by Carys Bray
Of course it mattered. Zippy had a horrible vision of Issy coming forth on the morning of the first resurrection with a dissected dress and her knickers showing.
“I’ll help,” she offered.
Mum put the scissors down. “Are you sure? You don’t have to.”
“No, I will.”
Mum scrunched the dress until it was shaped like a ring doughnut. She handed it to Zippy and then she stood at the head of the coffin. “I’m going to lift Issy and you need to put the dress over her head.”
Mum raised Issy’s head and shoulders. Zippy had expected Issy’s head to flop forward, but it didn’t. She seemed very solid, as if all her softness had leaked out. Zippy looped the ring of dress around Issy’s head, then let go quickly so she didn’t have to touch her. A strip of black stitching ran across Issy’s crown like a hairband.
“Don’t worry about that,” Mum said. “We’ll cover it up in a minute. Why don’t you get the socks and I’ll sort this out?”
Zippy picked up the socks while Mum pulled the dress down to Issy’s waist and drew the sleeve holes up her arms. She rolled Issy slightly onto her side and asked Zippy to fasten the buttons. Zippy’s fingers went all fumbly as she did the job, and even though the undershirt stopped her from touching Issy’s bare skin, she could sense the coldness beneath.
Mum straightened the skirt of Issy’s dress and took the socks from Zippy. She lifted Issy’s feet and slipped the socks on. Issy’s legs looked blotchy and cold, a shade of purply-yellow Zippy couldn’t name. They were still spattered with red spots and her little fingers were burgundy. Zippy passed the hairband to Mum, who put it directly over the incision on Issy’s head.
Mum did the shoes next and then she asked Zippy to pass the patchwork blanket from home. Mum folded the blanket in half and placed it over Issy. It came right up to her chin. Then Mum tucked her in.
Issy looked better under her own blanket but Zippy was disappointed that she didn’t look more like herself. Mum put her arm around Zippy and they stood there and listened to the music for a bit.
“One last song,” Mum said, and she knelt next to the almost-empty bag, changed the CD, and returned to Zippy’s side. They listened as the choir sang “God Be with You Till We Meet Again.” When the song finished they were both crying, but this time the tears were leaky rather than noisy and it was easier to stop.
“Should we say a prayer or something before we go?”
“Probably,” Mum said.
Zippy closed her eyes and waited.
“But I don’t feel like it, so you can if you want.”
She opened her eyes and stared at Mum. “Don’t you think we should do it properly?”
“Go on, if you like.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Neither do I.”
Zippy said the prayer. But Mum didn’t fold her arms or bow her head, and Zippy was pretty certain she didn’t bother to close her eyes either, which made the prayer rubbish. It just sounded like a string of empty words.
After the prayer, Zippy picked up the CD player and put it back in the bag.
“I don’t want to leave her here by herself all weekend,” Mum said. “Do you think they’ll let us bring her home?”
“No.”
“I bet they would. People used to do it in the olden days.”
“No, Mum.”
“They did. They used to take family pictures with the dead person.”
“I mean, no I don’t think she should come home.”
“I’m going to ask them,” Mum said.
She swished the curtain back and hurried down the green carpet in search of the funny man with the white hair and Zippy chased after her because she didn’t want to be by herself with Issy’s body.
THE BELL RINGS for second period and Mr. McLean discards the testicle and dives back into the frog’s torso. This time he emerges with something that resembles a skinny, coiled earthworm.
“The small intestine,” he says as the gut swings from his tweezers.
Zippy’s stomach scrunches several times in quick succession and she knows if she doesn’t get out of the lab right now, she will throw up all over Mr. McLean’s desk.
“Can I be excused, sir?”
“Are you OK, Zippy?” The intestine wobbles as he speaks.
“I’m just a bit—”
“Go and get some fresh air.”
She pushes through the crowd of Year Elevens, looking at the floor, at the mishmash of black school shoes, not wanting to make eye contact with anyone who might either laugh or feel sorry for her. She shoves the lab door open and hurries down the corridor to the double-door exit.
Outside, she leans against the wall of the building and knocks back long swallows of fresh air. Breathe in, breathe out. She already feels a little better. Breathe in. A group of Year Sevens pass on their way to a science lesson. Breathe out. Some sixth-formers stroll by, heading for the sports hall. She walks over to the raised flower beds and sits on the corner of a planter. Several of Adam’s friends approach, lugging heavy sports bags; they’re laughing, but they quiet down when they see her and nod respectfully as they pass. Then Adam appears, bag bumping against his thigh as he jogs to catch up. He slows when he notices her and stops for a moment.
“All right?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. So what’re you doing here, then?”
“Just getting some fresh air.”
“Right.” He shuffles from one foot to the other. “And you’re all right?”
“Yeah,” she says again.
“I was going to send you a card.”
She nods as if she knows, and briefly wonders whether he would have written “love from Adam,” or just signed his name.
“You weren’t at Youth Night on Wednesday.”
“I didn’t feel like coming so Mum said I didn’t have to.”
“I just … I hoped you were OK.”
She attempts a smile to show she was fine and ends up pulling a face that demonstrates she wasn’t.
He puts his bag down and sits on the planter beside her. She shuffles to make more space but he rests a settling hand on her arm and she observes the bones and veins hiding under his skin.
“Maybe you should go back to class? Then you won’t be by yourself.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“It might take your mind off stuff—better than sitting out here, thinking.”
“It might.”
“Good.”
He slips his hand into hers and squeezes. She lifts their knotted fingers and brushes his skin against her cheek; he’s warm and full of life and doesn’t seem to mind her borrowing his hand for a moment.
“I’d better go.”
She relinquishes his hand so he can stand and pick up his bag and then she watches his body as he jogs away. It’s weird that he is made up of skin and muscle and strings of blood vessels; and it’s horrible that one day he will die and someone might have to open him up and catalog his pieces. Does everyone look the same on the inside? It’s impossible to know—it’s not as if you can turn your gaze inward to follow the hairpin bends of brain tissue or stare at your sinuses.
There’s no way she is going back to biology. She hopes Mr. McLean doesn’t come out to see if she’s all right; she doesn’t want to talk to anyone, not even Lauren, not properly. When they meet up at break time she’ll get Lauren chatting about Jordan Banks, that’ll take up the whole twenty minutes, easily. She can’t talk about this to anyone. Touching dead bodies is weird and even people at church would think it’s strange to keep one in your house.
The old man with the swirly hair thought it was weird.
“Why don’t you go home and have a talk to your family about it?” he suggested.
“It’d just be for the weekend,” Mum said, “so she’s not by herself. You can pick her up on Monday, when you come for us, before the funeral.”
The man said it was something to think about. Mum nodded and pretended
to consider it but Zippy could tell she’d already made up her mind.
The thing is—people are more than their bodies. Zippy isn’t sure about the mechanics of it, but when Issy climbed out of herself, she didn’t leave anything behind, she took all the bits that made her her—what’s left is empty and bringing it home is pointless.
– 9 –
Miracle Boy
There are so many kinds of never. There’s the never Mum uses when she says, “Never talk to strangers; it’s dangerous,” and there’s the never Dad uses when he says, “Never play with your food; it’s bad manners.” But Mum talks to plenty of people she doesn’t know, and Jacob has seen Dad break Oreos in half to lick the creamy bit.
Issy used to say, “I’ll never be friends with you again if you don’t play with me.” But she didn’t mean it. And sometimes she said, “I’ll never eat sprouts.” She did mean this, and if Mum is right, and death is definitely the end of being alive, Issy will absolutely never eat sprouts. However, Jacob has noticed something. “Never” is a word that doesn’t always mean not-on-your-life and absolutely-no-way. Sometimes “never” means “not yet.”
The house is full of sadness. It’s packed into every crevice and corner like snow. There are bottomless drifts of it beside Issy’s beanbag chair in the living room. The sadness gives Jacob the shivers and he takes refuge in the garden. Like the house, it is higgledy and unkempt. The lawn is scuffed and threadbare in places. Overgrown flower beds stream along the length of each of the old red-brick garden walls, all the way to the far wall, which is partially concealed by a hornbeam hedge. Randomly planted apple trees poke out of the lawn like twisted, witchy hands and clusters of green fruit cling to bent branches that are already almost bare of leaves. Windfalls pepper the grass and Jacob kicks them as he makes his way to the end of the garden. Some of the fallen apples are rotten and they detonate, spraying pulp and larvae. Others are hard and thwack on contact like tennis balls.
Last year, Mum supervised an apple-picking operation before the trees dropped their fruit. There were bags and bags full. Mum took lots of the bags to church and Dad made an announcement in Sacrament Meeting that anyone who wanted a bag of apples could come and get one from the car trunk afterward. Lots of people wanted free apples. Mum passed them out and said, “You’re welcome” a lot. She wrapped the apples that she didn’t give away in newspaper and put them in empty shoeboxes in the cupboard under the stairs. When she opened up the boxes several months later, the apples were pink and yellow, and soft. “I had no idea this would happen,” she kept saying, as if it was the most incredible thing she’d ever seen. She made everyone come and look. It was a surprise that the apples weren’t Brussels-sprout green and sour anymore, but Mum said it was miraculous.
This year, Mum hasn’t bothered. No one has bothered. Even the trees themselves seem to be fed up with balancing fruit in their knobbly branches, and there are so many fallen apples to kick that it takes Jacob a long time to reach the end of the garden. When he gets there he stares at the hedge, which is covered in crispy leaves that look like giant bran flakes. A few of them have fallen off, but he knows most of them will cling on through the rest of the autumn and into the winter. He knows this because last winter he and Issy played unseen in the gap between the hedge and the wall, hidden from view by the screen of lingering leaves.
IT WAS ISSY who found the dead bird. Most of it was under the hedge, but one of its wings lay on the lawn, spread out in a feathery fan. It had probably been killed by next door’s cat. Issy picked the wing up. Jacob opened his mouth then closed his lips over the words he had been about to say:
“Put it down, it’s unhygienic” was a sentence that belonged to Dad. Besides, he was suddenly keen to touch the wing himself. The feathers were shiny blue-black, and he had to know if they were both as sharp and as soft as they looked. Issy passed the wing to him and he touched the feathers with his eyes closed. They were soft and fluffy at the tips and coarse and strong at the base, where the shafts were thicker.
They buried the bird and its wing behind the hedge. They dug a hole with two plastic beach shovels from the garden shed. Jacob put the bird in the hole. One of its black eyes stared blankly at the sky.
“Don’t get soil in the birdie’s eye,” Issy said.
“We have to do it properly,” he replied. Although it was the first burial he had ever attended, he was pretty certain it wouldn’t count if he left part of the bird peeping out from under the soil. “Why don’t you say a prayer?” he suggested.
Issy prayed. She said the prayer that they all said at every mealtime, saying “bird” instead of “food.” She said it quickly, like they did when they were hungry and didn’t want to wait. “Dear Heavenly Father. Thank you for the bird. Please bless it. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.”
Jacob covered the bird with soil, which he patted down with the back of his shovel. They stood in the gap between the wall and the hedge for a few moments, flanked by dark red brick and brittle hornbeam leaves.
“I think we should sing a song,” Issy said.
“OK,” he replied. “What song?”
“One about birdies.”
“OK.” He tried to think of a song about birds. “ ‘In the Leafy Treetops’ has got some birds in it.”
“No.” Issy smoothed the bird’s grave with the tip of her sneaker. “A good one.”
“I don’t know.” He’d had enough. He was ready to do something else. Then Issy started to sing.
We will find a little nest in the branches of a tree.
Let us count the eggs inside; there are one, two, three.
Mother bird sits on the nest to hatch the eggs all three.
Father bird flies round and round to guard his family.
Jacob gave her a brief round of applause.
“Do you think that it was a mummy birdie or a daddy birdie?” Issy asked as they pushed themselves out from behind the hedge and onto the lawn.
“We could have checked for a willy,” he said, “but it’s too late now. Maybe it was a child bird.”
“Oh.” She looked surprised. “That would be sad.”
JACOB THINKS HE can remember the spot where they buried the bird. At first he isn’t sure if he will do anything. He stands next to the hedge, daring himself. Then he dashes back to the shed quickly, as if he is worried that something might stop him from fetching the shovel.
Spade in hand, he pushes through the hard and scratchy crisscross weave of branches and into the space between the wall and the hedge. He starts to dig. Nothing at first. He moves along a bit, his elbow grazing the wall. He disturbs more soil and he can suddenly smell clay and damp and he stops digging for a moment as he remembers.
HE DIDN’T WANT to go to the funeral. Mum was upset when he said this. As he had expected, the funeral was just more church, different from Sundays only in that they had to sit in the front row, except for Dad, who sat up on the stand as usual so he could do the service. There was an opening and a closing prayer, there were some hymns, and Dad did a talk about not being sad while tears coursed down Mum’s face and sprinkled into her lap, watering her hands.
Afterward everyone drove to the cemetery. There was a deep hole in the ground. When Jacob asked about it later, Dad said it had been dug by a mechanical digger. Someone had arranged a fake grass carpet over the pile of earth that had been dug up, and Jacob stood on a corner of it, scratching the soles of his shoes along its prickles.
Dad, Al, and two of the funeral men carried the coffin from the car to the graveside. When they put it down on two planks of wood that had been placed over the hole, Mum started to make a noise. Zippy rested her hand on Mum’s arm but Mum didn’t stop. Dad moved away from the coffin and went to stand next to Mum. He put his arm around her shoulder and the noise continued. It was a bit like a dog howling and it sent a zigzag of fear from Jacob’s heart to his willy. A squirt of wee leaked into his pants and spread in a warm circle. Dad shushed Mum but she wouldn’t stop so he fished in h
is suit pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. He stuffed it in Mum’s hand. She just stood there, so he lifted her hand and held it over her mouth for her. Eventually he let go and Mum carried on holding the handkerchief over her mouth, but the noise leaked past its edges.
Dad had to say a prayer to dedicate the grave. He said it loudly so people could hear him over Mum. It went on for a while, and Jacob wished he would hurry up. After Dad finally finished, the funeral men made the coffin go down. Someone walked up and threw a handful of soil into the hole and Mum stopped making the noise, moved the handkerchief away from her mouth, and said, “Don’t do that.”
People left quickly. Dad said Mum should say thank you to everyone. She said she was going to see them all again in a few minutes for the food, back at the chapel, but she walked with Dad toward the parked cars anyway.
Jacob moved off the plastic grass and onto the real stuff. He edged toward the hole. Issy’s coffin was a long way down and it was spattered with dirt. He knelt at the lip of the grave. The earth was damp, and he could feel wet soaking into the knees of his best trousers.
He had been hoping for a miracle. Sister Anderson was always going on about them on Sundays in Primary lessons. Some miracles happened a long time ago, like Noah’s Ark. Not many people seem to have thought about it, but once when he couldn’t sleep, Jacob had imagined how much poo the animals must have made and how much trouble it must have been for Noah to stop them all from eating one another. It had made him realize that Noah’s Ark was an ace miracle, right up there with Santa Claus’s flying sleigh. There were other good miracles from the olden days, like the Feeding of the Five Thousand, Daniel in the Lions’ Den, and Balaam and the Talking Ass—a miracle with a rude word in it. Dad was always saying that miracles happen all the time. Sister Anderson thought so too. She said that Brother Anderson’s cancer treatment was proving to be a modern-day miracle. Maybe she was right, but Brother Anderson’s head looked like an enormous egg, and Jacob had been imagining a much bigger miracle than that for Issy: one that would see her alive AND with hair.
