Excerpt from 'It Is What It Is' (On Snakes & Other Stories, by Yrsa Daley-Ward.)

For some reason, I keep thinking about the flat that we moved into in Blackpool when dad kicked mum out. It was mid March and just after my sixth birthday that Levy and I discovered that we had mice in the kitchen. Actually they were rats, but it was nicer for us both to pretend they were mice. One day I switched on the light to the kitchen to get a cup of tea and whiskey for mum and one of them scuttled across the worn lino and squeezed into the small gap underneath the sink. We did everything to try and coax it out. Levy carefully cut the mould off a block of red Leicester and placed it in front of the sink. Soon after that, we became aware of a ripe, sickly sweet smell in the air and twitched nervously for weeks and weeks as we tiptoed bare footed into the kitchen to fix ourselves snacks for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Although he was four years and two months older than me, I always suspected Levy was more scared of mice than I was, and that made me a little bit proud. We didn’t want to bring the subject up again because when Levy mentioned it in front of Mrs Green at Church one day, mum gave him a beating when we got home for showing her up in public. We were taken away from our mum six months or so after the rat encounter. My brother was sent to go and live with our Uncle in South East London. I was to go and live with my Great Aunt Delle in St Anne’s, Lancashire and no one told us anything further than that. 

When Levy left, I didn’t know what to do. He was at high school now and he’d started to speak differently. He had a Nike logo cut into his hair and one ear pierced. He had lots of friends, he said.

I didn’t have much in the way of friends. I was never allowed to go anywhere after school, went to Church on a Sunday and knew more in religious education than the teacher, much to his amusement. My hair grew like wool and I had no mum and dad to speak of. I couldn’t go to sleepovers and had never been to the cinema, (Aunt Delle believes that it is an abomination) and I could quote the Bible inside out. Sometimes the other children at school would be shopping on a Saturday and see all of us from Church preaching and singing in the market square. Some people laughed at us, or walked by ignoring us when we tried to hand out the tracts about the second coming of Jesus.

It sounded as though Levy was having lots of fun in London. I tried my best to match him with stories about what I was getting to back in sunny Lancashire, besides eating rice and peas every night and reading the Bible out loud while Aunt Delle nodded off by the fire. I invented some masterpieces. Once I told him that Aunt Delle had slipped in the bath and almost broke her back and I had put her in the recovery position and alerted the authorities, and that I was going to receive a medal that Sunday at the Town Hall. Levy was impressed but then Uncle called back, concerned. When my lie was discovered I got a good beating and was made to read the Bible upstairs all week and do chores. I was thoroughly miserable at the idea that he’d think me a fraud. The next time he called, I had been crying, because I was very depressed. I had lost my bible. Aunt Delle just had told me that I would never get to heaven if I continued to be so messy, on account of cleanliness being next to godliness. But I wasn’t much good at being tidy. When we lived with mum, nobody ever dusted, polished, or cleaned. There were flies landing on dirty plates and moss growing inside cups. Nobody minded. As a result, I always lost things that were dear to me. On the particular day that the Bible disappeared Levy made me feel much better by explaining that lost items were all due to crazy science, so it couldn’t possibly have ever been avoided.

“It’s all about entropy,” he had said, wisely. “The more energy something has, the higher the entropy—entropy being a thermo-dynamical Function Of State, you understand.”

At the other end of the phone I nodded, not really getting it.

“You see,” he continued, “as long as the things in your room have energy, they will always descend into chaos. The only way to get rid of entropy is to reduce the temperature to absolute zero…two hundred and seventy-three degrees below freezing.”

At the other end of the phone I shivered.

I tried explaining this theory to Aunt Delle, who hated anything scientific and as punishment I had to move up from Sunday school and go into Church with all the adults. If I was old enough to understand that nonsense, she said, I was old enough to lead prayers and do scripture readings in ‘Big Church’. Meanwhile I started to leave my bedroom windows open, even during the winter. Of course there was no chance of reducing the temperature to absolute zero, but I reasoned that lowering it a little could help matters.

It worked. Months later, the bible turned up at the bottom of the wash basket.