The Moon King (3 page)

‘Why don’t you talk, my bird?’ Rosheen was doing her homework that evening at one end of the kitchen table, in a square of sunlight. Ricky sat at her side, watching the progress of her pen across the lined page. ‘Are you afraid?’

Ricky shrugged.

‘Can you not find the words?’

Ricky shrugged.

‘Do you forget how?’

Ricky shrugged.

‘Cat got your tongue?’

Ricky smiled, then shot his tongue out between pink lips and waggled it, to show it existed. Delightedly, Rosheen grabbed at it, but Ricky whisked it back into his mouth, safe behind his teeth, and she ended up with a handful of his face instead. She slapped each cheek playfully and went back to her work.

Ricky sharpened a pencil for her, catching the black-sprinkled shavings in his hand and putting them in the bin when he had finished. Then he tidied her pencil case for her, turning everything out onto the table and
scooping the used bus tickets, sweetwrappers, twisted shapes of chewing-gum foil and more pencil shavings into his cupped palm, and making another trip to the bin. Then he placed everything back carefully, the pens and pencils lining the bottom, rubber and sharpener tucked into corners.

‘Bdong, bdong, bdong,’ said the radio set solemnly. ‘Bdong, bdong, bdong.’ A mournful sound.

‘Six o’clock,’ said Rosheen, zipping up her pencil case and slapping her copybook shut. ‘Time to move upstairs. Mammy Kelly’ll be starting tea soon. Want to come?’

Ricky clasped Froggo to him and shook his head.

‘Do you not like upstairs?’

Ricky said nothing.

‘Is it the dark? We can put the light on if you like.’

Ricky still said nothing.

‘You’re going to have to come upstairs some time, you know. You can’t sleep in the living room all the time.’

Ricky looked away.

‘Want to lay the table then?’

Ricky faltered.

Rosheen understood. ‘Me and you, that’s two. Mammy Kelly and Tomo, that’s four. Fergal and Lauren, that’s six.’ Then she started to use her fingers. ‘Charlotte, Helen, Thomas, Emma, Seamus and Billy. How many’s that? Two? Can’t be two. Oh, yes, twelve. Can you do twelve?’

Ricky looked doubtful.

‘Do you understand twelve?’

He nodded.

‘OK, look, one at each end, and five down each side.’

Ricky looked at the kitchen table. It was long, but it didn’t look long enough for that.

‘It’ll be all right,’ Rosheen assured him. ‘Some of the little ones are dead thin.’

Then she raised her voice and called out: ‘Ricky is going to lay the table, Mammy Kelly.’ And she danced out of the bright, light, green-and-white kitchen, into the dusk of the hall and disappeared.

There was a jingle of bracelets and a swish of skirts, and Mammy Kelly appeared in the doorway.

‘Knives and forks in the drawer in the middle there, Ricky. Plates on the dresser. Butter and sugar in that press over there and milk in the fridge. You’ll have to open two cartons of juice. In the fridge too. Glasses in that press up there. Can you reach? If you can’t there’s a climbing-stool behind the back door.’

Ricky’s eyes whizzed around as she talked. Drawer. Dresser. Press. Fridge. Oh! Fridge. Press. Back door. He felt breathless at the thought of remembering it all. What if he made a mistake? What if he spilt something? What if he couldn’t find something? What if there weren’t enough dishes? What if he dropped one and broke it? Was there a belt? Or a cane? Spiderboy doesn’t like laying tables.

‘Fergal’s a vegetarian,’ Mammy Kelly said, opening
the cutlery drawer, so Ricky could see. ‘Do you know what that is?’

Ricky was counting knives. There were enough.

‘He doesn’t eat meat. Only cheese and fruit and bread. He doesn’t like vegetables, which is a bit inconvenient for a vegetarian, isn’t it?’

Ricky was counting forks. There were enough.

‘Dairy though, he eats that all right. Which is something, I suppose. Protein, don’t you know.’

Ricky was counting plates. There were enough. He moved them carefully to the table and started to spread them out. He didn’t break any.

‘Yoghurt, eggs, that sort of thing. I don’t know why they call eggs “dairy”, do you? I never heard of a cow that laid an egg, did you?’

Ricky was counting cups.

‘Anyway, it’s quiche tonight, only there’s ham in it, so Fergal will have to have a boiled egg instead.’

Egg-cup, thought Ricky, and trotted back to the dresser for one.

‘Good thinking, Ricky,’ said Mammy Kelly.

Ricky smiled as he opened the fridge. How do you open these juice cartons?

‘Scissors in the drawer,’ said Mammy Kelly. ‘Here, I’ll do it. It’s very easy to spill it if you haven’t got the knack. Hope they don’t all get hives. I forgot we had eggs for breakfast too. Do you get hives, Ricky? From too many eggs, I mean?’

Ricky never ate too many eggs, so he didn’t know. He shook his head and then nodded it to be on the safe side.

‘I see,’ said Mammy Kelly. ‘
That
complicated. Oh dear!’

Ricky smiled again and counted everything just one more time to be sure.

Ricky had gone with Rosheen without really thinking about it, after tea, and now here he was, up past the rocking-chair on the first, dark half-landing, up past the dark first floor where half the family slept, up to the
second
, dark half-landing, with another bathroom door, and outside it yet another bookcase, and in front of that, a large chest, with a padded lid-seat and a huge bird-mobile
swaying
and clanking overhead. The birds looked as if they might swoop down at any moment and swipe your eye out.

On he toiled after Rosheen, up into the dark again. He didn’t like the dark and he didn’t like the height. He felt as if he might go rolling back down the stairs at any minute. But he kept going, just concentrating on keeping his eyes on Rosheen’s heels as they flashed from step to step ahead of him. Next came the second floor, where the other half of the family slept, high up, looking down on the treetops. Then one more flight, narrower this time, and darker, and unbroken by a half-landing. This must be the top now, the very top.

There were two rooms up here in the attic, way up at
the top of the house, hunching secretly under the roof, where no-one much slept, except extras like himself. Rosheen turned when they reached the attic floor.

‘Well done, Ricky, you made it!’

She opened a door into one of the under-eaves rooms. Like every space and every available surface in this house, it was full of things. An old sewing machine, the type you have to pedal, treadle, to keep going, and heaps of brightly coloured fabric. An old-fashioned manual typewriter, still with its two-tone red-and-blue ribbon. A dressmaker’s dummy wearing a huge lampshade, with a fringe, so that it looked like a naked lady at the races. A very wobbly-looking desk, piled high with boxes and piles of books. A box spilling hard and shiny bars of glass over its edges. A room full of promise. You might find anything there. Ricky stood on the threshold and stared, and sneezed.

But Rosheen closed that door and turned to the other door on the attic landing. She flung it open.

‘This is your room,’ she announced, standing back against the door to let him enter alone. The room was quite small, and of a very odd shape, with the ceiling sloping down on all sides, but all the same Ricky was dazzled by a sense of space and light as he stood in the doorway. Nowhere had he seen so much unoccupied space in this crazy, higgledy-piggledy, overstuffed house. The room was curiously, blessedly empty, except for a narrow iron bed and a tall and slender wardrobe. Both
these items stood directly on a plain wooden floor. The walls were painted white, and there were no friezes, no pictures, no borders, no panels, no ornamentation of any sort.

He turned to Rosheen, his eyes shining. ‘Yours?’ he said, in a muffled tone, barely managing to get the word out.

It was the first word she had ever heard him utter.

‘No, yours,’ she said gently.

‘Yes,’ he nodded, ‘yours.’

‘Now, are you sure you won’t mind being up here all by yourself? Fergal and Thomas and Seamus have the room directly below you. Look, your floor is their ceiling, so if you get scared in the night you can just bang on the floor and someone will come and make sure everything’s OK. Now, are you sure that’ll be all right? Because if you prefer, you know you can share with them, only it’ll be a bit of a squeeze, but they won’t mind if you don’t.’

‘Yes,’ stuttered Ricky.

‘Yes, what? Yes, it’s OK or yes you’d rather share with them?’

‘No,’ said Ricky. ‘Yes.’ He shook his head and nodded it and shook and nodded it, frustrated that he couldn’t express his delight with this room. He was afraid of being alone up here, of course he was, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him enjoying it. ‘Yes,’ he said again, emphatically sitting down on the end of the bed.

Rosheen took this yes to be a yes to the room.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘It’s yours.’

‘Yours,’ he said with satisfaction, nodding agreeably. ‘Yours.’

‘No,’ giggled Rosheen, ‘not mine, yours.’

‘Yours,’ Ricky agreed, and smiled at her. He placed Froggo solemnly on the pillow and stood back to judge the effect. ‘Yours,’ he repeated.

‘Why doesn’t he have to go to school?’ asked Helen,
buttering
her toast with vehemence and gesturing towards Ricky with her head. ‘I mean, we all have to. What’s so special about him?’

It was Ricky’s second breakfast in the tall house. He was still finding mealtimes noisy and scary, but he was learning not to jump at every raised voice. As long as he didn’t get in anyone’s way, he figured, and as long as he stuck with Rosheen, who was clearly his friend, he’d be OK.

Thomas and Seamus were rolling up pieces of toast into tiny balls and catapulting them at each other, using their knives as launching pads. A stray toast pellet suddenly came Ricky’s way, and he flailed his arms as if he was being attacked by some huge bird of prey or a deadly poison arrow. His elbow deflected the toast pellet and it fell harmlessly on the tablecloth. ‘Sorry,’ muttered Seamus ungraciously. Ricky grinned foolishly at him, to show it was all right, though it wasn’t really. His heart was pounding, and just then another pellet hit him with a soft
sting on the side of the cheek. ‘Sorry,’ said Thomas this time, but with a laugh in his voice. Hesitantly, Ricky gave a little laugh too, hoping he was doing the right thing. He put his hand to his face and looked wildly around, searching for clues as to how he should behave.

‘Ricky’s new,’ said Mammy Kelly firmly to Helen, as she poured tea from a big teapot shaped like a kettle. ‘I saw that, Thomas Kelly!’ she said, almost in the same breath. ‘If you don’t stop messing with the food there’ll be trouble.’

Thomas made a face but he stopped flicking toast about. Ricky gave another grin in Thomas’s direction, hoping to get him on his side, but Thomas had lost interest in toast pellets and was now arm-wrestling Seamus.

There was milk in the tea already, as it was poured out of the kettle. Ricky liked his tea black, but people here seemed to assume that everyone took milk in their tea, so he was learning to drink it that way too.

‘He’s not
new
,’ said Helen, determined to bring the conversation back to Ricky. ‘He’s at least nine years old, I’d say. That’s not new. If he was a dress he’d be old.’ And she smirked at her own cleverness, showing a row of small white teeth.

Ricky looked away, wishing they would just stop talking about him. All he wanted was to be ignored. Lauren hissed at Helen to shut her up, but Helen just went on smirking. Lauren lost interest then because at that moment Billy stood up on his chair, reached for the
cornflakes packet and keeled over, right into Lauren’s cereal bowl. Ricky saw him fall, like a small, plump shooting star and flung his arms out towards him, but he was too far away to save him. Billy set up a wailing and Ricky closed his ears with his fingers and briefly shut his eyes. But it was worse with his eyes closed. It all seemed even louder, somehow, and stopping his ears just made the sounds more distant, but not softer, so he unstopped them and opened his eyes again.

‘Oh my God,’ screamed Lauren, jumping up and flapping her school skirt. Spatters of milk came flying off it. ‘I’m soaking. And look at Billy! His hair is all milk. Look, Ma, he’s got cornflakes sticking to him! Oh he’s such a mess! There’s milk everywhere!’

Mammy Kelly was unruffled. He’s new to us,’ she explained to Helen, still talking about Ricky, as she stood up, picked Billy out of Lauren’s breakfast, and wiped his face and fluffy little head with a J-cloth she produced apparently out of nowhere. ‘And he’s not a dress, you foolish child. I think you’d better change your skirt, Lauren. Wear your blue one. It’s close enough to your uniform. They mightn’t notice, and if they do, explain what happened.’

Billy started to whimper. He didn’t like having his face wiped. Mammy Kelly sat down, put him on her knee and jostled him up and down to make him feel better.

Helen wasn’t a bit pleased at the way events were distracting everyone from the conversation she wanted to
have. ‘I know he’s not a dress,’ she went on determinedly. ‘I didn’t say he was, did I? And what makes you think you can call me a foolish child?’ She’d stopped smirking by now and, looking slyly from Rosheen to Ricky to Billy, she spat out: ‘You never call any of
them
names.’ She meant the foster-children.

‘Yes, you’re right, Helen,’ said Mammy Kelly wearily, still jiggling Billy and making vague daubs at him with the J-cloth.

It was always like this when somebody new came. Helen seemed to think she had to make a fuss every time, just to make sure her mother wasn’t forgetting about her. As if she would!

‘I’m sorry, Helen, love,’ Mammy Kelly said carefully. ‘I shouldn’t have called you that, but really what I meant was that you were pretending to be foolish, whereas I know perfectly well that you aren’t.’

Helen was mollified at this semi-compliment, but she couldn’t let go: ‘I was only pointing out,’ she whined, ‘that he’s not new.’

This was too much for Mammy Kelly’s patience. ‘You were only being smart, Helen,’ she said. ‘I’ve explained the situation now, and I don’t want to hear any more about it, OK? I won’t have Ricky being discussed like this as if he wasn’t here. You wouldn’t like it if it was you.’

Helen opened her mouth, but before she could get a word out, her mother put a hand up, palm outwards, in the air in front of her.

‘No, Helen, I don’t want another word, now. You heard me. I’m serious about this. End of conversation. If you don’t give over, there will be no telly for you this evening.’

Billy started to cry in earnest now, frightened by the tension he sensed in Mammy Kelly’s voice.

‘Shush, shush,’ Mammy Kelly said, standing up and hoisting Billy onto her shoulder. ‘Shush, Billykins. I didn’t mean you. It’s all right, lovey. Shush now.’

Helen pouted, but didn’t argue further. She didn’t want to miss telly. She was lucky that was the worst punishment she could imagine, but she didn’t know how lucky.

‘And we’ll see about Ricky going to school when he’s settled in, won’t we, Ricky?’ Mammy Kelly said, doing a little on-the-spot jig and patting Billy on the back. It seemed to be working, because Billy had stopped crying and now had his thumb in his mouth and his milk-streaked cheek rested softly next to Mammy Kelly’s.

Ricky looked up at Mammy Kelly with wide eyes. He’d been to school before, of course, but he never seemed to last very long. He didn’t know why. He supposed they mustn’t like him in the schools, but he wasn’t sure if that was it. And then they’d moved a lot, so that meant changing schools.

Changing schools was confusing. Ricky couldn’t see why all the schools didn’t do the same things at the same time, but they never seemed to. Every time he started at a
new school, they were in the middle of something they hadn’t done in his last school, and he couldn’t work out what was going on, because he’d missed out on the beginning. And then as soon as he began to get the hang of fractions or decimals or whatever it was, they’d suddenly go on to something else, and it would always be something he’d done six months ago somewhere else. He’d done the same three stories in his English reader four times in four different schools, but he never seemed to catch up on the other stories. And he had done long division at least twice, but it took him ages to get the hang of it, because he didn’t seem ever to have done ordinary division to start with. Once he worked that out, he was flying, but nobody had noticed he hadn’t learnt it, so he’d had to teach himself. School was not Ricky’s idea of a good place to go.

‘It’s OK, Ricky. It needn’t be for a while yet,’ said Mammy Kelly, noticing the look of panic on his small white face, ‘not till you’re good and ready. You can stay home with me and Tomo and Billy for a while. That’ll be nice, Billy, won’t it?’

‘Huh!’ Helen couldn’t suppress a snort, though she didn’t dare say anything.

Rosheen nudged Ricky’s ankle under the table and when he looked at her to see what she wanted, she mouthed something at him and jabbed her finger in Helen’s direction. Helen was sitting next to her, opposite Ricky. Ricky frowned. He couldn’t make out what Rosheen was trying to tell him, though he thought she
must be warning him about something. She mouthed again, and jabbed her finger more fiercely, but still Ricky couldn’t work it out. He screwed up his eyes in concentration, trying to read her lips, when suddenly her mouth went into a wide, wide O and he could see her bottom teeth. Her tongue tipped the roof of her mouth in an effort to prevent herself yelping. In spite of herself, she let out a little squeaking sound, but nobody heard except Ricky.

Somebody had kicked or pinched her. It must have been Helen, but she was calmly and innocently talking to Seamus about football. Ricky looked at Rosheen again. She had closed her mouth now, and her lips were smacked together in a grimace. Ricky raised his eyebrows in Helen’s direction, and Rosheen nodded, but then she shook her head to indicate that she wasn’t going to tell. And then, quick as a flash, she dug her bony elbow hard into Helen’s ribs.

Now it was Helen’s turn to give a squeak of pain and surprise. Rosheen smiled sweetly at her and pushed the marmalade towards her. Helen looked daggers at her, dug her knife viciously into the pot and twisted it savagely in the marmalade. She looked as if she meant business.

‘And there’ll be muffins for tea, Helen,’ said Mammy Kelly, noting her daughter’s angry jabbing movements and trying to distract her. ‘I’m going to bake them this afternoon, so they’ll be lovely and fresh.’

‘Mm,’ said Helen, who loved her food, but she couldn’t find it in herself to say thank you.