Grace McCleen - The Land of Decoration

Father was gray when he got in. Sometimes he didn’t cook the vegetables I had prepared but ate things like sausages and beans. Sometimes he didn’t even light the fire in the Rayburn but sat by the oven with the range on till bedtime. But no matter how tired he was, he always made sure we read the Bible portion.

I wished Mike could have stopped by. “Why doesn’t he?” I asked.

“He has to get home,” Father said.

I didn’t like to ask about the factory. Father didn’t say much except that there were lines of people called picketers at the gates and they shouted and never went away. “It’ll be over soon,” he said. “I’ll give them another week.”

But the strike people seemed to think it would last. On Tuesday after school, Mrs. Pew invited me round for tea. While we were eating corned beef sandwiches and macaroons at her foldaway table, some people knocked at the door. I heard Mrs. Pew open it and a man say they were calling on everyone, warning against failure to support the union and contact with something called “scabs.” He told Mrs. Pew to hang up if a scab tried to call, not to talk to them.

Mrs. Pew waited till he stopped talking, which was quite a while, then said: “I’m sorry?”

There was a pause, then the man said everything again and asked Mrs. Pew if she would like to make a donation for hungry strikers.

Mrs. Pew said: “Country bikers?”

“Hungry strikers.”

“Yes, I thought that’s what you said,” said Mrs. Pew. “I’ll get some money right away.”

She got some change from the jar on the sideboard. I heard her give the man some money and close the door. “A biking event,” she said as she came back into the sitting room. “I do like to give to a good cause. My husband, the late Mr. Pew, God rest his soul, was an ardent cyclist.”

“WHAT’S A ‘SCAB’?” I said to Father when I got home.

“Where did you hear that?”

“Someone knocked on Mrs. Pew’s door, wanting money for the strikers, and told her not to talk to scabs.”

“A scab is someone who’s not supporting the strike.”

“Then you’re a scab,” I said. “Why do they call them that? It’s a funny name.”

Later that evening, I was coming down the stairs when the letter box crashed and a water balloon fell through the slot and burst on the floor. I heard the squealing of bikes. I picked up the balloon. It wasn’t colored like a balloon I’d ever seen but clear. It was a different shape than a balloon too, longer, like a tube and the hole was too big to blow through. Father came into the hall from the bathroom, without his shirt on and with a towel round his neck.

He said: “Drop that!”

I stared at him.

“Drop it!” he said. “Go and wash your hands!”

On Wednesday someone tipped the dustbin up and strewed rubbish all over the garden. On Thursday, Neil and his brother snapped some branches off Mother’s cherry tree, and Father sat up till after midnight. On Friday night when the knocking began, he phoned the police. I heard him say: “Can’t you just send a car up or something? It’s getting beyond a joke. I’ll be had up for assault if I go out there and do anything…. No, I don’t know what started it.”

Later, when I was in bed, a police car came down the street. I heard it stop outside and the policeman talk to the boys. After that it was quiet, and when I looked they had gone away.

“God,” I said, “what’s happening? Why won’t Neil Lewis leave us alone?”

“Something to do with the fact that he has been getting into trouble in school every day because of you?” said God.

“Not because of me,” I said. “Because of what he does to me.”

“Swings and roundabouts,” said God.

“It’s not fair!” I said. “I didn’t know any of this would happen. How could I know he would start coming to the house?”

“Not easy, is it?” said God.

“No. I’ve solved one problem and found another one.”

“That’s life,” said God. “Things disappear and reappear somewhere else. You stamp on them here and they come up over there. Like molehills. Now you know what it feels like.”

“What?”

“Being Me.”

“I thought I could say just what I wanted to happen.”

“Yes, but can you stop things happening?” said God. “Did you think about that?” God laughed. “Thinking is a dangerous thing at the best of times.”

“But what’s going to happen?” I said. “With Neil and everything?”

“I don’t think it would be helpful for you to know at the moment,” said God. “In any case, it depends on you.”

IT WAS STRANGE that Neil kept coming to the house, because he didn’t come near me in school. He didn’t tell me he would kill me and he didn’t draw his finger across his throat and he didn’t hit me or put my head down the toilet or pull away my chair. He wasn’t doing a lot of the things he used to do. Mrs. Pierce made him move to Kevin and Stacey and Luke’s table so he didn’t sit with Lee and Gareth anymore, but so often when I looked up, his blue eyes were fixed on me, and they were strange, as if he wasn’t seeing me at all but something on the other side of me.

Mrs. Pierce kept him in detention four times that week. At home time, when he’d hoist his bag onto his shoulder, she would say: “Neil, where are you going?”

“Home, Miss.”

“I thought you and I had an appointment.”

“My dad’ll kill me if I’m late again.”

Mrs. Pierce would say: “It’s no fun for me either, you know, so the sooner you learn how to behave, the better for both of us. Sit down and get your books out.”

Neil didn’t follow me home once that week, but some of the other boys rode their bikes past me very fast and yelled swear words. On the following Wednesday, when I came out of school, I had seen a man with a shaved head and denim jacket waiting by the school gates. He was covered in tattoos. His arms were folded and his chin jutted out and his mouth was set in a tight line. As I went by, he opened the side of his mouth and a jet of saliva landed on the pavement.

“Sue,” I said, as Sue Lollipop crossed me over the road, “who’s that man with the shaved head?”

“That’s Doug Lewis,” she said in a low voice. “He’s on the warpath about something.”

So now I had a face to put to the “bad lot.”

On Thursday Doug was there again, huddled up against the wind. This time he was smoking. And as I went by, I noticed something I had missed before: On the backs of his hands, writhing to and fro and over and under one another, were lots of green snakes.

ON SATURDAY WE went preaching in town with the new leaflets. We stood in the main street opposite the Baptist church and Margaret held a placard that said: CAN YOU READ THE SIGNS? on one side and CHRIST DIED FOR YOU on the other. Uncle Stan had a loudspeaker, and Father and Alf wore boards over their jackets with THE END OF ALL THINGS HAS DRAWN CLOSE on them. Nel insisted on having a placard too, so we propped it up against her wheelchair, even though you couldn’t see her over the top of it. The rest of us gave out leaflets.

It was very cold. Sun winked in each of the shop windows. A market seller said: “Go and proclaim the gospel somewhere else,” but Uncle Stan said we had as much right to be there as anyone else, and after that it was a contest between us and the market seller as to who could shout the loudest.

Twice someone shouted: “Scab!” and a few spat on the ground as they passed us. Uncle Stan flushed but carried on shouting, and Margaret thrust her chest out and held the placard higher. Gordon’s neck was deep in his collar, his eyes were half closed, and he was chewing hard.