by Jenni Fagan
How did it come to this?
A week ago he thought the family business would keep him and now he’s shuffling through a sheaf of local tourist attractions: a castle, a stately home, a pottery up on Clachan Fells. Fort Harbor café does homemade banana cake and deer burgers. He’ll check that one out. A local taxidermist is giving lessons. There is an advert for stag hunting and one for hot yoga, and the timetables for a ferry that leaves from the harbor over the mountain; it will take him closer to the islands up north, where his grandmother came from. After all these years he is tracing her steps back that way. Dylan rolls a cigarette. He opens the fridge and finds four cans of cider. The thing has been switched off and it smells, but it is so cold in here they are still chilled. His mother never drank cider.
—Love is what makes it worth the utter strange!
Vivienne—the one time she took Ecstasy and got hysterical, he had to put her in a cool bath and read her nursery rhymes until she felt better. She was sixty-seven. The pills were a present from the guy she was seeing. What was she thinking? Dylan taps his fingers. He should be putting up the usual online advert, perhaps a triple bill by Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo, The Burden of Dreams + Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans) or tomorrow it could be Nosferatu (1922) + evening screening: Freaks (1932). On Tuesday he would have gone for The Goonies + Gremlins 1&2. The television screen stops sliding to the left and the picture settles. Footage flashes. Environmental protestors outside Westminster. Rows of police officers stare through them. SAVE THE PLANET signs bob up and down, and one fat guy with a ginger afro and SEE, WE FUCKING TOLD YOUZ CUNTS! scrawled across his T-shirt. Dylan rolls a cigarette.
As the camera pans along the front row, people begin to hold hands.
He takes a deep drag and exhales.
There are rows and rows of them.
Just standing by the river holding hands.
A little boy walks out to the row of police officers and places down a teddy. He holds out his hand to the policeman. The policeman is young and he looks straight ahead. The boy stands there with his hand held out. All the rows of people behind him are holding hands now and his mother puts her arms around him, leads him back. Something about it. The protestors stare back at the camera. A banner spells out CORPORATOCRACY IS A CRIME. An interactive map flashes up on the news show to pick out the potential areas that are going to be most affected by the cooling Gulf Stream. Europe, Canada, USA, Southern America, Africa. They all light up one-by-one. High alert. High alert. High alert. This message trails across the bottom of the screen in a band and he clicks it over, so the telly tries to find some more channels and Dylan closes his eyes. He falls asleep while light flickers on the walls.
—
It sounds like a bomber—it sputters out, then roars in again. Dylan lurches upright and grabs his phone, the LED reads five a.m. He stands up and pulls the net curtain back and his next-door neighbor’s door is open. Trees sway wildly where a few hours ago they were still. The sound drones from somewhere farther up the lane. He drags his coat on and walks out the front door. He steps easily over the rusted gate. At the end of the path a woman hoovers up the road.
Her pajama 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 yearlong 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 gray; it’s snaking over the hills from Fort Harbor. It’s six 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 color. 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 counselor.
—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, it’s 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 gray 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.
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 livable, 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-colored 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 ou
t 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 lockup 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?