by Jenni Fagan
Dylan measures 70cl of base spirit out and tips it into the pot. He has found exactly the right blend of lemon and sugar to make a solid base spirit this time; just a touch of tomato purée seemed to help and he let it cool to 23ºC before he stirred the baker’s yeast in. This batch has sat on a shelf above his wood stove for seven days and even though the fermenter is airlocked, he is sure it picks up a hint of wood smoke in the flavor. Dylan pours the mixture through the still for a stripping run. He turns the boiler on full power. It will take fifteen minutes before the next stage and he has already weighed out juniper berries, wild water mint, a few slices of cucumber, grains of paradise, bitter almond, lemon peel, orris-root powder. He pounds the botanicals down using a stone pestle in a mortar.
He has been avoiding Vivienne’s sketchbook all Christmas and New Year.
It sits on the table.
Last time he looked at it he was so drunk he wasn’t sure he understood what he’d found there. He picks it up and on the first page there is him as a little boy in their attic kitchen, rain behind him on the Velux window, a single flower in a vase.
There is a heron at their local park.
Her old boyfriend Jed the Herring.
Him asleep.
Him kicking a football down the hall in Babylon.
Babylon’s foyer chandelier.
Sketches of posters, of movie stars: there is Audrey Hepburn, there is Joan Crawford.
Seven pages of shoes.
Gunn MacRae dressed up like she did when she was going to greet guests for Saturday night at the movies. She’d still wear her bovver boots but she’d match them up with a twinset and pearls. His grandma was the original grunge woman. There is a sketch of her down in the cellar drinking a cup of tea, next to the head of a calf. There is her gin still. Her brewing, just like he is now. Their kitchen. The old cream oven, all tatty; and then lots and lots of sketches of his mum’s winkle-pickers, his old Chelsea boots, him laughing at something in the foyer, a massive poster of Godzilla behind him and he can remember her watching him—never saying anything much—sitting at night, sipping wine, and the sound of her pencil as she made sketches of their life.
He flicks through pages curled and bent from where she left the sketchbook out when she was cooking, or drinking, or smoking. On one page there are red smudges and they could be pasta sauce or they could be red wine. Between two pages she has pressed a flower and it has been there for so long it is as thin as paper; he leaves it like that, too scared to pick it up in case it disintegrates. On the very back page, on the hard cover insert—she has drawn a family tree.
He takes the book over to the window.
At the top of the page are Håvid and Bitta, his great-grandparents. They are drawn beside an outline of a fairly remote island in Orkney, a man and a woman holding hands outside a croft with a child—an arrow points down to: Gunn MacRae, and beside her there is a brother. He realizes, peering at it this time, that the last name Gunn had for her whole life since she moved to London was actually taken from Bitta’s maiden name. His grandmother did not keep the same surname as the rest of her family. She changed it when she left.
He peers at the page as the sound of the still bubbles in his kitchen. It reminds him of Gunn; she never talked about a brother, but there he is—Olaf Balkie—and his arrow runs along to a wife called Astrid.
Below they have an arrow that runs to their child.
A son.
Alistair Balkie.
Another line runs from Olaf back along to Gunn, and below them it points down to a child, his mother, Vivienne MacRae. There is a loop from Vivienne to Alistair to show they are half-siblings. Alistair’s line then runs along to his first wife, Christine, then his second wife, Morag; it then turns away from his wife and goes left to the mother of Alistair’s only child—Constance Fairbairn.
Below an arrow points to their son, Cael Fairbairn.
The name Cael has been scored out and his mother’s tiny spidery handwriting has replaced it with the name Estelle.
He puts the book down.
All the sadness in her makes sense to him now: his mother and Gunn, bickering their way around Babylon at three in the morning; the brittle way they had with each other, and how Gunn always seemed to love him so much more easily than her own child.
Why wouldn’t she just tell him?
He feels bad for the dead and their secret squirrel routine.
It’s not like it was her fault.
Was it that Vivienne was born of love, or something worse? Either way, they would have thought incest was the devil’s work on a tiny religious Scottish island all those years ago. He strides through to the kitchen, trying to get rid of tears. He doesn’t know what they are good for. A stream is coming from the output pipe on the still now. He collects the first 100ml in an old milk container; this first bit has all the methanol and acetone in it, so he uses it as a cleaning product like Gunn used to do.
Dylan pours out the rest of the brewed mixture into 2.5-liter bottles until the mixture begins to look cloudy. His hands are a little shaky. He leaves the rest of the mixture in the boiler and turns it off. Outside his window there are no birds. The body has its habits. He listens for birds each day, but he hasn’t seen or heard any for weeks now. They are frozen in trees or they have flown as far south as they can for winter. Only the bigger birds will remain and they are probably nesting in caves up on the mountains.
He looks at the family tree again. He feels dumb as a kakapo. He once had sex with a woman who tracked kakapos in the wild and she said that they walk on the ground, instead of flying, and if a predator comes they scurry up a tree, then fall out into a pathetic lump on the deck and then if you’re female—even if you’re human—they will try and have sex with you. The woman told him about this at her sister’s party in Brighton on a day when he had consumed so much MDMA he wasn’t sure if anything was real anymore and he remembers a similar grind to his brain—an inability to grasp things like how to walk up and down steps or drink a pint, and now he knows for sure that Vivienne did not buy this ratty tin bullet for any random reason. Why couldn’t the woman ever just use words?
What the fuck was wrong with her?
How about: Hello, Dylan, you have a second cousin, a child; a first cousin once removed who is also a half-uncle. They live in Scotland if you wish to meet them; no, your gran didn’t ever want to talk about it again, she would tell me about it when she was drunk, then the next day she’d be ashamed as if I was evidence of her life as a sinner, as if my personality was proof that a brother should never lie with a sister, no matter what the circumstance. She thought I was off like curdled milk from the day I was born, a bitterness in my mouth from her milk, a poison in me that only deepened over the years. All my love, Mum xx.
His mouth is dry. Ida walks down the path with a client, both of them looking highly unsexual, all wrapped up in layers with balaclavas on. She has sent her kids to live with friends. The iceberg took some fucking insane detour, but it is almost back here now and everyone is worrying it will collide and create an avalanche. That won’t happen but there’s no telling the locals, once a rumor spreads. He peers in his still. There are two good-quality bottles of gin there, by the look of it, clearer and better measured than the last batch. He puts the stoppers into the tops of the bottles and picks up his mother’s sketchbook again.
All those little lies, left unsaid, in families; all the things that then become unsayable.
The selfish dead fuck off and leave us with half-truths and questions and random relations and bankruptcy and debt and bad hearts and questionable genetics and stupid habits and DNA codes for diseases and they never mention all the things that are coming—like a fight at a wedding, it just breaks out one day.
He can’t tell Stella because she’s still getting better after her hospital trip and he doesn’t want to go through this with Constance, not yet. Not when they keep saying the world is going to end in some frozen version of Pompeii. Does any of this even matt
er? He tries to imagine Gunn leaving the islands and deciding to never go back and being excommunicated by her family. Not one word of contact ever since. What horrible secret makes a family do that? What makes a pregnant teenager run away to another country where she doesn’t know a soul, and never return? He looks at the tree again. Olaf Balkie. Her brother. Dylan curses the dead their privilege of silence.
Alistair and Vivienne share the same grandparents, Dylan and Stella share the same great-grandparents. Gunn would have been Stella’s great-aunt. His brain cogs process it bit by bit. Stella is his cousin and Vivienne’s half-niece. Why would Vivienne come up here and not say anything to Stella or Constance? Unless it was too much for her, so she bailed out and left it to him.
Which sounds right.
For his mother.
Absolutely.
Dylan puts some coal over the logs in his wood stove.
He clicks the door shut.
He sits on an old chesterfield armchair donated by Barnacle. He feels weak and cold. He pulls a blanket around him, from Constance. Ida dropped off a slow cooker that she says she never uses. There is a gnome stolen by Stella although she will not say from where. The fire makes the room glow and his Hawaiian-lady lamp base creates a mellow light in the caravan. Dylan takes out his original movie posters, 1968: 2001: A Space Odyssey and 1957: I Was a Teenage Werewolf. They were the last two he could have sold. He must have sold at least a thousand film reels and countless posters before he left Babylon. Perhaps the dead are entitled to their silence. It is not up to him to break it at all.
It is claustrophobic, all that whiteness outside his window, the incessant news. A month ago the army cleared the streets in Edinburgh so lorries could get in with supplies, but nobody can even manage that now. He is living on food from Constance’s apocalypse larder and he is angry because he cannot be the one to provide right now.
He opens his mother’s suitcase and finds the copy of Hustler he bought when he first got here. He walks through the caravan, checks himself out in the hall mirror. His beard is wide and round. It better suits his big squint nose, he looks older and paler, thinner. He needs to buy some red meat. Dylan picks up a pair of scissors and holds his hair in a fist; he cuts it bluntly, then lets it fall back down so it is just below his ears. He keeps cutting until the hair on his head is a short, shaggy mess and his beard looks even better this way. It is years since he had short hair and now he doesn’t look like someone who might be half-covered in ink underneath his clothes. He looks like someone’s dad. Dylan opens the fridge. There is nothing in there but the growing realization that Constance has been sleeping with two cousins.
This isn’t going to go down well.
Not at all.
All the times Gunn said she’d never go back home until she was on the Other Side—that is what she always said. It makes sense now. His mother not saying who her father was, just “someone” from the islands, and Gunn not even naming him on the birth certificate. Dylan sits down on the flowery armchair. Constance and Stella have had enough reason to ignore the villagers and their judgment; he doesn’t see why this should really matter to them either way, although he will tell them when this winter is over. A feeling skirting around him. A darkness like afternoon falling. That it wasn’t anything to do with love, that nineteen-year-old girl with a child in her belly leaving the island on a ferry, nobody to see her off at the shore and no one to meet her when she arrived where she was going. It was not a mistake she made, it was not her decision at all. Although he does not want to admit it, something in him knows it is true and that is why the chromosomes in his body keen whenever he sees Alistair, because he has half the blood of Gunn’s brother, and for something that wasn’t even her fault Gunn felt guilty and disconnected all her days. It is funny how he always thought she was a hero when he was a little boy, but he had no idea exactly how much that was true. He cries for Gunn, and his mum, who hadn’t done anything wrong in coming into the world; he cries and cries, he wants to let them know he loves them, to somehow make okay a fact of their life that they all lived within the shadow of and barely understood at all.
Stella clicks off her phone and surveys the top of the farmer’s field. She is wearing a plastic flower ring under her gloves. Vito sent it at Christmas after she got out of hospital. Every year all the kids used to go out and show off their new toys when they were younger. This year she didn’t even want to see anybody, but enough is enough. Stella Fairbairn is the fastest stand-up sledger in Clachan Fells. She doesn’t care what Lewis Brown says. Or anyone else. She can see them all up there, a row of children silhouetted against the snowy sky behind them. Most of them are teenagers. There’s a few from Fort Hope, maybe even the boys she got in a fight with. She pulls her hat down over her ears and trudges up the hill, pulling her sledge.
—Stella?
A nod. That’s all she has to give them. She’s not here to make friends. There are nods from other kids—ones from her class, ones whose birthday parties she has been to, whom she sang carols with as a kid and went trick-or-treating with—and a tiny bit of energy sparks along the line as people realize she is there. She is the fastest and most daring of all of them on a sledge. Every one of them knows it. They are all here for a serious reason. This is not a fuck-about.
She remembers when you used to go to somebody’s door and ask if they were coming out for a kick-about and then, when you were older, it was a fuck-about; and even when she was really little and Lewis came in for her, knocked on the door and she went out in jeans, when what she wanted was to wear a goth-skirt black tutu and braid her hair after growing it long. Everybody is here today and nobody mentions anything about how she looks now. A few raise a hand to say hello. Nobody says her old name. Nobody seems to remember passing a picture back in the village hall last year and, if someone mentions it, she will punch them on the nose.
Stella walks up to the top of the hill and takes her place right in the middle of a long line of kids. The sledges are all in a row. There are big plastic red ones and someone has a smooth big old tire and there are two tin trays and a thick plastic sack. It’s going to be war. She claps her gloves together to get snow off them and cricks her fingers. Stella arranges her wooden bobsleigh. It was her mum’s first birthday present to her as a girl, and she restored the sledge and treated the wood and put new metal runners on the bottom and waxed them, and on the back of the wooden seat she painted one tiny star and painted Stella underneath it. It is amazing to think that was over a year ago now. Stella found her new sledge in the kitchen that birthday, with a note tied on the back from a bit cut off her Frosties box: For my darling Stella, ALL MY LOVE Mum x. Of all the sledges, this bobsleigh is the one most people are looking at. It is to be both admired and feared. It is the ultimate racer.
Stella’s feet are cold and her fingers are numb and her heart is heavy.
There is hair on her lip and her voice is getting lower.
Her hair is in braids.
She doesn’t care anymore what anyone thinks.
She is going to win this race.
All the caravans look like igloos lately. The Inuit in her and the wolf in her mother will keep them wily enough to survive. If it is possible. If they can. Stella stops right in the middle of the line of kids and positions her sledge.
—You racing, then, Stella?
—Looks like it.
Lewis with his frizzy hair and his wide smile.
—Think you’re going to win?
—I will, if you keep holding your sledge like it’s a skateboard, Lewis.
He has it down on the snow, one foot on it.
—I’m going down standing up, are you? he asks.
—Always.
—Do you want to come over to mine later? I’ve got a new computer game.
—No, thanks, she says.
—You should come over. It’s a really amazing game, he says.
—Yeah? Why don’t you draw me a picture?
—I did say sorry for that, he
says.
—Did you?
—Hey, Stella, are you going down standing up? another boy shouts over.
—Same as last year!
The kids are tense. It only takes one bump, one rock, one wrong fall and your neck’s broken, or probably just your arm or even a wee finger, and that has happened before, they’ve all seen it—but you don’t know which one it will be if something breaks, that’s the thing. It could be irreparable. She still feels a bit fuzzy from them testing her blood and saying she’ll be okay and flushing the tablets away, and she has had enough of worrying what someone else might notice about her body and bring her up short on.
This is her.
So what if they don’t get it?
The little kids are all sitting down on their sledges, throwing snow at each other because they are amateurs and they don’t care yet, but the older ones are clapping their hands together and checking out each other’s sledges and getting ready to go. Lewis glances over at her and smiles again. He is so irritating. Stella looks down the farmer’s field, which is such a steep slope that most people stumble even when they are walking down it in the summer. The snow is powdery on top but packed dense underneath, so they’ll be able to go about as fast as they can handle. Once the sledges speed up, you can’t slow them down unless you go sideways and then you are risking a spin, or you can use your arms or your legs or just throw yourself off the side.
It often comes to that.
Speed doesn’t scare her.
All around her kids are saying things and making jokes and throwing snowballs, and Lewis is talking to another girl, so she steps onto her sledge and settles so she is perfectly balanced standing up. She pulls the reins in, getting ready to go. The rest of the kids begin to line up and put on gloves and scarves and take selfies with their friends, and one of the girls from the estate has a selfie stick and Stella has to resist the urge to take the thing off her and beat her over the head with it. Someone has been appointed the gunman at the end.