“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 houses. A supply path. It was the best way of collecting wood and stuff from the derelict buildings without being seen.
I never liked it down there. It gave me the creeps. It was dark, smelled of damp. There were lots of things to bump into.
We went up the steps that lead to the cellar door of what used to be my parents’ house. I could tell what was behind that door without it being opened. Red-flowered wallpaper with bulging baskets of fruit, red wooden paneling which ran round the lower part of the kitchen and was red only because that was the color of the paint that had fallen off the back of a lorry. Gramps had rescued the light from the old police station after it was bombed. All this and more was known to me about the house I was born in.
Nevertheless, we knocked politely.
There was a loud silence, then the door opened a little.
“Yes, what do you want?” said a man.
He spoke our home language well, with only a slight accent, but you could tell it wasn’t what his tongue was used to. He was, by the sound of him, a paid-up member of the Motherland, the real McCoy. Tell you this for a pocketful of dirt, you don’t see many of them — civilians, that is — in Zone Seven. It was quite a shock to me. It struck me that maybe Gramps was right about this spy business after all.
The man was coat-hanger thin, with a shock of gray hair. He had gray, bushy eyebrows, the only barricades against a large expanse of wrinkled forehead that threatened to tumble down in an avalanche of anxiety over the rest of his features.
“We have no food, we have no valuables,” he said, his voice wavering. “We have nothing to give you, nothing.”
I thought Gramps would harden when he realized this man was from the Motherland. But his voice was soft.
“I am your neighbor, Harry Treadwell, and this is my grandson, Standish Treadwell,” he said, holding out a hand.
The man slowly opened the door.
Sitting at the table, just like my mother used to sit, was a thin, pretty woman and opposite her, where I used to sit, was a boy of my age. Handsome, straight-backed, dark-blond hair and green eyes.
“I just thought,” said Gramps, “that I would see if you were settling in all right.”
I took the flowers and the small bowl of raspberries to the woman. She accepted the flowers and buried her face in the blooms. When she turned to me again there was golden pollen on her nose and a tear rolling down her cheek. She touched the bowl of raspberries with trembling hands.
I was aware all this time that the boy was staring at me, and I wanted to stare right back at him but I didn’t, not at first. I felt my cheeks to be red, felt awkward, unable to gauge the scene before me. Finally, in defiance, I turned to him, imagining that, like my classmates, he would find me strange, with my blemish of impurity.
What odd eyes you have.
What odd words you spell.
But his face was serious. He stood up. He was taller than me. He was not nervous like the man and the woman. Self-assured, he walked up to me.
“Thank you,” he said. “My name is Hector Lush, and these are my parents.”
I knew him.
But I knew I didn’t. I had never seen him before.
Gramps hadn’t moved from the cellar door. He just stood there watching, taking in all he saw. Then suddenly he turned tail and went back the way he had come. He called to me when he was at the bottom of the cellar steps.
It didn’t take us long to gather what we needed from our house, which was basically my dad’s revolver. It had the luxury of a silencer, stolen from a dead Greenfly. We went back up again into what once had been my kitchen. This time Gramps didn’t knock. Mr. Lush saw the gun and rushed to his wife’s side.
Hector smiled. “Are you going to kill us?” he asked calmly.
Gramps was unused to being polite, and the rigmarole of manners didn’t really interest him much. He said nothing, and taking aim, shot the first rat as it ran along the skirting board, then the second one, then the third . . . he stopped when he had shot seven of the buggers.
Numbers mattered to Gramps. Seven dead rats was something the king of the rats would respect. Shoot one rat and all his relatives will come looking for you; shoot seven and they understand you mean business.
We took the Lushes through Cellar Street, back to our home. They stood in Gramps’s neat kitchen, amazed. He had his system for survival down to a fine art. Nothing was wasted, everything collected and stacked with the order of a librarian. I helped him lay the table, each item cracked, broken, mended, cracked, broken, and mended again until it had an originality all of its own.
“Standish,” said Gramps, “the sloe gin.”
The minute he said that I knew he trusted the Lushes. But he wasn’t going to say so and he never did.
We all sat round the table. Both me and Gramps had finished our soup and were mopping our bowls with our homemade bread. When we looked up the Lushes hadn’t even started theirs.
“It’s cold cucumber,” said Gramps. “I made the bread this morning. Eat up.”
“Do you mean you will share this with us?” said Mrs. Lush, her face translucent, her eyes fishes, swimming in puddles of tears.
“Yes,” said Gramps. “It will get you
out of jail.”
“What do you mean?” asked Mr. Lush.
“Stop you starving to death,” he said. “There is a reason why you are in Zone Seven. I don’t need to know it. If we turn on each other and you all die, then they have won. If we stay together, we are strong.”
“You know that not all from the Motherland agree with what is being done in her name,” said Mr. Lush.
“Of course,” said Gramps.
“We thought you would be suspicious of us, think we were informers.”
“Eat up,” said Gramps. He raised his glass. “Let’s drink a toast: to new beginnings — and moon landings.”
That night the Lushes stayed in our house. For the first time since my parents left I slept in my old bedroom, Hector on a mattress on the floor.
Only as I was falling asleep did I remember we still hadn’t tackled the raspberry-stained shirt.
I hadn’t slept through the night once since my parents went. Gramps was exhausted. It was only because of Hector that I began to sleep properly. Mr. Lush and Gramps agreed the next night to knock the doorway through the wall that joined our two bedrooms so we might be together. I don’t remember anything being discussed about knocking more doorways between the two houses, it just happened. Gramps, me, Hector, and Mr. and Mrs. Lush all started to eat together, and bit by bit we stayed together. We were a good family.
Mr. Lush told us he was an engineer. He had refused to work on a project in the Motherland but what it was, he wouldn’t say. Mrs. Lush was a doctor who had refused to eliminate the impure. Which was really very good for Gramps, me, and the impure, for they all ended up exiled to Zone Seven.
I rocketed off my seat when the bell rang. Slicked my hair down, took a deep breath, knocked on the door, and went in. Mr. Hellman was standing up. He clicked his heels together, although I couldn’t see his heels as they were under his desk.
Then his arm shot out, scaffold-pole straight, and this glazed look came into his eyes as he said, “Glory to the Motherland.”
I halfheartedly raised my arm — but didn’t — and then I heard a cough. This cough was not coming from Mr. Hellman. It was coming from a man sitting in the corner of the room, a man in a black leather coat. He looked as if he was made up out of a geometry set, all triangles and straight edges. His face was hidden by a hat. It wasn’t at a rakish angle, not like they wear them in the land of Croca-Colas. No, this hat was knife sharp with a brim that could slice a lie in half. He wore black-framed, eye-socket-fitting sunglasses. It was gloomy in the office. I wondered what he could see and what he couldn’t. Tell you this much: he stood out like a sore thumb in a thunderstorm. He meant business, but whose or what I couldn’t figure.
What, I wondered, is he doing here? I thought maybe he was checking up on Mr. Hellman, though I doubted it. Mr. Hellman’s great claim to fame was that cheap chrome watch of his. It had been awarded to those couples who have had eight or more children. You see, no one wore a watch in Zone Seven unless they were important. Everyone else sold theirs on the black market long ago. How did I know that Mr. Hellman’s was a cheap watch? Well, I didn’t, not until I saw Mr. Lush’s. That watch saved us.
Last winter was the coldest I could remember, ever. Gramps said he had never known one as cruel, and he had known a fair few. Gramps had called it the revenge of General Winter. That General wasn’t on our side, that much I can tell you.
If it hadn’t been for Mr. Lush’s watch we would have been goners. We were down to one church candle to light the house and all that was left to eat was potato peel. One morning, when everything was frozen up including the bog, we were all sat round the kitchen table, Gramps working out what else he could use for firewood to keep the stove alight, when Mr. Lush suddenly left the room. We heard him over our heads lifting floorboards. I was thinking, We can’t burn those, the house might fall down. Mrs. Lush said nothing. She just started to twist her hands round and round. When Mr. Lush came back into the kitchen he handed Gramps something wrapped up in a cloth.
He said quietly, “You know what to do with it, Harry.”
Gramps carefully unwrapped it. Fricking hell. It shone bright as a star, that watch did. It turned out to be real gold, solid as Sunday.
Gramps turned it over. He studied the inscription on the back for a long time and said nothing. Mr. Lush was worried white. I could tell that Mrs. Lush had stopped breathing.
It was an eternity before Gramps said, “If we can grind off the words it will get us out of jail.”
Mr. and Mrs. Lush took a deep breath and nodded.
“Thank you, Harry,” said Mr. Lush.
Later I asked Gramps what it said on the back of the watch. He refused to tell me.
We still have some of the flour, rice, oats, candle oil, and soap, all bought on the black market. So I knew Mr. Hellman’s watch was worthless. It wouldn’t even buy him a candle to light his grave by.
Mr. Hellman started twiddling his thumbs. He had hairs sprouting out of the back of his hands. Black hairs like spider’s legs.
But that was by the by, that was just a distraction, like the watch itself. You see, there was so much wrong with this picture. For a start, the headmaster wasn’t full of wind and bustle. He looked like a deflated zeppelin — all the hot air gone.
The knot in my stomach told me that this leather-coat man was here to see me, and I was thinking really, really fast about what kind of trouble I might be in. I went through a list.
Was it the TV we’d retuned?
Was it about the two hens we had at the bottom of the garden?
Was this about Hector?
“Standish Treadwell?” demanded the leather-coat man.
I nodded. I tell you something — I was standing up straight then.
“Do you know what today is?”
Of course I knew what day it was — it was Thursday, and we would have Spam fritters for supper with the two eggs we’d been saving. But I knew what he wanted me to say — I mean, you would have to be really stupid not to know what day it was.
So I said nothing.
“Standish Treadwell.”
Why was he saying my name again, and what was in the folder he was holding?
“How old?”
“Fifteen, sir.”
“Fifteen.”
I didn’t like this repeating business. I looked at Mr. Hellman but he wasn’t joining in.
“Fifteen,” said the leather-coat man. “With the writing age of a four-year-old and the reading age of a five-year-old. Do you know what happens to children with impurities?”
“Yes, sir.”
I knew you got sent to another school, far away. It happened to Mike Jones, he of the funny legs. He’d never come back. Gramps told me Mrs. Jones, his widowed mother, had as good as lost her mind over the business. Still I didn’t say anything.
“Standish.”
What was wrong with this leather-coat man that he kept saying my name?
“A strange name.”
Shit. I wished I had been called John, Ralph, Peter, Hans — anything but Standish.
“And Treadwell?”
“From the Home Country, sir,” I said.
What did I know? That’s what I’d always been taught to say.
“Your parents are dead?”
Well, I didn’t think that was quite right, but I wasn’t about to argue.
He pulled a letter out of the file. He rounded on Mr. Hellman and started talking in the Mother Tongue.
Roughly translated, it boiled down to the fact that this nice, suburban school in this dead dump of a bombed-out Zone Seven should never have taken me in in the first place. How was it that I had gone so long undetected? I was supposed to be stupid, no good at anything. Though I understood every word they were saying.
“He had been making progress under Miss . . . under his previous teacher . . .” Mr. Hellman was beginning to sweat. “And Treadwell’s father was headmaster here before me — his mother a teacher at the school. After Mrs. Treadwel
l . . .”
I waited. They had my full attention. Would he say what happened to my father and mother? Would he? No, because I saw even Mr. Hellman wasn’t feeling too safe and that watch, when all was said and done, was just made from cheap chrome. No carrots in it like Mr. Lush’s. I didn’t know gold was weighed in carrots. I do now. Whoever dug up gold in the first place must have seen this coming. He knew we would be swapping gold for food.
The leather-coat man asked me again, “What is special about today?” But slower this time, as if wishing to make a point. Maybe he was thinking I was an idiot and that’s the way you speak to idiots.
I knew what was special about that day. Frick-fracking hell, I wouldn’t think there was so much as a rat in the occupied territory that didn’t know what was special about this day — and no, it was not the Spam fritters.
So I said with pride, as if I was driving in an ice-cream-colored Cadillac, “It is Thursday, nineteenth July, nineteen fifty-six, the day the rocket to the moon is launched, and a new era of the history of the Motherland will begin.”
I think I said it quite well, for both the headmaster and the leather-coat man’s arms shot skywards again. The leather-coat man looked almost misty-eyed behind those skullhole glasses.
“Correct. We will be the first nation in the world to have achieved such a feat, demonstrating our ultimate supremacy.”
The school bell rang as he said it. It was dinnertime.
“Have you ever been into the park at the back of your house?”
I was running through all the answers I could give. All lies. And still I was wondering what I was there for.
“No, sir, it is forbidden.”
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.”