Maggot Moon (13 page)

It was only then that it dawned on me that Miss Phillips had protected me at school. Like the time Mr. Gunnell tried to make the whole class join the Youth of the Motherland. It was Miss Phillips who had argued that they wouldn’t want a boy like me, a boy who had trouble tying his shoelaces. She probably told Mr. Hellman I was making progress in Miss Connolly’s class. Why didn’t I work that out before?

I emptied the bowl of dirty water and refilled it.

Gramps tilted her face to his and kissed her. Well, I wasn’t expecting that. I mean, Gramps is too old for all that. Surely when you are in your fifties that kind of thing stops? That myth had just been torpedoed out of the water. Gramps put his arm round Miss Phillips and she rested her head on his stomach.

“So that’s it,” I said. They both looked at me as if they had forgotten I was there. “You and Miss Phillips. I mean, how long have you been . . . courting?”

They both smiled.

“Three years.”

Well, you could have knocked me sideways with a feather. Three years.

“It’s been hard since the Lushes disappeared,” said Gramps.

I suppose me sleeping on top of his bed like a dog hadn’t helped.

Miss Phillips said, “Harry told me about the moon man and we have been doing our best to make contact with the Obstructors so that the information can be moved up the line. But Zone Seven is closed off from the outside world.”

The music stopped and the Voice of the Motherland broke in.

“Today, the leaders of the evil empires agreed to convene in our great capital, Tyker, to see our achievements with their own eyes. Earth will behold the first pictures ever to be taken of our new-won territory, the moon.

“Praise be the Motherland.”

There was an unmistakable cacophony outside our house. Boots hitting the pavement, car doors slamming, people shouting. Just one sound was missing from the orchestra of fear. They hadn’t brought the dogs with them, not this time. I was glued to the floor. We had been caught. It was all over.

Only when Gramps said fiercely, “Standish, move!” did I unfreeze.

We hid Miss Phillips upstairs at the back of Mum and Dad’s old monster of a wardrobe.

“That’ll be the first place they’ll look,” I said.

Gramps just pulled open the wardrobe door.

“No, the Greenflies aren’t that smart. They are getting greener by the day.”

Gramps was going into his bedroom when I remembered his coat. I ran back, took it from Miss Phillips and raced down the stairs. Another car screeched to a halt.

I hung up the coat, checked the table then opened the front door before they could kick it in again.

I wasn’t expecting the leather-coat man. He was yesterday’s problem. What surprised me most about seeing him was this: up to that moment my legs had been river reeds which threatened to collapse under me. But the sight of this git put the bull between my teeth good and proper.

“It’s becoming routine,” said the leather-coat man. “Every day I’m faced with Standish Treadwell. Where is your grandfather?”

“Asleep,” I said. “Why do you want him?”

He slapped me across the face with his leather glove.

“I ask the questions.”

He was speaking to me again as if I was stupid and to oblige I said, really slowly, “Yes, sir.”

I could see the Greenflies waiting behind him for the order to come charging in.

“Mr. Treadwell,” said the leather-coat man.

I turned to see Gramps stiffening that gammy leg of his. He pottered down the stairs real slow in his old pajamas and his patchwork dressing gown, yawning.

“Why are you here?” he asked. “You broke everything yesterday.”

It was not hard to see that the leather-coat man was a kettle of liquid fury about to reach boiling point. He sat on one of the broken chairs. It rocked back and forth. I hoped the bloody thing would break under him. He took to slapping the table, slapping it with his leather gloves.

Gramps just let out a sigh soiled with weariness. “I’m an old man. I try to survive with my grandson, nothing more. Why do you keep hounding us? We have done nothing wrong.”

The leather-coat man didn’t answer. He waved in the Greenflies. Gramps was right about one thing, they were very young. Just a bit older than me. Upstairs, downstairs, they went, into the cellar. An infestation of them.

I thought,
well, this is it, it’s all over apart from the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Louder than the rats in the woodwork were those soldiers. The walls seemed papier-mâché thin. The floorboards shook.

The leather-coat man sat there, smack-smack-smacking his gloves on the table. He stopped only to take out a cigarette and light it.

Finally, he said, “I want you to tell me where he is.”

“Who?” asked Gramps.

The leather-coat man was stuck on the flypaper of an unanswerable question.

The gloves hit the table again. The long silence was broken. The leather-coat man said, “We took a television away from this house.”

“Yes,” said Gramps. “It was from the time we were allowed to have them.”

Much to my amazement the leather-coat man didn’t answer.

I realized that Gramps must have pulled that TV apart so that no one would suspect that we had seen the land of Croca-Colas, where all the color lived, where people were having a ball.

The leather-coat man stubbed out his cigarette on the table, leaving a round, burnt hole. Maybe it was that burnt hole on the table that gave me the idea. You see, I saw in its pattern a stone. That’s when the idea floated into my brain.

The Greenflies came up from the cellar. They looked as if they’d done their job to the letter, their uniforms more gray than green. I knew they hadn’t found the moon man because if they had we would have heard their triumphant shouts. Instead they brought up the rat traps.

The man in charge of the Greenflies came down the stairs. He didn’t look too happy to whisper what he had to whisper to the leather-coat man.

“Nothing? Nothing? Are you sure?” shouted the leather-coat man.

“Nothing, sir.”

The odd thing about being that close to the edge was that I could see that both Gramps and I were resigned to the fall. It was almost as if it was Fate’s game, not ours. She was the one dealing the cards. I think I knew then what was going on behind the wall in the garden. They had built the moon in that hideous building, the one once called the people’s palace.

That was when my idea became a plan. I thought about it from all angles. I almost left the room — it was really taking shape.

“You are both under house arrest.” The leather-coat man interrupted my thoughts, which was irritating as I had spun the whole thing in my head, 360 degrees.

“Are you listening, Standish Treadwell?” he said.

I have this effect on people. They think I’m not paying attention when I am.

To the train-track mind of the leather-coat man, I appeared to be vacant.
Vacant
was the word Mr. Gunnell liked to use about me. Vacant I might look, but I am not. Hector and I spent ages working on this look of mine. You don’t get to sit right at the back of the class if you’re stand-out smart.

“You and your grandfather will be removed at zero six-thirty hours tomorrow. You are being offered salvation over annihilation. You will both be sent on a re-education course.”

No, we bloody well won’t. He was lying. We were going to be wiped out, maggot meat.

“Each of you can pack one suitcase,” he continued. “Under no circumstances are you to leave these premises.”

The jerk. This was our house, our home.

The Greenflies waited until the leather-coat man strode out to his black, bluebottle car.

We stood on the step, Gramps and me, as if we were saying good-bye to friends who had popped in for tea. We watched the last of the Greenflies climb back into the trucks. They drove off, leaving only the car with the detectives watching us from behind their dark glasses.

If I were a Juniparian, which I’m not, I would save the world. Still, I did have a plan. It was based on a story I once heard about this giant and a boy about my age, my height, and a stone. Just one small stone shot from a sling hit that giant between the eyes. He dropped down dead, the giant did. I tell you, it was such a foolish idea I thought it might be foolproof.

Miss Phillips came down the stairs. She wore a pair of Gramps’s trousers and one of his shirts.

She looked at him and smiled. “One of the Greenflies said if anyone was hiding in there they would have closed the door.”

I thought the difficult part of my plan would be to convince Gramps and Miss Phillips that it would work. That all I needed to defeat the Motherland was one stone.

And the stone thrower would be me.

There was much I learned that day about Gramps. For a start, as well as having Miss Phillips, he had a transmitter. I still can’t make my way round it. How I could be so naive about both? Apparently the transmitter broke over a year back. You can’t take a thing like that to the shop to get it mended. It was Mr. Lush who fixed it and made sure that even if the Motherland picked up the signal, the code would automatically be scrambled.

A day ago I didn’t know there was a transmitter behind a wooden panel in the kitchen wall. A day ago, I thought of Gramps as old. Today he is a silver fox with a cunning tail.

Miss Phillips sat in the secret chamber in Cellar Street. Cripes, she is clever. She could read the moon man’s notes even though they were in the language of the East. Gramps hadn’t been able to make tail or head of them. He sat on a stool next to her with the earphones on, patiently trying to get a message through to the Obstructors. All was dead.

By lunchtime there had been nothing.

In the end Gramps stopped trying. We ate scrambled eggs with stale toast. Miss Phillips hardly touched her food. She had lost her appetite. I think it was to do with the moon man’s notes. He wasn’t eating either.

“What do they say?” asked Gramps, squeezing Miss Phillips’s hand.

“Let me just go over them once more,” she said.

I knew she was stalling.

“They have had built a huge film set of the moon in the old palace, haven’t they?” I said.

“Yes,” said Miss Phillips. “They will film the rocket landing on the moon there, and the first moon walk. Afterwards, everyone who has worked on the project will be disposed of. That includes the scientists, the workers, and the astronauts. They have already dug the mass graves.”

I interrupted her. “How did the moon man find our tunnel?” The moon man wrote and Miss Phillips translated. I could see she was not sure if she should tell me the answer. I knew it already. Still I said, “Go on — tell me.”

Miss Phillips hesitated.

I said, “He saw Hector, didn’t he?”