Maggot Moon Read Online Free PDF Page A

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