Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

— Fucking hell, Stella says.

— Exactly.

— I wish I grew up in a cinema.

Dylan wants to say he had regulars that appreciated the age of the place and the films that they screened and the gin and wine. But instead he nods and imagines he must look like a strange old tattooed knob-end.

— I’m being schooled by robots, she says.

— Yup, he says.

— My classmates are robots as well, they get wound up downstairs in the school basement each morning and marched up with matching shoes and, if one of them has something different at all — even a brass-coloured screw where all the others are silver — they just get put outside for the bin men or they get kicked around the gym hall until you can’t recognise what they were in the first place.

— I bet they do, he says.

— I have a lot of brass-coloured screws, she says.

Dylan looks straight at Stella. Her jaw. Her shoulders. Her way of tapping the bell on her bike with the gobstopper and how she keeps looking up at him, a little nervous of herself, even teary.

— Sounds like you’re the only real, sane person in there.

— Truth, she says.

— S’best to never let them know you’ve twigged they’re robots, though — just keep smiling, he says.

— Is Vivienne still in Babylon?

— No.

He almost stops on the path and sinks to his knees, so overwhelmed by someone asking where she is that he has to pull himself together.

— Is your gran still there?

— No. They both, recently — you know.

He can’t even say it.

— They’re on holiday?

He just looks at her and she takes it as an affirmative.

— Who is going to put the films on today then?

— Nobody.

— You have to come to Bonfire Night. I’ll introduce you to my mum.

— Okay.

A shot of adrenaline at the thought of being introduced to the moon-polisher.

— I’m going to start my own political party, Stella says.

— Impressive, what are your aims?

— I’m going to draw up a human-rights contract that says everyone on earth must agree we are here as caretakers of the planet, first and foremost.

— Unless the Ice Age gets us first.

— Which way would you rather go? The last great war or frozen like a fish finger?

— I dunno, they both sound so tempting!

Over at the park a cluster of kids run around the green, out playing before breakfast and the darkness lifts fully. Lights still glow in some of the caravan windows; people are getting up to make breakfast and start their day. He can smell wood-smoke and hear someone clattering around with pans. Stella stands astride her bike, looking across at the park for somebody.

— Do you have any cigarettes? she asks.

— Why?

— I’m trying to stunt my shoulders, so I don’t end up big and boxy like a football player or something. I want smaller, girlier shoulders.

— I don’t think there’s a cigarette packet in the world that warns of stunted shoulders.

— I want to just try one.

— You’re too young to smoke, but if you want to give me a hand taking all of this over to that bonfire pile, I can pay you in chocolate?

— Okay, but don’t be tight. You can throw in enough tobacco for a roll-up too. Have you met Barnacle yet? He lives across the path, and then there’s me and my mum. Ida is up there, you’ll meet her. She’s got two kids and a skinny husband. She’s our resident porn star. She does adult babies on Thursdays. Down there are the lesbian schoolteachers at Rose Cottage, and up there a couple of Satan-worshipping stoner kids; and in that one right up the back there’s a guy nobody sees much, and if you do see him he’s on a bicycle. He’s here for the aliens.

— Lot of aliens in Clachan Fells?

— Loads. They like the clear skies.

Dylan looks across to the caravan she is pointing at and to the stickers of aliens outside it.

— I thought that was left over from Halloween?

— Nope. The first thing he’ll say when he meets you is: The truth is out there, friend . Then he’ll try and figure out if you are one of them or one of us, then he might zap you on the lane. I shit-you-not.

— Interesting, he says.

— I’ve lived here my whole life.

— I lived in Babylon my whole life.

— My mother isn’t normal.

— Neither was mine.

They eye each other warily.

— And your dad? she asks.

— My mum didn’t catch his name, he says.

They grin at each other as the first snow of the year begins to fall.

— I’m not used to snow in November, Dylan says.

Stella tips her face up to feel the softness on her skin and holds her hand out to catch snowflakes. Dylan hauls stuff out of his caravan; he stacks it up on the flattened thistles. Stella helps him. He shifts the telly onto the armchair. Those are the only things that can stay. He takes the horse painting off the wall and it is so wide it almost stretches his full armspan. Stella is off with a pile of wood over to the bonfire stack. She is skinny but strong for a kid. He rips up the carpet and underneath there are ceramic tiles in a brown-and-cream pattern. It’s a kind of abstract design. Could be worse. He rips the nets off the windows and shoves them in a box with the tasselled lampshade; he keeps the china Hawaiian-lady base and a light-bulb so he can read later. In the caravan across the path a telly blares, and an audience claps loudly for some morning chat show. Over at the park Stella drags the carpet along behind her, a fistful of wood in her other hand, and throws it onto the bonfire with ease. Dylan strides over with the last of the wood. The snow has eased off again as quickly as it started.

— I’ll get it the rest of the way, she yells, running back to meet him.

— No, you just bring the other curtains. You’ve already done loads, he says.

They keep passing each other midfield and, by the time they are finished, Dylan’s legs are achy and all that’s left in the caravan is the armchair, telly, lamp, bedside cabinets, the bed, his mother’s sketchbook and cardigan. Dylan goes back to the end of the path and hands Stella a couple of roll-ups and a box of matches. In the kitchen he finds the metal coffee-pot he used in the Bethnal Green flat when he left home to study. He sparks the camp-stove and sets it on to boil, and the smell of sulphur from the matches is soothing. He rinses out mugs and his fingers are red from the cold and he notices the sink is stained all different shades of grey-silver. Dylan goes back out into the garden and a wisp of smoke rises from a patch of thistles. He is careful on the wet porch steps because they’re still green with old slippy moss. He’ll scrape that off later. He hands Stella a mug of hot chocolate and half of a giant bar of Fruit & Nut.

— A nutritious breakfast, he says.

— You need proper boots or you’ll die when winter really comes.

— I know, he says.

— Who’s in that tattoo?

— That’s my grandmother, Gunn. She’s wearing a pinny and smoking outside the stage door. She always used to be there, watching for me coming home from school.

Stella looks at the tattoo — it looks like Gunn is staring right out at her.

— You really want to buy some steel-toe caps one size too big, so they fit your winter socks underneath. You can get them cheap at the Army & Navy store.

— Gunn wore those, Dylan says.

— Gunn was smarter than you.

— That’s an understatement.

— You don’t have winter socks, do you?

— No.

— Is your cinema house gone bust?

— Bust-as-fuck.

— Do you have an axe, no? Do you have a clean rainwater tank ordered? Do you know how to fiddle your meter so your electricity bill isn’t so big that you have to live off noodles? A man in caravan eleven lived off noodles for three years. He died. Another neighbour, Ethel at number seven, died too.