The map appeared without explanation or preamble. We ran to our beds one evening, frightened under the covers by the hail-patter of bombs on a nearby roof, and when we awoke, the world was quiet, and there was a map. My mates and I approached it cautiously. Someone had pasted the map—with real glue, which we could still smell on the morning’s breath—behind the rows and rows of beds. It took up the whole wall, too: that was the astonishing bit. The world spread out, larger than nightmares, across all six feet of space and dust.
“Could it have been Mrs. Darringham?” Pat asked, rubbing at his eyes with his fists.
I snorted. “Why the devil would Mrs. Darringham have put a map up in our room?”
“And besides, where would she have gotten it?” said Rich.
“I s’pose,” said Pat.
“S’pose nothing.” I cuffed him.
Most of the other lads started to lose interest, but Pat and Rich and I hung back. I think we were in shock with the sight of it all. None of us had ever left England, you see, and we’d barely left Mrs. Darringham’s twice since the Germans came. It was an odd thing, to see the world—so small, and yet enormous—laid out on paper for our taking. I felt rather like a pauper who’d stumbled into a grand feast, only I’d been starving my whole life, and I didn’t know what anything was.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Pat and Rich step forward to examine the thing more closely. I did the same. Land and sea had been traced out in muted colors: the gray of our London sky, and the ashy blue of the river by the factories. I recognized some names, here and there: the Rhine, the Seine, France, Belgium, America. Much of it, though, tasted new.
“What’s that one say?” Pat squinted. He’d lost his specs during an air raid. Mrs. Darringham kept promising to snatch him a new pair, but it hadn’t happened, and Rich and I had to help him get around.
“Which one?” I asked.
“The one below Rumania.”
“Bulgaria?”
“Bulgaria.” Pat tried it out. “What do you think they’re like there?”
Rich folded his arms across his chest. “How are we supposed to know?”
“You’re not supposed to know. I’m asking you to use your head a little, is all.”
“Fine, fine. Bloody hell.”
“Imagine it. What do you think they’re like there?”
“They probably talk funny,” I said.
“Talking is talking.”
“Not true, son. There’s all sorts of ways a man can talk, you know. Languages are different in different places—that’s what I’ve heard. Maybe in Bulgaria, they don’t say ‘I did this’ and ‘I did that.’ Maybe it’s all ‘we did this or that.’ Could be, you know.”
“I bet they eat rabbits for lunch,” said Pat.
“Dolt,” laughed Rich. “People here eat rabbits for lunch—or they did, anyway.”
“Can’t be much worse than here.” Lily appeared, pushing her way past me and my mates. She stood on tiptoe to see the top of the map. Lily was shorter than any of us, and she’d been at the home far longer. “Look at that! Next train comes this way, I’m getting on and running off to Finland.”
“They wouldn’t let a girl on a train,” said Rich.
“Oh, wouldn’t they?”
“And what the bloody hell’s Finland?”
Lily pointed. “Up there.”
“What’s there,” I asked, “that makes it worth going?”
“It’s far. Look how north it is.”
“It’ll be damned hot if it’s that far north.” Rich put a knowing finger against his nose. “Mark my words. Hotter than a virgin’s cheek.”
“Hot?” Lily doubled over, laughing. “You bloody fool, it’ll be cold. It’s colder up north than it is down here.”
“No, it’s not.”
“It is, too. Look there.” Lily picked up a paddle Mrs. Darringham tossed aside after my last whipping, when she caught me with half a pound of Cambozola from the abandoned cheesemonger’s downtown, and used it to point at the map. “The sun shines on the middle bits, the equator and such, and it misses the top and bottom of the world. That’s how it works. So, it’s cold up there and down there, but it’s warm all about the middle.”
“Well, hang Finland,” said Rich. “I’m going to the Union of South Africa. Warmer there, it looks to me.”
“Too warm,” said Lily, “or weren’t you listening?”
“The clouds there are made of candy floss,” I offered.
“That’s bloody ridiculous,” said Lily.
“Is not. My old man had a book he used to read, before it all.” That’s the closest we ever came to talking about the time before the war: before it all. Anyone who said anything more got his teeth knocked out. “I looked it over myself, when he wasn’t about.”
Lily raised an eyebrow. “What sort of book?”
“A book on strange lands and such. The clouds are made of candy floss, and they have laws against crossing the street without bowing first.”
“In the Union of South Africa?” said Lily, with the authority of someone who’d named the place herself.
“In the Union of South Africa.”
“That sounds like a regular pain in the arse,” said Rich.
“What if there’s no one around?” said Pat.
“How’s that?” I asked.
“What if you’re on your lonesome? Do you still have to bow?”
“Who would you be bowing to?”
“That’s my question, you see.”
Lily had put her hands on the map, trying to cover the Soviet states with her palms. Kyrgyzstan and its brothers peeked out from beneath her elbows. “Did you know,” she breathed, “there were so many places in the world? Do you think anyone’s ever been to all of them?”
“That’s impossible,” said Rich.
“I don’t think so.” I pointed to America. “If you started here and went to one country every single day—”
“But how long does it take to get to a different country?” said Pat. “Instead of going to all of ’em, even the rubbish ones, why not just go to the good ones?”
“We don’t know what the good ones are.” Rich patted England condescendingly. “See, the folks way down in South Africa probably think England’s one of the good ones. Don’t you think? They wouldn’t know otherwise until they landed and a bloody kraut smacked ’em in the eye.”
“What if there aren’t any good ones?” Pat’s voice was very small.
“There have to be.” Lily put an arm around his shoulder. He flinched. I remembered—as Lily did, too, I’m sure, for she removed her arm—that Pat had a bruise from a bigger lad’s boot. “With that many places in the world, there have to be some good ones. It just stands to reason.”
Rich and I agreed.
“But what if there aren’t?” said Pat. “Or what if there used to be, but then the Germans came and swallowed them all up?”
“The Americans and the others,” said Lily, “are putting them all back.”
Pat shied away from Lily. “They might never get them back, though. We see the things happening out there. What if it stays that way, without a good place ever?”
As Pat began to sob, I went downstairs, returning with a bit of charcoal from Mrs. Darringham’s fire. She just left for the morning, to barter for food and supplies in the remains of yesterday’s raid, so the coal was still warm. It turned my hand the color of the poles on the map.
“What have you got?” said Rich.
I pulled up a chair and stood to reach Europe. My hand took a short journey from Portugal to England, trailing bits of charcoal—miming the trains that took the same journey every day, trailing coal and starving children. When I reached England, I drew a circle in the middle, just so. I drew it right where London ought to be, but where it hadn’t been in a long time. The coal wept black as I darkened the circle. Then I jumped down from the chair and turned to Rich.
“A good place,” I answered him. “We’ll just make one.”
“What do you mean make one?”
“That’s how places get started, right? Some fellow plops a flag in the dirt, and wham, it’s a new country.”
“We’ll need a flag, then.” Lily ripped the tattered cover off a nearby bed. “Will this do?”
“Don’t see why not,” I said. “We’ll need laws next.”
“What about a law that says you have to be happy?” said Pat. “All the time. Nobody’s sad here, ever.”
“But what if you bloody well want to be sad?” said Rich.
Lily held the flag aloft. “What about no laws, then?”
“What’s to keep someone from knocking another bloke’s head off?” I asked.
“The Eight Commandments.” Pat’s face lit. “Those can be our laws. They got everything covered there, don’t they?”
We agreed that they did, in fact, have everything covered there.
“All that’s left is to have a name,” I said.
“What shall it be?” asked Pat.
“How about Good Place?” said Lily. “We were just saying that a bloke down in South Africa wouldn’t know a good place until he got there. Well, if we call our place what it is, everyone will know to come here. Won’t they?”
“But if everyone knows to come,” I said, “it’ll fill up with rubbish people.”
Rich snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it. We’ll call it Rubbishtown. That way, no one will ever want to come here but us, and we’ll be the lords and ladies of all the land.”
“My God, I love it.” Lily grinned. “They’ll never come to muck it up if they think it’s already mucked up, now, will they?”
“From this day forward,” I said, “we shall be the the rulers of Rubbishtown!”
Lily waved the flag, and I climbed atop the chair again to write the name of our town on the map. The word was a tad crooked, and a bystander might have been forgiven if he’d mistaken it for a dead moth, but it did the job. We stood back to regard our handiwork, feeling quite proud of our new home. It was a good place, we decided, even for a moment, even until the charcoal bled from the paper.
