Grace McCleen - The Land of Decoration

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 paradise?”

The girl stared at me, she stared at Father, then she stared at the Bible.

I said: “Would you like to live in a world where there won’t be bad things anymore?”

The girl moved her feet back and forth in the carpet. The carpet was pink and fluffy. Her feet looked snug there. I said: “I’m sure you would. Can I share a paragraph with you from this book?”

The girl put her finger inside her left nostril and turned it.

I said: “This verse is talking about the future,” and I read the scripture from Isaiah about how the lion will lie down with the lamb.

The girl took her finger out of her nostril and put it into her mouth.

I said: “This is God’s promise, that the whole earth will be turned into a paradise. There are signs all around us that tell us it will happen very soon. Would you like to find out more about this?”

The girl took her finger out of her mouth and put it into her other nostril.

I began to feel hot. If she didn’t say something soon, we would have to go. I wanted to take her head and make her read the words. I wanted to make her say something so that I could say something back.

Then a woman appeared. She had three gold hoops in each ear, a necklace with what looked like a gold tadpole on it, and gold rings on each of her fingers. She held a cigarette in her hand. She opened the door wider and said: “What d’you want?”

I opened my mouth but Father said: “Good morning. My daughter was just telling your little girl about a hope for the future. We’ve been asking your neighbors an important question: Do you believe God will step in and do something about the world?”

The woman said to the girl: “Get in the house.” To Father, she said: “We’re not interested, love.”

Father said: “Did you know God has plans for this earth? Do you want to find out about a better future for yourself and your family?”

The woman waved and shouted to someone on the other side of the street: “All right, Sian! Aye! Don’t forget it’s bingo tonight!”

Father said: “Do you wonder what the world is coming to?”

The woman sucked on the cigarette, and her eyes half-closed and her bosoms swelled. “Not really,” she said, and she blew smoke in Father’s face.

“God said He would step in and bring an end to the wickedness we see,” Father said. “Can I show you that?”

“You’re wasting your time,” the woman said.

“All right, well, thank you, we’ll see you again,” Father said, and we walked back down the garden path.

A few houses later we came to Moorland Road.

I BEGAN FEELING sick as soon as we turned in to it. The wind off the mountain hit us like a wall, and there were little bits of hail in it. There was a burned-out car in the road and a lot of boys on bikes and music thumping somewhere. I looked at the boys on bikes but I couldn’t see Neil.

I said: “Do you think those houses we left might be in now?”

“We’ve only just called on them.”