The Land of Decoration (26 page)

M
Y MOTHER AND
father prepared a room for me before I was born. Mother decorated it and made curtains and a hot-air-balloon light shade, and Father made me a bed and a trunk. They wanted a baby more than anything and when they found out Mother was pregnant everything seemed perfect. But things went wrong.

When Mother was giving birth, she began to bleed. The doctors said she must have a blood transfusion or she would die, but she knew God didn’t approve of them. She knew that it was written that we must not take blood into our body, because blood gives life and belongs to God. The doctors didn’t understand and they wouldn’t help her. Some got very angry. “Save the baby,” she said. One doctor agreed to; the others walked out.

The greatest test of faith is to give your life for it. Mother gave her life for her faith. She saw me and was happy. She told Father she would see him in the new world. Then she died. She wasn’t afraid, because God had promised to resurrect her. Father wasn’t afraid, because he also knew God had promised. But I think he was angry, and I know he was sad.

He kept the house and garden as she had left it. He watered the Christmas roses, he pruned the cherry tree and golden cane. He dusted and polished her things and kept them safe. But he stopped smiling, he stopped laughing, and he stopped making plans.

I asked God if it was my fault Mother died, and He said that it was. I knew that already though. I knew it every time Father was angry with me. “What can I do?” I said to God.

“Nothing. I told you. You can do things, but undoing them—that’s something else altogether.”

I
T WAS THE
last day of the term. We took down our work from the walls, ripped the spare pages out of our exercise books, and put them in a pile to be used as scrap paper. When everyone went into the hall in the afternoon to sing carols, I crossed my arms, put my head down, and closed my eyes. For the first time in my life I felt better at school than at home.

A sound made me look up. Mrs. Pierce was closing the door. She said: “Nobody will miss me for five minutes.” She sat down beside me.

“Judith, I hope you don’t mind, but I wanted to have a word with you before the end of the day and I probably won’t get a chance if I don’t do it now. You don’t say much, but I’ve been very worried about you lately and wanted to check up on you. What did your father say when you asked him to come and see me?”

I swallowed. “He said he would come up,” I said, “but not for a while—because he’s busy.”

Mrs. Pierce said: “That’s unfortunate. I’d hoped he would—” She sighed and said: “Judith, here is a letter. I’d like you to give it to your father. Tell him it’s very important he reads this.” She looked at me. “All right?”

I bit my lips and nodded.

Then she took a piece of paper out of her pocket and pushed it toward me. She said: “Judith, this is my phone number. I don’t usually do this, but if you need to talk to anyone over Christmas, please call me.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“In fact,” she said, “in the new year, regardless of whether I manage to speak to your father or not, I’m going to get you some help. I think there are a lot of things going on in that head of yours, a lot we could do to help you if we knew what we were dealing with.”

“What do you mean?” I said, and I was frightened.

“It’s nothing for you to worry about,” she said, “just help from some professional people.”

I didn’t know what that meant, and I didn’t want to know.

She got up from the table and said: “They’ll be finishing in a minute. I’d better go back.”

I looked at the paper, and suddenly my eyes were full and my heart was beating so fast. “Mrs. Pierce,” I said.

“Yes, Judith?”

“There’s something I do have to say, but I don’t know if I can.”

“Stop!” said God. But I had started.

Mrs. Pierce came back to the table. “Yes, Judith? I’m listening.”

I felt dizzy. “If I told you I had done something bad…” I said.

“Yes?”

“If I told you I’d done something very bad … something unforgivable—”

“Judith—”

“No!” I said. “If this thing was very bad—”

Mrs. Pierce put her hand on my arm. She said softly: “Judith, I don’t mean to make light of what you’re telling me, but I’m sure you’re not capable of doing anything very bad.”

“I am!” I said. “It’s worse than you can imagine!” and I began to cry.

She waited and handed me a tissue and then said: “And you can’t tell me?”

I shook my head.

“Have you talked to your father about this?”

I shook my head. “He warned me about it—he told me it would lead to trouble, but I didn’t believe him.”

Mrs. Pierce was flushed. She shook her head and said: “Judith, I’m going to phone your father; the sooner I talk to him about this, the better.”

When she said that, I began to breathe very fast, and she put her hand on my arm and said: “Judith, please try not to worry. I’m sure that whatever you did, you did it with the best intentions and your father will understand that; I really do think I should try to talk to him.”

*   *   *

T
HAT AFTERNOON
M
RS.
Pierce read the last chapter of
Charlotte’s Web
to us, where Charlotte dies but is happy because she has done everything she could to save Wilbur and people think what she has done is a miracle. Of course the real miracle is that it was such a difficult thing for Charlotte to do because she was dying and yet she did it anyway. Mrs. Pierce stood by her desk as we trooped out and said: “Have a lovely holiday! Don’t eat too many mince pies. I want you all in peak condition for next term.” As I passed, she said: “Remember what we talked about, Judith.” I nodded.

When I got home I burned Mrs. Pierce’s letter in the Rayburn, and I was glad I had done it before I read it, because it made me more frightened than I could imagine thinking of Father reading it. But I stuck Mrs. Pierce’s number in the back cover of my journal. Then I went upstairs to lie on my bed and ticked off the days till I could go back to school; I thought how strange it was to do that, to want to go back. Then I felt colder and got under the covers into bed.

A little later a car pulled up. I heard a door slam and then the gate swing open and a man’s voice say: “Steady.”

I got up and peered through the window, but whoever it was was now opening the front door, and I jumped because it banged against the wall. Someone said: “I’ll get it,” and it sounded like Mike.

I ran along the landing and down the stairs. And then I stopped halfway down, and so did my heart, because it
was
Mike. He had his arm around someone who looked like Father but I couldn’t be sure: The person who looked like Father had his arm across Mike’s shoulders, and his face looked like it had been pushed sideways, and there was blood on it, and his eye was puffed up and closed like a fetus.

Mike said: “Whoa!” when he saw me. Then he said: “It’s all right, pet. Your dad’s just fallen down some steps. He’s going to be fine. Run and get some cold cloths, will you?”

I must have still been standing there, because Mike said: “Go on, there’s a good girl.” But I still couldn’t move until the person who looked a bit like Father picked up his head and said: “I’m fine, Judith,” and the voice sounded a bit like Father’s too, except that the person’s mouth sounded full of something.

I went back upstairs to the bathroom and began soaking a flannel under the tap. Halfway through soaking it my legs sat down on the side of the bath, because I knew Father hadn’t fallen down steps and I knew it was something to do with what had happened to Neil, and I was pretty sure that a person had done this to Father and that person was Doug Lewis.

I got up and turned the tap off and took the flannel downstairs. Father was sitting at the table and the washing-up bowl was beside him. Mike was touching his eye with some cotton and Father’s head was going back whenever Mike touched him. I put the flannel on the table and Mike said: “Good kid. Your dad’s going to be as right as rain. Go and make us a cuppa, will you do that?”

I went to the sink and heard Mike say in a low voice: “You should have let me take you to the hospital.” Father said something back and spat into the bowl.

I brought two cups of tea in and put them on the table, but Mike seemed to have forgotten he wanted them. He finished bandaging Father’s eye and said: “Lift your shirt,” and when Father did, I saw blood on his stomach and a red mark that looked like the sole of a shoe.

Father put his hand to his eye and touched it. He took it away then touched it again, as if he had forgotten he had done it the moment before. When Mike had finished bandaging him, Father lay on the sofa. His face was white and his arms and legs lay any old how like a rag doll. Mike said: “I’ll call on you tomorrow after work with some groceries.” Father raised his hand but Mike said: “John, I’m telling you, not asking,” and Father let his arm fall again. Mike said: “For once you’ve got to give in and let someone else take over.” Then he put his arm round my shoulder and squeezed. Then he said: “See that he doesn’t get into any more trouble, will you, Fred?”

Then he said in a different voice: “He’s going to be all right, Judith; your dad’s a toughie.” But Father didn’t look tough. He looked dead.

*   *   *

T
HERE WAS NO
sound in the room. Beyond the window, street light spilled over the black garden and the broken cherry tree. My jaw was too tight to speak. I said in my head: “It’s because of Neil, isn’t it? It’s because of what I made happen to him.”

“An eye for an eye,” the voice said. “A tooth for a tooth. A life for a life.”

I began to cry. “But Father isn’t dead,” I said. I began to shake, my whole body. “
Why
didn’t You protect him?”

God said: “My ways are unsearchable.”

I said: “It’s convenient being unsearchable, isn’t it?”

W
HEN
I
CAME
downstairs the next morning Father was in front of the Rayburn. That day he got up to get dinner and that was all. I asked: “Shall I call May or Elsie to help?” but he shook his head.

The next day he sat in front of the Rayburn again. He hadn’t shaved and he hadn’t changed his clothes and he didn’t seem to have slept much, because his eye—the one I could see—was bloodshot.

I couldn’t ask him if he was going to phone Uncle Stan without letting him know I had heard the conversation, but when he unplugged the phone I felt shaky and said: “What if we need to call anyone?”

“We plug it back in.”

I was pleased because now Mrs. Pierce wouldn’t be able to get through, but I was worried that Father wasn’t going to phone Uncle Stan. “But he will,” I said to myself. “Now that Neil isn’t knocking anymore, he’ll calm down. He’ll make the phone call to Uncle Stan anytime now,” and all that day I didn’t go far from Father in case he made the call when I wasn’t there.

Over the next few days, the rest of Father’s body turned all shades of blue and yellow, and green. A doctor came and looked at his eye and said Father was lucky, that he wasn’t going to lose it but that he should have gone to the hospital. Mike came by every day after work and sat with Father. On Thursday he left an envelope on the table, and Father saw it as Mike was going out the door and told me to run and give it back to him, but Mike wouldn’t take it.

The days were long without school. I wrote in my journal. I fed my mustard seeds some Baby Bio that Mrs. Pew gave me. I didn’t dare touch the Land of Decoration. One morning I was so tired of nothing happening with the mustard seeds that I dug them up and spread the soil out on a plate and tried to find them. The ones I did find looked exactly the same as when Brother Michaels gave them to me.

I went round to see Mrs. Pew a bit. She showed me photographs of her and Mr. Pew on a tandem and taught me how to play “Chopsticks” on the piano and I held Oscar in a blanket while she gave him his worming tablets, but all the time I had a pain in my stomach thinking about Father, and though I was glad to get out of our house, I was more glad to get back.

He slept or sat with his eyes closed—in front of the grill, I wasn’t sure which. He didn’t say: “Don’t slam the door,” and didn’t say: “Are you playing with that food or eating it?” and didn’t notice when I was loud, which I was on purpose, just to test him. His eyes passed over things as if he didn’t recognize them. He went to bed at eight o’clock. When I came down in the mornings, he was still sleeping. All he did was get up to make tea or stare at the open mouth of the grill, with its black tongue and the black space crusted with char and the black elements, as if there was some great secret in there.

We ate potatoes and bacon or sausages every night. I cooked them, because Father said I could, and didn’t get them right once, but he didn’t notice. There was no more praying and no more reading the Bible and no more pondering, though I did enough pondering for both of us. On Sunday, Father took his eye patch off and began reading the newspaper, so after dinner I took away the plates, then fetched the Bibles. I said: “We’ve been forgetting.”

Father looked at the Bible for a few minutes, then sucked in breath through his nose, as if he was waking. He said quietly: “I can’t do this right now, Judith.”

I felt a flash of heat as though I was falling. “But it’s important!” I said. “It’s Sunday and we didn’t even go to the meeting! We haven’t done the study for ages!”

Father raised his eyebrows and shook his head. “I can’t get my head round it at the moment, Judith.”

It made me feel terrified when he said that. I said: “What do you
mean
?”

“I just need … a bit of space.”

“
Space?
”

He sighed. “Sometimes things are too complicated for children to understand.”

“I can understand,” I said. “Tell me!”

But he got up and sat with his back to me.

“Well, I’m going to read,” I said. “I’ll read for both of us.”