The Land of Decoration

“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.”

* * *

THAT AFTERNOON MRS. 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.

* * *

THERE 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?”

Fish and Chips

WHEN 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