The leather-coat man looked at the paper he was holding and said the strangest thing.
“What does the word eternal mean?”
Sometimes I think adults are just plain barking mad. Mad. Hairbrush mad.
“It means going on forever, like the great Motherland.”
I put that in like pepper and salt on chips, though I didn’t believe it, but frick-fracking hell, what did that matter? I believed in life and one day I was going to the land of Croca-Colas, but these two wise guys didn’t need to know that.
“Did you ever see anyone else in the park?”
Too late, I felt the talons sink into me and I realized this was nothing to do with Hector’s disappearance, nothing to do with me being unable to spell or read or write. This was nothing to do with my father being headmaster, or my mother, or even the hens in our back garden — no, this was to do with an altogether more worrying matter.
It was about the moon man.
Only three weeks ago — three weeks sounded like another century — me and Hector were planning our mission to planet Juniper. Let the frickwits be thrilled about the moon landings, we knew that our achievement would make a walk on the moon look like a cheap circus trick.
Gramps wasn’t bothered one way or another about the moon mission. “Waste of money,” he said, “when there are starving people down here on Earth.” He belonged to another generation. He’d lived through the wars and not much had got better and a whole lot had got worse. According to Gramps, a man in space wouldn’t make a hare’s breath of difference. But Hector and I knew better. After all, hadn’t we seen the future with our own eyes? Not that we were meant to, but Mr. Lush had managed to rig up a television set, and more than just rigged it up, we often received programs from the land of Croca-Colas. Mr. Lush was a bloody wonder.
There was this one program me and Hector liked best of all. It had a lady in it, all plastic perfect. She shimmered next to this huge fridge in this shiny kitchen. The lady from the television had big lips and cone-shaped boobs. She laughed all the time. This is how I thought the Juniparians would be. On that planet we would be all warm and safe in our own solar system, free from bedbugs and hunger. Bet you that fridge could feed us for a year, no, maybe longer. This woman had a name like a ball — but not like a deflated football. In Croca-Cola land a ball means a great deal of fun. They were having a ball. We weren’t.
This actress was Hector’s favorite. The pictures were in black-and-white but that didn’t fool us, not one iota — we knew this promised land was bursting with color. And that it would all be coming here the minute our rocket landed on Juniper, the minute we’d left our first footprint where no footprint had ever been. I mean, that moment would change everything here. Put an end to the war. It would be an event so humongous in the anus of history that it would become a before and after all of its own making. A “Were you alive before they discovered Juniper?” event. It would overshadow everything, overshadow the moon landings.
Or so I thought three weeks ago.
Hector had been sent to my school, to the same class as me. I was dead chuffed about that. It took Hector less than a week to have Hans Fielder and his merry men under control.
Miss Connolly was our teacher then. She was kind, sat me at the front near her desk, spent time explaining. Miss Connolly didn’t like Hans Fielder and his merry gang of frickwits any more than I did. She took a great liking to Hector, though. It turned out he was supernova bright, spoke the home language with only a slight accent, and played the piano, and I don’t mean dong-dong merrily on high. He had beautiful hands — long with really thin, long fingers. As for the rest of him, he was lanky with a perfect-shaped head, not fish flat at the back. His hair was dark blond and flopperty thick. I liked the way he swept his hair from his face.
Sadly, Miss Connolly disappeared down a hole in the middle of the autumn term. No explanation. There never is one. Nobody dares ask why. Just there one day and the next disappeared, without leaving a footprint behind to tell us where she had gone. See, I said death and disappearing were the same things. Both stink.
That was when Mr. Gunnell appeared. He brought with him no knowledge worth learning. Just propaganda. A minor major man was Mr. Gunnell.
On the first day he ordered Hector to have his hair cut to regulation standards. Hector never did. You see, Hector was in a league all of his own making. He had sea-green eyes that would go stormy with indifference. Hector had a way of making Mr. Gunnell repeat what he had just said so he could take in the hollowness of his words.
It turned out that our new teacher, for all his patriotic fervor for the Motherland, couldn’t speak a word of the lingo. That made me smile. He never did understand quite what Hector said. It drove him bonkers knowing Hector had the upper hand.
From the start, Mr. Gunnell took a dislike to me. My eyes plagued him something rotten. Such an impurity was in itself a good enough reason to have me removed from the school, so he thought. And that was before he realized I couldn’t read or write, let alone spell. That little delight came later. As for Hector, he took against him too, simply because he could see right into Mr. Gunnell’s moldy old heart.
Our punishment was to be sent to the back of the class. Mr. Gunnell thought he was being so clever in ignoring Hector. Except no one could ignore Hector. He was too present, too there, to be ignored. Hector took to standing up to Mr. Gunnell. He would say, “That’s wrong, sir, the sum should read . . .”
Mr. Gunnell’s face would go as red as the word he sat under. One day he could take it no more. He charged at Hector, you could almost hear the engines going in those army-tank arms of his. He lifted his cane, hungry to find the comfort of flesh. The first slash hit Hector’s shoulder. He didn’t flinch, not once. Neither did he put his hands up to defend himself. He just stood, took the blows, and he stared hard at Mr. Gunnell with the hurricane force of his all-seeing green eyes.
That stare took the oil out of Mr. Gunnell’s arms, I can tell you. He had sweat pouring off him as he turned to walk back down the row of quietly terrified boys. He dropped his cane on the way. Hector, bleeding from the slash he had been given across his face, picked it up and took it to Mr. Gunnell’s desk. Stupid man, he hadn’t seen that coming, had he? No, too busy checking on his toupee tape and wiping the sweat from his brow.
Hector said calmly, “You forgot this, sir,” and he brought the cane down hard with a crack on Mr. Gunnell’s pile of exercise books. Mr. Gunnell, thinking he was going to be attacked, flinched and put his army-tank arms up over his head.
There’s no need to say it, but he never beat Hector again.
The day the leather-coat man turned up was one I will never forget. And it had nilch to do with the rocket going to the fricking moon. By then I didn’t care anymore about the moon landing. Never did in the first place. Why should I? I left that to the likes of Hans Fielder and his merry men. They all swallowed that crappy crap.
Me and Hector instead liked to think about our planet, Juniper. It had three moons, two suns. The folk that lived there were kind, wise, and peaceful. They knew who the aliens really were: the Greenflies and the leather-coat men. All of them, Hector said, had come from the red planet Mars. They were Martians here.
I was sure that all we needed to do was get a message to planet Juniper and they would come and rescue the world, make it possible for me and Hector to live in the land of Croca-Colas. I promised Hector we would. You don’t break a promise.
All the brainwashed of the Motherland could get as excited about the moon mission as they liked. I couldn’t. Why not? We had the moon man hidden in our cellar.
From a window I could see Mr. Hellman escorting the leather-coat man back to his black Jag. For a moment Mr. Hellman was lost from view in a fog of speeding car fumes.
I had missed school dinner because of having to go to the headmaster’s office. I just wish I had missed break time. Break your bone, break your nose, break your soul, break your spirit. Break.
I
refuse to be broken.
For some reason Mr. Hellman had thought it would be a good idea to put a park bench in the playground. Don’t tell me he didn’t know exactly what would happen if a bench was pushed diagonally across the corner of the playground. I mean, you didn’t have to be good at maths to work that out. The sheep sat on the wooden back of the bench so no teacher could see what was going on. Then, in the tiny triangle behind the bench, a boy beat up a weaker one, a runt, or one who didn’t fit in, one who stood out from the flock.
Hans Fielder was his old self now there was no more Hector to cramp his style. He was the drawing pin. He sent his merry men to round me up and push me behind the bench.
“What would a officer want with a dunce?”
“You mean the leather-coat man?” I said. I saw that Hans Fielder was wound up tighter than a clockwork soldier, ready to do battle.
“Of course I mean him, you fricking moron.”
You see, Hans Fielder had from birth greedily drunk all this Motherland sheep milk. Mrs. Fielder has eight, nine, ten, eleven children. Can’t remember, not good at counting sheep. What I know is that she and her husband survive on their rewards for the patriotic support of the Motherland. They take pride in their work, which is to report on all the good citizens who don’t toe the party line. Yes, these Fielders have well-fed, well-clothed children.
It’s easy to spot the parents who are collaborators in our school. Their sons wear long trousers. I, like most of the underclass, wear shorts that once were trousers before I grew too long for them. Now they are cut off below the knee, the two drain pipes of fabric kept in my mother’s sewing box in case repairs are necessary.
Hans Fielder, of the long trousers and the new school blazer, pushed me up hard against the playground wall and asked the question again. His sidekicks all gathered round.
I didn’t fight back when they started in on me again.
Gramps once said, “Whatever else you do, Standish, don’t raise your fists. Turn away. If they throw you out of that school, well . . .”
He never finished what he was saying. There was no need.
But I couldn’t keep quiet any longer.
I said, “The next time I see the leather-coat man I might tell him all about your mother.”
Hans Fielder stopped punching me.
“What about my mother?” he asked.
“How she informs on people, makes up lies, sends innocent people to the maggot farms — to keep you in new trousers.”
That stopped him. Doubt is a great worm in a crispy, red apple. You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to know who the real idiots were here: Hans Fielder, who believed he was destined for greatness, along with his merry gang. They were all bleating sheep, the whole maladjusted lot of them. They never questioned anything. There was not one of a rare breed of Whys among them, just plain, shorn, bleached sheep. The brain-branded idiots couldn’t see that, like all the rest of us who lived in Zone Seven, they were never going anywhere. The only chance Hans Fielder had of escape was to be sent to fight the Obstructors, and that was as good as booking yourself a slot in the crematorium. But that realization had yet to dawn on him.
So the beating continued. I thought of my flesh as a wall. The me inside the wall they can’t bully, they can’t touch, so while they beat the drum of my skin I thought hard about that leather-coat man and where his black Jag was going next. In my mind’s eye I could see it arriving in our road. He wasn’t going to have any problems finding where we live. After all, it was the only row of houses left standing. I saw the leather-coat man finding our hens, the TV, pushing Gramps down to the cellar, and, worst of all, discovering the moon man. I was seeing this all in my head like a film being played and ending badly.
“Standish Treadwell,” shouted Mr. Gunnell, “what are you doing behind there? The bell has gone.”
I hadn’t even noticed it. I tasted the blood in my mouth, felt my nose and thought, at least it isn’t broken.
“Standish Treadwell!” Mr. Gunnell shouted again, his face red. His eyes bulged out of his head, as did two veins leading up to that troublesome toupee.
I climbed out from behind the bench and stood in front of Mr. Gunnell. I had a bloody nose and a half-shut eye that refused to open. He was holding his cane, tap-tap-tapping it on the palm of his hand, and his tongue was sticking out sideways from his small mean mouth. It was then that I had a revelation of sorts. I was taller than he was. I could see his tank arms were well oiled for a beating. I could see that like it or not he was forced to look up at me. Just as he had to look up at Hector.
“You can’t keep hitting me,” I said. “I’m taller than you. Pick on someone your own size.”
The whole class was watching, awestruck. Since Hector, no one, and I mean no one, not even the Head Perfect, talked back to a teacher. The wheels of Mr. Gunnell’s mind were visibly turning.
“Treadwell, your shoelaces are undone.”
I bent down, ducking the fists, feeling the cane on my back. I glanced up quickly, saw his chin jutting out, and without a second thought, I stood to attention fast, making sure I hit him as hard as I could under the jaw. I heard with pleasure the sound of his teeth clacking together, then pushed my hand out in a salute, as hard as it could go, straight into his chest. I must say, even I was surprised by my own strength. Mr. Gunnell tripped backwards, and his toupee, a dead rabbit, came free from its trap and jumped unceremoniously onto the pavement.
The entire class started to laugh, including Hans Fielder, but it was Little Eric, he of the short trousers, of the bleach-bowl bright hair, who was laughing the hardest. He couldn’t stop himself, especially when Mr. Gunnell took another step backwards and accidentally stamped on his toupee.
I was thinking, this is no laughing matter and now Mr. Gunnell will do me in. His eyes were glazed over with a look of pure hatred. He came towards me, cane lifted. I waited for the blow but at the last minute he had a change of plan. You see, Little Eric was still laughing. Mr. Gunnell pulled the boy towards him by his ear then he started to beat him, first with the cane until it broke, then with his fists. He didn’t stop, his punches coming harder and faster. Little Eric was on the ground, curled into a ball, crying for his mummy.
This seemed to fuel the rage in Mr. Gunnell, for he was now kicking, kicking the shit out of Little Eric, screaming, “Don’t you ever laugh at me again. . . . I am to be treated with respect!”
The more Little Eric wept, the harder Mr. Gunnell went at him. We all watched paralyzed as gobbets of blood splashed on the pavement. Eric Owen wasn’t moving, and I knew exactly what Mr. Gunnell was about to do as he lifted his army boot high above Little Eric’s head.
I rushed at Mr. Gunnell and I hit that frick-fracking bastard as hard as I could. His boot narrowly missed smashing Little Eric’s brains in. To make doubly sure Mr. Gunnell could do no more harm, I hit him again hard on his nose. I heard it crack and he yelped in pain, bloody mucus rolling into his moustache.
Miss Phillips had been sent by Mr. Hellman to find out what was keeping us. We were the only class not in the assembly hall, and in five minutes history would be made: the rocket would be launched from the Motherland. At first Miss Phillips couldn’t properly see what had happened because all the boys were gathered round Eric Owen.
“Mr. Gunnell,” she snapped, “what is going on?”
“A matter of discipline, that is all,” replied Mr. Gunnell.
Miss Phillips pushed her way through the terrified pupils and saw Little Eric Owen lying there like a twisted sack, his hair no longer bleach-blond but bloodred, his face raw mutton, one of his eyes hanging out of its socket.
Mr. Gunnell was standing upright. Everyone was silent. We watched Miss Phillips bend down over what was left of Eric Owen. She lifted his floppy broken arm, hoping to find a pulse. She turned to one of the sheep.
“Go and get help — quickly.” The boy ran off. “Who did this?” she asked, shaking with anger. “Who is the monster that did this?”
“Standish Treadwell,” said Mr. Gunnell.
She looked at me. “What has happened here, Standish?”
And I told her.
“Did you do this, Mr. Gunnell?” she said, her voice incredulous.
“I won’t be laughed at,” said Mr. Gunnell, patting his nonexistent toupee with a bloody hand. “I demand respect. I am no one’s laughingstock.”
Now Mr. Hellman was running towards us, followed by other members of the staff. Miss Phillips closed Little Eric’s one good eye and gently pushed the other back into its socket. She stood up slowly. There was blood on her skirt. There was blood everywhere.
“I have called for an ambulance. Difficult at this time,” said Mr. Hellman, not daring to look down.
Miss Phillips took a deep breath through that snub nose of hers and said, very calmly, “Mr. Hellman, the boy is dead.”
“He’s just playacting,” said Mr. Gunnell. “He will be all right.”
“No, he won’t,” said Miss Phillips.
“This is Standish Treadwell’s doing,” said Mr. Gunnell.
I said nothing.
Mr. Hellman looked at me as if I was a creature from out of space.
Still, I said nothing.
To my surprise, it was Hans Fielder, Mr. Gunnell’s pet sheep, who said loud and clear, “Standish Treadwell had nothing to do with this, sir. He tried to save Little Eric. It was Mr. Gunnell who beat him to death.”
“Liar!” shouted Mr. Gunnell. “You fucking little sod of a liar!”
Hans Fielder stood tall, looked straight at his teacher, his hair golden blond, his eyes cheap plastic-bag blue, shining with a passion.
“I never lie, sir,” he said. “Never.”
All I wanted to do was go home and make sure Gramps was all right. I knew well enough if I were to make a run for it, me, Gramps, plus the moon man, would end up in a maggot farm. Once you’re there you’re nothing but fly fodder.