Moon 2

There’s something you should know about the rubble - you can build things in it. You can tunnel your way in and down and you can clear out spaces, even huge spaces if you want. So despite everything, we have our own spaces. The rubble is riddled with tunnels and rooms. You can build, two, three or four story houses if you want them, all underground. There are palaces down there, they say, deeper down, where the resistance have their houses and their Parliament and committees. There are towns, there are villages. The only thing you can’t have is a room with a view.

I’m just an ordinary person, someone who got caught in a landslide who has a dent in the side of his head and can’t remember things that happen all that well. I’ve never seen the really big places because the Resistance own them, and they are buried so deep a man like me would take a hundred years on my own to dig down so far. Our everyday places are much smaller than that, up near the surface; but the authority, them and the rich people, they have the means get down deep. That’s why all the diggers and the bulldozers that the UN or the other agencies bring in disappear so quickly - because they get whisked away underground, under the rubble.

You can’t blame them. Those things are supposed to be for rebuilding on the surface, but of course as soon as anything goes up on top, the Americans come and blow it to smithereens when it’s most inconvenient for us poor English. So what’s the point of re-building? Better to get the trucks and the diggers and so on underground where the Americans are scared to go. ... although that doesn’t explain why those diggers and trucks and so on aren’t used to make underground towns for us poor people, but just to make ever bigger and more splendid underground villas for the bosses. The Resistance always say that the Americans have blown up those machines or stolen them, but we know better. The Resistance itself has taken them for itself to work for them underground, clearing away yet more rubble to make them yet more glamorous underground palaces ....

So they say.

I know! Some people say this and some people say that, so how do you know who’s telling the truth? Maybe everyone, maybe no one at all. What’s a story and what isn’t? I don’t know. I only know what I see and what I hear. I try never what’s going in inside my brain. Brains in general are not things to be trusted.

I’ll tell you for why I know that for a fact, about brains. Long ago my brother and I and our sister Jane, we had a really good hideout under the ruins of the old cooperative building - the Victorian one, not the more modern one, which had hardly any rubble in it at all, because it was all made of steel and glass, You can see where that one was as the elevator is still standing, partly. Anyway, we were under there, and my brother Jerome insisted it was as safe as houses. He said there was steel - well, iron in a building that old - that was holding up the roof and that this brick pillar that was in the middle of the hideout was holding up the iron that was holding the roof up. That space was big - big as a swimming pool. It was great! Jane and me, we were always looking up at the roof and worrying because it looked too big to stay up, and wondering why, if it was so safe, that the Government weren’t in there instead of us, and why the Americans hadn’t blown it up. But Jerome, he knew better. He knew better about how safe it was all the way until it fell. That pillar wasn’t holding up the roof. Maybe it was holding up the sky because that never fell, and the sky was about the only thing didn’t fall that day. The whole building came down, and it came down right on top of us. Afterwards, the pillar was still there, holding up a small pile of bricks and few old window frames in the top of it.

Jane got out without much, just a broken arm which she took to the NGO’s and had it fixed. Me, I got rubble on the head. There’s a dint here, there, look - you can’t see it normally because I’ve grown my hair over it. It makes me look crazy so I cover it up with my hair. But you can feel it - here. A dint. My friend Jerusalem explained to me that that bit of my head didn’t work too good any more and that as a result, I was a bit hazy over what was real and what wasn’t real, and my memory has turned to rubbish; and he told me that anyone who called what I see as visions needed to be ignored, because they’re probably trying to take advantage of me. Which I don’t entirely believe. Visions might as well be true, because they certainly feel more true than what just happens ordinarily sometimes. But poor old Jerome, who knew so much, well, he knew so much it killed him. After the first fall all that was showing where his feet and they weren’t moving much. Jane went to me first because I was groaning, but then some more roof came down on top of him. So he’s still down there, I guess.

Anyway, that’s why I don’t always trust brains. Not my brain. Not anyone else’s brain either.

But I was telling you about my friend Sli.

If you were to ask Sli why he’s called Sli, he’d tell you that it’s because his name’s Silvester, like the old time movie star. But that’s not true. His real name’s Dave. He only got called Sli because that’s what he is - sly. That’s what Mother Margeorie called him, when she found he was hoarding away some bits of jewellery that belonged to her because he’d found them at work on her land. Everything that comes out of the ground where we live and dig belongs to Mother Marjorie - all the jewels and bones and metal and wood and anything else that we dig out.

So she first called him Sly and then she told everyone that we all had to call him Sly, too, so that everyone would know that’s what he was. But of course, being Sly, he found a way out of it and now, half of Manchester thinks Sli is short for Silvester, and they don’t know he’s sly at all.

But Sly he is, and in fact, it means that Sli must be even cleverer than Mother, so you might think he’d be rich and some kind of a top gangster by now, but he’s not. Even so, it’s just as well to remember that this guy is a weasel, a damn monkey waiting in between the cracks to come out and bite you and steal your breakfast or your girlfriend, and set your friends against you. So long as there’s something in it for him, he’ll agree it to. That’s what you’re waiting for all the time with him. But in the meantime, while he thinks it’s some kind of good fortune for him to be friends with you, or to help you in your hour of need and do good deeds, well, he’ll do that as well. Sometimes he’ll do things just to make you happy. Although then, of course, while you’re feeling happy, you never know whether he’s waiting for your guard to come down so that he can get you for something else.

‘It’s always Sli first and everyone else second,’ says Jane. And - ‘He always wants the biggest, the best and the most.’ Which is pretty damning, really, but almost certainly true. On the other hand, he’s my friend, my best friend in fact. Which is pretty odd. Maybe it doesn’t say much about my choice of friends. If it wasn’t for Sli I don’t think I’d have half the good things I have, or half the luck I get, because when he gets good things for himself, which he does quite often, he shares them with me. I don’t know why. It was Sli who helped dig me out from the rubble that time the Co op fell down on my head. It was Sli who sat by me and talked to me while I was getting into a panic about getting out from under the bricks because every time they tried to pull a piece of masonry away the whole pile of ruins creaked and groaned and moved, like it was about to fall down again. You have to love a guy for that, even if he is a villain and greedy. I mean, the Co op could have fallen down on him, sitting there by me, when you think about it.

‘Oh, I have plans for you, McFly, don’t you worry, that’s why,’ he always says when I ask him why. But I don’t know. And it was Sli who helped us build our palace, our very own palace, dug into the ruins of the central library just where I wanted it, with it’s many little rooms and passages so you can go from one place to another. It was hard work excavating that. Sli didn’t have to. But he did. And now the palace belongs to us both.

- He’ll call you back on it one day, Jane says. Why not, I owe him. Why shouldn’t he ask me for a favour? He brought me closer to the books and the hard drives - closer to my dreams. No one else has done that for me. So he can’t be all bad, can he?

Our Palace - that’s what we call it - has fifteen rooms which is a good few more than anyone else I know. Fifteen! Sli is always taking it upon himself to excavate another one, even though the whole thing could in theory fall down on his head in a moment. But he knows what to take out and what to leave, which is a thing I could never work out, any more than my brother, Jerome.

So on this day - this is where my story starts - on the day in question, we’d started working for Mother, like we usually do - digging down into the rubble and finding the wood to sort out in one pile, and the metal in another, and all the other bits and pieces that could be sold on - the old clothes, the bent bicycle frames, the old pieces of electronics that might have worked long ago. All that. We dug it out for Mother and sorted it out into piles for her to sell on to the other Americans. She maybe makes quite a lot of money out of it, selling it on the outside. Who knows? Americans are known to lie all the time about how much money they have, unless they have so much they want to boast about it. We just about get paid enough to eat by Mother; and Mother says she just about earns enough to keep her in a few basic luxuries. And that’s how the world works.

We were doing all that, but then a couple of helicopters turned up and disgorged - that’s a good word, you know, I only learned that one recently - disgorged. Anyway, they disgorged a load of Americans soldiers who started shouting that there was an Americans solider buried here many many years ago and they wanted to return his body to the homeland in honour, so we had to clear off because we were desecrating his grave.

‘Well, but where is his grave?’ someone asked.

And the Americans laughed and said - ‘Anywhere you are.’ So you get the picture, that just by being anywhere we were dishonouring their colleagues, so if they lost it and started shooting us up or whatever, that was only fair. A few people objected, because we’re supposed to be allowed to work for the Mothers and Fathers, who are nearly always Americans as well, and who pay the soldiers good money for that land. But we all got sprayed and peppered, and a couple of us got shot, so we all all ran off - those of us who still could. And that meant - a day off! The foremen starting shouting that we better get to the B site to do some more work, but we knew they were likely to take the day off as soon as they could, so there’d be no one to check up on us. It was raining, a cold drizzly day, and there’d been a frost that night, and who wants to be pulling their way through icy frost bricks and getting icy wet and tearing their gloves and hands on a cold windy day?So we all ran off. Sli and I ran to our Palace under the central library. We sat there for a bit drinking coffee, then we spent a bit of time pounding bricks to crumble in order to level out the floor of the new rooms. Then I went to have a kip.

It was a very nice kip. Sli was playing pop music a few rooms along, just far enough away for it to filter through without being too loud to wake me up properly. There was some kind of insect chirping away in the rubble around me, some kind of cricket or other, and for a while it was chirping in time to the music which was very very cool. I went to sleep like that ... chirping and music, and I felt like a King in my palace with my servants entertaining me with music and the insects keeping watch over my sleeping form ...

... and I woke up a while later with Sli calling softly to me from the passage outside ... ‘Fly, Fly, McFly, wake up McFly.’ But not like he normally does, which is very loud, but in quite a soft, don’t-get-excited-now kind of voice. So I knew at once something was up. I thought - soldiers.

‘Hi, what’s up?’ I said, softly, casually so as not to excite anyone.

‘You better come here, Fly, said Sli. I can still see him bending over to peer in on me in the dusky shade outside of my room but I can’t make out his face. But he nods at me, as if to say - Yeah, trouble. So I nod back at him as if to say - So do I really need to come out of my nice room into this trouble? And he nods back at me as if to say, yeah, you really do.

So I did.