The Sunlight Pilgrims

by Jenni Fagan

  He should probably go and tell her right now?

  An owl calls out nearby and another calls back and he takes another hit.

  The world spins obligingly.

  There are several seas of lava on the moon and the others are called Tranquillitatis, Fecunditatis, Crisium, Nectaris and Serenitatis, each preceded by Mare. The moon is also a satellite that was—he sways on the steps—it WAS originally a part of the earth but it broke away—the earth was so enamored with her own beauty that she created a mirror to light up her crevices in the night—to send moon glades as adornments to her earthly mother—she was something cooler and clearer, and more than willing to play rival to the earth’s much larger sun.

  He’s going to marry a moon polisher.

  He’ll write her a song.

  Make her a tiny little paper bird.

  They’ll have three goats in a yard outside a barn they built themselves.

  Constance won’t ever marry him really, but he’ll propose each morning over coffee all the same, twice on Sundays, once at Easter. He’ll have to tell them about the sketchbook and the news, but not today. He might wrestle Alistair to impress her. He could wrestle that gray-haired fox right into fucking oblivion!

  He stares at the mountains.

  This place is nothing like even his most beloved or favorite open space in London—it’s not a park with brightly colored parakeets screeching in the treetops all summer, flying in twos and threes and sometimes in packs of ten or twenty—or Soho, where he would go to see a single heron—something about seeing that single heron standing in a park in the middle of the city, it always did astound him. He goes back inside and puts his coat on. He needs a Twix. It is imperative. He marches through the snow to the site office, stoating a little to the left the whole time. And a Pot Noodle. How many years is it since he ate a Pot Noooodle? Nobody is out. Since it hit minus twenty, nobody comes outside much at all. Dylan goes into the big barn store that’s also the site manager’s office. The storeroom is made of corrugated sheets of iron. It has a tractor casually parked in the corner. He loves that. Excuse me, you at the crisps, while I drive behind you and casually park my great-big-fuck-off tractor! Steel shelves are fixed all the way up to the roof. How has it come to be that his mother—a woman who loathed grass and flowers and all things natural and earthly—has become just a dirty gray smudge in a ratty garden, while he is in a cowshed in the middle of fuck knows where, looking at copies of Hustler on the top, top shelf? He wonders for a minute if his mother was always so sad because she knew? Something in her knew what her mother had gone through to bring her into the world?

  Fucking Hustler!

  How many years has it been since anyone got their porn from magazines? It must be a niche market. He is tall enough that he can reach them without moving along the ladder that sits at the front of the rails. Height has its advantages—peeeeple. It has its GAINS! He can’t imagine this setup passing for health and safety anywhere: customers climbing a ladder for a tin of macaroni cheese or a copy of Asian Babes?

  Who still buys porn on the page?

  The site manager sits at the till, smoking a cigarette. She taps things into an old computer keyboard in front of a bulky PC screen. She clicks on a kettle beside her and tips a sachet of Cup-a-Soup into it. She has a bulbous nose and she has absolutely no interest in him whatsoever. Dylan stops in front of a plastic container with curry-flavored noodles and beside them there is a packet of fortune cookies, with a dragon on a shiny wrapper. Chinatown this is not! As a boy he used to walk past all those glistening ducks roasting in windows and smart young men sitting outside bars, and other men who wore lipstick and shops that sold dirty books and women that looked like plastic dolls, but he still thought they were pretty. One of the guys on their street took him into his first dirty movie when he was seventeen. All these guys sat around in this cinema wanking. He let the guy he was with stick his hand down his trousers. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t amazing. He was almost legal. It was something to try.

  Dylan walks along an aisle stacked with microwave meals.

  There are spare plugs for sinks.

  Tins, tins, tins.

  Ida waddles by the big open door and she must have a client in today because she has her schoolgirl shirt open, her gargantuan tits spilling out, a school skirt on and long white socks, gym shoes; her hair is tied up in bunches. Over all of that she has a fur coat draped around her shoulders. He watches her for a good long minute. She must have got out of a client’s car and is just about to go into her house and jump in a hot shower. Dylan grabs the first Hustler at the top and two packets of bacon and (it looks like a large old pickle jar) what claims to be cloudy cider. The bottles of cloudy cider come in three strengths: mellow, biting, blows-your-brains-out. He reaches out and grabs two Twixes as well. The woman rings up his purchases and has the decorum not to look at him while he waits for his change. He strides back up the park. The snow is so high that all the gnomes he saw on his first night here are now faint hillocky bumps in people’s gardens. Constance appears behind him, trudging through the snow in her big welly boots trying to keep up. She is wearing her wolf cape and her ears and nose glow in the moonlight.

  —Don’t comment. It keeps me warmer than any of the hats!

  Dylan turns round and looks at her, with snow all around so cold he can smell it, and streetlights glow orange on the path and those mountains behind them climb up into the black sky, so there is no knowing where rock ends and sky begins until the stars come out. This is the wrong time to have a hard-on and want to take Constance to bed. He doesn’t want to speak. He is done with talking. There is an older one and a younger one, but right now there is just her and him and that is how it is. He is glad the Hustler is tucked at the back of his bag. They’re not at that stage yet. If they get to the porn stage they’ll use a laptop. All he needs right now is her. He takes her hand and they walk up onto Ash Lane. She grips his hand back as he walks up to his door, getting more sober by the minute—a perk of being a giant: can get pissed and unpissed if you don’t go too far down the bottle. He avoids looking toward the gray patches of snow—he turns the key and they fall into the hallway.

  The door flies shut behind them, caught by the wind. It howls over the caravan roof while she shrugs off the wolf cape and slips it over the back of a chair in his lounge. She pulls off her boots, taking two steps down the hall as he pulls his jumper off—his hands are freezing on her skin, sliding under her top, finding her nipples, her breath ragged; she undoes his belt buckle—shoves him hard onto the bed and a bite as she wriggles out of her jeans, pulling him onto her, and she’s wet so he pushes straight in. She grips her knees into a lock around him, taking him in deeper, until they are just tongues and sweat, and pushing and pulling and biting and tasting and touching and holding and getting tired and slowing down and starting again and forgetting that there is anything outside this bed.

  Afterward they lie in the dark not talking.

  She traces his arm lightly.

  A bed as an altar. A bed as respite. A bed that smells of sex. Sex is better than prayer, better than talking. They’ve said everything they need to now. He kisses her neck and it is cold and she smells like snow.

  They lie in the dark for hours. At one point he goes and pours them each a glass of wine. She smokes a cigarette. The duvet only reaches round under her arms and so he puts on the little portable three-bar fire and it glows in the corner and smells like chemicals.

  —Would Vivienne have found this funny?

  —Not in the fucking slightest.

  —I suppose not.

  —I’m just glad it’s not Gunn; she had a weird enough death and life, it turns out, and he shakes his head.

  —You didn’t mention that before.

  Her skin is alabaster in the dim light. Her fingers are long and with rough calluses where she has been chopping wood and smoothing down furniture and building things. Just to hold hands. Such a simple easy thing. To lie like this. Let the snow
fall out there. There is an ordinariness to their strange. Like they could outlast a lot more than this first bit.

  —Devil’s snare—it’s a fatal hallucinogen. They call it other things as well: the angel’s trumpet, jimson weed. Devil’s snare creates an agonizing trip that never ends if you take too much, which is exceptionally easy to do, apparently.

  —I don’t fancy it, she says.

  This is harder than he thought.

  —After tripping about as far out as a person can, it creates a really, really long, slow, hideous painful death.

  He’s pretty sure his skin is white and he flexes his knuckles, and this bedroom is too small for a giant, this whole caravan is. It’s kind of ridiculous, he’s going to start scouting around for disused barns or old wrecked bothies. Constance looks up at him and rests her hand on his chest.

  —Vivienne?

  —Gunn.

  —Why did she take it?

  —The story goes, I have since found, detailed in my mother’s sketchbook, she drew pictures and she has left these little notes and— He stops.

  —You don’t need to say anything, she says.

  —I know.

  —I sat and had a few gins with Vivienne, one night, she says.

  —Did she mention her sketchbook?

  Constance appears to be studying the roof in his bedroom.

  —I found out a few things, he says. The first was that Gunn arrived in Babylon seven months pregnant, after prying the keys to the place from a corpse’s fist—it was some aristocrat that owned it and he had a heart attack during a game of poker and, other than him being dead, she swore she won it fair and square. She didn’t really have to prize the keys because rigor mortis hadn’t set in, but it felt, you know—wrong. She went to a phone box and called someone for back-up in the islands who was working in the meat trade and he said it was best, under those circumstances, to get rid of the corpse. He picked it up in his van and took it to Dead Man’s Wharf, weighted it down, slid it in. Babylon had been used for orgies, politicians, underage kids—that’s what we heard much later, but she was earning a living from it by then. She brought her daughter up knowing how to run it by the time she was a teenager. Vivienne had me when she was seventeen and they taught me the business when I was a kid, but Gunn apparently said it was borrowed time. She said one day the devil would come to collect his dues and she’d take the consequences on herself. She’d take it so it didn’t get passed down to us, so she reckoned the worse it was, the more she’d know we were in the clear so to speak. The day she got ill, Vivienne swore blind the devil came to the back door and asked for Gunn.

  —That’s fucked up.

  —I know; thing is, I think Gunn was expecting him.

  —Why?

  —She was religious really, she thought the devil was coming to collect his fee for her sins.

  —Maybe they weren’t her sins?

  Dylan looks at Constance and wonders for a minute if she knows about the family tree, about him and Alistair, that a whole community and family forced Gunn out and never spoke to her again and she hadn’t done anything wrong, so there had to be a reason for it.

  —This was just six months ago? Constance asks.

  —Aye. Gunn had convulsions for days, she was seeing things everywhere, under her skin, on the walls; all her organs shut down one by one—it was hideous and it was even worse, you know, because she was so lovely and hard as nails, and she always put me and Vivienne first.

  —Did they do an autopsy?

  —They said there was enough in her body to kill a very tall man, or ten. Then the night before my mother died, quite peacefully, in her sleep, she told me quite clearly at the kitchen table that she would never, ever forgive me!

  —For what?

  —Well, they were both pretty psychic, so I reckon…

  Dylan points outside, where patchy areas of gray snow lie all around the porch and down the garden path. She gets up with the duvet wrapped around her and he pulls on a T-shirt, thinks about making coffee. The door lets in an icy air, which feels nice for a minute. The two of them huddle there in the doorway, his arm around her.

  —This would have been right up there on Vivienne’s list of fucking no-nos! he says.

  —Not the way she wanted to go.

  —Not really.

  Barnacle’s door clicks open and he comes out onto his little porch steps and looks across to see them both sniggering helplessly at Dylan’s front door.

  —Been on the weed again? You bloody reprobates! Get a life! Grow up! You’ve got a child in there, he shouts.

  He slams the door and eventually they stop giggling.

  Dylan offers her a roll-up and she takes it. He goes inside and comes back out with another glass of wine and a throw, which he wraps around her shoulders. He is wearing her wolf cape and the ears stick up, making him look even taller. She giggles again. He catches her glancing at him. His wrists, the tattoos, his Chelsea boots, she isn’t impressed by any of it; what she is drawn to is something else.

  —My mother never had it in her to work out who she was, she says.

  —Where does she live?

  —She’s down south. She did every job as a wife exactly right—she went above and beyond, but he just picked at her and picked at her and picked at her until she didn’t even look the same, or act the same, and he did it with us too. It’s like she wasn’t there in the end. It was like she never had been there. She was going through the motions. Making beds perfectly.

  —The first time I saw you, you were polishing the moon.

  —What?

  Dylan tips her chin up and kisses her on the doorstep, where anyone could walk past and see them, and the shock of their tongues, the heat against this freezing cold, and they are apart just as quickly and he flicks one of the long wolf legs back over his shoulder.

  Stella has five empty clear plastic bottles in the bedroom. She has cut the top off each of them and filled them with water. She drops in dried flowers and acorns and berries and mistletoe. They will freeze outside in no time and she can take the plastic off and they will be great ice sculptures. When you scatter people’s mothers into slushy mush, then the only answer is to make some art. It appears to be becoming her answer to everything. She has cleaned the house. She made some soup. She sent Vito a whole load of songs from YouTube as a mix tape. She has cleaned her ice grips. She cleaned the grate for the fire. She visited Barnacle and slid all the way down his path.

  —It’s an ice wonderland today, she tells her mother.

  —I’m going to go to the shops, Stella.

  —Can you bring me back bananas?

  —Yes.

  —And chocolate?

  —Yes.

  —Is Dylan still angry at me?

  —He wasn’t angry.

  —He was, for fuck’s sake! Stella huffs.

  —When did we give up on the swear jar? Constance demands.

  —When the world threatened to end each day, and when it got so dark that it made everyone in Clachan Fells crazy. Did you see the satanist putting up pictures of pentagrams and all that weird shit all over his windows? He reckons Satan is going to rise for the second coming of evil, or some shit.

  —I didn’t see that, no.

  —He freaks me out. I bet he’ll behead his girlfriend or something.

  —Don’t say that!

  —Oh, come on, Mum, you know Incomers can’t handle the bloody darkness here, and this winter is going to be the longest, darkest, freakiest, possibly most never-ending one we’ll ever have!

  —It will end!

  —I know: in human extinction.

  —No, Stella, it will end in spring. Stop watching the bloody news!

  Stella switches her laptop on and off again. Constance leaves to go to the shop. There is no Internet signal. None at all. She switches the router on and off but there isn’t anything, then she picks up the phone and the line is dead too. No Internet on her phone. The telly is working but the picture is fuzzy. She wa
its until her mother reaches the end of the path and then she takes out the packet in her pocket. Today is the day. She didn’t want to do it like this. She waited and waited for a letter about her appointment to see the gender specialist, but it didn’t come. The fluff around her lip is getting dark. She will start with two. She swallows down the tablets without a drink and one lodges in her throat and, after she has managed to swallow it down, she wonders what is really in it? It came in an unmarked envelope. There is no little list of potential side effects, just a stupid bottle on the table and it doesn’t even say hormone blockers on it. She found the tablets on a site where you can buy all kinds of drugs and hormones on the Dark Web. She should tell somebody this is what she is doing, but not Constance or Dylan. Maybe Vito. Lewis was in the park yesterday. He looked cute.

  Vito is her only real friend, though.

  And Dylan.

  Except she scattered his mother across the lawn.

  In their kitchen there is a pine fir tree and tonight they will decorate it with baubles from a box Mum keeps under the caravan. They will thread tinsel around it and there are even decorations she made when she was a little kid that her mum has kept all these years. She won’t even open the box that arrived addressed to her from Alistair. It can go to the charity shop. She curls up on her side in bed. She feels a bit ill, now she has taken the pills. Her heart is beating in a fast, light way and fear shoots up her spine. Her skin is slick in a cold sweat. She reaches for the bottle and knocks it over. She just didn’t want to have hair on her face. Outside snow won’t stop falling and she is feeling really scared now, because her heart is beginning to hammer and her skin is hot. A hard shot of fear. Panic that her mother is going to find her on the floor, dead. Reaching for her phone, blurry and wanting to stand up, texting Dylan first because he can explain it to Constance later and she probably can’t even get out to the hospital in this. Feeling desperate now, her heart pounding even more and the world feeling far away, like somewhere she might not be again.