Maggot Moon Read Free

table.
    Gramps was astonished.
    “Do you know, lad, there are two things I wish for at the moment. First, that I knew how to make raspberry jam and second, how the flipping hell we make your one and only shirt white again.”
    Once I might have said someone heard his prayers and answered them. But now I know it was more random than that. Hector and his family had just moved in next door. Gramps was sure they were spies, and if they were, he reckoned they would know how to make a raspberry-stained shirt white. And that’s how it all got started.

Gramps always made me feel safe. The walls of our house may have been shaky, but they weren’t see-through — Gramps made sure of that. He was a silver fox, cunning. He stood tall and proud, always told me he owned nothing but his dignity and he wasn’t about to give that away to no one. To no creed, to no church, to no dogma. Nothing passed the twinkle in those gray eyes of his. He saw a lot, said little.
    When our new neighbors moved in, he said he wasn’t about to take over a bowl of sugar.
    “Sugar?” I said. “Why would you do that? It’s like gold dust.”
    Gramps laughed. “Before the war when the streets were lined with smart, un-bombed houses, you would be neighborly. If someone was in want, you gave.”
    That struck me as a sensible idea, but there was no one else in our street of derelict houses who you could give anything to. Gramps told me the Lushes were spies. I knew that was another way of saying he didn’t want anyone living there. The house had belonged to my parents before they became nonexistent. It made their disappearance more final. Dotted their eyes, made the question mark next to the why that much bigger, that much harder to avoid. At that time, Mum and Dad had vanished over a year back. There were many unexplained disappearances: neighbors and friends who like my parents had been rubbed out, their names forgotten, all knowledge of them denied by the authorities.
    It had struck me then that the world was full of holes, holes which you could fall into, never to be seen again. I couldn’t understand the difference between disappearance and death. Both seemed the same to me, both left holes. Holes in your heart. Holes in your life. It wasn’t hard to see how many holes there were. You could tell when there was another one. The lights would be switched off in the house, then it was either blown up or pulled down.
    Gramps always suspected that the main informers in our neighborhood lived in the rooster-breasted houses at the top of the road, the other end from the palace. These were the sound, untouched homes specially reserved for the Mothers for Purity. Like Mrs. Fielder and her crones. They did sterling work for the Greenflies and the men in black leather coats, spying on their neighbors in return for baby milk and clothes, all those little extras that the mere, half-starving, non-cooperating citizens like us queued for every day.
    I asked Gramps why would spies know how to get a raspberry-stained shirt white.
    “They wouldn’t,” he said, “but the woman might.”
    I didn’t think that made much sense but Gramps had been very grumpy lately, ever since the family had moved in next door. Grumpy in a crotchety way, which Gramps hardly ever was.
    “Life has become more complicated,” he said.
    I didn’t know then that old silver fox had a bushy tail. He’d kept that well hidden.

It was my idea to take the flowers and a bowl of raspberries round to our neighbors as a present. I thought it might help with the shirt business. By the time we had agreed to do it, the curfew siren had sounded. We heard one of the Greenflies’ armored patrol cars make its first round of the evening, so the street was out of the question, and the only means of paying a visit to any of the other houses without being seen was to go down to what I called Cellar Street. Cellar Street was nothing more than a series of holes pick-axed through the basement walls of the