My body was full of shaking blood.
Then Father shouted:
When I looked again, Father’s hands had dropped to his sides and his face was white. He said: “What do I have to say to get through to you? What do I have to do to make you
I looked at him, and I said: “No.”
Giving It Back
I SAT IN my room and I looked at my knees. “You told a lie,” God said.
“Father would have been more upset if I hadn’t.”
“Another lie,” said God.
“Oh, be quiet!” I said. “I should never have listened to You in the first place! I wish I had never found out about the miracles. If I’d listened to Father, none of this would have happened.
“Well?” I said after a moment. “Haven’t You got anything to say?”
I stood up. “You know what I hate about You? The way You just disappear when You feel like it. I wish
“God,” I said after a while, “I don’t want to be Your Instrument anymore.”
He couldn’t let that go. “What do you mean?” He said.
“I don’t want the power,” I said. “I’m giving it back.”
BOOK III
Dark Matter
Through My Window
IT GOT DARK in the room. Shadows spilled over the floor and slipped down the walls. They skimmed the ceiling and the hot-air balloon light shade and traveled like clouds over the Land of Decoration. They appeared and reappeared and went elsewhere.
I watched the streetlights go on and the moon come up. The moon was so bright that it had a halo. It looked like chalk dust and the moon like chalk and the sky looked like a blackboard and all over the blackboard there were pinpricks of stars. I remembered it was written that the sun would be darkened and the moon wouldn’t give its light, and I wondered if when the end of the world came it would be like a giant eraser had wiped the moon and stars out and rolled up the sky like a blackboard, with a snap. I thought how nice that would be.
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.”
