A Song for Issy Bradley (5 page)

She drags all the shopping into the kitchen. The room is chockablock with cheering, chiding crafts made at Relief Society meetings, each designed to point her in the right direction: ceramic tiles, decorated woodblocks, door hangers, wall hangers, collages, and organizers. The best of her efforts is the
With God All Things Are
Possible
painting; even the children recognized the long-legged, winged creature as a bird.

She opens the fridge to store the lemonade, pausing to glance at the laminated jumble of cutesy letters beside the door:
No Other Success Can Compensate for Failure in the Home
. She allows another imaginary cotton ball to fall from her ear—“BUGGER OFF”—take that, Failure in the Home! She switches on the oven and lines frozen sausage rolls along baking sheets. As is often the case when there’s work to be done, Alma is nowhere to be seen. At least the party will be over at one o’clock and then, after the cleanup, there’ll be a few hours to relax. She puts the sausage rolls in the oven, grabs the Tylenol and a syringe from the top cupboard, and hurries upstairs.

Issy is curled up like a little bug, feverish and shivering. Claire touches her arms where they peep out of her princess nightie.

“Oh, sweetheart, you’re not well, are you?”

“No.” Her voice crackles.

Claire sucks the medicine out of the bottle with the syringe and squeezes it into the corner of Issy’s mouth. Her eyes remain tightly shut and she flinches as she swallows.

“There you are. You’ll feel better soon. What a shame to come down with something on Jacob’s birthday. Shall I save you some cake?”

“Yes.”

Claire tucks the covers back over Issy and bends to kiss her flushed cheek.

“Love you, sweetheart,” she says. “Have a nice sleep. You’ll feel much better when you wake up.”

Back in the kitchen, she grabs a pen and begins to make a list of the things she needs to do before Jacob’s friends arrive at eleven o’clock. Sausage rolls, nuggets, pizzas, cocktail sausages, party bags, hot potato. She isn’t sure how she will get it all done in an hour. She makes a list of games to play and divides the party into
two sections, Fun and Food, which makes the two hours seem smaller and filling them a somewhat easier task. She switches the CD player on and presses play. The flute and piano introduction reveals that the children haven’t changed the CD since last Sunday.
“Dearest children, God is near you, watching o’er you day and night.”
It’s a good hymn to listen to in the circumstances. God loves children, He loves each of Jacob’s friends and she will also try to love them, even if they turn out to be a rowdy gang of hooligans. And God loves Issy too. He will watch over her during the party and make her better. The choir accompanies Claire as she unwraps frozen pizzas and empties a bag of chicken nuggets onto another baking sheet:
“He will bless you, He will bless you. If you put your trust in Him.”

I
SSY
’
S HANDS ARE
cold, so are her feet. She wants Mum to come back. She wants to get up and find Mum, wants to climb into Mum’s lap and nestle in the warm wrap of her arms. But her eyelids are heavy; every time she opens them they collapse shut, forcing her back into sleep. She feels as if she is falling through the mattress, down through the ceiling into the kitchen, past the linoleum and down, and down.

When Jacob’s friends arrive, Al has to stand in the hallway, holding the front door open for kid after kid while trying to remember Mum’s instructions about smiling at people and saying, “Come in” in a voice that doesn’t simultaneously declare, “Get lost.”

He spent most of the morning hiding in his room, imagining what it would be like to score a last-minute Champions League winner for Liverpool and practicing a variety of goal celebrations in front of the mirror. Mum called him several times, but he pretended not to hear. It was for her own good; if he’d gone downstairs to help, he’d have only done it wrong and made things worse. He shouldn’t even be at home; today’s the first day of the junior football season and he should be speeding down the wing of one of the pitches at Hightown, not answering the door to a load of bratty seven-year-olds.

It always feels weird when ordinary people come round; the picture of Jesus in the hall seems to double in size and Al feels like an outsider, someone who has grown up in the country of the house without managing to learn its language. A few of the kids’ mums offer to stay and help but he says, “No thanks.” A house full of nonmember women expecting forbidden cups of tea would make Mum even more pissy.

When every kid has arrived and Mum has herded them into the living room, she claps her hands and says, “Quiet, please,” but no one listens. Some of the kids are singing rude versions of “Happy
Birthday,” others are bouncing on the sofa, and one little monster is swinging the old light saber around his head. Mum is all sweaty and she looks as if she’s going to cry; perhaps that’s why she gets it wrong when she says, “Shush. Shush! Jacob’s big sister, Zipporah, will be down soon, she’s just finishing her homework, and this is Jacob’s big brother,
Alma
, who’s going to—”

“Actually, I prefer to be called Al,” he corrects. But it’s too late, little kids are teasing machines, weakness is their favorite smell, they can sniff the tiniest whiff of it on anyone.

“Hey, Alma!” The kids giggle. “Al-ma, Al-ma.”

And Al, who has already had enough of Mum’s endless pleas for help and her nail-me-to-a-cross expression, shouts, “Piss off!”

Several of the children snigger, but some, including Jacob, are shocked. Mum’s face collapses for a moment, and Al realizes the most helpful thing he can do is disappear.

“I think I’ll go out to the garden for a bit.”

“No,” Mum says. “Playing football’s hardly a punishment. Go to your room, find a book, and don’t come back down ’til everyone’s gone home. And check on your sister while you’re up there.” He stomps up the stairs and into his room. He has been telling everyone not to introduce him as Alma for ages, ever since he went to Matty’s house for the first time and Matty’s dad, Steve, said “Hey, Matty, I thought this Alma you were going on about was a girl!” Steve apologized and ruffled Al’s hair and then he said, “There used to be an Alma in
Coronation Street
. I thought it was a girl’s name, but what do I know?”

When Al got home and told Mum, she apologized so painstakingly that he was forced to say it didn’t matter, when it did—it does. At least she’s sorry. Dad doesn’t even care; he’s the one who insisted on scriptural names for everyone. Jacob and Issy got off lightly and no one minds about Zippy’s name, they think it’s funny; she sometimes gets birthday cards picturing that puppet with the zipper mouth that used to be on TV years ago. Dad says it’s important to
“look for the positive”;
having an unusual name is a
“missionary
tool,”
and it’s up to Al to make the most of it by telling people that Alma is the name of a prophet from the Book of Mormon. As if. Of course, Dad means Alma Senior, Mr. Humble-Goody-Two-Shoes, and not his wicked son, Alma the Younger, who got struck down by an angel.

Dad doesn’t get stuff. He’s one of the only people Al knows who is the same in real life as he is at church. It’s as if Dad lives in the overlapping bit of one of those Venn diagrams, straddling both worlds. Other people adapt, they step from circle A to circle B, they act normal in real life and accessorize their Sunday clothes with holy words and best manners, but Dad is unchanging. He exists in a perfect egg of divine assurance. He always says and does whatever God wants him to. “Obedience is the first law of heaven,” he said when he explained why he
had
to go to the missionary meeting today. Al noticed that Mum’s eyes did a quarter-pipe roll as Dad spoke, but she acted like they were just skating about of their own accord when she realized she was being watched.

He picks
Bad Guys of the Book of Mormon
off his shelf. Dad ordered it specially from Salt Lake City and it seemed like it might be OK ’cause the bad guys in the Book of Mormon are pretty brutal, but it’s not even a story, it’s like a really long lesson, full of stuff about passing through hardships and never complaining—it’s even got bloody footnotes.

Al skims a page, then puts the book down and tiptoes along the hall to Jacob and Issy’s room. He pokes his head round the door and sees an Issy-shaped hump on the bottom bunk.

“Wassup, Issy-wizzy?” He leans farther into the room to make sure she can hear him. “Are you sulking ’cause it’s not
your
party? Betcha are.”

When Issy doesn’t respond, he heads to Mum and Dad’s room, where he bounces on the bed a few times. The bed isn’t as bouncy as it was when he was a little kid. He tries a seat drop and the bed groans and metal mattress springs poke his butt. He gets off and sits down at Mum’s dressing table. She’s not got much stuff on it, just
an old photograph from years ago and a jewelry box. He scowls at the photograph. It’s of the whole family at the docks in Liverpool and they’re all smiling, even Issy in her buggy, all except him and no wonder—he’s wearing a 1990 Liverpool shirt Dad bought for a fiver on eBay because he refused to
“condone”
Carlsberg, but it was just an excuse: When the sponsorship deal changed, the shirts were
“too expensive.”
Al puts the picture down. He opens Mum’s jewelry box, stuffs his hand into the jumble of brightly colored beads and listens to the scratch of glass and plastic. He opens the dressing-table drawers and finds some old, empty makeup cases and a box of tampons, which he unfastens. The tampons are wrapped in orange paper and they rustle when he touches them. He takes one out and pretends to smoke it like a cigar while he watches himself in the mirror. Smoking is against the Word of Wisdom and he’s promised Dad that he will never, ever do it. Steven Gerrard wouldn’t smoke, only ancient French footballers like Zidane do it, but sometimes Al wonders what it tastes like and why people enjoy it so much and he thinks that one day he might try it, just to see. He stops smoking the tampon and peels away its paper. He’s never seen an actual tampon. He fiddles with the pieces and a roll of cardboard comes away in his hand. There’s a string dangling from the other roll and he pulls on it and the tampon pops out. He tries to put the whole thing back together but now the tampon seems too big for the cardboard bit, so he just stuffs the pieces back in the box and hopes Mum won’t notice.

He gets up, goes over to Dad’s bedside cupboard, and opens the drawers: socks, handkerchiefs, and folded piles of Dad’s old-fashioned Temple garment underwear. Once, when he was at Matty’s house, they looked in Steve’s drawer and found a packet of condoms. When Matty had finished pretending to throw up they stole one and hid in Matty’s room, taking turns trying to stretch it over their heads. Dad’s drawers are boring and Al isn’t expecting to find anything noteworthy in Mum’s either, but he looks. There are socks, bras, and wormy bundles of Mum’s Sunday tights in the top
drawer. The bottom drawer is full of folded Temple garments like Dad’s, but silky-smooth. He stuffs a hand into the glossy pile and feels something stiff and crispy underneath. He digs below the underwear and pulls out a cylinder of money, secured by a red elastic band. He unties the band and the money roll opens like a time-lapse flower. He counts sixty-two tenners—six hundred and twenty pounds.

When people find loads of money in movies they throw it in the air and laugh. Al settles for a more muted celebration and holds it at head height before letting it fall onto the bed like a shower of leaves. He’s never seen so much cash. He gathers it back into a pile, rolls it, and wraps it in the elastic band. He fully intends to put it back, he does, but then he thinks about Dad refusing to pay his football association registration, about the humiliation of turning up at training sessions each week knowing he won’t be allowed to play in any official matches. And he thinks about the time he really wanted to buy Matty’s limited-edition Steven Gerrard Match Attax card and Dad wouldn’t give him the money, so he used the emergency fiver he’s supposed to keep in his blazer pocket—which was fine until Mum asked to borrow it one day when she didn’t have any cash. And then he had to admit he’d spent it, and although he got a new fiver, he also got a major telling off and Dad called him a nasty thief. He curls his hand around the money. It feels good.

Before Dad put a stop to football, Al used to imagine that he’d play in the Premier League one day and make enough to buy Mum a big house with a cleaner and everything. Mum washes all the clothes; she also irons them and puts them away. There’s no reason for anyone else ever to open her drawers, and that makes the money seem like a secret—but it doesn’t make sense: Mum hasn’t even got a job. Dad has to give her money each week to buy food and the other stuff everyone needs. He stuffs the money in the zip-up pocket of his hoodie. He’ll look after it for a bit; he’ll put it back later and then he’ll remind Mum about his football association registration fee and his out-of-date uniform. If she acts all innocent, he’ll ask
whether Dad knows about the money. He won’t rat her out, he’d never do that, he’s on her side. He even told her so a few weeks ago when Dad was out—probably helping someone—and Brother Campbell and one of the missionaries popped round to deliver the Home Teaching message and check whether everyone was saying their prayers and reading their scriptures.

After Brother Campbell had finished lecturing them all, he said, “Would you like to assign someone to say a prayer, Alma?”

“I’ll choose someone,” Mum offered.

Brother Campbell shook his head. “The priesthood is like an umbrella, Sister Bradley. The men hold it and the women are protected by it. Alma should assign the prayer. He’s the man of the house when the Bishop isn’t here.”

“I’m the adult when Ian isn’t here,” Mum said, and then she laughed. “Hang on, I’m also an adult when Ian
is
here! Anyway, I’m happy to ask someone to say the prayer.”

“But you’d like to fulfill your responsibilities as a priesthood holder, wouldn’t you, Alma?”