Chapter I

SNOTTY

Hamercy Street ran downhill from the highest point in Widdleshift, which was in the neighborhood of Makewater, which was in the district of Hackendosh, which was part of the county of Queerspittle. All of these were in the far northwest of what had once been the nation of Albion, but which was now known, in the great city of Megalopolis, as East New York.⁴

On Hamercy Street there lived a boy named Snotty. It was an ugly name, and he was an ugly boy. He had very big ears and a very big nose, and very little everything else. He was dusty colored and his eyes were red. His teeth were crooked and his elbows and knees stuck out of everything he wore, no matter how new or old—although his clothes were mostly old and didn’t fit him anyway.⁵

Inside of him was ugly, too. Inside of him was moldy and dusty and like it was filled with broken furniture and garbage. So he hardly ever looked inside. You wouldn’t have either, if you were Snotty.

Outside of him was not much better. Hamercy Street was mean and ugly and cold and wretched, and Snotty lived at the top of it, in a very ugly house, with his mother—who was no oil painting herself. He didn’t see much of her. She spent a lot of her time downstairs, on the pea green settee in front of the broken electric fire, watching TV with a can of lager in her hand. This—along with getting up once in awhile, yawning, and scratching her backside—pretty much constituted her career. She and Snotty had started out well enough when he was born and had shared a few laughs, and of course she felt more warmly toward him as he grew older and was able to pay rent. She liked the added income—on time and everything. Even though he was only twelve years old, Snotty was very punctual about business matters.

“I’ve got the best kid on all of Hamercy Street,” his mother bragged, sitting for a change on the tilting stoop of her house, of course still clutching her can of lager. “The best AND the smartest. Pays me rent and everything. Not like your useless bunch.”

The other mothers grunted at this. One of them, her dearest pal, gave Snotty’s mother a vicious look before taking herself inside and slamming the door after. The door was broken, and fell off its top hinge, which spoiled the effect. This made Snotty’s mother laugh so hard that the beer came out of her nose.⁶

“What’s with her?” she said as she wiped the beer off her face with the back of her hand.

“Don’t know,” shrugged one of the other mothers. “She’s been on a rag ever since that kid of hers got shot by the cops.”

“What, still? ” Snotty’s mother said cheerfully. “That was—must’ve been at least a month ago. AND he was a stupid kid. God.”

“She liked him though,” someone else said in a reflective way.

“Well, I mean, get over it,” Snotty’s mother said.

“Yeah.”

They sat there in the gathering gloom, and after awhile there didn’t seem to be much to say. So Snotty’s mother took herself off, too, braying up the stairs as she went back to her pea green settee: “Snotty? You up there or what?”

There was no answer. It didn’t matter. Snotty’s mother didn’t care. She went to the pea green settee, and, flopping herself on it, began to pick at a scab on her heel. She chortled as she remembered her neighbor’s face. “Got her good,” she thought. It was enough to keep Snotty’s mother happy for weeks, upsetting her friend that way. She yawned, satisfied with herself and her world, and with the half empty can of lager in her hand, curled up on the settee and snored. After a moment, the can tipped over and fell. As Snotty’s mother grunted, a line of stale beer snaked out over the worn carpet, following the warp of the floor to the bottom of the stair, which itself snaked up, listing and leaning, with a rattly old railing you wouldn’t want to lean on, all the way to a shifty little landing made out of cracked pieces of wood.

It was on this landing that Snotty stood, his tiny hand on the splintery wood of the railing. He listened hard until he heard his mother snore. And then he turned and went inside the attic door. His footstep was light—so light that it barely left a print, even in the fine dirt of the back alley off Hamercy Street—and he didn’t make a sound.

“This is the last time I’ll stand here,” Snotty thought to himself, looking around the attic—his room—with a dispassionate eye. “The very last time.”

Snotty had determined to leave his ugly little house and his ugly little room, and, really, looking at it, you wouldn’t have wanted to stay either. It was a desolate space. It was moldy and cold, and the wind whistled in through the cracked windowpane. One naked bulb lit the whole, worked by a greasy switch. In the corner, in front of a bricked up fireplace, lay a single mattress topped by a crumpled sleeping bag. There were no toys, unless you counted one dirty bit of yellow and black battered plush that lay shoved over between the dirty mattress and the floor. It might have been the remains of a teddy bear. Then again, it might not. It was hard to tell.⁷

“Can’t say I’m going to miss it much,” Snotty said, shrugging to himself. And I don’t think anyone would have missed it much, either. Except that Snotty was only twelve years old, and this was the only room he had ever known.

He went over to the window for one last look out over Widdleshift. It was dark and it was gray and it was scattered with rusting iron fences and yellowing patches of grass on which pieces of broken glass sparkled in the twilight. The dirty brick houses huddled together, tilting this way and that. This was the only sight that Snotty had ever known.

“Or that, either,” Snotty said, trying to keep his courage up. He was mean and ugly, but he was brave, too. You have to be brave to leave your home when it’s time to go, even if that home is mean and ugly.

Snotty lingered, then, for a minute, but not because he was afraid. He stayed to look at a sight that had long puzzled him, off and on, when he had the time to be puzzled—which was not often, given the business interests that would tonight, he hoped, be taking him to a more ambitious field of action altogether.

“Six houses,” he said to himself. “But seven gardens. Why should it be like that? When everybody knows that six houses should have six gardens.”

Because that was what he could see, from his attic room, at the top of Hamercy Street. In the middle of the street, in the part where it leveled off before heading on to the church and the pub and the police station, there were six mean little dirty brown brick houses. But behind them, in a back alley—an alley, incidentally, that Snotty knew very well—there were seven gardens. He could see from where he stood that the gardens were mingy and wretched, covered with broken glass and rotting, creosote-soaked lumber, matted with a tangle of nettles, dandelions, and stunted blackberry leaves. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that there were too many of them.

“Six houses. Seven gardens.” Snotty shook his head. “It’s not right.”

But after tonight, he would never see those houses or those gardens again. He brightened at the thought. So there was really no use worrying about them. And since Snotty very rarely did anything that was of no use to him—he couldn’t remember the last time, in fact—now he put the gardens and the houses out of his mind. And lifted up a heavy, frayed backpack onto his scrawny little back.

His cool eyes raked the miserable room one last time. Then he turned off the one light, and went out, closing the door behind him.⁸

“Evening, Snot,” a small boy said as he swept a bit of glass out of our hero’s way. “Nice night, isn’t it?” His face shone in the darkness with an expression of anxious deference. Snotty was something of a legend to the smaller ones on Hamercy Street, and the boy timidly hoped for a word of encouragement from his hero.

Snotty ignored him. One of the first lessons he had learned on Hamercy Street was that kindness equals weakness. He never made the mistake of being nice to anyone smaller or more helpless than himself. So he passed the small boy by as if he hadn’t even seen him, and speeded up his already fast pace. So energetic, purposeful, and efficient was his stride that if he hadn’t been scrawny, ragged, and just twelve, he might have been mistaken for a district manager on his way to a very important meeting. The smaller boy looked after him with helpless admiration, vowing to be like him some day.

Snotty’s energy and purpose and efficiency faltered only once, and that was down in front of the six houses that fronted the alley of Back Hamercy Street. Here, unable to help himself, he stopped and stared and frowned.

He looked at the houses and counted them. There were definitely six. Six houses. Even though he had better things to think about, this positively annoyed him. Then he noticed a paint-peeled Garden Gnome leering at him from the weeds in front of the sixth house. Snotty aimed a kick at the Gnome’s head and stomped it efficiently into the cracked concrete of the pavement.

He felt better after that and continued on his way.

“BZZZZZTTT.”

Snotty walked onto the waste ground that lined the other side of Hamercy Street and ducked under the phone mast there. It spat out a thin blue light as he passed.

“BZZZZZTTT.”

On the other side of the phone mast was a billboard. On this billboard, fading and peeling as it was, was pictured the beautiful face of the most beautiful young man in the world. He was elegant and slim and dressed in creamy white. His skin was tan and his hair was luxuriant and black. His teeth were pearly. His nose was straight. His eyes were the color of turquoise. His hands were in his pockets, and he was laughing. And over his head was just one word: BIG.⁹

He was cool and elegant and young and strong, even with a strip of paper peeled off his side. Snotty paused for a moment to gaze up at him.

“I’m going where you are,” Snotty said to himself. And the young man locked eyes with him and seemed to understand. As if some message had been sent and received, Snotty picked up his pace and, with a renewed sense of purpose, strode into the darkness ahead.

“BZZZZZTTT.”

Behind him, the thin blue light from the phone mast flashed again.

It lit up the waste ground with a faint and sickly glow, and Snotty could see five boys his own age standing around the cracked, weedinfested concrete of a schoolyard. They stared dejectedly at an object on the ground.

An old man lay there, moaning and clutching at his head, his pockets turned inside out. The boys had robbed him. But he had been a disappointment.

Snotty stopped to have a look. One of the boys held out the handful of change they’d gotten for their trouble. The others looked away, ashamed. They knew what a successful businessman like Snotty would think of this kind of profit margin.

“That’s it?” Snotty said, disgusted. He shook his head. “You guys should go in for another line of work. You’re no good at this one.”

There was an embarrassed pause. “Well,” said one of the boys finally, wiping his nose on his sleeve, “it’ll be better when we’re old enough to join the Police.”¹⁰

“It’s your own stupid fault,” Snotty scolded, and the boys hung their heads. “Who do you think is going to come by this place, the amount of times you’ve robbed somebody here? Show a little innovation! Try somewhere else for a change!”

The shamed expressions on the boys’ faces turned to smiles as this advice went home.

“Thanks, Snot,” one of the boys said gruffly, holding out his hand. Snotty gravely shook it, and then shook hands all around. And the boys went into a huddle to construct a new business plan.

Snotty smiled a superior little smile and continued on his way. One of the boys—his name was Stan—ran after him. (At this, the old man on the ground took advantage of the opportunity to crawl off the playground into the shelter of the boy’s toilet, where he would wait until two mornings later, when the school’s half-pay janitor would find him and call the fire brigade.)

Stan caught up with Snotty and grabbed at his arm. “Put in a good word for me with your boss,” Stan pleaded. “Put in a good word for me with Mr. Big.”

Snotty wheeled around, hands on his hips. “You’ve got no head for business,” he said shortly. “That’s a fact. Why would I tell Mr. Big about you?”

Now, it was one of Snotty’s achievements that he was known to be the personal runner of Mr. Big himself. No one knew how the rumor got started—Snotty was always tight-lipped about his own business—but nobody doubted it was true.

“I’ve got a good arm on me,” Stan whined. “And I’m loyal, really I am. You know you’ve always been my role model.”

Snotty turned again and gave Stan a look.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.” Snotty thought that Stan might come in useful someday. You never knew.

“Aw, thanks, Snot, you’re a real pal,” Stan said. But his eyes were hard, and he might have decided to give his role model a thump just for old time’s sake, if it wasn’t for a shout now that went up from the other boys on the playground.

A dog had appeared, all gray and black with a huge maw, and the boys chased it around the schoolyard. Stan’s eyes gleamed at this. He would have been off to join them if Snotty hadn’t grabbed him by the sleeve.

“Let go, Snot,” Stan said. “Look, it’s a dog.”

“Listen,” Snotty said, hanging onto Stan’s jacket. “I just remembered. Doesn’t your aunt live in the middle of Hamercy Street?”

Stan nodded, annoyed at being kept back. The rest of the boys chased the howling dog. “Yeah, sure. The house with the Garden Gnome. She loves that Garden Gnome.”

“Listen,” Snotty insisted again. Stan was straining to be off, but Snotty held him there. “Listen,” he repeated. “Six houses there, right?” Stan nodded again. “Then how come there’s seven gardens behind?”

But Stan wasn’t listening. He yanked his arm away from Snotty and ran off to where the boys had the dog cornered. It cowered against what was left of a rusting chain link fence.

Snotty, expressionless, let him go. He continued, with his usual sense of purpose, along his way. The howls of the dog followed him, but he never allowed anything like that to distract him from business, and it was to a business meeting that he headed now.