Maggot Moon (4 page)

We all sat round the table. Both me and Gramps had finished our soup and were mopping our bowls with our homemade bread. When we looked up the Lushes hadn’t even started theirs.

“It’s cold cucumber,” said Gramps. “I made the bread this morning. Eat up.”

“Do you mean you will share this with us?” said Mrs. Lush, her face translucent, her eyes fishes, swimming in puddles of tears.

“Yes,” said Gramps. “It will get you out of jail.”

“What do you mean?” asked Mr. Lush.

“Stop you starving to death,” he said. “There is a reason why you are in Zone Seven. I don’t need to know it. If we turn on each other and you all die, then they have won. If we stay together, we are strong.”

“You know that not all from the Motherland agree with what is being done in her name,” said Mr. Lush.

“Of course,” said Gramps.

“We thought you would be suspicious of us, think we were informers.”

“Eat up,” said Gramps. He raised his glass. “Let’s drink a toast: to new beginnings — and moon landings.”

That night the Lushes stayed in our house. For the first time since my parents left I slept in my old bedroom, Hector on a mattress on the floor.

Only as I was falling asleep did I remember we still hadn’t tackled the raspberry-stained shirt.

I hadn’t slept through the night once since my parents went. Gramps was exhausted. It was only because of Hector that I began to sleep properly. Mr. Lush and Gramps agreed the next night to knock the doorway through the wall that joined our two bedrooms so we might be together. I don’t remember anything being discussed about knocking more doorways between the two houses, it just happened. Gramps, me, Hector, and Mr. and Mrs. Lush all started to eat together, and bit by bit we stayed together. We were a good family.

Mr. Lush told us he was an engineer. He had refused to work on a project in the Motherland but what it was, he wouldn’t say. Mrs. Lush was a doctor who had refused to eliminate the impure. Which was really very good for Gramps, me, and the impure, for they all ended up exiled to Zone Seven.

I rocketed off my seat when the bell rang. Slicked my hair down, took a deep breath, knocked on the door, and went in. Mr. Hellman was standing up. He clicked his heels together, although I couldn’t see his heels as they were under his desk.

Then his arm shot out, scaffold-pole straight, and this glazed look came into his eyes as he said, “Glory to the Motherland.”

I halfheartedly raised my arm — but didn’t — and then I heard a cough. This cough was not coming from Mr. Hellman. It was coming from a man sitting in the corner of the room, a man in a black leather coat. He looked as if he was made up out of a geometry set, all triangles and straight edges. His face was hidden by a hat. It wasn’t at a rakish angle, not like they wear them in the land of Croca-Colas. No, this hat was knife sharp with a brim that could slice a lie in half. He wore black-framed, eye-socket-fitting sunglasses. It was gloomy in the office. I wondered what he could see and what he couldn’t. Tell you this much: he stood out like a sore thumb in a thunderstorm. He meant business, but whose or what I couldn’t figure.

What,
I wondered,
is he doing here?
I thought maybe he was checking up on Mr. Hellman, though I doubted it. Mr. Hellman’s great claim to fame was that cheap chrome watch of his. It had been awarded to those couples who have had eight or more children. You see, no one wore a watch in Zone Seven unless they were important. Everyone else sold theirs on the black market long ago. How did I know that Mr. Hellman’s was a cheap watch? Well, I didn’t, not until I saw Mr. Lush’s. That watch saved us.

Last winter was the coldest I could remember, ever. Gramps said he had never known one as cruel, and he had known a fair few. Gramps had called it the revenge of General Winter. That General wasn’t on our side, that much I can tell you.

If it hadn’t been for Mr. Lush’s watch we would have been goners. We were down to one church candle to light the house and all that was left to eat was potato peel. One morning, when everything was frozen up including the bog, we were all sat round the kitchen table, Gramps working out what else he could use for firewood to keep the stove alight, when Mr. Lush suddenly left the room. We heard him over our heads lifting floorboards. I was thinking,
We can’t burn those, the house might fall down.
Mrs. Lush said nothing. She just started to twist her hands round and round. When Mr. Lush came back into the kitchen he handed Gramps something wrapped up in a cloth.

He said quietly, “You know what to do with it, Harry.”

Gramps carefully unwrapped it. Fricking hell. It shone bright as a star, that watch did. It turned out to be real gold, solid as Sunday.

Gramps turned it over. He studied the inscription on the back for a long time and said nothing. Mr. Lush was worried white. I could tell that Mrs. Lush had stopped breathing.

It was an eternity before Gramps said, “If we can grind off the words it will get us out of jail.”

Mr. and Mrs. Lush took a deep breath and nodded.

“Thank you, Harry,” said Mr. Lush.

Later I asked Gramps what it said on the back of the watch. He refused to tell me.

We still have some of the flour, rice, oats, candle oil, and soap, all bought on the black market. So I knew Mr. Hellman’s watch was worthless. It wouldn’t even buy him a candle to light his grave by.

Mr. Hellman started twiddling his thumbs. He had hairs sprouting out of the back of his hands. Black hairs like spider’s legs.

But that was by the by, that was just a distraction, like the watch itself. You see, there was so much wrong with this picture. For a start, the headmaster wasn’t full of wind and bustle. He looked like a deflated zeppelin — all the hot air gone.

The knot in my stomach told me that this leather-coat man was here to see me, and I was thinking really, really fast about what kind of trouble I might be in. I went through a list.

Was it the TV we’d retuned?

Was it about the two hens we had at the bottom of the garden?

Was this about Hector?

“Standish Treadwell?” demanded the leather-coat man.

I nodded. I tell you something — I was standing up straight then.

“Do you know what today is?”

Of course I knew what day it was — it was Thursday, and we would have Spam fritters for supper with the two eggs we’d been saving. But I knew what he wanted me to say — I mean, you would have to be really stupid not to know what day it was.

So I said nothing.

“Standish Treadwell.”

Why was he saying my name again, and what was in the folder he was holding?

“How old?”

“Fifteen, sir.”

“Fifteen.”

I didn’t like this repeating business. I looked at Mr. Hellman but he wasn’t joining in.

“Fifteen,” said the leather-coat man. “With the writing age of a four-year-old and the reading age of a five-year-old. Do you know what happens to children with impurities?”

“Yes, sir.”

I knew you got sent to another school, far away. It happened to Mike Jones, he of the funny legs. He’d never come back. Gramps told me Mrs. Jones, his widowed mother, had as good as lost her mind over the business. Still I didn’t say anything.

“Standish.”

What was wrong with this leather-coat man that he kept saying my name?

“A strange name.”

Shit. I wished I had been called John, Ralph, Peter, Hans — anything but Standish.

“And Treadwell?”

“From the Home Country, sir,” I said.

What did I know? That’s what I’d always been taught to say.

“Your parents are dead?”

Well, I didn’t think that was quite right, but I wasn’t about to argue.

He pulled a letter out of the file. He rounded on Mr. Hellman and started talking in the Mother Tongue.

Roughly translated, it boiled down to the fact that this nice, suburban school in this dead dump of a bombed-out Zone Seven should never have taken me in in the first place. How was it that I had gone so long undetected? I was supposed to be stupid, no good at anything. Though I understood every word they were saying.

“He had been making progress under Miss . . . under his previous teacher . . .” Mr. Hellman was beginning to sweat. “And Treadwell’s father was headmaster here before me — his mother a teacher at the school. After Mrs. Treadwell . . .”

I waited. They had my full attention. Would he say what happened to my father and mother? Would he? No, because I saw even Mr. Hellman wasn’t feeling too safe and that watch, when all was said and done, was just made from cheap chrome. No carrots in it like Mr. Lush’s. I didn’t know gold was weighed in carrots. I do now. Whoever dug up gold in the first place must have seen this coming. He knew we would be swapping gold for food.

The leather-coat man asked me again, “What is special about today?” But slower this time, as if wishing to make a point. Maybe he was thinking I was an idiot and that’s the way you speak to idiots.

I knew what was special about that day. Frick-fracking hell, I wouldn’t think there was so much as a rat in the occupied territory that didn’t know what was special about this day — and no, it was not the Spam fritters.

So I said with pride, as if I was driving in an ice-cream-colored Cadillac, “It is Thursday, nineteenth July, nineteen fifty-six, the day the rocket to the moon is launched, and a new era of the history of the Motherland will begin.”

I think I said it quite well, for both the headmaster and the leather-coat man’s arms shot skywards again. The leather-coat man looked almost misty-eyed behind those skullhole glasses.

“Correct. We will be the first nation in the world to have achieved such a feat, demonstrating our ultimate supremacy.”

The school bell rang as he said it. It was dinnertime.

“Have you ever been into the park at the back of your house?”

I was running through all the answers I could give. All lies. And still I was wondering what I was there for.

“No, sir, it is forbidden.”