The Friday Gospels

by Jenn Ashworth

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

It's Friday in the Leeke household, but this is no ordinary Friday and the Leekes are a little unusual: they are Lancastrian Mormons, and this evening their son Gary will return from 2 years as a missionary in Salt Lake City. His mother is planning a celebratory dinner - with difficulty, since she's virtually housebound with an undiagnosed, embarrassing condition. What she doesn't realise is that the rest of the family - her meek husband, disturbed oldest son, and teenage daughter - have other plans for the evening, each involving drastic and irrevocable action. As the narrative baton passes from one Leeke to the next, disaster inexorably looms. Except that nothing goes according to plan, and the outcome is as unexpected as it is shocking. Giving a fascinating insight into the Mormon way of life, this blackly funny tale of innocence betrayed shows the havoc religion can wreak.

Release date: January 17, 2013

Publisher: Sceptre

Print pages: 337

Sample

5.16. There it is in square red numbers. Dawn. Fourteen minutes before getting-up time. Mouth tastes like blood and old onions. You can never pinpoint the exact second you wake up, can you? It’s not one thing or the other. It’s slow, like growing or your dreams wearing off. Is today really the day? At last? Eventually?

I reach out of bed and slide the switch to turn off the alarm. That’s three days in a row I’ve woken up before it goes off. Why does that happen, anyway? Is it like your brain’s been trained to it and you really don’t need the alarm any more? There’s black stuff, something mouldy and powdery, creeping along the seal between the window frame and the glass. It’s actually really disgusting. I lean over and slide the phone out from under my pillow. This alarm is set a bit earlier, to get me ready for the second one. As I bring it out it goes off, buzzing in my hand. Freeze for a second, then turn it off.

5.19. Getting light and the first birds tuning up but if I wake Julian there’ll be hell to pay and there’s still a dint in the wood on my door from that time he threw his mug at me when I forgot and flushed the toilet first thing. It’s maybe ten or twelve or fourteen hours until Gary gets back, depending on what the wind and the ash are doing.

Ash. It’s clogging up the sky, keeping the planes on the ground, making people live in airports for days, unable to come home, late and having to eat things like Wendy’s and send emails from the terminals in the airport, queuing for an hour or two every time. I am coming home, soon, soon, soon, all he ever says, home soon, Jeannie, can’t wait to see you, home soon.

I sit up quietly and find Lewis’s work number on my phone and press the button to dial. So early. There’s no chance he’ll be in. Apart from maybe a flood or a delivery. A backlog of work for impatient customers. Some other emergency that means he won’t want to talk to me anyway. I’d ring him at home, or on his mobile, but I don’t know the numbers. I listen to the ringing, and imagine the phone on the counter. An old-fashioned, rattly one with a dirty receiver. I’ve seen it before. Rings. I don’t count. Rings rings. He does sometimes sleep at work. Rings. I don’t let myself think of him sleeping under that horrible tartan blanket, but the thought, and then the smell of it, the feel of the fringe along the edge tickling my shin and now my stomach is working at itself as if it’s frightened, trying to get away. So I press the red button and lie back on the pillows, staring at the ceiling until the sicky feeling goes.

There are cracks and peeling paint round the light fitting and a cobweb weighed down with dust strung across the edges of the lampshade like a hammock for a fairy. I stay still. Arrange myself so I’m exactly in the middle of the bed with my arms by my sides and my legs straight out and my feet pointed right at the door like an arrow. I put my head in the middle of the pillow and pretend I’m a cancer patient in a hospital. Shut eyes. The chair by the side of my bed with the bubbly, chlorine-smelling cup of water turns into one of those lockers and the creaky-wheeled divan gets a set of a rubber sheets and a flowered curtain falls around me and visitors creep in to admire, whispering. I lie perfectly straight like this, so good, so still.

People would be nice to you. There’d be no shouting if all you had to do was lie there and wait to be dead. I want to get that feeling I sometimes get when I open my eyes after I’ve already been awake for a while – that I am in the wrong room and that my body is in the wrong place – the doors aren’t where you expect them to be and for a minute everything tips and spins and I could be anywhere and I want to be in a hospital. I blink and screw my eyes shut and try it again. No good. I’m not going to get it this time. I fell asleep with the curtains half open and the light is blue and grey and when I look at my hand lying on top of the duvet like a fish my skin looks dead.

Julian is going to kill someone. Me, Lewis. He won’t even care who. He could have killed me straight when he chucked that mug and he never even looked around to see what it had hit. Mum was screaming up the stairs and he was off to the workshop without even getting washed and I wish it had hit me and killed me and that’s a fact.

I get my journal up from down the side of the bed. Find my pen. It’s a nice big red book with a hard cover and in gold writing on the front of it: journal. The large white pages are ruled neatly, all smooth and unspoiled. I flick through the pages I’ve filled up; the space for the family tree in the front with all our names in it. This is the place to write down all my feelings. All the things that have happened to me. And when I am dead my posterity will read it and see what sort of life I had. I close it without writing anything.

My name is Jeannie and that is half my problem. Mum says that. Half your problem is. And then the latest thing. Half my problem is I think the washing gets itself done. Half my problem is I have no idea how long it takes to plan and cook a two-course meal for five (four). Half my problem is I think carpet is free and mud disappears on its own. My problem has ten, twenty, fifty halves. And is dividing, swelling itself up into thousands.

There are no Jeannies in the scriptures – whatever version you look at. Sister Williams’s first name is Ruth and Brother Fletcher’s is James. His mother is Esther. There are Rebeccas and Naomis and Sarahs with me in the Mia Maids. Even Mum, nearly, because she’s a Pauline. All good scriptural names. Gary was supposed to be Nephi and Julian should have been Enoch but Dad wouldn’t let Mum do it to them and threatened to leave her over it both times. She brings it up every single time he forgets to take the bins out. The night he wouldn’t let her have her own way over the new curtains. Curtains! It’s the first thing I’ve put my foot down with you about, Pauline, he said – very quietly. I can’t magic money out of thin air. And she erupted. O no it’s not! she went, like a pantomime, but I didn’t laugh, O no it’s not. What about the boys’ names? What about that, eh?

Curtains. I shouldn’t have gone out. I could have turned the music up. I put my own frog into that pot, though, didn’t I? Curtains. Jeannie. I wasn’t supposed to be called anything other than what I am because by the time I turned up she’d given up on the idea. I am just Jeannie and it isn’t short for anything and it doesn’t stand for anything better and although I have checked my concordance Jeannie is not a scriptural name.

When I hear Dad start moving around I get up and kneel on the floor. Put my forehead against the saggy edge of the mattress and try to listen for something. I am the temple of the Lord. His spirit dwells inside me. I wait, feeling like an old house with the doors kicked in, and hearing nothing but the wind howling through the gaps. And the kitchen taps and the back door go as Dad gets the milk in. The radio, for the news. Bovril’s claws scrabbling at the lino. Just because you can’t hear something doesn’t mean it’s not there. Tree branches moving – the leaves rippling and showing their lighter undersides – enough to show a wind. The smell of cooking, enough to prove there’s food on the way. Dad’s here and part of the family forever, all the time, even when he’s at work or out with the dogs just because of the dint he leaves behind on the couch cushions. I listen out some more. Nothing to say this morning. The carpet is scratchy under my knees.

I move quickly and get into my school uniform and check my phone – 5.32 – and grab my bag, which is already packed up because it’s always the last thing I do before bed. Need to wee but Julian’s snoring so I creep down the stairs. I’ll wait and do it at Brother Fletcher’s house even though the soap in his bathroom is always grey.

‘You’re up,’ Dad says and he is standing at the cooker looking pleased and in his work uniform already and Mum who is never up at this time is there in her dressing gown, heaped and bundled into her chair with a tray across her lap, and she’s smiling too.

‘I’m going in early today,’ Dad says, ‘take you, then out with Bovril for a quick hour, then work, and,’ he is talking to Mum, ‘I’ll be back for two so we can get the house ready?’

She is nodding but not looking at him. Scrawling on a scrap of paper with a short pencil, resting on the tray she normally eats off of.

‘I’m going to have the sisters round this morning, help me get the kitchen scrubbed out and freshen up Gary’s bed, and then we’ll cook. You do know I’m doing a special dinner and I want you home right from school, no shallying around this time?’

She’s writing so I don’t say anything. I stand in front of the sink and run myself a mug of cold water and drink it looking out at the brambles in the back, the throttled greenhouse and the nettles under the hedge. The water’s so cold it makes my teeth hurt and I know why that is from an advert I saw on telly: there’s lots of tiny holes in the surface of your teeth and through them tiny nerves poking out and getting hurt. I think once your teeth have got these little holes in them, that’s it, there’s nothing you can do about it apart from buying that special toothpaste, but we only get Morrisons own because Dad says it’s a rip-off and all you’re paying for is the label. I look down and run the cuff of my school jumper around the shiny bottom of the sink where a few drops of water have gathered to spoil it.

‘Jeannie? Are you listening to me?’

‘I’ll be back,’ I say, and she says, ‘Make sure you are, disappearing like a cat – no sign for hours, and if there’s one night Gary’s going to expect us to be all here, around this table,’ she leans forward and taps it with a long fingernail, ‘it’s going to be tonight and so that’s what he’s going to get. Special dinner, us all here. Yes?’

‘It’s Julian you want to be worrying about,’ I say, and she raises her skinny eyebrows like she’s about to start but my Dad empties eggs from a frying pan onto a plate, turns the gas off and puts the plate on the tray in front of her.

‘Pauline, don’t start it this morning, of all mornings,’ he says, ‘and whatever you’re planning on cooking, can you leave the cracked wheat out of it, please? My guts are giving me gyp as it is.’

He’s still in a good mood – they both are, and I look at Mum but she’s prodding the egg yolks with the blunt side of her knife and pretending she doesn’t hear him.

‘Worry about me doing what?’ Julian says. He’s leaning in the doorway, wearing jeans, but no socks or shirt, and digging into his ear with one finger.

‘What are you doing up?’

He pulls his finger out of his ear, inspects it, scratches an armpit and yawns. ‘They have not shut the airspace again, have they?’

‘Don’t speak to me about it, Julian. I just can’t stand it. Can’t think about it. The best thing we can all do is pray, right now.’

‘You can check the news,’ Julian says. ‘I will turn the telly on, shall I?’

6.12. He squeezes himself sideways past the table. A blast of his armpitty, sleepy smell as he passes. He says forfuckssake under his breath and no one hears it apart from me. The telly goes on, Mum fusses and mutters and hauls, forcing her chair through the gap, and we follow.

‘Put that mug down, Jeannie. You’re not bringing a drink into the front room,’ she says, without looking at me.

The early morning news is on, and there are pictures of people waiting in airports – Manchester and Heathrow and Gatwick and John Lennon. All stuffed full of bedraggled passengers sleeping on floors, using their luggage as pillows. Airport staff handing out bottles of water, and nappies, and vouchers for free meals. Queues forty long for the toilets, and all the car parks full. Mum is chewing her eggs slowly and leaning forward, looking at all the people even though Gary won’t be one of them, he’s in the air now, right over our heads in a plane. Though we can’t see it, the sky is darkening.

‘He’ll be all right,’ Dad says. They switch to a clip of Eyjafjallajökull itself. The plume of ash and dog-grey smoke endlessly billowing out of the top, as it has been doing for days now, to cover the world. That’s a funny thing, that they call the volcano a she like it’s a person, a girl or a woman, like they do with boats and spaceships. Dad says they do it to boats and other things like that, sorts of vehicles, big trucks too, because they are things that carry people, like women do when they have – Dad leans over and turns the telly off to stop Mum getting worked up.

‘All right! All right? Hand me that phone, I’m going to call the bishop.’

‘Pauline.’ Dad puts his hand on her shoulder again, takes her eggs. He moves away and his voice floats in from the kitchen. ‘Bishop Jackson will still be asleep. He’s got a long enough drive to do today as it is. You can ring him later. When it’s a decent time.’

‘Fine,’ she says, and shifts round in her chair to look at me. Julian’s got his feet up on the arm of the couch and is staring out the window at the sky. He looks like he’s going to go back to sleep any second, except he’s smiling, like he’s planning something other than a day at work.

‘Just make sure you’re all back here early tonight. No dawdling.’

‘Must we? There is a lot for me to do at work today,’ Julian says, in that funny way of talking he’s got – like he’s planned all his lines out in advance and is just reciting them. Gary said he started doing it when he got to high school, and he puts it on deliberately. No one knows why. Dad says to leave him alone; he’s not hurting anyone.

‘Anyone would think you preferred spending time with Drake than being here to welcome back your own brother,’ Mum says, and stares at Julian. Julian turns back to the window and ignores her.

‘I’ve got hockey after school,’ I say.

‘Can’t you miss it, just this once? And you,’ she waves her hand at Julian, ‘bring Drake, if you can’t be parted from him.’

I feel my hands grabbing at each other, but Julian just huffs. He knows what Mum’s getting at and he’s not going to play.

‘Stop moidering them, Pauline. He’s not going to be back until seven, at the earliest,’ Dad says, and motions over her head for me to get my bag and follow him out, ‘let her go to her hockey. She’ll be back long before Gary is.’

‘You better had be. No disappearing.’

‘I’ll be back,’ I say, ‘it was just that one time,’ and Dad catches my eye and shakes his head and I drop it like he wants me to, and before me and Dad head out the door in the usual rush she catches my sleeve and pulls me back, so close the wheels on her chair are digging into the front of my knees, and I have to stoop over her and see the egg yolk caught in the hairy corners of her mouth, and she gives me the bit of paper she’s been writing on and the list, and two folded twenty-pound notes from the pocket of her stained dressing gown, and says:

‘You will do this for me, won’t you, Jeannie? Go to Richardson’s supermarket and get them to call you a taxi and bring it all back during your dinner, then I’ll have it all here in the afternoon so I can do the cooking. Will you do that for me? Can I rely on you this time?’

I look at the money and nod and take the list and Dad is holding the front door open for me with one arm and putting his other into his jacket and I duck out past him, smelling the shaving foam still clogging the little cups in the bottom of his ears as I pass.

‘Come on then,’ he says gently as we get into the car, ‘same as usual?’ and it’s a game we have and I nod and we drive the rest of the way without speaking, his hands light on the wheel except when we’re going round corners and then he’s extra careful because winter last year he hit a cat and still isn’t over it, not really.

I like the quiet. The empty roads and us driving right through the town centre in five minutes flat, with just a couple of cars on the Flat Iron and the Richardson’s lorry (she) parked right up on the pavement as the early morning staff move backwards and forwards carrying in the bread. To Me. To You. The shutters are still down on all the shops, and their special yellow bags of rubbish haven’t been collected yet. Smell the chlorine as we go past the leisure centre, even with the windows shut. A train goes through the station, the speed of it making the yellow and red of the carriages streak to a long blurred smear in the corner of my eye. But I don’t like the way I’m trained to wake up at five or earlier even on Saturdays and get guilty if I’m ever still lying in after six. Lazy. Another half of my problem. Don’t like the class every morning either – the long, confusing sentences and verses to learn off by heart and Friday quizzes and scripture chases and the certificates Sister Williams makes on her computer and gets photocopied at the Spar place around the corner. Hole-punched with a ribbon threaded through to make a bookmark. Over-critical of others’ efforts. One more half. Don’t like having to see them all every morning – between six and eight, every day before school, and it is seeing them all so regularly that is supposed to keep you in line. To remind you, even before you get to school, that we are a peculiar people and our lifelong friends will come from inside the Church and not out of it. Sullen. Antisocial. The third half, and counting.

‘Things will be different after tonight,’ Dad says when he pulls up and he’s as glad as Mum is. I’ve seen him marking the days off on his Crufts’ Winners calendar with the marker he uses for work.

‘I know it will be,’ I say.

Gary is coming home tonight. It’s been two years. Since I was twelve. I have grown eighteen centimetres since then and wear a bra now and I need to suck in my belly when I walk and I am embarrassed at the thought of him seeing me. 6.58.

Gary, when you are home, finally, at last, eventually, I will tell you a story. Are you sitting comfortably? ‘Gary,’ I will say (I have been practising this one for three weeks and two days), ‘Gary, it wasn’t my fault. What it was, was just like when we went up the log flume at Camelot. You and me and Julian the year before you left. How old would I have been? Eleven? Maybe eleven or nearly twelve. Do you remember that day? We’d been on the teacups and the merry-go-round and the caterpillar, and we’d seen Merlin and Scoop doing card tricks, and when we watched the jousting one of the knights asked for a favour from a fair lady, and you pulled the ribbon out of my ponytail and stood up and waved it in the air. It made a pink S shape on the end of your hand. The knight rode over to the barrier and nodded and you pulled me up and we ran down the steps between the seats together and the knight took the ribbon, held it up and kissed it and then wrapped it around the top of his arm. Everyone whoo-whooed and my face went that red. My knight was the good one, in a blue and yellow uniform. His horse too. And signs, saying not to put your hand through the barriers because the horses weren’t tame and they’d bite you. The bad one, all in black, came out and everyone booed and ssssssed, and King and Queen stood up on their platform and said some things, and rang a bell, and then they made the horses charge at each other. The knights were holding poles. My knight won, course he did, and once he’d put his pole back in the rack and collected his cup, he draped the ribbon over the barriers and Gary, I made you go and get it because he was waiting there to talk to us, I think, and I was too shy.

And then later I wanted to go on the long flume and Dad said yes. Do you remember? We were wearing those see-through plastic macs and also caps with the Camelot castle on that Mum had let us get from the gift shop. And you and Julian shouted and waved your arms in the air as the log fell down the slope and after you all said I was brave because I never made a peep she never made a peep not a sound, and you and Julian shoved me on the shoulders and Dad looked pleased with me and I still couldn’t talk or smile because my cheeks were numb and my teeth stuck together with all the screaming I wanted to do. I was frozen like a stone, like I was made of cement. Something that can’t move, can’t run away, can’t make a peep. So I didn’t do anything.’

That’s the end. I couldn’t say any of that to you.

We have the seminary class in Brother Fletcher’s front room. Mum’s never been in here, but if she did she’d say this is a place that needs a woman’s touch. Thin blue carpet with no underlay and magnolia walls and a grey three-piece suite with tiny red diamonds on it and some extra folding chairs he gets out for the class. There’s a little wooden bookshelf and a plasma telly and no plants or photos but the picture of Jesus in the red cape on the wall over the gas fire and another little one of the First Presidency he keeps on the phone table, which is wooden too, but not the same kind of wood as the bookcase.

Sister Williams teaches the seminary with him every morning and because he’s not married it wouldn’t be appropriate for the two of them to be in the house together so Sister Fletcher his mother needs to come to chaperone because even though there are plenty of Beehives and Mia Maids and Laurels we don’t count because we’re under eighteen and anyway not married ourselves yet, although Joyce’s a Laurel and she’s waiting for someone to come back off of his mission next year.

Sister Fletcher usually sits in the kitchen with her knitting in a basket between her feet. She does tiny clothes for the premature babies’ box and cat blankets out of old jumpers and sometimes comments on points of scripture through the open door. Angela Williams who is only five sits in there with her, eating Ready brek and waiting for us to be finished with her mother so she can get taken to her special school and she never makes a peep, but only takes some of the wool and rubs it against her lips and she’s lovely.

I’m still not feeling well.

Sister Williams comes into the living room to start the class, stepping over the legs of the people who are sitting on the floor, and picks her way to the front next to Brother Fletcher, who is standing in front of the plasma telly holding the Book of Mormon with both hands in front of him like it is a tiny blue shield. Now she’s here he bows his head to do the opening prayer. I fold my arms and turn my face down. Eyes closed, I hear Beth breathing next to me through a nose that needs blowing.

‘Dear Heavenly Father, we thank thee for this beautiful morning. We thank thee for bringing us all safely together here to study thy scriptures and learn more about thy will. We thank thee for our health and strength, for a refreshing night’s sleep and we thank thee for letting us live in a free country where we can read and worship according to thy word. This morning we ask that the teachers of the lesson be inspired and the young men and women here are able to understand, apply and remember the precepts and principles taught here today. We ask thee to bless us that we may obey thy commandments, and in particular we ask thy blessing on the health of Angela Williams, thy daughter. And we say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, our saviour, amen.’

Beth always makes sure she says ‘Amen’ the loudest, in this strange, sort of telephone voice. On Sundays you can hear her from the back. The rest of us just mutter. When you get up so early, closing your eyes and putting your head down for the prayer is dangerous. Blinky and fuzzy when it’s over – as if wakening from another sleep. The light is too bright, the air too dry. Brother Fletcher makes a bit of a fuss of me.

‘Gary’s coming back! Have you heard from him yet, has he landed?’ he says while Sister Williams moves slowly on her small feet, lumbering, almost, in her wide cream and blue dress.

I swallow down cold spit.

‘Dinner time. His plane gets in at Heathrow and the bishop is driving him back. We’re all having a meal tonight.’

Sister Williams smiles. ‘So that means he’ll be first up on Sunday?’

I nod and she beams at me and all of us and there’s more talking and I don’t notice she is carrying a tray until she turns again and shows it to us.

There’s a murmur of interest. It’s a tray of fairy cakes. One or two of us who have been dozing or slouching sit up a little straighter. We’re not allowed to eat in the class and if you’re not naturally a morning person breakfast is cold toast that is too chewy and tastes like the Tupperware you brought it in. They look funny, they’re so perfect – like something out of a cookery book. All spotless paper cases, white icing and glossy glacé cherries dead centre on the top. Beth has been trying to catch my eye, so I turn myself around a bit and pretend I am paying extra-special attention to the lesson.

‘Each of you young women,’ Brother Fletcher is saying, ‘has a very special possession. It is something you were born with, and something that, when the time is right, you will give freely to the one chosen to walk beside you for eternity.’

Sister Williams offers the plate to Beth, who takes a cake and holds it in her hand. Rebecca and Sarah take one each, and finally the plate comes to me and I don’t hesitate over choosing because all the cakes are exactly the same. There are a few left, but instead of handing them around to the boys Sister Williams takes the plate back and puts it on top of the television.

No one speaks or moves. We know better than to start eating.

‘Girls,’ Sister Williams says, ‘your job is to look after your special possession as if it was the most important thing that you own – because it is.’

Jacob sniggers loudly, swallows, and turns it into a cough.

‘You know that in some circumstances it’s permissible and forgivable to use violence as defence,’ Brother Fletcher says.

‘Nephi himself was permitted to kill Laban with a sword in order to obtain the plates,’ Sister Williams says.

‘And similarly you young women are permitted and encouraged to defend your virtue by whatever means are open to you,’ he carries on.

They are staring at us. Our teachers and all the boys are staring at us. The cake feels sticky in my hand.

‘Your Heavenly Father wants you to know that life is precious and should never be taken but just as precious is the ability to give and nurture life, something that all you young women carry within you,’ Sister Williams says. ‘The veil that the spirits waiting in heaven pass through in order to come to earth,’ she says, properly excited, ‘it’s inside you. Can you think of it?’

She smiles. She might be thinking of Angela, who we can hear babbling quietly to Sister Fletcher – not real words, just noises, little cries, like a baby.

‘The sacred importance of that calling, that power, is the reason for this exception,’ Brother Fletcher says. He surveys us, sitting there with our cakes, and the boys lean back into their half of the room, scared to even breathe on us. ‘But even better, each young person needs to choose wisely. To use their free agency and avoid getting themselves into situations where their chastity, their virtue – even their reputation – is put at risk. It’s a sacred responsibility each of you has.’

He hands over to Sister Williams. I don’t know if they practise the lesson, or just read the prompts out of the lesson book, but sometimes it’s hard not to think of them as television presenters working on an autocue.

‘Sometimes, just sometimes, a young woman can make a poor decision and that is the object of today’s lesson.’ Sister Williams scans our faces, staring at us in our assortment of school uniforms, grey skirts pulled down low over our knees. ‘Look what happens now.’

‘You, Jeannie, go and choose one of the boys to give your cake to,’ Brother Fletcher says.

I stand up and wait, certain that I’m going to make a mistake. He’s picked me because Gary’s coming back today and the extra attention is supposed to be a treat, to make me feel special, to help me learn better and to feel like I am helping them teach the lesson, but it doesn’t feel anything like that.

‘Go on then, it doesn’t matter who you choose,’ she says, ‘these bad decisions are often made hastily, without planning or discrimination.’

Michael is nearest to me and sitting on the arm of the couch looking bored and confused, so I touch his arm and shove the cake in his face. He blinks, pushes his glasses up his nose, and takes it.

‘Go on then, Michael,’ Brother Fletcher says, ‘she’s let you have it. Her own free will. It is hers to do what she likes with, after all.’

Michael starts to unpeel the paper from the side of the cake.

‘The cake is to represent marriage,’ Sister Williams says, ‘and you’re old enough now to realise that the icing on the cake represents the sacred relationship between man and wife. Now, Michael, I want you to have a go at that icing. Get your tongue out and lick it off. I was stood in my kitchen at eleven o’clock last night so don’t hold back.’

Michael looks at her, at me, at the rest of us. He is baffled. Sister Williams and Brother Fletcher close in, smiling, and he opens his mouth and starts lick