4
GOODNIGHT GARBAGETOWN
“OI, TETLEY! FUCK off back home to your darkhole! We’re full up on little cunts here!”
And that’s how I got my name. Barely past the battery spires of Electric City, a fat gas-huffing fucksack voltage jockey called me a little cunt. But he also called me Tetley. He brayed it down from a pyramid of telephones, and his friends all laughed and drank homebrew out of a glass jug and went back to not working. I looked down—among the many scraps of rubbish clinging to my shirt and pants and backpack and hair was a bright blue teabag wrapper with TETLEY CLASSIC BLEND BLACK TEA written on it in cheerful white letters, clinging to my chest.
I tried to feel the power of my new name. The me-ness of it. I tried to imagine my mother and father when they were young, waking up with some torn-out page of Life or Time magazine stuck to their rears, not even noticing until someone barked out their whole lives for a laugh. But I couldn’t feel anything while the volt-humpers kept on staring at me like I was nothing but a used-up potato battery. I didn’t even know then that the worst swear word in Electric City was dark. I didn’t know they were waiting to see how mad I’d get ’cause they called my home a darkhole. I didn’t care. They were wrong and stupid. Except for the hole part. Candle Hole never met a dark it couldn’t burn down.
Maybe I should have gone home right then. I had my name! Time to hoof it back over the river and through the woods, girl. But I’d never seen Electric City and it was morning and if I stayed gone a while longer maybe they’d miss me. Maybe they’d worry. And maybe now they’d love me, now that I was a person with a name. Maybe I could even filch a couple of batteries or a cup of gasoline and turn up at my parents’ door in turbo-powered triumph. I’d tell my brother all my adventures and he’d look at me like I was magic on a stick and everything would be good forever and ever, amen.
So I wandered. I gawped. It was like being in school and learning the Fuckwit song, only I was walking around inside the Fuckwit song and it was all still happening right now everywhere. Electric City burbled and bubbled and clanged and belched and smoked just like the bad old world before it all turned blue. Everyone had such fine things! I saw a girl wearing a ballgown out of a fairy book, green and glitter and miles of ruffles, and she wasn’t even going anywhere. She was just tending her gasoline garden out the back of her little cottage, which wasn’t made out of candles or picturebooks or cat food cans, but real cottage parts! Mostly doors and shutters and really rather a lot of windows, but they fit together like they never even needed the other parts of a house in the first place. And the girl in her greenglitter dress carried a big red watering can around her garden, sprinkling fuel stabilizer into her tidy rows of petrol barrels and gas cans with their graceful spouts pointed toward the sun. Why not wear that dress all the time? Just a wineglass full of what she was growing in her garden would buy almost anything in Garbagetown. She smiled shyly at me. I hated her. And I wanted to be her.
By afternoon I was bound for London-town, so hungry I could’ve slurped up every eel the Thames ever had. There’s no food lying around in Electric City. In Candle Hole I could’ve grabbed candy or a rice ball or jerky off any old midden heap. But here everybody owned their piece and kept it real neat, mercilessly neat, and they didn’t share. I sat down on a rusty Toyota transmission and fished around in my backpack for crumbs. My engine sat on one side of a huge cyclone fence. I’d never seen one all put together before. Sure, you find torn-off shreds of wire fences, but this one was all grown up, with proper locks and chain wire all over it. It meant to Keep You Out. Inside, like hungry dogs, endless barrels and freezers and cylinders and vats went on and on, with angry writing on them that said HAZMAT or BIOHAZARD or RADIOACTIVE or WARNING or DANGER or CLASSIFIED.
“Got anything good in there?” said a boy’s voice. I looked round and saw a kid my own age, with wavy black hair and big brown eyes and three little moles on his forehead. He was wearing the nicest clothes I ever saw on a boy—a blue suit that almost, almost fit him. With a tie.
“Naw,” I answered. “Just a dry sweater, an empty can of Cheez Whiz, some souvenirs from home, and Madeline Brix’s Superboss Mixtape ’97. It’s my good luck charm.” I showed him my beloved mixtape. Madeline Brix made all the dots on her i’s into hearts. It was a totally Fuckwit thing to do and I loved her for it even though she was dead and didn’t care if I loved her or not.
“Cool,” the boy said, and I could tell he meant it. He didn’t even call me a little cunt or anything. He pushed his thick hair out of his face. “Listen, you really shouldn’t be here. No one’s gonna say anything because you’re not Electrified, but it’s so completely dangerous. They put all that stuff in one place so it couldn’t get out and hurt anyone.”
“Electrified?”
“One of us. Local.” He had the decency to look embarrassed. “Anyway, I saw you and I thought that if some crazy darkgirl is gonna have a picnic on Hazmat Heath, I could at least help her not die while she’s doing it.”
The boy held out his hand. He was holding a gas mask. He showed me how to fasten it under my hair. The sun started to set rosily behind a tangled briar of motherboards. Everything turned pink and gold and slow and sleepy. I climbed down from my engine tuffet and lay under the fence next to the boy in the suit. He’d brought a mask for himself, too. We looked at each other through the eye holes.
“My name’s Goodnight Moon,” he said.
“Mine’s…” And I did feel my new name swirling up inside me then, like good tea, like cream and sugar cubes, like the most essential me. “Tetley.”
“I’m sorry I called you a darkgirl, Tetley.”
“Why?”
“It’s not a nice thing to call someone.”
“I like it. It sounds pretty.”
“It isn’t. I promise. Do you forgive me?”
I tugged on the hose of my gas mask. The air coming through tasted like nickels. “Sure. I’m aces at forgiving. Been practicing all my life. Besides…” My turn to go red in the face. “At the Black Wick they’d probably call you a brightboy and that’s not as pretty as it sounds, either.”
Goodnight Moon’s brown eyes stared out at me from behind thick glass. It was the closest I’d ever been to a boy who wasn’t my twin. Goodnight Moon didn’t feel like a twin. He felt like the opposite of a twin. We never shared a womb, but on the other end of it all, we might still share a grave. His tie was burgundy with green swirls in it. He hadn’t tied it very well, so I could see the skin of his throat, which was very clean and probably very soft.
“Hey,” he said, “do you want to hear your tape?”
“What do you mean, hear it? It’s not for hearing, it’s for luck.”
Goodnight Moon laughed. His laugh burst all over me like butterfly bombs. He reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a thick black rectangle. I handed him Madeline Brix’s Superboss Mixtape ’97 and he hit a button on the side of the rectangle. It popped open; Goodnight Moon slotted in my tape and handed me one end of a long wire.
“Put it in your ear,” he said, and I did.
A man’s voice filled up my head from my jawbone up to the plates of my skull. The most beautiful and saddest voice that ever was. A voice like Candle Hole all lit up at twilight. A voice like the whole old world calling up from the bottom of the sea. The man on Madeline Brix’s tape was saying he was happy, and he hoped I was happy, too.
Goodnight Moon reached out to hold my hand just as the sky went black and starry. I was crying. He was, too. Our tears dripped out of our gas masks onto the rusty road of Electric City.
When the tape ended, I dug in my backpack for a match and a stump of candle: dark red, Holiday Memories scent. I lit it at the same moment that Goodnight Moon pulled a little flashlight out of his pocket and turned it on. We held our glowings between us. We were the same.
5
BRIGHTBITCH
ALLSORTS SITA CAME to visit me today. Clicked my knocker early in the morning, early enough that
I could be sure she’d never slept in the first place. I opened for her, as I am required to do. She looked up at me with eyes like bullet holes, leaning on my waxy hinges, against the T in BRIGHTBITCH, thoughtfully scrawled in what appeared to be human shit across the front of my hut. BRIGHTBITCH smelled, but Allsorts Sita smelled worse. Her breath punched me in the nose before she did. I got a lungful of what Diet Sprite down at the Black Wick optimistically called “cognac”: the thick pinkish booze you could get by extracting the fragrance oil and preservatives out of candles and mixing it with wood alcohol the kids over in Furnitureford boiled out of dining sets and china cabinets. Smells like flowers vomited all over a New Car and then killed a badger in the backseat. Allsorts Sita looked like she’d drunk so much cognac you could light one strand of her hair and she’d burn for eight days.
“You fucking whore,” she slurred.
“Thank you, Auntie, for my instruction,” I answered quietly.
I have a place I go to in my mind when I have visitors who aren’t seals or gannet birds or hibiscus flowers. A little house made all of doors and windows, where I wear a greenglitter dress every day and water my gas-can garden and read by electric light.
“I hate you. I hate you. How could you do it? We raised you and fed you and this is how you repay it all. You ungrateful bitch.”
“Thank you, Auntie, for my instruction.”
In my head I ran my fingers along a cyclone fence and all the barrels on the other side read LIFE and LOVE and FORGIVENESS and UNDERSTANDING.
“You’ve killed us all,” Allsorts Sita moaned. She puked up magenta cognac on my stoop. When she was done puking she hit me over and over with closed fists. It didn’t hurt too much. Allsorts is a small woman. But it hurt when she clawed my face and my breasts with her fingernails. Blood came up like wax spilling, and when she finished she passed out cold, halfway in my house, halfway out.
“Thank you, Auntie, for my instruction,” I said to her sleeping body. My blood dripped onto her, but in my head I was lying on my roof made of two big church doors in a gas mask listening to a man sing to me that he’s never done bad things and he hopes I’m happy, he hopes I’m happy, he hopes I’m happy.
Big Bargains moaned mournfully, and the lovely roof melted away like words on a door. My elephant seal friend flopped and fretted. When they’ve gone for my face she can’t quite recognize me, and it troubles her seal-soul something awful. Grape Crush, my gannet bird, never worries about silly things like facial wounds. He just brings me fish and pretty rocks. When I found him, he had a plastic six-pack round his neck with one can still stuck in the thing, dragging along behind him like a ball and chain. Big Bargains was choking on an ad insert. She’d probably smelled some ancient fish and chips grease lurking in the headlines. They only love me because I saved them. That doesn’t always work. I saved everyone else, too, and all I got back was blood and shit and loneliness.
6
REVLON SUPER LUSTROUS 919: RED RUIN
I WENT HOME with my new name fastened on tight. Darkgirls can’t stay in Electric City. Can’t live there unless you’re born there, and I was only ten anyway. Goodnight Moon kissed me before I left. He still had his gas mask on, so mainly our breathing hoses wound around each other like gentle elephants, but I still call it a kiss. He smelled like scorched ozone and metal and paraffin and hope.
A few months later, Electric City put up a fence around the whole place. Hung up an old rusty shop sign that said EXCUSE OUR MESS WHILE WE RENOVATE. No one could go in or out except to trade, and that had to get itself done on the dark side of the fence.
My mother and father didn’t start loving me when I got back even though I brought six AA batteries out of the back of Goodnight Moon’s tape player. My brother had got a ramen flavor packet stuck in his hair somewhere outside the Grocery Isle and was every inch of him Maruchan. A few years later I heard Life and Time telling some cousin how their marvelous and industrious and thoughtful boy had gone out in search of a name and brought back six silver batteries, enough to power anything they could dream of. What a child! What a son! So fuck them, I guess.
But Maruchan did bring something back. It just wasn’t for our parents. When we crawled into the Us-Fort that first night back, we lay uncomfortably against each other. We were the same, but we weren’t. We’d had separate adventures for the first time, and Maruchan could never understand why I wanted to sleep with a gas mask on now.
“Tetley, what do you want to be when you grow up?” Maruchan whispered in the dark of our pram-maze.
“Electrified,” I whispered back. “What do you want to be?”
“Safe,” he said. Things had happened to Maruchan, too, and I couldn’t share them anymore than he could hear Madeline Brix’s songs.
My twin pulled something out of his pocket and pushed it into my hand till my fingers closed round it reflexively. It was hard and plastic and warm.
“I love you, Tetley. Happy birthday.”
I opened my fist. Maruchan had stolen lipstick for me. Revlon Super Lustrous 919: Red Ruin, worn almost all the way down to the nub by some dead woman’s lips.
After that, a lot of years went by but they weren’t anything special.
7
IF GOD TURNED UP FOR SUPPER
I WAS SEVENTEEN years old when Brighton Pier came to Garbagetown. I was tall and my hair was the color of an oil spill; I sang pretty good and did figures in my head and I could make a candle out of damn near anything. People wanted to marry me here and there but I didn’t want to marry them back so they thought I was stuck up. Who wouldn’t want to get hitched to handsome Candyland Ocampo and ditch Candle Hole for a clean, fresh life in Soapthorpe, where bubbles popped all day long like diamonds in your hair? Well, I didn’t, because he had never kissed me with a gas mask on and he smelled like pine fresh cleaning solutions and not like scorched ozone at all.
Life and Time turned into little kids right in front of us. They giggled and whispered and Mum washed her hair in the sea about nine times and then soaked it in oil until it shone. Papa tucked a candle stump that had melted just right and looked like a perfect rose into her big fancy hairdo and then, like it was a completely normal thing to do, put on a cloak sewn out of about a hundred different neckties. They looked like a prince and a princess.
“Brighton Pier came last when I was a girl, before I even had my name,” Time told us, still giggling and blushing like she wasn’t anyone’s mother. “It’s the most wonderful thing that can ever happen in the world.”
“If God turned up for supper and brought all the dry land back for dessert, it wouldn’t be half as good as one day on Brighton Pier,” Life crowed. He picked me up in his arms and twirled me around in the air. He’d never done that before, not once, and he had his heart strapped on so tight he didn’t even stop and realize what he’d done and go vacant-eyed and find something else to look at for a long while. He just squeezed me and kissed me like I came from somewhere, and I didn’t know what the hell a Brighton Pier was but I loved it already.
“What is it? What is it?” Maruchan and I squealed, because you can catch happiness like a plague.
“It’s better the first time if you don’t know,” Mum assured us. “It’s meant to dock in Electric City on Friday.”
“So it’s a ship, then?” Maruchan said. But Papa just twinkled his eyes at us and put his finger over his lips to keep the secret in.
The Pier meant to dock in Electric City. My heart fell into my stomach, got all digested up, and sizzled out into the rest of me all at once. Of course, of course it would. Electric City had the best docks, the sturdiest, the prettiest. But it seemed to me like life was happening to me on purpose, and Electric City couldn’t keep a darkgirl out anymore. They had to share like the rest of us.
“What do you want to be when you grow up, Maruchan?” I said to my twin in the dark the night before we set off to see what was better than God. Maruchan’s eyes gleamed with the Christmas thrill of it all.
“B
righton Pier,” he whispered.
“Me, too,” I sighed, and we both dreamed we were beautiful Fuckwits running through a forest of real pines, laughing and stopping to eat apples and running again, and only right before we woke up did we notice that something was chasing us, something huge and electric and bound for London-town.
8
CITIZENS OF MUTATION NATION
I LOOKED FOR Goodnight Moon everywhere from the moment we crossed into Electric City. The fence had gone and Garbagetown poured in and nothing was different than it had been when I got my name off the battery spires, even though the sign had said for so long that Electric City was renovating. I played a terrible game with every person that shoved past, every face in a window, every shadow juddering down an alley, and the game was: Are you him? But I lost all the hands. The only time I stopped playing was when I first saw Brighton Pier.
I couldn’t get my eyes around it. It was a terrible, gorgeous whale of light and colors and music and otherness. All along a boardwalk jugglers danced and singers sang and horns horned and accordions squeezed and under it all some demonic engine screamed and wheezed. Great glass domes and towers and flags and tents glowed in the sunset, but Brighton Pier made the sunset look plain-faced and unlovable. A huge wheel full of pink and emerald electric lights turned slowly in the warm wind but went nowhere. People leapt and turned somersaults and stood on each other’s shoulders, and they all wore such soft, vivid costumes, like they’d all been cut out of a picturebook too fine for anyone like me to read. The tumblers lashed the Pier to the Electric City docks and cut the engines, and after that it was nothing but music so thick and good you could eat it out of the air.
Life and Time hugged Maruchan and cheered with the rest of Garbagetown. Tears ran down their faces. Everyone’s faces.
The Past Is Red Page 2
