Maggot Moon (3 page)

What I have discovered about languages is this: when you are not good at spelling or reading you become a whizz at hearing words. They are like music, you can squeeze out the essence of them. All I had to do was empty my mind, tune in to the delivery of the speech, and nine times out of eight I had it spot on the mark.

I tell you this for nothing, I could have yelped for joy when I finally found the hatch to that tunnel. There it was, buried under a tangled carpet of greenery. It had been hidden for such a long time that it took all my strength to make nature relinquish what she believed belonged to her.

I felt like bleeding Santa Claus when I put my bounty on our kitchen table.

Gramps was astonished.

“Do you know, lad, there are two things I wish for at the moment. First, that I knew how to make raspberry jam and second, how the flipping hell we make your one and only shirt white again.”

Once I might have said someone heard his prayers and answered them. But now I know it was more random than that. Hector and his family had just moved in next door. Gramps was sure they were spies, and if they were, he reckoned they would know how to make a raspberry-stained shirt white. And that’s how it all got started.

Gramps always made me feel safe. The walls of our house may have been shaky, but they weren’t see-through — Gramps made sure of that. He was a silver fox, cunning. He stood tall and proud, always told me he owned nothing but his dignity and he wasn’t about to give that away to no one. To no creed, to no church, to no dogma. Nothing passed the twinkle in those gray eyes of his. He saw a lot, said little.

When our new neighbors moved in, he said he wasn’t about to take over a bowl of sugar.

“Sugar?” I said. “Why would you do that? It’s like gold dust.”

Gramps laughed. “Before the war when the streets were lined with smart, un-bombed houses, you would be neighborly. If someone was in want, you gave.”

That struck me as a sensible idea, but there was no one else in our street of derelict houses who you could give anything to. Gramps told me the Lushes were spies. I knew that was another way of saying he didn’t want anyone living there. The house had belonged to my parents before they became nonexistent. It made their disappearance more final. Dotted their eyes, made the question mark next to the why that much bigger, that much harder to avoid. At that time, Mum and Dad had vanished over a year back. There were many unexplained disappearances: neighbors and friends who like my parents had been rubbed out, their names forgotten, all knowledge of them denied by the authorities.

It had struck me then that the world was full of holes, holes which you could fall into, never to be seen again. I couldn’t understand the difference between disappearance and death. Both seemed the same to me, both left holes. Holes in your heart. Holes in your life. It wasn’t hard to see how many holes there were. You could tell when there was another one. The lights would be switched off in the house, then it was either blown up or pulled down.

Gramps always suspected that the main informers in our neighborhood lived in the rooster-breasted houses at the top of the road, the other end from the palace. These were the sound, untouched homes specially reserved for the Mothers for Purity. Like Mrs. Fielder and her crones. They did sterling work for the Greenflies and the men in black leather coats, spying on their neighbors in return for baby milk and clothes, all those little extras that the mere, half-starving, non-cooperating citizens like us queued for every day.

I asked Gramps why would spies know how to get a raspberry-stained shirt white.

“They wouldn’t,” he said, “but the woman might.”

I didn’t think that made much sense but Gramps had been very grumpy lately, ever since the family had moved in next door. Grumpy in a crotchety way, which Gramps hardly ever was.

“Life has become more complicated,” he said.

I didn’t know then that old silver fox had a bushy tail. He’d kept that well hidden.

It was my idea to take the flowers and a bowl of raspberries round to our neighbors as a present. I thought it might help with the shirt business. By the time we had agreed to do it, the curfew siren had sounded. We heard one of the Greenflies’ armored patrol cars make its first round of the evening, so the street was out of the question, and the only means of paying a visit to any of the other houses without being seen was to go down to what I called Cellar Street. Cellar Street was nothing more than a series of holes pick-axed through the basement walls of the houses. A supply path. It was the best way of collecting wood and stuff from the derelict buildings without being seen.

I never liked it down there. It gave me the creeps. It was dark, smelled of damp. There were lots of things to bump into.

We went up the steps that lead to the cellar door of what used to be my parents’ house. I could tell what was behind that door without it being opened. Red-flowered wallpaper with bulging baskets of fruit, red wooden paneling which ran round the lower part of the kitchen and was red only because that was the color of the paint that had fallen off the back of a lorry. Gramps had rescued the light from the old police station after it was bombed. All this and more was known to me about the house I was born in.

Nevertheless, we knocked politely.

There was a loud silence, then the door opened a little.

“Yes, what do you want?” said a man.

He spoke our home language well, with only a slight accent, but you could tell it wasn’t what his tongue was used to. He was, by the sound of him, a paid-up member of the Motherland, the real McCoy. Tell you this for a pocketful of dirt, you don’t see many of them — civilians, that is — in Zone Seven. It was quite a shock to me. It struck me that maybe Gramps was right about this spy business after all.

The man was coat-hanger thin, with a shock of gray hair. He had gray, bushy eyebrows, the only barricades against a large expanse of wrinkled forehead that threatened to tumble down in an avalanche of anxiety over the rest of his features.

“We have no food, we have no valuables,” he said, his voice wavering. “We have nothing to give you, nothing.”

I thought Gramps would harden when he realized this man was from the Motherland. But his voice was soft.

“I am your neighbor, Harry Treadwell, and this is my grandson, Standish Treadwell,” he said, holding out a hand.

The man slowly opened the door.

Sitting at the table, just like my mother used to sit, was a thin, pretty woman and opposite her, where I used to sit, was a boy of my age. Handsome, straight-backed, dark-blond hair and green eyes.

“I just thought,” said Gramps, “that I would see if you were settling in all right.”

I took the flowers and the small bowl of raspberries to the woman. She accepted the flowers and buried her face in the blooms. When she turned to me again there was golden pollen on her nose and a tear rolling down her cheek. She touched the bowl of raspberries with trembling hands.

I was aware all this time that the boy was staring at me, and I wanted to stare right back at him but I didn’t, not at first. I felt my cheeks to be red, felt awkward, unable to gauge the scene before me. Finally, in defiance, I turned to him, imagining that, like my classmates, he would find me strange, with my blemish of impurity.

What odd eyes you have.

What odd words you spell.

But his face was serious. He stood up. He was taller than me. He was not nervous like the man and the woman. Self-assured, he walked up to me.

“Thank you,” he said. “My name is Hector Lush, and these are my parents.”

I knew him.

But I knew I didn’t. I had never seen him before.

Gramps hadn’t moved from the cellar door. He just stood there watching, taking in all he saw. Then suddenly he turned tail and went back the way he had come. He called to me when he was at the bottom of the cellar steps.

It didn’t take us long to gather what we needed from our house, which was basically my dad’s revolver. It had the luxury of a silencer, stolen from a dead Greenfly. We went back up again into what once had been my kitchen. This time Gramps didn’t knock. Mr. Lush saw the gun and rushed to his wife’s side.

Hector smiled. “Are you going to kill us?” he asked calmly.

Gramps was unused to being polite, and the rigmarole of manners didn’t really interest him much. He said nothing, and taking aim, shot the first rat as it ran along the skirting board, then the second one, then the third . . . he stopped when he had shot seven of the buggers.

Numbers mattered to Gramps. Seven dead rats was something the king of the rats would respect. Shoot one rat and all his relatives will come looking for you; shoot seven and they understand you mean business.

We took the Lushes through Cellar Street, back to our home. They stood in Gramps’s neat kitchen, amazed. He had his system for survival down to a fine art. Nothing was wasted, everything collected and stacked with the order of a librarian. I helped him lay the table, each item cracked, broken, mended, cracked, broken, and mended again until it had an originality all of its own.

“Standish,” said Gramps, “the sloe gin.”

The minute he said that I knew he trusted the Lushes. But he wasn’t going to say so and he never did.