A Song for Issy Bradley Read online

  “Will you tell me a story now?” He climbs onto the kitchen table and sits with his bare feet resting on the seat of one of the chairs. He sniffs the burny smell of hot oil and feels a fizz of birthday happiness in his tummy. “Tell me the story of when I was born.”

  “Well, once upon a time, exactly seven years ago today,” Mum begins, and she recites his story while she opens the cupboards to find syrup, chocolate sauce, lemon juice, and sugar.

  She jumps when the telephone rings and Jacob climbs off the table and wraps his arms around her waist as she answers it. He billows his face into her pillowy middle, closes his eyes, and squeezes extra tight. He holds his breath and pretends his supersonic strength can stick her to the spot.

  “Hello, Sister Anderson. No, of course you’re not a nuisance.”

  Jacob knows what’s coming next. If he had a big sword he could chop Sister Anderson’s arms off and then she wouldn’t be able to use the telephone.

  “Well, it’s Jacob’s birthday. But … yes, of course, just a moment. I’ll go and get him.”

  Jacob doesn’t let go of Mum when she attempts to move. She tucks the phone under her chin and tries to unfasten his arms.

  “Jacob.”

  He holds on, even though he knows it’s silly, even though he knows he will make her cross. Mum pulls the phone out from under her chin and covers the mouthpiece with her hand.

  “Stop it. Let go. Now.”

  “But what about my presents? Has Dad got to go? He’s already missing my party, he can’t go out now as well! Am I going to have to wait until he gets back before I can open anything?”

  “Let go.”

  He lets his hands flop to his sides and stands statue-still, pulling his saddest face. But Mum isn’t having it. She shakes her head, then goes upstairs.

  It’s suddenly lonely in the kitchen. Jacob hears the low rumble of Dad’s voice through the ceiling. He suspects Dad is going to miss the birthday pancakes and he tries to think of something to make him stay. He knows “Please” won’t be enough, because Dad likes to follow the rules. If he is going to stop him, he will have to come up with a bigger, more important rule than the one about helping people, a rule that will trump the saying Dad always repeats when he has to disappear at important moments: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Mum has an easier way of saying the almost-same thing: “Do as you would be done by.” Jacob thinks about the best way to persuade Dad—“Inasmuch as you have stayed to eat breakfast with me on my birthday, you have done it unto Jesus.” But it sounds cheeky. He wishes Dad was the kind of person who would say, “No, I’m sorry I can’t come. If it’s an emergency, you must call the police or the fire brigade because today is Jacob’s birthday.” But he knows Dad isn’t that kind of man because Dad has already said, “Of course I’ll come to a missionary meeting on Saturday. I’ll miss Jacob’s party, but I’m sure he’ll understand.”

  Jacob looks at the casserole dish of pancakes through the glass of the oven door and decides that after he has died and gone to live in the Celestial Kingdom, when he is actually in charge of his own world, he will make it a commandment for dads to stay at home on their children’s birthdays. And if they don’t, he will send a prophet to chop their arms off.

  ISSY WAKES UP with achy arms. When she opens her eyes, they are full of lightning icicles. She tries to get out of bed and discovers that there isn’t much breath in her tummy. She wonders if part of her has popped in the night, like a balloon.

  – 2 –

  Diabolical Sins

  Zippy stares at the textured wallpaper on the ceiling. It’s old and ugly, but Dad won’t strip it in case the plaster comes off too. His voice floats up the stairs along with the smell of something cooking; he’s probably talking to Sister Anderson—no one else would dream of calling at this time on a Saturday. She can’t make out Dad’s words, but she hopes he’s saying no. She rolls onto her side, tucks her knees up to her chest, and shucks the covers past her shoulder. It’s beginning to get cooler in the mornings and the air feels damp. Behind the curtains, the latticed windows are probably streaked with condensation. She slips an arm out of the covers and feels on the floor beside the bed for Persuasion. She opens the page with the folded corner: “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope …” When she reaches the end, she sighs and takes a deep sniff of the soft, yellowed pages. Then she closes the book and places it on the pillow beside her.

  The phone is sure to have woken everyone, and it won’t be long before Issy slips into the room and dives under the covers in a tangle of chatter and fierce hugs. Zippy listens for the scamper of her feet on the stairs, but the house is quiet again. She yawns, rubs her eyes, and glances at the poster on the wall—“Kindness Begins with Me.” She made it herself, collaging the letters with strips torn out of the free newspaper, a reminder of her goal to be kind to everyone, even Alma. She isn’t supposed to use Blu-tack because it leaves greasy marks, but no one has said anything and the wallpaper isn’t worth protecting—it’s that horrible lumpy stuff that looks like it’s been spattered with sawdust. Sometimes she asks Mum what the paper is called because whenever Mum mentions woodchip she does a funny dance and sings a song about living in small houses and meeting up in the year 2000 and it’s clear, just for a moment, that before she turned into Mum she was someone else, someone who knew the words to songs, someone who liked to dance.

  Zippy sits up in bed and stretches. Last night’s visual aid is dangling from the coat hook on the back of her bedroom door. It’s a hanger, one of those white, lacy, padded ones that old people like. A little piece of heart-shaped card is suspended from the hook and it reads: “Hang onto your values … Hang onto your goals … Hang onto your testimony … So some day you can hang your wedding dress on me.” All the girls got a special hanger, and a poster of a bride standing outside the Temple that says, If This Isn’t Your Castle, You’re Not My Prince. The boys didn’t get anything.

  Sister Campbell was in charge last night. Sister Valentine would have done a nicer presentation, but she isn’t married, so she had to sit at the front of the chapel in her best dress and nod while Sister Campbell spoke. It was a shame Sister Valentine didn’t have anywhere better to go on a Friday night, especially as she’d made a real effort and put lots of makeup on. She looked quite nice from a distance, but when she held the chapel door open for everyone and said, “Come in! Welcome!” Zippy could see she hadn’t exfoliated before she applied foundation and her forehead was rutted like the fine side of a cheese grater.

  Sister Campbell didn’t help with doors and she didn’t welcome anyone. She just stood at the front of the chapel and waited, her long hair in its usual braid, dangling past her bottom like the tail on a coonskin cap. Long hair can be beautiful, but there is something taxidermic about Sister Campbell’s braided rope. A couple of years ago there were some polygamists from Texas on the news and the women all had long hair and high, stern foreheads; they looked as if they might break if they laughed; they looked like Sister Campbell.

  Zippy hovered by the chapel doors while she waited for Adam Carmichael to sit down—half agony, half hope. He plonked himself in the front row beside his dad, then turned and waved and patted the empty space on the pew beside him. She hurried to the front and Mum and Dad followed.

  Brother and Sister Campbell were supposed to present Standards Night together, that’s the way it works, but Brother Campbell spoke for only five minutes at the end to remind the boys that porn is everywhere: online and in the Next catalog. Sister Campbell spent the majority of the night talking about the things girls need to know.

  “Stand up please, girls,” she said after the opening prayer.

  “Before you go out every morning, you must check your clothes. You can do this by singing ‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes’ in front of the mirror. Tonight you can practice in front of the young men and your parents.”

  Zippy’s T-shirt rose when she raised
her hands and she wondered whether Adam could see her bare skin. It slipped back down as she touched her shoulders, but she felt it lift again as she bent to touch her knees, and while her hands were resting on her toes Dad murmured, “You’ll have to get rid of that top; I can see your back.”

  When she sat down there seemed to be less space on the pew and her leg ended up pressed against Adam’s. He leaned in to whisper, “You look cold.” And then, while Sister Campbell talked about the importance of subjecting skirts to The Sit-Down Test and The Sunlight Check, he rubbed his hand along her goose-bumped arm, which wasn’t the slightest bit helpful as he had made her shiver in the first place.

  “Girls who choose to be modest choose to be respected. If you check your clothes every day before you go out, you will never be walking pornography. I’m sure none of you want to be responsible for putting bad thoughts into men’s heads. Please think about the men,” Sister Campbell said.

  So Zippy did. She thought about men; with Adam’s thigh pressed up against hers and his warm fingers rubbing her arm, it was hard to think of anything else.

  The quiet of the house is broken by the slam of the front door, which means Dad has gone to help whoever was on the phone. Zippy can hear Mum coming up the stairs, plod, plod, plod; a moment of quiet as she pads along the first-floor landing and then the glum sound of her feet again, plod, plod, plod.

  Mum knocks first, she always does, and then she opens the door and peers around it. She looks tired and old. There are purple smudges under her eyes and gray streaks whisker the hair at her temples. Zippy has told her to dye it like Lauren’s mum, but she says it’s too expensive.

  “Could you get up? Dad’s gone out, Issy’s still asleep, and Alma won’t budge. Jacob’s desperate to eat some pancakes. He wanted everyone to have breakfast together.”

  “OK.”

  “And after breakfast will you help Issy get ready while I go to Asda? Dad was supposed to be here, so I’d planned on him helping out, but—”

  “Aw, Mum, I’ve got homework.”

  “Please.”

  Zippy glances at the homemade poster on the wall. Kindness leads to all sorts of blessings. Lauren calls blessings karma. She got really into it during the Buddhism topic in Year Nine and she still goes on about it; the right kind of pizza in the canteen, a treat from her mum, Jordan Banks saying “Hello”—all karma, according to Lauren. But she’s wrong; when good stuff happens it’s not a cosmic mystery, it’s the natural consequence of good works and faith.

  “OK, OK,” she says. The words leak into a yawn, and while she stretches her arms high to lever the stale air out, Mum comes in properly. She drifts past the bed to open the curtains and unfasten the wet windows; a slice of autumn breeze arrows past the gaps, and the sound of seagull caws and the squawked conversations of geese seep into the room. Mum stands there staring at the changing trees in the park across the road, and it seems like a good opportunity to ask.

  “You know what you did during Standards Night?” Zippy pauses, relieved to have begun and nervous about how to continue. “Well, it made me wonder …”

  Mum turns and tries a smile, but her lips don’t lift properly. She steps away from the window and fiddles her wedding ring with her thumb. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t just sit there,” she says.

  Zippy waits for her to continue, but Mum tilts her head slightly and adopts the quizzical expression she wears on Sunday afternoons when she asks, “What did you learn at church today?”—an expression that seems to have very little to do with listening and a lot to do with deciding, as if she’s making up her mind whether she agrees.

  Sometimes Dad jokes that Mum could write a fifth gospel, The Gospel According to Claire, and he has to remind her not to look beyond the mark. Zippy doesn’t want to hear an installment of The Gospel According to Claire, but there are things she would like to know, things she is beginning to feel curious about, small things such as the name of Mum’s first boyfriend. But Mum rarely begins sentences with “I,” and she frequently changes the subject when she is asked about herself.

  “No one’s perfect, Zipporah. People make mistakes.” Zippy stares at Mum’s hand, at her thumb as it sneaks around the back of her ring finger and flicks the diamond round and round and round. Mum’s got crocodile hands; they’re bumped by blue-green veins, and her skin is dry and scaly. Zippy wonders how long her hands have looked like that. Mr. McLean said in Biology that the cells of the human body are replaced every seven to ten years. That means all of Mum, except for her cerebral cortex, is literally a different person from the one who met and fell in love with Dad. Maybe that’s how repentance works—a sort of gradual baptism of skin and tissue, the shedding of the old self and the cultivation of the new.

  “Perhaps there is an ideal way to live,” Mum says. “I suppose I can get behind that, but is it helpful to punish people who don’t live up to that ideal? We don’t live in an ideal world.”

  Zippy already knows the world is not ideal; Mum is just changing the subject, and two can play that game. “Well, our house is definitely not ideal. We’ve got that stuff on the wall—what’s it called?” she asks and waits for Mum to cheer up and sing the woodchip song.

  “It’s called paper.”

  “Aw, Mum.”

  “I’m not talking about houses. I’m talking about people’s lives.”

  “OK, OK.” She’ll ask again later, after Jacob’s party, when the day is winding down and things are more relaxed. “Was it Sister Anderson on the phone?”

  Mum nods.

  “What’s up with her now?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “I wish she’d go away.”

  “Zipporah.”

  “Well, I do. She’s always bothering us. I’ll be down in a bit.” Mum pulls the door closed behind her and Zippy listens to the steady rhythm of her feet as she heads down to the first-floor landing, past the other bedrooms and down the next flight of stairs, plod, plod, plod. She snuggles back under the covers, flicks Persuasion open, rereads Captain Wentworth’s letter, and thinks Half agony, half hope; that’s exactly what it’s like being in love. Every gesture, touch, and word has to be weighed and measured and placed on one side of the scale: He loves me, he loves me not; half agony, half hope. Poor Anne Elliot has to wait ages to get married; she’s entirely given up hope of finding happiness when Wentworth reappears. Perhaps Sister Valentine would like Persuasion; it might give her hope. She’s getting old, and when she talks about being unmarried she does this brave, windshield-wiper grin. She did it each time someone caught her eye last night, which was quite often as she was sitting at the front, facing everyone. It made Zippy feel horribly sorry for her, so she lowered her gaze. But then she noticed the way Sister Valentine’s feet plumped out of her shoes like sugar puffs, and the sorry feeling got worse. She looked up at Sister Campbell instead. No one could ever feel sorry for Sister Campbell.

  “What’s the worst sin you can commit?” she asked as she opened her presentation. Parents waited for their children to answer, and the silence stretched uncomfortably until Zippy plunged into it.

  “Murder.”

  “No.” Sister Campbell pursed her lips and shook her head. It was clear she was pleased to hear the wrong answer. “Denying the Holy Ghost is the worst sin, followed by murder. What sin is next to murder in seriousness?” She rapped the book she was holding into the palm of one hand and it made a thwack like a fist. “Come on!”

  “Adultery?”

  “Assault?”

  “Stealing?”

  “No, no, no.” Sister Campbell was triumphant. She opened the book and began to read about the diabolical crimes of sexual impurity.

  Mum’s hand fluttered for a moment and then she raised it high. Sister Campbell stopped reading.

  “Yes, Sister Bradley?”

  “You know I wasn’t raised in the Church, so it’s possible I don’t know …”

  Sister Campbell nodded her agreement that Mum likely didn’t know.
r />   “… but, I think that might be an old quotation,” Mum continued, her hand partially raised in a way that simultaneously protected her head. “The word ‘diabolical’ seems a bit … much.”

  Sister Campbell flicked to the front of the book. “It was published in 1992. Not particularly old, I’d say.”

  Mum’s hand was still shielding her head; she looked like she was expecting Sister Campbell to belt her, but she carried on.

  “I do think twenty years is quite a long—”

  “God is the same yesterday, today, and forever; we know that from the scriptures, Sister Bradley, don’t we? Let’s have an object lesson.”

  Sister Campbell likes object lessons. Once, she brought a dartboard to church and everyone had to take aim at a target she had Blu-tacked to the board. At the end of the lesson she peeled the paper target away from the board and on its underside was a picture of Jesus’s face, smiling out through the perforations—“This is what you do to Jesus every time you sin,” she said.

  Last night she reached into her homemade scripture case to pull out a stick of Wrigley’s Doublemint gum.

  “Who would like this?”

  No one said anything. Everyone suspected a trick.

  “You would, wouldn’t you, Zipporah?”

  Zippy shook her head but then thought better of it and nodded. Sister Campbell stripped away the foil wrapping, put the gum in her own mouth, and chewed loudly.

  “Mmm. Delicious.” She reached into her mouth and pulled out the chewed gum. “There you are, Zipporah,” she said. “Come on up and get it; it’s all yours.”

  Zippy gave a surprised laugh and a couple of other people joined in.

  “It’s no laughing matter. These are the fruits of sexual immorality.” Sister Campbell held the gum out and shook her hand for emphasis. “Who wants dirty, chewed gum?”

  The laughter stopped. Mum whispered something to Dad, who shook his head. Mum poked him, and when he ignored her, she stood up. Zippy assumed she was headed for the bathroom, but she stepped forward and joined Sister Campbell. They stood side by side, Mum nervously fingering her wedding ring as Sister Campbell’s face set into an expression hard enough to chop wood.