Grace McCleen - The Land of Decoration

Father told me to sleep in the middle bedroom and I didn’t ask why. He took a long time coming up, and when he did I heard him slide the bolt home on the front door and drag something heavy across it.

I DON’T KNOW if Father phoned the school or not, but in the middle of our math lesson on Friday Mr. Williams came to talk to Mrs. Pierce and they went out of the classroom; after a minute they came back in and Mrs. Pierce said: “Neil, Mr. Williams wants to talk to you.” Neil flushed dark red, and followed Mr. Williams out of the room. After ten minutes Gareth and Lee were called out too. Neil didn’t come back to class, but Gareth and Lee did, and they were pale and quiet.

I asked Mrs. Pierce if I could go to the toilet, and she looked at me sharply and said: “Are you all right?” I nodded. In the toilet I thought I was going to be sick, but in the end I wasn’t. I just sat on the floor by the bowl, leaning my head against the tiles.

I could feel Mrs. Pierce watching me for the rest of the day, and at home time she said: “I know things are difficult right now, Judith. We are going to support you and your father. I want you to know that. We are going to see that this sort of thing stops.”

LATE THAT NIGHT a voice woke me. Father was pulling back the blankets and saying: “Get up quickly, Judith.”

“Is it Armageddon?” I said.

“No, it’s a fire.”

“The Land of Decoration!” I said. And though a few days ago I had thought it was stupid, I realized I wanted it very much indeed.

“Just put your dressing gown on.”

Father took my hand and we ran along the landing and down the stairs. “The Land of Decoration!” I said again. “Let me get it! Please! Let me put part of it in a bag!” I was afraid I was going to cry, though I knew how much Father hated it.

He said: “The fire won’t get to your room, Judith; the firemen are on their way.”

We held our sleeves over our faces at the bottom of the stairs, because smoke was coming from underneath the front-room door, then went through the hall into the kitchen and the back garden.

Mrs. Pew was standing by her back door in dressing gown and hairnet. She didn’t have her lipstick on or the white stuff on her face, and she looked almost normal except for the wobbling. She was fiddling with her hearing aid calling: “Are you all right?”

Father said: “We’re fine. But could Judith stay with you for the time being?”

Mrs. Pew said: “Of course!” and held out her hand, and he told me to go with her.

Mrs. Pew made me hot chocolate and I sat at her breakfast bar and tried to see through the window into our back garden while Oscar sat on the windowsill, grumpy at being woken and flicking his tail. “A dreadful business,” Mrs. Pew said. “Truly dreadful. I’m always worried that a fire will start in this house. So far, thank the Lord, I haven’t had one.”

I heard a big engine pull up out front and doors slam. In the sky there were blue flashing lights. I heard men’s voices in our house. The back door was open and I heard shouting and a steady sound and every now and then a heavy noise as though they were dragging something heavy.

Not long after I had finished my second hot chocolate, Father came back and said it was all over. The damage was mainly by the front-room window.

Mrs. Pew said: “How on earth did it start?”

Father said a brick had been put through the living-room window. He said there was a rag tied around a brick. The rag was soaked with petrol. A match had probably been thrown in afterward. He said it all very calmly.

Mrs. Pew blinked and blinked and touched her throat. I thought she was going to faint. She said: “You must stay here tonight! You can’t go back.”

Father said: “I think Judith had better, but I want to keep an eye on the house, so I’m going to sleep in the front room.”

“But the window is smashed!” said Mrs. Pew.

“The firemen are going to board it up,” said Father. “I’ll come and get Judith in the morning.”

I went to the door with him. “ Can’t I come home with you?”

“No. You’re better off with Mrs. Pew tonight.”

“Please,” I said.

“It’s one night, Judith.”

I SLEPT IN a room at the back of Mrs. Pew’s house in a soft feather bed that smelled of potpourri. The smell made me feel sick. The softness of the bed made me feel I was falling. I wanted to race back to my room, where there were floorboards and blankets and it didn’t smell of anything at all. I began to rock back and forth.

“God,” I said, “how could You let this happen?”

“If I were you, I would be asking Myself the same question.”

“What?” I said. “What do You mean, I should—Hello? Hello? ” But there was no answer.

That night I dreamed of a house made from a shoe box. A Lego brick had been pushed through the window. There were flames of orange paper, and when they moved, they crackled. The flames reminded me of something, but I couldn’t think what. The fabric doll was asleep in the front bedroom and I shouted to her to wake up. The doll ran along the landing and woke the pipe-cleaner doll. Flames were climbing the stairs. They beat at them, but they faded then glowed into new life again.

When I woke, it was like coming up through water, the opposite of drowning, though it felt just as bad. And then I remembered what the flames reminded me of: the cellophane wrapper from a bottle of sports drink.

THE NEXT MORNING, while it was still early, Father came to take me home. I looked at him as we went through Mrs. Pew’s gate into our back garden, but his face didn’t tell me anything; there was no expression on it at all.

Inside the house, everything smelled of smoke. The front-room tiles were black and the walls were black around the window and there were pools of black water on the floor. The armchairs were black and eaten down to the stuffing. The paint on Mother’s sewing machine was bubbly and flaking. Where the window used to be there was now a board.

The front garden was like one of the pictures in the leaflet showing what it would be like after Armageddon. The golden cane around the front-room window was burned to the ground and so were the Christmas roses. The cherry tree was charred and the ground full of cinders. A rug, armchair, and table were piled up by the gate, and they were black too.

My room was as I left it: the bedclothes thrown back, the Land of Decoration just the same, the two little dolls I dreamed about safe and sound.

I got down on my knees. I said: “Thank you!” over and over, and clasped my hands. Then I opened my eyes. And I stared.

Because in the middle of the Land of Decoration was the cornfield, the one that caught fire, and one half of it was covered with the wrapper from a bottle of sports drink.

I SAT ON the side of the bath and said: “I don’t understand, I don’t understand, I don’t understand.” I wiped my mouth and flushed the toilet.

Then I went back to my room and I screwed up the drink wrapper and rolled up the field. I stamped on the earth and threw away the grass heads. I put the people and the containers of water back where they were. I said: “I don’t understand. I didn’t want to make a fire. I was playing.”

“Didn’t you realize that whatever you make can become real?” said the voice.

“No!” I said. “I thought I had to make something on purpose.”

“When you made the field, you were frightened,” God said. “Fear can make things happen. It’s like praying for disaster.”