by Jenni Fagan
—That’s called slavery.
—Yes, yes, of course, quite right. Well, we could take all the idiots and put them on another planet. Best place for them. Of course you might think I am one of those idiots, and I am, but we are all raised in madness. The people in control have police and armies with guns and tanks, all of them trained to kill or to imprison, to restrain, to caution, to make sure what the ruling parties say goes. But we’re free, right? Free to get shafted so far up the fucking arse we all just hobble our way to the shitting grave! That’s how fucking free we are.
The flames on the bonfire leap this way and that; people’s faces change in the firelight, they look happy one minute and sad the next. Kids race around the fire with sparklers.
—Have you been to the industrial park yet, Dylan?
—Not yet.
—There’s an Ikea there, lots of fast-food places, DIY stores. You will find everything you could possibly never need over there. Giant fold-out swimming pools, dubiously named paint, dogs, budgies, Japanese cars.
Barnacle glances up at him and taps his long feet. His one concession to fancy dress is a plastic Alice band with two long prongs and lights on the end that flash different colors.
—Did you know the woman who owns your caravan, Dylan?
—My mother, Vivienne.
—Really? She was a looker—striking woman. We had a few gins one night, it was homemade stuff with wild water mint, fucking marvelous stuff.
—My Grandma Gunn’s home brew.
—You should get the recipe for that, I’d buy it!
Gunn—distilling in their cellar. Bottles and a brass gin still and selling it to the fancy hotel up the road for their cocktails. It is not a bad idea. He has been without a daily job for such a short time but it’s already making him feel weird. The still will arrive any day now.
—I offered your mother a glass of water once, she said she couldn’t possibly drink the stuff; when I asked her why, she said Fish fuck in it, darling!
They both laugh so loudly people look over—Barnacle stooped in his C shape and Dylan with his head and shoulders above everyone else. Barnacle aims to slap Dylan on the back, but gets his arse instead and that sets the two of them off again. Dylan smiles over at Stella, who has stopped for a minute to watch them in mock horror from the other side of the bonfire.
—He’s a good kid, Barnacle says.
—She’s a good kid.
—That’s what I said.
Dylan doesn’t say anything for a minute.
—Constance is a looker, isn’t she? She doesn’t take any shit. I pity the kid that picks on Stella, they’ll wake up to find their balls hanging from her Christmas tree. Your mother rented the caravan out to a woman called Ethel for a while, an ex of mine. She was an unusual woman, Ethel, like a rare, infertile peduncle. Quite unkissable, except in the right light. I knew her when she was younger. I had a Saab 900 and I’d drive back along the farm roads and there she’d be, and she was quite wonderful to look at then; and, well, something happened much more recently with her, not long before she left for a home actually. It quite freaked me out. She turned up at my caravan in the middle of the night—I never lock the door, you see—and I found her in the living room in her nightie with her pale, hairy legs quite on display, you know. I could see…all of heaven.
—Awkward!
—The bark, though. Where did it come from? Shameful. Barking at her. Bark, bark, bark. She scurried back over to her caravan and all her cats spilled out, to rub up and down her legs, and she slammed her door. I was furious with myself. I should have just lain down with her, should have held her and touched her cheek, and pushed her hair back off her face and told her she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen—should have tried to make her feel light and wanted and free, but I didn’t. She freaked me the fuck out and I barked at her like a rabid beast.
—I’m sure she understood.
—She didn’t. Not one bit.
—Do you know if the ferry at Fort Harbor goes as far as Orkney?
—You might need to take two ferries and a little plane. Not in these winds, though.
—I want to take my mother’s and grandmother’s ashes there.
—They are both gone? Dear boy, I am sorry. Did you know the women on the islands used to prepare the bodies of the dead? Aunts, sisters, mothers: they’d sing songs while they bathed their husbands or sons one last time—sing them right through to the Other Side. They had all kinds of great rituals. Like tipping the chairs over once the coffin was lifted, so the spirit of the dead couldn’t sit down, or throwing the windows open as soon as someone died, so their soul could leave, but snapping it shut again quickly in case they tried to get back in. They don’t do any of that now, as far as I know. You should take them both back up there for sure, young Dylan. What’s your family name?
—MacRae.
—Time to burn the guy! Ida shouts.
The guy has been made out of a one-armed mannequin with a Girls’ World head and a ginger afro; someone has made up the face with bright-blue eyeshadow and red lipstick and it is wearing a shell suit.
—I can’t even remember how many years it is since I saw someone wearing a shell suit, Dylan nods at the guy.
Barnacle stares up at it intently as it blows up in flames.
—Highly flammable, shell suits, he says.
—I think that is why they dressed the guy in it.
—I once met an ex-girlfriend’s family who’d come up from some godforsaken shithole down south and we had to go into town and meet them. They drove up in a minibus and when I got there, they all got out, wearing matching shell suits!
Dylan starts laughing.
—Matching?
—Identical and there was about fourteen of them—we had to take them all over the city like that. Absolutely mortified I was! Barnacle shakes his head.
Kids run around in the park with their faces bright in the firelight. Someone has set up a barbecue on the other side of the park and the smell of hamburgers wafts across the green and then sparklers—a burnt metal smell; it takes him back to being a kid and writing his name on a backdrop of night. The thrill of being able to make words and pictures on a black sky. She is on the other side of the fire. The light catches her eyes. Constance Fairbairn is a perfect wolf. The sky is clear. Two planets are outlined in a faint red. Barnacle turns his neck and looks up and the lights on the end of his Alice band jiggle.
—Look, there’s Orion. Little Bear and Big Bear; that is the Plough, Jupiter and her moons. Outstanding! I have a telescope but you don’t need it here very often.
Barnacle points out constellations above them, without looking up. A star shoots straight across the sky. Constance circles around the other side of the fire. Her wolf tail flicks behind her and Stella runs after a dalek and a clown. The kids are intimidating spirits—come to roar at the firelight, come to stamp their feet and gnash their teeth. More than a glint of red in each of their eyes. They race around in between dancers who are all variations of strange, and wholly unconcerned by it. A man pulls his wife in close to him, she has long red hair and he runs his hand down her side. The young satanist and his girlfriend stand at the edge of the fire; she is wearing contact lenses that make her eyes violet. He has a cat on a lead.
—Do they do this celebration every year? Dylan asks.
—Yeah, on Halloween the kids go trick-or-treating, and at Guy Fawkes they all dress up again and get to stay up as late as they want.
Dylan watches Constance. She is straight-up-and-down sinew and muscle and bone. Her eyes flash in the cutout of her wolf mask and you can tell it has been made from a real wolf pelt and this Alistair guy has made it for her with skill and love.
—What did you come as, Dylan?
Stella is in front of him and staring at him, and her wolf mother is watching him now and the man she is talking to looks a lot older than Constance.
—See that shimmer in the sky! A full aurora borealis is due, Barna
cle says.
—You didn’t come as anything, did you? Can you even speak?
—I didn’t know it was fancy dress.
—Leave him alone, Stella, he’s feeling a bit peaky. What are you anyway—are you a bogey?
—The guy’s totally melting! Stella shouts.
Kids point and laugh. The plastic Girls’ World head on the top is melting and Barnacle stares at his own shoes. Dylan imagines the guy must spend his whole life staring at those shoes, like he is an old man cursed for cutting off a hundred soldiers’ feet in some past life, so now—no matter how beautiful the scene before him—he has to stare at his shoes before all things. Barnacle glances up at him, head turned to the left, a long face with flaccid chins.
—You don’t want to go for that one, he says.
—What one?
Dylan shifts uneasily and wishes he’d brought more to drink and thinks it is time he quit his (every-other-day) attempt to not smoke anymore, and he wonders if the site shop is still open.
—Constance. See the man she’s talking to, that’s Alistair. He’s Stella’s biological father. They never lived together but she was with him for a long time. He’s back with his wife now, and then there’s the younger one, Caleb. He goes abroad each year and then he comes back.
—She’s not with either of them anymore.
—Not this month.
—There’s nothing to say she’ll go back to either of them, Barnacle.
—No, but they’re a love triangle that has lasted over twenty years, that’s all I’m saying. Constance has taken so much shit for having two lovers over the years, never living with either of them, raising a child that way. The woman knows what she wants. Falling in love with a third won’t change that.
Barnacle smiles and extends a paw and it looks exactly like that, a soft curved paw, nail-less, like he’s been declawed. Everything is stranger and warmer and wilder—the kids louder and their teeth shinier, and spirals of light against darkness and sparklers and fireworks whizzing up from miles away.
—Are you all right?
Constance is in front of him. She pulls off her wolf’s head and her hair is stuck down and white and her skin is pale, so pale it glows, and she barely has eyebrows or eyelashes, which makes the gray of her eyes particularly clear. She glances at him and Barnacle looks awkwardly up at her and grins.
—Constance!
—Barnacle, you’re not scaring the fresh blood, are you?
—He doesn’t seem easily scared. I was just asking him why he moved—here!
The old man gesticulates, a conductor before an orchestra, his large hands palm up and drawing some strange pattern on the air. Constance, with the wolf head in one hand, casually accepts a bottle of beer from a crate going by. She grabs a second, hands it to Dylan. They lock eyes. She tilts the bottle, still looking at him, and gestures to Stella by holding up her watch. Over on the other side of the bonfire an old couple are dancing, all stomachs and chins and an air of utter bliss as they hold each other and gently step forward—one-two, side-side, one-two. Barnacle shuffles back toward his caravan and jabs his finger up and mutters, and there are ribbons of light across the sky, billowing scarves of purple with tiny inroads of green.
The bonfire is so hot, Dylan has to step back; flames lick around the horse painting from his caravan and it paws the ground before it goes up in flames, and the ground is mush under his sneakers. He looks up and she is not there and he looks around but he can only see the satanist kids walking their cat back to their caravan. A pitbull is up at their caravan window waiting for them.
—Do you want a sparkler, Dylan? Stella races around the fire.
—Thanks for asking me for dinner and not telling your mum it was a grown-up neighbor coming, not one of your school friends!
—I don’t have school friends. Do you fancy my mum? Stella asks.
—No.
—Liar.
Barnacle has settled on his porch, waiting for the fireworks. Loud bangs echo across the green as a young guy lights them, one by one. The area is cordoned off but it’s so close, if a rocket went backward it could easily take out an eye or set a costume alight in the crowd. The young guy lights a Catherine wheel and it fizzes on the air, then sounds like a rope being pulled, and then the wheel is turning, shooting out tiny sparks in different colors until white electricity rockets up into the air, then a tiny dot exploding into arcs of sparkling light. Constance walks back over. The fire crackles but it is somehow distant and everything around them gets blurrier, and he is so high the ground is going up and down in gentle waves. What he needs is more beer.
—Where’s your girlfriend, then, Dylan?
—Why do you ask, Constance?
She grins and takes a swig of beer and looks away, at the fire, over the green, then back at him.
—Just making conversation, she says.
—No, you’re not.
The sounds of fireworks whizz and the hiss of the fire and kids and clatter and she looks at him. Dylan resists pulling a strand of hair off her face. Constance flicks the ash off her cigarette and then she is walking away, raising her hand—a silhouette of wolf ears and her tail flicking its way around the flames.
There are three suns in the sky. Constance raises the ax and there is a swoop-thud-crack as she brings it down. A log splits cleanly in two, falls onto a pile of softer shavings. She stacks the wood, straightens up, her hand on the small of her back.
Stella shades her eyes so she can see all three suns.
It’s the most amazing thing she has ever seen in her life.
She frames the suns as if she’s looking at them through an old film camera. The middle sun is the brightest and the two on either side are a tiny bit smaller and more hazy, but it is clearly suns in triplicate. The middle sun radiates a large white halo, which arcs out almost far enough to touch the suns on either side. Trails of light go up into the clouds. Stella tips her head back and narrows her eyes until sunlight makes the insides of her half-closed eyelids a warm blood orange. Light soaks into her chromosomes.
—What are they called again, Mum?
—Parhelia. It’s a phenomenon that looks like three suns, but the two on either side are just reflected light—it’s something to do with ice crystals.
She likes watching these suns and those wispy little clouds. It does something relaxing to the eyes, like the seagulls dive-bombing down at Fort Harbor, dropping out of the sky, then the splash. Or when the mackerel are migrating, rippling the water as they swim along. Clean. Easy. Dylan appears behind them. He stares at the suns. Stella sees herself as the middle sun, but she reckons he is looking at the parhelia and seeing all three of them. If that was their life. That would be something. Adults are so stupid. It’s clear they like each other. Her mum shades her own eyes and turns toward the three suns.
—They say three suns in the sky heralds the start of a great storm.
—Judging by the snowfall, they’re right on cue, Dylan says.
Her mum brings down the ax again, cracking into a log where it juts out at an angle. There is snow everywhere. Piles and piles and piles of it. Smooth valleys up on the mountains that sparkle, totally untouched by anything. Constance unfolds a blue tarpaulin and fixes it over the stack of firewood to try and keep it dry. Dylan shields his eyes and stands on the other side of Stella, scanning the landscape. The seven sisters radiate! He looks up at the suns again.
—They call them sun dogs, he says.
—Why?
—I don’t know.
—I met someone once who told me you can drink energy from the sun, store it in your cells so you grow strong. She said we should all do it. It’s like a backup store of it in our cells; she said there were sunlight pilgrims doing it all the time—it’s how they get through the dark, by stashing up as much light as they can, Stella says.
Dylan turns to look at her.
—Who told you that?
—Just some woman I saw in the caravan park.
�
��My gran said those words, pretty much exactly like that, he says.
—Did she?
The two of them stare at each other and Stella notices for the first time that the shape of Dylan’s eyes is exactly like Alistair’s, and her heartbeat skips a little and picks up and she digs the toe of her boot into a pile of snow. Somewhere far away she can hear the motorway hum and she tries to imagine it is the sound of waves like the seashore at Fort Hope, and they need to go down there soon, to hear the boats click-clack at night and ask the fishermen when this iceberg is going to appear.
—Gunn told me there was an island close to Norway, but still part of the archipelago, that was home to a bunch of monks they called the sunlight pilgrims. All they had to eat was gannets and one year they all went mad, threw themselves off the cliffs, about seventy of them. Nobody knows what did it, but they were totally isolated from the mainland and they had one boat and they couldn’t go for help until spring. They all died apart from one. They found him on the mountaintop naked, sitting in lotus, drinking light—orange to gray. That’s how he said it. He said you just drink it. He said it keeps humans right. Guy claimed he hadn’t eaten for weeks and the devil had taken his brothers, but he was okay, he said he got everything he needed from the sun. Apparently all the bones of the monks are still there on the island, Dylan says.
—I’d like to go there, Stella says.
—Which island is it? Constance asks.
—I don’t know. It’s not on the map, though; you can only get out there from spring to summer, because the sea is too rough the rest of the time. Fishermen say it moves too, sometimes it’s there, other times it’s not, that’s how Gunn told it.
—They should have had a nuclear larder, Constance says.
—We have enough food in our apocalypse larder to be able to live solely off tins and rice and pasta for about what: six months, Mum?
—You won’t be taking the piss when you don’t have to eat gannets, Stella.
—It would be seagulls here, and deer.