by Jenni Fagan
—Who is that from?
Stella nods toward a postcard tacked up onto the wooden saucepan rack.
—Caleb.
Her mother turns away and there’s a tenseness to her when she says his name. From the back she doesn’t look like an adult, but she doesn’t really look like a teenager either, because she is too muscular, her frame lean, hair too short. Constance sits down at the kitchen table and puts the open cereal packet on the bunker.
—Would you take him back, and Alistair?
Her mother doesn’t answer.
—What about Dylan?
Constance unfolds the paper and keeps frowning at it. Stella grabs her coat and she is out of the door, her eyes stinging. She crunches down the porch and away in the distance the village church bells chime. The snow and the ice and the cold are seeping into everybody. The whole world is getting meaner, if that is even possible. The church bells have been ringing like this for hours. It is something to do with the suns. The bells are always rung by the same old man, who took the job over forty years ago and came to the school last year to tell the pupils at Clachan Fells Primary School all about it. He told them that when they first moved to Clachan Fells, his mother warned him to be careful if he was going to get drunk in the village pub in winter. She said their neighbors would be able to tell how drunk he had been by the pattern of his footprints in the snow the next morning. That afternoon they made snowflakes by cutting little triangles out of paper and then they decorated the village hall for the Christmas party and a guy was brought in to DJ, with some flashing lights, and all of the songs were rave or pop and Stella prayed for Joy Division to materialize and stun them all. The song by Joy Division she would have had the DJ play would have been “She’s Lost Control.” That is what this winter feels like. Like everything that was once in order has unraveled, so fast nobody can keep up. Stella can hear the thwack of metal ringing from the bells all the way out here by the fields. Ropes run up into the belfry so that the bell chimes, it chimes, and chimes, and they are telling everyone to come to church, now the weather is getting worse by the day rather than weekly. They must all gather to pray. There are people in Clachan Fells village who believe this winter is the devil’s work. He is wreaking revenge for being disbelieved all this time. The parhelia is still there but it is already fading. She checks her bike over; the big wheels are wide and can handle the snow as long as it is packed hard underneath, so she shouldn’t go off-road, or not far anyway. The fields will be frozen as well—she’d probably be able to cycle on them too. The winter spokes are brilliant. Her mother always finds what they need out of sheer thin air. Luck and tenacity are her only employers. Constance steps out onto the porch to watch her checking over her bike.
—Stella?
—What?
Constance has put boots on and a polo neck and the steam from her mug of tea is misting up her reading glasses.
—We need to go to the doctor’s this afternoon at four p.m., okay? she says.
Her mother puts down her mug and carries a large bag of grit over to Barnacle’s step. She tips it up and moves from left to right to distribute it evenly down his steps and all the way along the path to the car-park end and she does the same on the way back. She knocks on his door and he opens it and they nod and talk and laugh. Barnacle pats her mum on the arm and he points up at the mountain and she looks sad. Stella fixes her hat and her gloves, and checks that her phone is charged up enough—she has 60 percent; it will do until she gets back. There is a haze in the upper part of the mountain and the trees along the bottom hills are mere outlines of white. Stella walks down the path with her bike and there is just the crunch of her boots, cold air on her face and her nose red and her breath unfurling like a specter.
—Morning, Barnacle.
—Morning, young Stella.
—I’m going out now, Mum.
—You need to be back for three, okay?
—It’s not even ten yet.
—You won’t get far in this anyway. Why don’t you just walk?
—I’ll come back if I get stuck.
Stella stamps on the ground and her boots make footprints in the solid snow.
—They say the aurora is coming, young Stella, and that great big bloody iceberg has been seen as close as Tanby Island now—it’s definitely floating this way! Good morning, Dylan, Barnacle says across the path.
—Morning, Constance, Barnacle, Stella. The sun gods are hanging on a wee bit longer!
—Three suns! Barnacle whistles.
—See youz!
Stella hops on her bike and the pirate flag on the back flaps along. It’s best to stick between the tire treads in the snow, which are flatter and more densely packed. She has to go slowly so as not to skid. Her iPhone has enough charge to take pictures. She has her journal. She has a new hat that her mum knitted, which has big mohawk spikes in multicolors on the top, and she has a hood like an Eskimo child. Her fur-lined boots are waterproof with spiked soles. She grips the handlebars so hard her knuckles hurt under her gloves and she turns up her iPhone to full volume, and the gloves are so thick she has to jab at the screen until a death-metal track comes on full blast. She picks up speed. Faster. Faster. She pedals harder. Air stings her few inches of bare skin, so it is colder than ice floes on the North Sea—or even right at the bottom of the ocean where the skeletons hold hands or do the jitterbug or bang their fists on a whole roof of ice forming overhead.
Stella pedals faster, down the back of garages; she steers the bike between wide tractor treads and the backs of her legs begin to ache even though she is strong and too muscular. The girls changing in the gym watched her from the other side of the room the first time she went in, and one of the nuns was sitting there as well, just because Stella was there. They took her into a meeting in school and she had to say in advance that she wasn’t a lesbian, or they wouldn’t have let her even try to use the girls’ changing room. They asked her if she was still a Christian. She explained that her family is not religious. They asked her what she knew of damnation. She asked them what they knew of autonomy. They asked her how she knew that word. She asked if they had met her mother. They said they would pray for her. She said it was not necessary. They asked if she might feel different in a few months, or if perhaps she should simply change for gym in the janitor’s cupboard. She said she’d felt like this her whole life and no amount of praying was going to change it and she could use the janitor’s cupboard to change, but she was a person, not a broom. They said she needed to find Jesus. She asked if that was like finding Wally? Only one nun knew what she meant. That little drawing in those old comic strips her mum had, when you look for the dweeby guy in the stripy hat. It took nearly a year for the nuns to let her use the girls’ changing room—so many meetings, all to put on white shorts and a white T-shirt and girls’ gym shoes instead of the boys’ blue ones. Eventually her mother said she was taking her out of school because the boys were all making Stella so self-conscious in their changing room when she took her shirt off and revealed her bra top. Her face burns even to think of Lewis and all the other boys mocking her—them sniggering, grabbing their crotches like rappers on bad videos, a horrible dark air that crept into her life that morning. Stella can’t even explain how much she has dreaded gym class after that. It’s worth going through an Ice Age just to not have to do that again. She could lie down in the snow like an angel and wait for winter to take her home.
At one of the meetings the Mother Superior asked her mother why her father wasn’t there. Constance said he was with his wife, and she could bring her other boyfriend in if it helped any. Stella sat and felt like she was making an inconvenient fuss about nothing. Just like they wanted her to feel. Constance was furious with the nuns. It wasn’t that Stella ever wanted to make anyone feel weird by being herself, but they did and ever since it has felt in school like every move she makes is exaggerated and observed and judged. It’s like judging others is the absolute favorite occupation for some people in this l
ife. Always to find the other person short on something. Just for kicks. Like how she is muscular from chopping wood since she was seven. She should be embarrassed but she’s not. She wants to get some of the girls at school in a headlock sometimes—with their noses and their little mouths and their sports bras and all so lofty, yet not one of them can swing an ax. Stella can swing an ax on just the right side of freedom. That’s the key to swinging an ax. Hold it with a lightness—then let it drop—so the ax does the work for you—This is the best way to hold it; no, like this—and her mother in the back garden showing her how to split logs, then split them again. Her mum could cut logs in her sleep, she has cut logs in her sleep. Every year at school they have an extracurricular skills day. Stella is daring herself for the next one. Simply go up to the blackboard and explain that we are all born female. That every man has a penis that started out as a vagina. Sketch it out. Hand out a spreadsheet for the nonbelievers. Probably she won’t. Instead she could draw a diagram explaining that when logs are smaller, they don’t need to be so hot to burn. Best not take an ax into school, though.
Or she should go and see Alistair and ask him for something dead to go and skin in front of everyone, to show them where a brain is and a heart is and that a body is just a body and if it is dead the soul is gone, nothing more to know about it until you’re a spook—skulking around the living, hoping they will give you a smile. Touching them in their beds at night. Hiding their keys. She could ask Alistair to take the body apart for her and ask him exactly why he has a problem with her being a female, when he clearly has devoted his adult life to having as many wives and girlfriends as he can manage? It was good to hang out with him, just once, or twice. She hates to even admit it. A few years ago Alistair showed her how to drain all the fluids out and take out the organs—why do you take out the organs?—and her mum pointing out odd things in jars then—eyeballs, hearts—showing her exactly how a heart works and this is the main aorta, the heart valve, and this is where blood comes in to feed it with oxygen, and our hearts not that different from squirrel hearts or our guts—not so different from hedgehog guts, and our brains not so different from eagles’. She found a hedgehog dead in the caravan park once—so dead and sad—its guts trailed around the caravan park for miles. Then he met his third wife. He married her in the same registry office where he’d wed the second one, but he didn’t tell her that until later.
His white house is just over there. If Stella knocked on the door it would be like she was a spook come to haunt them. That’s how they like to think of her really. Dead. Devil spawn. Other. As if she never existed in the first place. Alistair’s wife hates her. Stella reminds her of all the things that go bump in the night. She doesn’t like the black nails or the stripy tights or the eyeliner, but what she hates most is that, to her, Stella is a girl who used to be a boy, and even more than that: she is her mother’s daughter through and through, and Alistair’s wife loathes Constance. Her husband still loves someone far more than her. She’s never been able to take it, so she hated Stella and convinced him it was Stella that had the problem, it was her that wasn’t right and she is so sure of it, so utterly righteous and vindictive in her piety. She doesn’t want to think about them. She wants to think about clean things. Birds in flight. The noise of an ax—silent on the swing, then the thud, the crack, so satisfying—wood splitting. A whole two sheds full is what her mother has done now. Her mother smelling of oil and wax, her hands callused. Showing her how to paint the furniture. Letting her paint the drawers that sit under the telly in the living room and each one painted a different color and each glass knob a different color, and on the bottom drawer two skull-head knobs found specially and kept for her birthday.
The farm road is empty. A dark blanket pulls itself across the mountains and the air grows dense and it doesn’t seem like snow is going to fall, but it might begin to hail.
Stella’s phone vibrates in her pocket.
Home.
Home.
—Mum?
—Are you turning back?
—Yup.
She clicks her phone off and she has one foot on the bike pedal and the other on the ground. She must talk later on. To. A. Doctor. She wishes it weren’t a doctor. It’s not like she is ill. Hail snakes in a thick line down the mountains. Stella watches to see where the weather will go. She sits back on her bike and pedals even harder, and cycles past where she and Marie (the skank) made Richard’s sister eat ten stalks of barley; she boaked up rough spiky bits for ages and then she trailed after them all the way home, repeatedly bleating, Am I in your gang yet? Stella slammed the door in her face, then went and had her tea, and even now when she thinks about it—even in this cold—her face stings red. It’s a thing that makes her cycle further than she should each time she goes out. Better to be alone. At least it is honest. She takes her metal spikes off so she can cycle easier, slings them over the handlebars. She cannot help this thing in her that makes her always wants to go further, to keep going, and as the first drops of hail begin to fall she is by the forest where trees sway—they shake, tall skinny boughs, and snow slides off them. It is too dark to go through the forest in this weather, but she can go over the stile instead, away from the mulched forest floor: that bit where you can fall through the false roof at the buried cottage and not get back out. A place to break your ankle or your leg and get trapped like an animal. In the summer there are always kids doing something down in that cottage that is sunk under the ground. Something disgusting. Or even pirates. Or even worse than pirates: pedophiles, or child murderers. It makes her sad. What’s wrong with people?
She’s up high now. She can see the old water pump, it’s how you know where the cottage roof is on the forest floor—right there, because it is only uncovered in summer and in autumn is hidden by leaves and the mulch is dangerous and sometimes a dog or a walker falls through it. This whole area is built over old mine shafts too, massive hollow things. Leaves fall between exposed wooden beams in the cottage, come spring, and then you can look down and see the whole building has just dropped into the forest floor, under the ground like a troll lair that no self-respecting troll would be seen dead in. The place is full of pornos and the remnants of fires. Richard’s sister said a man once caught her in the cottage and he made her pull her top up and then he got his dick out and made her touch it. He still lives in the village. Kids still go to his house to get drunk. All the kids know who he is and half the parents, so how come he still gets to live there? Stella cycles as close to the cottage as she dares but she can’t see anything. All the walls are crumbly with a faded imprint of flowery wallpaper and swear words daubed on them. Sometimes the older kids get wasted and play music in there. This year there was a drum kit set up for months, and a boy gave her a joint last time and she held it like she was going to smoke it, and he stared at her top like he was trying to see tits through it. The smell of weed is disgusting. She pretended to smoke some, then handed it back. The farmer’s old scarecrow is in that cottage and he’s going to be down there all winter—laid out on a brass bedstead over broken springs. The boys turned it into a Mrs. Scarecrow and one of the older boys kept bending it over and saying he was doing it up the arse and he’d show them how to bukakke. Stella had to pretend it was funny, the same as the other girls did, but her heart was beating so fast and nobody from her class made one mention about her being anything than just a straight girl that day; they didn’t want the older kids to turn on her. That was something. She wanted those boys to let the scarecrow be. There’s something wrong with her. She even feels empathy for stones.
A shower of hail clatters off the frozen snow on the ground and it bounces back up, gets bigger every second. The hailstones batter off the earth—it’s a comforting sound. Stella tucks her head down now and cycles fast and she should be heading for home, but she wants to see where they’ve kept the cows. If snow starts she’ll have to get off and walk. In a field below a tractor snaps its lights onto full beam and farm buildings in the distan
ce are flooded yellow. Stella picks up speed and she does not look back to where the fallen cottage is. She doesn’t think about an outhouse, or six pairs of girl knickers stuffed down a rabbit hole. They were her first girly ones and she stole them all from Morag, who lived on Oak Tree Lane. Stella’s mum found out and it made her cry. She’d never seen her mother cry before. There is a clatter of hail on the ground, but it thins and the second and third sun disappear from the sky. Her boots slip on the pedals as she cycles toward the farm, tractors in the distance. The hail ceases and right through the middle of Clachan Fells silence builds until twenty deer bolt from the forest. They curve across the fields—the fawns big now, their hooves barely touching the ground. Stella races them down through the white valley.
Hooves clatter off the ground.
The deer gain speed and she is only yards from them now, her chest burns and for a fraction of a second she is flying! They arc ahead of her and she careens after the fleeing herd. The hailstorm has come back right overhead now. Round white pellets batter the ground as the deer disappear into a big empty cowshed. Her muscles burn. She skids into the big old shed behind them. It is dark enough that it takes her a few minutes until her eyes adjust and she breathes in the smell of hay and manure. As her vision adjusts to the light inside the barn, she sees the deer all clustered together at the far end of the echoey old corrugated-iron building. Hail beats on the tin roof and the deer all watch her. She stops so they know she is not anything to worry about. Water drips off her chin. She checks her phone and finds no signal. The barn doors are wide open and it is so, so cold. She will have to find her way back before dark. If the snow begins to fall and doesn’t stop, then she’s in trouble. Stella unzips her jacket and wrings the damp out of it. She throws it over a pen to dry.