The Sunlight Pilgrims

by Jenni Fagan

  Constance thuds back out of the caravan and shuts the door behind her and leans against it. Dylan nods at the ax she left sticking out of a tree.

  —You couldn’t do that in London, he says.

  —Stella’s still not answering my texts.

  —We’ll find her.

  —I’m going to finish painting this one really quickly and then we can go, okay?

  Hail is battering off the tarpaulin in her back garden. The bones in Constance’s wrist jut out and her brush swishes up and down furiously as she attacks the dresser, and the air smells of oil and wet wood and she sits back for a minute to appraise her work. He can’t figure out how she doesn’t know he wants to touch her. Trying not to think about it. Circles of other thoughts. Setting up the projector in his caravan to see if it is still working and finding a bit missing, and wondering if Babylon has had her guts ripped out and thinking he should set up his old media website to see if he can track down any old friends from Soho because there were a few, and how this morning he opened the kitchen cupboard and the smiley sticker on Vivienne’s Tupperware urn was already looking faded. If Constance or Stella knew what he found in Vivienne’s sketchbook. If they did. He will have to tell them. If he is completely, totally honest, he doesn’t want to tell Constance until he knows if she will sleep with him. If they just lay down. If she was on top. Dragging him further into her. Sweat against the cold air even in their caravans. A bed as a refuge. Just to lie there. Pass ownership of your body to someone else. Yes, you can lick me here, touch me there; you’re angry, it is okay to use me, it is fine to suck and fuck and pull and scratch and bite. It’s the only place in life we do it. Someone else touches us when we’re little, to have a bath or get dressed or be hugged, then our bodies walk around surrounded by air until you want someone like this, and he feels like it is only a matter of time before they are naked, but then that intoxicating thrill that says what if they don’t? What if this want keeps getting bigger and nothing comes of it at all? It’s that unknown quantity: add this to this, her to him, what will come out of it, they don’t know. When he sees Constance looking back up the mountain toward Alistair’s house or the postcard she has on her fridge from Caleb, he gets it. If Marina turned up now, he can’t say he wouldn’t sleep with her again. They were together seven years on and off. Perhaps some bits of love never go. He picks at his cuffs and watches the way she turns on her heels to paint the other side of the wardrobe, her eyebrows so pale and that frown she always seems to wear. Constance has to come to him. That’s how it works. She must feel him waiting. He’s not being obvious about it. But it’s there. An unspoken question they both skirted around when having a bottle, or two, of wine, wrapped in blankets, last night on her porch. He tries not to feel like he knew her before, to imagine her face in the dark, her lips. They’d have to use his place. This is the other reason why people have jobs. So they don’t stalk their neighbors. She is beautiful. He just likes her. It’s not creepy. Even if Alistair is his cousin, if it is right—the family tree Vivienne has left—and he wants to tell her that he found out exactly why Vivienne bought him a caravan right next door to them, but it might mean she’d never give him a chance and right now he is too selfish to take a risk on that. The guilt sits uneasily on him so he makes himself a deal: he’ll tell her in one week, and he’ll look at the tree Vivienne wrote down again and he’ll double-check the details. Constance finishes touching up the metal 1950s larder. The inside has already been fitted out with patterned vinyl and the doorknobs are plain white; she is precise and focused as she finishes up the final touches of paint. As the hailstorm stops, the snow begins.

  —Stella should be back by now, Constance says.

  —Hello!

  Dylan knows who it is before he even turns around. He feels angry before he even looks at him. Irrationally hostile. There is a tension in the air. Alistair grins at him and goes over to kiss Constance on the cheek, an electricity between the two of them as well, and Dylan is caught in the middle of it, some of it is diverting around him from both of them. Alistair is looking him up and down. Dylan looks down at the guy, glad to be taller. He’s looking to see his mother in this stranger’s face. Or his gran. It would be Gunn, if she is Alistair’s aunt and if Alistair’s father is possibly Vivienne’s dad. If the family tree Vivienne left is right, it means the guy standing in front of him is his mum’s cousin and all he can think about is that he wants to bash the bloke’s face in and go to bed as soon as he can manage it, with the love of his life.

  —Pleased to meet you, I’m Alistair.

  He holds a hand out, Dylan does not shake it.

  —What are you doing here, Alistair?

  —Do I need a reason to visit you now, Constance?

  She glances toward Dylan.

  —I’m busy.

  —Aren’t you going to introduce me?

  Dylan holds his breath.

  —No, I’m not, Alistair. Don’t come down here again until you apologize to Stella.

  Alistair laughs. He is a sinewy guy with bright eyes; they are black and penetrating and he is handsome enough, Dylan will give him that. His hair is dark and he’s wiry, narrow, a bit mean-looking, but Dylan’s got no doubt he could take him, if it came to it, arm wrestle, Scrabble, pub quiz, fist to the face. Just if he had to. Not that he’d try. Unless this offensive-looking faux artist was game.

  —Doesn’t she know we are seeing each other again, darling, he says, looking at Dylan the whole time.

  —I don’t know, Alistair. Does your wife know we had a one-off, darling? I can always let her know how truly mundane the whole thing was, she hisses.

  —I’m making a present for Cael, he says.

  Dylan steps forward and flicks him on the nose as hard as he can.

  —What the fuck are you doing?

  Alistair grabs his nose while looking up at Dylan towering over him, blocking out the light, squaring his shoulders even more.

  —Her name is fucking Stella, he says.

  —Who the fuck are you?

  Alistair looks right up at him and for a minute Dylan thinks the bloke recognizes him. Constance is staring between the two, a little in shock, but there’s a definite hint of amusement.

  —That was fucking unnecessary, Alistair says.

  —No, this would be fucking unnecessary. Dylan curls up a ham-size fist.

  —I cut up bodies for a living, pal, you’re not intimidating me.

  —Animal bodies.

  —Obviously!

  —I’ve cut up animal bodies before, for meat, not to try and be interesting.

  —I’m not trying to be interesting!

  —Good, cos if you were, it wouldn’t be working. I never met a taxidermist that wasn’t a total bore, d’ye know that?

  —I bet you’ve never met a taxidermist in your life.

  —I have and he was boring, and an arsehole!

  —Okay, guys, you can stop waving your dicks at each other and I am going to go and find my daughter. I’m serious, Alistair: you want near this house, then you apologize to her, and you mean it.

  —Aren’t you going to make him apologize? I might call the police!

  —For what? Nose flicking? Dylan says.

  Alistair crunches away down Ash Lane wearing his big Russian hat with thick furry flaps. Dylan realizes his heart is pounding and his right hand is still curled up. It’s just the idea of it—that this guy’s dad could be his great-uncle and, worse than that, his granddad as well. He feels dizzy. He wants to sit down. He is losing it. He just flicked her lover’s nose and she is quietly packing her brushes away, not looking at him. He shouldn’t have tried to work out the rest of the family tree in Vivienne’s sketchbook when he was drunk. Maybe he got it wrong. Why would Vivienne leave this kind of information to him? What is he meant to do with it? He is furious with her. He has fallen out with his mother and she isn’t even here for him to tell her about it, and so that anger is just fermenting in his head. A tiny childish part of him thinks if h
e gets angry enough at her, she’ll have to come back. Just to put him in his place. And she could do that. Vivienne did it plenty enough times. With that, he feels that weight of missing her and Gunn, wanting to tell them things, make a drink, annoy them by his presence; get a hug on the way to his projector booth and look up midfilm to find a coffee or a beer has been slipped inside the door for him; go to Borough market and buy them olives and bread. Nothing much, yet everything. They are never coming back and he is clearly flipping out. Constance checks her phone again.

  —What was with the nose flick? she asks.

  —I’m really…I don’t know.

  —You’ll be Stella’s hero forever now. Her smile flashes for a second and is gone.

  —We’ll find her. Stella knows Clachan Fells better than anyone.

  He gets a shot of fear that Stella’s seen the sketchbook.

  —The boys at the village hall drew a picture of Stella last month and she looked all girly, except for a pair of scissors in her hand and a dick cut off. It was at her feet, like she has to get a sex change to be a girl or she has to get it cut off, or even that they are thinking about that!

  —Do you want me to go round to their houses?

  —And what: flick their noses?

  —Seriously, I will.

  —No, I just thought they were nicer kids than that.

  —It was only one who drew it?

  —It was only one who drew the bit where she was…cut. If one of them hurt her like that, I swear to God I would track them down and kill them with my bare hands, each and every fucking one, no hesitation at all!

  He looks at her.

  —You might be better trying a good nose flick, he suggests.

  Constance stands with her hand on the ax, unsmiling.

  —We’ll drop off this wardrobe, so I can get some cash, and come back round the other side of the mountain. She was on the farm road, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s headed for the lower forest, or she’ll be on the middle sister, sheltering there.

  —The what?

  —We call Clachan Fells mountains the “seven sisters”—did nobody tell you that yet?

  Constance pulls the edge of the tarpaulin and a pile of snow slides off onto the ground and she glances over at the caravan, wrinkles her nose.

  —She’ll be fine.

  —It doesn’t always work out like that, though, does it? I’ve been on the trans websites. I’ve seen the stats. Anyway, if more of this kind of weather comes down, we’ll end up snowed in for months. It sounds bad but at least I’d know she’s safe for a while, have time to work things out. Or if it gets worse than that, if it doesn’t even stop snowing—you know, if the temperature just keeps dropping.

  She’s brittle. Moving quickly in front of him. Not meeting his eyes.

  —This wardrobe is going to a farmhouse near Fort Harbor. They’ve bought loads of stuff from me and she wants this to put in her new garage extension. They’ve built a wee flat above their garage, which is easily bigger than both of our places put together.

  For some reason this highly unfunny truth has them snorting and giggling and avoiding each other’s eyes even more and there is a lightness now as they move around one other. Constance lifts her side of the wardrobe and he takes the other end. It’s heavy, but they walk down the path with it and slide it into the back of the ambulance. She lies the wardrobe on top of an old duvet and throws some covers over the top, then uses climbing hooks to secure the rope holding it in place. Dylan climbs into her ambulance and there’s a hole in the floor right through to the ground. It smells of paint in here, and oil, and her—which is a clean thing like unscented soap and hair that has the faintest tinge of wood smoke. The passenger seat is inches lower than it should be because it’s obviously been pulled out of some other car.

  —She’s still not answered my texts. I fucking told her not to go out!

  She turns the key and pushes the clutch. The engine catches and she drives slowly. She ceaselessly scans the landscape. He touches her hand for a fraction of a second and the silence between them deepens. They are complicit. Pretending, like neither of them notices. They drive past the industrial site and a Japanese car showroom where there is some event on, people drinking wine in the brightly lit display room, and metallic red and blue balloons filled with helium are beginning to droop under the falling snow outside. They drive past the industrial estate and round a big roundabout and up a hill toward the other side of the village. She switches on the radio.

  —I mean, I don’t have a problem with people eating meat, but what I do have a problem with is them telling us it’s pig when it is potentially another animal or something genetically modified or even worse—what else are they putting into the food chain now? There were even rumors of —

  — [Bleep. Cough.]

  —Listeners, we lost Jane from Milton Keynes, but let me ask: are you feeling the pinch, are you able to afford groceries? How are you going to get by this winter? We’re expecting whole communities, whole cities in fact, to be snowed in. In Yorkshire there have been plows out, trying to get cars out of traffic jams, and in Aberdeen one man drove around in a snowstorm for nearly two days. Angus, a residential careworker from Scotland who said he got so lost, he had no satnav, no phone. People: you have to be safe out there; take satnav, take phones, make sure they are charged, have supplies in your car, prepare your homes for the greatest snow we are ever going to see in Britain. Keep sending in your photos of snowmen. We love them. We’ve put them up on the website, and will announce a competition winner for the best snowman of the 2020 deep freeze at the end of this week. Please do phone into VfR.556 and let us know how you’re getting along out there. We’re turning up the heating and getting our thickest socks on: now, there’s an image for you listeners! This is Nico’s classic radio bringing you the news from around Britain.

  —Sounds like we’ll have to resort to Stella’s plan soon, Constance says.

  —What’s that?

  —Drinking light.

  You’d be the last monk on the island, Constance! You’d be shooting down gannets with a homemade bow and arrow, taking solar shots with the foxes. You’d be a survivalist pilgrim.

  She’s laughing then, that low timbre.

  —There’s no telling Stella. She made me vow to become a sunlight pilgrim before I got out of bed this morning, and I was so hungover. My lips are still almost black!

  —Where were you last night?

  —I ended up at the miners’ club, drinking with Ida, then Alistair turned up. That’s why he is sniffing around here this morning.

  —Are you back with him?

  —Does it matter?

  —It matters to Stella.

  —I wasn’t asking that.

  —Your lips are reddish black.

  —They’re normally about as pale as the rest of me, she says.

  Constance leans over him to take a piece of cloth from the dashboard to wipe the window, and he has that drop kick in the aortal region as blood rushes to a hard-on. She rubs at the window and blasts the air conditioner and the engine dies. She pats the dashboard.

  —Come on, you old relic—just one more trip.

  Cars pull out around them and everyone is driving slowly today. The engine catches and Constance is elated and humming under her breath and they fly down the motorway with the ambulance roaring and clunking.

  —I know how to butcher animals if we need to go hunting, he says.

  —Or people?

  —I don’t know why I said that.

  —It might come to it: cannibalism for the last few survivors in the winter wilderness that is Clachan Fells. Who would you eat first? She grins.

  —It wouldn’t be you, or Stella, he says.

  —So sweet, and considerate.

  —You’re both too skinny, he says.

  —I’m not skinny—it’s sheer muscle on these legs, she says, slapping one.

  Dylan resists asking her to do that again; he has to rein in his impul
se control somewhere this afternoon, so he looks away from her upper thighs, slim under her jeans, and fixes his gaze out of the window.

  —I learned to butcher because Gunn had a sideline going for a while. Babylon is under the arches, where the railways used to run, and they all had these big storage cellars underneath. Anyway, I came home one day when I was twelve and found a few dead calves being rolled down the beer hatch. It completely freaked me out. They were long-lashed things with unpliant lips and hooves clattering off stone, and she was hoisting them behind barrels of ale like it was the most ordinary thing to be doing. See here, Dylan, you insert the knife to the side of the windpipe with the back of the blade against the breastbone. Press toward the spine, three inches or so; now cut through the carotid arteries and watch out for the jugular veins. Now cut the hide around each foot, that’s it, then a long slit down the middle of each leg like this and a longer cut from tail to throat and then work through the membrane. Then you can peel the skin off in one go and let gravity help you. Come closer, Dylan, hold that shoulder. Now look, here’s the liver; this is the heart; follow the rump; cut with one motion!

  —She sounds like my kind of woman.

  —Gunn was fucking amazing. In our kitchen there was always the smell of olive oil, thyme, garlic, onion, red wine, and sometimes she’d cook up a batch of fresh black pudding and my mum would sit at the kitchen table smoking. Gran would knock back a shot of blood (as a tonic), with a second tossed down the drain for the sick and weary.

  —That’s what she said?

  —Aye, exactly like that. She’d play her old gramophone and I can remember, as a wee boy, hearing Bessie Smith sing “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” and watching the lights flash in the peep shows and strip bars outside.

  —You never went in those, right?

  —Not until I was twelve, and then only once a week or so.

  Constance laughs.

  —Later Gunn would tell me all these stories, while through the floorboards we could hear the audiences laughing or clapping below. By then my mum would be seated in her projectionist booth chain-smoking and drinking gin until the credits rolled.