape the river of Lethe, so she’s taking them on her travels across the universe until she finds a place to put them back in. Lethe is the river of forgetting — oh, you know that? Okay. Above their heads, see right there, that’s the death-wish comets, they blaze through the stars intent on total self-annihilation. Sometimes they fall right out of the sky.