by Jenni Fagan
She steps back and looks at him.
Three stones.
That’s what he needs.
She finds them right at the bottom of the bag, which is wet with ice and snow, and she places the buttons down the middle of his open suit jacket and now he is sharp. He is super-smart. She can see herself in the reflection of the binoculars and she looks like a radiant elf. Stella checks out her snowman one last time and he is solid. She’ll bring Mum down to see him later. She wades back across the fields toward the gap in the fence where she can squeeze back onto the caravan-site road and Lewis Brown has been standing at the back of his caravan watching her. She gets the feeling he has been there the whole time. He raises his hand. She pretends not to notice, so he climbs across his fence and wades toward her.
—Stella!
—Lewis.
—You didn’t answer my e-mails, he says.
—You didn’t turn up at Fort Hope when I got a kicking-in from all those guys you like over there. What was the matter: couldn’t face it? she says.
—I couldn’t stop them, he says.
She pulls up her hat and parts her hair and points out the scar going up into her head.
—You are a coward, Lewis Brown!
He watches her wading through the snow away from him. She turns around and he is frowning, all that snow around him, but just as handsome as he ever was.
—I’ll call you! he says.
—Oh, fuck off, she calls back.
It was a good day until she saw his face. She hopes he freezes out there in the field, with nobody to watch him die but her snowman.
The man on the tannoy says something while big televisions play news footage on repeat and everyone in here is glued to them—cannot stop watching, cannot look away, only getting up to get food or go to the toilet. The snowfall is heavy outside and people text anxiously. Even in here it’s Baltic. There’s a tired guy on the tannoy talking about the medi-aid in Bargain Corner and free soup up at the cafeteria. They’ve opened Ikea as a place for the community to get medical aid and shelter, buy food, get heat. He is curiously exhilarated to be sitting here looking at meatballs and fries and gravy and extra cranberry sauce. The tannoy person starts speaking in depressed tones again.
—You are welcome to stay in-store until further notice. We will bring you weather updates throughout the day and you can see news footage on televisions throughout the store. The food in our restaurant and the shop downstairs has been reduced, to help those who are unable to attend jobs at this time. There will be songs, sung by the staff each day at one p.m.
The tannoy boy clicks up and goes off somewhere to commit suicide.
Dylan feels better walking around here with all this space. The caravan is giving him cabin fever—that and the snow and Vivienne’s sketchbook and feeling guilty whenever Constance lies in his arms and he doesn’t say anything. He goes over to the condiments and stuffs packets of sauce, vinegar and sugar into his big pockets. He gets a tray and goes over to the hot plates. What to have now? The ciabatta with bacon? He has sold four bottles of gin this week, so he can afford this. There are always ways to make cash and the more this temperature drops and the higher the snow stacks up along the roads, the more people want to drink. It’s an ideal beginning for his brewing empire. On the way out of here he will buy as much food as he can for Constance’s larder. The guy further up Ash Lane, with his alien badges, gave Dylan a lift all this way and is off to get himself a new office desk–type thing to put his new alien transceiver box on; he zapped Dylan this morning on Ash Lane and Dylan staggered back a few steps. That’s what nailed him the lift.
He pushes a little metal trolley ahead of himself with two trays on it, and the hot counter is bright and the boy with his yellow uniform stands there with his badge, which says HAPPY TO HELP!
—I’ll take a cooked breakfast, please.
The boy has a white hat on and he scoops up beans; he uses tongs to add two sausages, mushrooms, potato scone, hash brown, bacon, a little folded-up yellow thing that appears to be masquerading as a miniature omelet. Two brown rolls. Dylan slides his bank card in with the faintest hesitation—what if there’s nothing in there? He is relieved when the guy hands him a receipt.
Dylan pushes his trolley over to a table at the quiet area around the corner, where big windows look down on the store so that customers can admire fake flowers and brightly colored plastic chairs. They have pinned up banners of material around the walls in all different colors. There is a green sheet covered in third eyes: two smaller eyes on either side, then a big one in the middle looking right at him. The pattern repeats throughout the open-plan area below. He soaks up bean sauce with a buttered roll. The sausage tastes dreadful and there is a completely fake feeling to the egg omelet, but the tattie scone is delicious. Gunn loathed this place. Wholly detested it. It was Vivienne who used to make him drive her all the way out to Croydon and, when they had lunch, she’d always get one of those little bottles of white wine and a Dime-bar cake. Then another bottle of wine. He smiles to himself. Dylan dunks a chunk of sausage in brown sauce. It’s edible. Needs sauce, though, and that egg thing. Like a yellow brain. Airport food on an Ikea plate. That’s what it is. Dylan pushes the food away and it is uncomfortable to sit for too long. He goes over to the big window where the mountains and caravans are all covered in snow. If snow keeps falling, it will soften noise across the whole world and everyone will have to pipe down a while, put down their weapons, stay home, make soup, talk quietly.
Over in the farmer’s field there is the most amazing snowman. It’s tall and wide and dressed with a suit coat and a tie and suit trousers and scuffed trainers and a big tummy and buttons, and a colored-in deodorant can for his nose and binoculars that look familiar. Cheap Japanese binoculars for watching black-and-white films. Stella must have pinched them from his caravan! He needs to watch that girl. He taps his boots on the ground and behind him a woman is crying to her friend and the people going downstairs to the market hall all looked pinched and haunted. Constance is sleeping a lot this week too. He’ll get back, soon, but first he will find a living-room area to read a paper, one with a working lamp and a blanket and a footstool. It is so good to walk around somewhere that seems even vaguely normal for a while. Dylan makes his way out of the cafeteria and begins to follow the arrows and he is tempted to steal a teapot for Constance. How clever of this store to stay open in these conditions. Great for community relations: it says We are here to support your family through the fucking apocalypse, people—come back here for the rest of your life to buy corner sofas and clever Scandi kitchenware; we are all the extended human race: you, me, everybody!
Outside the window a digger rolls through the snow.
For a minute he gets an image of Stella on her bicycle, an imprint of light behind his eyes. She is standing on his pathway, holding a Gobstopper aloft like a poisoned apple.
There are still no e-mails from Vito. He has been eaten by the snow. Northern Italy is a white mass and when she looks at their news everyone is scared, and they look like that in the village at Clachan Fells this week too. Perhaps Vito has had enough and he is living with a piccolo player in Azerbaijan. She dreamt of Gunn MacRae last night. The woman came right into the caravan and took a bottle of Dylan’s homemade gin.
—He got it wrong on the mint, Gunn said.
She screwed up her face and drank three shots in a row.
—The branding’s good, though, she said.
—Why are you here?
—Aren’t you getting up, Stella?
—Why should I get up?
Gunn sat down at the table and put her boots up on the chair so that mud got on the cushions and she burped and lit a cigar. She pulled the bottle of gin over to herself.
—Coatlicue is on her way, she said.
—On her way where?
—Poplar Path.
—Where’s Vito?
—They took his hormones away, he’s standing on a bridge in Pordenone.
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br /> —I don’t want him to do that.
—You’ll meet him one day, don’t worry. He’s going to be fine.
She had a chess board with her and she set it up on the table and they passed Pawns and Queens and Bishops and Rooks and Knights, and Gunn told her all about rocks and men and how everything could be settled with sex, and how her value was only going to be as solid as she decided it would be and how little anyone knows about anything and how they all play dress-up and let’s-pretend, and that she has to work out how to make some money and how to keep it coming in and that is the key, and don’t stay with a man who plays games with your emotions and always have a lover on the side or you might as well be dead.
—You look a little like me, she said.
Stella pushed forward her Knight to claim checkmate.
—What about the real sunlight pilgrims, who were they?
—Those fucking crazy monks?
—Yeah.
—You’re descended from the one that was left on the island, Gunn said.
—The one that didn’t eat gannets.
—The one that drank light until his eyes glowed like lasers in his head. I had a toy like that once, a little wind-up metal monkey, and it had two red lights for eyes and it played the drums and stamped its feet a lot. It was my first true love, she said.
—Why aren’t you visiting Dylan?
—That boy’s brain couldn’t take it—he’s figuring out a few things right now.
—He’s heartbroken since you both died.
—He’ll get over it, Gunn says.
—You miss him.
—I do.
—He was your favorite, over Vivienne?
—By a long, long way but I’m not proud of that. It wasn’t Vivienne’s fault, you know.
—What wasn’t her fault?
—Any of it.
—Why come to me?
—I’m just doing the rounds.
—What are you, a milkman?
—Just seeing the family, she said.
When Stella woke up she felt like she hadn’t slept at all, and rolling over and looking at their kitchen table and no mud prints on the cushion and no cigar in the ashtray, only the dog ends from her mum’s joint and cigarettes and glasses on the drying rack. Stella opens the curtains. Outside the sky is a clear, clear blue and the snow has stopped. Crystals sparkle across everything, over the lumps and hillocks of things hidden by the snow. She can hear Constance turn over in her bed. There is no sign of last week’s skies, which were so white and dense and heavy it seemed it was pressing down onto Clachan Fells. Lewis Brown walked past their caravan three times last night. Everyone knows you only walk past someone’s caravan if you want to stick your hands up their jumper. She will get Vito over here and he will drive through the caravan park in a big fancy car and park right outside Ash Lane and all the kids will watch her as she climbs inside. She’ll wear a headscarf and big glasses and bloodred lipstick, and she and Vito will neck for ten minutes in front of everyone before he starts the engine and his car flies right up into the sky. He will drive her to Gretna Green and marry her. Just the two of them. Maybe her mum will come, and Dylan, and Barnacle, and she’ll stay with him forever. He’ll be the only man she’ll ever kiss and even when she is old he will sing her songs.
Stella goes online.
The usual news is there.
Strange people doing even weirder things.
Ugly things.
Weather reports coming in from everywhere. A new coalition treaty to deal with environmental issues. A lorry gone off the road in Plymouth and straight through a house. A gunman in Florence. Migrants stuck off the coast of Sicily, Greece, Turkey. A man trying to sell a child outside a bingo hall. No e-mail from Vito. He was last in the chat room three days ago. Now he is gone. She wants him back. She makes some tea, drinks it so hot that it scalds her throat, and she checks for hair on her face—just soft down and it is not growing in so fast anymore with this waxing, but they have still not got the hormones from the clinic, although it is only a matter of time now. She pulls on the moccasins that Alistair gave her. He must have taken ages to make them and it means something, although just because her feet look pretty in them doesn’t mean he can retrace his steps, but these moccasins are clearly not designed for a boy. Her biological donor has never called her by her real name, but he has stopped using the boy one and he did not give her shirts this year; he spent months sewing together the prettiest little moccasins she has ever seen. The laces are strong leather and she ties them up, tightly. On the radio a DJ is commending the emergency services and hospitals for stepping up, despite the cuts that keep going, due to a general economic decline that they are saying can only end in a complete collapse. He talks about the bankers and the government and big business but in a sad way, like the only thing he really has to look forward to is the cheese sandwich he’ll eat later on. They break for the weather. It is always on the radio now. There should be a spring one day, but not for at least a month or three.
In essence:
—It’s going to get a whole lot colder.
They don’t know if temperatures will rise.
Dylan gets his parka, pulls his boots on, clicks the caravan door shut. He crunches along Ash Lane. He heads down along past the park and for no reason at all he decides to take a left and go down through Poplar Path instead of the other route behind the garages, just for variety. He had an urge to have a gin this morning. He had to quell it with tea and loud music and burning a few logs on the fire. For today, in that, he wins. He saw Alistair going into Constance’s last night—that’s what did it, he was in there for an hour. Dylan paced for another hour after he left; the man still makes him want to turn to violence but he needs to rein it in. He turns onto Poplar Path and stops.
Down at the end of the path there are two black boots.
They stick up from the snow and it is clear some dog has gone past and scrabbled around and exposed the boots, otherwise they would be completely covered in snow.
He looks behind him.
Nobody is about.
As he walks down the path it appears to elongate.
He brushes the snow off the boots.
It is clear already from the body shape. He dusts snow off and his fingers can tell that what he is touching is solid as granite and twice as cold. Barnacle’s eyes stare up at the mountains. Clear. Frozen solid. They reflect the tall shadow of Dylan as he flicks snow off the guy’s collar, shows off those two badges on his lapels, one with a pure pristine world from space, the other celebrating a revolution. He steps back and the garages are reflected in those eyes as well. Barnacle must have walked here last night and sat down like an old Eskimo, like he said he would, that night on the roof. Snow falls off his arms, and his hands are out in front of him like two claws, like he is sitting in an armchair and is just about to get up.
The world turns.
People are somewhere talking, doing, being, driving; there are work places, there are strip lights.
He dials 999 on his phone.
Barnacle’s eyelashes are frosted white and solid—he still has the pleat in his beard where he wanted it out of the way so he could drink and eat and laugh, and words are coming back to Dylan as he listens to the ring on his phone: Constance asking if Barnacle was going to stay with Ida, or at the community center and Barnacle saying he’d rather just sit down in the snow—Dylan takes a few steps back.
—Which service do you require?
—I have found a body frozen in the snow, it’s my neighbor.
Dylan gets a feeling of motion, all the mountains blurring slightly around him until he kneels down, tears again, brushing them off his face, furious with everything.
—I am sorry to hear that, sir. We do have a designated service for these calls now, sadly—please hold!
He keeps checking behind him, hoping Stella won’t appear and see Barnacle sitting here like this, his hands held out before him like two dinosaur claws.
—Hello, can we help you, sir?
—Yeah, I found a body.
Barnacle is leaning right back, so he is still in a C shape but he is able to look up, he has gone like that—lying there watching the stars, watching night turn to morning and waiting for the sky—his wife.
The landscape is brilliantly lit, flawless—the mountains look like somebody has cut them out of the sky. The skies are clear and blue, but the wind still bites and nips at any exposed inch of skin. Each of them wears snow goggles so their eyelashes don’t get frosty, and balaclavas pulled up right up over their face and nose. The cold is clangorous. It vibrates. Shrill and deadly. They argued about it for two weeks before coming out to do this. Constance has enough food to get by for two days, a shelter in her backpack. They have three charged phones. They were going stir-crazy in the caravan. Stella is just behind him now and there is the crunch of their feet on soft powdered snow over the hardpacked ice layer below it. They wear ice grips over their boots, and gloves and scarves like they are moon travelers setting out into this landscape alone.
—How old are the polar ice caps?
—Up to fifteen million years old, Dylan says.
Stella stops and looks at him, he puts out his hand to help her up the slope and they walk on.
—So this winter has happened really because of water melting from the ice caps, which means this winter started out, in a way, about fifteen million years ago? This is all sort of time travel! We’ve kind of gone back in time—this was fifteen million years in the making. Stella gestures around them.
—Shouldn’t you be playing with My Little Ponies or something? Dylan snaps.