xXx
The whole throwing-up thing in Port Claim had definitely worked in our favour. Word had started getting around about the band in the months since that had happened, and there was a small but present demand for our crappy CD. Socks put together a cheap little website to sell them, and mail and money started trickling in. People wanted to know when we were playing in their city, if we wanted to play with their band, all kinds of stuff. We hadn’t played any shows in a long time, and it was pretty awesome that people really, really wanted us to.
And then we got a really amazing-sounding offer. We all knew Goreceps — I’d really gotten into their album Excrement from Birth. They were from the U.K., and we got an email from their manager offering us a tour with them. A week and a half touring across England, and two shows in Ireland and Scotland.
Of course there was the money issue. We’d have to cover our own flights, and four round-trip tickets to the U.K. were pretty expensive. But Goreceps’s manager assured us that the crowds there would be quite large, and they would pay us a small sum for each show. We could also sell our own merchandise and CDs. We had a few hundred dollars from the CDs we’d sold al-ready, and we could put that towards doing a run of T-shirts. So all we had to do was somehow scrounge up enough money for the flights — everything else would be taken care of.
I made the design for the T-shirt. Two blood-spattered women pressed against one another, dresses torn, faces skeletal, and eyes hollow beneath their long ratted hair. One was dark haired, the other pale. They pressed their bony hands together, the fingers entwined, gripping a hank of black hair. Dangling from their grasp was a severed head, several teeth wrenched from its dry gums, dark blood oozing from its scooped-out eye sockets. I pressed my pencil hard into the drawing, adding the best smirks I could to the girls’ exposed bone faces, willing their happiness to reflect in the dark hollows of their eyes. It was Judith and her maidservant and the head of Holofernes, but of course, it was me and Fern and the head of Balthazar. That legend, that myth, was going to be our reality. I pored over the drawing for hours and hours. I dreamed that my teeth had been sharpened down to pointy nubs, and I used them to bite through stomachs, chewing at spongy entrails while my mouth filled with blood over and over again.
Edgar’s parents agreed to loan us money for the flights. My parents agreed I could go. I hadn’t caused any tension in the house since that horrible night, and I think they were worried about me being depressed or something. The T-shirt was printed. We packed our bags for tour. Fern and Edgar would bring their guitars, Socks would share a drum kit with Goreceps. We filled our remaining suitcases with CDs, shirts to sell, and stage clothes, and went to the U.K.
THIRTY-SIX