Free Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner Page A

was now at the sink, washing his face and hands. I turned on the radio again. It was playing music for the workers of the Motherland.
    Quietly, she said, “Thank you.”

Gramps returned to where Miss Phillips was sitting. He took off her hat. Miss Phillips’s hair had always been long, neatly wound into a bun. It was now so short it stood up in tufts, and blood was mixed up in it.
    I knew that haircut and I knew exactly what that haircut meant. It was what they did to the Obstructors. Strip them naked, take away all their clothes, cut their hair off. If it was a woman they didn’t bother to kill her, not outright. They left that to the young, hungry vultures. The Hans Fielders and the boys from the torture lounge.
    It was a slower death but it gave them a bit of practice in killing. You couldn’t be squeamish if you joined the Youth of the Motherland. The Mothers for Purity would be ashamed of them if they hadn’t mastered the art of butchery before they’d left school. I mean, it’s one of those rights of way you have to go through. It certainly showed up the fags from the thugs. A thug would have beaten Miss Phillips’s brains out for breakfast. Goodness knows what he would have done to her by lunchtime.
    It was only then that it dawned on me that Miss Phillips had protected me at school. Like the time Mr. Gunnell tried to make the whole class join the Youth of the Motherland. It was Miss Phillips who had argued that they wouldn’t want a boy like me, a boy who had trouble tying his shoelaces. She probably told Mr. Hellman I was making progress in Miss Connolly’s class. Why didn’t I work that out before?
    I emptied the bowl of dirty water and refilled it.
    Gramps tilted her face to his and kissed her. Well, I wasn’t expecting that. I mean, Gramps is too old for all that. Surely when you are in your fifties that kind of thing stops? That myth had just been torpedoed out of the water. Gramps put his arm round Miss Phillips and she rested her head on his stomach.
    “So that’s it,” I said. They both looked at me as if they had forgotten I was there. “You and Miss Phillips. I mean, how long have you been . . . courting?”
    They both smiled.
    “Three years.”
    Well, you could have knocked me sideways with a feather. Three years.
    “It’s been hard since the Lushes disappeared,” said Gramps.
    I suppose me sleeping on top of his bed like a dog hadn’t helped.
    Miss Phillips said, “Harry told me about the moon man and we have been doing our best to make contact with the Obstructors so that the information can be moved up the line. But Zone Seven is closed off from the outside world.”
    The music stopped and the Voice of the Motherland broke in.
    “Today, the leaders of the evil empires agreed to convene in our great capital, Tyker, to see our achievements with their own eyes. Earth will behold the first pictures ever to be taken of our new-won territory, the moon.
    “Praise be the Motherland.”

There was an unmistakable cacophony outside our house. Boots hitting the pavement, car doors slamming, people shouting. Just one sound was missing from the orchestra of fear. They hadn’t brought the dogs with them, not this time. I was glued to the floor. We had been caught. It was all over.
    Only when Gramps said fiercely, “Standish, move!” did I unfreeze.
    We hid Miss Phillips upstairs at the back of Mum and Dad’s old monster of a wardrobe.
    “That’ll be the first place they’ll look,” I said.
    Gramps just pulled open the wardrobe door.
    “No, the Greenflies aren’t that smart. They are getting greener by the day.”
    Gramps was going into his bedroom when I remembered his coat. I ran back, took it from Miss Phillips and raced down the stairs. Another car screeched to a halt.
    I hung up the coat, checked the table then opened the front door before they could kick it in again.
    I wasn’t expecting the leather-coat man. He was yesterday’s problem. What surprised me most about seeing him