The Land of Decoration (18 page)

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.

T
HAT 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.

*   *   *

L
ATER 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.

O
N
S
ATURDAY 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!”