Imperishable

“Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.” 1 Corinthians 15: 51-52

“Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out—those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned.” John 5: 28-29

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The trumpet sounds at about 9am, GMT, on a Tuesday in February. In some parts of the world it is night, and in some parts of the world it is late in the morning, and the sun is moving inexorably towards its highest point. In London, it is half term, and Mercy is eating pancakes and playing Minecraft. At first she thinks the noise is inside the game, though as soon as she marks it for just street noise, she forgets she ever heard it. “Mum,” she asks. “Can I have some juice?” Nesta has her head in the fridge, rearranging leftovers from her mother’s funeral, and hears both the request and the trumpet only in her ears. Her mind is elsewhere. Last time they had all this food… Too many losses in so few years.

There are two eggs left, again. Easier to use than to make space for, she thinks. “Mercy, you want another pancake? Lent begins tomorrow.”

“No, just juice.” Mercy keeps building a staircase. Nesta already has two put aside for Joseph, but wonders whether Charles might like a pancake when he gets home from work. He’s not so hungry as he was when they first married though, Shrove Tuesday or no.

“If you want to make pancakes, I will have a pancake” says Granny Mary.

For a heartbeat, Nesta holds a Clingfilmed plate of chicken in stasis above a bed of Tupperware, but there is no reason not to put down the plate, and so she does. Mercy glances across the table at her grandmother, wide eyed beneath a furrowed brow. Then she looks down, adds another floor, fingers moving confidently across the screen, tapping a world into being. Nesta brings the eggs and milk back to the pan.

“You gonna want syrup or strawberries with it Mumma?”

“Syrup” Mary answers. “Make two small ones, your father will be back soon.”

Nesta cracks the eggs, pours in milk and flour, hums while she whisks. Perhaps it is seeing her mother again, but she feels lighter than of late, though she got out of bed with sore hips and an aching head, feeling the unwelcomed weight of the matriarchal crown. Now she is moving around the kitchen like she’s five years old and in that sweet spot between full and hungry. Out of the window she sees Ellen from next door speaking with two younger women who look like they could be her sisters if they were twenty years older, and against the wall, near their feet, a man asleep, and Nesta says a small prayer for his deliverance from affliction.

*

Further out, in the city, Charles hears the trumpet and checks his watch. He is late for work, and perhaps it is because it is an unusually fine day, but it seems like there can be nobody at their duties yet at all. The little park, where crocuses crouch in purple solidarity against trampled soil is teeming with people, and despite it being Tuesday, and February, and threatening plague and flood and war, there is a festive feeling in the sprightly bounce of the crowd. Charles forgets his bad knee and his constipation dissolves as he walks. He is slowed by the thick bustle on the street, but he sees his boss, Ant Abate Junior, in conversation with men he has seen in pictures on the board room walls; Matt Abate, still with his handsome dark hair, and Antonio Abate, grey haired and unmistakably like his grandson. Charles figures his tardiness won’t be noticed.

In the office, a queue has formed at his desk, and Charles takes his place behind two other men, watching a third stare perplexedly at the computer. He nods at Kai, queuing nearby, and notes three men in Tudor garb and a woman in a long woollen tunic by the water dispenser. Five young roman soldiers are asleep beside the photocopier, and Amy is having to step over them to use it. Generally, Charles does not like waiting, does not like too much time with his thoughts, not these last few years. But today he feels his body squarely on the ground, his spine, his gut, his lungs, right where they should be. He feels at peace. Ant comes into the open plan and calls over the hubbub. Company-wide meeting at 10. Charles wonders how safe his job is. He has been here 24 years in April.

*

Upstairs, Joseph yelps. Nesta looks at Mary now, meeting familiar eyes, a look that says “teenagers!” but without impatience. A moment later, he appears, man-tall and boy-tender in the doorway, bare-torsoed and sleepy, and Nesta wants to press her face to her son’s chest and hear his heart beat in her ear and keep him close and also imagine he is someone else.

“Why are you shouting? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Moses startled me is all.”

Nesta drops the pan. “Moses?”

“Who’s the man on the landing?”

“Where is Moses?”

“In bed still. There’s a woman too.”

Nesta pushes past a lady in a floral sundress on the stairs, and her father on the upstairs landing, and into Joseph’s room. Moses and Joseph’s room. And there, dark lashes curling on his cheek, smooth skin glowing warm against the white of the pillow, there is her boy, fifteen, still, though three years have passed since he was.

“Moses!” Her hands are on him, checking her eyes, feeling his presence, her heart spilling out to fill the room as she shakes him, but he does not wake.

“Hey Moses.” Mercy stands in the doorway, tablet in hand, a trapdoor propped open in the floor of her game. Around her Joseph, Grandad, Granny Mary. An assemblage of strangers.

“He’s to be judged.” A man in a dog collar speaks. “He won’t wake until he’s been judged.”

Nesta looks at her oldest son. Behind her, her mother, dead less than a fortnight, her father, her neighbours, folk going back a thousand years maybe, all risen, and her son, her beautiful boy, asleep still and dreaming, the curve of his lips and the arch of his nose, the thin pallor of his lids flickering with movement beneath. Her child. Her babe. Her Moses.

The crowd has parted for the priest now, and he stands unflinching in her gaze “Did he die in the light of Christ?”

Nesta nods, and knows it is not so.

*

Charles finds he does not mind so much, after all. From a staff body of 13, they have let 47 go, and he doesn’t take it personally. At least he had the grace to show up, he supposes. Not everyone did. Besides, the air feels like an extension of his skin, and his feet feel like they could carry him anywhere and never tire. They carry him home, of course, to Nesta and Joseph and Mercy, and the gaping hole he never saw coming. There is nowhere else he would rather be. He stops to buy a cake on the way home. He feels like celebrating. But there is no cake. The bakery shelves are stripped, and they tell him to come back later, but it had only been a whim.

There are sleepers on the front path, and Charles knows by now that he will not wake them. Still, he takes care not to touch them as he approaches the house. It is quiet inside, despite the previous residents, and he finds his mother-in-law before he finds his wife.

“Mary! It is good to see you looking so well” he tells her, and they hug. Beside her, a younger man holds out his hand.

“You must be Charles? I’m glad to meet you. I hear you have been taking good care of my daughter.”

The men shake hands, and Charles thinks how much more like Joseph this man looks in the flesh. He hears Mercy call from upstairs.

“Daddy?”

There is something in her voice and Charles does not wait for her to come to him or for sound to travel up and down the stairwell, but climbs the stairs himself, two and three at a time. Mercy is stood by the door to Joseph and Moses’ room. Inside he sees Nesta and Joseph, seated on the bed, and between them the slender shape of a person beneath the sheets, and he knows that it is Moses. He thinks that he will run to him, has seen himself run, a thousand times, to embrace his boy, to take him up in his arms and hold onto him this time, and never let go. But he does not run. Nesta turns her face, and he can see that she has firmed her jaw and set her eyes.

“Moses is sleeping just now, so don’t be waking him, all right? The child needs his rest.”