The Moon King (5 page)

It was Rosheen who noticed Ricky wasn’t at tea.

‘Where’s Ricky, Mammy Kelly?’ she asked. ‘Is he still out with the pigeons?’

‘No, no,’ said Mammy Kelly. ‘He came in a while ago, with Helen.’

‘Helen!’

‘Yes, Helen was out at the shed with him.’

‘But Helen hates the pigeons. She says they’re smelly.’

‘They are too,’ said Helen, coming into the kitchen and shaking her hands in front of her. ‘The towel’s missing from the downstairs loo again,’ she added accusingly to her mother.

‘Where’s Ricky?’ Rosheen asked.

‘I don’t know,’ shrugged Helen. ‘I’m not his minder, am I?’

‘He doesn’t need a minder,’ Rosheen retorted.

‘It looks like he does, if he’s got lost between the back door and the kitchen. I smell muffins. Oh goody!’

‘No muffins for you, Helen,’ said Mammy Kelly
firmly. ‘You heard me.’

Helen started to argue, but Rosheen wasn’t interested in hearing her.

‘Excuse me,’ she muttered to nobody in particular – nobody heard her anyway – and slipped down from her chair and went to look for Ricky.

Of course the first place she thought of was his bedroom in the attic, so she chased up the stairs, two at a time, calling his name as she went. By the time she got to the second half-landing, the one with the bird-mobile on it, she was beginning to get out of breath, so she stopped calling, but went on climbing.

It was quite dark on the attic landing, though it was not yet night. It was just that there was no window up here, and the bulb in the electric light had blown and nobody had bothered to fix it, because it was so high up and difficult to reach. Rosheen stood outside Ricky’s door and called out softly: ‘Ricky, it’s me, Rosheen. Can I come in?’

No reply.

Rosheen tapped lightly on the door this time. ‘Ricky,’ she called, through the keyhole, ‘come on, it’s only me.’

Still no reply.

‘Oh Ricky!’ Rosheen said in a pleading voice, her mouth to the crack at the side of the door. ‘Come on, you can open up for me. None of the others are with me. I won’t tell anyone you’re here if you don’t want me to. Just open the door, come on.’

Complete silence from Ricky’s bedroom. Perhaps he
was asleep? Maybe she should knock a bit harder.

Rap-rap-rap, Rosheen knocked. The silence was eerie. Maybe he wasn’t there after all.

Frustrated and irritated, Rosheen turned the handle of the door. The lock clicked as it gave, and Rosheen pushed the door open just a crack, giving Ricky, if he was inside, plenty of notice that she was coming in. ‘Ricky?’ she called, leaning against the opening door. ‘Ricky, are you there?’

Still there was no reply, so Rosheen pushed harder and the door opened with a slow screech into silent darkness. Rosheen reached for the light switch. The curtains were closed, which explained the dark, and the bed lay neatly made. Suspiciously neatly. Surely Ricky wasn’t that good at bed making? Rosheen stepped across the room and flicked the covers back. It was an old-fashioned bed with blankets and sheets, not a duvet.

‘Waa-aah!’ Rosheen started back as a large brown frog leapt out at her, as soon as she lifted the sheet, and landed on the floor at her feet.

‘Tribb-err!’ said the frog, rather surprisingly, like an elderly man who smoked too much clearing his throat. ‘Tribb-err, tribber!’ It seemed a bit dazed, but then it pulled itself together and with two more leaps it bounded over Rosheen’s rigid feet and out the door onto the landing, where Rosheen could no longer see it.

‘Tribb-err, tribb-err!’ she heard it say again, and then she heard a flunking noise as the frog took another leap.
Flunkety-flunk, it went, flunkety-flunk, down the stairs.

Shaking a little from the shock she’d got, Rosheen slid to the floor and sat there with her arms around her knees. From her vantage point on the floor, she could see a plastic bag crumpled up and thrown under Ricky’s bed. She wondered what it was doing there, the only thing out of place in Ricky’s tidy room. Who could have put the frog in Ricky’s bed? she wondered. She didn’t think it could have been Ricky himself. He might, she supposed, have had some confused idea that the frog would like it in his warm dry bed, but she didn’t think so. Ricky would know that frogs like cool damp places. He mightn’t say much, but he wasn’t stupid. No, it had to have been put in Ricky’s bed as a nasty practical joke. How mean!

Poor old frog, Rosheen thought. She stood up, brushed herself down and folded the plastic bag without thinking much about what she was doing. She put the folded plastic bag on the bed and went looking for the frog.

Rosheen found the frog on one of the half-landings, cowering under a chair. She picked it up and took it downstairs and out into the back garden, where she left it in the shade of a large mossy stone.

After leaving the frog outdoors, Rosheen came back into the house and trudged up the stairs again, to re-make Ricky's bed. She didn't want him to know anything about the frog episode, but if she left the sheet turned down and the plastic bag on the bed he'd know something odd had happened. Poor old Ricky. It wasn't fair to tease him like that. He was shy and scared enough as it was, without
putting
a frog in his bed.

She didn't know for sure who had put the frog in Ricky's bed, but she had a shrewd idea it must have been Helen – she'd been picking on Ricky since he'd arrived. What had got into that girl? Rosheen wondered. Why was she so determined to make Ricky miserable? But there was no point in confronting her with it. She'd only deny it and then there'd be a row and probably Rosheen would end up in trouble instead of Helen. Rosheen sighed.

‘Ricky!' she called, when she reached Ricky's room, rattling the door handle hopelessly and rapping on the door again, though she knew he wasn't there. No reply came, so Rosheen creaked the bedroom door open once
again, and had a good look around. Nothing had changed. The bed clothes were still pulled back, as she'd left them after the frog jumped out at her. She went in and gave the bed a good tweaking and smoothed it over again. There! You'd never guess, she thought.

Then something occurred to her. She left the light on in Ricky's room and the door open, so that there was some light on the gloomy landing, and she went and rattled the door of the other attic room.

‘Ricky!' she called again, and opened the door. The light from Ricky's room revealed a lot of humpy shapes in the other room. Rosheen reached out and felt for the light switch.

‘Ricky?' she called as the light came on, her eyes travelling around the room: sewing machine, dressmaker's dummy, bolts of cloth, baskets full of patchwork pieces and knitting wool, a large basket of pillows and quilts, a desk, a chair, a box full of pieces of glass. A chair with a brightly coloured blanket screwed up in a strange shape on it. A blanket that breathed! She'd found him!

‘Ricky!' Rosheen shook Ricky's shoulder and pulled the blanket down to reveal his sleepy-eyed face. ‘You idiot. How could you sleep with your face all muffled up like that! You could have suffocated.'

Ricky blinked at her, shading his eyes from the light. He had Froggo in one hand as usual.

‘Rosheen!' he said with a smile.

‘Yes!' cried Rosheen delightedly, ‘that's right, it's me, Rosheen.' He'd never spoken her name before. ‘It's Rosheen,' she repeated, idiotic with pleasure.

‘Rosheen,' Ricky said again, with a smile, delighted to be able to please her.

‘Oh Ricky!' Rosheen said then, ‘what a lovely chair! Where did you find it? Was it always here? I never saw it before. Oh look, it's a moon chair! It's like, like, like a throne. Oh Ricky, it's a throne for the moon king!'

Ricky smiled happily and yawned.

‘You must be the moon king, Ricky,' Rosheen said.

Ricky smiled some more.

‘Yes, that's it, that's it!' Rosheen cried. ‘You are the moon king!'

‘Moon?' said Ricky experimentally.

‘Yes, yes, Ricky.' Rosheen was thrilled. He was starting to talk, and it was to her that he talked. He must really trust her. ‘You are the moon king, Ricky,' she said again. ‘You are the moon king.'

‘You – are – the – moon – king,' Ricky said carefully after her.

‘No, no, Ricky, you always get that wrong. I can't be a moon king, I'm a girl. I can be a queen, but not a king.
You
are the moon king.'

‘You are the moon king,' Ricky repeated.

‘No, no, oh Ricky, can't you get this right? Listen. Say it after me: “I am the moon king.”'

‘I?' said Ricky.

‘Yes, yes, “I”, that's right,' said Rosheen. ‘“I am the moon king.”'

‘You are the moon king!' said Ricky again. ‘You are the moon king!'

‘No, Ricky, you've still got it wrong. You are the moon king!'

‘You are the moon king!' said Ricky happily. ‘You are the moon king.'

Tomo came lumbering in the back door one afternoon, pulling and hauling at a large, cumbersome and foul-smelling lawnmower. Ricky was sitting at the kitchen table, painting a picture of Rosheen.

Nobody had mentioned school since that day a few weeks ago when Helen had asked at breakfast why Ricky wasn’t going. Ricky hoped they wouldn’t bring it up again. He didn’t want to face into school yet. The only bit he’d ever really enjoyed in school was art, and they’d only done art once a week in any school he’d been in. Anyway, he wasn’t ready for school yet. He was just settling in with the Kellys and starting to enjoy being there. He missed his mother, but life had been so complicated at home recently, with Ed there and everything, that he didn’t want to go back there, or not for now anyway. He was starting to feel safe here.

In Ricky’s picture, Rosheen was dancing. She was like a dandelion flower. Her yellow dress was all puffed out with air from the dance and her hair was yellow and streaming out like moonbeams, like that first night when
she knocked on his door because she thought he was a banshee.

‘There y’are.’ Tomo nodded at Ricky.

Tomo was often at home during the day. He did shiftwork and his hours were constantly changing. He wasn’t good at adjusting his sleeping patterns to fit with his shifts, though, so he was often up and mooching about the house when he should really have been catching up on his sleep. That’s what he was at today.

Ricky noticed that Tomo’s face was bright pink from the exertion of managing the lawnmower, which looked as heavy and awkward as it was smelly and ungainly. He took a big blue hanky out of his pocket and mopped his face. Ricky had never seen anyone do that before, only heard about it in books. Policemen did it in stories and station-masters and firemen, large people in heavy clothes. He looked tired, Ricky thought, tired and overworked. He looked like he needed a hand.

Ricky didn’t want to stop painting. He had just got the yellow for Rosheen’s hair right, and he’d had to mix and mix to get it like that. He didn’t want the paint to go all hard now. But …

Ricky looked thoughtfully at Tomo and the lawnmower for a moment. Then he wiped his paintbrush carefully on the sheets of newspaper Mammy Kelly had spread on the table, to get the paint off it, and dropped it into his jamjar of water. He put the lids back on all the paints. Then he wiped his painty hands on the damp J-cloth
Mammy Kelly had given him and slithered off the chair.

He went and stood beside Tomo and waited for him to stop wiping the perspiration off his face. Tomo finally bunched the blue hanky up and crammed it back into his pocket. Then he noticed Ricky standing there.

‘Are you right, so?’ said Tomo, as if he had been expecting Ricky all along to help him with the lawnmower.

Right, Ricky nodded.

‘Good lad,’ said Tomo. ‘The kitchen isn’t too bad. Rough old floor, you know.’

The lawnmower kept catching wilfully in things and being cussed, but eventually they got it as far as the door out of the kitchen.

‘Now comes the hard part,’ said Tomo.

The hard part! thought Ricky, already hot and panting with the effort of moving the lawnmower.

‘We have to get it through this door, and then take it through the house without doing any damage. That means we can’t push it along the floor, because it might scratch things, you know, catch in things, scuff things, get caught up in the rugs, bash into the doorposts. So you see, we have to sort of lift it through the house.’

Sort of lift it!

‘Now, I’m biggish, so I’ll take the weight of it. You just hold it up so I don’t drop it, OK?’

OK, Ricky nodded.

Walking through a house backwards tilting up a
heavy, awkward, smelly lawnmower is not easy, even if the other person is taking most of the weight. Ricky was worn out when they finally reached the front porch with their burden, but he wasn’t finished yet.

Tomo lunged with the lawnmower off the porch and onto the front lawn and hung, exhausted, perspiration gathering in little streams down his face and into his beard, over the handle.

‘Now, I’ll get the petrol, and then we’ll get started.’

Petrol. So that was what the unpleasant smell was. Ricky didn’t know lawnmowers ran on petrol. His nana’s lawnmower was a dinky little green thing that you just pushed and it made a nice satisfying sound like a corncrake and grass cuttings came flying out of it. It was like a little factory, whirring and crunching and producing lots of sweet-smelling grass, like toy hay, which you had to rake up at the end.

Tomo had disappeared into the house, and now he reappeared carrying a dirt-streaked plastic bottle with a filthy rag around the lid. He poured the petrol into the lawnmower, re-plugged the bottle and then he started to pull at a special string thing that was part of the lawnmower. Every time he pulled, the lawnmower screamed, and then stopped. Pull, scream, silence; pull, scream, silence. It didn’t want to go.

‘Here, you try,’ said Tomo.

So Ricky pulled. But this time, the lawnmower didn’t even scream. It just sort of sobbed and jerked a bit and
then went silent. Ricky tried again. This time, he couldn’t even get the string out of its little container. His nostrils were full of the smell of petrol and his hands were smeared with oil and dirt and he was tired. He tried the string one more time, and the lawnmower gave a little phutting sound and died again. Ricky plonked down on the lawn and put his head in his hands. When he opened his eyes, he could see the lawn all around him, like a green sea. The grass didn’t look long to him. He couldn’t understand why Tomo thought it needed to be cut.

‘Here, don’t sit there,’ said Tomo. ‘How am I going to mow the lawn if you are sitting in the middle of it like a garden gnome?’

Ricky crawled to the path and lay on it, flat on his back, looking up at the sky. There were tiny little clouds in it, little puffball things, miles high, and the sky was much vaster when you looked at it from flat on your back. The earth shook then, as Tomo finally yanked the lawnmower into life, and started to mow the lawn, up and down, up and down, screaming and whining. Ricky could hear it right in his ears, as if the lawnmower was screaming at him. Like the sky, the lawnmower’s voice seemed much bigger when he was lying on the ground, so he pulled himself up into a sitting position, and sure enough the whine of the lawnmower got instantly less and the sky seemed immediately less far away and endless.

Tomo didn’t need help now, so Ricky sat on the path and chewed a stem of grass and just watched him. The
front lawn sloped steeply to the gate, and Tomo had a job keeping the lawnmower from flying away from him, off down the slope and into the laurel hedge at the bottom of the garden. He was like somebody walking a very large and energetic dog.

A thought occurred to Ricky, and he stood up and bounded into the house, through to the back door, up the back garden to the shed where the lawnmower lived, next to the pigeons. Yes, sure enough, there was a garden rake. One or two teeth were missing, and it was heavy, but he could manage it. He carried it gingerly through the house, sidling it through the doors so that it didn’t snag, and out into the sunny front garden again. Then he started to rake the area of lawn that Tomo had mown. When Tomo turned around at the end of a stretch he waved to Ricky over the throb and whine of the lawnmower and gave him a thumbs-up. Ricky waved back and went on raking.

When the lawn was all done, Tomo brought two tall glasses of lemonade out of the house and they both sat on a garden bench holding the icy glasses in their hands and surveying their work.

It was home-made lemonade. Ricky didn’t usually like drinks with bits in and no fizz, but he was so hot and so thirsty from his work that he gulped it down in long, cold and deliciously sharp-tasting draughts.

‘Thanks, son,’ said Tomo, raising his lemonade glass.

Ricky raised his glass back. You’re welcome, he smiled.