2. Idle Talk of Gravity

And so Carlos began telling his little brother the story of Isaac Newton sitting under the apple tree and getting bopped on the head.
“Look! I’ll show you - I’ve just happen to have an apple for snacktime,” he went on, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a large carrot. Manuel laughed to see his brother so confounded.
“Remind me, this Isaac Thingy was sitting under an apple tree when a carrot fell on his head. No wonder he was surprised.”
“No! I don’t know how that got there.”
“I do,” said Manuel smugly. “You’ve got my trousers on. I had a carrot in my pocket for school snacktime.”
Carlos was irritated. “Then hand them over."
"Are you saying we should take our trousers off here, on the Moon, where anyone might see us?"
"No, just give me my apple. And the other things...”
Manuel handed over the contents of his brother’s pockets. The long lost apple, followed by two matchboxes.
“It’s all right, I’m taking them to school; we’re doing insects.” Carlos explained unhelpfully and put them in his pocket.
“I thought you were doing gravity.”
Carlos gave Manuel one of his big brother looks and said: “Watch!” as he tossed the apple in his hand, and then threw it up into the air. They watched it soar into the black sky.
“I’m not sharing my carrot with you, just because you threw your apple away.”
“I didn’t throw it away,” said Carlos, putting out his hand and looking up. The apple was slowly returning: It fell gently out of the starry sky and landed softly in his hand. “That is gravity.”
Manuel searched in his pockets for something to throw and pulled out a seashell that he had picked up on the beach the day before. He threw it up, but not straight up, so it went soaring out into the night sky as they watched it spinning away from them until it disappeared over the horizon.
“It’s not coming back!” he said, worried.
“It will land eventually, but not here.” explained Carlos.
“I liked that shell.” Moaned Manuel. “I was taking it to school. we’re doing shells.
Carlos felt sorry for his little brother and tried to cheer him up. “Still it was a great throw! You are stronger than you thought! And do you know why?”
“Gravity?”
“Yes! Because the gravity is less on the Moon you can throw things much further - and...”
“And what?”
“And you can jump much higher!” said Carlos with a leap that took him ten or twelve feet into the air.
The expression on Manuel’s face changed from puzzlement to joy. Now this was something he understood, This was a nice short word; fun! He was soon launching himself upwards and the two of them took advantage of the weak gravity to make several record-breaking high-jumps.
Soon they were running across the Moon surface with huge strides, leaping over boulders and craters and generally acting like giant rabbits. Until they came to a steep cliff of Moonrock that rose up like a sheet hanging on a washing line. They immediately began to look for a way to climb up. They were used to clambering over cliffs and knew what to look for; skid marks where someone has lost their foothold; broken plants that were not strong enough to stop them from falling, and loose rocks that invite you to test them with your weight. But this cliff had never been attempted by anyone; it was and unmarked it looked impossible to climb, so they turned and followed the wall along hoping to find a way up somewhere. But the cliff just led them round in a curved line that just went on and on curving.
“Do you know what I think?” Carlos said suddenly, stopping and touching his brother on his arm. “I think we have been going round and round in circles.”
“Let’s go back then,” said Manuel cheerily.
Carlos was always ready to put his little brother down, but this suggestion was stupid even for him. He shook his fists in frustration.“What is the point?” Then he began waving his arm around as though he was doing an impression of a windmill. “If it’s a circle, we’ll only end up here!”
Manuel was trying to work this out when he turned around and saw a strange creature that was standing a short way off as though it had been following them for quite a while. It was a bit like a green kangaroo with a long tail and a small head that had two horns sprouting from it that were shaped like trumpets. Manuel jumped and spluttered out a snort of surprise, and the creature also jumped to find that it had been spotted. Carlos turned around in time to see it turn and start to run away. It had a long heavy tail, which it waved from side to side as it scampered off.

“What was that?” he gasped.
“A monster!” squeaked Manuel turning and fleeing as fast as he could in the opposite direction. “Let’s go!”
In his haste Manuel had forgotten that they were trapped in a circle of rock, and he was still running at full tilt when he ran straight into the creature which was running just as fast, looking over its shoulder as it too fled in terror. They banged hard into each other and fell to the floor.
Manuel cried out in pain and clutched his head while the creature whined and sat on the ground. Carlos caught up and found them both crumpled on the floor soothing their bruises. When the creature saw Carlos approach it stood up shakily on its hind legs and limped away.
“Hey!” Carlos cried after it. “Come back, we won’t hurt you!”
The creature made a humphing snort as it rubbed its aching thigh and sat down a little way off. It uncurled its long toes in pain and the claws showed, pinky-green. Carlos came near to reassure the wounded creature, but when he touched it on the shoulder up! it leaped, scaling the wall with a single jump, just skimming the topcrust with its long toenails, leaving nothing behind but some scattered crumbs of moonpastry and the memory of its terrified heartbeat still throbbing in Carlos’s empty hand.
“Lets go after it!” called Carlos.
“Are you mad? Did you see what that was?”
“All right, we’ll just go round and round this crater until we die.”
“That sounds nice!” said Manuel rubbing his sore head.
That creature - whatever it was - had given him a massive bump. He closed his eyes and soothed his spinning head.

When he looked up he saw Carlos trying to climb the crater wall and then sliding down. He had to laugh because his big brother was acting like a clown, he almost made it to the top and then losing his foothold in the dust, he tumbled in slow motion back down to the bottom.
Then Carlos had another idea; he went over to a large boulder that was lying nearby, and began to push against it. Manuel laughed to see his brother attempt something so totally impossible, but to his surprise the rock began to move.
Apparently with superhuman strength, Carlos rolled the boulder over to the wall. “Gravity!” he explained: “Not so much!”
“Oh yes, I remember the apple!” said Manuel as he mucked in. They heaved and shifted and lunged and lifted, and soon they had a large pile of moonrocks leaning up against the crater wall, with plenty of footholes and steps to climb up on.
Carlos lead the way and Manuel followed, squeaking with fear and excitement. They reached the top of the crater wall and sat there looking out over a magnificent Moonscape.
“Everything looks so clear and - what’s that thing from cameras? Yes, that’s it, in fowkiss.” But there was a black and white film in the camera, or so it seemed as there was not a speck of colour to be seen, and no sign of the injured monster they had followed.
“Carlos? Are we going to sit here until we die?”

For answer Carlos pushed himself down the slope and taboganned down the crater on his school-trouser-bottom. Manuel launched himself off after him and after a bruising descent they landed with a not too gentle bump in a cloud of fine Moondust. Or two clouds rather, since Carlos landed first, and Manuel made a second slightly smaller cloud of moondust a few seconds later.
This part of the moon was smoother than the area inside the crater. Until they had hit the dust a few seconds before, it seemed that there had been no major impacts in this area of the Moon. They had arrived at what seemed to be a wide sandy beach, except it couldn’t be a real beach because there was no sea. They stood still for a moment, wondering which way to go. Any one direction looked the same as any other.
“The tide is out; very far out. In fact I can’t see the sea at all,” pondered Carlos.
They gazed out across the flat sand. No wind ruffled their hair, no salty spray stung their eyes, just stillness and silence.
“It’s very calm,” said Carlos, staring blankly.
“What is? The sea?” asked Manuel.
“No, stupid, there is no sea here. There is a word for this place but I don’t know what it is.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know all the long words.”
“Are you stupid, Carlos?”
“No I am not stupid, and anyway I do know some long words.”
“Good, I am very glad. I don’t want to get stuck on the moon with someone who turns out to be stupid.”

At that moment they saw three shapes coming towards them, and their conversation stopped. The shapes looked at first like someone walking two dogs, which was a sight they had often seen on the beach at home, especially early in the morning, before breakfast. As they got nearer the tall figure turned out to be a woman who looked like she had stepped out of a history book. She wore a long dress with a skirt that made a giant bell shape, and her hair was piled up into two spiral buns. But the boys were more concerned about her dogs which they could now see were not dogs at all.
“Silly of you to expect to find dogs on the Moon, really.” chided Carlos unfairly.
One of them was the strange monster they had chased earlier. The other one was slightly larger and was a paler green and had only one trumpet shaped horn on its head. The boys waited for the lady to come closer. She was waving at them.
“Hey! Hello there!” she called in a friendly though commanding voice, which was high pitched and excessively loud. “Good Afternoon! Is it afternoon yet? Or is it Wednesday? I get these things mixed up, the days are so short up here!”
The boys couldn’t understand what she was talking about, but they cowered at her booming tone of voice, and kept their distance from her two monstrous pets.

“Don’t worry, they won’t bite!” said the lady, tugging at the leads she held in each hand. “We’re just finishing our walkies, aren’t we girls?” The monsters looked tired. “We’ve got to keep our leashes on, since we tend to run off otherwise,” jested the Lady at full volume. “I just found this one wandering about who-knows-where getting up to who-knows-what-kind of mischief! Didn’t I, my darling?”
At this she ruffled the beast’s head with a gloved hand playfully pulling at the trumpet shaped horns (which actually turned out to be ears) in a rough display of affection.
“She came back with a terrible bruise on her head!”
The bruise matched the one on Manuel’s head.

1: Carlos and Manuel's Quest

On the shoreline, where spiny tufts of grass sprouted out of the sand, there stood a little fisherman’s cottage. From here the fisherman would keep a careful watch on the sea, because it was always changing its mood. Sometimes the sea would sulk far down the beach behind a line of seaweed and he had to drag his sleepy old boat across the sand to reach the first dreary waves. Other times the sea would come bounding up the beach and lap at their doorstep, and his boat would be just as keen, bobbing up and down on its tether.
The sea changed colour too; from stony grey on cloudy days, to deep blue in the sunshine. The fisherman liked it best at night when the Moon threw silver lines all over the dark water. These waving lines attracted the fish, so he would always have his nets bulging with a big catch on moonlit nights. Unfortunately the Moon was forever changing too: Sometimes it was round and fat and at other times it was a toenail clipping in the sky.
There were even some nights when it disappeared altogether and on those long nights the fisherman would come home with his shoulders sagging and his nets almost empty.
So it is not surprising that the fisherman’s face would change too. On moonlit nights when the tide was high it was a beaming cheery face. But this evening, when he kissed the boys good night, it was shaded by worry.
“Good night Carlos, sleep well. Good night Manuel, sweet dreams.” He said, and then he closed their bedroom door and tiptoed away.



A moment later Carlos and Manuel could hear the groan of their father’s saggy old armchair as it adjusted to his weight slumping into it. There were a few little creaks as he shifted himself, and then a louder groan which turned out to be their mother’s voice, saying: “Aren’t you going fishing tonight?”
“I don’t think I’ll bother,” their father mumbled.
“Well, if it’s too much bother then don’t bother and we won’t bother eating either. It doesn’t bother me if you’ld rather see your family go hungry than be bothered.”
“The tide is out,” the fisherman explained. “I would have to drag the boat across a mile of sand in the dark, and since there’s no Moon tonight there won’t be any fish. That’s what I mean - it is not worth the bother.”
“I’m not going to argue,” said their mum. “All I can say is I hope the hens can be bothered to lay some eggs for breakfast, because if they can’t be bothered there won’t be anything to eat but lemons!”
The boys heard their father putting on his heavy boots, and the strike of a match as he lit his lantern. The front door latch clinked, and their mother’s voice called out angrily.
“Where are you going?” - there was no answer. The front door closed, quietly but firmly, whilst in their bedroom the boys whispered to each other. There was a candle left burning on the chest, which cast a shuddering shadow of Carlos, as he sat up in bed.
“Hey, Manuel, are you awake?” asked Carlos.
“Yes, are you awake too?” whispered Manuel.
“Of course I am you twit, I’m talking to you, aren’t I?” hissed the older boy.
“You could be talking in your sleep - you sometimes do.”
“Well I’m not. Do you know what they were arguing about?”
Manuel murmured cluelessly.
“I think it was something about the Moon.” Carlos went on. “Yes, they were definitely arguing about the Moon. I heard Daddy say that it has gone. Mummy was very angry about it.”
“Where has it gone?” asked Manuel, who sometimes expected his big brother to know everything.
Carlos always tried to live up to expectations. “It has just disappeared! And the worst thing is it has taken all the fish with it too! Mum said there would be nothing to eat.”
“That’s terrible!” gasped Manuel. “What are we going to do?”
“We must go and find the Moon and bring it back,” said Carlos. “Before we all starve to death!”
Carlos threw the sheet off him and began pulling school clothes out of the drawers for both of them. He helped Manuel dress himself as they pulled their uniforms on over their pyjamas, dressing with more speed than neatness.
Carlos took the candle and opened the bedroom window, and they climbed stiffly out into the back yard,


(where ) the hens were settling down in their little house clucking and shuffling. The night air blew their drowsy “good night”s and “sleep-well”s out of their heads in a gust of salty wind that made the unhappy lemon tree shiver.


Carlos sheltered the candle flame with his hand as they stood in the yard for a while looking up at the sky, wondering which way to go. There was no point going down to the beach since they already knew the moon wasn’t there, so instead they began to climb up the steep hill behind the cottage.

It was hard to see their way in the dark. Not only was it a moonless night, it was also cloudy so no stars shone, but they knew the route so well they could have done it in their sleep. The pale sandy path shone faintly in the candlelight against the darkness of the scrubby plants that clung to the headland.

They could smell the woody smoke from their cottage, as they climbed higher than the chimneytop and went on stumbling and clinging onto prickly plants and almost dropping the candle but at last they reached the top, but they were no nearer finding the moon, so they continued down the other side of the hill. As they went on the earth became boggy; at each footstep brown water oozed out of the turf and into their shoes and they had to pull their feet free from the clingy soil with a noise like dogfood coming out of a can.

After a while they came to the edge of a forest and found themselves on firmer, drier ground. The trees in this forest were famous for being the tallest trees in the world. Their trunks went up so high and their branches were so thick that even in the daytime it was dark. So dark that no one dared go into the forest.

Except Carlos and Manuel, who stepped in almost without a flicker of fear. The tree trunks were so close together they had to push their way through, just the way they did to get through the crowded market. But unlike the market-place this was still and very quiet. The air smelt of mould and nothing moved. There were no fallen leaves or pine-needles on the ground, and no twigs, so their footseps didn’t crunch, infact they seemed to sigh, as though they was walking on sponges. Carlos bent down to examine the forest floor with his candle and saw that it was a carpet of mushrooms. He picked one and examined it close to the candle flame.
“Don’t eat it, Carlos, it might be poisonous!” warned Manuel.
Carlos put it in his pocket. “I’ll take them home; Mum will know what to do with them; if she says they’re okay we could come back and get some more. She could make mushroom soup.”
“Yes and poison all of us.”
After stumbling through the darkness, bumping into trees and treading on squishy things, Manuel broke the silence: “How do you know which way we are going?”
“We don’t,” admitted Carlos.
“Isn’t that a bit stupid?”
“There’s nothing to worry about. I know where we are.”
“Where?”
“Here!” announced Carlos, indicating the spot where he stood, which, to Manuel, looked the same as any other spot in the wood.
Suddenly Carlos caught a glimpse of a light glinting through the trees.
“This way!” he said, and Manuel followed him in pursuit of the light, which seemed to keep disappearing behind trees, as though playing hide and seek with them. At last they found a lamp that was hanging on a bracket. In its pale gleam they could make out a small door that was set into the wall of a narrow stone tower. The lamp flickered as they disturbed the air and flickered more as Carlos unhooked it from the bracket. He turned up the flame.

“Where’s the doorbell?” Carlos wondered aloud, before knocking on the door with his fist. He found the keyhole and shouted into it: “Hello! Anyone home?”
“Are you mad?” hissed Manuel. “It might be a giant!”
“To judge by the size of the door it must be a very small one,” commented Carlos.
“Yes, but very hungry - and you know what they eat, don’t you?”
Carlos was too busy trying to turn the knob to reply. Suddenly there was a heavy clunk! and the door creaked open. Inside there was a spiral staircase that went up into the darkness. Each step was so worn down by use it looked more like a twisted pile of pillows. Carlos laid his left foot gently on the first step. The stone was so soft it began to sink under his weight.
“Are you sure this is safe?” asked Manuel, but Carlos was already running up the steps, which first sank under his weight and then bulged out again, as though they were being pumped up with air.



Manuel bounced up the stairs after Carlos and decided that this must be an inflatable castle.
The further they climbed the more the tower grew, in fact Manuel began to suspect that they were inflating it themselves with their effort to get to the top. Every time he trod on one step another one seemed to pop up ahead of it. They soon lost all sense of how far they had gone, since they became dizzy going round and round and up and up, but at last, panting and ready to collapse, they came to a window. They rested on the ledge and gasped.
“There must be a wonderful view from up here,” said Carlos. But when they looked out of the window and there was no view at all, just a confused scribble of knotted black hair.


“We must be in the tree tops,” said Carlos. “So this is what the leaves of the tall trees look like. They are not leaves at all, they’re hairs!” They could hear squirrels scurrying about snip-snip-snipping with tiny pairs of scissors, and birds with combs nesting down for the night in the dark tangled growth. As they looked around they recognised some of the hairstyles:
“Look there is Miss Lopez’s bun!” cried Carlos. Manuel saw the music teacher’s tall hairstyle growing out of a nearby branch, exactly like the real thing, except that it had a small blue egg sitting in it. Looking about they recognised several more familiar hairstyles that they were used to seeing on the heads of their teachers and classmates, but which looked equally fetching on the end of a branch.
Carlos pulled his tired little brother up some more steps. Their feet grew cold as they tugged themselves up until at last their fingers clawed another window ledge and they gazed out. But again there was no view, this time they found they were staring into a thick fog.
“We’ve gone up so high we’re in the clouds.” said Carlos. He thrust his arm out of the window and waved his hand around making the vapour swirl through his fingers, just like the patterns in the water when he trailed his hand out of his father’s boat. He pulled his hand back in - it was wet.
“Condensation.” he said. He loved to show off with long words. To avoid any awkward questions about what condensation actually was he turned and dashed upstairs.
After a few more dizzying turns up the spiral staircase the air cleared and their heads unclogged. Manuel felt sure that they must be above the clouds by now, since every breath felt like ice cold lemonade as it fizzed through his nostrils.
“Have you noticed,’ said Carlos, “that the air is getting thinner?”
“And colder!” shivered Manuel.
“It”s the altitude,” said Carlos.
Manuel looked puzzled, and Carlos ran upstairs.

They climbed to the next window, but just as they reached it there was a flash of light and a spark flew in through the window and shot past them.
“What was that?” screamed Manuel, as it bounced off the walls and clattered down the stairs, sending off sparks every time it hit the cold stone walls. Carlos watched it disappear down the staircase.
“I think it was a shooting star,” he said. “They are not really stars, they are only little bits of grit that are flying through space and they burn up as they enter the atmosphere.”

Cautiously they looked out of the window and saw the black sky, punctured by millions of shooting stars skimming about like stones on still water. As they leaned out of the window the tower seemed to lurch sideways. At first the boys thought the tower was going to fall, but it wasn’t falling; it was bending and growing upwards. It continued to grow like a bean, twisting round as it did so, until it presented them with the sight of the full Moon staring brightly through the window into their open mouths and wide eyes.
Their tiredness forgotten, the two boys clambered up some more stairs which took them out onto the roof of the tower. It was a round flat rooftop, with a low wall running round it. From up here the Moon was so close it shone brightly enough to see without the lantern, which Carlos put down, lowering the wick to conserve paraffin. It was almost as bright as day, but strangely the light was colourless. Everything was black and white, like an old film. Even Manuel’s school uniform, which should have been green, was grey.
“Look at that!” gasped Carlos. “You can almost touch it!”
He reached out and stretched up to touch the moon. Then he jumped up and managed to brush it with the tip of his finger. He felt the Moon pulling him up, holding him in space for a second, until he fell back down, scraping off a bit of moondust which fell into Manuel’s eyes.

“I touched it! I touched the moon!!” he cried. “Trouble is I couldn’t quite get a grip of it.” Then he noticed a ladder lying on the roof. They hoisted the ladder upright and found that it was just long enough to stretch to the Moon. Carlos rocked the ladder to see if it wobbled, which it did, quite a lot, and then he began to climb.
“Is it safe?” asked Manuel.
“Going into space on a wobbly ladder? I don’t think so, do you?”
For once Manuel agreed. “No, I think it is stupid and dangerous.”
“Look, we can always climb back down if we want to.”
“That’s okay then,” said Manuel following his brother boldly.
They grappled themselves clumsily onto the Moon and clung onto it like barnacles on their father’s boat. Manuel still had his foot on the top rung of the ladder, but he felt it sliding slowly away from him. A moment later they heard a loud Clunk! as the ladder slipped off the Moon and collapsed down onto the tower below. It teetered on the battlements for a moment, still drawn to the Moon. The desire to stick to the Moon was weak and the need to fall down to Earth was strong, so the ladder went tumbling past meteors and through clouds until at last it became lodged in the topmost branches of the tall trees, rudely disturbing the sleeping birds and squirrels in their hair nests.

Meanwhile the boys lay face down on the Moon and listened to the silence of space, hardly daring to speak.




“Are we the first boys to step on the Moon?” whispered Manuel.
“I think so, but we haven’t stepped on it yet, we just crawled on it.” said Carlos.


Manuel noticed that the ridge of Moonrock that he was gripped onto made in a circle and looking about he saw many more circles dotted about.
“Where do all these round holes come from?”
“I dunno, giant rabbits?” said Carlos, with a smirk. “Shall we stand up now?”
Manuel gripped his rabbit hole even tighter. “What if we fall off? You saw what happened to the ladder.”
“Manuel, you can let go; the Moon has gravity.”
“Who-ity?” asked Manuel.
“Gravity! We’re doing it at school.”
“So what is it?”