by Carys Bray
“I was going to have you mow the lawn, but you looked like you needed something to do. And with the Second Coming getting closer by the day, I might get some use out of this old girl yet.” Brother Rimmer stands up and pats the handcart. “Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is to keep going,” he says. “When I saw you standing on my doorstep, I thought you looked like you needed to hear that, Alma Bradley.”
WHEN IT’S TIME to go, Brother Rimmer gives Al a tenner for his mission fund, which makes him feel like shit.
“Will you come again next Saturday?”
“Yes.”
“Good lad.”
Al unlocks his bike from Brother Rimmer’s front gate and cycles home. The car isn’t in the driveway so Dad must still be at the Work Day. He chucks his bike in the shed and grabs a football for keepie-uppie practice: left knee, right knee, shoulder, head, shoulder. He’s not sure how to let Dad know that Brother Rimmer’s tenner won’t be going in his mission fund—he’ll have to hide it and hope Dad doesn’t ask whether he got paid. It’s hardly a brave approach, but there’s no acceptable way of disagreeing with Dad. Matty sometimes disagrees with Steve, Al has seen them shout at each other and it doesn’t ruin anything, Steve just laughs and calls Matty a cheeky git. Dad never expects disagreement because everything he thinks is backed up by the Church and no one is allowed to disagree with the Church. Al isn’t sure why, but saying “I’m not saving up for a mission” would be the same as saying “Fuck off, Dad, I hate you.”
No one has ever asked if he wants to go on a mission, everyone just takes it for granted. As soon as he could talk, people were beginning sentences with “When you go on your mission,” and he had to dress like a missionary on Sundays and sing “I Hope They Call Me on a Mission” and “I Want to Be a Missionary Now” in Primary. The idea of leaving Mum and not talking to her for two whole years used to frighten him. She noticed and whispered, “Don’t worry” and, “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to” when people mentioned it. But as he got older she stopped the whispering and looked at him sadly instead.
Nana and Granddad give him £10 on his birthday. He’s not allowed to spend it. It’s for his mission fund. Granddad wants the money back if it’s not spent on a mission; Al would like to give it back now and save Granddad the bother. Zippy gets money but she’s allowed to spend it, and Issy used to spend hers too. Granddad says missions aren’t important for girls ’cause their priority is to get married. Girls get fivers and boys get tenners. But a fiver in the hand is better than an invisible tenner any day.
Al puts the ball down, dribbles to the back door, and positions it for free-kick practice. It’s sometimes tempting to behave like a twat in order to manage everyone’s expectations and give them the pleasure of saying “I’m not surprised” when he turns out badly. What he’s done today could land him in deep shit—if anyone finds out he’ll look like a proper thief. Maybe the brave thing is to swap the money back, maybe it’s to go upstairs and tell Mum about the microwave—who knows? What if Brother Rimmer’s stash has nothing to do with the Second Coming and he needs it in real life? What if telling Mum the truth only makes things worse? How can you be brave when you don’t know what the brave thing is? He jogs back toward the hedge to fetch the ball and is thumped by the hurt of missing Issy as he half-expects her to emerge from behind a tree to retrieve it. He doesn’t know what’s brave or stupid, he’ll have to work it out. In the meantime he’ll do what Brother Rimmer said and just keep going.
– 15 –
Top-Secret Boy
Monday mornings are good because after assembly it’s News time and everyone gets to write about what has happened to them that week. Jacob missed two Mondays in a row last month—one when Dad let everyone have a day off after Issy died, and the next one when it was her funeral—so he had a lot of News to catch up on last week. He drew a special picture of Issy being dead in the living room. It was too difficult to draw her lying down, so he drew her sitting up in the coffin, smiling. He wrote his News below the picture.
Issy died and I went to her fewneral.
Mrs. Slade said, “Well done,” and stuck one of her special “Mrs. Slade thinks I am a STAR” stickers underneath his work.
There’s only one really interesting thing to put in his News this Monday but he can’t because it’s a secret. He chews his pencil and tries to think of something else to write.
It’s been a mostly boring week. He went to Early Drop-off Club and After-School Club on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Dad says he’ll be going every day this week too unless Mum feels better. School, school, and more school. It’s starting to feel as if he lives here. He glances around the table at the other children’s work.
George Hindle has written, “My Dad won totil wipe out on saterday.” Last week George Hindle said his big sister is Cheryl Cole. Everyone knows George is a big fibber. Jessie Sinkinson hasn’t done any writing yet. She is drawing a huge picture of the cinema and all the people in the audience look the same. She draws this picture every Monday because her News is always that she has been to the cinema. She might be fibbing, but Jacob isn’t sure because she often gets into trouble for telling the truth. Sometimes she says, “This is boring” in assembly in a loud voice and she said, “You look horrible” when Mrs. Slade had her hair cut short.
Jacob thinks for a bit longer and then he decides what to write. Once he has finished he gets up and takes his book over to Mrs. Slade’s desk to show her.
My Mum is like sleeping bewty.
“That’s lovely writing!” she says. “Well done, Jacob. Do you think you could write one more sentence and draw a picture? Come back and show me when you’ve finished, there’s a good boy.”
He goes back to his place and adds another sentence. Then he draws a picture and colors it in with felt tips. He hurries back to Mrs. Slade’s desk and presents his book. Mrs. Slade reads his work and looks at his picture.
My Mum is like sleeping bewty. She has been in bed for a week.
“Oh, is your mum not very well? Poor Mum! Is this her? You’ve drawn her in a lovely, big, special bed, just like a princess!”
“It’s my bunk bed,” he says. “She’s on the bottom bunk. That’s where she is.”
“Oh.” Mrs. Slade looks surprised.
“But Dad says she isn’t lazy,” he adds quickly.
“Oh no, I’m sure your mum isn’t lazy, Jacob. Everyone gets ill sometimes.”
“Do you?”
“Oh yes.” Mrs. Slade nods.
“Do you stay in bed all day and cry?”
“Well, not usually. But if I was ill … or very unhappy, then I might. How about you, Jacob? Are you feeling ill or unhappy?”
“Nope,” he says. “I’m fine.” And he is. He knows a secret and it’s going to make everything better.
“If you ever feel sad, you know you can come and talk to me,” Mrs. Slade says, and Jacob nods, even though he doesn’t want to talk to her or any of the other grown-ups who are suddenly anxious to chat. “Go and find a book to read until break time. And, Jacob, you can tell me about anything that’s been happening at home, if you need to,” she says.
He nods again, fetches the Big Book of Fairy Tales from the library corner and sits down next to Jessie Sinkinson, who is drawing identical smiles on every person in her cinema. He opens the book and pretends to read, but he is really thinking about his secret.
BECAUSE IT’S AUTUMN, things are dying everywhere. The geese know it and they’re on the move, flying over the house and the school playground toward the marsh and the beach, cackling as they go. Daddy-longlegs flies are blowing everywhere at break times—there were so many last week that Jessie Sinkinson was allowed to stay indoors because she throws a tantrum if an insect so much as touches her. There were dead flies on the windowsill in the boys’ bathroom, and in his bedroom, right next to Issy’s toy box, was a big, dead spider, all folded up like a hairy umbrella.
Last Monday when Jacob got home from
school, Issy’s glasses case was on the kitchen table next to Mum’s handbag. The case was empty, so he thought it was probably OK to take it. He was late home because Mum had forgotten to pick him up. He wanted to take the glasses case up to his room but Dad was in there with Mum and Dad sounded cross, so he decided to put the case in a safe place, which ended up being his school bag.
After dinner he popped back up to his room to collect the dead spider. Mum was in Issy’s bed with the covers over her head. He tiptoed in, picked up the spider, and tiptoed out. When he got downstairs he took Issy’s glasses case out of his school bag and dropped the spider in it. He’d been thinking about the dead bird from the garden. It had been small, but he wondered whether it might be easier to resurrect a really small animal. He couldn’t decide if a spider was the right size so he had a look around the house for some more dead things. He found a fly in the bathroom and a beetle on the back step that wasn’t dead, at first. The collecting bit of the job was exciting. That afternoon Mrs. Slade had begun their class project about Egypt. She’d made hieroglyphic worksheets and she talked about pyramids and mummies and a special book of magic spells to bring a dead person back to life, The Book of the Dead. He liked hearing about The Book of the Dead. If Issy had died in Egyptian times, he could have put a book of spells in her coffin to help her get resurrected. He slipped the fly and the slightly squashed beetle into her glasses case—his Box of the Dead.
That night Mum slept in Issy’s bunk. He was glad. He’d been finding it hard to sleep suspended over Issy’s bed; it felt as if he was sleeping above a deep, empty space and sometimes, when he woke in the heart of the night and the dark was silent, he worried he might tumble into the emptiness like Alice in Wonderland, falling down and down and down. Sometimes the veil between real life and his dreams was as filmy as a net curtain and he wondered if Issy was in the room, if she could see him in bed, if she was watching all the time, like Heavenly Father, and he made sure to hide his head under the covers when he picked his nose, just in case.
By Wednesday he wished Mum would go back to her own room because she kept crying in the night. The first time, he got out of bed, patted the bump of her hip through the duvet and said, “Shush, shush,” like he’d seen her do to Issy when she was little. It worked, and he climbed back into his bunk feeling clever and pleased with himself. But soon she was crying again and this time he didn’t know what to do to make it better. It made him want to cry too, so he slipped down the ladder and along the hall to Dad. “Can I get in your bed?” he asked and Dad mumbled something that didn’t sound like no, so he crawled in on Mum’s side. Dad was a noisy sleeper; when he breathed it sounded like he was blowing up balloons, but at least he wasn’t crying.
ON THURSDAY NIGHT Dad went Home Teaching and Jacob agreed to play football with Alma because he’d been crying. But football was boring and when he found a dead wasp Jacob hurried into the house to fetch the Box of the Dead.
Afterward, he made sure Zippy was watching TV and Alma was still playing football before pulling a chair up to the kitchen countertop, flipping open the lid of Issy’s fish tank, and plunging his hand into the water. Mrs. Slade said Egyptian people liked to be buried with their pets so they wouldn’t be lonely. Jacob knew he shouldn’t kill bigger things than insects—and Mum didn’t even like him to do that—but it was OK to kill Fred because first, if he prayed very hard and Fred was resurrected, it would prove that Issy could come back too, and second, if Fred was completely dead and couldn’t be resurrected, at least he would be able to keep Issy company.
It was hard to get hold of Fred. He was very swimmy and Jacob couldn’t quite grip him as planned, so he just grabbed his tail and held him in the air above the water while he twitched and squirmed.
When Fred was dead, Jacob plopped him back in the water—he was very slimy and Jacob didn’t want him to make a mess of the Box of the Dead. He wiped his hands on his school trousers and said a prayer, copying the special, powerful words he’d heard Dad use when he gave people blessings.
“Dear Heavenly Father, by the power and authority of the Melky-is-ick priesthood please bless this sick and afflicted fish to be resurrected. Please help thy Spirit to be with us and—”
The back door opened. “What’re you doing? Reckon you’ll get closer to heaven by standing on a chair?”
“Go away, Alma.”
“What’re you praying for?”
“Not telling.”
“What? Is it a secret prayer?” Alma laughed and started to sing the words of a hymn in a high, silly voice. “Pray in secret, day by day!”
“Go away.”
“ ’Tis solace to my soul to know God hears my secret prayer.”
Jacob ran out of the kitchen but Alma pranced after him, singing in his high, silly voice; he wouldn’t shut up, so Jacob went upstairs to his room and got his pajamas on. Mum was wrapped up in Issy’s duvet, facing the wall.
“Hello, Mum,” he said. “The geese are flying out to the marsh. They’re doing their flying in big arrows, taking turns to be in the front, just like last year.” He paused so she could join in, but she didn’t say anything, not even “Oh” or “That’s nice.” He waited a little while longer before he went down the corridor and got into Dad’s bed. He said one more prayer, then he closed his eyes very tight and tried to make the morning come quickly.
FRED WAS STILL dead on Friday morning. No one noticed because they were too busy. Jacob watched him floating on top of the water and tried not to mind, but when Dad said there weren’t any Shreddies left, he cried.
In assembly he pulled his sweater over his face because the Reception class did their harvest poem, without Issy. He put his head down on the table in math when he had to answer a problem: “Simon has 16 sweets. He decides to give half of the sweets to his sister. How many sweets does Simon’s sister have?” At break time he found a really big dead daddy-longlegs for the Box of the Dead, but George Hindle stood on it and it stuck to the bottom of his shoe. Jacob cried and Mrs. Slade said he could stay indoors with Jessie Sinkinson at lunchtime and sit outside the staff room drawing pictures with the new felt tips.
“Why are you here?” Jessie asked.
“My sister’s dead.”
“I know. Mrs. Slade told us when you were off. She said we weren’t allowed to talk to you about it in case you got upset, but you got upset anyway.” Jessie stuck the felt-tip lid to her tongue and pulled it off with a pop. “Did they drop your sister in a big hole or did they burn her?”
“In a big hole.”
“Did you see her when she was dead?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“At my house.”
“Were you scared?”
“No.”
“Was there blood and guts everywhere?”
“No.”
“What are you drawing?”
“Geese.”
“Why?”
“I like them.”
“Why?”
“They’ve got special wings that make them do gliding. They can go up and down and fast and slow. And when they fly it’s—it’s a bit like a miracle.”
“Oh.”
“What are you drawing?”
She looked at him like he was thick. “The cinema.”
BY THE TIME Jacob got home from school he’d forgotten about Fred and so it was a ginormous surprise to go into the kitchen and see him there, all fishy and alive! He pressed his face to the tank and as he watched he felt like he did when he saw his presents on Christmas morning and couldn’t work out how Santa Claus managed it. Fred glided back and forth, all boggle-eyed and completely not dead, and Jacob raised both hands in the air and shook them above his head, just as he’d seen Alma do when he scored a goal. “Yes, yes, yes!” he cheered.
JACOB FLICKS THROUGH the Big Book of Fairy Tales. There are some ace stories, but his is better.
George comes back from the library corner with The Sports Car Guide and drops it on the table.
&
nbsp; “Fairy tales are for girls,” he says, pointing to a red car with doors like wings. “My dad’s got a Ferrari. He lets me drive it on the weekend. Bet your dad hasn’t got a Ferrari.” The red car looks small and Jacob is glad Dad doesn’t have one because there’s no way everyone would fit in.
“Bet you didn’t drive a Ferrari on the weekend,” George says. “Bet you stayed home and watched boring telly and your dad drank beer and shouted and called you a right pain in the arse.”
“I went to church,” Jacob says. “My dad doesn’t drink beer and he’d never shout at anyone.”
SUNDAYS SMELL OF Mum’s perfume and the brown stuff she wipes on her face that smells damp and muddy. Yesterday didn’t smell like Sunday. Jacob didn’t want to go to church without Mum but Dad said put your best foot forward which meant stop complaining and do as you are told.
Primary was ace. Sister Anderson did “Here We Are Together” in singing time. It took ages to go around the room and include everyone’s name—some people went too fast and there was lots of laughter when things got jumbled up. Afterward there was enough time for the first five verses of “Follow the Prophet.” Everyone marched up and down the corridor, trailing Sister Anderson, singing, “Follow the prophet, follow the prophet, follow the prophet!”
Dad had forgotten to pack the Sunday bag, so Jacob had nothing to play with during Sacrament Meeting. Dad let him borrow his scriptures—thick as a brick and twice as heavy, with wafer-thin pages like the crispy toilet paper at school. Jacob flicked through the scriptures. At the end of the Bible bit there were some color maps of where Jesus lived. They were quite interesting and they had little red arrows on them. Zippy said the arrows showed the journeys different people had taken. One map said “The Third Journey of Paul” and Jacob thought if there was a map about his journeys it would be very boring: “The Three Hundredth Journey of Jacob (to school).”