Grace McCleen - The Land of Decoration

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.”

“My arms?”

“Dust.”

“My eyes?”

“Dust.”

“I see,” I said.

“Dust you are,” said the voice, “and to dust you will return.”

The more the voice talked, the heavier my arms became and the heavier my legs became and finally even breathing was difficult.

Then I looked down and saw that the pavement was clear, and I went back with water from the watering can and washed it. I scrubbed it with leaves and with grass. I scrubbed so that little white curls of skin appeared on my knuckles.

“Dust,” said the voice, and I nodded.

I closed the gate and put the watering can back and washed my hands under the tap. The stars were so bright now that they seemed to be pulsing.

“But stars are made of dust,” I said suddenly.

“Everything is,” said the voice.

There was a glimmer for a moment, something I wanted to catch hold of. But it disappeared too quickly. I went inside, locked the front door, and went upstairs to bed.

ONE OF MY good thoughts is that there are no big things in this world, only lots of little things joined together, that there are other worlds in which we are as small as the smallest person in the Land of Decoration, that the band of the Milky Way people thought was everything is itself just one of billions of other galaxies and beyond that a cosmos at least a billion, billion, billion times larger than even the farthest part of the universe scientists can see with the biggest telescopes, and beyond that other cosmos that reach into infinity.

I like to think about how it could all go on still farther, that we only know about things like space and time because of light, so there is no way we can know what happens where it is dark, that other worlds could be out there, other dimensions, other Big Bangs, which is only another way of saying God. I like to think that all that has happened is the universe has taken a breath and bounced up and we have appeared for a moment before the ball falls back and the breath is withdrawn again. I like to think that from a certain point all things are the same, and the whole of our story is no more than the paint on the knob on the top of the Eiffel Tower, and we are the layer of pigeon poop on top of the paint on top of the knob.

I tell myself that small things are big and big things are small, that veins run like rivers and hairs grow like grass and a hummock of moss to a beetle looks like a forest, and the shapes of the countries and clouds of the earth look like the colors in marbles from space. I think how the shell of a nebula of oxygen and hydrogen looks like the splash made by a droplet of milk, when the sides rise up in a crown. I think about the pictures of rocks and of dust and of galaxies in space and they look no more than snowflakes in a blizzard, and black holes look like pearls in deep cases, superclusters like bath bubbles—like honeycombs, like cells in a leaf, the grid of a bumblebee’s nose. That the whorls of a nebula and the caverns of a fire glow with the same light and your eyes get warm and filled up looking at both.

I tell myself that wildebeest scurry like ants, the earth is a blue bubble floating in darkness, a cell is a spaceship. The pieces of comet-shaped rock, which are light-years across and thrust out of a nebula when it explodes, are heads of corn in a blue sky, if you are lying in a field in summer when the sky is cornflower blue, and the corn is reaching into it. I say to myself there are palaces in clouds, mountains in rock pools, highways in the dust at my feet, and cities on the underside of leaves; there is a face in the moon and a galaxy in my eye and a whirlpool at the crown of my head.

And then I know that I am enormous and I am small, I go on forever and am gone in a moment, I am as young as a baby mouse and as old as the Himalayas. I am still and I am spinning. And if I am dust, then I am also the dust of stars.

I LEARNED YOU can do things you didn’t know you could the night I went down to the street to clean up the mess the boys had left. I learned that nothing is impossible and the only reason it seems to be is that it just hasn’t happened yet. These are useful things to know.

On Monday, Neil didn’t say anything about us coming to his house. Perhaps it was because his father had told him not to have anything to do with me, but it could have been because Mrs. Pierce didn’t take her eyes off him. She picked on his spelling, on his grammar, on the dirt beneath his fingernails, and on how far behind he was. He didn’t say anything, but more than once I caught him watching me. I wanted to shout: “I’m not doing anything to you! I’m never going to do anything to you again!” but I just had to sit there.