Maggot Moon (7 page)

Bad news spreads fast, doesn’t need words. Even those who didn’t know Little Eric Owen knew he was dead.

It was the school caretaker who had covered him in a dust sheet. They left his broken body lying abandoned in the playground. No one was allowed to miss this hiatus hernia of a historical day when the pitiless pure of the inhuman race sent a man to the moon.

A huge flag of the Motherland smothered the back wall of the gym. There, on a makeshift stand, sat a make-do television. For this great event, every school in the whole of the occupied territory had been lent one working television for the day.

Mr. Muller, the maths teacher, tried his best to make the fuzz go away. He held the aerial at different heights, his arms wildly thrashing.

“There, just there,” shouted Mr. Hellman.

“I can’t stay like this with my arms up, it’s preposterous!” Mr. Muller spat the words into his wirehair, flea-ridden moustache.

A hat stand was utilized. A very technical way of solving the problem in this age of moon men and murders. The TV still didn’t quite work. The images splintered, came and went.

“Can you all see?” asked Mr. Muller.

No one said a word. They had seen too much already.

Hector and me — or should that be Hector and I? — used to do puppet shows. We made a theater out of an old box. I think Mr. Muller might have been better off doing a puppet show than trying to conjure a picture from that broken thing. It could have been presented quite well. All he would have needed was one wobbly rocket pulled on a wire towards a wobbly moon where tinfoil astronauts walked on a surface made of wobbly cheese.

You know, I didn’t care a blue parrot’s tutu if we saw this moment in history or not. I think that maybe — no, not maybe, there’s no maybe about it — I think the Greenflies and the leather-coat men, or Martians as Hector used to call them, shouldn’t be going anywhere except back to their frick-fracking planet. I don’t buy all this pure race chatty crap. There’s nothing pure about any one of those frickwits.

It was kind of the president of the Motherland to address us. The leader of the moronic Martians. She always looked the same, never changed. Her hair a construction of steel wire, her eyes unblinking. She didn’t fool me, not one iota. Underneath that propaganda-perfect face paint she had red scaly skin and a hole for a mouth. Her words were worms that buried themselves into your worried mind, to rot all thoughts of freedom.

“Today, we, the race of purity, will demonstrate our technical supremacy over the corrupt countries whose ambition is to destroy the great Motherland.”

She made her usual non-stopping Olympic speech, at the end of which we all stood to attention, rows of nutcracker would-be soldiers. We saluted. I noticed it was the weakest Motherland salute I had ever seen this school give. Only Mr. Gunnell’s arm was out rod-stiff, his gobstopper eyes glazed.

We sat down cross-legged on the floor again. Amazingly the picture became clear and we were shown photographs of each of the three astronauts. Their names flashed up on the screen. Names that were supposed to be hard to forget. Names that I couldn’t remember. To me they were one long, unreadable word that joined a whole bunch of other unreadable words.

They appeared on each of the group photos that had been plastered round Zone Seven: ARO5 SOL3 ELD9. Only after the moon man arrived had I looked again at that word. Some of the letters were printed on his space suit. And here were the letters again on the television. Each astronaut’s photograph given a part of that meaningless word.

ARO5 — clean-cut with a short, bristled head of hair. Next to him, as always, was SOL3. He looked as if his face had been polished white, so that it shone. I knew he was the Mothers for Purity’s golden hero. The last of the trio was ELD9. His head was shaven, his face well fed, pumped up, pumped out. But I knew what he really looked like.

ELD9 was what was printed on the space suit of the moon man. ELD9 wasn’t in the Motherland. He was in our cellar.

The camera turned its attention to the control room. Up to that point I had thought there might be a way out of all this stinking shit. Then I knew that there wasn’t. The control room was full of men in uniforms and white coats. I wanted to get up, throw caution to the mangle. I was stretched out good and proper anyway. I stood and walked to the very front. You see, I was certain that in among all those scientists I spied Mr. Lush. Wait — hold it — don’t change that picture.

Frick-fracking hell, I was right. Lead stones in my shoes. Lead stones in my head. Lead stones in my heart. I knew then what the secret was, the secret that Hector had refused to tell me. That the moon man was unable to say.

The rocket was launched into a pale-gray sky. Of course, we only saw this in black-and-white, it was the commentator who was doing the coloring in by numbers. The rocket was red, the sky was blue. It all looked pretty gray to me. Higher and higher it went until it was just a dot.

There was a commotion outside the gym. The leather-coat man had returned, accompanied by an impressive array of Greenflies and detectives. The detectives were wearing square-framed sunglasses. I suppose they made it harder to see the evidence. The leather-coat man snapped one of his leather-gloved fingers, and the Greenflies marched into the gym. One of them turned off the television, and Mr. Gunnell was ushered outside. Mr. Hellman ordered us back to our classrooms. Hans Fielder, Head Perfect, was put in charge of our class.

I was sitting next to the window, no longer daydreaming. There was too much reality, it shut out all daydreams. I could see the paint-spattered white dust sheet that lay over Little Eric’s body. It was stained red. A halo of flies hovered above him.

Hans Fielder looked decidedly uncomfortable. He was seated in Mr. Gunnell’s chair. No one was speaking. Finally, a detective pushed the door half open and shouted out two names.

I knew this was coming, and so did Hans Fielder. We followed the detective down the stairs to the bench outside Mr. Hellman’s office. Bet you two matching socks and one pair of long trousers that Hans Fielder had never had to sit there before. I had a feeling this was my last time. I hated to think what would happen to me and Gramps if they’d found the moon man in our cellar.

Hans Fielder was called in. He rose from that bench like a flying saucer. The door closed behind him and one of the Greenflies, rifle across his chest, stood guard over the door. Or over me. I’m not sure which.

I heard talking, then Mr. Hellman’s cane. Hans Fielder was spat back into the corridor. He had pissed his pants. Nearly everyone did after Mr. Hellman’s beatings. Bet that one was harder than his average. He had to impress the leather-coat man. Bet that was his only hope of clinging on to that cheap watch of his.

Then it was my turn.

The leather-coat man was seated in Mr. Hellman’s chair. Mr. Hellman was standing upright rubbing his wrist. His black hair dye ran down the back of his neck in dribbles of sweat.

“We meet again, Standish Treadwell,” said the leather-coat man.

I nodded. He had removed one of his gloves. His bare hand was large, dead-fish white. Before him on the desk was Mr. Hellman’s watch.

“I didn’t notice it before,” he said. “You have different-colored eyes: one blue and the other, a light brown.”

Was he being poetic or just stating the obvious? That I had two definite defects?

I kept quiet.

“Am I right in saying,” asked the leather-coat man, “that you were beaten up because you wouldn’t tell the other boys about our interview?”

I answered that one. “Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s no one’s business but my own.”

The leather-coat man was studying me very carefully indeed.

I put on my best vacant face. If you are clever, know more than you should, you stand out like a green sky above a blue field, and, as we all know, the president of the Motherland believes that artists who do those sorts of paintings should be sterilized.

I was waiting to be caned or taken away.

“Standish Treadwell,” said the leather-coat man, “I don’t think for one moment you are as stupid as you would like us to believe.”

My lips were sealed.

“There is a lot going on in that head of yours,” he said. “Do you know ‘stupid’ is what Mother Nature intended all mere mortals to be? Stupid rises to the surface like shit and cream. Stupid means everyone does as they are told. Stupid wouldn’t break his teacher’s nose, even if that teacher was in the process of killing a fellow pupil. Stupid would stand and stare. You’re not stupid, Standish Treadwell, are you?”

The leather-coat man suddenly brought his bare fist down hard on Mr. Hellman’s watch. It shattered with a satisfying ping as small wheels of time spun across the desk.

Mr. Hellman was shaking.

“I am waiting,” said the leather-coat man, as with one sweep of his hand the crumbs of time vanished into the wastepaper bin.

I said, “I think a wise man would have turned a blind eye.”

“Which eye, Treadwell, the blue or the brown?” He laughed, a rattatat of a laugh, then turned to Mr. Hellman. “What do you say?” he asked, the smile still on his face.

“I say,” said Mr. Hellman, through steel-welded teeth, “I say that Standish Treadwell is expelled from this school.”