Love in the Time of Fridges

Chapter One ONE DAY LATER I didn't know her then. Not when she stepped into the tiny drongle and sat down, soaked through, her slim lips mouthing a faint curse, her brown eyes a stark echo of someone I had once known. The drongle had just clattered under the concrete snarl of New Seattle's main gate, carrying me back into a city that I had not seen for eight years. My life had gone missing since I had last been here, mislaid among too many motels, too many bad memories, and a never-ending succession of nights fogged with the bittersweet taste of mojitos. I stared out at the gleaming city lights star-bursting through the rain. I had tried to close the door on all that had happened here. But that door had never quite shut, and the past had seeped out in a deathly trickle, contaminating my life. And now I was back, watching the city slump by, pretending these awkward, unfamiliar buildings were my home. We passed a new city sign that shone with garish insincerity in the rain: WELCOME! New Seattle Welcomes Visitors* *See exclusions A billboard with a huge list of exclusions rose up behind it and I caught the wordsreal estate agentssomewhere near the bottom. They were resented in a lot of places now, and actually hunted down in Texas by bounty hunters, because the residents had lost patience after being randomly sent inappropriate house details time after time. The drongle juddered to a halt and the sign loomed over us. It seemed unlikely anyone had ever actually read all that small print, however much it constituted part of the legal agreement to enter this city. It would have probably ranked as the dullest half hour of my life, and I had once talked to a man at a party who was a real fan of scat singing. I tilted my head as we passed by and saw a bird sitting on the top, motionless, staring down, and the image sat frozen in my mind as we shuddered on through the streets. When it faded I saw the girl was wrapped in her own thoughts, and her deep brown eyes appeared lost in an alleyway of her past. A Health and Safety sign rose up behind her, filling the drongle dome with a screaming green light. "New Seattle Health and Safety asks you to stay safe! Be careful of apple pie filling! It's absurdly hot! A strong Health and Safety Department means a strong city!" I had seen a handful of these signs already and I had read somewhere that the H and S Department wielded the political power behind the machinations of the west coast of America now, and especially in New Seattle. The department had become so powerful it even had an army and had invaded Denmark a few years before. It claimed the war was necessary to settle an international disagreement over the use of hard hats. Eventually, after it had taken over most of Copenhagen, a protracted truce was agreed. Health and Safety published several Venn diagrams to prove that more people wore bright reflective clothing in Denmark than they had previously and this, they claimed, meant victory. So they left. Although two thousand people died in the fighting, nobody cared too much. It was a long way away, and wars in other people's countries don't really count. Except to some life-shattered veterans who probably walked through the crowds in the mall on a Saturday afternoon drunkenly telling a story in snatches that no one wanted to hear. The drongle rattled to a halt behind a line of others in the splattering rain, and I felt a prick of frustration. I had been in this city less than fifteen minutes and I was already about to be hassled at a police checkpoint. The girl's eyes came back and looked around. "Thank you for traveling today," said the drongle. "Your lucky color is blue. Your lucky artist who died miserably is Toulouse-Lautrec. Please take the receipt that is being printed. It may contain traces of nuts, so if you aScott, Tim is the author of 'Love in the Time of Fridges' with ISBN 9780553384413 and ISBN 0553384414.