The Land of Decoration

Through My Window

IT GOT DARK in the room. Shadows spilled over the floor and slipped down the walls. They skimmed the ceiling and the hot-air balloon light shade and traveled like clouds over the Land of Decoration. They appeared and reappeared and went elsewhere.

I watched the streetlights go on and the moon come up. The moon was so bright that it had a halo. It looked like chalk dust and the moon like chalk and the sky looked like a blackboard and all over the blackboard there were pinpricks of stars. I remembered it was written that the sun would be darkened and the moon wouldn’t give its light, and I wondered if when the end of the world came it would be like a giant eraser had wiped the moon and stars out and rolled up the sky like a blackboard, with a snap. I thought how nice that would be.

I heard the hall clock strike eight. I heard it strike nine. I heard it strike ten. Then I must have closed my eyes, because when I looked out the window again, I had slipped down on the pillow and there was a wet patch where my mouth had been.

It was very still and very cold. I had the feeling it was quite late and I felt uncomfortable, as if I had dreamed something bad and it was still dragging behind me. I felt confused too, as you do when you wake and aren’t sure if it’s morning or evening or can’t remember where you are, which was strange, because I was in my own bedroom. I suddenly thought that I might not be real, or I was real and everything else was make-believe: Either way it was a pretty lonely feeling.

A sound made me look down. Six boys were standing astride bikes under the streetlight. Neil Lewis was there and his brother and some other boys, older than I had seen before, about fifteen or sixteen. I edged closer to the window and sat so that only my face was in the light. I didn’t think they could see me, because the light was shining on the window.

They were doing wheelies and playing piggybacks and laughing and drinking from bottles and cans. Neil was sitting on top of another boy’s shoulders. He threw a can into our garden and it fell into the golden cane. Neil’s brother was drinking from a bottle. When he finished, he went right up to our garden wall.

What I saw next didn’t make sense. The boy pulled down his trousers and crouched down. There were cheers and whoops, but the noises made no sense to me now and sounded like the horns of cars or the honking of ships or some kind of animal. Another boy came forward and went to the wall, and he undid his trousers and there were cheers again. I let the curtain fall back, and for a minute I didn’t think anything at all.

I don’t know how long I sat there or if the noises went on below, because I didn’t hear a thing, but when I looked again, the street was empty.

After a minute I stood up. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do but I went to the door. I opened it and went along the landing. At the top of the stairs I stopped because my heart was beating so hard I felt ill. But it was as if my brain had switched off.

I could hear Father sleeping in the back bedroom. He was breathing hoarsely. I could hear the indrawn breaths. The spaces between the breaths were so long I thought he might stop breathing altogether, but the breath always came back again. It rose and rose, and stopped right at the top, and for a moment it was nowhere. Then it began all over again.

I wondered how people didn’t die every night, how their heart kept bringing them round without being asked to, perhaps without them even wanting it to, and I thought how amazing it was. I suddenly felt sorry for my heart. It was gripping me and letting me go and gripping me all over again, like a little man clutching his hands and saying: “Oh, oh, oh.” I said to my heart: “It’s all right.” But the little man went on clutching his hands, and I felt sadder than I ever had in my life and didn’t know why. After a minute I went on down the stairs.

I turned the key in the front door, and opened it and moonlight spilled across the hall. The street was silent. Cold was like smoke in my nostrils.

I went through the gate and looked at the pavement. I don’t know how long I looked at it. I didn’t even know it was a pavement anymore, there were blank spaces where there should have been words. After a while I went back into the garden and picked some leaves. Then I went through the gate, picked up what was on the pavement, and carried it and put it behind the golden cane.

I did it again and again. I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing. I was thinking about other things, and all the time my heart, my heart, was beating, beating.

I said: “What am I?”

“Dust,” said a voice.

“Is that all?” I said.

“Yes,” said the voice.

“What about my heart?”

“Dust,” said the voice.

“What about my mind?”

“Dust,” said the voice.

“My lungs?”

“Dust.”

“My legs?”

“Dust.”

“My arms?”

“Dust.”

“My eyes?”

“Dust.”

“I see,” I said.

“Dust you are,” said the voice, “and to dust you will return.”

The more the voice talked, the heavier my arms became and the heavier my legs became and finally even breathing was difficult.

Then I looked down and saw that the pavement was clear, and I went back with water from the watering can and washed it. I scrubbed it with leaves and with grass. I scrubbed so that little white curls of skin appeared on my knuckles.

“Dust,” said the voice, and I nodded.

I closed the gate and put the watering can back and washed my hands under the tap. The stars were so bright now that they seemed to be pulsing.

“But stars are made of dust,” I said suddenly.

“Everything is,” said the voice.

There was a glimmer for a moment, something I wanted to catch hold of. But it disappeared too quickly. I went inside, locked the front door, and went upstairs to bed.

Dust and Stars

ONE OF MY good thoughts is that there are no big things in this world, only lots of little things joined together, that there are other worlds in which we are as small as the smallest person in the Land of Decoration, that the band of the Milky Way people thought was everything is itself just one of billions of other galaxies and beyond that a cosmos at least a billion, billion, billion times larger than even the farthest part of the universe scientists can see with the biggest telescopes, and beyond that other cosmos that reach into infinity.

I like to think about how it could all go on still farther, that we only know about things like space and time because of light, so there is no way we can know what happens where it is dark, that other worlds could be out there, other dimensions, other Big Bangs, which is only another way of saying God. I like to think that all that has happened is the universe has taken a breath and bounced up and we have appeared for a moment before the ball falls back and the breath is withdrawn again. I like to think that from a certain point all things are the same, and the whole of our story is no more than the paint on the knob on the top of the Eiffel Tower, and we are the layer of pigeon poop on top of the paint on top of the knob.

I tell myself that small things are big and big things are small, that veins run like rivers and hairs grow like grass and a hummock of moss to a beetle looks like a forest, and the shapes of the countries and clouds of the earth look like the colors in marbles from space. I think how the shell of a nebula of oxygen and hydrogen looks like the splash made by a droplet of milk, when the sides rise up in a crown. I think about the pictures of rocks and of dust and of galaxies in space and they look no more than snowflakes in a blizzard, and black holes look like pearls in deep cases, superclusters like bath bubbles—like honeycombs, like cells in a leaf, the grid of a bumblebee’s nose. That the whorls of a nebula and the caverns of a fire glow with the same light and your eyes get warm and filled up looking at both.

I tell myself that wildebeest scurry like ants, the earth is a blue bubble floating in darkness, a cell is a spaceship. The pieces of comet-shaped rock, which are light-years across and thrust out of a nebula when it explodes, are heads of corn in a blue sky, if you are lying in a field in summer when the sky is cornflower blue, and the corn is reaching into it. I say to myself there are palaces in clouds, mountains in rock pools, highways in the dust at my feet, and cities on the underside of leaves; there is a face in the moon and a galaxy in my eye and a whirlpool at the crown of my head.

And then I know that I am enormous and I am small, I go on forever and am gone in a moment, I am as young as a baby mouse and as old as the Himalayas. I am still and I am spinning. And if I am dust, then I am also the dust of stars.

A Cornfield

I LEARNED YOU can do things you didn’t know you could the night I went down to the street to clean up the mess the boys had left. I learned that nothing is impossible and the only reason it seems to be is that it just hasn’t happened yet. These are useful things to know.

On Monday, Neil didn’t say anything about us coming to his house. Perhaps it was because his father had told him not to have anything to do with me, but it could have been because Mrs. Pierce didn’t take her eyes off him. She picked on his spelling, on his grammar, on the dirt beneath his fingernails, and on how far behind he was. He didn’t say anything, but more than once I caught him watching me. I wanted to shout: “I’m not doing anything to you! I’m never going to do anything to you again!” but I just had to sit there.

That evening I said to God: “I’m not doing anything to him, but Neil is still angry.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” God said. “You set the wheel in motion. It’s easy to do things, not as easy to undo them.”

“Well, I’m not making anything else happen,” I said. “I’ll never make anything happen again!”

“We’ll see,” said God.

That week I didn’t make anything new in the Land of Decoration; I just told stories. I told a story about a red balloon that wanted to go higher and kept on going until it reached outer space but after a while couldn’t be sure which way was up anymore, or which way was in or out, or which way was the future and which way was the past and in the end it couldn’t be sure it was going anywhere at all.

I told a story about an Eskimo who caught an enormous fish and they became friends and the fish didn’t want to go back to sea. But it couldn’t live on land with the Eskimo, because it kept breaking the ice the Eskimo was standing on, so they made a boat from a whalebone and the fish towed the Eskimo away with him and neither was seen again.

I told a story of a fiddler who played so beautifully that even the birds in the trees began singing his songs back to him night and day. The only time they would be quiet was when he played to them, but he couldn’t play at night, and he couldn’t sleep, and he couldn’t eat, and finally he broke up the fiddle and ran away.

I told a story about a cornfield. The corn was green and called out to the sun to warm it. The sun warmed the corn and the corn became yellow. The corn thrust itself into the sky. It blossomed, it jostled, it fingered the blue. “Warm us some more,” it said. The sun licked the corn heads. The corn became darker. It chattered and rustled. A little smoke appeared at the edge of the field. A little flame too. “Warm us some more,” said the corn. The flames were made of a sports drink wrapper. They spread as the wind carried them. The corn began to crackle. Someone rode to the nearest town and rang the bell in the square. People came from all around with buckets and hoses and kettles and tanks full of water. But though they worked all afternoon and though the corn cried out to the sun that it was burning, the sun did not stop; soon there was nothing left but a space where a field used to be.

THE LAND OF Decoration seemed to me to be getting uglier. I couldn’t remember why I ever began making it. The streets looked jumbled, the fields brown, the rivers dull, the sun just a bulb, the mirror sea a stupid idea. Perhaps it was always like this, I thought. I wondered what other things I had not been seeing clearly.

It occurred to me that I had been worrying about Neil Lewis when all along I should have been worrying about Father. On Wednesday I went to the corner shop after school to buy sweets, and a newspaper said: VIOLENT CLASH BETWEEN PICKETERS AND WORKERS LEADS TO THREE ARRESTS. It had a picture in it of a man lying in front of a lorry, which was driving through the gates at the factory, and there were police with shields and helmets and horses fighting men with baseball bats and dustbin lids. A man with blood coming down his face was being held by the back of his sweater. I was so surprised I just stood there. Father hadn’t told me about any of that.

I went to the top of the road and looked down the hill to the factory and I saw how strange it was really, like a sleeping beast, a black thing with funnels and towers and ladders and pipes and above it these huge clouds of smoke like clouds of breath. And somewhere inside it was Father.

THE BOYS KNOCKED every night, but Father no longer went outside. There were more boys than I had seen before, the big boys, about four or five of them, and there was Neil in the midst of them, spitting and swearing and riding on the others’ backs. Father phoned the police, but by the time they arrived the boys had ridden away. It became a game with them to scarper down the backstreets as soon as they heard the cars. The police found nobody, we went to bed, the boys came back, and it all began again.

On Thursday night something different happened. There wasn’t any knocking, just a flip of the letter box. Father waited a minute, then went into the hall. He was standing by the door with a piece of paper in his hands.

“What’s that?” I said.

Father’s face was blank. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

“Is it a note from the boys?” I said.

Then Father said: “Judith. Please.” As if he was hurt, as if I was hurting him. He had never spoken to me like that before, and I went back to the kitchen.

“I’d like you to send up a car,” I heard him say. “They are still here…. Yes … I can’t say over the phone.” He was silent for a minute. When he spoke again it was quieter. He said: “Let me tell you, you are making a big mistake…. Yes … I certainly will. I’ll bring it down first thing.”

“You’re taking that note to the police station?” I said when he came back into the kitchen.

“Judith, I would prefer it if you didn’t listen when I’m talking on the phone.” He threw some more coal in the Rayburn, then shut the door firmly and said: “From now on I don’t want you walking to school the back way anymore; go along the main road, all right? And don’t go out of the playground at lunchtime.”

“OK,” I said.

“And keep out of that boy’s way. He’s not a nice individual. I’m going to speak to the school tomorrow; if the police can’t do anything, maybe they can.”

“Really?” I said. I began to feel sick.

“Yes,” he said. “This has to stop.”

We were sitting by the Rayburn a few minutes later when something hit the front door hard. There were shouts. The voices sounded older than Neil and Lee’s, and there was laughter. There was another blow to the door and we heard the bushes crash in the front garden. Father cleared his throat once, sharply, and it sounded to me as if he couldn’t get his breath.

We were both very still as the noises went on and the air around us seemed to be getting thinner and more difficult to breathe. It went on, and on. And on. I didn’t understand how noises could paralyze you, but that’s what they were doing. I wanted to move more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life, but I couldn’t. Father’s skin looked as if someone was tightening it at the sides of his head. Suddenly he jumped up and went to the dresser. He took down the Bible, opened it, and handed it to me. “Read it,” he said.

“What?”

“Read.”

“Where from?”

“Anywhere.”

When I still looked at him, he said: “Go on!”

“Therefore thus saith the Lord concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow there, nor bare a shield before it, nor erect a rampart against it. By the way that he came, the same way he shall return, he shall not come into this city, saith the Lord.”

“Louder,” Father said.

“For I will defend this city, and save it, for my sake, and for the sake of my servant David. And it came to pass that night that the angel of the Lord went out and smote in the Assyrian camp a hundred and fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, look, there was not one living.”

“Louder!”

But my throat ached as if it was in a vice. Father snatched the Bible and began reading himself. He held the book away from him and read in a clear voice with his chin raised. He read till the hall clock chimed nine, through the laughter and voices outside, and I kept my head bowed.

A police car arrived again just after nine, but Father hadn’t called it this time. I wondered who had and thought perhaps it was Mrs. Pew or Mr. Neasdon.

Father told me to sleep in the middle bedroom and I didn’t ask why. He took a long time coming up, and when he did I heard him slide the bolt home on the front door and drag something heavy across it.

The Sixth Miracle

I DON’T KNOW if Father phoned the school or not, but in the middle of our math lesson on Friday Mr. Williams came to talk to Mrs. Pierce and they went out of the classroom; after a minute they came back in and Mrs. Pierce said: “Neil, Mr. Williams wants to talk to you.” Neil flushed dark red, and followed Mr. Williams out of the room. After ten minutes Gareth and Lee were called out too. Neil didn’t come back to class, but Gareth and Lee did, and they were pale and quiet.

I asked Mrs. Pierce if I could go to the toilet, and she looked at me sharply and said: “Are you all right?” I nodded. In the toilet I thought I was going to be sick, but in the end I wasn’t. I just sat on the floor by the bowl, leaning my head against the tiles.

I could feel Mrs. Pierce watching me for the rest of the day, and at home time she said: “I know things are difficult right now, Judith. We are going to support you and your father. I want you to know that. We are going to see that this sort of thing stops.”

LATE THAT NIGHT a voice woke me. Father was pulling back the blankets and saying: “Get up quickly, Judith.”

“Is it Armageddon?” I said.

“No, it’s a fire.”

“The Land of Decoration!” I said. And though a few days ago I had thought it was stupid, I realized I wanted it very much indeed.

“Just put your dressing gown on.”

Father took my hand and we ran along the landing and down the stairs. “The Land of Decoration!” I said again. “Let me get it! Please! Let me put part of it in a bag!” I was afraid I was going to cry, though I knew how much Father hated it.

He said: “The fire won’t get to your room, Judith; the firemen are on their way.”

We held our sleeves over our faces at the bottom of the stairs, because smoke was coming from underneath the front-room door, then went through the hall into the kitchen and the back garden.

Mrs. Pew was standing by her back door in dressing gown and hairnet. She didn’t have her lipstick on or the white stuff on her face, and she looked almost normal except for the wobbling. She was fiddling with her hearing aid calling: “Are you all right?”

Father said: “We’re fine. But could Judith stay with you for the time being?”

Mrs. Pew said: “Of course!” and held out her hand, and he told me to go with her.

Mrs. Pew made me hot chocolate and I sat at her breakfast bar and tried to see through the window into our back garden while Oscar sat on the windowsill, grumpy at being woken and flicking his tail. “A dreadful business,” Mrs. Pew said. “Truly dreadful. I’m always worried that a fire will start in this house. So far, thank the Lord, I haven’t had one.”

I heard a big engine pull up out front and doors slam. In the sky there were blue flashing lights. I heard men’s voices in our house. The back door was open and I heard shouting and a steady sound and every now and then a heavy noise as though they were dragging something heavy.

Not long after I had finished my second hot chocolate, Father came back and said it was all over. The damage was mainly by the front-room window.

Mrs. Pew said: “How on earth did it start?”

Father said a brick had been put through the living-room window. He said there was a rag tied around a brick. The rag was soaked with petrol. A match had probably been thrown in afterward. He said it all very calmly.

Mrs. Pew blinked and blinked and touched her throat. I thought she was going to faint. She said: “You must stay here tonight! You can’t go back.”

Father said: “I think Judith had better, but I want to keep an eye on the house, so I’m going to sleep in the front room.”

“But the window is smashed!” said Mrs. Pew.

“The firemen are going to board it up,” said Father. “I’ll come and get Judith in the morning.”

I went to the door with him. “Can’t I come home with you?”

“No. You’re better off with Mrs. Pew tonight.”

“Please,” I said.

“It’s one night, Judith.”

I SLEPT IN a room at the back of Mrs. Pew’s house in a soft feather bed that smelled of potpourri. The smell made me feel sick. The softness of the bed made me feel I was falling. I wanted to race back to my room, where there were floorboards and blankets and it didn’t smell of anything at all. I began to rock back and forth.

“God,” I said, “how could You let this happen?”

“If I were you, I would be asking Myself the same question.”

“What?” I said. “What do You mean, I should—Hello? Hello?” But there was no answer.

That night I dreamed of a house made from a shoe box. A Lego brick had been pushed through the window. There were flames of orange paper, and when they moved, they crackled. The flames reminded me of something, but I couldn’t think what. The fabric doll was asleep in the front bedroom and I shouted to her to wake up. The doll ran along the landing and woke the pipe-cleaner doll. Flames were climbing the stairs. They beat at them, but they faded then glowed into new life again.

When I woke, it was like coming up through water, the opposite of drowning, though it felt just as bad. And then I remembered what the flames reminded me of: the cellophane wrapper from a bottle of sports drink.

THE NEXT MORNING, while it was still early, Father came to take me home. I looked at him as we went through Mrs. Pew’s gate into our back garden, but his face didn’t tell me anything; there was no expression on it at all.

Inside the house, everything smelled of smoke. The front-room tiles were black and the walls were black around the window and there were pools of black water on the floor. The armchairs were black and eaten down to the stuffing. The paint on Mother’s sewing machine was bubbly and flaking. Where the window used to be there was now a board.

The front garden was like one of the pictures in the leaflet showing what it would be like after Armageddon. The golden cane around the front-room window was burned to the ground and so were the Christmas roses. The cherry tree was charred and the ground full of cinders. A rug, armchair, and table were piled up by the gate, and they were black too.

My room was as I left it: the bedclothes thrown back, the Land of Decoration just the same, the two little dolls I dreamed about safe and sound.

I got down on my knees. I said: “Thank you!” over and over, and clasped my hands. Then I opened my eyes. And I stared.

Because in the middle of the Land of Decoration was the cornfield, the one that caught fire, and one half of it was covered with the wrapper from a bottle of sports drink.

Master and Servant

I SAT ON the side of the bath and said: “I don’t understand, I don’t understand, I don’t understand.” I wiped my mouth and flushed the toilet.

Then I went back to my room and I screwed up the drink wrapper and rolled up the field. I stamped on the earth and threw away the grass heads. I put the people and the containers of water back where they were. I said: “I don’t understand. I didn’t want to make a fire. I was playing.”

“Didn’t you realize that whatever you make can become real?” said the voice.

“No!” I said. “I thought I had to make something on purpose.”

“When you made the field, you were frightened,” God said. “Fear can make things happen. It’s like praying for disaster.”

“But that would mean something could happen at any time,” I said, “that things come from nothing—out of thin air!”

God said: “It’s worth considering that that model world has got a life of its own.”

“Then I’ll throw it away!” I said. “I won’t keep it! Anyway it isn’t me! It’s You! It’s not me who makes things happen! You made the fire! I said I wouldn’t make anything else happen and I meant it. I don’t want the power! I don’t want anything to do with it!”

“Power can be a difficult creature to tame,” God said. “Sometimes it’s not certain who the master is and who the servant. Anyway, I’m afraid you can’t just hand it back.”

“Why not?” I said. “No one said anything about having to keep it.”

“Well you’re becoming very useful to me. And anyway, you can’t switch the power on and off, you know.”

“Then it’s simple,” I said. “I won’t do a thing—ever again.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Watch me!”

“The power won’t leave,” said God.

“Please take it,” I said and I bit down hard on my lip so that I wouldn’t cry. “Nothing happens the way I think it will. Something always goes wrong.”

“That’s because Something and Nothing are more closely related than people think,” God said.

Dark Matter

FATHER TOLD ME that there is a lot of Something in the universe and we can see it and measure it and it takes up space and things bounce off it and go on their way again. But for all of the Something there is just as much Nothing which can’t be seen and can’t be measured and people only stumble upon it by accident.

I have wondered if God made the Nothing or it came about by itself. Perhaps there could be no Something without Nothing. Just because the Nothing is invisible doesn’t mean it isn’t strong. It’s more dangerous than Something, because you can’t see where it is and it makes things disappear. In some places the Nothing is so strong that everything we know vanishes altogether. This is called Dark Matter.

Father said Dark Matter was what God used to create the universe. It drew things into itself, and those things were never seen again or came out the other end so misshapen they didn’t look like themselves anymore. He explained Dark Matter as the outside surface of a box and matter as the inside surface. We are inside the box so we see only the Something. But if you took the same piece of cardboard and unfolded it, you would see that both are simply different sides of the same thing. In fact, if you folded the box back up again the wrong way, you wouldn’t know the difference. This shows how close Something and Nothing really are.

How can you tell if you are dealing with Nothing or Something? How can you be sure if you’re inside the box or outside it? You can’t. And this is the problem: The inside and the outside, depending on where you’re standing, look just the same.

A Fence

I WAS WRITING in my journal when I looked up and saw Father standing in the doorway. I pushed the journal away and said: “Are we going preaching?”

“No.” His eyes were dark. “Put on some rough clothes and come downstairs.” I didn’t have time to ask any more, because he was gone. A minute later I heard the back door slam and some clattering. I put my journal underneath the floorboard and pulled on my dungarees and sweater and went downstairs. Father was hauling planks round to the front of the house. He thrust a bucket of nails into my hand and said: “Take these out the front,” so I went into the garden and waited.

The world was blue and yellow and glittering like diamonds, and the air was so cold it burned the inside of my nose. The outline of the mountain looked like it had been drawn with a pin. A robin perched in the branches of the cherry tree and began to sing, and the notes cooled like drops of lead as they fell around me.

Father appeared after a minute with a saw and planks and two milk crates. He set up the milk crates and laid the first plank across them. “Hold it tight,” he said to me and I held the end of the plank. Then he started sawing. His body shuddered with each stroke and the sound tore the air. His face was red. A plank fell to the ground and he reached for another. It was horrible holding the planks.

When the saw’s teeth stuck, the plank brought me up with it. When the saw bent, my own teeth jumped.

Father began ramming the cut planks against the garden wall. I didn’t know where he would put them, because there was already a wall around our garden and above the wall railings, like in all the front gardens, but I began handing him nails. He put the planks on either side of the railings and smashed the nails so far into the wood that it splintered, so far in that the heads disappeared. He hammered nails all over the place, at all sorts of angles; once he hammered his finger, and blood ran down his hand.

The planks were different sizes and different thicknesses. They began and ended in different places. If they weren’t long enough, Father hammered on another one. If there was a gap, he threw cement into it, and stones, or pieces of brick. I thought he would throw himself in too if he could.

He didn’t look at me and he didn’t speak to me. Around about ten o’clock he started making noises like an animal. The noises made me sick in my chest and my arms feel like liquid. He said: “What are you staring at?” and I turned my head so he couldn’t see that I was crying.

He worked all morning, not stopping to eat or drink, his breath filling the air in great clouds. I kept passing him things as fast as he shouted. He threw off his sweater; his shirt was wet with sweat.

A small group of people gathered on the opposite pavement. Mrs. Andrews was there and Mr. Evans and Mr. Andrews. I don’t think they had ever seen a fence go up so quickly. At half past eleven Mr. Neasdon came out of next door and stood on the pavement. He had his hands on his hips and was blinking fast.

Father either didn’t see him or pretended not to. “McPherson!” Mr. Neasdon shouted. “What’s going on?”

“Fence!” said Father.

Mr. Neasdon said: “Did it occur to you to let us know before you started?”

“Hammer!” Father shouted. I handed it to him.

Mr. Neasdon looked up the street and back again. He shook his head, then he looked the other way. He threw his hands in the air. Then he finally looked back at Father and said: “How high is it going to go?”

“Don’t know!” Father said. He swung the plank into place. “Nails!”

Mrs. Pew poked her head over the railings at the other side of the garden wall and said: “John, would you like a cup of tea?”

“No tea, thank you, Mrs. Pew!” Father said.

She fiddled with her hearing aid. “I have Tetley if you like.”

“No tea! Thank you, Mrs. Pew!” Father said.

Mr. Neasdon said: “Whoa, whoa! Just a minute! I want to know how high this fence is going! It’s already blocking out the light at our front and it looks bloody awful! You just don’t do this without asking us.”

Father continued to hammer.

Mr. Neasdon’s chest began to go up and down. “You know, we’ve just about had it up to here with you! What with your proselytizing and your End of the World this and Armageddon that and you’re not striking—but this is the limit! I’m not going to stand for it!”

Father shouted: “Nails!”

Mrs. Pew reappeared and said: “What about herbal?”

Mr. Neasdon’s eyes bulged. He went inside, slamming the door.

Mrs. Pew came back later, but by that time we could only hear a voice saying: “John! John! I’ve peppermint if you’d like!”

IT BEGAN TO get dark at five o’clock. The group of people on the other side of the street went indoors. I expect they wondered if Father was going to go on all night, but no one came to ask him to be quiet.

Father told me to go inside, but I was feeling sick and wanted to see him in front of me, so I carried on handing him wood. I was cold though. “Isn’t it high enough now?” I said at last.

“High enough?”

“We can’t see the street anymore.”

“Not high enough by half!” he said, and hurled the cement at the board as if he was teaching it a lesson.

Not long after that, I was handing Father a plank when a splinter went into my hand. Father didn’t see. I tried to pull it out but it broke off, and after that it hurt whenever I passed him anything. It was quite dark then and Father rigged up the Tilley lantern on top of the planks and carried on working, tottering on top of another two milk crates. He asked me to go and fetch the carrier bags of glass for the bottle bank, and when I did, he jumped on them and stuck the broken pieces in the cement along the top of the wall and in the gaps between the wood where the cement was fresh along the outside. At nine o’clock, we went inside. Father’s face was red, and around his eyes there were two white rings. He poured tea in the kitchen and his hand shook. He said the only thing left to do now was make a new gate and he would do that tomorrow.

We ate dinner in silence. It hurt to hold the fork. I didn’t feel like eating anyway. Suddenly I said: “You forgot to say thanks.”

Father stopped eating. Then he swallowed with a gulp and reached for his cup of tea. “Well, it’s too late now,” he said.

I stared at him. He cleared the last of his plate with a clatter, pushed back his chair, and said: “Is this finished?” I didn’t answer, but he took my plate anyway and went to the sink.

“What’s the matter with you?” he said as we were washing up.

“Nothing.”

“Yes there is. Come on, out with it.” Then he stopped rinsing the dishes and said sharply: “What’s the matter with your hand?”

“Nothing.”

He took the plate I was drying and opened my palm. The skin around the splinter was red and raised. When he touched it, I jumped.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he said, in a different voice altogether, and I shrugged and looked away.

Father turned off the tap. He told me to sit down and went out of the room. When he came back in he had antiseptic, cotton, a tin of Band-Aids, and a needle. He pulled up a chair and sat opposite me and took my hand and began stroking the splinter with the needle.

Father’s face seemed to be completely empty now. I could feel his breath on my hand. He was gentle so it didn’t hurt, but my eyes got full anyway and I couldn’t look up.

He took a bandage and peeled off the back and pressed it down around the cut. “By there,” I said, and he pressed it. “And there.” He pressed the Band-Aid some more. All around us, the room had become very still.

Then he stood up as if he’d suddenly remembered something and said: “That should do it.”

I said: “Do you think I need it wrapped?”

The darkness came back into his face. He said: “It’s a splinter, Judith.”

I put my hand over the Band-Aid and watched him go.

A Gate

WE DIDN’T GO to the meeting the next day, so I didn’t have to decide whether to wear Josie’s poncho or not. We didn’t go preaching or read the Bible or eat roast lamb and bitter greens. Instead, Father made a gate.

I have never seen a gate like it, and I don’t think anyone else had either judging from their faces as they walked by. Father worked on it all day in the front garden. There was ice on the ground and it didn’t melt, because there was no sun. I took cups of tea out to him, but he told me to stay inside because it was so cold.

At ten to two Uncle Stan phoned to find out if we were all right. I thought it was strange Father hadn’t phoned him or Alf before now to tell them about the fire, but I didn’t like to ask why. I told Uncle Stan that Father was making a gate. He said: “Oh…” Then he said: “Well, as long as you’re both all right … not ill or anything.”

“No,” I said. “Would you like me to get Father for you?”

“Is he busy?”

Father tottered past the window with the gate. “A bit,” I said.

Stan said: “Well, don’t bother him, pet.” Then he said: “A gate?”

“Yes.”

“Well, just let him know I phoned to say we missed you.”

“All right.”

I felt strange when I put the phone down. Uncle Stan’s voice seemed to be coming from another world. I suddenly wished we had gone to the meeting. I wouldn’t even have minded wearing the poncho.

When Father had finished the gate, it was taller than him and shaped like a church window. It was three planks thick, with metal studs in the front and right in the middle a brass knob that was as big as a hand and shaped like a spike. It took Father an hour to hang it, and the sweat ran down his face and he made a noise as if he were in agony. Afterward, he showed me how to unlock it and gave me a key. The key was longer than my hand and very heavy.

At dinner I said: “Uncle Stan phoned.”

“Oh.”

“He wondered if we were ill.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That you were making a gate. He said to tell you they missed us.” I took the plates to the sink and said: “Shall I get the Bibles?”

Father put his head in his hands. “In a minute.”

I hadn’t noticed his hands till now. They looked twice their normal size and were bright red, as if they’d been plunged into boiling water. There were cuts and dried blood and pieces of skin peeled back. His fingers looked like sausages about to burst out of their skins.

I washed and dried the dishes and fetched the Bibles. But when I came back, Father’s head was on his arms and he was fast asleep.

A Ring of Stakes

ON MONDAY, NEIL Lewis wasn’t in school and I was glad. Mrs. Pierce didn’t seem to know about the fire and no one else did either, so if Lee and Gareth had been with Neil they hadn’t told anyone.

When I went home, I saw Mr. and Mrs. Neasdon, Mrs. Andrews, and Mr. Evans standing on the corner of our road with bags of shopping. Mrs. Neasdon was saying: “We’ve got to live next door to that.”

Mr. Evans said: “I can understand why he’s done it, but you don’t go and do that. I mean, look at that glass.”

Mrs. Andrews said in a low voice: “If you ask me, I think he’s losing it.”

Mr. Neasdon shook his head. “He lost it long ago.”

They stopped talking when they saw me, and Mrs. Neasdon smiled a wobbly smile. I didn’t smile back. I heard her say when I had passed: “And God knows that child gets stranger every day.”

I felt itchy as I walked to the house. I went through the gate and locked it behind me. I peered through a crack in the fence. The itching got worse. Then I picked up a small stone and climbed the cherry tree. I flung the stone as hard as I could over the top of the fence, then dropped to the ground. When I looked through the crack, they had all stopped talking and were looking at the house.

I waited till they began to talk again, then got another stone, climbed up the blackened cherry tree, and threw it as hard as I could. It caught Mr. Neasdon on the neck, and he saw me before I could jump clear. Through the fence I saw him stare at our house. Mrs. Neasdon put her hand on his arm. They went indoors.

I felt hot after they had gone and sat with my back against the fence, digging my shoes into the earth. I didn’t go inside until the bus came with Father on it, though it was dark by then and I was shivering.

“What are you doing out here?” he said.

AT DINNER I said: “Mr. Neasdon said how much he liked the fence.”

Father said: “I’m glad it meets with his approval.”

After a few minutes I said: “Is it going to stay there?”

“For the foreseeable future.”

“Good,” I said. “I like it. It’s the best fence in the world.”

The Bible study that night was about Jerusalem. It turned out Jerusalem also became a Den of Iniquity after Jesus died, and yet it was the capital of the Land of Decoration. God let it be destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. Most of the people inside forgot to escape to the mountains, like Jesus told them to do, when the first troops came and went again. When the Romans came back, it was too late; they built a fence of pointed stakes around the city and the people starved and began eating their own children. “Only a few escaped,” Father said. “Those who remembered what Jesus had told them. They went to the mountains and stayed there until the Romans went away. The Great Tribulation will be the same. We mustn’t become complacent, because it will come like a thief in the night.”

THAT WEEK, PEOPLE shouted if they wanted to speak to Father, and he stood on a milk crate and peered down at them. The postman had to throw our mail over the top of the fence because Father said a letter box was asking for trouble. I had told Father I liked the fence, but when I came home from school and someone was walking behind me, I didn’t go in through the front but slipped down the lane and went in through the back gate.

I couldn’t sit in my room anymore, because I didn’t want to be near the Land of Decoration. I was trying to remember exactly where everything was and couldn’t be sure if something had moved or not. I had a bad headache before bed and had to ask Father for some acetaminophen.

At night I slept with my back to the Land of Decoration, but then I felt frightened and turned back to face it again. Once I dreamed the little people were scaling the sides of the bed with ropes, and I woke as the little man I had made to look like Neil was nailing my hair to the mattress with toothpicks.

After school, I spent a lot of time walking around the garden, looking through the cracks in the fence. It was like being invisible, but we weren’t invisible—we were the most visible house on the street. If our town had been Jericho, we wouldn’t have had to tie a red cord to the window; God would have known which house to leave standing.

I had lied to Father about Mr. Neasdon liking the fence, but someone really did like it. On Tuesday Mrs. Pew was coming home with her shopping and said: “I wish I could have something like that. It would be ideal for hanging baskets.” She asked me to ask Father if he could build her a fence, but I didn’t. He was acting strangely.

He sat in the middle room every evening after the Bible study and went over bills—at least that’s what he said he was going to do, but when I looked through the keyhole he was staring into space. He told me off for leaving the hall light on and for throwing a crust away because there was mold on it. He said: “It’s only penicillin; you’re lucky to have food at all!”

He went to bed earlier than usual and began sleeping on a mattress on the kitchen floor. Before bedtime he walked around the garden and checked that the back gate was locked. Then he came inside, turned the electricity off, and balanced an ax above the back door. I lay in bed looking out over the town and thought about those people in Jerusalem. I wondered who the Romans were this time, and if they came, would the mountains hide us?

A Vision

ON FRIDAY, NEIL Lewis came back to school. I felt him come into the room before I saw him though he didn’t come in as he usually did. He sat down quietly. Then he did something strange. He glanced over his shoulder at me, as if to check I was there and in that moment I knew everything. I knew he had started the fire, he and his brother and his friends, and I began to feel sick. I wasn’t sure if it was because I was angry or because I was afraid, but I knew I mustn’t think about Neil Lewis anymore, not even for a second, because if I did I would do something bad.

On Monday I woke to a strange sound: a slap and a roar. The roar came a split second after the slap. I looked down to see Father standing on the pavement. He had a can of brown paint in one hand and a brush in the other. He was dunking the paintbrush into the can and splattering it against the fence. His face was screwed up as if he was crying.

I had never seen Father look like that, and it made me feel worse than I had ever felt in my life. I sat down on the bed for a minute. Then I went down. When I came through the gate, he shouted: “Get back! Your clothes’ll be ruined!” But I had seen what was on the fence, the words sprayed in big looping letters, and this time I understood them all.

I went back to my room and curled up and shut my eyes. I put my fingers in my ears and pressed hard and kept pressing. I ground my teeth. But I could still hear the roaring and I could still see Father’s face.

I began to think I would like to hurt Neil Lewis badly.

MY HEAD WAS hot and full in class that morning, like it had been the afternoon I made the first miracle. We were making snowflakes at school, folding and cutting and opening circles of paper. I would normally have enjoyed making things, seeing how the patterns suddenly sprang into life when you opened out the snowflakes, but my eyes kept wandering to Neil.

He was sitting with Kevin and Luke, his cheek on his hand. He looked bored, half asleep: The sunshine was catching his hair and making his eyelashes whiter than ever. I thought that you would not know to look at him what he was like. You would never know what he wrote on people’s fences and did to their gardens. I began cutting my snowflake again, but my eyes were getting fuzzy and I couldn’t make the scissors go where I wanted. I looked up again. Neil was putting his thumb inside the corner of his nose. He saw me looking at him. And when he did he smiled so that his eyes became slits and his lip curled.

I looked down and bit into my lips and kept pressing down until I tasted iron. I thought of Father and what he had said about forgiveness. I thought of everything good and everything right and everything hopeful, but it was all I could do to keep cutting. Something was rising inside me, millions of small things, scurrying down my arms to my fingertips, crawling up my spine into my hair.

Specks appeared in front of my eyes. There was roaring. The room was getting darker.

I don’t know what made me look up, but when I did I saw that someone was standing behind Neil Lewis. I couldn’t see the person’s face because it was hazy. The rest of the classroom was empty. The person’s hands took Neil’s head, brought it back, then down onto the desk. I jumped. The head made a dull sound and the desk rocked.

The roaring was getting louder. The hands brought Neil’s head back again. His skin was stretched and his eyes were staring. His mouth was an “O.” The hands brought the head down on the desk and Neil yelled. When his head came up this time, there was blood coming from his nose.

He tried to get up but lost his balance. The hands brought his head down again. This time it hit the edge of the desk and I heard a softer sound, like a cabbage broken open.

I opened my mouth but nothing came out. I was being pressed into the seat. My eyes were closing, I was falling. The hands brought the head down again. The face didn’t look like Neil anymore. The hands brought the head down again. Neil had stopped yelling now. His mouth was a hole and his eyes were two bags of flesh and his nose had spread sideways.

Then someone was saying: “Judith! Can you hear me?” But the roaring went on and the hands went on bringing the head down on the desk.

“Judith!” Someone was shaking me. The roaring was stopping, the light was coming back, the room was full of people again.

Mrs. Pierce’s hands were on my shoulders and her face was white. Anna and Matthew and Luke were staring at me. Everyone was. I looked around. Neil, too. He looked normal. Nothing had happened to him.

My body was wet. I thought I was going to be sick. Mrs. Pierce opened my hands and took the scissors. My fingers were cut and the snowflake was in tatters.

What Have You Done?

“WHAT HAPPENED IN there?” said Mrs. Pierce. I was sitting on the seats beneath the coat rail.

“I don’t know. My head got hot.”

“Has this ever happened before?”

Her face was more serious than I had ever seen it. She said: “We have to talk about this. With your father. I’d like you to ask him to come and see me as soon as possible. Right now I have to get back to class. Would you like to go home?”

I nodded.

“All right,” said Mrs. Pierce. “I’ll get someone to walk with you.”

“No,” I said, “I’ll be all right. It’s not far.”

“No,” said Mrs. Pierce. “Wait here and I’ll go and get Anna to walk with you.”

When she had left, I got up and went out.

I don’t remember walking home, but I must have. I don’t remember if it was raining or sleeting or blowing a gale, but it must have been doing something or other. I don’t remember Sue not being there and having to cross the road myself, but I suppose I must have done that too. I don’t remember turning in to our street or coming through the gate or unlocking the door or coming upstairs or sitting beside the Land of Decoration, but I must have done all those things, because then I remember staring at the figure I had made of Neil Lewis, standing up, and bringing my foot down hard on it. I remember the feel of the figure beneath my shoe and the roaring in my head and hearing myself say things I had never heard before, like “I will drain the very gorge from his veins”—though I didn’t know what “gorge” was and whether it came from veins or another place altogether. I didn’t know if I was speaking, because it didn’t feel like my mouth or my voice, and when I caught sight of myself in the sea I didn’t recognize my face either. Then the roaring grew less and I don’t remember anything after that. I lay down and went to sleep.

When I opened my eyes, my head felt as if I had hit it and my tongue felt too big for my mouth. Light from the streetlamp was falling on the fields and the hills and the towns of the Land of Decoration. A voice was saying: “What have you done?”

It said: “I think you really have done something this time.”

“No I haven’t,” I said.

“Look,” said the voice.

I picked up the figure of Neil Lewis and looked at it. The head dangled, one leg was longer than the other, an arm was missing. The face was in pieces.

I pushed the arm into the body, but it wouldn’t stay. I pushed the head on again, but it fell off. There was nothing I could do about the face. I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. “It doesn’t mean anything,” I said.

“Like the fire didn’t mean anything?”

“I’ll remake it.”

“What have I said about remaking things?”

“I don’t care!” I said. “I’ll do it. I’ll make it right.”

I got out wire and wool and modeling clay. I remeasured the wire and remodeled the head, but my hands were shaking. I remade the hands and the feet and re-dressed him and re-wigged him and repainted his face, but the eyes were smaller and the nose was straighter and the checks fuller than they should have been. I didn’t have any more Wite-Out left to do the white stripe down the trousers, and the new figure was a good half inch shorter.

I pushed the figure away. “It doesn’t mean anything,” I said. But I knew of all the things I had made, this meant the most.