Mrs. Lush had spent weeks collecting all she needed to make my birthday cake. She told us that the secret ingredients in the cake were her recipes. She had swapped them for butter, for sugar. Mrs. Lush was a whizz at making meals from thin air. Anyone who could do that had something worth swapping.
I thought it was the best birthday tea I could remember. I tried to forget about my mum and dad. It hurt too much to think about them. Except they kept breaking through the sound barrier of my daydreams.
When my parents had been teachers at my school, Dad managed to at least look as if he toed the party line. Mum didn’t. She made it as clear as glass that she had no intention of teaching a whole load of rubbish to children who deserved better. The Mothers for Purity hated her. She wouldn’t treat their long-trousered sons any different from those with short trousers.
One day, out of the blue, the Greenflies came to our house and dragged my mum away. She clutched at the kitchen table but only managed to grab the cloth. Everything crashed to the floor. Gramps had to hold Dad down, using all his strength, otherwise we would all have been maggot meat. I had never seen my dad cry before. I can’t remember what I did. Maybe I wasn’t there. The next day, Mum was driven home.
I rushed up to her. The look in her eyes told me that she didn’t know who I was. Blood ran down the sides of her mouth. She said nothing, not one word, not even when she was seated at the kitchen table. Dad went on his knees and finally he made her open her mouth. Gramps put his hands over my eyes and took me out of the room.
That night, Dad came and told me they had to go, that I was to stay with Gramps. He and Mum would be back for us, he promised.
I am still waiting.
Gramps and Hector’s parents had made a huge vegetable plot in our adjoining gardens. It was hoped that it would supply us with most of the food we needed for the coming winter. We’d even taken over a third garden, which was a bit useless for growing things, but had a small potting shed.
The vegetable garden meant there was nowhere we could play football. The road was out of bounds because of the four o’clock curfew. So that left the park on the other side of the wall. We knew we weren’t allowed to go there, it was expressly forbidden. I told Hector about how I had found the flattened football in the first place. How I hadn’t seen any Greenflies there. The trouble was that once we had that football the temptation was too great. It was so easy. We went through the air-raid shelter tunnel to reach the park beyond. Cautious as hen’s teeth we were to begin with, then, when we knew there were no Greenflies, knew that Gramps and Mr. and Mrs. Lush hadn’t clocked what we were up to, we went as many times as we could.
It was only when the wall that ran along the bottom of our garden started to grow that we decided it was best to leave it for the time being. At least until the wall stopped growing. But that wall just kept getting taller. It didn’t make any sense to us. The wall was already neck-breaking high to begin with. Why did anyone feel the need to make it higher?
We heard Gramps and Mr. and Mrs. Lush say, “It’s going to start again.”
Neither Hector or I knew what they meant.
“What will start again?” I asked Mr. Lush as we ate our tea.
Mr. and Mrs. Lush both looked to Gramps for an answer. Gramps wasn’t a man to waste words, so he said nothing.
Soon that wall was nearly as high as our house, if not higher. It began to cast a long shadow over the vegetable garden, cutting out the sunlight. It cast a long shadow over everybody in Zone Seven.
One day, eight or nine weeks before the moon mission, Hector and I started playing football on the crazy paving, near the wall by the potting shed. We were in the middle of a really good game when I went and kicked the ball right up into the sky. It was a freak accident, it wasn’t meant to go that high. The ball flew right over that frick-fracking wall. We stood there open-mouthed, unable to believe what I’d done.
“Doesn’t matter,” Hector said, “I’ll nip through the tunnel and find it.”
“No,” I said, “it’s too dangerous. The ball’s gone, forget it.”
The trouble was, Hector couldn’t.
It rained every day after we lost the football so neither the Lushes nor Gramps realized it had gone missing.
Hector and I concentrated on building our rocket in the attic. The newspapers were full of the moon mission. Note the word newspapers. That was the first time I had ever seen one. Propaganda rags, as Gramps called them. Hector read them to me. It was always the same rubbish. Always about the great Motherland, about the purity of the astronauts who were going to conquer space. In the end we decided the paper was better without the words. The pictures were good, though. We kept those and made papier-mâché from the rest.
“If we are to go into space, Standish,” Hector said, “we wouldn’t want to go to the moon with this lot there.”
I found planet Juniper myself. I found it in my head, but that didn’t matter. Hector thought it was probably the best discovery I had ever come up with.
I drew the planet. I drew the Juniparians. I drew the rocket, more like a flying saucer than something that pricked the sky. Hector decided we should build it in the attic. Both of us started to collect all the things we might need. It wasn’t that easy making a spacecraft out of nothing, not when everything was used, reused, and reused again. The idea that there was rubbish was a joke.
But that week, the week I kicked the football over the wall, the week it rained, Mrs. Lush had given us an old ironing-board cover. There was no electricity, so there was no point in ironing. A waste of time, a waste of hope. Tell you this for nothing, that ironing-board cover stopped me worrying about us being fried or frozen in space.
Once I had heard Mr. Lush say, “If they believe they can make it through all the radiation that’s round the moon in no more than silver foil, they are fools.”
Now we had the ironing-board cover, I reckoned we had nothing to worry about.
I asked Mr. Lush if he knew how far away the moon was from Earth.
“Roughly,” he said, “221,463 miles.”
A bloody walking cyclops, was Mr. Lush.
The flying saucer was nearly ready when Hector became ill.
Mrs. Lush was a doctor but there was little she could do for Hector except nurse him. She said a doctor with no medicine is the same as a pianist with no piano.
Gramps tried to conjure up some aspirin. No easy task. After all, we were the only people who were left on our road and you couldn’t just go up to one of the double rooster-breasted houses and ask for their help. Gramps told us it would be the quickest way to become oven-roasted meat.
It was when Hector’s fever was high that the Greenflies rounded up every able-bodied person in Zone Seven. They left Hector. He was too sick to stand upright. They wouldn’t allow Mrs. Lush to stay with him either. We were taken to the park in front of the hideous building at the top of our road. Mrs. Fielder and her Mothers for Purity were ordered to attend. I thought that was a good sign.
Mr. Lush said gloomily, “There are no good signs in Zone Seven.”
We all stood, hundreds of us, bunched together. I saw Miss Phillips in the crowd. She edged her way closer towards us until she was standing beside Gramps. The Greenflies were pushing us around with the butts of their guns, pulling out the well-fed, long-trousered brigade, making them stand at the front. On a podium before us were several men with cameras. We waited.
A humdinger of a car came up the road, stopped, and out stepped a man in a raincoat with a very bad haircut. What he was doing there I hadn’t a snowflake of an idea. He stood and said nothing while a leather-coat man shouted into a megaphone. He asked all those who spoke the barber’s language to put up their hands. To my amazement everyone did except Gramps, me, and the Lushes. We kept our hands down. The cameras flashed, the bulbs popped. I had never heard of the barber’s language before. I thought it must be to do with the bad haircut. That’s why I didn’t put my hand up. Gramps didn’t put his hand up because he kn
ew it was a trick to make it look as if we were all saluting the Motherland, and we weren’t.
Mrs. Lush was so pleased to find that Hector had slept the whole time she had been away. More to the point, Gramps had managed to get a bottle of aspirin.
Hector smiled weakly when I told him about being asked if we spoke the barber’s language.
“I wondered,” I said, “if it had anything to do with the man in the raincoat and his bad haircut.”
“Standish,” said Hector, “he is our commander in chief.”
“You mean that man with the bad haircut is in charge of these shorn shores of ours?”
Hector had closed his eyes and I thought he might be asleep when he started to laugh.
“Only you, Standish. Only you.”
Every day I went to school and every day I came home hoping Hector would be better. Then the fever broke and Mrs. Lush said that he had finally turned the corner.
I didn’t know there were corners in illness.
The weather too changed. It stopped raining. Hector was allowed out of bed as long as he took it easy. Hector never took anything easy. It wasn’t Hector’s way. By this time the flying saucer was all but finished. We had collected all the newspapers we could find and given the spacecraft a protective coat of papier-mâché. It fitted the two of us and we sat on cushions in the middle with a control panel made out of old tops and cans.
I tell you, I believed with every part of me that in the next week or so Hector and me would be out of there on our own mission to planet Juniper.
Hector was distant. I asked what the matter was and he said nothing. Maybe the illness had taken more out of him than I thought. But I had never seen him like this. I wondered what I had done wrong.
As we walked home on his first day back at school, he said, “Standish, you should ignore bullies. Don’t play their games. That’s what the creeps want you to do.”
“I don’t,” I said. “Anyway, it’s OK now you’re back.”
He was silent a long time.
Then he said, “Don’t count on it.”
That afternoon we all sat down for tea. It was a bright evening, and kicking a ball around wouldn’t have gone amiss.
Gramps was bringing some boiled potatoes to the table when he asked, “Where’s the football? I haven’t seen it for a while.”
I was about to say that we — or rather I — had kicked it over the wall when Hector said, “I’ll get it.”
I stopped eating. Suddenly I wasn’t hungry. Not after Hector came in with the red football, for I knew it meant he had been through the air-raid shelter tunnel and had seen what was on the other side of that wall.
Mrs. Lush and Gramps seemed to be unaware of what Hector had done. Only Mr. Lush looked like he knew.
That night when the lights were out I asked Hector what was on the other side of the wall.
Hector said, “Go to sleep.”
“I can’t,” I said. “You are keeping something from me.”
Hector sat up in bed. The walls of the house were thin. He put his finger to his mouth. I could see him clearly due to the moon that spilled its light onto the bare floorboards of our room.
We carefully made our way to the attic. One candle in a jar was all the light we had. That and the moon, of course.
When we were in the attic with the ladder pulled up, I said, “What’s behind the wall?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s a lie. Why are you lying to me?”
“Look,” said Hector, “I got the ball back. That’s enough, isn’t it?”
“No. Tell me what you saw.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because. Because I promised I would keep it secret.”
“Who did you promise?”
“My father,” said Hector. “I can’t break that promise.”
I was so cross with him. My feet were frozen and I thought, frick-frack this, I’m off to bed.
“Standish,” said Hector as I got to the trap door, “don’t you want to launch the spacecraft?”
I looked at that papier-mâché rocket and said, “You think it’s only a game. You don’t believe there is a planet Juniper. You just think I made it up —”
“No, Standish, I do believe,” Hector interrupted. “I believe the best thing we have is our imagination, and you have that in bucketloads.”
We sat in our cardboard flying saucer with its ironing-board cover. Slashes of moonlight shone through the holes in the roof.
“Once we had a tall house in the city of Tyker,” Hector said quietly. “We had servants to cook and clean. Everything smelled of polish and money. It was all taken away from us and we ended up in Zone Seven.”
“Why?”
“Because of what my father did.”
“What did he do?”
Hector was silent, then he said, “Best you don’t know.”
I said that we should launch the spacecraft while there was still time. I don’t know why it came to me, but it did. I saw Hector as someone on the verge of a long journey. The thought that he might go alone was unbearable.
I woke with a sore head, my eyelids thick and heavy. I remembered that Hector and I had curled up together inside the spacecraft, imagining we saw the stars pass us by. We were on our way to Juniper when sleep overtook us. Bit by conscious bit I knew something was very wrong. I was lying on the same blanket but in an empty attic. No flying saucer. No Hector.
I went down to the kitchen. Gramps was sitting at the table, his head in his hands.
“Where’s Hector?” I asked.
Gramps said not a word. I went into every room to look for him. I couldn’t find Mr. and Mrs. Lush either. Finally, I went back to the kitchen. Gramps stood there by the teapot.
“Where is Hector?” I shouted.
Gramps put his finger to his mouth. He pointed to a piece of paper on the table. It had writing on it. His handwriting. I knew what it said. I didn’t need the written words to tell me. I knew they had been taken.
I felt the scream rise. Gramps caught hold of me and we toppled to the floor. We were both crying. Gramps held his hand firmly over my mouth.
I still have that scream in me.
Gramps pulled me to my feet. Still his hand was over my mouth. Still I could feel the scream in me. He took me outside. We stood next to the vegetable plot in the rain.
“I think the house is bugged,” was all he said.
“Why didn’t they take us too? Why?” I shouted through his fingers. The words returned to me warm, fired up with rage. There was a lump in my throat so solid it almost suffocated me.
“I don’t know,” replied Gramps. “Do you?”
“No. Yes. There was a secret. But what it was, Hector wouldn’t tell me.”
“Good,” said Gramps. “I’ll take you to school.”
“No. No, never. I am never —”
“You have to, Standish. You just have to.” He let go of me. There was nothing then to keep me standing. Nothing. Gramps’s words trailed behind him, hot air from a leaden balloon. At the back door he said, “Do it for Hector.”
I was soaked by the time I went back into the house. Gramps had the radio on, tuned to the only station that the authorities allowed us mere lava mites to listen to. Dripple for the workers of the Motherland. They sang it loud, they sang it clear:
“And once those feet did tread upon silver sand
And footprints deep marked out new moons of Motherland
Which all salute with upraised hand.”
I went upstairs and put on my school uniform. Every part of me dead. Limp. Dead.
In the kitchen, Gramps had made tea. He had broken into the bank, he’d put a fresh spoonful of tea in the infuser. That’s something we didn’t do often. Splash out, why not? After all they have taken your best friend, your brother. We sat at the kitchen table, drank our tea in silence.
What can I say about the days after Hector was taken? You see, once you are rubbed out,
you never existed. Night, day, day, night. All blue. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat. Went to school, where no one talked to me. No one asked about Hector. Because they daren’t. His name was erased from the register. He was expendable. That was the disease he was born with. Weren’t we all, in the Motherland? Except Mr. Gunnell. He had the foolish notion that he was exceptional. The frickwit.
Hans Fielder, the leader of the torture lounge, had left me, the untouchable, alone. Until, that is, the visit from the leather-coat man.
What I remember about Gramps after the Lushes went was that he looked older, more worried, with each day that passed. We were being watched. One thing bled into another. The wound kept oozing grief, no matter how many bandages of “it will be all right.”
In the evenings we listened to the radio. Gramps took to writing down what he wanted to say. Half pictures, half words. Only in our minds were we free to dream. The radio played and we believed it would hide our thoughts.
And footprints deep marked out new moons of Motherland . . .
Moon . . . ARO5 . . . SOL3 . . . ELD9.
Words. All meaningless words. I wanted to kill myself.
Gramps said, “Standish, don’t think about the past. We’ll do what we always did, before the Lushes came.”
What was that, then? Hector brought the light. All he left was the darkness.
Every night we would make out we were off to bed.
“Good night,” Gramps would shout into the room I refused to sleep in. We would sit on the edge of his bed together. Outside a wasp of a car buzzed up and down the road. Midnight, Gramps had worked out, was when the detectives in the wasp car had a break from their duties. Time for a pee, for a bite to eat. That was when Gramps and me would make our way quietly down to Cellar Street.