Gunk
Amongst the adverts for 3D glasses that see through clothes, sea-monkeys, and back issues, was a half page spread with two pictures of a boy. The first boy was pulling out his pockets like the ears of a cartoon rabbit. The second boy was riding on a bicycle with a bag over his shoulder. He waved at a house with a freshly mown lawn where stood a couple waving back at him, so implacable in pose it was as though the very shrubbery had bought and put them on display. Next to the first boy the advert asked: “HAVE YOU EVER FELT LEFT OUT? YOUR FRIENDS AWAY ON SUMMER VACATION WHILE YOU’RE LEFT ALONE IN THE HOUSE? HAVE YOU EVER WANTED MORE POCKET MONEY?” Then below the second boy, in large writing: “DON’T BE A SUCKER! EARN YOUR OWN MONEY TO SPEND ON COMICS, GAMES, TREATS AND MORE BY INTRODUCING GUNK TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS!” Below there were details about how to get started and a coupon to fill out and send away to a PO box for a GUNK starter pack. A page earlier Woody had learnt that the Masked Banshee planned to use her toxic defibrillator on Gamete and he was eager to find out how Gamete was going to defeat the Masked Banshee and rescue the Junior Press Club from their imprisonment in the bank vault. The Masked Banshee reminded Woody of a life-sized model of Boudicca that was in the town museum. In the exhibit, Boudicca was holding a stake high above the head of a Roman centurion, her face contorted into a mad snarl and her hair like red strips of cloth from a bleeding puppet. The Masked Banshee wore thigh-high boots and there were purple and orange wavy lines coming from her mouth in a spiral to show that she was singing to hypnotise Gamete. If Gamete fell asleep then the toxic defibrillator would poison his heart. But he would not fall asleep. Woody stretched himself out on the skin-coloured bathroom floor across some pale orange patches where his sister had spilt her hair dye earlier that morning. A few strands stuck to the grouting around the bath, which had started to blacken. “You haven’t got the heart to defeat me!” shouted Gamete as a strand of DNA coiled around the Masked Banshee’s waist, knocking the toxic defibrillator from her hands. While reading Woody absent-mindedly tugged at the furry belt of his dressing gown, the end of which had grown soggy in a patch of water by the shower. The tinted glazing on the bathroom window has been installed only the week before and made it look as though there was ivy trapped under the glass. The ivy was flat and transparent. Woody rocked forward on his stomach as the summer light began to fade. The Masked Banshee’s eyes were the same colour as the lawn in the advert. One would imagine they had been inked at the same time. Because his mother was at her sister’s house, Woody found a small brown envelope in the dresser in his parent’s bedroom and putting inside it $5 of his own money, sent the coupon to GUNK Corp., Inc., Abyssport, LO. 08438.
“Now that you’ve swam in the gene pool, Plasma Boy, you have the strength of 10,000 men!” Woody rode up Stanford Avenue, a sack of thin white letters strapped to his shoulder. Every time his feet fell from the pedals he scraped against the tiny black bobbles of the high-friction fibreglass the skin of his Achilles tendon exposed above the socks that had slipped down to his heels. Physically begging the bike up the gently inclining street, the sounds of cars backfiring and dogs whimpering and balls being kicked against garage doors pulsed rhythmically up and down. The street wobbled left and right in time with the bicycle. Woody burped up a little sick. Anderson St., Dors Ave., Wickersham St., South and North Webster Ave., Faber St., Midway Ave. had all been delivered to. Over the last five weeks, he had become accustomed to the length and design of all variety of letterboxes. Some had synthetic bristles that would hug the letter like in a car wash; others had spring-loaded guards that had to be lifted carefully with a finger while the other hand stuffed the letter through. The wind was thick with the sweet smell of barbecue and honeysuckle. Stopping his bike at a crossroads and weighing the bag in his hands, Woody estimated that he had only forty more houses to deliver to. He got back on the bike. Each blade of grass of a newly sprinkled lawn seemed to wink rainbows at him from little watery eyes. He pedalled harder and felt the inner-binding of his shoes puncturing his ankles. Two identical triangular marks of raw skin. The sounds of the street that rose and fell did so with an invisible shape that joined all the points of pain across his body - the bleeding skin over the tendons, the blistering ankles, a stitch at the bottom-right corner of his chest, a dull pain in his ears that made a sound like a boulder makes when rolled across the entrance to a cave. Above all a heavy feeling like dark water in the forehead and sweat prickling upon his back. Keeping one hand upon the handlebars, with the other hand he stroked the blond, downy hairs on his belly in small comforting circles. So far, he had only missed one house just two streets along from his own. Upon poking the white envelope through a particularly thick set of bristles a dog had started barking at the other side of the door and he had dropped the letter. The next day he noticed that a “For Sale” sign had been put up outside the house, but he had doubted that the two events were connected. However, the letter was still there and had clearly been trodden upon, without being picked up. The muddy imprint of the shoe was made of jazzy intersecting triangles. The red “GUNK” stamp on the front of the letter was smeared and something had clearly snapped itself it. Angry, Woody had thrown the letter in a skip and kicked the frame of his bicycle, theatrically so that the people in the house would notice. Then he had got back upon his bicycle and spent the next three hours delivering letters.
The paychecks when they arrived didn’t have Woody’s name on the front, but just said “To The Occupant”. However the check inside was marked for Woody and was always relative to the amount of envelopes he had delivered. The money he received he spent on more comics, which meant that as the summer wore on Woody stayed inside more and more and only left the house to make deliveries. The muscles on his arms thickened and soon he was able to ride up Stanford Ave. without even catching breath. However, as weeks passed - weeks spent between the sanguine greys of the bathroom and the stodgy heat of the neighbouring blocks - Woody grew troubled by an emerging trend. For it seemed that on weeks where he got through all his bags - weeks without punctured tires or screaming dogs - Gamete was sure to defeat the Masked Banshee and save Hope City from any danger. However on weeks where it rained and try as might to drape his plastic mackintosh over the bag, the ink drained out and the paper wrinkled and twisted as if fevered - then on those weeks Gamete was sure to find his Chromosome Suit torn asunder or the gene pool drained. On one particularly terrible week when Woody was taken ill with food poisoning and so spent a whole two days in the bathroom, hacking and crying, curled up on the floor like a caterpillar with its head staple-gunned to its tail - on that week the Masked Banshee succeeded in killing all of the Junior Press Club. Their skins were hung from the flagpoles outside the Mayor’s office. The skin around the cheeks had been stretched down so they had long faces like Greek tragedy masks and the eyeholes were big and hollow. Five panels had been simply images of the children’s parents crying and the Mayor asking in stern capital letters, “WHY HAS GAMETE FORSAKEN US? WHY HAS HE SO SELFISHLY SHIRKED HIS REPONSIBILITIES?” After that Woody vowed never to be ill again. He would rise at 5.00 in the morning, oil his bike and then cycle until evening, not stopping until every letter had been delivered.
On the day term began again and Woody was to go to school Woody begged with his mother to let him stay home. He locked himself in the bathroom and his father had to take the lock off the hinges with a Phillips screwdriver. All week he couldn’t concentrate in lesson because he kept thinking about Gamete and the terrible fate that had befallen the Junior Press Club. He asthma started to worsen again and he had to sit out of P.E - his white socks pulled up high so as to hide his swollen ankles. The night before Gamete issue. 1634 he stayed awake all night. He had only managed to deliver 200 letters in the whole week and at least 30 of those had been put through the letterboxes of houses he had already delivered to. He was outside the newsagents at opening time and rushed to the back of the store where the comics were kept. On the cover of Gamete issue. 1634 it said “FINAL ISSUE - GAMETE DEAD” and lying at the bottom of the page was Gamete, rogue DNA sprouted from his chest, probing his mouth, filling his nostrils. Above Gamete, standing atop a skyscraper was the Masked Banshee. Her mask thrown to the floor. Her hands two ragged papercuts. Her eyes two postage stamps. Her mouth a great flapping envelope hinged with a metal trap spewing the word GUNK in wild tumbling typescript. Woody felt, very strongly, that if only he could post the final envelope through that hole then everything would be ok.