The Land of Decoration

Monday

ON MONDAY IT rained. Rooftops rang, drainpipes sang, and little pieces of snow coasted along gutters like islands setting to sea. Drips fell from Sue Lollipop’s hat as she crossed me over the road to school. I wondered if she knew just who she was crossing over but I didn’t say anything, because God had said not to talk about being his instrument.

Sue said: “I’m off to the Bahamas. Any day now, kid, I’m going to get the ticket.” I asked if I could come with her, and she said she would stow me away in her suitcase.

In the classroom I sat and waited for them to come in from assembly. I don’t go to assembly because Father says they sing to false gods. The smell of the classroom was making my stomach twist, so I forced myself to think of the snow I had made. And now it was turning to water. Two buckets were collecting drips from the ceiling, and rain battered the window. Drops falling from the sky stood out pale in the fluorescent light. They looked like tiny sparks, appearing and disappearing. I tried to follow them as they fell but it made me dizzy, and in the end I just put my head on the desk and closed my eyes.

The door banged against the wall and I jumped. They all poured into the room and a wave of sound came with them; they were laughing and pushing. Neil was jumping on Hugh’s back and shouting. I slipped down in my seat. Then I made myself sit up again. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I said. “Not anymore.”

Gemma, Rhian, and Keri sat down at the table. They didn’t say hello. They were looking at a magazine Gemma had. When Gemma saw me looking, she held it up so I couldn’t see.

Gemma has blond spiral hair and skin that is brown all year round. She can do the splits. She has two sets of gold earrings in each ear; gold rings on her fingers; wears high-top trainers with ankle socks; and has a spangly leotard. I have never had a leotard. I am not good at PE. I wear boots and long socks. I wore some trainers to school once, but they had a Velcro strap and Gemma said: “I had a pair like that—when I was four,” and everyone laughed. Gemma is good at making people laugh. But Gemma was just jealous of my trainers because they lasted longer than hers. And I wouldn’t be caught dead in a leotard, even if it did have spangly bits on it.

Gemma and Keri began to giggle. I was getting out my reading book to show I wasn’t interested. Then a pie hurtled past our heads. A bag of crisps followed and a few seconds later a pair of football boots. I turned around to see Hugh, on the floor and picking things, while Neil shook his bag out. Suddenly the door slammed. Mr. Davies said: “What in God’s name do you think you are doing?”

There was laughter and scraping of chairs. Neil sat down, then got up again and took a handful of the back of Hugh’s sweater. Mr. Davies shouted: “NEIL LEWIS! Do you think what I say applies to everyone but you?” Neil sat down and grinned as if Mr. Davies had paid him a compliment.

Mr. Davies passed his hand over his eyes and walked toward his desk. He got halfway then lifted his foot. He said: “What the—” Then his face turned dark and he shouted: “This is the limit! The absolute limit! How did this pie get here?”

Neil said: “It flew, sir.”

Lee said: “Hugh threw it, sir.”

Mr. Davies shouted: “I will not tolerate this sort of behavior! I will NOT, do you hear me?”

He took off his shoe and went to the sink and got two paper towels. As he came back, he tripped over the bucket that was collecting the drips. He stood up and his glasses were steaming. “Someone get some paper towels and CLEAR UP THIS MESS!” He sat down at the desk, loosened his tie, and opened the attendance book. “Right,” he said. “Right! Scott! Robert! Stacey! Paul…”

Mr. Davies had got to “Rhian” when there was a squeal from the back of the room. We turned to see Neil hoisting Hugh over the back of his desk by his tie. Mr. Davies stood up. “NEIL LEWIS,” he roared. “LET HUGH GO!”

Neil let Hugh go so suddenly he fell off his seat. Mr. Davies sat down and wiped his head with his handkerchief. His hand shook. It moved toward the drawer of his desk. He seemed to consider something a moment, then went on with the attendance.

When he had finished, Mr. Davies said: “Page seventy in your English books! Exercise eleven!” There were groans and opening and shutting of desks and slapping of books on desks. Mr. Davies said: “Is it possible to do it quietly please?”

AT TWENTY PAST ten, Mr. Davies banged on the top of the desk, the drawer shot forward, and he took something out. He stood up and said: “I’m going out for five minutes. When I come back I’ll expect you to have finished the exercise.”

“Five minutes!” he said, poking his head round the door.

As soon as the door shut, a waterfall of noise broke over the room. Chairs screeched, cupboards banged, someone began to draw on the blackboard, someone else got onto a table. Gemma put down her pen and yawned. She rolled onto Rhian’s shoulder and giggled. Then she sat up and looked at me sleepily. To Rhian she said: “Neil Lewis is sex on a stick.” But she was looking at me.

Someone said to Gemma: “All right, babe?” and I felt a wave of heat pass over my body. Neil was standing behind Gemma. He said: “Hiya, spaz. How’s life in Freaksville?”

I looked down at my book. “You are God’s Instrument,” I said to myself. “There is nothing to be afraid of.”

Gemma stretched back in her chair. She said: “Judith, your father is nuts. I saw him knocking on doors the other day.”

I said: “The world is going to end; we have to tell people.”

Gemma said: “You’re nuts too.” She turned to Neil. “Her father came to my house and asked my mum if she thought God would do anything about the trouble in the world!”

“He called on my house once and my dad told him to fuck off,” said Keri. “He had a hat on. He always wears that hat.” She laughed suddenly. “I bet it really smells!”

Neil said: “If he ever calls on my house, my dad will kick the shit out of him.”

I gripped my pen tightly. I said: “We have a commission. People have to be warned.”

“Oh God,” said Gemma. “She’s starting again.”

Then something happened very quickly. Neil pulled my head back and stuffed something into my mouth. The thing had edges. Neil pushed it so far I thought I was going to choke. He held on to my arms.

Gemma, Rhian, and Keri burst out laughing. I could feel the heat in my face. I wanted to shut my face up and lock it away but I couldn’t, and they went on laughing. Then someone ran in and said: “He’s coming!” Neil cuffed the back of my head and sauntered to his seat.

I pulled the thing out of my mouth. It was paper. The paper made a soggy lump on the desk. I scooped it into my drawer and bent my head over my book.

“Have you all been behaving yourselves?” said Mr. Davies. He opened the drawer of his desk and closed it again. His voice was stronger now. He said: “Let’s check these answers.”

But I couldn’t think about answers. Something was creeping down my arms and into my fingers, rising up my neck into my hair. My head felt hot and full again, like it did the day of the snow, and the room was vibrating slightly. Specks appeared in front of my eyes.

I wasn’t sure whether I was frightened or angry; if I was angry it had never happened before.

Tuesday

WHEN I GOT home that evening, I made a sandwich and watered my mustard seeds. I thought perhaps they needed more light, so I moved them to the other windowsill and prodded the soil a bit. Then I went upstairs and sat on the floor in front of the Land of Decoration.

I thought of making a model of Neil and sticking pins in him, but in the end I made a banana boat with lots of paddles and six little men with bones through their noses. I intended them to look happy, but they all looked quite fierce.

ON TUESDAY NEIL opened his mouth and rolled his eyes at me. He pushed his tongue in and out of his cheek and lapped. He flicked paper balls and they bounced off the top of my head.

I thought of hailstones and balls of fire rolling down streets. I thought about earthquakes and lightning. I thought about people screaming and buildings falling and rivers of molten lava. Then I heard someone saying: “Hello! Earth calling Judith!

“Well,” said Mr. Davies, when I looked up, “now that we’re all here…”

Neil’s lip curled and his eyes smiled.

At eleven o’clock, I went up to the desk for my work to be marked. I watched the army of black hairs move back and forth in Mr. Davies’s nose and smelled the sharp tobacco smell coming down it and waited for him. He handed my book back to me and said to the class: “Listen everyone, we have someone here who has already finished.” When I went back to my seat, Neil’s eyes followed me.

One by one everyone else came up to the desk with their books to be marked. At half past eleven Mr. Davies said: “You three at the back—the rest of the class is waiting for you.” Then Neil, Lee, and Gareth came shuffling to the front with their exercise books and slouched in a line.

Neil stood right behind our table. I could hear the rustle of his Puffa jacket and the silky sound of his warm-up pants and smell the sickly smell of his skin. Gemma was smiling, but I couldn’t see why. A minute later I heard a noise like a little trumpet and something landed on my hand. I looked down and saw a perfectly round plug of snot, pale green and circled with red. It must have fitted the inside of Neil’s nose exactly.

Gemma said: “What’s that?”

Keri said: “Gross!”

Rhian said: “Oh my God.”

My head began to get hot. I looked for something to get rid of it but I couldn’t find anything, so I wiped my hand against the underside of the chair, bent my head over my book, and began writing very fast but I couldn’t remember what.

Mr. Davies finished marking Gareth’s book and began to mark Lee’s. The line moved forward. Neil stayed where he was. I heard him shuttle a slug of snot to the back of his nose. Then I felt something in my hair.

“Oh my God,” Gemma said. “Judith, what’s in your hair?”

I put up my hand and my fingers came away covered with green paste.

I felt dizzy. I tried to tear a page from my exercise book, but my hands were shaking and it tore wide.

Neil said: “Judith tore her exercise book, sir.”

Mr. Davies looked up. “Judith, did you tear your book?”

Neil made a chopping motion with his hand.

“I didn’t mean to,” I said.

“She’s lying, sir,” said Neil. “She did it on purpose.”

“Be quiet, Neil,” said Mr. Davies.

“It’s true, sir,” said Gemma. “I saw her.”

Mr. Davies frowned. “Judith, I’m surprised at you. We don’t deface school property here.” He turned back to marking Lee’s book.

My head was very hot now. After a minute I tried to wipe away the snot, but the paper only spread it. Gemma said: “Sir, I don’t want to sit next to Judith.”

Mr. Davies said: “What is going on at that table?”

Rhian said: “Judith needs a tissue, sir.”

Mr. Davies said: “Judith, if you need a tissue, then go to the toilets and get one. I wouldn’t have thought I would have to tell you that.”

When I didn’t move he said: “Well, go on.”

As I got up, Neil smiled.

“And wash your hands!” Mr. Davies called after me.

The Other Cheek

I SAT IN front of the Land of Decoration for over an hour that evening. The little people looked at me with their painted-on smiles. I knew every one of them. The two little people I had made to begin with, years ago—a pipe-cleaner doll with a green sweater and a kite, and a fabric doll with brown hair, dungarees, and flowers—stared at me hardest of all. They seemed to be asking something, but I didn’t know what.

“God,” I said, “I’m finding it really difficult having this power and not using it to punish people.” But God didn’t answer.

AT TWENTY TO six I heard the front door slam. Father called up to me, then he went into the kitchen. I heard Mike with him. Mike is not a believer, so we shouldn’t associate with him, but Father says he is a good man so it’s all right.

Mike and Father work in the factory together. Most of the people in town do. Inside the factory they make steel for things that fly. Mike says as factories go it’s not such a bad place. In the next valley is a factory where they kill chickens, and someone got so tired of killing chickens he put his hand in the machinery. And not long ago in the paper, there was a factory where people began getting ill because their gloves weren’t protecting them from the chemicals they were using, though the factory said it was nonsense. But Father has never liked our factory much and is always in a bad mood when he comes home, unless Mike is with him.

I got up and went along the landing. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I stopped to tie up my shoe. And that was when I heard Mike say: “Doug’s a bad lot. I’d keep out of his way if you can help it. I know it’s easier said than done.”

Someone moved a chair and Father said something I didn’t catch, then Mike said: “Aye, I heard about that.”

Father put something on the Rayburn. “Jim and Doug go to the Social together. They’re like that.”

“Aye. Well,” Mike said, “I’d say something.”

“It’s cutting the hours that’s done it,” said Father. “It’s getting to some of them.”

“Extra meetings for the union.”

Father said: “The union’s a joke.”

Then Mike said: “It might be a joke, but if they do strike I’m not looking forward to it.” He sighed. “If it wasn’t this it would be something else. They’ll get this sorted and something else’ll pop up; it’s like molehills.”

Father said: “I didn’t read my contract properly,” and I could tell he was smiling.

Then they were quiet, and I went to the door and opened it and Mike said: “Top of the morning to you!” which is what he always says even when it’s evening. And I said: “How’re the hens laying?” which is what I always say back.

He said: “What have you been up to, Fred?”

I thought for a minute and then said: “Making things.”

Mike said: “Good for you. Why did the chicken cross the road four hundred and seventy-eight times?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because his suspenders were stuck to the lamppost.”

“Good one,” I said. I sat at the table and peeled a tangerine.

They went on talking, but not about the factory. After a minute I said: “What’s a bad lot?”

Mike looked at Father, then he said: “A bad lot is someone you should stay away from.”

I put a piece of the tangerine in my mouth. “What’s the union?”

Father said: “Judith, don’t you know better than to listen to other people’s conversations?”

Mike laughed. “The union is a group of people that hang around with one another.”

“Oh,” I said. I thought about Gemma and Rhian and Keri, and Neil and Gareth and Lee. I knew about gangs. “Why is it a joke?”

Father shook his head and got up. Mike said: “I suppose they just aren’t very good at what they do.”

“What do they do?”

Mike said: “Talk about the third degree! Well, they organize things so that us workers get a fair deal; that’s the theory anyway.”

LATER, WHEN FATHER and I were having tea I said: “Why isn’t the union any good?”

Father said: “You don’t give up, do you?”

I was just about to ask again when he said: “The union’s too disorganized to do anything.”

“Oh.”

He was eating quickly. I could see that a lump of potato was traveling down his throat. He said: “It’s nothing for you to worry about.”

“So why do they want to strike?”

“They don’t think our hours should be cut.”

“Should they?”

The muscles of Father’s jaw and temple were moving up and down. “It’s not important what I think, Judith. What’s important is that we honor the civil authorities as God’s representatives on earth. Jesus said: ‘Pay Caesar’s things to Caesar, God’s things to God.’”

“But is cutting the hours unfair?”

“Jesus said: ‘Turn the other cheek.’ We have to leave things in God’s hands,” Father said. “Most things aren’t worth getting wound up about. Most things are small stuff.”

Smoothed my potato down. “Small stuff is important too,” I said.

Father put down his knife. He said: “Are you playing with that food or eating it?”

I stopped mashing.

“Eating it,” I said.

The Present

ON WEDNESDAY, NEIL Lewis put a worm in my curry and threw me in the bin and I had to bang till Mr. Potts, the caretaker, heard me. When Father saw my clothes, he was angry and said he had enough to do without this, but I didn’t say anything about Neil, because I didn’t want Father to have to go to the school. I just went up to my room and told a story in the Land of Decoration.

On Thursday, Neil pulled my chair from under me and tried to start a fire in the playground with my bag. When Father saw my bag he said: “Damn it, Judith, money doesn’t grow on trees!” and I knew he was very angry because he had sworn. I went upstairs and played with the Land of Decoration and told a story about an umbrella that had a pattern of flamingos on it; if it had been opened, each flamingo would have taken flight, but it never was, because the little girl it belonged to loved it so much she didn’t want it to get wet.

On Friday, I kept my head bowed over my work and didn’t look up once, because if I had seen Neil I wouldn’t have been able to hide how angry I was. And it was strange how I didn’t remember being angry, only frightened, before I discovered my power, but now that I had, I was angrier than I had been my whole life and felt as though something was racing round inside me, like the Road Runner trying to get out.

Mr. Davies’s face was the color of putty that morning. He adjusted his glasses and his hand shook. Sweat glistened on his forehead. At ten to eleven he banged on the desk, fumbled in the drawer for a bottle inside, and stood up. He said: “I’ll be back in five minutes. Get on with your work quietly and remember: I’ll be checking spelling and grammar!”

When he had gone, pandemonium broke out. I bent over my book and leaned my head on my hand. We were doing creative writing in our news books. I like creative writing, but the subject was “Presents” and was difficult for me to write about. The Brothers don’t celebrate Christmas or birthdays, and Father didn’t buy presents, because he said the world was full of materialism and we didn’t have to add to it. I suppose I could have written about one of Josie’s presents, but I didn’t want to.

Gemma was saying: “I’m getting a pony for Christmas.”

“I’m getting a trampoline,” said Keri.

“I’m getting a pair of Rollerblades,” said Rhian.

Then Gemma said: “You don’t celebrate Christmas, do you?”

“No,” I said, “because it’s not Jesus’s birthday. It’s the birthday of the Roman sun god.”

Rhian said: “You don’t have birthdays either.”

“No, because they were pagan celebrations, and on the only birthdays recorded in the Bible, people were beheaded.”

Keri said: “You don’t have television either.”

“No,” I said, “because when my mother and father got married, my father said: ‘It’s either me or the telly.’ My mother made the wrong choice.”

They didn’t get the joke. They gave me the “weird” look, which is one eyebrow raised, chin drawn in, and a frown. Then Keri said: “You don’t have a mother, do you?” And I said nothing.

Gemma said: “Anyway, Jesus was born on Christmas Day. Everyone knows that.” And one turned her back on me and leaned on her arm and forced me over the edge of the desk.

But suddenly I knew what to write about: I would write about the snow. It was easily the best present I ever had, better than any Christmas or birthday present, and it was safe to write about too, because Father had only said I shouldn’t talk about the miracles and no one would read my news book except Mr. Davies, who wrote Good work at the bottom of everything—once I wrote I would rather die than go to school and he wrote Good work at the bottom of that too.

I drew a margin with my ruler. I wrote the date. I closed my eyes and the noise of the classroom faded. I could hear the wind rising. I could feel the air getting colder. Whiteness was filling my eyes. Everything got darker.

I DON’T KNOW how long I had been writing when I felt something behind me. When I turned, Neil Lewis was standing there looking pleased, as if he had just found something he had forgotten about. He said: “What you doing, spaz?”

“Nothing,” I said.

I opened the drawer to put my book away, but he was faster.

I grabbed at the book, but Neil held it higher. I grabbed at it again and he lifted it above my head. Then I sat very still and looked at my hands.

Neil found the page I had been writing on. He read in a loud voice: “I had the best present I found out I have a gift it was magic it happened on Sunday I made it snow—” He frowned. Then he laughed and shouted: “Oi! Everyone! Judith’s got magic powers!”

There were hoots. There were shouts. They gathered around.

Neil began to read again. “I made it snow I made it in my room I made it from cotton wool and sugar—”

There was shouts.

“God showed me how to make it—”

There were hoots.

“It was a mi-mir-a-mira-c-mira—there was no other ex-exp-expa-…” Neil cleared his throat. “… other explan- … explan-…” Neil frowned. “As we appro-appro- the con-conc-conclu- we must be vigi-…” He was getting red. “As we ap-ap-appro-appro- the con-conclusi- … we must be vigi- … we see an inc-inc-incre- in sup-erna- occ-occu-…”

People were staring. Neil said: “What the fuck?” and he hurled the book at my chest.

“Thank you!” I said, like it was all a big joke, but my hands were shaking too much to open the drawer.

Neil’s face was dark. He bent close to me and I saw again how blue his eyes were. He said in a soft voice: “So you’ve got magic powers. So you made it snow.”

I tried to smile, but the smile wobbled.

He came closer. His voice rose. “But you’re scared really, aren’t you? You’re scared now. You’re shitting your little pants.” His lip curled. “The end of the world. Ooh. I’m scared.”

There was laughter and shouting. Neil stood up and grinned. Then he sauntered away. And as he did, something rose inside me. It rushed down my arms and into my fingers. It crawled up my neck and into my hair. I heard a voice say: “You will be.” I think it was me.

Neil said: “What?”

Someone else said: “Oh my God.”

I said: “You will be.” And this time I knew I had spoken.

Neil’s face was thickening with something, as if he had smelled something foul, like when Gareth did one of his farts. He came close to me and said in a low voice: “You are such a waste of space.” And all of the words were heavy and slow, as if they were too enormous to be spoken.

My head was too hot to think. It was too hot to see. I said: “At least I can read.”

For one second there was complete silence. Then someone laughed. The sound bounced up as if released by a spring. It bubbled somewhere beneath the fluorescent strip light, then the silence reached up and strangled it.

Neil’s face was peculiar. It changed, then changed again as I watched, as if something was passing through it. He said: “You are such a fucking loser.”

I stood up and there was a roaring sound and my body was full of shaking blood. I said: “It’s you that’s the loser. You’re the biggest loser I’ve ever met. Stay away from me, Neil Lewis, or you’ll be sorry.”

“What are you going to do?” someone shouted. “Turn him into a frog?”

“I might,” I said. “If I want to.” I looked at Neil and I said quietly: “I can do anything I like.”

Then three things happened. Neil lunged forward, I stepped backward, and the door opened.

Mr. Davies said: “Why is everyone out of their seats?” Neil and I stared at each other. Mr. Davies said: “Perhaps you two didn’t hear me!”

Neil walked over to his desk. Mr. Davies said: “Thank you.”

I sat down, and I was glad to, because my legs didn’t feel solid anymore.

Gemma said: “Oh my God.”

Keri said: “He’s going to kill you.”

Rhian said: “Can you really do magic?”

I bent over my book. I tried to find my page. But two invisible strings were attached to my back. Whenever I moved, the strings moved too. When I turned, Neil was staring at me. And as I watched, he took a pencil in one hand and, without taking his eyes from me, snapped it.

A wave of heat rushed over me and I was falling. But I felt something else too. I felt my whole body pricking as if it was catching light, like it did when Brother Michaels told us about the mustard seed, like it did when I saw the snow.

And as I turned back to the front, I thought about the snow, of how it came softly at first, of how the flakes melted and left no trace. But how soon it covered roads and houses and wiped the town clean and flattened ditches and made the mountain disappear and shut down the factory and turned off the power and shouted from the page of every newspaper in black six-inch letters. Of how it came from nowhere, while I was sleeping, and turned the world white.

A Decision

WHEN I CAME out of school that afternoon, something happened that had never happened before. Neil and Lee and Gareth were waiting for me on bikes by the gate; they followed me all the way home.

I made myself walk slowly and didn’t look round. When I turned into our street, they circled, and Neil rode so close to my feet that gravel sprayed up. They waited to see which house I went into, then they cycled away. I went upstairs and lay on the floor and stared at the ceiling.

I like the ceiling in my room. There are small stains and gray furry balls in the corner where spiders live that are like a little cluster of huts. There are old cobwebs that hang like tired party streamers. And there is a hot-air balloon lamp shade. My mother made the lamp shade. She liked making things too. When I look at the hot-air balloon, I think of her and I think of traveling somewhere and leaving this town behind. I was looking at it now, but for the first time I wasn’t really seeing it. God, I said: “I wish I could do something.”

“Like what?” said God, and I was so pleased He had spoken to me again. I had the feeling of fire along my back and my hair, as if someone had flicked a switch.

I sat up. “Well, what’s the point of having this power if I don’t use it?” I said.

“Your father said it was dangerous,” said God.

“You use Your power.”

“Yes,” said God. “But I am the Almighty.”

“I’ve only used my power for good things so far, haven’t I?”

“Yes,” said God. “So far…”

“But this was what I wanted it for in the first place,” I said. And suddenly I was shaking. “I hate him!”

“Aren’t you forgetting forgiveness?” said God.

“Yes.”

We were quiet for a while.

Then God said: “Of course, there is another way….”

“What?”

“There’s the Old Testament as well, you know. Have you heard the saying ‘an eye for an eye’?”

“That’s the Law.”

God said: “I see you’ve been paying attention. ‘Soul will be for soul, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand.’ I got tired of being messed around, you see. If people hurt Me, I hurt them back. It’s My Fundamental Law. But you don’t need Me to tell you; you know all this.”

“What are You saying?”

“That someone needs to be paid back,” said God.

“Do You think so?”

God scratched His head—or it could have been His beard. I heard Him scratch something. “Yes,” He said at last.

“Really?”

“Yes,” said God. He sounded more certain. “Something has to be done.”

“I’m so glad You agree!” I said. “But what about Father?”

“He doesn’t believe you can do anything anyway,” said God. “I wouldn’t worry. What were you thinking of doing?”

“Oh, something little,” I said. “Nothing much. To begin with.”

“I like it,” God said. “I like your style.”

My heart began hammering. “And it will be OK?” I said.

“Of course,” said God. “That is: I think so. As you said, it’s a small thing. I can’t see any problems with that. A taste of his own medicine will do the boy good.”

“Hooray!” I jumped up.

“I’m just saying, I can’t give you a guarantee it will all turn out as you expect.”

“OK.”

“So are you going ahead with it?”

“Yes!”

God laughed. “Then what are you waiting for?”

How to Make a Man

THIS IS HOW to make a man. You will need:

mohair

cotton

umbrella/nylon fabric

all-purpose glue

modeling clay

pipe cleaners

paint (acrylic)

Wite-Out

toothpicks

wool

1. Make shoes and shins and hands and arms and a head and neck from modeling clay using the toothpicks. Make holes in them for wire with the toothpick. Let the clay harden.

2. Glue pipe cleaners into the holes and bend them into a figure. The spine must be thin enough to bend but not thin enough to break.

3. Give the man a nose (upturned, in this case), two eyes (blue, for example), a mouth (big teeth), and whatever else you fancy (freckles).

4. Give the man mohair hair (yellow, cowlick). Give him a mood (a frown, tears).

5. Wrap wool around the pipe cleaners. Measure the wool, then cut it off.

6. Paint the man’s shoes (or trainers). Give him trousers (or warm-up pants: black cotton and Wite-Out stripe). Give him a coat (or Puffa jacket: umbrella material).

7. Breathe into his lungs and stand him up.

A Knock at the Door

I PUT THE man I had made in the middle of a group of people. The people stood around and pointed. The man tried to break through the ring, but the people didn’t let him. He walked around, but the people wouldn’t let him pass. He sat down and put his hands over his ears. I felt better just looking at him. I had no idea what was going to happen yet, but whatever it was, I didn’t think Neil Lewis was going to like it.

Then I wrote up my journal. When I heard the front door shut I hid it under the loose floorboard and ran downstairs. My legs felt like I had just run a race and my heart was beating in my ears.

THAT EVENING FATHER lit the fire in the front room, which meant he was in a good mood. The front room is where all of Mother’s things are: the black piano with the gold candleholders, the Singer sewing machine with the pedal underneath, the three-piece suite she made white-and-pink covers for, the lupine and hollyhock curtains, the cushions she embroidered. I will be allowed to use Mother’s sewing machine when I am older.

It was nice in the front room, like being in a boat. Dark and rain buffeted the windows but couldn’t get in. The wind clamored and the waters rose higher and spray spattered the sides, but we were safe and dry. Father sipped his beer and poured me a lemonade and listened to Nigel Ogden while I lay on my belly in the half circle of firelight.

I was drawing the angel standing on the earth from the Book of Revelation who gave the apostle John the little scroll that was sweet and then bitter. That was what the old man in the dream said about the stone I had chosen, and I still didn’t know what he meant. I wondered if it mattered whether the sweetness came first or the bitterness did and tried to remember which way round it had been but couldn’t.

I liked Revelation. It was mostly about the end of the world and the last few chapters were about what it would be like afterward, in the Land of Decoration. “What will Armageddon be like?” I said.

“The biggest thing the world has ever seen,” Father said, and his voice was calm and good-tempered. He was settled deep in the chair and his legs were stretched out.

I sat up on my knees. “Will there be thunder and lightning?”

“Perhaps.”

“Earthquakes?”

“Maybe.”

“Hailstones and balls of fire rolling down streets?”

“God will use whatever He sees fit.”

“But it’s strange though, isn’t it?” I said. “Killing all those people…”

“Not really,” Father said. “They will have been warned for years, remember.”

“But what if one or two didn’t get the message,” I said, “and it couldn’t be helped? Like—what if they didn’t listen because someone had told them not to? Would God let them off?”

I looked at my drawing. The angel’s face was stern. Muscles bulged from his arms. He didn’t look like he would let anyone off.

“God can read hearts, Judith,” Father said. “We have to leave these things to Him.” I felt better when I remembered that and went back to drawing the angel.

When I had finished, I showed it to Father. The angel had blue eyes and hair like the sun. He had one foot on Egypt and one foot on Algeria. “There’s the Great Rift Valley,” I said, in case Father missed it.

Father said: “Very good.” Then he said: “Why are both the angel’s feet on the land?”

“What?”

“One of his feet is supposed to be in the sea.”

“Is it?”

I turned to Revelation, Chapter 10. Father was right. But if I colored over Algeria with blue, then it would end up purple and it would be the wrong shape. I said: “Does it matter a lot?” But I knew that it did, because the angel wasn’t just a parable but symbolic, which meant it had a larger significance, like Prefiguration, and even the smallest detail had much bigger meaning. So I picked up the eraser. And then our letter box crashed. Three short bangs.

Father went to the door. He opened it, but I didn’t hear any voices.

“Who was it?” I said when he came back.

“No one.” He put some more wood on the fire and took a sip of beer.

“No one?”

“No.”

“Oh,” I said.

I began to erase the angel’s foot, but the drawing underneath just got messy.

I sighed. “Maybe the angel moved around a bit. Maybe his foot got cold in the sea.” And as I spoke, the letter box crashed again, three short bangs.

This time, just before Father opened the front door, I heard the gate click and laughter. I peered through the curtains but couldn’t see anyone.

When he came back I said: “Who was it?”

“Boys playing games.” He put more wood on the fire.

“Oh,” I said.

Father was being very calm but I knew he was angry; he hated people knocking on the door hard or even slamming it, because the door had a beautiful picture of a tree in the colored glass, which Mother had restored. He often commented on how pretty it was.

I took a new piece of paper and drew the angel’s head. I didn’t want to think anymore about what Father had said, I had just begun coloring the face when the letter box crashed again.

This time Father went to the back door. I heard a shout and the sound of running feet, then the garden gate clicked.

A minute later Father came into the front room, laughing. He said: “I surprised them!”

“Who?”

“The kids.”

A wave of heat passed over my body. “What were they doing?”

“Making nuisances of themselves.”

“Have they gone?”

“Yes. They ran off when they saw me. They didn’t expect me to come up the lane.”

I looked down at the angel. “What did the kids look like?” I said.

“Boys. No older than you, I should think. One had blond hair. Big kid. D’you know anyone like that?”

I had felt hot but now I felt cold. The angel’s blue eyes looked back at me. “No,” I said. “I don’t know anyone like that at all.”

Sunday

SOME THINGS EVEN miracle workers can’t get out of. Today I discovered Josie has knitted me a poncho.

May said: “No, it’s a shawl.”

“No, no,” said Elsie. “It’s a poncho.”

“Orange with shells and tassels,” said May.

“Were they shells?” said Elsie. “I thought they were pearls.”

“Shells,” said May. “The small ones you can thread.”

“Anyway, she’s looking for you,” said May.

“Aren’t you lucky?” said Elsie.

I spent the rest of the time before the meeting hiding in the toilets.

ALF GAVE THE talk. His tongue was in fine form, flickering at the corners of his mouth. “What is God asking us to do, Brothers?” he said. He glared around, his face red, his eyes bulging. After half an hour it made my head ache to listen to him, but it could have been the fumes coming from Auntie Nel; they were stronger than usual this morning. Even the yellow plastic roses were looking the worse for wear.

Alf’s voice got louder. His arms thrashed. I thought he was going to get them tangled in the microphone cable. “What is God asking us to do?” he repeated. When he said it a third time I couldn’t bear it any longer and stuck up my hand and said: “Fill in our report cards?” because this is usually the right answer. But everyone laughed. Father explained afterward that Alf was asking what is called a rhetorical question, which is just meant to hang there and no one is supposed to answer.

Alf said I was right—of course, God did want us to fill in our report cards, but He also wanted us to have faith.

I pushed my nail into the side of my Bible. I had faith. More than anyone knew. I’d made things happen they couldn’t even imagine. If they knew, they wouldn’t laugh at me. If they knew, they would be amazed.

I couldn’t help thinking it was strange no one had noticed I was God’s Instrument. I’d expected it to be showing by now. I decided that I would ask Uncle Stan for Brother Michaels’s address. I was sure he would take me seriously.

AFTER THE MEETING, I went up to Uncle Stan and tapped him on the arm. I said: “I wondered if you could give me Brother Michaels’s address. Or his phone number.”

“Brother Michaels?”

“Yes.”

“Why’s that, pet?”

“I need to tell him about the mustard seed and how a miracle happened.”

He smiled. “Right you are.”

“What?”

“Well, I’ll get it for you.”

“Oh…”

“Remind me if I don’t bring it next meeting,” Stan said. He began putting papers in his bag.

Perhaps he hadn’t heard what I had said. “Uncle Stan,” I said, “I made a miracle happen! I made it snow!”

“Did you?” he said.

I said: “What do you mean, ‘Did you?’” The heat was coming back.

“Judith…” he said, and put a hand on my head.

“I’m not making it up!” I said. “I wasn’t going to tell you, but then it just slipped out—that’s why I need Brother Michaels’s address. This is serious. I need to know what to do next. With my power.”

“Well, I’m sure Brother Michaels will be able to advise you, sweetheart,” said Uncle Stan. “Now I’ve got to see Alf about something…”

But he needn’t have worried; I saw a bright pink hat with peach feathers coming toward us. Josie was scanning the room.

“I have to go too,” I said, and slipped to the end of the row. It looked like if Josie didn’t get hold of me soon, she would send out a posse.

The Fifth Miracle

WHEN I WALKED into the classroom on Monday, a woman was standing by Mr. Davies’s desk. It was difficult to know how old she was, because she was quite small, but I thought she must have been about Father’s age. She had red hair pushed back with a hair band and round glasses and small hands that looked raw. Her hands were as red as her hair. I liked her hair. I thought how good it would be to make it for one of my little people. I would use bright orange wool and tease the strands apart.

The woman was trying to open the drawer and the whole thing was moving forward. “You have to bang the top,” I said.

“Oh.” She frowned, banged hard, and the drawer slid open. She beamed at me. “Thanks. Who are you?”

“Judith.”

“I’m Mrs. Pierce,” she said. “I’ve come to replace Mr. Davies for the time being.”

“Oh,” I said. “What’s happened to him?”

“He’s not very well. But he’s going to be fine.” She smiled again. She had very small teeth, and at either side one of the top teeth lay sideways so that the edges stuck out. I liked Mrs. Pierce’s teeth. I liked her voice too. It reminded me of green apples.

She said: “Don’t you go to assembly, Judith?”

“No. I have to stay separate from the World.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Pierce. She blinked. “What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s a Den of Iniquity,” I said.

Mrs. Pierce looked at me more closely, then she sniffed and said: “Well, you’re not missing much.” She banged the desk again and the drawer shot out and caught her elbow. She closed her eyes and said something under her breath. Out loud she said: “This will take some getting used to.” At that moment the door opened and everyone came in.

They stared at Mrs. Pierce. She sat on top of Mr. Davies’s desk and crossed her legs. “Good morning, class eight,” she said. “My name is Mrs. Pierce. I’ll be looking after you for a while.”

“Where’s Mr. Davies?” said Anna.

“He’s not well,” said Mrs. Pierce. “But I’m sure he’ll be better soon. In the meantime we’re going to have to get used to one another. I have my own way of doing things, so there’ll be a few changes around here.”

There was scuffling at the back of the room. A second paper airplane hit my head. On it was written LOSER. Mrs. Pierce sniffed and reached for the attendance book. “For a start,” she said, “we’ll have you three boys—yes, you—sitting at the front. Would you mind telling me your names please?”

“Matthew, James, and Stephen, Miss,” said Neil.

Mrs. Pierce smiled. “Fortunately, Mr. Williams has drawn me a seating plan; it wouldn’t be Gareth, Lee, and Neil, would it?”

“Yes, Miss,” said Matthew. “I’m Matthew, and that’s James, and that’s Stephen.”

Mrs. Pierce jumped off the desk. “Come on, boys.” She began to move two tables together. “On your feet!”

“I can’t, Miss,” said Neil.

“Why is that?”

“I can’t find my bag, Miss.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Pierce. “When did you lose it?”

“Don’t know, Miss,” said Neil. A smile slunk across his face. There was laughter.

“Well, you can still come and sit here,” said Mrs. Pierce.

Neil pretended to be caught on the chair and tugged this way and that at his coat. “Oh dear,” said Mrs. Pierce. “It is difficult standing up, isn’t it? Can someone give Neil a hand?” Everyone laughed again but this time with Mrs. Pierce.

Neil freed himself from the table and swaggered to the front. Mrs. Pierce held out a chair and he sat down backward, looking at the class. Everyone laughed again.

Mrs. Pierce smiled. “You’re quite a comedian, aren’t you, Mr. Lewis? There’s just one problem. You’re in my class now and I don’t have time for jokes. Now, would you get your books out? You see, we are waiting for you to begin.”

Neil rubbed his head. “I can’t, Miss.”

“Why is that?”

“Lost them, Miss.”

“Your books?”

“Yes, Miss.”

“What, all of them?”

“Yes, Miss.”

“Do you often lose things, Neil?”

“Don’t know, Miss.”

There was more laughter.

Mrs. Pierce walked to the back of the room and pulled a bag out of the corner. “They wouldn’t be in your bag, would they?”

“No, Miss. That’s not my bag.” Neil turned to Lee and grinned.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Pierce. “Well, in that case, I shall keep this bag and its contents until the owner claims it. In the meantime, I will expect you to replace the books and equipment you need by the end of the week.” She threw Neil’s bag into the art cupboard, slammed the door, turned the key, and pocketed it.

Neil said: “Hey!”

“Yes?”

Neil scowled and turned to the front again. He shoved the desk. “I don’t want to sit in this crappy seat!”

“Cheer up, Neil,” Mrs. Pierce said. “This way you can see the blackboard more easily.”

I laughed out loud. I put my hand over my mouth, but it was too late. Neil turned round and his eyes flashed. But for some reason, instead of looking away I looked right back.

“Well, now that’s sorted out,” Mrs. Pierce said, “let’s get on with our lessons. We’re going to be reading poetry today.”

“Poetry?” Gemma said.

“That’s right, Gemma,” Mrs. Pierce said. “Nothing wakes you up like a good poem. That’s because poets never say exactly what they mean—or not the best ones. Instead they find other ways of saying it. They paint a picture or they talk about it as if it were something else. We use pictures in everyday speech too—for instance, we say ‘the leg of a table,’ ‘a sunny disposition,’ ‘I wouldn’t bank on it,’ ‘an icy stare,’ ‘boiling hot.’”

She wrote the phrases up on the blackboard. “See if you can spot how many pictures this poem uses to describe the sun: It’s by Robert Louis Stevenson and it’s called ‘Winter-Time’:

“So,” said Mrs. Pierce when she had finished reading, “did anyone spot the pictures?”

“Yes,” said Anna. “The sun in bed.”

“Good. And how does that help us understand what the poet is trying to say?”

“Because the sun gets up later in the winter,” said Anna.

“Good,” said Mrs. Pierce. “Yes. There’s less daylight. Anything else?”

“The sun is a blood orange,” said Matthew.

“Great,” said Mrs. Pierce. “And why is that applicable?”

“Because of the color.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pierce. “Have you noticed how much redder the sun can be in the winter? There are brighter sunsets too. Anything else?”

“The wind like pepper,” said Rhian.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pierce. “Now, that’s strange. Why do you think the poet wrote that?”

“Because it hurts your nose in the cold?” Rhian said.

“Yes. Excellent,” said Mrs. Pierce. “I can see this class is full of budding poets! The wind also tickles sometimes too, have you noticed that? And I suppose the poet could even be referring to hail. Now do you see how the pictures make the poem richer, more interesting?”

“There’s the picture of his breath like frost,” said Stephen.

“Yes, the patterns his breath makes in the air are like the patterns the frost leaves.” Mrs. Pierce smiled. “There’s one more picture the poet uses to help us see more clearly.”

“The land frosted like a wedding cake,” said Luke.

“Excellent,” said Mrs. Pierce. “And how does that help us see more clearly what the poet is saying?”

“Because the snow is like icing sugar,” said Luke.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pierce. “Or it could be frost. Sometimes frost is very heavy and as thick as snow.” She turned to the blackboard and wrote up each phrase. “Now”—she turned back to us—“does anyone know what those pictures the poet uses are called?”

She waited, then picked up a piece of chalk and turned back to the words on the board.

“Metaphor,” said Gemma. She looked at me and smiled.

“Well done!” said Mrs. Pierce. “Yes. Metaphor is when we talk about something as if it was something else. Can anyone give me another example of a metaphor?”

“A leap of faith,” I said. I looked at Gemma.

“Excellent!” said Mrs. Pierce. “Though that might be a little bit difficult to explain: Faith is believing in something. To say faith is like a leap is to say it’s like stepping into thin air, to leap from one place to another without getting hurt. Is that how you would describe it, Judith?”

I nodded.

“OK,” she said. “But in fact, going back to our poem, only four of the five ‘pictures’ Robert Louis Stevenson uses are metaphors; the last picture, the one where the poet compares the wintry landscape to an iced cake, is in fact a ‘simile.’” She wrote the word “simile” on the blackboard. “Can anyone see the difference between the metaphors and the simile?” said Mrs. Pierce.

I stared at the poem. I didn’t see what Mrs. Pierce was getting at. And then suddenly I did. I put up my hand.

“Yes, Judith.”

“The land is like a wedding cake,” I said. “It isn’t one.”

“Indeed,” said Mrs. Pierce. “Can you explain that to us, Judith?”

“The sun is in bed; it is a blood orange; the wind is pepper. But the land is only like a wedding cake.”

I felt Gemma’s eyes on me.

Mrs. Pierce’s cheeks were quite pink. “Did everyone get that?” she said. “A simile says something is ‘like’ something else. But a metaphor says something really ‘is’ the thing you are comparing it to. So, we have similes and metaphors, both pictures, both interesting ways of saying things. But”—and now her voice became quieter—“one is stronger than the other; one is much more powerful. Which one do you think it is?” She raised her eyebrows encouragingly. “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t expect you to know this.”

Was one more powerful? I wondered. The similes and the metaphors seemed to be the same. But I looked again and there was something about the line that said the sun was a blood orange that was missing from the line that said it was like a wedding cake. And then I knew why: It didn’t sound as good.

Mrs. Pierce beamed when she saw my hand. She said: “Yes, Judith.”

“The metaphor is stronger,” I said.

“Why do you say that?”

I flushed. Now I looked stupid, as if I had guessed. I hadn’t; I just couldn’t explain why I knew for certain.

I could feel Gemma looking at me. Neil too. But it was no use; I couldn’t explain. Mrs. Pierce turned back to the board.

“There’s a clue in the word. ‘Metaphor’ is made up of two Greek words: meta, which means ‘between,’ and phero, meaning ‘to carry.’ So metaphors carry meaning from one word to another.”

And then I remembered something someone had said: that it wasn’t enough to imagine what the new world would be like, we had to be there. It was Brother Michaels. He said faith could do that for us. “Because we’re there,” I said suddenly, without putting my hand up. Everyone turned to look at me. I flushed. “I mean, it’s there. I mean—it’s not side by side.” My cheeks were hot. “Metaphor isn’t imagining, it’s the thing itself.”

Mrs. Pierce’s eyes were so sharp they should have hurt, but they didn’t. They were like a current of electricity passing from her to me, and the current flared and warmed me.

“Yes,” she said at last. “The words aren’t talking about something; they become the thing itself.” She put down the chalk, and we looked at each other for a moment, and it was as if I was flying. Then the moment passed and she dusted off her hands and said: “Right, class, I’d like you to write poems using metaphor.”

LATER THAT MORNING, while Mrs. Pierce was organizing the stationery cupboard, a ball of paper landed beside Gemma’s elbow. I didn’t know how the paper had got there, but I saw Gemma’s hand close over it. She kept the paper underneath her hand for a minute, then unrolled it. She giggled and drew something, rolled it up again, and flicked it to Neil Lewis. Neil opened it and grinned. He passed the paper to Lee, and Lee’s shoulders shook. Lee passed it to Gareth.

Mrs. Pierce looked up. She said: “Is something funny? If there is, I am sure the whole class would like to hear it.”

Everything was quiet for a minute or two, then the paper shot back to our table. This time Gemma squeaked she was trying so hard not to laugh. She wrote something, rolled it up, and flicked it back to Neil. Neil then wrote something and flicked it back. Gemma slapped her hand down on the paper too loudly and Mrs. Pierce put her hands on her hips. She said: “Whatever is going on over there had better stop!”

Nothing happened for four whole minutes. Then Neil flicked the paper to Gemma. The paper shot wide and landed by my feet.

Mrs. Pierce put down the tubes of paint she was holding. She said: “Pick up that piece of paper. Yes, you, Judith! Read it out please.”

I picked up the paper and unrolled it. What I saw didn’t make sense. At the top was the word “METAPHOR.” Beneath it was a picture of a girl kneeling in front of a man. Something was coming out of the man’s trousers. It looked like a snake. A wave of heat passed over me and after the wave sickness. At the bottom of the picture there were four words. One of them was my name.

“Go on,” Mrs. Pierce said. “Read it out.”

I looked at her.

“Read it, Judith!” she said. “I won’t have any secrets in my class!”

“Judith gives good head,” I said.

A breath rippled through the class.

Mrs. Pierce looked like someone had slapped her. She walked up to me and took the paper. “Sit down, Judith,” she said quietly. Then she went to her desk.

“All right,” she said brightly. “Let’s get these fractions marked. Who can start us off with the answer to number one?”

Strike

“HOW WAS SCHOOL?” Father said when he got in.

“We’ve got a new teacher,” I said. “She read us poetry.”

“Good,” Father said. He filled the kettle.

“She read out a poem about winter.”

“Did she now?” He put the lid on the kettle and switched it on.

“And we talked about metaphor.”

“Good.”

“Then we all wrote poems and Mrs. Pierce liked mine.”

“Good,” said Father. “That’s good.” He placed both hands flat on the worktop and looked at them. Then he said: “Judith, I’ll be coming home later next week. A bus is bringing me and it might take a bit longer.”

“A bus?”

“Yes.” Father took his hands off the worktop. “They’re striking.”

“But you’re still going to go to work?”

“Of course.” He got potatoes from the box under the sink.

“Caesar’s things to Caesar, God’s things to God.”

“But why do you have to be brought home in a bus?”

“All the people who aren’t striking are going to go to work in a bus,” Father said. He ran the tap.

“Why?”

Father turned the tap off the wrong way, and the water came out in a spurt. He began to wash the potatoes. “Well, some people think we shouldn’t be working,” he said. “And they want to stop us.”

“Stop you?”

“Yes, Judith! Look, I’m just telling you so you don’t wonder why I may be a bit late.”

I knew he wanted me to stop asking questions but I also knew there was something he was hiding. I said: “What do you mean ‘stop us’?”

Father said: “I just mean—Look, it’s no big deal, OK? It’s nothing for you to worry about.”

“OK.” I looked at Father. “Aren’t you afraid?”

Father put down the potato peeler and looked at the taps. He said: “No, Judith. There’s nothing to be afraid of; the strike will be over in a week or two and everything will be back to normal.”

“Is Doug striking?”

Father said quietly: “You’ve got a memory like an elephant,” then more loudly: “Yes, Doug is striking.”

I looked at Father and knew I couldn’t ask any more. I wandered to the windowsill. “Nothing is happening to these mustard seeds,” I said. “Do you think it’s because I don’t believe they will grow?”

“No, Judith,” Father said. “It’s probably because you don’t know how to grow mustard seeds.”

THAT NIGHT, THE Bible reading was about the Harlot sitting on the waters. Father said the waters prefigured rulers and nations and the Harlot was causing civil unrest. “Like the strike?” I said.

“Well,” Father said, “it’s all part of the sign of the end.”

And then the door crashed. Three short bangs like before. Father went out and I heard a shout in the street. He didn’t come back for twenty minutes.

When he did, he was panting and his face was shining as if he’d been laughing. He said it was the same boys as the other night. He had chased them down the hill. He caught the blond boy at the top of the multistory car park. Father said: “He was saying: ‘Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, mister!’ As if I would hurt him! I frightened him though. He lost one of his shoes.”

“What did you do to him?”

“I just told him to clear off,” he said. Father shook his head and laughed. “I don’t think we’ll have any more trouble.”

Neil Lewis Learns a Lesson

THE NEXT DAY, while the others were in assembly, I asked Mrs. Pierce what the note meant. Mrs. Pierce turned over some papers on her desk. Then she said: “It didn’t mean anything, Judith. It was nonsense.”

I said: “It must have meant something.”

“Do you know who wrote it?”

“I think it was Neil … and Gemma.”

Mrs. Pierce nodded. “I thought as much.” She sighed, then she smiled at me. “How would you feel if we moved you from that table?”

“I’d like that.”

It was strange sitting with Anna and Stephen and Matthew. No one whispered or giggled or looked sideways at me. No one whispered or pushed my arm or hid my pen or took up all the space or threw things at my head or dropped things in my hair. I wondered why Mr. Davies had never moved me.

Neil came in late that morning, carrying a plastic bag over his shoulder. His feet made a funny sound on the floor, and when I looked down I saw that he was wearing a pair of daps like we wear for PE, except they were too big for him. “Neil Lewis,” said Mrs. Pierce, “where are your shoes?”

Neil said: “Shoes are for wankers.”

Mrs. Pierce said: “One hundred lines.”

“What the fuck?” said Neil.

“Three hundred lines,” said Mrs. Pierce.

Neil opened his mouth.

Mrs. Pierce said: “I asked you a question: Where are your shoes?”

Neil sat down and threw his bag under the table. His face was dark red. “Lost them.”

Mrs. Pierce said: “You lost your bag yesterday; today it’s your shoes. Have you replaced the books you lost yet?”

Neil frowned so much, his eyebrows hid his eyes. Suddenly he said: “My dad gave me a right bollocking ’cause of you! You got no right to take my bag!”

“Oh, so it was your bag,” said Mrs. Pierce.

Neil’s face grew purple. He said: “My dad’s going to come and see you!”

“Is that supposed to scare me?” said Mrs. Pierce.

Neil’s leg jigged up and down. He seemed to be thinking of something.

Mrs. Pierce sighed, got up, and sat in her usual place on the edge of her desk. “Now, what do you normally do on a Tuesday morning, class eight?” she said.

“Grammar,” said Hugh.

“Well, from now on we’ll be doing Art.” There were murmurs of surprise. “Gather round, everyone.”

She held up a postcard. In the postcard there was a café lit with yellow light. There were lamps in the ceiling and the lamps looked like little planets. The lines in the painting were warped, as if they had been painted by someone who was drunk, but Mrs. Pierce said the interesting thing was that the man who painted it could draw perfectly well. He had painted this way deliberately, to heighten “the emotional charge” of the picture.

Then she told us all about how pictures could make us happy or sad, comfortable or uncomfortable, excited or sleepy. She said pictures, like poems, were charged with electricity. There was laughter. Mrs. Pierce said: “Well, pictures make us feel emotions. Emotions are just electricity. How does the picture make you feel?”

“It makes me feel seasick,” said Gemma.

Mrs. Pierce looked at Gemma. She pursed her lips: “You’re quite an artist yourself, aren’t you, Miss Butler?”

Gemma said: “What?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pierce. “I saw an example of your artwork yesterday. Tell me, do you often draw your classmates?”

Gemma flushed. “I don’t know what you mean, Miss.”

“I think you do,” said Mrs. Pierce. “But perhaps the picture I saw was a joint masterpiece—with Mr. Lewis. Is that right?”

Neil scowled.

“I expect you both thought it was quite amusing, though I’m afraid I didn’t. And your grasp of human anatomy was sadly lacking.” Mrs. Pierce picked up a ruler and got down from the desk. “Would you like to know where your picture is now?” She said a little more loudly: “I said: Would you like to know where your picture is now?” Then there was a crack like a whip and Neil jumped. He wasn’t slouched over his desk anymore.

Neil had turned red. “Mr. Lewis!” said Mrs. Pierce. “I asked you a question.” Neil folded his arms and stared at the desk, but his chest was rising and falling.

Mrs. Pierce began walking again. “The picture is in a safe place,” she said. “Where it will stay until I decide what to do with it—and what to do with the people who drew it.” She frowned and put her hand to her chin. “Perhaps,” she said, “I should include it in the work I show to parents on parents’ evening. It would make interesting viewing, don’t you think?”

Gemma’s eyes were filling. She said: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Miss!”

“A liar too,” Mrs. Pierce said. “Well. It takes all sorts. Doesn’t it, Mr. Lewis? Yes,” she said as she walked back to her desk, “it takes all sorts.” Suddenly she sounded tired. “All right, everybody, let’s get painting.”

I painted the field I had seen in the dream. But instead of me and the old man in the field, I painted the first two people I had made for the Land of Decoration—the pipe-cleaner doll with the green sweater and the fabric doll with dungarees. Mrs. Pierce said: “That looks interesting.” I told her it was and that it was something I had made. “Really?” she said. “Out of what?”

“Rubbish,” I said, and I told her about the Land of Decoration.

Mrs. Pierce said: “And who are these two people meant to be?”

“Father and me,” I said. I hadn’t known this before but saw now that was who they were. I said: “We’re going to be there one day. When the earth is a paradise.”

“A paradise?” she said.

“Yes. After Armageddon.”

She said: “You really will have to tell me more about all of this, Judith. It sounds fascinating.”

I was very happy for the rest of the morning. When I had finished, Anna and I went up to the sink to rinse our brushes. I was swilling out the jar when I turned to see Neil beside me. He said: “Still got magic powers?” And then he put his mouth close to my ear. “You’re going to need them.”

He turned, and as he did he knocked the jar out of my hands, splashing yellow water on my skirt and tights. “Oh. Sorry,” he said. “I must have slipped.” He grinned. “You’d think you would have grown out of wetting yourself by now.”

Neil went back to his seat. I saw him nudge Lee and Gareth. Lee said: “Judith’s wet herself, Miss.”

Mrs. Pierce looked up. “Judith, what happened?”

Neil mouthed: “I’ll kill you.” I looked back at Mrs. Pierce.

“Judith?” she said.

Neil made furious chopping motions with his hands.

“Neil threw water over me,” I said suddenly. It was easy.

Neil stared at me.

“Yes, Miss,” said Anna. “I saw him.”

“Well, well,” said Mrs. Pierce in a flat voice. “Why am I not surprised? Judith, go to the nurse and get some dry clothes. Neil, you seem to have some sort of problem with Judith. What is it? Can you tell me?”

WHEN I CAME back to class twenty minutes later, something was strange. I knew it as soon as I closed the door. It was as if something had landed in the middle of the room and no one could look at it. Mrs. Pierce was walking up and down between the desks with a bright, hard look on her face, and everyone had their heads bent over their books. I sat down and then I saw what the strange thing was. Neil wasn’t in his seat. He was sitting with his back to us at a desk at the front of the room that hadn’t been there before.

He stayed there for the rest of the day, as still as a stone. I wondered if he could tell I was looking at him, that everyone was now and then. I think he could, and whether or not it was because of him not being with us, or because Mrs. Pierce was on the warpath, everyone was quieter.

When it was time to go home, Mrs. Pierce said: “Neil Lewis, where do you think you’re going? We have an appointment, remember?”

Neil’s shoulders dropped. He said: “Oh, Miss, I’ve got boxing! My dad’ll kill me if I miss it!”

Mrs. Pierce said: “That’s too bad; you should have thought of that before you swore in my classroom.”

“But, Miss!”

“No buts,” Mrs. Pierce said. “Get your exercise book out.”

She went to the board and in large chalk letters wrote: I will not use foul language in Mrs. Pierce’s classroom.

Neil stared at her. Then he threw his plastic bag down, flung himself into his chair, and slapped his exercise book on the desk.

“Three hundred lines. No mistakes,” I heard Mrs. Pierce say as I went down the corridor.

“YOU LOOK LIKE you’ve just won the lottery,” said Sue as she crossed me over the road.

“I’ve won something better than the lottery,” I said. I ran the rest of the way home. “It’s working!” I said, and I jumped up and punched the air. “It’s working!—And it’s better than I imagined!”

“How was school?” Father asked when he got in.

“Great!” I said.

Father raised his eyebrows. “Wonders will never cease,” he said.

More Knocking

AFTER I HAD gone to bed on Saturday night, the knocking began again. Father went out, but the boys had gone away by the time he got to the door. He went to the door four more times, but the boys kept running away. I watched from the window. When the letter box crashed a sixth time, Father went into the street, and Neil Lewis and Lee and Gareth and some other boys rode round him on bikes.

When Father came inside, I stayed awake for ages but I didn’t hear him come to bed. The boys ran sticks along the railings and threw stones at the windows. They laughed and did wheelies in the road. “Why is this happening, God?” I said. But God didn’t answer.

The next day, in the meeting, Father turned the scriptures in little jerks with his thumb and first finger. His head looked shiny and hot, as if there was too much blood in it. Uncle Stan gave the talk about being separate from the world. He said that the Brothers who were not striking merited the congregation’s support and that we shouldn’t give funds to the strikers. He said: “Our leader is Christ, not men.” A prayer was said for the safety of the factory workers, and Stan said we must have faith that God would help and we should not be afraid. Being afraid was just like faith, he said, but it attracted bad things instead of good. “If we’re fearful, we’re praying for the wrong things,” he said.

Afterward, everyone went to look at the new tracts we had been sent from headquarters. “It’s a new initiative,” said Alf. “We’ll use them next week.” Uncle Stan said we should preach in the main street.

I tugged at his sleeve. “Can I talk to you?”

I took his hand and led him to the side. I said: “I made another miracle happen. I wanted to punish someone. But something unexpected is happening.”

Uncle Stan shook his head. He said: “What is all this miracle business? I’m glad things are looking up for you, pet, but does your dad know you’re going around talking like this?”

I said that Father had said something to me, he had said it was nonsense but I thought that Uncle Stan would believe me.

“I do believe you, Judith,” he said. His face looked kind and tired at the same time. “At least, I think you think you’ve made something happen.”

I wondered whether to tell him about God speaking to me. I suddenly felt I couldn’t bear it a moment longer if no one knew. And then something strange happened. I heard God say: “DON’T,” very clearly. And it was peculiar, as if a bit of my brain had split off from the rest.

Uncle Stan frowned. “Are you all right?”

“Yes—”

“Are you sure?”

I put my hand over my eyes. “Yes,” I said and made myself smile at him.

Uncle Stan said: “Oh, by the way, love, I wanted to ask you if your dad was all right. With the strike and everything, it must be pretty difficult at the moment. We’re all thinking about him, but he never talks much. Is he OK?”

“Yes,” I said. “But he’s annoyed about the knocking at the door.”

“What?”

“There are some boys knocking at our front door.”

Uncle Stan frowned. “Your dad hasn’t said anything about that. Nothing serious, is it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s what I was trying to tell you, about what I did to the—”

And then God said: “STOP!” so loudly that I jumped.

“What’s the matter?” said Stan.

And then I jumped again, because another voice said: “All right?” and I looked up and there was Father.

He and Stan began to talk and I slipped away. When I looked back, Uncle Stan had his hand on Father’s back. I hoped he didn’t tell Father I’d been talking about miracles. Then I jumped a third time, because two fat arms grabbed me and a voice said: “Gotcha!”

A whiskery face with a mouth like a slash and creamy bits of spit in the corners was grinning. “You’ve been avoiding me!”

“No, Josie! Honest!”

“Hmm.” She eyed me suspiciously, then shoved a parcel into my arms. “Present!”

“Thank you.”

“Well: Open it!”

“A poncho,” I said.

There were more shells, there were more tassels, it was more orange than I could have imagined.

Josie’s body shook with laughter. “Well, I know how you like these little things. I’m so busy making things for this one and that one, but I always find time to make you something extra special. Try it on! It should fit, but I made it a bit big to be on the safe side.”

The fringe brushed my ankles. “Just right,” I said.

“Why are you taking it off?”

“Keeping it for best.”

I looked back to where Father and Uncle Stan were talking. Uncle Stan was talking and Father was looking serious.

“I want to see you wearing it next Sunday,” she said.

“OK.”

“Come on, cheer up!” she said. “Don’t you like it?”

I looked back to Father and Uncle Stan and they were laughing. Suddenly the world was brighter. “Yes,” I said, “I do. Thanks, Josie, I like it a lot.”

One Good Thought

THAT NIGHT THE letter box crashed again. I know that’s what it was because as I woke I heard the boys laughing and the gate spring shut. I got up and stood by the side of the window and looked through the curtains. I couldn’t see much without moving them, so I slipped into the other front bedroom.

Neil and Lee and Gareth were down below, with Neil’s brother Tom, who I sometimes saw at the school gates, and some older boys I had never seen before. When Father opened the door, they rode away. But they came back about five minutes later. One of the older boys was swigging from a can; the others were doing wheelies on their bikes and spitting on the ground. The phone rang in the hall, and I heard Father come out of the kitchen and the door slam behind him. The phone stopped, and then I heard him say: “Mrs. Pew!”

“Yes,” he said. “Thank you. I’m dealing with it.”

He said: “Everything is being taken care of, Mrs. Pew. Please don’t worry.”

I was cold then, so I went to bed.

When the boys came back they shouted: “Where’s the witch?” through the letter-box slot and threw chippings at the upstairs windows. I felt the noise in my chest like a shower of red-hot pellets, and I wondered if this is what it felt like to be shot. I couldn’t lie there, because my body was on fire and I was shaking, so I got out my journal and wrote. But the noise went on so I put the journal away and sat against the wall. I sat there for a long time, until it was quiet in the street, until the hall clock struck twelve. Then I got up and opened the curtains.

It was very still and very bright. The full moon cast long black shadows from the houses and trees in the Land of Decoration. The shadows stretched right across the floor. I wondered what they reminded me of, and then I remembered that the graveyard in town looked like that when shadows fell from the headstones.

“God,” I said quietly, “why is this happening?”

“Well,” said God, “to Neil it looks like you’re the cause of all his problems at the moment.”

“I can’t help it if Mrs. Pierce doesn’t like him,” I said. “What should I do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re God!” I said.

“But you got yourself into this.”

“You did,” I said.

“No,” said God. “It was you.”

“But I’ve only done what You told me to do.”

“You’ve done what you wanted to do.”

“It’s the same thing,” I said.

“What?” said God.

“I don’t know!” I said. I began to feel hot. “I don’t know why I said that.”

I didn’t want to talk to God anymore, I didn’t want to be in my room anymore, I was afraid the cloud would come over me again like it did the day I made the snow, so I went to the door, but when I got there I couldn’t go out, and I sat back down. After a minute I went to the door again and this time I went down the stairs.

Halfway down, I screamed.

A figure was standing in the hall. The figure whirled round and Father’s voice said: “What the—”

“You frightened me.”

“What are you doing up?”

“Nothing. I—I didn’t want to be in my room.”

He turned back to the front door. He looked like a boy with the moonlight catching the back of his head.

I couldn’t see any reason for him to be standing in the hall, so I said: “Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

I suddenly wanted to say something to him very badly, but I didn’t know what. “Don’t worry about the boys,” I said.

“I’m not worried!” He turned and his eyes flashed.

“Good,” I said. “I was just checking.”

“Everything’s under control!”

“OK.”

“They won’t be back tonight anyway.” He sniffed loudly and put his hands in his pockets as if that settled it, but he continued to stand there.

I said: “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine! You’re the one who’s all bothered! You should be asleep! What are you doing up?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, get back to bed.”

“OK.”

AFTER A WHILE the boys came back. I heard Father go out. He stood in the street and they rode around him, calling him names and spitting at him.

At last he came back in. I heard him open the front-room curtains and saw the light stream across the road. I heard a creak and knew Father had sat down in one of the wicker chairs. I didn’t understand what he was doing. Then I heard him begin to whistle, and I knew he was thinking good thoughts. The boys hung around for a while and then they went away.

My Perfect Day

FATHER SAYS WE should never underestimate the power our thoughts have to help us. He says that all we need is One Good Thought to save the day. I have a few good thoughts. These are some of them:

1) that the world is about to end,

2) that everything is actually quite small,

3) that I am in the Land of Decoration, having my perfect day.

The last is the best thought of all.

I HOPE THAT there are still things from this world left over in the Land of Decoration, because I am very fond of some of them. If I could have all of my favorite things in one day, that day would be perfect, and this is how it would be.

To begin with, there would be Father and Mother and me. I know Mother will be in the Land of Decoration, because God has promised to bring the dead back to life if they were faithful, and Mother is dead, and she is the most faithful person I know. They still talk about her in the congregation, about what an example she set, about how she died, about how she trusted. Margaret still has a dress Mother made for her, and Josie has a shawl.

I’ve tried so many times to imagine meeting Mother, but all I have are odds and ends. I know, for instance, that she had brown hair and eyes like me. I know she smiled a lot, because she is smiling in most of our photos. I know that she liked making things. But after that I have to use my imagination.

In my perfect day, it would be one of those days when you wake up to sunshine, with nothing to do and all the time in the world to do it in. This day would be like a bubble floating past your window. It would be like opening your hand and it landing right in your palm, the light touching it the way it does, so that only the surface seems to be spinning and the inside of the bubble is perfectly still.

The day would begin with Mother and Father and me having breakfast, and as we ate I would tell Mother all about my life in this world and how I had been looking forward to seeing her, and she would tell me what it was like to be dead and how she had been looking forward to seeing me. Then I would show her the things I have made with the things she left, and she would shake her head as if she couldn’t believe it, she would hug me, and then we would go outside.

It would be one of those days when everything shimmers and the world is made up of jostling pieces of light. The air would be warm and smell of summer and the hedges would be filled with cow parsley and butterflies. There would be dandelion clocks and crane flies and dragonflies darting and stopping quite still in the air. There would be a field leading down to a river with grass long enough to wade through and a few flowers and some trees, and in the distance maybe the sea. Mother would take one of my hands and Father would take the other, and it would be difficult to believe it was really happening, because I had imagined it so often, but I would have to believe it because it would be true.

We would go walking in the field. There would be lots of different sorts of grass, and the grass would get inside our shoes and the cuffs of our trousers and inside our socks. And there would be a shaggy dog with one ear up and one ear down and he would bounce ahead of us. He would race ahead, and on this most perfect of days I would be able to whistle and bring him back.

But Father doesn’t approve of dogs because he says they carry germs, so we would keep the dog away from him.

Then my mother would point and over the way there would be a Ferris wheel and music. But Father doesn’t approve of Ferris wheels and fairgrounds, because they are dangerous and they are a Waste of Money, so Mother and I would go alone.

We would ride on the dodgems and shoot down the slide. And when we came home, there would be fish and chips for tea, and the chips would be fluffy and squidgy, and the fish would fall apart in moist flakes, and the batter would crunch when you bit it and then it would ooze, and Mother and I would eat with our fingers. But Father doesn’t approve of fish and chips, so for him I guess there would be bitter greens or something.

And there would be television. This might seem a strange thing to have in paradise, but I like television. Father says television is softening to the brain, but he needn’t watch it, Mother and I could, when the stars came out, in a gypsy caravan which would be our home now, with blankets pulled over us and a fire crackling outside and sausages on sticks and black-currant punch. And I have forgotten the main thing! Which would happen earlier: There would be a hot-air balloon.

One summer day when Father and I were in the back garden, a balloon came over. It was like a creature from the deep sea. I saw the shadow pass over, I heard the flaring, and I wanted to go where those people were going so much.

Yes, there would definitely be a hot-air balloon and we would take a ride. Or perhaps just Mother and I would, because Father doesn’t approve of hot-air balloons either. He says they’re dangerous and if anything happened to you in one of them there would be No Chance. He means if it exploded in the air, you would get fried or plunge to your death. But I think the feeling of flying would be worth the risk.

I DON’T KNOW what Father’s perfect day would be like. I expect it would be full of Necessary Things like Bible study and preaching and pondering and Saving Electricity and Being Quiet and Wasting Not Wanting. In which case he has his perfect day all the time.

Or perhaps his idea of a perfect day vanished a long time ago and he has forgotten how to imagine a new one.

Neil Lewis Gets Angry

ON MONDAY NEIL looked at me and whispered a word which sounded like “blunt.” Mrs. Pierce looked up as he turned round. She said: “Neil, if you would like Judith to help you with your arithmetic, you can ask her. You don’t need to whisper.” Then Neil looked as if he would like to murder someone. He bent his head over his desk.

Mrs. Pierce said: “Do you need help, Neil?”

Neil’s fist tightened on his pen.

Mrs. Pierce said: “I’m sorry, Neil. I didn’t hear you. Was that a ‘yes’?”

Neil flung down the pen.

“Don’t be embarrassed, Neil,” said Mrs. Pierce. “No one is going to laugh if you are struggling. Would you like some help?”

Neil sat up so suddenly, the chair screeched on the floor.

“All right,” said Mrs. Pierce. “Then you’ve no need to bother Judith, have you?” She raised an eyebrow at me, then went back to her marking.

Everything was quiet for about fifteen minutes, then something whizzed past my head and clattered to the floor.

Mrs. Pierce looked up. “What was that?”

“A ruler, Miss,” said Anna.

“Whose is it?” Mrs. Pierce said.

Lee spluttered: “Neil lost it, Miss!”

“Judith took it!” Gareth said.

Lee said: “She can do magic, Miss.” There were guffaws and giggling.

Mrs. Pierce turned to me. “Judith, did you take Neil’s ruler?”

“No, Miss.”

“What is your ruler doing by Judith’s desk, Neil?”

“I don’t know, Miss,” said Neil.

“You can’t remember why you left your ruler there?”

Neil scratched his head and looked round. Everyone laughed.

Mrs. Pierce said: “Really, Neil, I’m getting quite worried about you. On Monday you lost your bag. On Tuesday you told me you had lost your shoes. This morning you can’t remember where you left the ruler you were using a few seconds ago. If this goes on, you should think about seeing a doctor.”

Everyone laughed again and Neil scowled. “Pick up your ruler, Neil,” said Mrs. Pierce. Neil came to the table and picked up the ruler. As he straightened he looked at me and his eyes were sleepy and slow, full of something I couldn’t name.

AT LUNCHTIME I walked around the edges of the buildings, looking for things for the Land of Decoration. I collected five different weeds, three wrappers, two can tops, a straw, and half a plastic Kinder egg case, in which I planted the weeds. I showed them to Mrs. Pierce because she was on playground duty. “Are these for the model world in your room?” she said, and I nodded.

“I’d love to see the things you’ve made,” she said. “Could you bring some in for me?” I said I would. Then I went to the toilets to water the weeds.

I was leaning over the sink when I heard a slippery sound, looked up, and saw a black jacket in the mirror. I didn’t have time to see any more, because hands were dragging me toward the toilets and my legs were scrabbling on the floor. Someone said: “See if God can help you now, bitch!” My head knocked against the toilet bowl; my nose was burning, and water was filling it.

Then I was falling backward, and Mrs. Pierce was holding Neil by the back of his jacket and her voice was shaking, but I didn’t think it was because she was afraid. She said to me: “Go to Mr. Williams, Judith, and tell him exactly what happened.”

When I got back to the classroom, Mrs. Pierce and Neil were standing opposite each other. Mrs. Pierce was shouting: “What makes you think you’re different from everyone else? What makes you think you can get away with this sort of behavior?”

Neil said: “I didn’t do anything to her!”

Mrs. Pierce shouted: “Good God, boy! I saw you!”

I sat down.

“There’s not one good thing I can say about you, Neil Lewis,” Mrs. Pierce was saying. “Not one! And to top it all you are an incorrigible liar. Right now I don’t know what to do with you! I don’t even want to look at you!”

Neil picked up his coat and walked toward the door. He said: “I’m not staying in this fucking dump.”

Then something happened to Mrs. Pierce. She was in front of Neil, blocking his way, her glasses were flashing, her cheeks two bright pink spots. I suddenly saw how small Mrs. Pierce was. Neil was almost as tall as her. I thought he was going to hit Mrs. Pierce, because his fists were clenched. Then I thought Mrs. Pierce was going to hit Neil, because her chest was rising and falling. And as I watched them, something seemed to be happening to me too, because my heart was beating so hard I was floating and something was flowing out of me as if there was a leak.

Nobody moved for what seemed the longest time. Then something, somewhere, snapped. The strings holding Neil were cut; Mrs. Pierce set her chin a little higher. It was difficult to say what changed exactly, but we all felt it. Mrs. Pierce said: “Get!” and Neil went to his desk. He put his hands over his ears and he didn’t look up.

And something about the way everyone was looking at him, something about the way he drew in his head and curled up, reminded me of something I had seen somewhere else, though just then I was too tired to remember what it was.

In the Classroom

AT HOME TIME Mrs. Pierce said: “Would you wait behind a minute, Judith, please?” so I sat at my desk while everyone trooped out, and after a little while the classroom was quiet.

Mrs. Pierce shut the door. Then she came to my table and sat down beside me. She said: “I’m sorry about what happened today. If it’s any consolation, I think things are going to change quite a bit around here, so you won’t have to worry about that sort of thing anymore.”

I said: “They’ve changed a lot already.”

Mrs. Pierce inhaled. She said: “And high time they did.” Then she said: “Judith, there was just something I wanted to ask you. You see, something I overheard Neil say today in the toilets puzzled me—something about God helping you? At least that’s what it sounded like. Perhaps I’m wrong….”

I heard God say: “Be careful. Be very careful.”

“Don’t worry,” I told Him.

“I don’t remember,” I said out loud.

Mrs. Pierce frowned. She said: “I thought I heard him say: ‘See if God can help you now’—or words to that effect.” She smiled. “I only mention it because it reminded me of something I read in your news book, about God making it snow. Is that right?”

“Get out of there,” said God.

“But Mrs. Pierce is my friend,” I said.

“I’m your friend,” said God. “And I’m telling you to get out.”

“I have to answer her,” I said to God.

I said to Mrs. Pierce: “Yes, I did make snow in my model world. And then it really did snow. But it was just a coincidence. God didn’t make it happen.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Pierce. “I thought you wrote that a miracle had happened.”

God said: “Get out right now!”

My hands felt slippery.

Mrs. Pierce said: “How did Neil know God ‘helped’ you, Judith?”

I looked down. “Neil read my news book.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Pierce. “Then I did read it there.”

“But it’s all made up!” I said. “It’s just imaginary. I’m a good storyteller.”

“You are,” said Mrs. Pierce. “Well.” She smiled and folded her hands in her lap. “That explains that.”

“Yes.”

I thought she had finished, but then she said: “Judith, there was just one more thing. There was a conversation with God in your news book. It was so lifelike I wondered whether you ever heard voices or chatted to people—in your imagination, of course.”

“Why are you still there?” shouted God.

“No,” I said. “I mean yes. Sometimes!”

Mrs. Pierce bent her head so that she could see my face. “And is that person God?”

“GO!” shouted God.

I rubbed my hands back and forth over my knees. “Yes,” I said to Mrs. Pierce. “But that’s pretend too.”

Mrs. Pierce’s voice was very soft now. “What about seeing things, Judith? Do you ever see things other people don’t, things that are invisible? Do you ever see things you can’t explain?”

God shouted: “She is going to ruin everything!” and His voice was so loud it sort of flattened me and it took me a minute to feel three-dimensional again.

I heard Mrs. Pierce saying: “Judith, are you all right?”

She was saying something else too but I couldn’t hear her, because it was like being turned round and round.

I heard Mrs. Pierce say: “It’s all right, Judith, it’s all right; let’s stop talking about this. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I was just interested, that’s all.”

Then God said: “GET OUT.” And His voice was so deep and so strange I wondered if it was God at all, and it frightened me so much that I began to cry.

Mrs. Pierce said: “Judith! What’s the matter?”

I walked to the door but I couldn’t go out. Instead, I stood there, staring at the handle and it was as if my body was one big heart. I said: “I’ve never seen anything invisible, but I do believe in God. And sometimes I talk to Him,” and it was as if the words were the burning coals the angel touched to Isaiah’s lips, and saying them was like stepping off a cliff. There was a rush of heat and my blood frothed up inside me. But once I had said them I was glad, because Mrs. Pierce smiled, as if she had been hoping I would say something like this all along and knew I would manage it eventually.

She came up to me and said quietly: “Does talking to God make you unhappy, Judith?”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. I looked down at my shoes. “I don’t know,” I said.

“All right,” said Mrs. Pierce. “Sometimes it’s difficult to know what we feel, isn’t it?” She put her hand on my shoulder. “You’re a very special person, Judith, I want you to remember that. I also want you to remember that if ever you need to talk about anything—anything at all—you can come to me and talk to me in the confidence that whatever you tell me won’t go any further. And though I might not understand, I’ll do everything in my power to help you.”

God was silent as I walked home. It was like being in a room with someone you weren’t talking to, but I couldn’t go out of the room because it was my own head. In the end I couldn’t bear it. I said: “Why were You acting so strangely? Mrs. Pierce is our friend.”

“I’m your friend,” said God.

“She was just being kind,” I said. “She wants to help us.”

“If you carry on blurting things out, there won’t be any ‘us,’” said God. “You’ll be on your own. Don’t you know how dangerous it is telling people everything like that? They’ll try to separate us. They’ll tell you you’re not talking to anyone at all. They’ll tell you you’re imagining it and send you to some sort of doctor.”

“I wouldn’t listen if they did,” I said. “I know what’s real. I didn’t tell Mrs. Pierce anything anyway.”

“You told her far too much,” said God. “Listen, young lady: Your power depends on you doing exactly what I tell you. That’s the deal. You won’t get far without Me.”

“I’m sorry!” I said. “I’ll try to be more careful. But I don’t understand: You weren’t like this when I talked to Father or Uncle Stan.”

“That was different,” said God. “I didn’t foresee any problems with them.”

“Father didn’t believe me at all!”

“Precisely,” said God. “I mean—more fool him.” He coughed. “Listen,” He said. “If that teacher tries to talk to you again—”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t say a word.”

Then I remembered something. “Oh, and God,” I said, “please don’t ever use that strange voice again.”

“WHAT, THIS ONE?” said God, and it was like being wiped out in a flash of light.

“STOP IT!” I shouted out loud, and I put my hands over my ears.

“Sorry,” said God in His normal voice. “Better?”

I leaned up against the railings. A woman on the opposite side of the road was staring at me. I felt like crying. “Was that really You?”

“Who did it sound like?” said God.

I shuddered. “The Devil,” I said.

Trouble Begets Trouble

FATHER CAME HOME late from work that evening. I knew he was going to, but it seemed an awfully long time anyway. I peeled the vegetables for dinner and put them in the saucepan. I set the table and I watered my mustard seeds. Though I didn’t know why I was bothering, as there was still nothing to be seen. Then I wrote in my journal and I told a story in the Land of Decoration about a dragon who loved roses and whenever he passed a rose tree would have to stop and sniff it but his breath charred the flowers. I couldn’t finish it. In the end I just sat on the stairs and waited.

At five to six I heard the bus and ran to the front door. Through the stained-glass picture I could see the bus. It had grates on the windows, and some were slipping off. A tomato was caught in one and what looked like egg was smeared on the window. There were six men on board. Father came down the steps, and even through the colored glass I could see how pale he looked under the streetlight. He waved to Mike, then came through the gate and I ran into the kitchen; I didn’t think he would have wanted me to see.

Father switched the kettle on. He said: “How was school?” He didn’t look at me but began lighting the fire in the Rayburn. I knew then that I mustn’t ask about work. I said: “Mrs. Pierce got cross with Neil Lewis because he tried to put my head down the toilet. But I don’t think I’ll have any more trouble with him.”

Then Father did look at me. He said: “Are you all right?”

“Oh yes,” I said. “It was nothing.”

Father frowned. He said: “Is Neil Doug’s son?”

I tried to think quickly. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Were you having trouble with him?”

“Sort of—but not anymore.”

Father said suddenly: “That’s not the kid who knocks on the door, is it?”

I looked at him and then at the fridge. “I don’t know,” I said.

Father straightened up. “Judith, you haven’t been aggravating him in any way, have you?”

“No,” I said, and my heart beat once, very hard.

“Are you sure?” Father said.

“Yes.”

“Good,” Father said; he turned back to the fire, “because trouble only begets trouble.” He stood up and closed the Rayburn door to a crack to let the air in. “And there’s more than enough of it to go round now lately.”

WE READ THE Bible while we had tea instead of clearing the table first. The study was about God being jealous. It wasn’t the way we thought of the word, Father said. It meant that God wanted people to serve only Him, that He exacted Exclusive Devotion.

My head was all tangled. I didn’t know if I was being stupid or asking a proper question, but I said: “Why must God have Exclusive Devotion?”

“Because He knows what’s best for us,” said Father.

I thought again, but for some reason what Father said still didn’t make much sense. I said: “Why?”

Father didn’t get angry as he usually does if I say “why” too much. In fact, it looked as though he was thinking about something else. He was frowning and holding his breath. And then suddenly the frown went away and he blinked and said: “What?”

Then I, too, had to think to remember what we were talking about. “Why does God know best?” I said.

“Because He knows everything,” Father said. And then he said quickly: “And He made us”—as if I should know this—as if he should know this—as if he should have thought of it before. Then he said: “Hang on,” and got up and went into the hall. When he came back, I said: “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

I looked at him, but he didn’t say any more, and he began to read again.

WHEN I WENT to bed, Father was sitting by the Rayburn in his overalls. After I had been in bed a little while, I crept back downstairs. But the kitchen light wasn’t on, the middle room one was, and through the keyhole I saw Father at his desk, sifting through bills he kept there. I was pleased he wasn’t staring at nothing like he used to and went back to bed.

But later, quite a lot later, when I was just dropping off to sleep, I heard the front door open, and when I peeped through the curtains he was standing on the pavement, the wisps of his hair catching the light. He stood there for a long time, though the street was empty.

Four Photographs

FATHER IS NOT the person he used to be. I know this because of four photographs. The first is in the album in the cupboard in the middle room. In the cupboard photo, Father is standing against a sign that says JOHN O’GROATS. He has jeans on and a belt that says LEVI’S and a T-shirt. He is smiling and his whole face seems to be shining. I have never seen Father’s face like that. This was taken on Mother and Father’s honeymoon, and Mother was taking the photo.

The second photo is in a silver frame and is a photograph of Mother and Father lying in grass. Mother is wearing blue dungarees and has long, curly brown hair, and the sun is in her eyes and all around her so that her hair looks like a halo. She is laughing so hard, all her teeth are showing. Father is holding the camera above them at arm’s length and making a funny face.

The third photo is in the album again, and they got someone to take the picture for them and are standing on a pier against some railings. Mother’s tummy is stretching her T-shirt; she has her arms around Father’s waist and her head on his shoulder, and he has his arm around her neck, and both are smiling and look as if they have caught the sun, and their hair looks like it has been blown all day long in the wind.

I don’t look at these photos often, because it feels so bad. It isn’t just knowing Mother isn’t here now but knowing she isn’t here because of me.

The last photo is the worst of all. It’s in another album and is quite different. Father is holding me in a white blanket. I am bound up like a little grub and all you can see is my face, which is crumpled and red because I am screaming. In the bed behind us is my mother. Her face is white and her eyes look very small and she seems to be in another place altogether, looking back at us. Father’s face is dark and his eyes are blazing. And this is the Father I know.

The Snowball Effect

THAT WEEK FATHER came home at six o’clock on the bus every day. It was strange being in the house on my own. I didn’t think it would be much different from when Father was there, because I am in my room and he is in his, but it was. May and Elsie offered to come and sit with me, but I asked Father not to let them, because it would be Bible stories all the way, and in the end he agreed, on the condition I didn’t touch the cooker, the matches, or the kettle.

Father was gray when he got in. Sometimes he didn’t cook the vegetables I had prepared but ate things like sausages and beans. Sometimes he didn’t even light the fire in the Rayburn but sat by the oven with the range on till bedtime. But no matter how tired he was, he always made sure we read the Bible portion.

I wished Mike could have stopped by. “Why doesn’t he?” I asked.

“He has to get home,” Father said.

I didn’t like to ask about the factory. Father didn’t say much except that there were lines of people called picketers at the gates and they shouted and never went away. “It’ll be over soon,” he said. “I’ll give them another week.”

But the strike people seemed to think it would last. On Tuesday after school, Mrs. Pew invited me round for tea. While we were eating corned beef sandwiches and macaroons at her foldaway table, some people knocked at the door. I heard Mrs. Pew open it and a man say they were calling on everyone, warning against failure to support the union and contact with something called “scabs.” He told Mrs. Pew to hang up if a scab tried to call, not to talk to them.

Mrs. Pew waited till he stopped talking, which was quite a while, then said: “I’m sorry?”

There was a pause, then the man said everything again and asked Mrs. Pew if she would like to make a donation for hungry strikers.

Mrs. Pew said: “Country bikers?”

“Hungry strikers.”

“Yes, I thought that’s what you said,” said Mrs. Pew. “I’ll get some money right away.”

She got some change from the jar on the sideboard. I heard her give the man some money and close the door. “A biking event,” she said as she came back into the sitting room. “I do like to give to a good cause. My husband, the late Mr. Pew, God rest his soul, was an ardent cyclist.”

“WHAT’S A ‘SCAB’?” I said to Father when I got home.

“Where did you hear that?”

“Someone knocked on Mrs. Pew’s door, wanting money for the strikers, and told her not to talk to scabs.”

“A scab is someone who’s not supporting the strike.”

“Then you’re a scab,” I said. “Why do they call them that? It’s a funny name.”

Later that evening, I was coming down the stairs when the letter box crashed and a water balloon fell through the slot and burst on the floor. I heard the squealing of bikes. I picked up the balloon. It wasn’t colored like a balloon I’d ever seen but clear. It was a different shape than a balloon too, longer, like a tube and the hole was too big to blow through. Father came into the hall from the bathroom, without his shirt on and with a towel round his neck.

He said: “Drop that!”

I stared at him.

“Drop it!” he said. “Go and wash your hands!”

On Wednesday someone tipped the dustbin up and strewed rubbish all over the garden. On Thursday, Neil and his brother snapped some branches off Mother’s cherry tree, and Father sat up till after midnight. On Friday night when the knocking began, he phoned the police. I heard him say: “Can’t you just send a car up or something? It’s getting beyond a joke. I’ll be had up for assault if I go out there and do anything…. No, I don’t know what started it.”

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:

I thought for a minute.

I chewed the end of the pencil.

“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.

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.

A Story

ONCE 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.

A Bad Lot

ON MONDAY 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.

Mrs. Pierce said: “Two things, Mr. Lewis: Firstly, it is your son who has been persecuting other children in this school for God knows how long. Secondly, I don’t like being threatened. I never have and I don’t intend to get used to it now. Now, if you don’t mind, you’re disturbing my class, of which there’s still another fifteen minutes; if you want your son, feel free to take him. I’d be only too happy for you to. He’s nothing but a nuisance.”

Doug Lewis came close to Mrs. Pierce. He said: “You stuck-up little bitch. I’ll have you up before the authorities. You won’t get a job anywhere!” Mrs. Pierce turned her face away. Doug seemed to consider something—we could hear him panting—then he decided whatever it was wasn’t worth it and lunged at Neil. The chair fell over. Doug pushed him toward the door and Neil stumbled forward, pulling his sweater straight. His face was still very white.

Doug Lewis glared around as if he was looking for someone, then turned back to Mrs. Pierce, but she wouldn’t look at him. Doug pushed Neil into the corridor, then followed, slamming the door so hard that the windows rattled.

Mrs. Pierce’s shoulders drooped a little. After a moment she said: “Get on with your work quietly, class eight. I’ll be right back.” Then she went out too, and we were left in silence.

I THOUGHT ABOUT Doug Lewis the rest of the day and how Neil had changed before my eyes. I thought how strange the classroom felt after they had gone, as if some shameful thing had happened to all of us, as if we had seen ourselves with no clothes on and couldn’t look at one another. The strangest thing of all was that I had wanted this to happen but now that it had I didn’t feel how I expected to. In fact, I felt quite the opposite.

Rising Above

THAT EVENING AFTER we had finished dinner, Father said: “I want to have a talk with you, Judith.”

“Oh,” I said. Suddenly I needed to go to the toilet.

Father folded his hands on the table and looked at me sternly. “I expect you’re worried about what’s been happening at the house. Well, don’t be. Sometimes God’s servants become subjects of attack through no fault of our own. We shouldn’t think that God has stopped helping us. It’s a test of our faith, d’you see?” I nodded.

“It’s never very pleasant being tested, but it’s part of being a Christian. The harder the test, the more worthwhile it is.” He frowned. “The point is, faith helps us to rise above these things. They don’t seem so big anymore; we see them for what they really are. Only then can we see them as they really are: stepping-stones bringing us closer to God. Of course, it also helps to know the real reason behind the recent events.”

My stomach felt as if I had gone over a humpbacked bridge. I said: “The real reason…”

Father said: “The real reason for things isn’t always obvious; those boys aren’t acting independently, although they think that they are; the unrest in the town isn’t really caused by the factory; they are all pawns of larger forces. Someone is behind all of this.”

“Oh,” I said. The room had become terribly still.

“These things are signs of the end,” Father said. “And we know who is roving about, like a lion seeking to devour someone.”

“Oh,” I said, and the room came back to life again. “You mean the Devil.”

“He’s our real enemy,” Father said. “He’s every Christian’s real enemy.”

“But don’t you think those boys are bad, then?”

“Do bad people exist, or are there just bad actions?”

I thought. “Bad people,” I said.

“That’s not what Jesus said,” said Father, and I could see he was pleased to correct me. “Jesus said it was the evil that proceeded out of a person that condemned them.”

And then I saw what Father meant, because I couldn’t have imagined feeling sorry for Neil before, but since I’d found out what Doug was like I wasn’t sure what I felt about Neil; now I felt angry with Doug. But what if Doug had a bad father? Would I feel sorry for him too? And what about Doug’s father—what about his mother? A long line of figures suddenly appeared, like paper cutouts. I said: “Then who’s to blame?”

“For what?”

“Everything.”

“The Devil.”

“What if he was a cutout too?” I said quickly: “I mean—what if something made him that way too?”

“No,” Father said. “The Devil had the same chance to be good as all the other angels.”

“So we are supposed to feel angry with the Devil?”

Father said: “There’s no need to feel angry with anyone. Jesus didn’t feel angry. He said: ‘Forgive them; they know not what they do.’”

“But God said: ‘An eye for an eye,’” I said. “‘A life for a life.’” I sat up straighter. “It’s the Fundamental Law.”

Father said: “Which would you prefer was applied to you?”

I didn’t say anything.

LATER THAT NIGHT, after Father had gone to bed, I woke and heard voices below my window. Neil Lewis and Gareth and Lee and the other boys were underneath the streetlight on bikes and leaning up against the railings. Neil was riding on another boy’s back. They were drinking from cans and crushing them and sticking them on the branches of Mother’s cherry tree. The sound of their laughing was like donkeys braying and pigs snorting. Two of the boys came against our garden fence and undid their trousers. I saw two bright arcs of water catch the light, and a cold wave passed through my body. I sat down on the bed. I said: “We must rise above.”

I said: “They know not what they do.”

I said: “I forgive you.”

It wasn’t working.

Little Witch

ON SATURDAY WE went preaching to Hilltop. Hilltop is the poor neighborhood at the top of the town. There are no trees there. Wind whistles between the fences and pebble-dash houses, and beyond the houses there is nothing but mountain.

Strange people lived in Hilltop. There was Crazy Jane, who hugged children and cried; Jungle June, who invited strange men into her flat; Dodgy Phil, who wore a mackintosh belted around the middle and had a three-legged dog; and Caerion, who thought the government was spying on him, kept the orange-and-brown curtains of his house closed, and disguised himself when he went shopping. We’d talked to them all at one time or another. Father even started a Bible study with Caerion, but it was difficult because he kept getting up to look through the curtains.

Someone else lived in Hilltop. Neil Lewis. We’d never called on the Lewises, so I didn’t know which house he lived in, but I was pretty sure it was one of the houses on Moorland Road, right at the top. I’d seen him riding his bike there. I didn’t know what would happen if we called on Neil today. Now that he was knocking at our house. Now that there was the strike and Doug wasn’t working. Now that Doug was angry because of what was happening to Neil at school. I didn’t know what would happen and I didn’t want to know.

We met in Stan’s house. We sat on his red settee and the room smelled of aftershave because Gordon was there and of dog because the dog was there and of toast because Stan’s house always smells of toast, and we read the day’s text. Stan said the prayer, Margaret said we must all come back for pancakes when we had finished, then we went out. Stan worked alone, Father and I worked together, Gordon worked with Alf, Brian worked with Josie, and Elsie and May worked together.

Josie prodded me. “You’re not wearing your poncho.”

“It’s too good for preaching,” I said.

She seemed to think about this. “I suppose it is.”

It was so cold I began to wish I had worn it. There was frost on the ground and small pieces of hail in the wind. The looks we got weren’t much warmer. Banners hung from windows. They said: SUPPORT OUR STRIKE and A FAIR DAY’S WORK FOR A FAIR DAY’S PAY. But I was thinking about Neil.

There was a little hope: The hope was that if enough people invited us in, we might never reach Moorland Road at all. It might really be possible too because, unlike other places, for some reason Hilltop was full of people who deployed no Tactics of Evasion at all but on the contrary invited us into their houses. In fact, sometimes the trouble was getting out.

We got off to a good start with the first person we called on. He was a fat man in a shirt more yellow than white, with oily hair that rose up at the front. There were pictures on the living-room walls of a man in a white suit with his knees turned in and paintings of Hawaiian girls whose skin was strange shades of orange and green. The man pointed to the picture of the man in the white suit and said: “The King is alive!” Father told him another King was alive too and showed him the scripture from Revelation about Jesus on a white horse. He gave the man a magazine and said: “This will explain things more.”

The man took the magazine but didn’t look at it. He grinned at me in a sickly way and made snapping movements at my face with his hand, like a crocodile. He said he had a daughter about my age but he never got to see her. Father said: “Did you know that there is a time coming when families won’t be divided anymore?”

Then the man began to cry. He said his wife wouldn’t let him near his daughter. Father turned to another scripture but the man didn’t look at it, he wiped his eyes on the back of his hand. He said he wasn’t the one who had been drinking. It was her, that bitch, though she told the court it was the other way round. It was her, that whore, she’d been having it off with some man up the road. Many was the time he’d thought of taking the ax and putting it through the two of them. And now she’d taken his angel. She had it coming, he said, she had it coming and one of these days—but I never found out what she had coming, because around about then Father said it was time to go.

After that we had a lot of houses where people shut the door straightaway and then even more where no one was in and Father said we would call back later, and I began to think perhaps we would get to Moorland Road before twelve o’clock after all. Finally we got to a house where a girl came to the door. She was wearing pajamas and had bare feet. The house was warm and I could hear people talking and a door banging. It was my turn, so I said: “Hello. We are talking about the good news of the kingdom. Did you know that soon the whole earth will be a paradise?”

The girl stared at me, she stared at Father, then she stared at the Bible.

I said: “Would you like to live in a world where there won’t be bad things anymore?”

The girl moved her feet back and forth in the carpet. The carpet was pink and fluffy. Her feet looked snug there. I said: “I’m sure you would. Can I share a paragraph with you from this book?”

The girl put her finger inside her left nostril and turned it.

I said: “This verse is talking about the future,” and I read the scripture from Isaiah about how the lion will lie down with the lamb.

The girl took her finger out of her nostril and put it into her mouth.

I said: “This is God’s promise, that the whole earth will be turned into a paradise. There are signs all around us that tell us it will happen very soon. Would you like to find out more about this?”

The girl took her finger out of her mouth and put it into her other nostril.

I began to feel hot. If she didn’t say something soon, we would have to go. I wanted to take her head and make her read the words. I wanted to make her say something so that I could say something back.

Then a woman appeared. She had three gold hoops in each ear, a necklace with what looked like a gold tadpole on it, and gold rings on each of her fingers. She held a cigarette in her hand. She opened the door wider and said: “What d’you want?”

I opened my mouth but Father said: “Good morning. My daughter was just telling your little girl about a hope for the future. We’ve been asking your neighbors an important question: Do you believe God will step in and do something about the world?”

The woman said to the girl: “Get in the house.” To Father, she said: “We’re not interested, love.”

Father said: “Did you know God has plans for this earth? Do you want to find out about a better future for yourself and your family?”

The woman waved and shouted to someone on the other side of the street: “All right, Sian! Aye! Don’t forget it’s bingo tonight!”

Father said: “Do you wonder what the world is coming to?”

The woman sucked on the cigarette, and her eyes half-closed and her bosoms swelled. “Not really,” she said, and she blew smoke in Father’s face.

“God said He would step in and bring an end to the wickedness we see,” Father said. “Can I show you that?”

“You’re wasting your time,” the woman said.

“All right, well, thank you, we’ll see you again,” Father said, and we walked back down the garden path.

A few houses later we came to Moorland Road.

I BEGAN FEELING sick as soon as we turned in to it. The wind off the mountain hit us like a wall, and there were little bits of hail in it. There was a burned-out car in the road and a lot of boys on bikes and music thumping somewhere. I looked at the boys on bikes but I couldn’t see Neil.

I said: “Do you think those houses we left might be in now?”

“We’ve only just called on them.”

“So,” I said, “they might be in now. There were some we missed altogether, you know—where the road went into that cul-de-sac. We should do them before we forget.”

Father said: “I didn’t think we missed any houses.”

“Yes,” I said. “And if we don’t go back, we might forget about them and Armageddon could come tomorrow and they will never have got the message.”

Father frowned. “Judith, why don’t you want to work this road?”

“I do!” I said.

“Then come on.”

At the first house we came to, the gate was hanging off. We knocked but we didn’t need to; a bull terrier chained up next to a mattress in the front garden began snarling and yanking the chain. A volley of bikes went by and boys called: “Bible thumpers!”

Father knocked again. I edged farther away from the terrier, who looked like he was choking himself to death.

“Father,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Do we have to work this road?”

Father said: “Judith, these people deserve to hear the message as much as anyone else.”

We walked down the path and went up the next one. The front window of the house was taped over with packing tape, and the letter box was missing its flap. A door slammed upstairs and someone shouted: “Whoever it is, tell them to piss off!” This time an old man with eyes like a wild animal opened the door.

Father said: “Good morning, sir. We’ve been asking your neighbors a very important question: Do you believe God will step in and do anything about the situation in the world?”

The old man’s eyes flitted from Father to me. He swallowed and his lips rolled over and under each other as if he was chewing.

Father said: “I expect things have changed since you were a boy. I expect you could go out without locking your door then. Things are different now, aren’t they? It’s not surprising so few people believe in God. But look what the Bible says will happen.”

The old man’s jaw moved up and down but no words came out. His eyes darted inside the house, then back to us again.

Father read a scripture and gave the old man a leaflet. The man’s fingers were yellow and the paper rattled in his hand. Father said: “Look at that. That’s the way God has promised to make the earth. Would you like to live in a world like that?”

A woman shouted: “Tell them to piss off!” The old man’s Adam’s apple yo-yoed in his throat. He backed away, closing the door.

Father said: “Perhaps this isn’t the best time. When we call again, I’d like to discuss this hope for the future with you. Have you got a Bible? If you do, have a look at some of those scriptures.”

We went out of the garden and Father wrote down the details. He said: “I think we may have found a sheep there, Judith. I think we may very well have found a sheep.”

It was now twenty to twelve. We might just do it, I thought. It wouldn’t take much; two or three more calls where we talked for a while.

At the next house, a man in a vest and trousers held up with string came to the door. The vest ended a bit above his waist and his trousers ended a bit below it. In between, his flesh was the color of the lard Father saves from the lamb on Sundays and there were lots of pale hairs. Father said: “Hello, Clive, how are you? I expect you know I’m a Christian. My daughter and I have been sharing a hope for the future with your neighbors.”

The man didn’t look at Father at all. He grunted and looked down the road. His chin stuck out.

Father said: “I don’t know about you, but this world seems to be in a pretty bad way to me.”

Clive looked down the road one way, then he looked down the road the other. He seemed to be holding his breath, because every now and then a little bit of air escaped. He put his arm on the doorpost above my head and his flesh juddered. In his armpit, pale hairs clustered like two little forests pointing in different directions.

Father said: “But the Bible promises we are living at a time when God will sweep this world away. Would you like to live in a world where there is job security and poverty is a thing of the past?”

Clive nodded to someone walking on the other side of the road. He let a little bit more air escape. But still he didn’t look at Father.

Father said: “Could I leave you with a leaflet that explains things a bit more?”

Clive didn’t do anything for a minute. Then he shook his head, very slowly, from side to side.

Father said: “Well, never mind. Perhaps we can talk again another time.”

Clive grunted, lifted his arm off the doorpost, and closed the door.

“Satan has blinded their minds,” Father said as we walked away.

We reached the end of one side of the street and began on the other. It was ten minutes to twelve. I really felt like we might just do it. All we needed was one more conversation.

We came to a house with a car engine and a child’s pram in the garden. The front door was boarded up at the bottom, and the glass was taped across at the top. When Father knocked, a girl came to the door, holding a baby. She looked about fifteen. She also looked half asleep. She had black hairs growing on her arms and black hairs growing above her lip and black hairs growing between her eyebrows. I could see her nipples through her T-shirt. She had bare feet. The baby was fussing and chewing his fist and had no nappy on.

Father said: “Good morning. We’ve been asking your neighbors a very important question: Do you believe God will do anything about the world?”

The girl’s eyelids seemed too heavy to lift. She said: “What?”

Father repeated the question.

She swayed a little. “Are you the Mormons?”

“No,” said Father. “We’re sharing with your neighbors a hope from the Bible.” He handed the girl a leaflet.

She screwed up her eyes. “D’you want money?”

“No.” Father smiled. “It’s yours to read if you want to. But I’d really like to tell you about the hope for the future, which—”

The girl opened the door. She said: “I can’t stand here with ’im, I’s too cold.”

Father said: “Oh. Well. That’s kind of you,” and we followed her into the house.

The house smelled of frying and gerbils’ cages and damp and something else, a sickly smell that made my stomach curl, that reminded me of someone. The girl led the way into a room at the back of the house.

I had never seen anything like that room. The floor and walls halfway up were covered in lino. There was no furniture except kitchen cabinets with no doors and a plastic table and molded benches that were fixed to the floor. A washing machine was going and had a broom jammed between it and the table.

We sat at the table. I put my hand on it and it was slippery and sticky. I took my hand off again and put it on my lap and hoped the girl hadn’t noticed. She raised her T-shirt and began to breast-feed the baby. Around the girl’s nipple there were little black hairs. I felt hot and looked at her feet. Between the girl’s toes there were little red marks. They looked like they had been bleeding.

Father read part of Matthew, Chapter 24, about the signs of the end. He said: “It’s not hard to see Jesus is talking about our day, is it?” He pointed to the verses but the girl seemed to be having trouble focusing. Father said: “Have you got a Bible? If you have, look up the scriptures in this magazine. I think you’ll find it very interesting.”

Then we heard what sounded like a truck pull up in front of the house and a door swing to. A rush of cold air came in from the hall as the front door slammed. Father stood up and smiled. He said: “Perhaps next time we call, we can discuss any questions you might have.”

We went to the kitchen door and Father put his hand out to open it, but as he did, it opened inward and standing there was Doug Lewis.

Doug looked at Father. He looked at me. He looked at the girl, and she rushed out of the room. I heard the baby begin to cry as Doug’s eyes slid back to Father.

Father said: “Hello, Doug. I didn’t know you lived here. We were just talking to your daughter about…”

Doug seemed to be as surprised as we were. Then he said, in a voice that was more like a growl: “She’s not my daughter.”

Father took my hand. “Well, I’m sorry if we’ve inconvenienced you. We didn’t know you lived here. We’ll be going now.”

We went through the kitchen door and my heart was beating so slowly it was hard to breathe. We walked through the hall and it was like being underwater.

Then Doug shouted: “Damn right you’ll go!” He seemed to have suddenly woken up. “Get out! Get out of my house! Don’t ever come back! Don’t ever step through the gate! Don’t set foot on the fucking pavement!” He kept shouting as we went through the front door and down the path. It was difficult to think and walk at the same time, though it was what I wanted to do more than anything, because my head felt like it was being battered from side to side and I was afraid I might faint.

“We don’t want any of your satanic mumbo jumbo, McPherson! You come here spouting about goodwill and scab off and leave the rest of us to take the fucking flak!” There were people staring from windows now and from the other side of the road and from the next-door garden. “Oh, and McPherson! Keep that little witch away from my son! Getting him into trouble all the time! Tell her to put the finger on someone else, d’you hear me? STAY AWAY FROM MY SON!”

We kept walking but I was in a dream, I had fallen through ice and I was sinking. The spot of light above my head was getting fainter and fainter. As long as I keep walking, I thought. As long as my legs keep moving. And then my legs felt like bits of string, because suddenly I saw Neil ahead of us, standing astride his bike with Gareth and some other boys. He must have come home with Doug in the truck.

Doug was still shouting as the boys began riding. They rode closer and closer. They stood up on the bikes and leaned from side to side. As they passed us, showers of stones spewed up from the wheels and the wheels made a tearing sound. The boys rode, in circles; the stones flew faster.

Father kept walking. He didn’t stop and he didn’t turn round and he didn’t let go of my hand. He walked right down the middle of the road. I didn’t see how the bikes kept missing us but they did. It seemed to me we were walking through the Red Sea and there were currents of electricity passing back and forth between Father and me and crackling in the air all around us.

We turned out of Moorland Road. The boys shouted. They threw a stone or two. Then they dropped back and it was just Father and me, the wind whipping around us and banks of cloud moving over the valley below.

Father held my hand for a few more moments and then he dropped it.

A Lie

FATHER DIDN’T SAY anything all the way home. I ran alongside him. Every so often I glanced up at his face, but it was set in a mask and I couldn’t read it. When we got home he went straight into the kitchen. He put his bag on the table, then turned round. He said: “What’s this about you and Neil Lewis?”

“I haven’t done anything,” I said.

Then he shouted: “Don’t lie to me, Judith!” and it was like being winded.

“All right!” I said. “I wanted to punish him! I wanted to punish him for what he does to me every day. I hate him!”

Father’s face was dark. “What do you mean, ‘punish’ him?”

I tried to breathe slowly. “I made things,” I said. “In the Land of Decoration. I wanted bad things to happen to him. And they did.”

Father said: “I have told you, Judith, about this NONSENSE! I warned you no good would come of it!”

“It’s not nonsense!” I said. “I did make things happen!”

Father came close to me. “Do you have any idea what I’m dealing with?”

I tried to keep looking at him but couldn’t, so I looked at the floor.

“Doug Lewis and I have never got on, but now things are a hundred times worse. Here I am trying to keep things together, trying to keep food on the table, trying to keep a roof over our heads—and you go around stirring things up with his son!”

“I haven’t stirred anything up.”

“You told him you could perform miracles!”

“I didn’t!” I said.

“Then what was Doug talking about?”

I looked at my shoes. “I wrote about the miracles in my news book; Neil read it out in class.”

Father banged the table hard with his hand. “But damn it, Judith—you can’t perform miracles!”

My body was full of shaking blood. “I CAN!” I shouted. “I’ve got special powers! Everything I’ve wanted has happened. Every single thing. But I didn’t mean to tell anyone—I wanted to tell you, but you didn’t believe me!”

Then Father shouted: “YOU DO NOT HAVE, NOR HAVE YOU EVER HAD, SPECIAL POWERS!” and I stumbled backward and covered my face.

When I looked again, Father’s hands had dropped to his sides and his face was white. He said: “What do I have to say to get through to you? What do I have to do to make you grow up?” He shook his head. “For the last time, Judith, have you threatened Neil Lewis or aggravated him in any way? Look at me!”

I looked at him, and I said: “No.”

Giving It Back

I SAT IN my room and I looked at my knees. “You told a lie,” God said.

“Father would have been more upset if I hadn’t.”

“Another lie,” said God.

“Oh, be quiet!” I said. “I should never have listened to You in the first place! I wish I had never found out about the miracles. If I’d listened to Father, none of this would have happened.

“Well?” I said after a moment. “Haven’t You got anything to say?”

I stood up. “You know what I hate about You? The way You just disappear when You feel like it. I wish I could disappear!” I sat down and put my head in my hands. “It’s like talking to myself.”

“God,” I said after a while, “I don’t want to be Your Instrument anymore.”

He couldn’t let that go. “What do you mean?” He said.

“I don’t want the power,” I said. “I’m giving it back.”