“We both devour humans, piece by piece,” the raven finished his riddle into the din, but no one heard him.
Someone gripped Olive’s arm.
“Come,” said the White Queen. “I’ll take you with a pleasure. Twopence a week, and always jam to-day.”
“Come where?”
“Where you were always going, where you have already been. Where we are already friends, where we have already fought long and hard together, where we have sat upon the field of battle in one another’s arms and looked out over a free Wonderland. Where everything is as it was before the war, before our world split in two, before the Other One, before anything hurt.”
“Is that really what’s going to happen?”
“No. It’s impossible. But I believe it anyway. It’s the only way I can bear to face breakfast.”
Olive glanced offstage. There was a flash of light there, something reflecting in all the flotsam of the theatre. A pane of glass from some lonely window. And for a moment, Olive thought she could see, on the other side of the glass, Darling Mother in the parlour, asleep with Little George in her arms, a nearly empty bottle of gin on the end table and rain still pouring down outside. The shadows of the raindrops looked like black weeping on her mother’s face. Everything as it was. Before. Before anything hurt. Could such a thing ever be?
She took the White Queen’s white hand. They ran together through the wings and out through two mossy hidden doors back beyond the reach of the footlights. The two of them burst into the glen, into a river of folk running away from the Tumtum Club and into the Looking Glass World, running slow, and thus, streaming along so fast they could never be caught.
Olive looked back over her shoulder at the great skeleton covered in moss and flowers and briars and vines. She hadn’t seen it when she came in. The glow-worms had dazzled her. The whole world had dazzled her. “We loved her so,” the White Queen said, not in the least out of breath as they ran on and on into the wood. “She came back, and she ate a hundred mushrooms so she could grow big enough to protect us. I was there when she died, hardly bigger than a pearl in her hand. She was so old—I hardly remember ever being so old! Living backwards makes it terribly easy to forget. She smiled and said: oh my gracious! and closed her eyes. And of course the moment she did, the Red Queen called her pawns to arms—but for a moment, when she was huge and high and here, for one tiny minute in all the world, almost everyone was happy. We loved her so; we never wanted to be parted from her. We wanted her to be with us forever. And she is.”
The giant’s skeleton was wearing a heavy iron crown, and the crown had two words lovingly etched all the way round it:
QUEEN ALICE
Badgirl,
the Deadman, and
the Wheel
of Fortune
The Deadman always wore red when he came calling. Not all over red. Just a flash, like Mars in the night time. A coat, a long scarf, socks, a leather belt. An old sucked-dry rose in his buttonhole. A woolen cap with two little holes in it like bite marks. A fake ruby chip in his ear. One time, he wore lipstick and I cried in my hiding place. I always cried when the Deadman came, but that time I cried right away and I didn’t stop. Real quiet with my hands over my mouth. I can be a little black cat when I want, so he didn’t hear.
Daddy always used to say the Deadman came to bring him a cup of sugar and when I was a tiny dumb thing I thought that meant he was gonna make me cookies or blue Kool-Aid or a cake with yellow frosting even though it wasn’t usually my birthday. I liked yellow frosting best because it looked like all the lights in our apartment turned on at one time and nothing can be scary when all the lights are turned on at one time. I liked blue Kool-Aid best because it turned my tongue the color of outside.
So I hid from the Deadman in my treehouse and thought real hard about blue Kool-Aid with ice knocking around in it and a cake all for me with so much frosting it looked like an ice cream cone. My treehouse wasn’t a treehouse, though. It was the big closet in the hallway between the two bedrooms, the special kind of closet that has four legs like a chair and doors that swing out and drawers under the swinging doors. I heard the Deadman call it something French-sounding but he said it like a pirate kiss. Arrrr. Mwah. Daddy called it my treehouse because it’s made of trees nailed together so what’s the difference when you think about it. Whenever the Deadman came with his cup of sugar, I pulled out the drawers like a staircase, climbed in, shut the swinging doors tight behind me, and closed the latch Daddy screwed onto the inside of the pirate kiss closet. It was nice in there. Nothing much in it but me and a purple sweater half-falling off a wire hanger that might’ve been my mom’s, but might not’ve just as easy. It smelled like a mostly chopped down forest and crusty pennies. I tucked up my knees under my chin and held my breath, and turned into a little black cat that didn’t make one single sound.
“You got what I need?” my Daddy said to the Deadman. And the Deadman said back:
“If you got what I need, Mudpuddle, I got the whole world right here in my pocket.”
And then there was a bunch of rustling and coughing and little words that don’t mean anything except filling up the quiet, and in the middle of those funny soft nothing-noises the Deadman would start telling a joke, but a dumb joke, like the kind you read on Laffy Taffy wrappers. Nobody likes those jokes but the Deadman.
“Hey, did you hear the one about the horse and the submarine?”
“Yeah, I heard that one, D,” my Daddy always said, even though I never heard him tell a joke ever in my whole life and I don’t think he really knew the one about the horse and the submarine at all. But after that the Deadman would laugh a laugh that sounded like a swear word even though it didn’t have any words in it and he’d leave and I could breathe again.
Everybody called my Daddy Mudpuddle just like everybody called the Deadman the Deadman and everybody called me Badgirl even though my name is Loula which is pretty nice and feels good to say, like raindrops in your mouth. Where I live, we don’t call anybody by the name they got at the hospital.
“It’s ’cause I’m a real honest-to-Jesus old-timey gentleman, Badgirl,” Daddy told me, and clinked our mugs together. His had a lot of whiskey and mine had a very little whiskey, only enough to make me feel grown up and stop asking for cocoa. “Almost a prince, like that cat who went around sniffing all those girls’ feet back when. So when I’m escorting a lady friend and I see a big nasty mudpuddle in our way, I always take off my coat and lay it down so my girl can walk across without getting her shoes dirty.”
“Daddy, that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard. Who cares if her shoes get dirty when your coat gets ruined? Why can’t she just walk around the puddle? What’s wrong with her?”
Daddy Mudpuddle laughed and laughed even though what I said was way smarter than what he said. I thought people called him Mudpuddle because his clothes usually weren’t too clean, and the cuffs of all his pants were all ripped up and stained like he’d walked through the mud. But I didn’t say so. It’s not a nice thing to say. I liked the story where my Daddy’s almost a prince better, so I let that one stay, like a really good finger painting hung up on the refrigerator. Besides, I’ve never done anything very bad except get born and one time swallow a toy car and have to go to the hospital which Daddy couldn’t afford, but I still get called Badgirl. One time Daddy tucked me into bed and kissed my nose and whispered:
“It’s ’cause you were so good your Mama and I had to call you Badgirl so the angels wouldn’t come and take you away for their own.”
And that’s stupider than putting your coat down on a mudpuddle, so I figure names don’t really have any reasons or stories hiding inside them. I wasn’t good enough to still have a Mama now. I wasn’t good enough not to swallow a toy car and cost all that money. Names just happen to you and then you go on living with them on your shoulder like an ugly old parrot.