by Jenni Fagan
—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.
—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-colored 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 recognize what they were in the first place.
—I bet they do, he says.
—I have a lot of brass-colored 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 tasseled lampshade; he keeps the china Hawaiian-lady base and a lightbulb 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 coffeepot 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 sulfur 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 gray-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 ax, 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 neighbor, Ethel at number seven, died too.
—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 thwe 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 wineglass 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 ax. It’s a foregone conclusion.
—
Stella opens the living room door quietly and kicks the frost off her boots, only now realizing 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 neighbor, 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 rain forest. 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 ax 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 birdbath, trying to free the leaves, but they are frozen solid. She blows on her fingers. Dogs bark somewhere down the hill. Alistair’s white house 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 ax 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 make
s 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.
—There isn’t much light, she says.
—Those clouds will clear in a minute, Stella says.
The woman taps where an old heart beats under thin skin.
—You have two spirits, she smiles.
—No, I don’t, Stella says.
The woman is wearing a thick donkey jacket and even from here she smells like pickles. Behind her the mountains bathe in light as white cloud shifts and rays of sun spill out. The woman tips her head back and stares at the sun, so her eyes light up and her face softens its craggy lines and her white hair is haloed.
—Are you staring right at the sun? Stella asks.
—I’m staring right under it.
—You’ll go blind.
—No, I won’t. I was taught how to by the sunlight pilgrims, they’re from the islands farthest north. You can drink light right down into your chromosomes, then in the darkest minutes of winter, when there is a total absence of it, you will glow and glow and glow. I do, she says.
—You glow?
—Like a fucking angel, she says.
Stella turns around to look behind her.
A gate clacks in the wind.
Dogs bark farther down the caravan park.
The woman is gone.
Away over on the furthest hills the wind farm’s nacelles rotate and the big white tripod legs supporting some of them look like they could just start marching toward the caravan park and trample all their homes. Like that time when the mine shafts were swallowing up caravans right into the ground and everyone was trying to move out. Pit bulls begin to scratch at the satanist’s kitchen window. He sticks his head up between the curtains and scowls at Stella, points toward his dogs as if she is waking them up, and he is sweaty like he has been shagging his satanist girlfriend.