Maggot Moon (11 page)

What can I say about the days after Hector was taken? You see, once you are rubbed out, you never existed. Night, day, day, night. All blue. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat. Went to school, where no one talked to me. No one asked about Hector. Because they daren’t. His name was erased from the register. He was expendable. That was the disease he was born with. Weren’t we all, in the Motherland? Except Mr. Gunnell. He had the foolish notion that he was exceptional. The frickwit.

Hans Fielder, the leader of the torture lounge, had left me, the untouchable, alone. Until, that is, the visit from the leather-coat man.

What I remember about Gramps after the Lushes went was that he looked older, more worried, with each day that passed. We were being watched. One thing bled into another. The wound kept oozing grief, no matter how many bandages of “it will be all right.”

In the evenings we listened to the radio. Gramps took to writing down what he wanted to say. Half pictures, half words. Only in our minds were we free to dream. The radio played and we believed it would hide our thoughts.

And footprints deep marked out new moons of Motherland . . .

Moon . . . ARO5 . . . SOL3 . . . ELD9.

Words. All meaningless words. I wanted to kill myself.

Gramps said, “Standish, don’t think about the past. We’ll do what we always did, before the Lushes came.”

What was that, then? Hector brought the light. All he left was the darkness.

Every night we would make out we were off to bed.

“Good night,” Gramps would shout into the room I refused to sleep in. We would sit on the edge of his bed together. Outside a wasp of a car buzzed up and down the road. Midnight, Gramps had worked out, was when the detectives in the wasp car had a break from their duties. Time for a pee, for a bite to eat. That was when Gramps and me would make our way quietly down to Cellar Street.

Before the war — which war, I don’t know, there’s been so blooming many, all won of course by the great Motherland — anyway before the wars, Gramps had been the senior scene painter at the big opera house in Zone One. Maybe there weren’t zones in those days, but that’s not the point. No, the point is that once, at the start of the wars, Gramps had painted airplanes on the ground. They looked from the sky like the real McCoy. After that war, the Motherland introduced the first program of re-education. Gramps was forced to attend it for painting those planes. Some of his friends refused to do it. Some were the wrong breed, wrong color, wrong nationality. They weren’t allowed a re-education. The Greenflies needed their maggot meat. As for Gramps, he passed the test. Just.

They — him, Gran, and Dad and Mum — were moved here just before I was born. Anyway, that’s another way by the by.

The reason I thought about Gramps being a scene painter was because of the wall he had built and painted at the bottom of Cellar Street. You see, Gramps had painted a perfect illusion of a perfect wall. It slid in tight, right next to the alien growth, a giant mushroom-like thing that shone with an unnatural light. It stank as bad as the lines of the Anthem of the Motherland.

Hidden in its pungent, fleshy folds was a small lock and if it was jiggled in a certain way the wall would slide open. Only when the wall was shut again did the lights flicker on in the secret chamber. They ran off an old battery that Mr. Lush had rigged up.

It was because of the painted wall that, after the Lushes were taken, Gramps took to working outside in the front garden. He looked as if he was pruning the white roses. Secretly, he was putting in a warning system to tell us if anyone was in the house while we were down in the storeroom in Cellar Street.

I tell you this for a bagful of humbugs, it was eerily deserted under those houses. All we could hear down there was the conversation of rats. A very stubborn thing is your common brown rat. I often wondered how it was the rats became fat when we were so very lean.

A week ago, I came home from school, lost in a daydream. This one involved our flying saucer landing on planet Juniper. To me it was like having a cinema in my head. I could see Hector touching down, the Juniparians waiting to greet him, smiles on their faces. They were dressed . . . I stopped as I reached the kitchen. Gramps wasn’t there. Where the frick-fracking hell was he? Panic flooded through me. I couldn’t see straight, couldn’t think straight, my head was about to blow a fuse. I rushed outside into the drizzle. He had to be in the vegetable plot, he bloody well had to be in the vegetable plot.

That’s when I saw the door to the air-raid shelter had been opened.

No! No, no — he hadn’t gone through the tunnel. He wouldn’t do that, would he? I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. All of me felt about to break apart. That was when I spied the enormous boots sticking out of the potting shed.

I ran back indoors. Gramps was in the kitchen, taking off his old army coat. I couldn’t speak, so I dragged him to the potting shed. Inside, there was this fricking moon man desperately pulling at his huge, steamed-up helmet with his space gloves, his whole body jerking.

Gramps said, “Go and work in the vegetable patch.”

“But what about —”

“I’ll take care of this.”

Frick-fracking hell. I started to dig, did my best to make it look as if I was digging for my supper rather than for our lives. I knew what Gramps was trying to do in the potting shed. Take off the moon man’s helmet and fast, otherwise I had better start to dig a grave. I heard a crack and someone gasping for air.

After a bit, Gramps came out of the potting shed and closed the door. Together we went into the kitchen and turned the radio on, razor loud.

Gramps whispered over the din, “We will have to wait until it’s dark.”

We waited and waited until night pricked the old sun’s balloon.

Only then were we able to bring the moon man into the kitchen.

He seemed giant-tall, very clumsy in all the clothes he wore. It was strange to see close up a face that was so familiar from the posters. Here he was, ELD9, all the hope of the moon landings rinsed from his features. Left in its place were worry lines etched deep into his forehead. The twinkle in his eye extinguished, the cheeky smile a grimace. We sat him down on a chair and gave him tea, which he drunk from the corner of his mouth as if each sip was painful.

The moon man said nothing. Then he opened his mouth to show us he had no tongue to speak with.

I guessed that’s what they had done to my mum.

The day Mr. Gunnell killed Little Eric Owen and a rocket was launched into space was the day I knew for certain that Gramps and me were unlikely ever to make it out of Zone Seven. Alive, that is. Owning a television is enough of an offense in itself for both of us to be sent away to be re-educated.

By the time we reached our house the front door had been kicked in. There was no need — we never locked it. There was not much point. Inside they had done a very thorough job. There was nothing that hadn’t been touched or turned over. It wasn’t the broken I minded, I just didn’t like who did the breaking. I looked at Gramps. He put his arm around me.

We tried to salvage what we could in the vegetable patch then worked inside, tidying up the house by candlelight.

Gramps had never taken down the blackout curtains so at least no one could see in, but we knew the detectives had returned. We made a cup of tea and went upstairs to bed. We snuffed out the candle, we waited a hard, hungry hour. I was half-dreaming of Spam fritters. Our tummies rumbled. It was after midnight when we finally went down to the cellar, taking some bread and the Spam fritters with us.

Gramps put the traps with that day’s catch of rats near the stairs that led up to our house. Then we set off again into what you would think was the farthest part of Cellar Street. The pungent smell hit you down there. That was the reason the leather-coat men’s dogs were unable to sniff out the moon man. That alien fungus smothered everything with its earthy stench. It even glowed in the dark, looking almost alive, hungry, feeding off the damp and the dark of the house, brittling its bones to the core.

We opened the sliding door. Cripes, I can tell you it was a relief to see the moon man. Not to mention the two hens and the radio Mr. Lush had wired up so we could hear, once in a while, the evil empires of the world speak words of comfort to us.