The Sunlight Pilgrims by Jenni Fagan

Author:Jenni Fagan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781473507081
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

18

THE WOLF is back on the shelf. Its nose points toward the door. Stella has smoothed down her braids and resumed her post back-to-front on the sofa, staring out of the window. Constance stands at the door; she does that thing where she flexes her toes – her bare feet are bony – and cricks her neck. She takes half a step to the kettle, then one turn to the bright-red cereal bowls that she bought in Italy years ago.

– Who is that from?

Stella nods toward a postcard tacked up onto the wooden saucepan rack.

– Caleb.

Her mother turns away and there’s a tenseness to her when she says his name. From the back she doesn’t look like an adult, but she doesn’t really look like a teenager either, because she is too muscular, her frame lean, hair too short. Constance sits down at the kitchen table and puts the open cereal packet on the bunker.

– Would you take him back, and Alistair?

Her mother doesn’t answer.

– What about Dylan?

Constance unfolds the paper and keeps frowning at it. Stella grabs her coat and she is out of the door, her eyes stinging. She crunches down the porch and away in the distance the village church bells chime. The snow and the ice and the cold are seeping into everybody. The whole world is getting meaner, if that is even possible. The church bells have been ringing like this for hours. It is something to do with the suns. The bells are always rung by the same old man, who took the job over forty years ago and came to the school last year to tell the pupils at Clachan Fells Primary School all about it. He told them that when they first moved to Clachan Fells, his mother warned him to be careful if he was going to get drunk in the village pub in winter. She said their neighbours would be able to tell how drunk he had been by the pattern of his footprints in the snow the next morning. That afternoon they made snowflakes by cutting little triangles out of paper and then they decorated the village hall for the Christmas party and a guy was brought in to DJ, with some flashing lights, and all of the songs were rave or pop and Stella prayed for Joy Division to materialise and stun them all. The song by Joy Division she would have had the DJ play would have been ‘She’s Lost Control’. That is what this winter feels like. Like everything that was once in order has unravelled, so fast nobody can keep up. Stella can hear the thwack of metal ringing from the bells all the way out here by the fields. Ropes run up into the belfry so that the bell chimes, it chimes, and chimes, and they are telling everyone to come to church, now the weather is getting worse by the day rather than weekly. They must all gather to pray. There are people in Clachan Fells village who believe this winter is the devil’s work.

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