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?”
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