The Moon King

by Siobhán Parkinson

  The Moon King

  ‘Written sensitively and beautifully, The Moon King is sure to be another winner’

  DUBLIN ECHO

  ‘Siobhán Parkinson is a cunning and practiced hand at storytelling, and getting under her characters’ skin, and this is a dead cert for readers from ten upwards’

  BOOKS IRELAND

  ‘Original and fascinating story … stylishly and thematically, Parkinson’s novel credibly demonstrates the power of the imagination to reshape and transform experience’

  THE IRISH TIMES

  ‘A sensitive portrayal of a child’s struggle to rebuild his life’

  BEST BOOKS

  Special Merit Award to The O’Brien Press from Reading Association of Ireland

  ‘for exceptional care, skill and professionalism in publishing, resulting in a consistently high standard in all of the children’s books published by The O’Brien Press’

  THE

  Moon King

  Siobhán Parkinson

  For Matthew and Benjamin

  and Matthew and Benjamin

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The moon chair shown on the cover is based on chairs made by the furniture-maker Paul Berg. The idea for this book came from a chance remark made by Cyril Forbes, former chairman of the Crafts Council of Ireland, talking about a Paul Berg chair.

  The characters and events in this book are entirely fictitious, but the tall house with the sloping garden and the attic really exists. The real house is in Cork, but the house in the story is in an imaginary town.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  1. Spiderboy and the Lipstick Woman

  2. Dandelion Girl Meets the Banshee (or Not)

  3. Breakfast in the Tall House

  4. Up into the Dark

  5. Ricky Helps

  6. In the Attic

  7. Helen Sticks the Knife In

  8. The Pigeons

  9. The Blockade

  10. The Moon Chair

  11. A Practical Joke

  12. Ricky Goes Moon-flying

  13. ‘You Are the Moon King’

  14. Mowing the Lawn

  15. The Ruined Picture

  16. Ricky Goes into Hiding

  17. Where’s Ricky?

  18. Spiderboy Sleeps

  19. Humouring Mrs O’Loughlin

  20. Break-in

  21. A Living Duvet

  22. Food for Ricky

  23. Tea-time

  24. The Search

  25. Rosheen’s Nightmare

  26. The Stranger

  27. Helen and Rosheen

  28. Ricky Gets Away

  29. Searching

  30. Home Again, Home Again

  31. Jiggety-jog

  32. ‘I am the Moon King’

  About the Author

  Other Books By Siobhán Parkinson

  Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  Spiderboy and the Lipstick Woman

  Up and up. Pain in your throat and back of your neck from looking up. Can’t see tiptop of roof from here. Tall gate, and thin. Iron. Bars. Like cage. All those steps. So high. Steps climb up through garden. Grass all tilted down, like carpet out to dry. Good for rolling. Terrible for football.

  The woman creaked the gate open and beckoned to Ricky to come with her. Reluctantly, Ricky stepped through the open gate, onto a little concrete platform, where the garden steps began. The woman pushed the gate closed behind them. She gave Ricky a gentle push, and he started up the steps, toiling up and up through the steep, down-tilting garden. He stopped on a little concrete landing, halfway up. Whew! Then came more steps, and more climbing.

  At the top, near the front door, the final step opened out onto a smooth area with a park bench and a chimney-pot full of pink flowers – the ones with the musty smell, geraniums – in front of the house. Ricky had never seen such a big high house before, with such tall windows. He could have stood on the windowsill and his head would still have been lower than the middle bar, where the upper and lower pane met. Not that he would do such a thing. It was probably the people’s living-room window. Or maybe not. It was more like a store-room. Anyway it was full of things, absolutely choc-a-bloc with things – furniture, things that looked like hatstands, things that looked like very large and heavy electrical appliances from the fifties, toys, car-tyres, even a bicycle.

  The woman was ringing the doorbell. Ding-dong, said the house, out of its deep belly. Ding-dong. There were noises inside, rustlings, people unwrapping themselves, thumps, shrieks, laughter, shouts. Ricky felt nervous.

  Want hide. Look at wall. Wall friendly. White, with cracks. Spider scuts out one crack, into another crack. All legs, spiders. Shoulders hunched. Busy, busy, busy.

  Suddenly Ricky crouched down, knees bent, ears hidden, elbows out, facing the wall of the house.

  ‘Ricky! Stand up, now, there’s a good boy.’ The woman’s voice came from way above him.

  Won’t stand up. Not good boy. Spider. Spiderman. No. Spiderboy.

  Flap-flap said the door of the house, opening into the dark. Ricky could just see all the dark inside the house from where he hunkered by the front wall. He looked away. He didn’t want to see in. He was Spiderboy. He wished he had a crack to scuttle into, like the real spider. Then whoof! the woman bent down beside him. There was a smell of lipstick and the sound of beads clicking right in his ear. He clamped his hands tightly over his ears, but he could still hear her voice, the voice of the lipstick-smelling woman, like a voice under water: ‘Come on, now, Ricky. It’s OK. Really it is. This is a nice family.’

  Don’t like nice families. Don’t like families. Don’t like big tall houses. Don’t like grass rolls down garden. Terrible for football. Don’t like living room all hatstands. Bicycle OK though. Like bikes.

  ‘Please, Ricky,’ said the woman gently.

  Ricky unbent and stood up slowly, unclamping his ears. Fearfully, he looked towards the front door. A large, comfortable woman, like a well-stuffed sofa in a dress, stood in the doorway. Her fair hair grew at all angles out of her head and went wandering off in every direction, but her eyes were looking straight at Ricky and smiling at him. As soon as he caught her eye, he looked quickly away, and let his gaze wander around and behind her into the house. Like the room he had seen through the front window, the hall was full of stuff. Even the stairs were piled high with things on both sides, with only a narrow channel of space for going up and down. There were cardigans, books, socks, envelopes, a hairbrush with clumps of blond, brown and red hair clinging to it, unidentifiable wooden objects, dog-eared photographs, a biscuit tin full of dusty sea-shells, roller skates. And the stairs themselves went up and up into the dark. Ricky could just make out a rocking chair at the top of the stairs, but he couldn’t see any further; after that, it was just dark.

  The large woman at the door didn’t say anything for a moment, but she continued to beam at Ricky. Then a door flew open somewhere behind her and it was as if somebody had let the lid off a pressure cooker. A riot of children came tearing down the hall, shrieking and yelling, pulling at one another’s clothes, tripping each other up. It looked like some sort of crazy race with no rules. One tall girl kept shouting, ‘Go easy, go easy, mind the small ones!’ but she was sobbing with giggles as she said it and it didn’t seem to make much impact.

  Hearing the rumpus, the large woman turned to face the avalanche of children. ‘Whoa!’ she ordered, and the children slithered and slipped more or less to a halt, but they continued to writhe and punch each other and the noise level didn’t go down much. Expertly, the woman, the mother she must be, plucked the smallest children out of the mêlée and pulled them to safety around her skirts. T
he very tiniest – a little scrap of a boy that danced and jigged in bright green dungarees, with pale hair all fluffed out from his head like a dandelion clock – she scooped into her arms and kissed several times.

  By now the babble of children’s voices and the scufflings and thumpings had subsided enough for the mother’s voice to be heard.

  ‘Come on, everyone. Back to the kitchen. We’ve got visitors to entertain.’

  The seething mass of children started to bubble and splutter with excitement as they scrabbled to their feet and turned back the way they had come, the voices of the biggest calling: ‘Biscuits! We’ve got visitors, so it’ll be biscuits.’

  The hub-bub died away as the main body of children disappeared into the back of the house, but the littler ones kept up a small, persistent clamour, which rose in pitch at the mention of biscuits. ‘Bikkies, bikkies, bikkies,’ they squawked, as if they only ever got biscuits at Christmas, dancing away ahead of their mother into the dark of the hall.

  Ricky and the woman with the lipstick followed the large woman down the dark hall and into a big bright green-and-white kitchen, where the sun came pouring in in such a stream that you felt you could wash your hands in it. There were pools of sun everywhere, and sun squares on the table, warm yellow squares of sunshine.

  The mother started making coffee, the warm sweet smell filling the sunny room. The children had suddenly gone quiet, as if they had worn themselves out with their earlier rowdiness. Even the small ones had stopped dancing and had settled quietly on chairs and stools and on the floor, like butterflies with their wings folded. Now that they had stopped knocking each other about and shouting at each other, they seemed finally to notice Ricky. They were watching him.

  ‘Sit down, son,’ said the mother, pouring water onto the coffee grounds. ‘Not there. Helen, move those newspapers, like a good girl.’

  With a loud sigh, the girl called Helen picked up an armful of newspapers from a chair and dumped them with a thump on the floor. Nobody seemed to mind.

  ‘Here,’ said the mother, then, swishing her hand across the seat of the chair, as if to dust it off, ‘sit here, Ricky. Now, who’d like a biscuit? One each now, one, do you all hear that?’

  ‘One,’ the smaller children told each other solemnly, raising their index fingers to one another.

  A plate of funny flat biscuits, with shapes on them, like writing, appeared. Ricky bit into his. It tasted warm and sweet, almost like the smell of the coffee. The mother and Lipstick Woman were talking now. ‘Aphasia,’ Lipstick Woman hissed. ‘Dyslexia?’ asked the mother. ‘Dysfunctional,’ whispered Lipstick Woman. ‘Place of safety.’ ‘Of course,’ said the mother with a nod. Ricky looked from one to the other, wondering vaguely what the words meant.

  The smallest child, the one with the dandelion-clock hair, offered Ricky another biscuit. He shook his head.

  Don’t want no more biscuits. Want go on bike. Want go home. Can’t go home. They won’t let you. Don’t want go home anyway, not really, not now. Home bad place now.

  ‘This is your home, now, Ricky,’ Lipstick Woman was saying. ‘For the moment. Until … until things change.’

  Don’t like change. Want go home. No. Don’t want. What then?

  There was that lipstick smell again and the sound of beads clicking as Lipstick Woman bent close to Ricky. ‘I’ll be back to see you in a few days,’ she said. ‘Won’t that be nice?’

  No. No. Won’t be nice. This house too full things. Too full people you don’t know. Too tall. You won’t be able to find your way to top. And if you do, you’ll fall. How can it stay standing, up on hill like this? Why doesn’t topple over? It will. It will. It will topple over. As soon Lipstick Woman leaves, it will topple over, crumple up, and all these children and mother and hatstands and hairbrush and Spiderboy will all be squashed to bits, like big heap rubble. Oh no! No! Can’t stay here this big house all strange people. No!

  Flap-flap said the door as the two women left the kitchen. As soon as the door closed, the children dived on the plate of biscuits, all jostling for illicit extra goodies. Then, stuffing biscuits into their mouths and into their pockets and up their sleeves and giggling at their own daring, they lurched to the door and followed the two women into the hall. They skipped down the hall and into the front living room, the one Ricky had seen through the window from the garden, to spy on Lipstick Woman leaving. Ricky trailed after them, watching as they found places to perch between the hatstands and things, all clamouring to get a view. They clustered around the window, like roses around a doorway, watching Lipstick Woman climbing down the garden, nodding and laughing, jostling and elbowing each other and munching their sweet spicy biscuits. Ricky stood miserably behind them.

  Want mother.

  Then the mother came in and whooshed the children away from the window. ‘Come,’ she said to Ricky, holding out her hand. ‘Come and help me to get your bed ready.’

  CHAPTER 2

  Dandelion Girl Meets the Banshee (or Not)

  Something woke Rosheen that night. She was a light sleeper. She was used to all the creakings and rustlings of the old house turning over in its sleep by now, so these things didn’t wake her any more, but strange sounds woke her, and this was a very strange sound. She sat up sleepily, her fair hair tangled like a web before her eyes, her eyelashes prising reluctantly apart, and listened. There it was again. A sort of high-pitched yowl, a bit like a cat’s night lamentings, but not exactly that either.

  Could be a banshee, thought Rosheen, swinging her pink feet out from under the duvet, and feeling for her slippers. Lucky she slept on the bottom bunk. Helen had fought for the top and won, but now Rosheen was glad. Being on the bottom gave her more freedom. A banshee would be good. The others would be dead impressed. She pushed the web of hair back off her forehead with a sleep-dampened hand and rubbed her eyes good and hard, to make sure she was fully awake. If she was going in search of a banshee, she’d better be awake and able to see properly. She patted the bed, searching in the dark for her bright yellow dressing-gown, and struggled into it.

  Rosheen crept along the wall to the door, and eased it open. The dim yellow glow of the landing nightlight filtered into the room, but Helen didn’t stir. Lazy lump. You couldn’t wake her if you tried. Rosheen stifled a giggle. Funny how being awake when someone else was asleep made you feel stronger than they were. Rosheen wouldn’t dare even to think like that when Helen was awake. Helen was supposed to be her friend – they were almost the same age – but sometimes she was hard to like, and today had been one of those times.

  Rosheen closed the door carefully behind her, the triangle of light on the bedroom carpet gradually diminishing till it was just a crack, and then at last the door fitted into place and the seal against the light was complete.

  She pressed her back against the door, arching her neck so that as much of the back of her head as possible touched the door, and, jamming her calves into a straight line against the wood, she listened again for the sound. This was how people creeping about furtively at night were supposed to behave. She knew from watching films on the telly. She wondered whether she looked sufficiently dramatic in her lemon dressing-gown with her hair mussed up and one hand behind the small of her back, the fingers spread out against the door. She cocked her head, and sure enough, as if on cue, there came the yowling sound again. It was coming from downstairs, she thought.

  Rosheen bent over and ran with her bottom in the air and using her hands as forepaws, as if dodging bullets. This was cool fun. When she got to the stairs, she grasped the banister rail for dear life and edged down from step to step, keeping her feet carefully on the varnished edge of the stairs, between where the strip of stair carpet ended and the banisters began. If she stepped on the carpet, the banshee would catch her. When she arrived at the last step before the hall, Rosheen wavered. She would have to step on the dreaded carpet now, banshee or no banshee, because here the floor was completely carpeted, with no wooden margin. She closed her eyes a
nd leapt into the air. It was like diving off a whaling ship. It was like launching into space. It was like swimming into the stratosphere. Goodness knows where she would end up.

  She landed with a thump, feet first, outside the living-room door.

  Then came the high-pitched yowl again, much closer now. There could be no doubt about it. It was coming from inside the living-room door. What did banshees look like? Rosheen wondered. They combed their hair, she thought, or was that mermaids?

  Gingerly, she pushed the door open, half-expecting to see a ghostly woman combing her ghostly locks in the moonlight, but of course there was no such thing, just a lot of dark shapes and an irregular ridge under the covers of a makeshift bed that Mammy Kelly had somehow constructed for the new boy, because he wouldn’t climb the stairs. He’d stood in the hall, gazing up at the half-landing, and resolutely resisting encouragement to go up. He was a funny lad. Didn’t say a word. In the end, Mammy Kelly said he could sleep downstairs, just for tonight, until he got used to the house.

  Rosheen was secretly relieved there was no banshee, but she wouldn’t admit it for the world and was busy making one up to tell the others about in the morning when the eerie yowling came again. It filled the room. It sounded much weirder close up like this, like an animal in pain, lifting its maw to the skies and bewailing its plight to the moon. Rosheen yelped without meaning to, and the smudge on the pillow shot up in the air. The ridge under the covers flattened and there was Ricky, sitting bolt upright, his hair standing about his head like a chimney brush and his face white in the yellowy light from the hall.