by Jenni Fagan
Stella and Constance stand side by side at the entrance to the city dump. They scan the horizon. A doorway stands alone. Mattresses. Jagged piles of electrical goods, their wires spilled out like the entrails of hedgehogs at Alistair’s, the one time he showed her how to embalm. There is a wall of fridges. A shop mannequin stands on one leg and holds her arm up like she is waiting to ask a question. The tip isn’t any better than dead people’s houses but at least their stuff is contained in rooms and spaces that make sense. The longer you stand in the tip, the stranger it gets. It’s like the guts of the whole world have been thrown up. A mound of plastic in all different colors blurs in front of her eyes and she has to look away or it will give her a headache. They’re not looking for any of this stuff. They need to get over to the other side, where furniture gets dropped off. Diggers nudge in toward valleys at the north side of the tip. It smells like the end of the world. There are no lorries arriving to make drop-offs, so the two of them stand there motionless for a few more seconds.
Constance lifts up the wire fence and Stella slips under.
They head for the far side, heads down, hoods up.
It is automatic to scrutinize the ground ceaselessly for wet concrete, or needles, or medication, or knives, or broken glass. All of people’s lives are here. Their bills. Letters. Even their blood on bits of tissue or sanitary pads. The boys in the caravan park pointed that out to her one time when she still played with them. You can even find DNA in this place. That’s what one of them said.
Her mother is wearing soft old jeans and faded leather gloves. They pause for a minute as the diggers change direction. It’s always like this. The strangest game of musical statues in the world. Here I am—playing still behind a mound of several thousand tires! Stella looks down at her boots. They are almost the same size as Constance’s now. Their four boots are black, scuffed, standing in a row pointing straight ahead, steel-toe caps, boots from dead soldiers. They are the only kind her mother has ever bought her, apart from wellies.
—Come on, let’s move, Constance says.
She trudges along behind her mother, the sky white and the land gulls spiraling. That woman from Rio had the most beautiful shoes, so elegant and tall, and they made her legs look even slimmer and prettier. Stella will wear shoes like that. One day her mother will despair. On the other side of the dump, diggers roll forward. Orange warning lights blare on top of cabins. They turn west, forks raised, and plunge into waste. Whenever they pass a decent piece of furniture her mother inspects it quickly, then she leaves a little bright-colored flag on the top so they can find it later.
Stella follows her mother, keeping up the pace, and she is warm by the time they get to the other side. If Lewis stayed home on the day she got beaten up at Ellie’s Hole, then it was because he didn’t want to hit her, and he didn’t want to see his friends hit her either; and at one time she was pals with them all too and, when they got her on the ground, one was shouting that she’d always be a boy and not to look at him like that, cos he’d never hit a girl. They were so angry because they’d told her all their boy secrets when they thought she was just like them and she’d slept over at Lewis’s a million times and they’d eaten crisps and watched anime and played computer games and talked about girls. He knew. If he’s honest about it. He liked her even then. If he would kiss her again, it would be enough to keep her happy for the rest of her life. Except that isn’t true. Kissing must be like smoking. If you like it, you always want another.
Her mother takes off her gloves as they reach high cliffs made from mulched paper—she is tempted (as always) to jump. It’s a thirty-foot drop. She would land in the vast basins of paper below. Stella has done it a hundred times and she can see herself leaping, an imprint of light against the sky—her outline like a negative. It’s dangerous, but every time she survives it feels like being reborn. She hasn’t done that for years now. Her mother’s fine hair lifts in the breeze and her own head is itchy under her hat now and she has too much saliva in her mouth. She is desperate for a cold drink. The snow is falling again lightly but it won’t last long. Stella’s breath hovers on the air and she rubs her fingers together and blows on her gloves.
Underneath the dump there are long shafts for the unused coal mines and they stretch out around Clachan Fells. Vast hollow spaces and all that coal just wasted, and up here layers of debris stretch out for miles in every direction. On the other side of the dump are the farmers’ fields, the caravan parks, the industrial parks where they have not been for ages. All the big stores are there, the warehouses, DIY stores, a garage and supermarket.
—Mum, can we go over to Ikea for lunch?
—No.
—Why not?
—We don’t have any money this week.
—We didn’t have any last week.
—We probably won’t have any next week either.
They giggle even though it is not funny.
Wind drags papers along the waste and there is a smell of glue on the air. She can imagine that man in the scary movie just standing on that endless road, looking forward and back and seeing nobody.
—If the snowfall is worse than last year, will it cover the entire caravan?
Her mother shades her eyes and scans the tip. She shrugs lightly but her face looks thinner and more worried than it did yesterday. Stella covers her nose for a minute and breathes in the smell of her wool gloves, damp with snowfall. When they are scavenging for furniture at the dump she has trained herself not to react to olfactory distractions. They could be anything. It is better not to know. Metal pylons stand out starkly against the sky. There is something creepy about them jutting out of the rubble like that. Two hilled peaks of rubbish frame the road that the diggers trundle along. To the west there are vast piles of tires all stacked on top of each other. It is dangerous over in that area. To the east is where the hospitals and old folks’ homes tend to dump their stuff and they sometimes see some wired-looking junky wandering over there. Land gulls swoop over diggers, and snippets of cries are cut off by the wind. They sound like children crying. Stella picks her way across a pile of ceramic sinks toward an old children’s wardrobe and wonders what the tips are like in Italy.
—Mum, this one’s good—there’s no handles but the varnish finish is still nice and there’s detail on the edges.
—Any woodworm?
—Nope.
—Mold?
—Little bit, but it’s not black. It has a wee ceramic sign that says 1922 C LONDON FELLOWS.
—Really?
Her mother picks her way over.
—Look at that, it’s a mission design.
—Unidentified person by the cliff area—please leave the danger zone; we repeat, get out of the zone!
A man stands in a digger a hundred feet away from them. He holds the loudspeaker to shout at them again and he waves his arm. The digger’s orange light flashes around and around. Constance raises her hand to let him know she has heard. Her mum puts a little fluorescent flag on top of the wardrobe, so it will be easier to find it later. They take the usual route toward farmland until they emerge at the west side of the dump. Wind snaps at any inch of bare skin it can find. Stella’s glad of the fisherman’s socks under her boots. Her mother’s hair is so pale it blends into the skyline behind her and her skin too, like it’s never seen sunlight. Alistair’s traditional wee white house is just up there and her mother glances that way. She has been with him on and off since she was nineteen years old. Stella has a horrible feeling it is only a matter of time before they start sleeping together again. Through every wife and fight and change in their lives, it always ends up that way. Stella will never speak to him as long as she lives. The man is hideous. There is nothing nice about him. She just knows that tonight she will dream about a hedgehog with HDMI cables for guts and land gull eyes and it is going to be answering questions asked by a naked mannequin.
They cross over an iced pond.
Her mum tests the weight, one step ahead of her
all the way and frowning.
Stella skids along behind her.
Over through the trees three parked tractors have icicles hanging off the big forks and the fat tires and the cabins. The trees around them are all decorated with glacial spikes as well. They are appearing almost as she looks at them. Winter doing her decorating. Making the world as pretty as can be. Up on the nearest mountain a herd of fallow deer emerge from the forest and canter up the mountain, young bucks at the rear.
Constance and Stella cross the farm road. Spikes of hay crunch underfoot, there are large dark patches on the ground where hay bales rest all summer. Stella used to roll the bales underfoot, gathering speed until she had to run to stay on top of one. She can still see that road in her mind from that film and she will dream about it again soon. She hates those nightmares. There is always a long icy track with endless fields on either side and the trees are black silhouettes; there is not one bit of green anywhere and just one person left in the whole world and they are walking along that road wearing a red coat. You’d be able to see them for miles and miles around.
A flock of birds fly low overhead.
Mossy greens and purples and red-golds have faded to brown.
Sleet billows off the mountain.
Treetops disappear in one blink as the white owerblaw races over the mountaintop and drifts down thicker and faster, painting everything white until within seconds the whole landscape is utterly changed.
Morning comes through the curtains to create a square of sunlight on the floor. He slept on and off, then woke to see mist creeping along the garden earlier on. Now there is frost all over the ground and the mountains radiate all bright and white in the morning sun. Breathing feels so clean here it’s almost making him dizzy. Dylan takes her book out of the bedside cabinet. He has been avoiding it. He goes through to the living room and opens the first page to find a cutting from the Soho Gazette. The paper is thin and the ink is faded. There is a photograph of his grandmother cutting a ribbon and, if you really look, you can just make out a baby strapped on under her coat. BABYLON, ART-HOUSE CINEMA, 17TH MARCH 1953. A chic Soho audience smiles in black-and-white. Beside the cutting there is a flat bit of ribbon with frayed ends pinned to the page. Vivienne’s book is musty and the pages have grown crisper from the damp in the attic flat. The neighbors were always trying to get her to fix the roof. Fix the roof, they’d say. She’d smoke cigarettes and tap her foot in irritation and ask them if they knew how many years it was since she’d bought new shoes, let alone an entire fucking roof! Vivienne used to sit with this book on her lap, sketching things. He turns the page. There is a sketch of Gunn. She is cleaning the projector. Her socks show above her boots. She is wearing a pinny. On the very first opening night Gunn was so nervous. She’d taught herself how to use all the equipment but she hadn’t tried it all together yet. When the very first reel played, she looked out at the back of the audience’s heads and held her breath. When she was sure the reel would work okay, and none of the customers were going to ask for their money back, when she saw they were all rapt and with halos around their heads, as she liked to say, she sat down and fed her baby in the projectionist booth, lulled her to sleep listening to 1920s gangsters holding a shootout in New York.
Tucked in between the pages is a folded letter. His mother’s scrawled handwriting:
Dearest Dylan,
I suppose you might have sold the caravan and gone abroad and now some holidaymaker is reading this. If that is the case, then please just put this book in the bin. It’s only drawings. I was never any good with words. If this is you, then I am sorry I never kept contact details for your father, but here is what I know: he is one inch taller than you. (Do you remember I used to tell you that you came from a race of giants and you would never believe me—well, here are some cuttings about tall skeletons found in Wisconsin, Bulgaria, Africa, New York, Greece, the Netherlands, Ireland. I know there are fake ones of these online but some of them are real. I do believe that somewhere down the line, these were your people.) Your father lived in Hebden Bridge. I don’t imagine there are many tall men there. I don’t have any wisdom for you, sorry, only a recipe for Scotch broth and some (at best) average drawings. I just wanted to tell you that holding your hand when you were a kid, watching The Wizard of Oz on the big screen in our pajamas, sitting on the back step eating our cheese sandwiches together or hanging out with Gunn, drinking gin—they were the very best minutes of my life. I could have traveled the world and nothing would have beat them. I’m sorry I didn’t teach you how to let the world in (other than in film) but I never figured out how to do it myself.
All my love,
Vivienne
(Mum)
xxx
He picks up a pen and a Post-it note. He writes: Why are there no tall men in Hebden Bridge? He focuses on breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth. He clicks on the three-bar heater, his fingers and nose already numb from cold. He flicks through a selection of newspaper clippings about tall skeletons found around the world. There is a skeleton with a 20-inch skull and dark eye sockets found in Peru. It is on display in a museum, its teeth still protruding. There is one in Greece at 7.6 feet, another in New Orleans at 8 feet 2 inches. There is a clipping about Robert Wadlow, all 8 feet 11.1 inches of him, the tallest person ever recorded. It makes his own 6 feet 7 inches seem pretty insignificant.
He clicks the kettle on.
Drops a teabag into a mug.
She never said anything nice like that while she was alive. Not once. She was probably pissed when she wrote the letter. Impending death makes people act nice out of desperation. He looks out the window. The sky is so blue. It’s piercing. The caravan-site store he visited earlier was not so bad. It’s in a cool old metal tractor storeroom and well stocked. He can go back later to get more supplies. The book lies open on the table. He can imagine Vivienne sitting here. Looking out at the mountains. Reading, reading, reading. Dylan opens the cupboard to try and find something to eat and the Tupperware box and ice cream tub just sit there.
—Morning, he says.
He closes the cupboard door.
Gunn MacRae died on May Day; she curled up in her bed like a fragile child and Vivienne lay down with her and stroked her hair and sang her songs until she went over to the Other Side. Dylan watched them both from the door. He can see her now. Her profile like that of a Roman. Thin arms. A smile like she knew something about something but she wasn’t telling anyone jack shit. There is an ache he cannot shift and he is uncertain how something this physical has the remotest chance of going. Scoured out. That’s what he is. He goes over to the window. There is still no sign of the moon polisher. If he had a camera he would have filmed her and made it into a short. Maybe that’s what he should be doing with his life now. Making films and living, instead of watching them and merely existing. It’s a thought. He picks up Vivienne’s book and finds a P.S. on the next page—
P.S. Your grandmother told me she prized the keys to Babylon from a corpse’s fist. He was a Lord of some kind, apparently they used to have orgies in there with laudanum and plum brandy, you know the sort. It came to the family in the worst of karma really, so of course we’d never get to keep the place forever. I answered the door to Babylon one night to find the devil on our back step. He held a top hat in his hands. He was wearing a Savile Row suit with scruffy old trainers. He asked if Gran was home. I said no, but he could smell mince and hear her singing loudly upstairs. He asked what she was cooking, I said shepherd’s pie and he said it was his favorite.
It was awkward.
Mum xxx
The field over at the park is frosty but that isn’t enough to stop the locals, who are still building a bonfire. The air is crisp and it has that Guy Fawkes vibe that he almost forgot existed. The pile of broken furniture is stacked up and all the stuff he didn’t need is going to burn and he supposes he isn’t leaving. At least not for now. Right now he needs to walk. Dylan tucks the cuttings into the back of the sketchb
ook, then wraps it up in Vivienne’s woolen cardigan and puts it under a pillow in the little bedroom. He rummages for a hat and yanks on a beanie that smells musty. He finds a pair of fingerless gloves. There is a toothbrush in a wrapper in the bedroom cupboard and a small travel-size tube of toothpaste. He brushes his teeth hard and takes a long drink of water. He bought two bars of chocolate from the shop and some oatcakes; it’s a good enough breakfast, hits at least some of the main food groups. He eats the oatcakes and stares up at the entire Clachan Fells range. It isn’t wise to walk a mountain in Chelsea boots.
Not wise at all.
The goats will laugh at him.