Maggot Moon (5 page)

The leather-coat man had X-ray eyes. I was sure of it even though I couldn’t see them. They burned right into you. Now I knew what a fish might feel like if the plug was pulled on the sea.

So I floundered and flapped and I said, “Only once. Or twice.”

The leather-coat man looked at the paper he was holding and said the strangest thing.

“What does the word
eternal
mean?”

Sometimes I think adults are just plain barking mad. Mad. Hairbrush mad.

“It means going on forever, like the great Motherland.”

I put that in like pepper and salt on chips, though I didn’t believe it, but frick-fracking hell, what did that matter? I believed in life and one day I was going to the land of Croca-Colas, but these two wise guys didn’t need to know that.

“Did you ever see anyone else in the park?”

Too late, I felt the talons sink into me and I realized this was nothing to do with Hector’s disappearance, nothing to do with me being unable to spell or read or write. This was nothing to do with my father being headmaster, or my mother, or even the hens in our back garden — no, this was to do with an altogether more worrying matter.

It was about the moon man.

Only three weeks ago — three weeks sounded like another century — me and Hector were planning our mission to planet Juniper. Let the frickwits be thrilled about the moon landings, we knew that our achievement would make a walk on the moon look like a cheap circus trick.

Gramps wasn’t bothered one way or another about the moon mission. “Waste of money,” he said, “when there are starving people down here on Earth.” He belonged to another generation. He’d lived through the wars and not much had got better and a whole lot had got worse. According to Gramps, a man in space wouldn’t make a hare’s breath of difference. But Hector and I knew better. After all, hadn’t we seen the future with our own eyes? Not that we were meant to, but Mr. Lush had managed to rig up a television set, and more than just rigged it up, we often received programs from the land of Croca-Colas. Mr. Lush was a bloody wonder.

There was this one program me and Hector liked best of all. It had a lady in it, all plastic perfect. She shimmered next to this huge fridge in this shiny kitchen. The lady from the television had big lips and cone-shaped boobs. She laughed all the time. This is how I thought the Juniparians would be. On that planet we would be all warm and safe in our own solar system, free from bedbugs and hunger. Bet you that fridge could feed us for a year, no, maybe longer. This woman had a name like a ball — but not like a deflated football. In Croca-Cola land a ball means a great deal of fun. They were having a ball. We weren’t.

This actress was Hector’s favorite. The pictures were in black-and-white but that didn’t fool us, not one iota — we knew this promised land was bursting with color. And that it would all be coming here the minute our rocket landed on Juniper, the minute we’d left our first footprint where no footprint had ever been. I mean, that moment would change everything here. Put an end to the war. It would be an event so humongous in the anus of history that it would become a before and after all of its own making. A “Were you alive before they discovered Juniper?” event. It would overshadow everything, overshadow the moon landings.

Or so I thought three weeks ago.

Hector had been sent to my school, to the same class as me. I was dead chuffed about that. It took Hector less than a week to have Hans Fielder and his merry men under control.

Miss Connolly was our teacher then. She was kind, sat me at the front near her desk, spent time explaining. Miss Connolly didn’t like Hans Fielder and his merry gang of frickwits any more than I did. She took a great liking to Hector, though. It turned out he was supernova bright, spoke the home language with only a slight accent, and played the piano, and I don’t mean dong-dong merrily on high. He had beautiful hands — long with really thin, long fingers. As for the rest of him, he was lanky with a perfect-shaped head, not fish flat at the back. His hair was dark blond and flopperty thick. I liked the way he swept his hair from his face.

Sadly, Miss Connolly disappeared down a hole in the middle of the autumn term. No explanation. There never is one. Nobody dares ask why. Just there one day and the next disappeared, without leaving a footprint behind to tell us where she had gone. See, I said death and disappearing were the same things. Both stink.

That was when Mr. Gunnell appeared. He brought with him no knowledge worth learning. Just propaganda. A minor major man was Mr. Gunnell.

On the first day he ordered Hector to have his hair cut to regulation standards. Hector never did. You see, Hector was in a league all of his own making. He had sea-green eyes that would go stormy with indifference. Hector had a way of making Mr. Gunnell repeat what he had just said so he could take in the hollowness of his words.

It turned out that our new teacher, for all his patriotic fervor for the Motherland, couldn’t speak a word of the lingo. That made me smile. He never did understand quite what Hector said. It drove him bonkers knowing Hector had the upper hand.

From the start, Mr. Gunnell took a dislike to me. My eyes plagued him something rotten. Such an impurity was in itself a good enough reason to have me removed from the school, so he thought. And that was before he realized I couldn’t read or write, let alone spell. That little delight came later. As for Hector, he took against him too, simply because he could see right into Mr. Gunnell’s moldy old heart.

Our punishment was to be sent to the back of the class. Mr. Gunnell thought he was being so clever in ignoring Hector. Except no one could ignore Hector. He was too present, too there, to be ignored. Hector took to standing up to Mr. Gunnell. He would say, “That’s wrong, sir, the sum should read . . .”

Mr. Gunnell’s face would go as red as the word he sat under. One day he could take it no more. He charged at Hector, you could almost hear the engines going in those army-tank arms of his. He lifted his cane, hungry to find the comfort of flesh. The first slash hit Hector’s shoulder. He didn’t flinch, not once. Neither did he put his hands up to defend himself. He just stood, took the blows, and he stared hard at Mr. Gunnell with the hurricane force of his all-seeing green eyes.

That stare took the oil out of Mr. Gunnell’s arms, I can tell you. He had sweat pouring off him as he turned to walk back down the row of quietly terrified boys. He dropped his cane on the way. Hector, bleeding from the slash he had been given across his face, picked it up and took it to Mr. Gunnell’s desk. Stupid man, he hadn’t seen that coming, had he? No, too busy checking on his toupee tape and wiping the sweat from his brow.

Hector said calmly, “You forgot this, sir,” and he brought the cane down hard with a crack on Mr. Gunnell’s pile of exercise books. Mr. Gunnell, thinking he was going to be attacked, flinched and put his army-tank arms up over his head.

There’s no need to say it, but he never beat Hector again.

The day the leather-coat man turned up was one I will never forget. And it had nilch to do with the rocket going to the fricking moon. By then I didn’t care anymore about the moon landing. Never did in the first place. Why should I? I left that to the likes of Hans Fielder and his merry men. They all swallowed that crappy crap.

Me and Hector instead liked to think about our planet, Juniper. It had three moons, two suns. The folk that lived there were kind, wise, and peaceful. They knew who the aliens really were: the Greenflies and the leather-coat men. All of them, Hector said, had come from the red planet Mars. They were Martians here.

I was sure that all we needed to do was get a message to planet Juniper and they would come and rescue the world, make it possible for me and Hector to live in the land of Croca-Colas. I promised Hector we would. You don’t break a promise.

All the brainwashed of the Motherland could get as excited about the moon mission as they liked. I couldn’t. Why not? We had the moon man hidden in our cellar.

From a window I could see Mr. Hellman escorting the leather-coat man back to his black Jag. For a moment Mr. Hellman was lost from view in a fog of speeding car fumes.

I had missed school dinner because of having to go to the headmaster’s office. I just wish I had missed break time. Break your bone, break your nose, break your soul, break your spirit. Break.

I refuse to be broken.

For some reason Mr. Hellman had thought it would be a good idea to put a park bench in the playground. Don’t tell me he didn’t know exactly what would happen if a bench was pushed diagonally across the corner of the playground. I mean, you didn’t have to be good at maths to work that out. The sheep sat on the wooden back of the bench so no teacher could see what was going on. Then, in the tiny triangle behind the bench, a boy beat up a weaker one, a runt, or one who didn’t fit in, one who stood out from the flock.

Hans Fielder was his old self now there was no more Hector to cramp his style. He was the drawing pin. He sent his merry men to round me up and push me behind the bench.

“What would a officer want with a dunce?”

“You mean the leather-coat man?” I said. I saw that Hans Fielder was wound up tighter than a clockwork soldier, ready to do battle.