The Land of Decoration (17 page)

*   *   *

W
E 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.

“U
NCLE
S
TAN,
” 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.”

“Cameras?” Father gave a strange laugh.

The policeman said: “There’s nothing we can do tonight. We’ll keep this on file with the other complaints you’ve made. If anything else happens, you know where we are.”

Father half-shook his head. He looked as though he was trying to get something out of it that had got loose. He said: “What—that’s it?”

“All we can do is patrol the area now and then,” said the policeman. “Good night, Mr. McPherson,” and he went out, pulling our new door shut behind him.

*   *   *

I
BIT MY
lip. I could see the little hairs on the top of Father’s head shining in the light. His arms hung by his sides. He scratched his eyebrow, then they went back to his sides again. He said: “Your mother loved that door.”

I suddenly wanted to touch him.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I was scared; Father never mentioned Mother.

He blinked as if he was waking. “Why are you sorry?”

Then he frowned and all the darkness came flooding back into his face. “It’s nothing to do with you!” But the way he said it made it sound as if it had everything to do with me. He put the mop in the bucket, locked the door, picked up the bag of glass, and we went back into the kitchen.

And I ate all my bitter greens, every scrap, though they were cold now and slimy, so that Father would carry on pondering the Fall of Man that happened six thousand years ago and not the thing that happened forty-five minutes ago in our hall.

O
NCE THERE WAS
a man and a woman. When they met, sparks flew, meteors collided, asteroids turned cartwheels, and atoms split. He loved her from here to eternity, she loved him to the moon and back. They were two peas in a pod, heads and tails and noughts and crosses.

Something about her made him walk toward her. Something about him made her say hello. They got married in the town where they had grown up, and their families were so happy. Then someone knocked on their door and told them the world was ending. The man didn’t know what to think to begin with, but the woman saw the light straightaway.

Believing meant giving things up; their families didn’t want to know them anymore; they moved away, to another town where the need for preachers was great. They bought a small brick house. The man took work in a factory. The woman made dresses. The neighbors didn’t like them. They didn’t mind. They had each other.

They filled the house with things no one wanted: a door with a picture of a tree, a clock with no pendulum, a chaise longue with no springs, an old fur rug; a threadbare tapestry of creepers and snakes, a picture of angels; broken tiles of birds of paradise.

The woman took the paint off the door and cleaned the glass so that the tree could be seen and the light glinted in its fruit. They repaired the tapestry. They made a border for the fire with the broken tiles. The woman made curtains and covers from scraps of materials. The man dug up the concrete around the house and planted Christmas roses and golden cane and a cherry tree.

Sometimes I see them, her sitting opposite him in the evening in the armchair, her long hair on her shoulder, embroidering lupines and hollyhocks, wrapping silk around the needle and drawing it clean through the middle. Then I think they would be side by side and she would be mending something. Then I think, no, she would be at his feet while he read the Bible aloud. The woman is pregnant. The man is young. Every so often they smile at each other.

Then I stop imagining, because I don’t want to see what comes next. But often, because I don’t want to, I see precisely that.

O
N
M
ONDAY AFTERNOON
, Mrs. Pierce was reading
Charlotte’s Web
to us when the classroom door burst open and Doug Lewis appeared. A smell came into the room with him like rotten fruit, like the smell of Father’s old wine bottles he keeps, for the bottle-recycling bank. Mrs. Pierce lowered her glasses. She said: “Can I help you?”

Doug said: “You can do more than that. I want my son! You kept him here every afternoon last fucking week!”

Everyone sat back as if they had been doused in cold water.

Mrs. Pierce said: “Would you like to come outside?”

Doug said: “No, I would not!” His voice was loud, and it was blurred as if his tongue or his lips weren’t working properly.

Mrs. Pierce said: “I don’t know how you got into the school in this state, Mr. Lewis, but no doubt someone is on their way to escort you out again.” She went to the door and tried to take his elbow, but he shrugged her off.

I looked at Neil. Something strange seemed to have happened to him. The Neil I knew had vanished and in his place was a boy who seemed to be smaller, his face white and shut up, as if it had been wiped out. It was like one of those octopuses that change color even as you watch them so you can never be sure where they are.

“You’re persecuting my son!” Doug shouted.