The Sunlight Pilgrims

by Jenni Fagan

  —Did you see that?

  —What?

  Stella turns round.

  Barnacle is sitting in his deck chair, looking the other way to the mountains, and the forests are white but the thick dark fir trees still stand out in layers all the way to the top. To the right of the biggest mountain is a smaller one and there are willow trees bent under the weight of snow. Constance stands on the front of the roof with her feet placed wide and lights a cigarette. Spirals of light unravel across the sky until they are sweeping arcs of green and purple.

  —It’s the aurora! Stella squeaks.

  Circles of green light are shot through with white dashes—horizontal iridescence shoots down in zigs and zags from somewhere above the sky. Stars sparkle through a moving river of light and color and it turns the tips of Constance’s wolf ears green, and she turns her face to the side so he can see her silhouetted—with the universe spreading out behind her.

  Those great hulks of stone and tree and bark and soil and clods of earth and the deer up there, and the wildcat he likes to imagine is up there, and the farmers’ dogs barking in the night—all of it is so cleanly real.

  —The sky is my wife, Barnacle says.

  —And how spectacular she is, Constance says.

  At Barnacle’s feet there are three old rearview mirrors, so when it hurts his neck too much to look up and out he can still see everything by looking down. Stella dances up and down the rooftop and Constance taps her on the shoulder to stop, lest she fall off. And the girl stands with her hands stretched up into the sky above her and she is radiant.

  —I always wanted a wife that was the sky, so I could admire her every day of her life, so she’d never stay the same and I’d always be watching for the changes, Barnacle says.

  Dylan sits down next to Barnacle in a big stripy deck chair and lets the old astronomer refill his wineglass with a ladle. If he had to grade life on the best days and the worst, he’d say seeing his grandmother on devil’s snare was the worst, and this—the best seat in the house to watch the universe unfold, with a woman he loves, and a kid he loves too and a neighbor who is affable and a tin box for home—is as good as it gets.

  The aurora unfolds, it moves, it’s never still. The light alters each second and it appears as a being, an entity older than they themselves will ever be. Down below them caravans are lit up, lights in windows; nobody is out, why would they come out?—they wouldn’t and even Ida has gone back inside. The caravan rooftops and the mountain are eerily lit by green light and the faint river of purple moving through it now, and a silhouette appears on the mountaintop—of a sole stag.

  —I bet you that’s the giant red. Barnacle sits up a bit.

  —Three hundred pounds and nine feet tall, the giant red doesn’t exist, Constance says.

  —Are the farmers out tonight? Stella asks.

  —Better hope not, cos they’d shoot that one, Constance says.

  The sky above them is opening—that’s what it is—the sky is opening and they are looking out and the lights of little cottages up on the mountains glow orange.

  —Can you see it? Barnacle whispers.

  They follow his arm, which is pointing over to the nearest peak of the mountain, and his head glancing up, glancing, glancing, and they are all following his directions and it is there—silhouetted—a green sky behind it and around it and somehow below it: on the closest peak of the mountain a second stag with his antlers wide and curved round and just a silhouette.

  —Is it the white one?

  —I don’t know—get the telescope.

  Stella takes the little lid off and places it down at eye height for Barnacle and he is looking, looking. Constance claps her hands together because the temperature is dropping further. They can’t stay up here much longer.

  —I can’t tell if it is the white one because it looks purple from the reflection of the sky, Barnacle says.

  Dylan can see the shape and it looks like it is white—then another appears and the two stags face each other, right up on the peak, with the aurora around them as if it’s radiating out from behind them and even from here: the size of them!

  —This qualifies as the best aurora party ever, Constance murmurs.

  It is like the caravan is in motion—like they are sailing into skies of purple and green—like this is their spaceship boat—and there are a few figures out now, in other gardens across the caravan park, all different people looking up.

  —It reminds me of Iceland, Barnacle says.

  —Do you get polar bears in Iceland? Stella asks.

  —One swam two hundred miles to get there not long ago; they shot it when it arrived.

  —Why? Stella asks.

  —They’ve got a policy. They won’t let them be reintroduced again.

  Barnacle has somehow reclined in his lounger in a way that makes it easier for him to look round, his back still bent, but he seems more comfortable and the colors of the sky intensify like it has an energy of its own. Treetops across the forests jut up into the purple aurora and behind it a cluster of shooting stars.

  —Did you tell them about Coatlicue, Dylan? Stella asks.

  Barnacle tilts his head as the Milky Way snakes right above them, so many stars. Dylan couldn’t even imagine seeing quite so many stars so clearly ever in his life.

  —Nope.

  —Who’s Coatlicue? Barnacle asks.

  —Soul collector, Dylan says.

  —Sounds like my first wife, but she went after bank accounts too, Barnacle says.

  —She gave birth to the stars and the comets. From the moment they appear, the death-wish comets are on a trajectory to complete self-destruction; they burn so fast through the universe so that they can return to the nothing they came from—they want to go back there and see what nothing is made of, so they burn, and burn, and burn, using up all the energy they can as fast as they can. Coatlicue has snakes in her hair and her skirt is a ballgown made out of skulls; they are tiny little skulls at the top and they get bigger all the way down, and when she walks across the universe they move out around her and talk to each other in whispers, and she collects souls that have been lost out there and puts them back in the river of Lethe so they can return. They say out there somewhere there is a bar beyond the veil where they siphon off the souls of humans. Funny thing is, when I first got here and I was up on the mountain a cloud drifted up over where I was standing and I had this feeling of being right on the edge of the other side of life, you know, and it was littered with these hideous, long-toothed skinny creatures who wanted to suck up the last bit of humans’ soul energy—you know, siphon off any goodness they had left and send it up into the universe to give it more energy for stuff like that! Dylan points up.

  —And I thought I was the goth, Stella says.

  —She sounds hot—she can collect my soul anytime, Barnacle says.

  —You won’t die for years, Stella says.

  —Why not?

  —You eat too much frozen food. The additives are preserving you.

  —I don’t believe in holding on. I want to be like an old Eskimo, just go out in the snow one night and fall asleep. Wouldn’t that be peaceful?

  —Peaceful like drowning? Stella asks.

  —How does anybody really know if drowning is peaceful? Constance asks.

  —Because they record the brain waves afterward or something, Barnacle says.

  —Bollocks! she says.

  —That is the brightest half-moon I have ever seen, it is so pretty!

  Constance gazes up to where her child is looking. Stella stands up on her tiptoes at the front of the caravan and holds her hands above her head in a curved steeple until it looks like an earth child has captured the moon.

  —

  Barnacle has gone back through to his caravan to bed. Dylan carries Stella over to the bedroom and lays her on the bunk, tucks her in. He looks at her for a minute in the dark. They share ancestors. They both love her mother. Somewhere in the park he can hear someone
blaring dance music and there were two fights earlier. People are going cabin crazy. It would take police hours to get out here and they are unlikely to turn up for anything small; Clachan Fells is more lawless by the day. Stella’s mouth is squint and plump and childlike, as if her dreams take her right back to a place ruled by the innocent and the free.

  —The plates and cups and ashtray and everything are still up on the roof. I should go up and get them, Constance whispers at the door.

  —Get them in the morning, he says.

  They step outside and she leans in as he lights a cigarette for her, and she looks at him with her white hair and her gray eyes with their orange rim, which is now always going to remind him of the parhelia. She takes his hand and they just stand there, neither of them feeling even the remotest need to begin speaking.

  Stella goes over to their sun mirror and combs her black hair so it shines. She braids each side neatly and puts on a tiny slick of lip gloss. Her tiny wax strips are in a pouch in the bathroom and she’s been using one each week, even when she can’t see any hair on her upper lip. She pulls up her polo neck under her chin and buttons her cardigan over the top.

  —Winter is proving to be the worst that has been seen in the UK in living memory, generating unseen conditions across the whole of Europe and indeed many countries worldwide. We will take you across the map now. Russia, as we can see here, is at an utter standstill, fatalities in rural areas and cities have reached a crisis point. Nobody is able to get in or out on the roads and a main cause of death is cold and hunger. Chicago is on city lockdown; we saw a forty-car pile-up in Chicago due to black ice on the road only few weeks ago; there have been riots across parts of the city, with widespread looting and violent crime; there are reports of home owners shooting anyone who enters their home without cause, and police are no longer intervening in these cases because there are just so many. Morocco is under twenty feet of snow this morning; we saw a demonstration against local government for the number of street children and families who are literally being left to freeze unless someone takes them in, and many ordinary people are opening their homes to others if they can do so. The northern British Isles are mainly frozen over, with icebergs at the furthest tip of the Orkney Islands; another iceberg—the biggest ever recorded outside the Arctic—has entered an area of Scotland called Clachan Fells; whale pods are migrating through the Atlantic at vast rates, birds are changing route and in fact in the UK there have barely been any bird sightings for weeks now. Those that are in nests have just frozen. Rivers are frozen. Blackouts across the grid can be seen lit up here, here and here. We are not sure how many fatalities this harsh weather will create, but thousands and thousands of people are dying due to dangerous conditions, and this is only the beginning. We can confirm the weather in the UK will be minus fifty before the next few weeks are through. The whole of Europe has come to a standstill. The entire planet is being impacted upon by the collapse of intricate weather systems that are vital to survival, just a few degrees lower than is manageable for human habitation, and we could be plunging into an Ice Age.

  As of today, the Prime Minister has released a statement saying people must stop panicking, but it seems the public do not agree. A man walked into Tate Modern on Tuesday and shot dead thirty people. There are widespread reports of violent crime having reached epidemic proportions. In the US you can see in this footage that families are traipsing from their main residencies to garden bunkers that are sometimes equipped with up to twelve months of food and water. For the next few days the temperature is anticipated to keep dropping rapidly and, as of now, there is no definite conclusion as to how this will end. We will keep you updated, with ITV proving a main point of contact while Internet connections are down. We will be back with you at eleven p.m. tonight, at ITV with leading scientists, politicians and religious leaders meeting to try and offer some guidance at this time. Until then, from us here in the studio, stay warm and stay safe!

  The news reporter is wearing a scarf and the window behind him is completely black, with snow in mounds halfway up it.

  Stella glances at her mum and they both look back at the television again. Constance squeezes her shoulder. The sun has been up for hours and the sky outside is a whitened gray and it feels ominous. From their windows there are icicles hanging all the way down to the ground and she is thirsty. Stella finds her army boots and puts them on and keeps her pajamas underneath, but slides her waterproofs on top of them, then she drags on a big jumper and her Eskimo coat with the furry hood and her mohawk hat and she opens the metal door.

  It is so still outside.

  Dylan’s caravan is quiet and his windows all bare because he still hasn’t got curtains, but at least now he has a tiny crooked metal chimney sticking out of the roof and smoke wisps up and curls into the cold air. There is a skitter-patter sound as a dog walks down the pathway; he cocks his ears at her; he has a clever face and a black-and-white coat and his tongue hangs out, and then there is a dog whistle sharp and short from somewhere in the park and he turns and runs over the field, so his back legs almost seem to move forward as one motion and his front paws plunge down into snow too deep, until he is a furrow moving forward through a white field.

  She traipses around the back of their caravan—the tarpaulin over the wood stack is heavy with snow. She lets one corner down so the snow all slides off onto the ground, then she puts it back into its peg to keep the logs dry. The only bit of furniture they have left to sell is the 1950s metal larder, and the snow chains on the ambulance are holding out but the engine doesn’t start anymore.

  Inside her mother’s garden food store there are half the amount of tins that were there before and only one crate of wine. The bags of rice are triple-wrapped in cling film but they have still frozen. She closes the door again. Stella takes the ax out of the tree. Icicles hang from the windows and they are clear and almost as thick as her wrist at the top, then they taper right down to the ground. She doesn’t want to get any of the bits that are frozen onto the caravan or they will taste like metal. Stella taps at the icicle a few inches below the windowsill, and small chips fly away into the air. She keeps tapping gently, with her left hand ready to catch it as it falls, and it does, in one piece.

  Stella holds the clear tusk out in front of her—puts it up to her head as if she is the unicorn—she spins around, holding the icicle out in front of her as a spear—jabbing it into air to show the spirit plane that she is her mother’s daughter—that the child of a wolf may not feel like she has fangs until she finds herself facing the moon, but they are still there the whole time regardless. Stella crunches down on the tip of the icicle and clean, pure water chills her tongue. The sky is so dense this morning that it is hard to imagine any stars were even there last night. She looks in the window and her mum has lain down on the sofa and closed her eyes. Stella goes back into the kitchen and the wood stove has almost gone out and she cannot be bothered to clean the grate right now, so she just adds some paper and kindling and two logs; it catches and it will keep the fire going for a while at least. She grabs a pair of old binoculars and a plastic bag she prepared a few days ago. There are no carrots in the fridge, so she takes an empty can of deodorant with a bright-blue round lid.

  Stella heads out along the paths, down past a caravan with cartoons blaring out of the window, and a woman shouts at her children with the kind of harsh tone that is as bad as a punch.

  Stella turns to look toward the open window. A little girl is staring out at her and she looks so miserable and lonely and hungry. She pushes down in between the scratchy gorse bush on the lane and then right across the car park, where the snow is up to her knees and then nearly to her thighs, then she is in the field and she can stand with the snow just touching the top of her boots. These are perfect conditions. The motorway still has movement. Over at the industrial park the lights on the big stores are all yellow and fake and somehow welcoming all the same. The car showrooms are closed, but they have bright lights shining down
on four-wheel drives with shiny interiors of leather and just one of those cars would cost four times more than their caravan. There used to always be young flash-looking couples from the city coming out to buy a car or go to Ikea or to pick up paint, but there is nobody visiting the industrial parks now.

  She feels angry. This stupid snow. Her voice is lower all the time and her mum is not sleeping again. Stella makes a snowball, pressing it down as hard as she can in one hand, and pats it with the other hand until it is really solid. It all comes from this one snowball—that’s how it all starts—and it has to be a good one and super-hard so the rest will stick to it and keep the shape. She rolls the snowball across the white expanse and the snow is so high she doesn’t even have to bend down properly until it gets bigger and heavier. This is good for her fury: the exertion and moving forward and shoving this big ball of snow forward with a vengeance in her. She rolls the big ball and it leaves an indented path behind it. She rolls and rolls; her legs hurt. She has to pat it down and make it solid again before she turns it and rolls back the way she just came.

  By the time she is no longer able to push the torso, she is near the entrance to the city dump. This is the best thing—creating something out of nothing. A landscape creates a snowman and later he uses these big long feet to walk across to Ikea, and he leaves a watery trail behind him as he takes over the tannoy to tell stories of all the creatures who came out of nothing—all the beings like him who came out of the snow, who have no idea where it is they return to. By the time she has rolled it all the way back to the torso, the head is ready to go on. Stella carefully places the head down on the body. She opens her bag. The nose goes on first: it is the miniature can of deodorant with waves on it and she sets it firmly there, so she can rest the binoculars on top of it. He is a snowman scanning a landscape. She can hear cars in the distance. His deodorant-can nose is perfect, with its round blue cap sticking out, and the binoculars sit well. She wraps the black scarf around his neck. Her snowman scans the landscape. There are vast layers of snow in every direction. Behind him are the mountains and the caravan parks. She pulls out an old suit jacket from the bag and she has to work to get it to fit around his wide neck; she has to recurve the shoulders so that he wears the thing like it was tailor-made.