The Land of Decoration (8 page)

f) noise in general

g) leaving doors open

h) not paying attention

And sooner or later I am bound to do one and forget to do the other.

Sometimes, though, I don’t know why Father is angry with me. Once I asked him what I had done wrong.

He said:
“You?”

“Yes.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You always seem cross.”

“
Me?
”

“Yes.”

“
I’m
not cross.”

“Oh.”

“You’d know if I was cross!”

“That’s all right, then.”

He said: “Cross indeed!” And he was angrier than he had been to start with.

  5) But worse, much worse than Father being cross, much worse than Father not talking to me or not wanting to look at me or not wanting to touch me, is when he is sad.

Sometimes when I was younger, I used to come downstairs at night to get a drink and the light would be on under the kitchen door. I would see Father through the glass panel, sitting at the table, not doing anything, just sitting there. I stood by the door waiting for him to move, and if he did it was like stepping into warm water. If he didn’t I would go back to bed with a pain in my chest and promise to be better and wait for the light to come.

That was when I thought I could make Father love me, but I don’t anymore. Because the reason he doesn’t happened a long time ago and I can’t do anything about it now, even though without me it wouldn’t have happened at all.

W
HEN
I
HAD
finished writing in my journal, I put it under the loose floorboard beneath my bed. I would have to hide it for now. Until Father came to his senses and saw what was staring him in the face.

I suddenly wondered what Brother Michaels would say if he knew what had happened, and I wished I could tell him how right he had been, that I could make things happen just like he said.

I got into bed. My head still felt hot and I was feeling even stronger than before. I could see myself in bed as if I wasn’t in my body. I’d fainted once and it felt similar. I was thinking about Father and the argument, thinking how surprised he would be when he finally did realize I could perform miracles, but it was as if it had all happened to someone else now, as if the little body lying in the bed and the house and our street and the town and the whole universe was pouring into my head and my head was big enough for it all, but it went on getting hotter and hotter, and it was all so strange I just lay back and let it happen. Then I heard something.

“So, you can make it snow,” said a voice. “What else can you do, I wonder?” Something shot up my spine and into my hair, and it felt like something inside me had melted.

“Hello?” I said, but no one answered. I waited.

Then someone sighed. I was sure of it.

I sat up in bed. I was breathing very hard. I pulled the blankets around me and took a deep breath. “Who’s there?” I whispered.

Everything was silent again. Then the voice said: “I said: ‘What else can you do?’”

I gasped. “Who are you?” I said.

“Now, there’s a question.”

I opened my mouth. I shut it again. “Where did you come from?”

“There’s another.”

I said: “I want to know—”

“You already do,” said the voice. It sounded quite close.

I shook my head. “Where
are
you?” I said.

“I’m all around,” the voice said. “Inside things and outside them too. I was, and am, and will be.”

Then my heart beat once, very hard, and I said: “You’re God, aren’t You?”

“Shh,” said the voice.

I swallowed. “Can You see me?”

“Of course,” said God. “I’ve been watching you for some time. You could be very useful to Me.”

I sat up. “What do You mean?”

“Well,” said God, “you’ve got a great imagination. I need someone like you to be My Instrument.”

“Your Instrument?” I said.

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“Miracles, that sort of thing.”

I put my hands over my face and then I took them away. I said: “I
knew
I was meant to do something important!”

“Shh!” said God. “Not so loud. We don’t want to wake your father.” He paused. “But there’s one condition: You have to have complete faith; you have to be prepared to do whatever I ask, no doubting, no grumbling, no asking why.”

“OK,” I said. “I won’t.”

“You mean it?”

“Yes!”

“All right,” said God. “We’ll talk later. Right now I have to get on with some other things.”

“What other things?”

“Well, this is a busy time in heaven right now. Four horsemen are straining at the bit, there’re some winds that are very restless, and there are a lot of locusts that are getting under everyone’s feet. Oh, and some seals that have to be opened. In the meantime, no blabbing, all right?”

“Can I carry on using my powers?”

“Yes,” said God. “I’ll let you get used to them for a bit.”

“Do you think I could make things happen to people and animals as well?”

God said: “Judith, it’s all a matter of faith.”

“The mustard seed!”

“Precisely.”

“I won’t say any more to Father.”

“Very wise.”

“But he’ll believe me in the end?”

“Yes.”

“Because I’ll do more and more things and he’ll have to see. He will have to see I am doing something special.”

“No doubt about it,” said God.

Then God went wherever it is that He goes and I lay down and thought two things. The first was that I had been silly to expect Father to understand about the miracles but I didn’t have to worry because it would all come right in the end.

The second thought was strange. It was that this had been waiting to happen to me, and thinking that made me happier than anything I had thought before in my whole life. The miracles had been waiting all this time, and so had I. And now the waiting was over, and things could begin.

F
ATHER SAYS THAT
God is the voice in every Christian’s head helping him to do the right thing. He says that the Devil tells the Christian to do the exact opposite. This means we must be careful which of them we listen to. Up until yesterday, I hadn’t heard God’s voice but I had been talking to Him. I think I must have been saving up things to say, because for a long time I didn’t talk at all.

*   *   *

W
HEN
I
WAS
small, Father took me to see a doctor because I didn’t do anything but stare straight in front of me. There is a photograph of me taken by Father at that time. It’s a warm day and I am sitting beneath the cherry tree he planted for Mother in the front garden. The grass is littered with blossoms. I am wearing a blue T-shirt and shorts that come down to my knees. There is a scab on the right one. My legs stick straight out in front of me. My hands are in my lap.

I can’t imagine Father thinking it was a good idea to take me to the doctor, because he never goes to them himself, but he did. I remember that the doctor’s room smelled funny. I remember there was a chair with a leather seat and in the corner a box of plastic blocks and a big red bus. I played with the bus and Father talked to the doctor.

The doctor did tests and made a plan and came to a conclusion. The conclusion was that we were both missing Mother, and the plan was that Father should read to me. So he did, and I learned all about the Nephilim, and the Ark of the Covenant, and why circumcision must be performed on the eighth day, how to clean an infected house of leprosy, what not to say to a Pharisee, and how to remove the sting of a gadfly. And as I began to read I began talking, and in a while I was talking as much as anyone—though perhaps not about the same things.

There weren’t many people to talk to except Father, so I began talking to God. I always supposed it was just a matter of time before He answered me. I used to think of it as a long-distance telephone call. The line was bad, there were birds sitting on it, there was heavy weather, so I couldn’t make out what the other person was saying, but I never doubted I would hear them eventually. Then one day the birds flew off, the rain cleared up, and I did.

I
DECIDED TO
use my power to help people, and first on my list was Mrs. Pew. I had been thinking about her since I saw her crying. I didn’t think she could be the type of person to kidnap children if she was so upset about Oscar; it was quite disappointing to think that Kenny Evans probably did go to live with his father after all.

Oscar is a large ginger cat who sits in Mrs. Pew’s front-room window between a bowl of hyacinths and a yellow china dog. I didn’t know why he had decided to disappear. Perhaps he was tired of the dog, who didn’t do anything but grin in an empty way, or perhaps he was tired of the view. Anyway, all that mattered was that I bring him back. So on Thursday when the snow came down in flurries, I made a cat with marmalade wool. Father called: “What are you doing?” and I called back: “Reading!” The lie was justified: I was now God’s Instrument and had work to do.

I gave the cat a blue collar and one white paw and took a chip out of his ear, just like Oscar, though I couldn’t remember which ear and hoped it didn’t matter. I made an old woman in a black dress and gave her a high lace collar and little black boots and pushed very small beads in the sides of the clay for buttons. I gave the lady black curly hair, glued pieces of cut-up staple in her hair for clips, painted her face white and her lips red. I made a trail of cat prints leading through the snow to the old lady and put the cat on her lap and made sure he was curled up and didn’t look like he was going to get up again. I sewed his eyes closed and tucked his paws in. Then I said: “Come home Oscar.”

When I had finished, I wondered what might actually happen if the miracle worked. Would Oscar’s whiskers be singed after being flown back from wherever he was at the speed of light, or would his fur stand on end after being brought back to life with a bolt of lightning? Anyway I went round to Mrs. Pew’s and knocked on the door. I saw her wobbling head and smelled the secondhand-shop smell and felt a bit queasy, but I stayed where I was and when she opened the door I said: “Don’t worry about Oscar, Mrs. Pew. I have a feeling he’ll be home very soon.”

She turned up her hearing aid and I said it all over again, and then she said: “Oh, I do hope so. I do hope so!”

I said: “Have faith, Mrs. Pew.”

Then she said: “Pardon?”

And I said:
“HAVE FAITH!”

Her hand fluttered at the base of her throat and she said: “Oh. I certainly will.”

She watched me go down the garden path. When I was at the gate she said suddenly: “You’re Judith, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

She said: “Thank you, Judith. It was nice of you to come by.”

I said: “You’re welcome, Mrs. Pew.”

When I got back, I wrote up the miracle in my journal, then turned over three pages and wrote:
Has Oscar come home yet?
and then I wrote the same on the next.

*   *   *

I
WAITED FOR
Oscar all that day and the next day too but it just went on snowing. In the meantime I decided that even though I didn’t want to go back to school, because of Neil Lewis, the snow would have to go. Father kept talking about how much work he was missing and accidents were happening on roads and old people like Joe were getting sick. Father said Joe had gone into the hospital and Watson was being looked after by a neighbor. So that afternoon I undraped the gauze and peeled back the cotton wool and blew away the flour and broke the icicles off the houses. I rolled up the cotton and dismantled the blizzard and packed up the snowmen and wiped away the shaving foam and put the blue back in the sky and turned on the sun.

On Saturday night the wind dropped. The next morning, blue sky appeared. By the afternoon the sun was quite warm. Icicles dripped outside my window like someone playing jars of water. The snow in the street became slushy and broke into platelets of ice. Father said: “I knew it couldn’t last.” I didn’t say anything but went and stood on the pavement and listened to water running into the drains at the side of the pavement and said: “Thank You, God. You have me again.”

But there was no Oscar. I waited all day and I waited all evening. I said: “Did I do it right, God?” But God must still have been busy with the four horsemen or something, because He didn’t answer.

I sat up in bed that night and watched clouds crossing the moon and veiling and unveiling the Land of Decoration. I watched the sun come over the mountain and blink a bleary red eye, striping the sky pink and yellow like a stick of rock. But there was still no sight of Oscar.

*   *   *

I
WAS STANDING
in the garden with Father after the meeting the next day when the fourth miracle happened.

Father was clearing the paths and I was helping him. Little birds had left prints here and there on the bird table and on the top of the walls. A trail of larger prints that belonged to some larger animal led from the garage doors. The buddleia bushes and golden cane bowed beneath a foam of snow, and the cherry-tree branches were black and dripping. There were open patches of ground here and there where the earth and a little sodden grass were beginning to show.

Father was drinking tea, looking around with his hand on his hip, his breath a pink cloud in the air. He said: “I think it’s going to be pretty next spring when your mother’s cherry tree is out. And a few more weeks and we’ll have the first Christmas roses.” That’s when we heard tapping and looked up to see Mrs. Pew standing at her kitchen window. She was beckoning me.

When I got to the wall, she opened the back door and pointed. By her feet, bent over a bowl of cat biscuits, cracking them with his teeth, turning his head this way and that, and making hungry noises, was Oscar. Mrs. Pew said: “I looked up and there he was on the windowsill!” Her head was wobbling twice as fast as usual. She said: “I thought he was dead, and here he is, right as rain, eating for England!”