Maggot Moon (9 page)

It was not much comfort.

It was on my birthday in March, after the terrible winter, that Gramps had given me his present.

So much had changed since Hector arrived eight months earlier that I’d forgotten all about the football. Gramps had mended it and gift-wrapped it in old newspaper.

“Can we kick it, or do we just look at it?” Hector had asked.

“You could play for the Home Country with that ball,” said Gramps.

Mrs. Lush had spent weeks collecting all she needed to make my birthday cake. She told us that the secret ingredients in the cake were her recipes. She had swapped them for butter, for sugar. Mrs. Lush was a whizz at making meals from thin air. Anyone who could do that had something worth swapping.

I thought it was the best birthday tea I could remember. I tried to forget about my mum and dad. It hurt too much to think about them. Except they kept breaking through the sound barrier of my daydreams.

When my parents had been teachers at my school, Dad managed to at least look as if he toed the party line. Mum didn’t. She made it as clear as glass that she had no intention of teaching a whole load of rubbish to children who deserved better. The Mothers for Purity hated her. She wouldn’t treat their long-trousered sons any different from those with short trousers.

One day, out of the blue, the Greenflies came to our house and dragged my mum away. She clutched at the kitchen table but only managed to grab the cloth. Everything crashed to the floor. Gramps had to hold Dad down, using all his strength, otherwise we would all have been maggot meat. I had never seen my dad cry before. I can’t remember what I did. Maybe I wasn’t there. The next day, Mum was driven home.

I rushed up to her. The look in her eyes told me that she didn’t know who I was. Blood ran down the sides of her mouth. She said nothing, not one word, not even when she was seated at the kitchen table. Dad went on his knees and finally he made her open her mouth. Gramps put his hands over my eyes and took me out of the room.

That night, Dad came and told me they had to go, that I was to stay with Gramps. He and Mum would be back for us, he promised.

I am still waiting.

Gramps and Hector’s parents had made a huge vegetable plot in our adjoining gardens. It was hoped that it would supply us with most of the food we needed for the coming winter. We’d even taken over a third garden, which was a bit useless for growing things, but had a small potting shed.

The vegetable garden meant there was nowhere we could play football. The road was out of bounds because of the four o’clock curfew. So that left the park on the other side of the wall. We knew we weren’t allowed to go there, it was expressly forbidden. I told Hector about how I had found the flattened football in the first place. How I hadn’t seen any Greenflies there. The trouble was that once we had that football the temptation was too great. It was so easy. We went through the air-raid shelter tunnel to reach the park beyond. Cautious as hen’s teeth we were to begin with, then, when we knew there were no Greenflies, knew that Gramps and Mr. and Mrs. Lush hadn’t clocked what we were up to, we went as many times as we could.

It was only when the wall that ran along the bottom of our garden started to grow that we decided it was best to leave it for the time being. At least until the wall stopped growing. But that wall just kept getting taller. It didn’t make any sense to us. The wall was already neck-breaking high to begin with. Why did anyone feel the need to make it higher?

We heard Gramps and Mr. and Mrs. Lush say, “It’s going to start again.”

Neither Hector or I knew what they meant.

“What will start again?” I asked Mr. Lush as we ate our tea.

Mr. and Mrs. Lush both looked to Gramps for an answer. Gramps wasn’t a man to waste words, so he said nothing.

Soon that wall was nearly as high as our house, if not higher. It began to cast a long shadow over the vegetable garden, cutting out the sunlight. It cast a long shadow over everybody in Zone Seven.

One day, eight or nine weeks before the moon mission, Hector and I started playing football on the crazy paving, near the wall by the potting shed. We were in the middle of a really good game when I went and kicked the ball right up into the sky. It was a freak accident, it wasn’t meant to go that high. The ball flew right over that frick-fracking wall. We stood there open-mouthed, unable to believe what I’d done.

“Doesn’t matter,” Hector said, “I’ll nip through the tunnel and find it.”

“No,” I said, “it’s too dangerous. The ball’s gone, forget it.”

The trouble was, Hector couldn’t.

It rained every day after we lost the football so neither the Lushes nor Gramps realized it had gone missing.

Hector and I concentrated on building our rocket in the attic. The newspapers were full of the moon mission. Note the word
newspapers.
That was the first time I had ever seen one. Propaganda rags, as Gramps called them. Hector read them to me. It was always the same rubbish. Always about the great Motherland, about the purity of the astronauts who were going to conquer space. In the end we decided the paper was better without the words. The pictures were good, though. We kept those and made papier-mâché from the rest.

“If we are to go into space, Standish,” Hector said, “we wouldn’t want to go to the moon with this lot there.”

I found planet Juniper myself. I found it in my head, but that didn’t matter. Hector thought it was probably the best discovery I had ever come up with.

I drew the planet. I drew the Juniparians. I drew the rocket, more like a flying saucer than something that pricked the sky. Hector decided we should build it in the attic. Both of us started to collect all the things we might need. It wasn’t that easy making a spacecraft out of nothing, not when everything was used, reused, and reused again. The idea that there was rubbish was a joke.

But that week, the week I kicked the football over the wall, the week it rained, Mrs. Lush had given us an old ironing-board cover. There was no electricity, so there was no point in ironing. A waste of time, a waste of hope. Tell you this for nothing, that ironing-board cover stopped me worrying about us being fried or frozen in space.

Once I had heard Mr. Lush say, “If they believe they can make it through all the radiation that’s round the moon in no more than silver foil, they are fools.”

Now we had the ironing-board cover, I reckoned we had nothing to worry about.

I asked Mr. Lush if he knew how far away the moon was from Earth.

“Roughly,” he said, “221,463 miles.”

A bloody walking cyclops, was Mr. Lush.

The flying saucer was nearly ready when Hector became ill.

Mrs. Lush was a doctor but there was little she could do for Hector except nurse him. She said a doctor with no medicine is the same as a pianist with no piano.

Gramps tried to conjure up some aspirin. No easy task. After all, we were the only people who were left on our road and you couldn’t just go up to one of the double rooster-breasted houses and ask for their help. Gramps told us it would be the quickest way to become oven-roasted meat.

It was when Hector’s fever was high that the Greenflies rounded up every able-bodied person in Zone Seven. They left Hector. He was too sick to stand upright. They wouldn’t allow Mrs. Lush to stay with him either. We were taken to the park in front of the hideous building at the top of our road. Mrs. Fielder and her Mothers for Purity were ordered to attend. I thought that was a good sign.

Mr. Lush said gloomily, “There are no good signs in Zone Seven.”

We all stood, hundreds of us, bunched together. I saw Miss Phillips in the crowd. She edged her way closer towards us until she was standing beside Gramps. The Greenflies were pushing us around with the butts of their guns, pulling out the well-fed, long-trousered brigade, making them stand at the front. On a podium before us were several men with cameras. We waited.

A humdinger of a car came up the road, stopped, and out stepped a man in a raincoat with a very bad haircut. What he was doing there I hadn’t a snowflake of an idea. He stood and said nothing while a leather-coat man shouted into a megaphone. He asked all those who spoke the barber’s language to put up their hands. To my amazement everyone did except Gramps, me, and the Lushes. We kept our hands down. The cameras flashed, the bulbs popped. I had never heard of the barber’s language before. I thought it must be to do with the bad haircut. That’s why I didn’t put my hand up. Gramps didn’t put his hand up because he knew it was a trick to make it look as if we were all saluting the Motherland, and we weren’t.

Mrs. Lush was so pleased to find that Hector had slept the whole time she had been away. More to the point, Gramps had managed to get a bottle of aspirin.

Hector smiled weakly when I told him about being asked if we spoke the barber’s language.

“I wondered,” I said, “if it had anything to do with the man in the raincoat and his bad haircut.”

“Standish,” said Hector, “he is our commander in chief.”

“You mean that man with the bad haircut is in charge of these shorn shores of ours?”

Hector had closed his eyes and I thought he might be asleep when he started to laugh.

“Only you, Standish. Only you.”