The Land of Decoration (20 page)

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.

O
NE 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.

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.

*   *   *

T
HE
L
AND 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.

*   *   *

T
HE 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.”