The Sunlight Pilgrims

by Jenni Fagan

  —It sounds better than trips to the city dump, Stella says.

  Constance passes him the joint.

  —Give us a minute, Dylan. I’m just going to get Stella’s costume on, so she knows it fits for the bonfire party later!

  Stella follows her mum through to their bedroom. He triple-drags and stands next to the fire. He had a wee look in their bedroom when he came in and it is nothing like his. It’s clad in wood and painted white, with a matching upper and lower bed and handmade patchwork blankets. There are fairy lights strung all around the caravan. This caravan has the exact same layout as his—but she’s painted everything white. There are clever nooks for everything; she’s even drilled holes in a wide driftwood shelf, so all her wooden spoons and kitchen utensils are neatly slotted in there. He takes a roll off the table and tears it in two, chews briskly so they don’t come back to find him eating at their table like a great big hairy-fucking-stoned Goldilocks. There are stuffed animals all over the place. On the wall an upside-down bat is sleeping behind a glass dome. Antlers hang above the kitchenette with tea towels and socks drying on them. Stella’s drawings are tacked up all over the place and one says UNIVERSE CLOSED, TAKE RAINBOW. Constance’s bookshelf is full and from here he can read a few titles: gardening manuals, History of French Furniture Restoration, Antiques for Beginners, color charts from Farrow & Ball, a History of Burlesque, nearly everything by Bukowski. There’s one by Edgar Allan Poe, a few Stephen Kings, Cookie Mueller, Trocchi, Breece D’J Pancake, a biography of Mama Cass and one big old volume of Coleridge. She has a record player in the corner and a stack of vinyl on the floor. Neil Young’s Harvest Moon lies with its sleeve lyric-side-up and a round red wine stain on it. Half the room is carpeted in woven matting and there is a thick rag rug on her real-wood kitchen floor.

  Constance comes out of the bedroom and takes the joint off him and stands just—that close. She takes two or three drags, waves the smoke out of the window and hands it back to him. The wind howls over her roof and the caravan moves slightly. He can’t work out what is worse: wanting a kiss and not getting one, or getting one and never getting another. She makes him feel like a teenager.

  —Mum!

  —I’m coming.

  —Did you get the wardrobe out of the tip totally by yourself? Did you use a roller to get it into the ambulance?

  Stella is asking her mother this and she’s saying Yes; she’s saying Lift your feet up; no, stop wriggling, turn around, that’s it—you look beautiful; okay, not beautiful, you look repugnant, yup, utterly foul!

  —Dylan?

  —Yes, Stella.

  —Our thermometer says it is minus ten, she calls through.

  —Fresh, he says.

  —Did they just mention that iceberg again on the radio?

  —Yeah.

  She is still bumping about next door, opening her bathroom cabinet, finishing things. Flames leap this way and that on her wood stove, and he wants to lie down with Constance and listen to her heartbeat. Not say a word to each other all night. Just sip wine and watch snow falling outside the window—hold hands in the dark.

  Constance stands in the doorway watching him. He’s not sure how long she has been there and a frown flashes across her, making her look older. They assess each other formally—a contract—a measuring up.

  —Don’t bogart that joint, she says.

  —You know, Dennis Hopper wanted that on the sound track to Easy Rider.

  —Riveting! she grins.

  —You remind me of my gran, he says.

  —That’s a new one, she says.

  —If you knew my gran, you’d take it as a compliment. Anyway, you do furniture restoration?

  —Oh, shabby shit the pipes the pipes are c-a-l-l-ing! Stella bellows from the next room.

  —Chic, shabby fucking chic!

  Constance takes a bottle of beer out of the crate on her front porch and opens it and has a long swig and then holds one out for him. She glances at a photograph he is looking at, of her and Stella, who is about six years old, dressed in a Spiderman outfit; and there is another one of her dressed as a little boy, all in blue; and a handprint in a tiny frame and the name Cael written underneath it. Constance takes a long drag and looks at him.

  —Is that Stella when she was little?

  She nods and neither of them say anything. They make more sense to him now. Constance’s vague air of melancholy and sex—there is something of both about her; he couldn’t place it before but she’s in mourning too, for a little boy that used to be her baby.

  —She made the transition thirteen months ago.

  —Did you expect it?

  —Not really.

  —Has she been okay?

  —No, she’s not. You weren’t what I expected, when Stella said she’d invited a pal over.

  —What were you expecting?

  —Someone shorter.

  —Most people expect someone shorter, he says.

  —And less hairy.

  —You have something against hair?

  They grin at each other, a quick flash and it’s sealed then. She knows he likes her. Her eyes are gray with a rim around the iris in orange or gold.

  —What’s with the plastic birds outside Rose Cottage? he says.

  Dylan squints out of her window, looking down the pathway at shadowy shapes.

  —Pink flamingoes, Constance says.

  —Have you seen the film?

  —Aye, I have actually. I took an ex-boyfriend to see it for a midnight screening at the art-house cinema on a trip to Edinburgh once; we stayed in a hotel, went out for a meal—the whole thing. At the movie there was a guy in the row behind us, doing a lot of jerking around all the way through the film. I don’t think he was epileptic.

  —How did the date go after that?

  —Didn’t see him again. I chatted to Vivienne a few times—interesting woman.

  —Oh yeah, what was she saying?

  Constance is looking at him, head tilted.

  —She didn’t tell you she’d been here at all?

  —No, she wanted to take my gran’s ashes up to the islands and scatter them, but she never told me she’d visited Scotland. My gran was Gunn MacRae, she came from Orkney.

  —Stella’s dad’s family are from up there.

  —He might know them?

  —Maybe, there’s a lot of islands.

  She looks down so her eyelashes create a slight shadow on her cheek in this light. She has no marks on her skin, no moles, no freckles; under her eyes there are lines where she has not slept and two furrows between pale brows where she frowns too much. She smiles and her eyes flash slightly luminous. They are too close to each other to be comfortable.

  Stella walks in and stands at the door. She has eight bulging eyeballs sticking out from her costume, they are green and round, and her hair is a big backcombed halo, black as night. She wears a dash of pink lipstick and her chin is pointier than he ever noticed and she is exceptionally pleased with herself. She is probably the coolest kid he’s met—not that he has met many. Dylan tries to focus on Stella. He tries not to appear like he thinks Constance Fairbairn is the most fuckable woman he has ever met in his entire life.

  —Do you like the costume? Stella asks him.

  —You look scarier than a scary thing!

  —Truth, Stella says.

  Constance grins at him. That urge in him to lie with her in the dark and hold her. To drink wine and read books and ignore each other, but her foot just by his, her legs, her mouth. There are herbs hanging from the kitchenette ceiling. The wooden shutters around each window are painted blue. On the wall above there’s a picture of a purple dog. Stella’s paintings are cool: long men with even longer arms and gadgets hanging off them, and dinosaur heads and dog tails.

  —Your costume looks great, he says.

  —You don’t know what I am, though—do you?

  —No.

  He feels like he wants to look after the kid, and he knows she wants him here b
ecause when she asked him to come for dinner she said, please. Please come for tea.

  —I like your caravan, he says.

  —You’d never know that all of our furniture comes from the dump and dead people’s houses, would you? My mum can make anything look expensive. It’s a skill.

  Constance uncorks a bottle and pours two large glasses of red wine.

  —Cheers to that! she says.

  —Do you know Lewis Brown? Stella asks.

  —No, Dylan says.

  —You will: he lives at the first caravan on Larch Lane with his sister and nan and their lodger, their mum and also his brother. Anyway, his uncle and granddad are in the jail and the women pad over to the phone box in their pajamas with fags hanging out, to phone them, and who uses phone boxes anyway? They have mobile contracts, though, they just put their SIM card in and talk. We used to be best friends but we’re not anymore.

  There is a tenseness around Constance’s features.

  —Lewis Brown has all the latest computer games delivered straight from Japan, but since the post only comes sometimes now, he’s hardly had any, which is giving him withdrawals, cos he needs to be distracted from anything real. He can’t take it. Especially in winter. He can’t take the gray. Some people can’t take the gray but I can—I’m built for it; it doesn’t scare me but it gets so gray here in January and February especially, it makes your eyes grow tired and then your soul too, then your only choice is to get drunk, or die, or eat chocolate.

  —Stella!

  —Or stoned, or simply give up.

  —I’d never give up, Dylan says.

  —Me neither. Wait here, I’m going to do my nails in green as well.

  Stella disappears back into the bathroom. Constance tears a bit of bread in two and they don’t look at each other this time. The clock ticks and the fire cracks and purrs. Wind whistles against the caravan and he can feel the thing move slightly. Her arms are bare. Her neck is perfect and pale as a swan, but her shoulders are broad. It’s like watching a silent-movie star. He takes three long drags of the joint and his spine molds to the back of her chair. Light from the fire flickers on the walls. Along the other wall there are carved bookshelves, a birdcage filled with fairy lights and the skeleton of some bird with its wings flung right out.

  —Is that a nest of tiny birds with yellow open beaks, sat in the middle of its feathered bird gut?

  —My ex is a taxidermist, she says.

  —That explains it.

  —He’s Stella’s father.

  —I see.

  —One of her exes; the other one went traveling, Stella says from down the hall.

  Constance accepts the joint back from him and their fingers skim fractionally too close and dull thud in his chest—like a pebble dropping down a well.

  —Dylan doesn’t need to know this, thank you, Stella.

  —Mum had two boyfriends for nearly twenty years.

  —I’m sure lots of mums have more than one boyfriend, Dylan says.

  Stella appears at the door.

  —At the same time?

  —Stella, let’s not go into this.

  —Now she won’t speak to either of them. She’s single and sad and lonely!

  —Stella! Stop it right now or you’re not going anywhere.

  —Sorry!

  —The three of us didn’t live together, ever. They didn’t speak to each other at all in fact. It was just one of those things that happened. It wasn’t a lifestyle choice, Constance says.

  —Alistair and Caleb couldn’t stand each other, Mum, could they?

  —Alistair got married but then they separated; we were together on and off. Then he married someone else, then we were together and he got divorced, then he married his third wife.

  —You were still together through that one, Stella says.

  —Thanks for that, Estelle.

  —I’m just saying.

  —Stella came out of one of those times. Then we were together, then he went back to his last wife, then left her again. I was still with Caleb—it was one of those things, we were open about it.

  —You know what Alistair really didn’t like?

  —What’s that, Stella?

  —That you called me Cael when I was a baby and it sounds like Caleb, a bit.

  —No, I suppose he didn’t.

  —Alistair says when he dies he wants his bones ground down and made into a china tea set.

  Constance and Dylan both just look at her.

  —Yup!

  He realizes his mouth is really, really dry.

  —So that is what I would inherit if he died, a bone china tea set.

  —You’ll get the cottage, Constance says.

  —I won’t. Christine won’t let that happen. The woman hates me, I won’t get a penny. Only a tea set. Made of bones. From a guy who has never even called me by my girl name. I’ll smash it, she says.

  Stella leans into her mum for a quick hug.

  —He thinks if I get the tea set, I’ll sit with my own kids one day and pour a cup of builder’s tea into Granddad? Fucking lovely, ay?

  —Swear jar!

  Dylan tries to be subtle about watching Constance, but it is compulsive. It’s like watching a fire. She is the fire and her daughter the wind—howling along the rooftops, rattling at his windows all last night, warning him she could blow his house down and it is not a house, it is a caravan—d.e.n.i.a.l. It’s not a river in Egypt, that’s what the kid would say.

  —Okay, I’ll give you a clue. Everyone has what I am, Stella gestures to her costume.

  —Eyes, he says.

  —I’m green, I’m all green; all the eyes are just, you know, to give it a fucking edge!

  —Estelle! SWEAR JAR.

  The girl shrugs and Constance shakes her head and puts her feet up on the bench beside Dylan. Her toenails are all even. Square-shaped and, like her fingernails, they’re unpainted.

  —Something we all have?

  —Aye.

  —Are you a virus?

  They both look at him.

  —No, okay. Are you a fungus? A rare tree fungus, like the devil’s cigar fungus in where was it—come on—where was it?

  —Where was what? Constance says.

  —It was a fungus, it was shaped like a star, they called it the devil’s cigar cos it starts off as a capsule and then it opens, and it was in some humid tropical forest somewhere. It was an interesting fungus!

  —As opposed to those less interesting fungi?

  —I saw it on that documentary where the guy got wasted with tribes and they’d always have some shamanistic intervention, where the whole village would put on a performance to draw out his demons so he could be spiritually free!

  —He got exorcised? Stella asks.

  —Aye, actually I know a great preacher in Peckham who will drive the devil from your soul for a tenner, he says.

  —I know a few people who could use that trick. Constance laughs.

  —Never mind that, you’ve taken too long, Tit-head, look—I’m a bogey!

  —Stella!

  —Tit is not a swear word.

  —Yes, it is—swear jar!

  They both say the latter bit in unison. Stella is like the wind outside and Constance is the fire. The wind is gentle, blowing lightly to brighten the flames, to stop the fire going out. Stella picks up the remote control and slumps on the sofa, and her bogey costume swells out like it’s got wire in it to make her a rounder, fatter, more luscious bogey, and she puts the telly onto a music station and taps her feet and chair-dances—she is a chair-dancing bogey and they say the word like it is a bow-gay—a bow-gay—if he was a gay he’d be a bow-gay, not just a guy who’s had a few blow jobs here and there over the years, slept with an old friend when they were drunk one night. He is in fact far too stoned right now to go outside and meet everyone else from this caravan park and his hands still keep twitching to clean a projector, stack reels, click on lights, take tickets, go back to his booth and switch the running time
to On! Camera, action, sound track, titles!

  Stella studies him, her eyeballs jiggle slightly.

  —You make a majestic bogey, he says.

  —Truth (she nods), truth, truth, truth.

  She comes dressed as a wolf. Through the bonfire he gets glimpses of her as she steps over the back of somebody’s fence. She has a wolf’s head and tail and she moves like a wolf. Constance’s eyes flash as a firework arcs up into the sky and cracks open into a waterfall of green and pink. She holds her girl’s hand and they move like one person—each a part of the other. All the trees are bowing to the left and nobody else seems concerned by the force of the wind.

  —My name is Barnacle, we haven’t met.

  —Dylan, pleased to meet you.

  The man offers a soft paw. His back is curved and he is bent over so far he can only look up at Dylan with quick glances. The smell of grass and wood smoke is strong. It is so cold it burns when he breathes. The mountains are dark and craggy and through the flames he can imagine people up there, naked fire children, leaping around, half-human, half-stag, fornicating pagans offering up blood to their gods. He is getting lots of looks, standing here in his Chelsea boots and his deerstalker. He always was too tall to hide in a crowd.

  —Are you a giant?

  A kid runs by him, sniggers to his friend. Dylan resists an urge to knock the little shite’s clown hat right off.

  —Little bastards, can’t fucking stand them, Barnacle says, looking at the kids running off.

  Dylan laughs.

  —Stella’s not a bad kid, she’s starting a new political party, Dylan says.

  —That girl is a diamond. What are her policies, then?

  —That every human vows to sign a contract as a temporary caretaker of the planet in their own lifetime, and the war against women ends.

  —Well, that’s never going to fucking happen, is it? She’s as much chance of that as I do of walking upright again, Barnacle scorns.

  —What would you put in place, then?

  —Free alcohol, he says.

  —Interesting.

  —Free prostitutes as well.

  —I see. So, who will pay them, if they’re free?

  —I didn’t think of that. Perhaps they could put it on our taxes; spend less on second homes for total cunts? Or maybe the women could just work for free?