The Land of Decoration

by Grace McCleen

  Later, when I was in bed, a police car came down the street. I heard it stop outside and the policeman talk to the boys. After that it was quiet, and when I looked they had gone away.

  “God,” I said, “what’s happening? Why won’t Neil Lewis leave us alone?”

  “Something to do with the fact that he has been getting into trouble in school every day because of you?” said God.

  “Not because of me,” I said. “Because of what he does to me.”

  “Swings and roundabouts,” said God.

  “It’s not fair!” I said. “I didn’t know any of this would happen. How could I know he would start coming to the house?”

  “Not easy, is it?” said God.

  “No. I’ve solved one problem and found another one.”

  “That’s life,” said God. “Things disappear and reappear somewhere else. You stamp on them here and they come up over there. Like molehills. Now you know what it feels like.”

  “What?”

  “Being Me.”

  “I thought I could say just what I wanted to happen.”

  “Yes, but can you stop things happening?” said God. “Did you think about that?” God laughed. “Thinking is a dangerous thing at the best of times.”

  “But what’s going to happen?” I said. “With Neil and everything?”

  “I don’t think it would be helpful for you to know at the moment,” said God. “In any case, it depends on you.”

  * * *

  IT WAS STRANGE that Neil kept coming to the house, because he didn’t come near me in school. He didn’t tell me he would kill me and he didn’t draw his finger across his throat and he didn’t hit me or put my head down the toilet or pull away my chair. He wasn’t doing a lot of the things he used to do. Mrs. Pierce made him move to Kevin and Stacey and Luke’s table so he didn’t sit with Lee and Gareth anymore, but so often when I looked up, his blue eyes were fixed on me, and they were strange, as if he wasn’t seeing me at all but something on the other side of me.

  Mrs. Pierce kept him in detention four times that week. At home time, when he’d hoist his bag onto his shoulder, she would say: “Neil, where are you going?”

  “Home, Miss.”

  “I thought you and I had an appointment.”

  “My dad’ll kill me if I’m late again.”

  Mrs. Pierce would say: “It’s no fun for me either, you know, so the sooner you learn how to behave, the better for both of us. Sit down and get your books out.”

  Neil didn’t follow me home once that week, but some of the other boys rode their bikes past me very fast and yelled swear words. On the following Wednesday, when I came out of school, I had seen a man with a shaved head and denim jacket waiting by the school gates. He was covered in tattoos. His arms were folded and his chin jutted out and his mouth was set in a tight line. As I went by, he opened the side of his mouth and a jet of saliva landed on the pavement.

  “Sue,” I said, as Sue Lollipop crossed me over the road, “who’s that man with the shaved head?”

  “That’s Doug Lewis,” she said in a low voice. “He’s on the warpath about something.”

  So now I had a face to put to the “bad lot.”

  On Thursday Doug was there again, huddled up against the wind. This time he was smoking. And as I went by, I noticed something I had missed before: On the backs of his hands, writhing to and fro and over and under one another, were lots of green snakes.

  What Happened in the Co-op

  ON SATURDAY WE went preaching in town with the new leaflets. We stood in the main street opposite the Baptist church and Margaret held a placard that said: CAN YOU READ THE SIGNS? on one side and CHRIST DIED FOR YOU on the other. Uncle Stan had a loudspeaker, and Father and Alf wore boards over their jackets with THE END OF ALL THINGS HAS DRAWN CLOSE on them. Nel insisted on having a placard too, so we propped it up against her wheelchair, even though you couldn’t see her over the top of it. The rest of us gave out leaflets.

  It was very cold. Sun winked in each of the shop windows. A market seller said: “Go and proclaim the gospel somewhere else,” but Uncle Stan said we had as much right to be there as anyone else, and after that it was a contest between us and the market seller as to who could shout the loudest.

  Twice someone shouted: “Scab!” and a few spat on the ground as they passed us. Uncle Stan flushed but carried on shouting, and Margaret thrust her chest out and held the placard higher. Gordon’s neck was deep in his collar, his eyes were half closed, and he was chewing hard.

  Only two people took a leaflet, even though I held them as Father said to and didn’t obscure them with my hand, and even though we employed thought-provoking questions. On the cover of the leaflet, happy people were walking through a garden. Inside, there were lightning and hailstones, buildings falling, and cars disappearing. People were shaking their fists at the sky. Some had their hands raised to protect themselves. The men wore headbands and tattoos and lots of denim. Some had transistor radios. The women had miniskirts and lots of makeup and high heels. It made me confused to look at the picture because all the Brothers looked like the happy people, and not everyone in the World carried a transistor or wore a miniskirt; Auntie Jo, Father’s sister, for instance, wore jeans and Dr. Martens in the photos she had posted to us, and Mrs. Pierce didn’t wear makeup.

  At midday Uncle Stan said: “A good effort.” He didn’t seem to notice we had as many boxes of leaflets as before. We carried them back to his car near the dumpsters behind the Co-op, then Father and I said goodbye to the group and we went into the Station Café for a cup of tea.

  We divided an ice slice between us. I licked the icing off my fingers and said: “Do you really think Armageddon’s coming soon?”

  “Yes,” said Father.

  “D’you think Mike will be saved?”

  “Only God knows the answer to that.”

  “What about Mrs. Pew?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “What about Joe and Mrs. Browning and Sue Lollipop?”

  “Judith, it’s useless speculating about these things. Only God can read hearts.”

  “What about Auntie Jo?” I said, and I didn’t look at him.

  Father brought his hand down on the table. Then he said: “Judith, you’ve asked this before—how do I know? Everyone will have had a fair chance.”

  “How do we know?” I said.

  “Because God has promised He will save everyone who deserves to be saved.”

  “I’m glad I’m not God,” I said, and I smiled at Father to show him I didn’t want to annoy him and wanted to be friends.

  “So am I,” said Father.

  I laughed. “I wouldn’t know who to save and who not to.”

  He smiled, but the smile was watery and tired. I thought it was better not to smile at someone than to smile like that. We finished and went to the Co-op.

  We were pushing our cart to the checkout a few minutes later when two men appeared. They looked like they had just stepped out of the picture in the leaflet—it would have been quite funny if I hadn’t been so scared. One had long hair and a headband, though he wasn’t carrying a transistor. The other man was Doug Lewis.

  The men’s eyes gleamed like marbles. They reminded me of the eyes of the dog from number 29 when he sees Oscar on a wall. Doug jutted his chin. He seemed to be nodding. He put his hands on the front of the cart and said: “Scabs eat, I see.”

  Father’s eyes were black, but when he spoke his voice was steady. He said: “Go and wait for me at the checkout, Judith,” but my feet wouldn’t move.

  Father said: “Let me get on with my shopping, Doug. I’m not hurting you.”

  But Doug didn’t take his hands off the cart. His face was red. He and Father looked at each other, and they kept on and on looking at each other until I wanted to scream. Then suddenly Doug shoved our cart sideways. It bounced, but Father didn’t let go. Doug’s chest rose and fell. The man with the long hair put his fist into his hand. Then he said to Doug: �
�Come on.” Doug’s nostrils flared. After a minute he slammed the cart sideways and followed his friend.

  We walked to the till. My heart felt as if it had been plunged into hot lead, and my arms and legs were falling away from me. Father didn’t seem to realize what had just happened. He began putting things onto the conveyor belt. Then he looked up and said: “All right, everyone, the show’s over,” and I saw that he did, and that the whole shop was watching us. To me he said: “Go and start packing,” and I was glad, because I couldn’t think what to do. Then he looked at me and smiled, a proper smile, but this time I couldn’t smile back.

  * * *

  WE DIDN’T TALK about what happened for the rest of the day, and for the rest of the day my heart felt sick and my legs and arms didn’t belong to me.

  A Broken Window

  “UNCLE STAN,” I said at the meeting next morning, “have you got Brother Michaels’s address?”

  “Oh darn,” said Stan. “Sorry, pet, I forgot. Keep reminding me.”

  “OK.”

  He said: “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I just really need to write to him.”

  “Look.” Uncle Stan smiled. “I’ll make a note.” He took out a little piece of paper, wrote on it, then folded it up and put it under his wedding ring. “How’s that?”

  “Great,” I said.

  Uncle Stan frowned. “Are you sure you’re all right, pet? How’s everything at home?”

  “Fine,” I said. I couldn’t tell him about what Doug Lewis had done yesterday. Father wouldn’t want me to. In any case, what had happened felt like it was stuck in the middle of my chest and would hurt too much to pull out.

  When we got home, I asked Father for a piece of his writing paper. “What for?” he said.

  “To write to Brother Michaels.”

  “Who?”

  “The Brother who came and gave the talk about moving mountains.”

  “Why on earth are you writing to him?”

  “I liked him.”

  Father shook his head and went into the middle room. He took a piece of paper from his desk. “That’s all you’re having,” he said. “So don’t waste it.”

  I went upstairs. I thought I may as well begin the letter now, even if I didn’t have an address yet. I wanted to talk to someone a lot. I wrote:

  Dear Brother Michaels,

  This is Judith McPherson, the girl you talked to after giving your talk about the mustard seed. You gave some to me, do you remember? I hope you are well.

  I thought for a minute.

  I am writing to thank you for coming to our congregation. Your talk changed my life. When I came home I made a miracle happen, and lots after that, but the first one was that night after you told us about faith. I made it snow by making snow for my model world. There is a world in my room made of rubbish. I made snow for it and then it really did snow, do you remember?

  After that I made it snow again and then I made it stop snowing. Then I brought back our neighbor’s cat and then I punished a boy at school. But now he is knocking at our house all the time and yesterday his dad threatened Father in the Co-op and called him a “scab.”

  I chewed the end of the pencil.

  The police are not helping. Nobody believes I have done any miracles. I should say also that I have heard God’s voice on numerous occasions.

  “Cross that out,” said God.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “It’s dangerous,” said God.

  “But I’ve only got one piece of paper.”

  “Cross it out!”

  I crossed the sentence out.

  The thing is, now I don’t know whether to try and make more miracles or not. Having power is not as easy as it looks.

  You said that all we needed to do was take the first step, but now I don’t know what to do next, and it doesn’t look like I can go back to where I began.

  Then Father shouted: “Dinner!” and I folded the letter up and put it inside my journal, put them both under the floorboard, and went downstairs.

  * * *

  A BIT LATER we were pondering the Fall of Man, which happened six thousand years ago—two thousand years from us to Jesus, Father said, and four thousand years from Jesus to Adam—and I was pondering the reason I had to eat bitter greens again and not saying anything at all. My face must have though, because Father said: “There are thousands of African children who would be only too glad of that dinner.” I was about to say: “Then I wish we could send it to them,” when we heard the sound of smashing in the hall.

  Father said: “Stay here,” and went out.

  I didn’t hear anything for so long that in the end I got up and went into the hall. The first thing that hit me was a gust of wind and rain. The second thing was that Father was standing with his back to me, and at his feet there were pieces of stained glass, in the midst of the glass was a brick, and where the stained-glass picture had been in the front door, there was a large hole. Beyond the hole was the night.

  Father cleared his throat. He said: “Go back into the kitchen please.”

  I sat by the Rayburn and drew my knees up and put my chin on them. I said to God: “Please help Father.”

  In the hall I heard Father say: “I’d like to report a smashed window.… Yes … my front door … About five minutes ago … No, not now.”

  I peered into the Rayburn. The coals flickered and glimmered, but in the heart of them, where they were palest, they were perfectly still.

  “I want someone here now,” Father was saying. “I’ve reported other incidents and nothing’s been done.… No, you listen. I’ve got a ten-year-old daughter—”

  There were caverns in the fire. There were gullies and canyons and ravines. I imagined I was journeying to the center of the earth. Heat lapped at my cheeks. Heat sealed up my lips. I closed my eyes and heat bathed them.

  Father went on talking. I went further into the fire. It was like being beautifully dead or asleep. My face began to sting, but I didn’t move away. This was how a star felt, I thought, and what were stars but furnaces eating themselves up, then falling inward, getting redder and redder and cooler and cooler until nothing was left but a heap of gray ash?

  A click told me Father had put the phone down. I pulled my chair back. When he came into the kitchen, you wouldn’t have been able to tell from his voice that anything had happened. He said he was going to clean up this mess and then we would continue with our Bible reading.

  He wouldn’t let me help. I watched from the kitchen doorway as he pushed the glass into a dustpan. I watched him wrap it so the garbagemen wouldn’t cut themselves. I watched him sweep the floor, then run his hand over it to see if there were any pieces he had missed. “Don’t walk around in socks for a few weeks,” he said.

  “OK,” I said. And then I looked up and screamed.

  A face was peering through the hole in the front door, a wobbling white face with red lips and black hair and a plastic rain cap. Father jumped too. He said: “Mrs. Pew!”

  “Oh, John! I saw it all!” Mrs. Pew said. She appeared to be dissolving. Small black snakes were making their way down her forehead, and her head was wobbling fantastically. “Three boys on bikes!”

  “I know,” said my Father. “I’ve spoken to the police. Everything’s taken care of.”

  “One of them had a brick,” she said. “How terrible! Why would they do such a thing?”

  Father said: “I don’t know, but don’t worry now. You go back inside. It’s too wet for you to be out here.”

  “Will you and Judith be all right?” she said as he took her arm.

  When Father came back, he went to the garage and came in with pieces of plywood. One by one he nailed them to the front door. I couldn’t bear to look, to see what he was doing to Mother’s door. But I heard the wood splinter and squeak and the rain whip and the wind batter. Then finally the hole was boarded up and the hall was quiet again.

  A policeman arrived as Father was drying the
floor. He stood in our hallway and wrote in a notepad. Father waited for him to finish, his eyes glittering like two lumps of coal beneath the light.

  The policeman said: “And you didn’t see who did it?”

  “No.”

  “All you found was the brick?”

  “Yes.”

  “At approximately nineteen hundred hours?”

  “Approximately.”

  The walkie-talkie on the policeman’s shoulder burst into life and he said back to the crackling: “Yeah, all right, tell him to hang on.… No, just a domestic.”

  Father waited. The crackling petered out. He said: “So what are you going to do to them?”

  The policeman said: “Who, Mr. McPherson?”

  “The thugs who did this.”

  “You don’t know who did it,” said the policeman.

  Father shut his eyes, then opened them. It seemed to me he was saying something without moving his lips. He said: “It’s the same boys I’ve been making complaints about for the past month.”

  “But you didn’t see them.”

  “On this occasion, no. I was in the kitchen with my daughter. We heard the crash, and when we got here they were gone.”

  “There you go,” said the policeman. He put his notepad away.

  “But our neighbor did see them.”

  The policeman said: “Could she identify them?”

  A vein pulsed in Father’s temple. “I don’t know; why don’t you ask her?”

  The policeman said: “I’m trying to help you, Mr. McPherson. If I were you, I’d think about getting some cameras installed. A visual holds up well in court.”