Jenni Fagan - The Sunlight Pilgrims

— I live in number seven, he says.

— Yup. People die here. In winter it gets so fucking cold you could freeze to death in your bed. You are aware that you are living in what is essentially a metal tin at the bottom of seven mountains?

— Doesn’t scare me.

— Tough guy, ay?

— Pretty fucking much, he says.

SHE ALWAYS knows hours before that she will log on and sometimes she tries to wait and then it is even better, but there is still a reluctance to go on and a wish that she could not even want to look; but mostly she just wants to see. Mostly. Her mother is asleep again and it is still early and she is quietly clicking on the laptop, that quick hum and click and the sign turning around and typing in her password and making sure to remember to clear the search history, taking off the parental lock, then going in.

There’s three of them. A woman and a man. A third person. They pull up her skirt and take her knickers down and there it is, she is beautiful. The woman has a name and a website; she is from Rio, she is stunning, the curve of her back as she bends over, the breasts small and perfect, the woman taking a nipple into her mouth and the man gets behind her. She doesn’t want to see that, just that there is a woman like her who was once a girl like her and she is confident and cool, and why is it this is the only place she can see a body like her own having sex? There was Boys Don’t Cry and she has a few models to look up to now, but other than that she feels like she is forever searching to find girls like her who are still wanted and attractive and normal. Stella checks again that the living-room door is closed and it is and it is a kind of falling this, but she can’t stop watching. A smell of cigarette smoke on her own breath. Dizzy still from inhaling. Lewis likes to smoke, he blew it in her face once and she thought she’d die right there on the ground in front of him. The woman laughs. There is an empty wine glass on the table beside her and she is wearing high-heels. Her legs are long and pretty and her hair. The screen is blue and it makes the living room feel seedy and strange and alien and she can’t help herself. She is Little Red Riding Hood and her feet will walk her through the forest to the Big Bad Wolf and he will wear a frilly gown and, instead of letting him eat her, she will hack his head off with an axe. It’s a foregone conclusion.

Stella opens the living-room door quietly and kicks the frost off her boots, only now realising she has still had them on the whole time.

— Why can I smell cigarette smoke?

She pauses in the hallway and looks toward the bedroom.

— I don’t know.

— Where have you been?

— I said hello to our new neighbour, he’s moved into number seven. I was helping him move some stuff over to the bonfire pile.

— Is he nice?

— He’s a giant beatnik and his mother slept with an angel.

— Excellent.

Stella steps into a bathroom barely wider than a shower cubicle. She sits on the loo. This is a new phase and they didn’t write about it in the leaflets the doctor gave her. Once this winter is done and she is a year older she can maybe go to that group in the city for trans teens, but right now she is a pioneer. It’s trial and error. Girls don’t stand to take a piss no matter how much they might want to, so she is doing it like this. If she sits and pushes it down, it works. The toilet seat is freezing. Her bones have turned to mush and she is fading back into this cold, taking in the wooden cladding painted white on the walls, the slight damp in the corner that Constance keeps painting over. She is hungry. She listens to the tinkle and presses her feet flat against the wall — that’s how small this space is, she can pee and keep her feet flat on the wall and spit in the sink all at the same time. In the girls’ loos at school they pee like a tap. There’s no subtlety. It’s like a broken dam. On, then off. Full flood, little tinkle. Stella starts slow, then speeds up, then tapers off. What if someone hears her at the new coffee diner at the bookshop in town? What if someone notices in the new ladies’ toilets with the hair-straighteners that cost a quid to use and the condoms and the toothbrushes that come in a little plastic ball that you chew on until your teeth are clean. If someone listened to her peeing! What kind of fucking freak would do that anyway? At home (like now) she always turns the tap on. If someone listened and said something, she could shout at them that they are obviously twisted sickos listening to a girl take a piss and then the bookshop staff would probably throw them out and then they might pat her on the back and ask if she was okay and then they might even give her a free muffin. She is paranoid. Nobody is so acutely aware of her body and how it sounds or works or looks, especially if they don’t know. Lewis is aware. He holds his breath when she walks past him. It feels good. She walks slower, hoping one day he’ll pass out entirely. She rips off one square of toilet roll. It takes thirty days to make a new habit. Rip off the square. Fold it. Drop it. Don’t think about the rainforest. Somebody knocks on their front door and she flushes quickly, goes out to find a note has been slipped under the door. Stella bends to pick it up and turns it over to read it.

To My Darling Constance — I Am Sorry, forgive me x.

It is Alistair’s handwriting.

Evidently not dead yet.

She thought her mother would kill him when he went back to this last wife one more time. So far, so not dead. The axe is still in the tree. Why did Alistair even want to reel her mother in? Why make her love him when he knew he’d never leave his wife? This wife hates Stella. She looks at her and sees Constance and it makes her feel ill. Constance is playing records every night and drinking wine and walking on the mountains for hours. Alistair’s taxidermy apologies to Constance are all around their caravan. A goose head wearing pearls and tortoiseshell specs. A tiny mouse standing on a street corner under an umbrella. A bird asleep on a bible under a chandelier. Stella waits until the footsteps have gone all the way down Ash Lane before she clicks open their metal door. There is a big square box on the mat. A car starts down in the car park. She looks out but she can’t see him.

— Who was that?

— Pizza delivery leaflet!

The box is too big for lumberjack shirts. Stella always puts her father’s useless gifts into the charity shop at Clachan Fells. Somewhere in the village there is a boy walking around dressed like her father’s son. Stella steps out onto the porch to make sure he is gone. If he ever gives her boy-shirts again she will leave them on his step. Folded very, very neatly and no note.

Red berries on the holly bush sparkle with frost. She goes carefully down the steps and picks up a stick and jabs at the bird-bath, trying to free the leaves, but they are frozen solid. She blows on her fingers. Dogs bark somewhere down the hill. Alistair’s whitehouse sits up on the mountain with smoke curling out of the chimney. She clenches her fist. He broke her mother’s heart again. She is Little Red Riding Hood and there is an axe in their tree. Stella doesn’t believe anyone would ever get to her with their shitty lines about big, round eyes or shiny, pointy teeth. He is toxic. He makes her mother ill.

A woman appears at the other side of her garden fence, she stops, lights a roll-up and takes a little silver bottle out of her pocket and has a drink. Through the hole at the bottom of her fence she can see the woman’s old army boots stand on a pile of frosty leaves. Her hand is rammed in her pocket and the other has a thick suede glove on it, her hair is white and her eyes are a watery blue. Stella wonders if she is visiting someone because she has never seen her in the caravan park before.