Maggot Moon (15 page)

Miss Phillips has come up from Cellar Street and is sitting in the shadows on the top stair.

I know why she is there. To say the unsayable good-bye.

Gramps opens the back door and turns towards her.

Miss Phillips’s hard, no-nonsense face is bruised, tender-wet with tears. She nods.

Outside, the moon is up over the wall. Gramps pulled down the air-raid shelter after the moon man appeared. All that is left of it is neatly stacked to hide the tunnel entrance. He removes the sheets of corrugated iron, ready for me to get through before he puts them all back. So that it will look like nothing has happened.

Here it is, a grave in the earth, ready and waiting for me. There’s no turning back, not now. I am in no-man’s-land. No land anybody would fricking want to be in, that’s for sure.

I kiss Gramps.

I don’t expect him to say a word.

He says, “Standish, I’m proud of you.”

I know I’m dead. The only question is how I die.

I am seeing what Hector saw when he broke through. The hatch is completely hidden among all the brambles and stinging nettles. I managed to rip my shorts and scratch my legs when I scrabbled out from under all that tangle of nature.

I dust as much of the dirt off me as I can, the rest I rub into my skin. I look pretty filthy and there is blood dripping down my legs. I climb up to where the meadow was. Now it’s a battlefield of lorry tracks and wounded earth. In the distance is that ugly old palace, its huge glass window still staring.

I know which way to go. I have the moon man’s map engraved in my mind, though the latrines are farther away than I imagined. The light is so bright you might convince yourself it was the middle of the day rather than the oncoming night.

It’s funny how in one’s head everything seems so simple. I had it all worked out. I would break in, find Hector, throw my stone, and together we would escape. It’s the fricking reality that destroys plans. I make my way towards the latrines, which aren’t far from that atrocity of a building. I could find them blindfolded — the smell is shit awful. I see the searchlight, an eye in the sky to winkle me out. Here goes, Standish, here goes.

“Stop!” one of the guards shouts as its beam pins me to the spot.

There is the sound of running feet. Two Greenflies grab me and drag me before a man whose face I can’t see — the light behind him is too bright.

Please,
I am thinking,
don’t let this be all over before it’s begun. Don’t let this be the leather-coat man.
I cover my eyes.

“Turn the light away,” the man shouts.

He is outlined in electric yellow. I am relieved to see an officer who isn’t the leather-coat man.

He is yelling, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

And I say, in my best Motherland tongue, “Taking a shit, sir.”

“Why down there?”

“Have you seen the latrines? Even the rats are killed off by the smell.”

I am expecting a slap for my cheek.

Instead he says, “A good shit? It must have been by the look of your legs.” He laughs. “So you don’t like the facilities?”

I think it’s best not to answer that one. He doesn’t look that stable, this hand-grenade of an officer.

“Are you on the day shift?”

I nod.

The officer marches me towards a hut, where an enormous woman is sitting in a chair. Behind her, a sacking curtain masks what lies inside. She stands up. So does the chair, stuck out at an angle from her bottom.

She is wearing a matron’s uniform but I don’t think she has much to do with nursing.

The officer is happily yelling at the fat woman. It’s not worth translating — anyone can get the general gist of what he is saying — but it gives me time to see more clearly what is beyond the open doors of the palace. It looks to me like the moon has collided with Zone Seven.

The moon man told me there were thousands of starving people working here. I can see a lot of figures standing on the dark side of the moon. I am now looking properly at a film set which is the most important film set ever to be built, one that will shape all our lives, change history. The world is about to swallow one huge, inedible lie. And I, Standish Treadwell, am the only one with a plan.

The fat woman returns to her post, cursing the officer under her breath as he walks away. I notice she has a whip which has fallen to the floor and I feel a great temptation to kick it away from her. But I don’t.

“Number?” she shouts at me.

“Um . . . not good with remembering numbers,” I say. Stupid will work well for me here.

She pulls back the curtain. And I’m thinking,
roll up, roll up, welcome to Hell’s waiting room.

Bunks upon bunks, nothing more than two boards to each bed, no covers, nothing. They are all sleeping in their clothes, even in their shoes. They look like shrunken corpses, the clothes the only solid reminder that they once filled them out with purpose.

There isn’t a spare bed.

I’m thinking about crawling under one of the bunks when a women says, “Here, love, you’d better share with me.”

She is painfully thin, her eyes hollow.

“Where are you from?” she asks.

“I’m lost,” I say.

“Aren’t we all.”

Such a cruel nation is the monstrous Motherland. I’m amazed no one has risen up to throttle the bitch.

I don’t remember much until the lights come on. A bell rings, and one by one each of the bunk beds is emptied. Everyone stands robot-still. The Greenflies have furious-looking Alsatians pulling at their leashes. We line up to wash at a pump.

The woman who let me stay on the bare boards with her says, “Drink the water. Wipe your face but drink as much water as you can.”

That’s not as simple as it sounds. The guards don’t want any water-drinking going on. We line up again. Each of us is given one slice of bread balanced on a mug of black tea. We are marched into the palace as the figures I saw last night march past us in the opposite direction, too tired to lift their feet. They are going to sleep on the hard wooden bunks we’ve just left.

Frick-fracking hell. Once you’re inside that atrocity of a building and you see that moon for yourself, that’s when you realize it fills the whole of this huge, ugly beast. There are men in white coats walking about taking exact measurements of everything.

Our orders for today are to get the sky backcloths in place and position the stars where they should be. Details are things the Motherland likes a lot. Paperwork and details. Everyone lines up. I tell you this, it looks so unreal. A city of moon workers. At least I won’t be noticed in this huge crowd. According to the moon man, the only way to get near the set is to volunteer, which no ever one does. The reason being that if you fail or one of the officers takes against you, that adds up to a bullet in the head. And you can’t argue with a bullet that final.

I might have to think that one through again. The one about volunteering, on account of my courage doesn’t seem to have woken up with me. I hope Gramps, Miss Phillips, and the moon man got away, for I don’t think I will.

“You there,” comes a voice.

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

I am pulled out of the crowd. I stand on the edge of the moon, feeling its silvery dust through the hole in my shoe.

“Did you hear what I said?”

This officer has a revolver in his hand and it looks like it might need a bit of shooting practice. I can see why Mr. Gunnell was so keen to join this load of maggot-makers.

“Yes,” I say.

Because although I was definitely thinking about other things I also was listening. They are wanting volunteers. The only bit I missed — which was a pity — was what they wanted volunteers for.

I put my hand up. The officer with a gun and the need for a head to fire it into looks almost disappointed. One of the Greenflies pulls me away.

There are two other boys of about my age who didn’t volunteer. Still they are dragged out of the crowd. I hear a woman yell out a boy’s name. The boy, older than me, flinches as he hears her. We are marched away from the moon set. Frick-fracking hell, I should have paid a bit more attention. Maybe I volunteered to clean out those stinking latrines. We are now in bright sunlight, and looking into a car park full of the silver lozenges of lorries that the moon man told me and Miss Phillips about. Yes, see, once all these thousands of moon workers have done their jobs they will be given a nice bar of soap and a nice gas bath.

The more I see of all this, the less optimistic I feel that I, Standish Treadwell, can do anything other than become like everyone else here. Maggot meat. The two other boys with me are so thin that they make me stand out. This worries me. Still they are not yet as skeletal as others I’ve seen. Somehow this doesn’t comfort me. What if it’s a trick? What if the leather-coat man found the tunnel last night, has arrested Gramps, Miss Phillips, and the moon man, and knows what I’m doing here? The place is swarming with Greenflies and officers. Never have I seen as many as I have today. I think I have entered an insect nest.

We march past the latrines, past the waiting lorries. That’s a relief. At least, I hope it’s a relief.

Hunger makes you see things leanly. This is no way to live, and those silver lozenges are no way to die.