Hungry Moon (2 page)

^{As soon as Diana's class were together on the moor, they began to clamour to go to the cave. Now that they were out of sight of the school they obviously felt freer to be themselves, red-haired Thomas telling feeble jokes to make his cronies giggle, Sally pushing her taped spectacles higher on her nose and blinking like a grandmother, advising her friend Jane to keep hold of her hand. Ronnie even slipped a catapult out of the pocket of the baggy trousers he'd inherited from his brother until Diana gave him a warning glance. 'We'll have to see if we've time for the cave,' she told the forty-three of them. 'Now remember, we want to see lots of work in your workbooks.'}

^{'So Mr and Mrs Scragg will know we've been working,' Jane said.}

^{'So they can see what a good class you are.' Maybe they were as streetwise in their way as the kids she'd taught in New York - they'd need to be when they went up to Mrs Scragg's class, quite a few of them after the summer vacation. Kids were tough, she told herself, but when she thought of putting any child into Mrs Scragg's hands for three years, sometimes she wanted to weep.}

^{The sky was clearing. The burst of May sunlight seemed to rearrange the landscape, opened out the moors and underlined the drystone walls with shadow, tinged clouds on the horizon green to show that they were peaks threaded with glinting streams. The sounds of the town had already fallen behind, and the two main Manchester-Sheffield roads between which Moonwell was the only town for miles were out of sight as well as hearing. Diana stood for a moment, her hands in the pockets of her zippered cardigan, the sun on her face. The silent brightening of the landscape felt like her first sight of Moonwell, her sense of having come home.}

^{When clouds hid the sun her hands wanted to pull the overcast apart, but she held them out to the children instead. 'Who remembers what I told you about sunshine?'}

^{Dozens of hands went up with cries of 'Miss, me, miss.' She was hoping Andrew Bevan might respond, but he was hiding behind Sally's and Jane's mothers, who were helping supervise the outing. 'Is that hand up or down, Sally?' Diana said.}

^{'Up, miss,' Sally protested, sounding hurt, and had to grab her precarious spectacles. 'Miss, you said there's less sunshine here than anywhere else in England.'}

^{'Right, because of the clouds and the mists. And that's why you must never- come on, now, you all know this.'}

^{'Go on the moors without a grown-up,' they said in a ragged chorus.}

^{'You said it. Remember, people have got lost on the moors for days. Now let's find somewhere you can sit and work and we'll see how the afternoon goes.'}

^{She led them up the grassy path to a bank where they could sit in groups in the midst of the heather. She chatted to the mothers and unobtrusively watched the children work. The landscape kept drawing her gaze, the miles of heather and bunched grass, the unearthly sameness broken only by an infrequent drystone wall or a dried-up stream bed the colour and cracked texture of burnt cork, the lonely whisper of grass, the flight of a single bird. The path would lead you downward so imperceptibly that you mightn't notice when the peaks sank out of sight, leaving you only the horizon of the moor. The slopes brightened again, and Diana felt as if she'd made that happen by watching. Perhaps she felt so much at home because her family had originally come from the Peak District, though now she had no family at all.}

^{Soon all the children had filled a page or more with writing and drawing. Andrew's picture of a bunch of heather was out of proportion but colourful. 'That's good, Andrew,' she said to stop him from scribbling it out, and praised the others wherever she could. She smiled then at all their eager faces. 'Okay, now I want you all to stay behind me and hold your partner's hand.'}

^{As she led them to where the path forked, slopes raised themselves ahead like giants awakening. One branch of the path led up over the moors, the other followed the edge above Moonwell, past the cave that apparently had given the town its name. For hundreds of yards around the bowl of barren land that sloped down to the cave, the moors were threadbare, grass and heather giving way to bare gritstone. She went up to the edge of the bowl and held up one hand to stay the children. 'This is as far as we go.'}

^{Two hundred yards away, at the centre of the stony bowl, the cave gaped. Presumably someone had once thought it looked wide or deep enough to lose the moon in. It was really a pothole, fifty feet wide at the mouth and surrounded by a drystone wall. The first time she'd come here she had stepped over the wall, only to discover that even at high noon in summer you couldn't see bottom; walls that looked smooth and slippery as tallow plunged straight into darkness whose chill seemed to reach out of the bowl to where she stood now. Though she understood that eventually the shaft bent, as far as her emotions were concerned it might as well go straight down forever. Even though the children were safe beyond the edge of the bowl, she couldn't help wishing she hadn't brought them there. 'Never go any farther than this, okay?' she said, and waited until they all promised. —They-started shouting then, trying to make the cave echo. Some voices made a noise down there, not all–Diana assumed it had to do with pitch. She watched Ronnie wondering if he could get away with a shot from his catapult, and she was about to wag a finger at him when Sally's mother cried, 'Andrew!'}

^{Diana swung round, fearing the worst. But Andrew had only strayed back toward the path, and was stooping over something that had crawled away from the bowl. Children crowded round him. 'Yuck, it's a lizard,' Sally squeaked.}

^{Jane stepped back with a cry of disgust. 'It hasn't got any eyes.'}

^{As Diana hurried after the rest of her class to see, Andrew stepped forward and trod heavily on the creature, ground his heel into it and looked round as if he hoped the other children would be impressed, but they shuddered away from him. 'It must have come out of the cave,' Diana said, glancing at the mess of white skin and innards. 'A pity you trod on it, Andrew. It's very unusual for anything like that to come into the open. Never mind,' she said quickly, for the boy's mouth was trembling. 'While we're here you can tell us how you help to dress the cave.'}

^{His small, thin, pale face with its hint of eyebrows looked resentful. 'I make a bit of a picture with flowers,' he muttered as if he hoped nobody would hear.}

^{'You use petals, don't you? And then your piece and all the others fit together like a jigsaw.' Throughout the Peaks, towns decorated wells with pictures made of flowers and vegetation, a tradition that combined paganism and Christianity in thanksgiving for the water that had stayed fresh during the Plague and the Black Death. Watching the townsfolk carrying floral panels big as doors up from Moonwell to fit together at the cave last Midsummer Eve, Diana had felt as if she'd stepped back in time, into a calm that the world was losing. But Thomas was whispering 'Petals,' nudging his friends and}

^{sniggering, and Diana found that she didn't feel calm so close to the gaping cave. 'I think it's time we headed back,'she said.}

^{'Tents all round,' Andrew muttered, and pretended he hadn't spoken. He was right, Diana saw: the tents on the slopes above and below Moonwell made a ring around the cave and the town. Campers and walkers kept Moonwell going now that the lead mines were exhausted, concrete lids covering the abandoned shafts on the moor.}

^{The path led back to the edge of the moor, and suddenly there was the town between a chapel and a church, tiers of limestone terraces like one side of an amphitheatre, the murmur of small-town traffic. Diana led her class down the nearest zigzag path and along the High Street, past townsfolk gossiping on street corners, greeting her and the children. Her class fell silent as they reached the stony schoolyard with a few minutes to spare before the final bell.}

^{Mr Scragg was in his office, caning a boy taller than he was. Some of Diana's class tittered nervously at the sight of the headmaster standing on a chair. Sally's and Jane's mothers stayed outside the gates and looked away. Diana herded the children to her classroom just as the bell rang. 'Hush now until you're out of the building,' she told them, and headed for the staff room.}

^{The air in the small dingy room was laden with stale smoke from Mrs Scragg's cigarettes. Mrs Scragg was sitting in her armchair, which looked too small for her large bones. She thrust her broad, red face, whose upper lip was even redder from plucking a mustache, at Diana in her pugilistic way that often reduced children to tears. 'Found your way back safe, did you, Miss Kramer? Here's someone you ought to remember.'}

^{'I hope Miss Kramer's pupils aren't getting used to having everything their own way,' said the woman in the other armchair, tipping a bottle into a baby's mouth,}

^{'now I'm not here to deal with them.'}

^{'I'm sure Miss Kramer knows what we expect by now, Mrs Halliwell.'}

^{'You can bet on that,' Diana said sweetly, and went to her locker. Childbirth hadn't improved Mrs Halliwell's view of children, it seemed. Best to leave before she had to bite her tongue, Diana thought, and was closing her locker when Mr Scragg came in.}

^{His face looked flushed from the caning. He kicked the door shut with his heel and brandished a magazine at the women, glaring at it from beneath his bristling grey eyebrows. 'Look at this muck I found in Cox's desk. He won't be holding anything before he goes to bed tonight, I promise you.'}

^{'From that bookshop, I suppose,' Mrs Scragg said without looking.}

^{'What else can you expect from people who'd sell books in a church? A pity the town didn't listen to me while they could. There's a good few regret letting them move in there now that it's too late.'}

^{'Too many strangers moving in, if you ask me,' Mrs Halliwell complained, and Diana felt her glare on the back of her neck. 'No wonder there's so much vandalism and theft all of a sudden. And those hippies squatting in the holiday cottages, filthy creatures. God forgive me, but I wouldn't have minded if they'd poisoned themselves to death with their drugs.'}

^{I wouldn't have taken you for a native with that Irish accent of yours, Diana thought of saying to Mrs Scragg. 'Modern times get in everywhere,' she said, meaning to joke.}

^{'Not in this town they don't. They're far enough away that we can see them coming. Here, I'll show you what we think of them.' Mrs Scragg took the magazine from her husband as if she were holding a soiled diaper. It was a
Wonder Woman,
Diana saw, just like the comics she'd read in her childhood, metal bra and all. Mrs Scragg ground her cigarette into the face of the woman on the cover, dragged the red-hot tip over the glossy paper until the scantily clad figure was crossed out. 'Clear enough? You can tell your friends at the bookshop that's what we think of anyone who sells muck to innocents.'}

^{'I don't think the Booths even sell comics,' Diana said, but she might as well not have spoken. 'Excuse me now, would you?' She hurried out of the stale room, along the shiny bilious corridor past her empty classroom. All she could do was as much as she could, she told herself: not just educate the children but strengthen their resilience, prepare them for years alone with the Scraggs, except how could she prepare children like Andrew? She stepped out of the school and lifted her face to the sun. More and more since she'd come to Moonwell she felt there was something else she could do, if she could only think what it was.}

^THREE

^{Business was slack at Booths' Books, despite all the unfamiliar faces the summer had brought to the town, and so Geraldine strolled along to the Bevans' shop. June Bevan was vacuuming the display of rucksacks and Primus stoves and climbing gear, her long brownish hair with its hints of grey swinging lankly beside her face. She straightened up, round-shouldered still. 'Gerry, tell me you've just come for a chat. You mustn't let Andrew take advantage of you.'}

^{'I'm going past the school anyway,' Geraldine lied. 'It's no trouble.'}

^{‘Well, it’s very kind of you to say so. We do appreciate you and your husband taking so much interest in him. I hope he says so if he ever speaks up for himself.'}

^{'He's quite chatty when you get to know him.'}

^{'Really? I mustn't know him very well, then.' June's small crowded face with its prominent cheekbones went blank. 'Anyway, I better hadn't keep you or we'll have him hanging round outside the school making people think nobody wants him.'}

^{Somebody does, Geraldine thought, and you should-but she shouldn't be so quick to judge. The Bevans had befriended her and Jeremy when Mrs Scragg at the school was trying to turn people against them, circulating a petition against letting the deconsecrated chapel be used as a bookshop. Some of those who hadn't signed seemed to feel guilty now even if they didn't go to church, especially those who had children in Mrs Scragg's class. Geraldine was tempted to have a showdown with the woman, but not now, not in front of Andrew. She made her way to the school along the High Street, past shops displaying clothes and wool and local artists' paintings and fossils gathered on the peaks.}

^{Andrew was lurking behind the stone gatepost, chewing his nails to clean them. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his long grey flannel shorts and looked away from Geraldine in order to smile at her. 'You look good and grubby,' she said.}

^{He glanced down at his grimy legs and fallen socks, and seemed to shrink into himself. 'Don't worry, you'll wash,' she said, taking his hand. Any eight-year-old should be dirty and untidy and tired by the end of the day: Jonathan would have been - but it was wrong to think about him while she was with Andrew. 'Aren't you talking to me today?' she said.}

^{'Yes,' he said with a shaky laugh, but that was all until they came in sight of his parents' shop. His thin, pale face kept glancing at her when he thought she wasn't looking, and he didn't notice the horse's turd at the edge of the pavement until he trod in it. Fuck and bother, he muttered, and flinched automatically.}

^{Geraldine managed to keep her face straight and look as if she'd heard nothing special. She held his elbow while he scraped his sole on the kerb. As she let go he blurted, 'I like being in Miss Kramer's class. I wish I could be forever.'}

^{'I'm sure she'd like you to be, Andrew,' Geraldine said, and couldn't think what else to say. She opened the door of Bevans' for him, to June's cry of 'Just look at you, where on earth have you been?' She gave June a placatory look and went on to the bookshop.}

^{The seventeenth-century Nonconformist chapel had fallen out of use twenty years ago, but had only recently been deconsecrated. It had seemed a perfect setting for the bookshop she and Jeremy had had to move from Sheffield when the mounting rates had forced them out, especially since living quarters were already built onto the chapel. But as if the undercurrent of righteousness among the townsfolk hadn't been enough, Geraldine thought wryly, they'd had to employ Benedict Eddings to help them convert the chapel.}

^{Jeremy was failing to reach Benedict by phone as Geraldine went in. 'You might tell him the alarm went off again at three o'clock this morning,' he said, tugging at the black beard that covered his face from his cheekbones down. 'I really would be grateful if he'd give us a call as soon as he gets in.' He put down the receiver and beamed at Geraldine, crinkles spreading from his large blue eyes across his square face under his high, balding forehead. 'No need for me to give his wife a hard time on his behalf.'}

^{He gave her a tame bear hug and said, almost too gently and casually, 'How was Andrew?'}

^{'Better than sometimes. I should have brought him to choose another book.' She disengaged herself eventually, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by Jeremy's hidden concern for her: if she were going to break she would have done so years ago. Jonathan was some-}

^{where, that was all that mattered - perhaps only in her imagination or somewhere like an endless dream. 'Come on, let's fix that shelf,' she said.}

^{When they'd secured the bookcase that had begun to sag away from the wall the day after Eddings had built it, she replaced the books while Jeremy made dinner. Halfway through dinner in the small white dining room with its view of the heathery slopes, they heard the Bevans come home. June was still scolding Andrew. 'Just you get upstairs and make sure the water's hot. What must Geraldine have thought of you looking like a little tramp? Have some thought for me if you've none for yourself.'}

^{'I won't be used like that,' Geraldine said with an edge to her voice, but telling June so might make it worse for Andrew. She put on a tape of Sibelius instead, music bleak as bare mountains, to blot out June's continued scolding. The tape hadn't been playing ten minutes when June rang the doorbell. 'Could you turn the music down a little? Not that we don't appreciate good music, but the boy's just gone to bed. The sooner he's asleep the sooner we'll have some peace, God willing.'}

^{Presumably he'd been sent to bed with no dinner. 'Send him over here if it's peace you want,' Geraldine suggested, but June was already marching away to her house. Geraldine turned down the volume and finished her meal, though her stomach felt tight. She was helping Jeremy clear up when the bell rang again. It was June's husband, Brian.}

^{'Is he in? Not interrupting anything, am I?' he said, and stepped over the threshold without waiting for Geraldine to invite him in. He had a soft round face with a jutting jaw that she thought he thrust forward deliberately, sallow skin tinged bluish under his eyes, curly sideburns that trailed down to the hinges of his jaw. He went into the kitchen and found Jeremy washing the dishes. 'Got you doing her jobs, has she? Listen, I hope mine didn't offend you before.'}

^{'Your . . .? Oh, you mean June. It was Geraldine she spoke to, actually.'}

^{'You know how she gets when she's on edge. Andrew was being stupid, contradicting her. Hadn't even the sense to keep his mouth shut. Anyway, listen, I wanted to ask if you were going out tonight.'}

^{'We weren't planning to. Why,' Geraldine said, 'would you like us to keep an eye on Andrew?'}

^{'I should think you'd had enough of him for one day. No, if you're not going out, come round for a drink.'}

^{'We're hoping to have the alarm fixed,' Jeremy said.}

^{'You'll hear Eddings from our house if he ever turns up. Say you'll come or she'll think she offended you. Besides,' Brian said as if this left them no option, 'we want to talk to you about Andrew.'}

^{When he'd gone Jeremy called Eddings, only to learn that he was still out patching up his handiwork. 'Let's brave the hospitality,' Jeremy said with a grimace. A vacuum cleaner was bumbling about the Bevans' entrance hall. 'You'd think he could have wiped his feet after coming round to see you,' June said by way of explanation, and ushered them into the front room.}

^{Porcelain was everywhere: shepherdesses on the mantelpiece above the grey brick hearth that surrounded the simulated coals of the gas fire, Chinese figures on shelves around the walls, a china tea set on the Welsh dresser. Geraldine couldn't see where there was room for Andrew to play, what with all that and the television and video recorder and the pine bar at which Brian was waiting to serve. 'What'll it be? Anything so long as it's Scotch, gin, or martini.'}

^{June handed out paper mats and slipped one beneath her tumbler of martini before she sat down, sighing. 'Maybe now I can relax after worrying about Andrew all day.'}

^{'What's been the matter?' Geraldine said.}

^{June stared as if Geraldine were being facetious. 'Don't you know where that American woman took}

^{them? Not just up on the moors but right by the cave. If you even set foot on the moors you should take a map and compass and food in case you get lost.'}

^{'I think that's only on a long walk,' Jeremy said.}

^{'My father said if you even set foot on the moors. Still, I suppose you feel you've got to defend his teacher, seeing that she's a friend of yours.'}

^{'We got to know her from taking Andrew to school,' Geraldine pointed out.}

^{'She's all right as teachers go, except she thinks she knows all about kids,' Brian said. 'What she needs is a man to teach her a few things, if you take my meaning.'}

^{Geraldine looked away from his wink. 'You were saying you wanted to talk about Andrew.'}

^{'We wanted your opinion, as long as you see so much of him.' Brian took a swallow of his Scotch and looked hard at each of them in turn. 'Maybe you know more about these things than we would. What I want to know is, do you think he's queer?'}

^{'Odd, you mean?' Jeremy suggested.}

^{'Not just odd,
queer.
I suppose you'd call it gay, though I'm buggered if I know what they've got to be gay about.' Brian's face was reddening. 'Do you think he's . . . not a man?'}

^{'He isn't yet, is he?' Geraldine said. 'He's only a little boy. Most of us aren't sure what sex we are until we're at least in our teens.'}

^{'People round here are, let me tell you, and he better had be if he knows what's good for him.'}

^{'I'm sure he's as normal as any of us,' Geraldine said, wishing he were, hoping he would be.}

^{'That's my feeling too. I didn't see how he could be queer. It isn't as if anyone could have got their hands on him.' He turned grinning to Jeremy. 'I'll tell you something now. I used to think you might be one of them, what with all the time you spend in the kitchen and that name of yours.'}

^{June broke the awkward silence. 'If Andrew's normal that way, then what is wrong with him?'}

^{'In what way?' Geraldine said.}

^{'In just about every way you can think of, God help us. He's near the bottom of his year at school, though your teacher friend has brought him up a bit this year; I suppose we must give her that. And out of school he's even worse, under my feet from dawn to dusk and won't go out because nobody will play with him. Not that you can blame them when he never acts his age. Talks like a baby half the time.'}

^{'Perhaps if you encouraged him to talk a bit more. . .'}

^{'Talk
morel
Dear Lord, when I've had a weekend of him sometimes I think my head will never stop aching. I dread the summer holidays, I don't mind telling you. If you had a day of him I don't think you'd be so anxious to encourage him.'}

^{'I wouldn't mind.'}

^{'Well, let's not let him spoil the evening,' Brian said as June pursed her lips. 'Who wants to watch a video? You two haven't got a machine, have you? I've something here you might like.'}

^{He reached behind the bar and produced an unmarked plastic box. His sudden eager good humour made Geraldine uneasy even before he said, 'It isn't what you'd call hard core. More of a comedy.'}

^{'I don't mind pornography,' June said with what looked like a brave smile, 'as long as it doesn't involve children.'}

^{Geraldine sighed inwardly and took Jeremy's hand as the film's few credits faded. Brian began to chortle as the target for a game of marbles proved to be an anonymous vagina. Geraldine refused to look at him, though she was sure he was gazing at her to see how she reacted, making her conscious of her long legs and large breasts, of the heat spreading up her heart-shaped face to her close-cropped silvery hair, to the tips of her slightly pointed ears. She hoped furiously that she wasn't blushing.}

^{'That's what I call a game of marbles,' Brian spluttered as the winner took the woman as a preamble to an orgy. At the first spurt of semen in the film Jeremy cleared his throat. 'I really think we should make sure we don't miss Eddings.'}

^{'You've never got to go yet,' Brian protested, and jumped up. 'Come with me first anyway, I've got something else to show you.'}

^{Jeremy glanced back helplessly at Geraldine as he followed Brian upstairs. She would have suggested switching off the tape, but June was staring at the screen with a tight-lipped smile that didn't invite any kind of approach. Overhead Geraldine heard a buzzing that surely couldn't be what it sounded like. The tangle of flesh on the television screen looked almost abstract to her by the time the men came downstairs.}

^{'Any time you want a rest from Andrew, bring him round to us,' Jeremy said in a casual tone that was meant to deny the rest of the evening. He was clearly as anxious to leave as she was. She took his hand, and they hurried out into the velvety evening. As soon as they were beyond the Bevans' gate he muttered, 'You'll never guess what he wanted to show me.'}