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
“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.
LATER 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.
Little Witch
ON SATURDAY 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
