“Mine!”
Alice found herself suddenly awake, with someone or something pulling at her leg.
“Mine!”
“I most certainly am not!” Said Alice, sitting up quite abruptly.
The thing that had a hold of her was the most peculiar creature. It had pipe-cleaner arms and spidery hands, a body that was a knot of hair, and feet made of tiny pieces of soap. Its face, if you could call it that, was an old penny. The Queen's face moved whenever it spoke in a way that struck Alice as positively disrespectful.
“I found you, you're mine. Those are the rules, and if we don't have rules, then everything just falls apart.”
“I'm my own!” Alice protested, kicking at the thing's spidery little fingers, one of which snapped like kindling. It made the creature let go of her though and gave her a chance to scramble back up onto her feet. “Sorry about that.”
“Happens all the time,” said the penny-face, and took another spidery little finger from a bag around its waist and plugged it into its hand.
“Are you broken though? Most everything that ends up down here is broken, and broken things belong to whoever finds them. I found you; therefore you belong to me. It's simple mathematics, d'you see?”
Alice squeezed water from her wet hair and combed it through with her fingers, picking out little pieces of muck from between the strands. “I'm fairly certain that's law, or philosophy, rather than mathematics, but we don't study that at school. As to whether I'm broken I'm not, I think something might have been left behind when I came through the grinder, but I suppose it's washed far away by now.”
“Then you're broken, and you're mine, and I get to keep you. A piece of trash that walks and talks before it has been made, and even went to school! Perfect. Come along,” it gestured and waved her on after it as it walked away from the water.
Alice didn't feel like she had much choice really, she didn't want to climb back into the water – which didn't seem to be going anywhere further, and following this strange creature seemed as good a thing to do as any.
“Might the missing piece of me have been washed up here?”
“Could be.”
“Well if I find it and put it back, then I won't be broken, will I?”
“Everything's broken,” said penny-face and with his ungainly stride, crested the top of the muck pile. “Everything's broken somehow.”
Alice hitched up her skirts, though they were already ruined, and hopped along after him, blinking in surprise as she saw what lay beyond. “Oh my!”
Laid out before her was a whole town, made up entirely of rubbish and grot. There were high piles of fat and congealed oil being tended by creatures like penny-face, sorting and straightening with broken combs and the discarded ends of snapped spoons.
There was a disgusting pile of toenails and fingernails, one of the few white things there was to be seen and everywhere else, rising into the distance, the town was a mass of sardine tins, matchboxes and old shoes. At the very furthest point, rising above the town, was a towering mass of shiny foil and chocolate wrappers, culminating at its very tippy-top in a bright gold ring with a massive diamond.
“My aunt's ring!” Alice exclaimed, but her voice was drowned out by a fanfare, blown through the empty shells of snails.
A gaggle of the junk creatures was approaching, gabbling, talking, in a constant uproar. Penny-face moved between Alice and the mob, protectively or possessively – she wasn't sure – and she had to peek around him to see.
It was hard to tell where one junk person began and another ended. They were a grey-brown blur of detritus, hard to pick out as individuals. All save one. An old cotton reel was being spun out, and unwinding from it an old red-brown bandage. It served – it seemed – as a red carpet, for what followed.
Carried and pulled, pushed and moved along by great dint of effort, was a fat blob of a creature. Pearl buttons for eyes, a pouting little mouth carved out from the vibrant orange fat that was its body. It was dressed in an ill-fitting suit of purple chocolate foil and atop its head was a hairy spider, trying very hard to hold still.
The bandage unravelled to its end, and the big round butterball arrived at its end. Scurrying creatures moved to set up a matchbox podium, and the fat blob set itself up behind it.
“Great job, just the best. You're the greatest scavenger there is. I've always said it,” the blob smiled, its button eyes twinkling in the dim light. “However, as Prime Minister, I have first dibs, that's the law.” The crowd applauded wildly.
Penny-face shook his head and moved his arm, pushing Alice back with one soapy hand. “I believe the law you passed was 'finders keepers', and as the finder, I lay claim to her.
“You're terrible, worst scavenger I've ever known. I've always said so. Bring forth and read the book of the law to settle this.”
“Do I get a say at all?” Alice asked, stepping gently around penny-face and curtsying, as you probably should do when you meet a Prime Minister.
“No!” They said, in unison, to more wild applause and cheering.
A little man, made of discarded twist-ties and pieces of broken glass pushed his way to the front, adjusted his bottle-bottom glasses and scanned through a dense, filthy book, full of tiny letters.
“According to the law, set down by the Prime Minister some four months ago, finders are, indeed, keepers. As settled in the 'I didn't know it was so shiny' case, as you may recall Sir.”
“Hmm, but I set out the laws don't I?” The Prime Minister quivered as he spoke and adjusted his spider toupee with one comically tiny hand.
“Indeed Sir.”
“Well then, take down a new law. The Prime Ministers may call 'dibs' on all good salvage.”
The little bottle-twist man flipped through the book until he found a blank page, where he squiggled down the Prime Minister's words with a practised flourish.
“There's a conflict between the two laws Sir, we'll need to consult the judiciary to determine how to proceed.
“Oh, how tiresome,” the Prime Minister grumbled, hands on his hips.
Then Alice saw the most horrible and disgusting sight she thought she had ever seen. The Prime Minister's orange, flabby bulk began to split down the middle with a sound like enormous, smacking lips. In a couple of breaths, he had completely split in half, two smaller versions of himself standing side by side, one with that ridiculous spider on his head, the other hurriedly donning a judge's wig of soiled cotton wool.
“I agree with the Prime Minister,” said the judge. “The Prime Minister's new 'dibs' law takes precedence over the older 'Finders Keepers' law. The Prime Minister will take possession of the salvage's beautiful, luscious, verdant golden hair with immediate effect.”
“My hair?” Alice, who had become quite bored with all the arguing to-and-fro and whose legs were beginning to ache from standing still, was suddenly paying attention. “You can't cut off my hair!”
“I can do anything I like!” said the Prime Minister, reaching for his judicial counterpart to glom back together.
“I... um... appeal!” Alice said, stepping around Penny-Face and feeling rather exposed. “I mean, if it's not too much trouble, Sir,” she added another curtsy just to be sure.
“To the legislature?” the judge asked, while the Prime Minister made wild, silencing gestures with his pudgy little hands.
“Yes?” Alice wasn't sure, this was all a bit beyond her, but she knew she was supposed to be polite around such august personages as judges and Prime Ministers, even when they were made of fat and rubbish.
“Very well, let's put it before the legislature,” both the Prime Minister and the judge began to split off portions of themselves and to slap them together like clay, forming a third while an attendant scurried to tie a bow time – made of sooty string – around this third version's neck.
Then the Prime Minister began to argue amongst himselves about who was in the right, it was all a show really. Since he was 'arguing' with himself, it seemed obvious how it was all going to turn out, and it looked like it was theatre for the cheering bits and bobs than anything meaningful.
Alice's stomach grumbled, loudly. She realised she hadn't eaten anything in quite some time and that she was starting to feel somewhat faint from it. Thankfully with all the arguing nobody had noticed and, given it was so filthy down here she didn't want to eat a thing. It was far easier to be hungry.
Her mind began to wander. The Prime Minister looked so much like butter that she couldn't help but think about it, that led her to bread and butter and thence to sandwiches. In that funny way the mind has of connecting one thing to another she ended up recalling an argument she had had with her friend Emily about sandwiches.
When you cut a sandwich in half, you get two sandwiches, not half a sandwich. Emily thought this was the most wondrous thing imaginable, while it bothered Alice a lot. If you cut anything else in half, you got halves, not doubles and the Prime Minister was cheating by doing the exact same thing. Cut those halves in half, and there are four sandwiches, not a quarter sandwich, cut those in half diagonally, and you got finger sandwiches, not eighths.
Alice was no fan of geometry or fractions, but it seemed to her that you might as well just have one big sandwich and eat it, rather than going to all the trouble of fiddling about with all those smaller sandwiches. She also supposed that eventually you would just run out of sandwich and have nothing but crumbs if even that and that you couldn't possibly keep dividing things into infinity. Emily disagreed, and Alice hadn't been invited to take tea with her for weeks afterwards.
“You're a sandwich!” Alice shouted, interrupting the pretend negotiations the Prime Minister was having with himself, causing some consternation.
“And you're a baguette, a stinking, foreign baguette!” Shouted the Prime Minister, petulantly.
“I'm sorry, Sir, I mean rather that I should like to take my appeal directly to the people!”
The Prime Minister, the judge and the legislature huddled together, whispering and when they split apart again, agreed.
“Very well. Your appeal shall be put to the people, and let that be an end to it!”
Almost immediately the Prime Minister – in all his forms – began to split apart into many, many little pea-sized blobs, scattering around him and lining up to vote to take Alice's hair. She was heartened, however, to see that many of the subjects of this little kingdom were lining up to vote in her favour – just not enough of them.
“You can do what he does!” She called out, desperately, and saw a few of them take her advice, breaking down and remaking each other into smaller and smaller versions until all of them, the whole cheering crowd, were so reduced in size that Alice towered above them like an Amazonian giantess.
While they continued to fight and argue and to organise themselves to vote, Alice took one giant stride over them, delicately trying not to crush them, and made her way toward the tin foil tower and its glittering ring.