Fabulous

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Piper drove into town at last. He took his gaudy van, all decked out in the colours of fire and fir-trees, right into the Thoroughfare again, weaving sedately between the bollards designed to exclude cars. He switched off the engine, and sat watching. He knew how many human eyes must be on him. His phone kept buzzing as the messages stacked up. He took no notice. He watched the rats. He’d heard about this sort of infestation but never thought he’d see it.

  In normal circumstances rats are selfish, non-cooperative creatures. They are hangers-on of the human race, but by humans they are detested and shunned and chased with pitchforks. The emotional atmosphere in which they have evolved has not favoured the development of altruism. They look for food and when they find it they eat it fast and furtively, always on the lookout for competitors of their own kind. They have no partners. They don’t care for the pack. They don’t even care for their families. In certain circumstances, though, they band together, and when they do so their unanimity is absolute.

  Piper ate a cheese sandwich he’d made for himself before setting out. He didn’t think he was going to get much of a break once his day’s work had begun. By the time he’d finished, and licked the chutney off his fingers, his van had grown a thick carapace of furred bodies.

  He heard the scuffling and scuttling all around him. He heard the tiny screech of clawed feet skidding down the van’s sides. Pale bellies pressed themselves against the windscreen. Bent-pin claws fixed themselves to the wipers. When he saw them beginning to gnaw at the edges of the bonnet – they wanted to have a go at the rubber seal – he started up the engine. They froze. He reversed, and they began to drop off. He jerked into first gear and gunned the engine. As he drove away rats flew out behind him.

  ‘Where’s he going, Mummy?’ chirped Sylvia’s little boy, huddled next to her in the loft and peeping through an air-vent. ‘Isn’t he going to save us? If Piper can’t save us, what will we do?’

  The river that crept beneath the town surfaced beyond it. For the last part of its course it meandered, as rivers should, open to the sky. Ponderous ginger-haired cattle grazed the water-meadows to each side of it. At this season the bulrushes were last year’s – black and rebarbative – but the wild garlic was up, stinking fresh, and there were tiny blue and white anemones starring the grass under the willow trees.

  Piper took the old road that ran along the river valley, the one with grass growing along the spine of the tarmac like the coarse black hairline on a donkey’s back. He hummed as he drove. His eyes were narrowed to slits. He was planning his route. He had to have a clear run to the sea. The tide was propitious. He talked to himself silently, in the way he often did, soundlessly but with his lips moving, and he looked extremely pleased with what he had to say.

  At the airstrip he moved fast and methodically. He’d made the bus’s top deck cosy, with a proper bed spanning the entire width at the back, and benches built in. He kept it neat. The lower deck was where he stacked his gear. He trundled out the great black coffin-sized boxes, the coils of rubber-coated cable, the silvery metal containers that rattled as he loaded them up.

  He was a long time inside the transit, clipping this to that and stapling that to the other thing. He checked his tyres and topped up the radiator and the reservoir of windscreen-washing fluid. He climbed up onto the roof of the van and secured the superstructure he needed, the gangling metal assemblage of bars and saucers and needle-thin antennae. He changed into his black biking clobber (it still fitted, even though it was seven years since he’d got rid of the Harley). The boots rang against the metal floor of the bus. He put his particoloured trousers back on over the leathers. He gelled his hair and shaved his face, carrying the enamel basin of boiled water out into the sunshine and using his old ivory-handled brush and the wooden dish of cedarwood soap.

  On going into battle, he’d been told, the Spartan warriors made themselves as sleek as oiled blades. It was a practice he approved of.

  He made sure that the transit’s every door and window was closed up tight, and he set off back into town.

  Sylvia and her boy were in the bathroom. She had a vague idea that rats couldn’t swim so they might be safest there, although the old thing about sinking ships bothered her. Anyway bathtime was always soothing, and Billy was content. His fingertips were dead-white and wrinkled as walnut kernels, and normally she would have got him out hours ago, but today wasn’t normal and it was a relief when he stopped fretting and started on a long story about his shoal of rubber fishes, muttering sometimes to her but mostly to himself. She sat on the wicker chair and let her mind go blank.

  There were dark shapes swinging and bumping against the windows, but thank goodness it was impossible to distinguish, through the frosted glass, whether they were moving leaves (as though there were leaves that size this early) or something else. After all, she’d never, she thought, heard of anyone actually being killed by rats.

  The tiny girl, who never seemed to grow, was with her dad, who saw to her on a Thursday when his wife had to go for her treatment. The girl wasn’t afraid, though he was. She clambered onto the back of the sofa that was pushed up against the front window so that she could watch the way the rat horde surged over the cobbles, or mounted the raised flower beds like cresting waves, ebbing back down again to leave nothing but scrabbled grey earth where the tulips and forget-me-nots had been.

  She was very attentive and curious. Are they hungry? she asked. Do they have homes? Will they get tired soon? Are mice baby rats or are they different? Why have they come? I don’t know said her father. I expect so. I’m not sure. No – mice are different. I wish they never bloody well had.

  Piper parked at the point where the Thoroughfare debouched into the market square. He sat still for a bit, calculating angles.

  He’d had a disco when he was still at school. He’d built the rig himself, and made a packet going around the big houses where the kids who went to day-schools in London had their eighteenths. The bigger the house, the less time the owners spent in it. It didn’t make him indignant, the way it did some of the men who drank in the pub. People interested him, the illogical ways they did things. He didn’t get angry with them, any more than he got angry with rats.

  The disco gave him power. If he spotted a lad with that yearning look that made a face lose definition and go kind of mushy, he’d lend a hand by putting on the Walker Brothers and next time the boy shuffled past him he’d have his cheek sweatily clamped to his girl’s and his hand in her hair.

  Piper could swivel the speakers from inside the van. He did a neat five-point turn, minutely adjusting the direction of his front wheels so he was ready for the off. He was hesitating between the Ode to Joy and The Blue Danube. Rats, he’d found, responded to pretty much the same repertoire as the middle-brow, middle-aged human. Then he thought, no, let’s sock it to them, and he put on the march from The Pirates of Penzance.

  Baah Baah Bababa Baah. The masses of grey bodies that had twitched and undulated ceaselessly all morning across the paving of the market square stilled. Innumerable torpedo-pointed heads turned in the direction of the van.

  Bah bababa baba. Bah bababa baba. The roofs shed their loads. Tiny clawed feet skittered and scrabbled their way down sheer concrete, down usefully cratered terracotta brick, down lumpen pebble-dash with its helpful protuberances. As the upper levels of the town cleared, the ground became ever more densely packed with shuffling bodies.

  Baah Baah. Piper turned his key in the ignition. Bababa Baah. As the speakers picked up the power generated by the engine the volume surged mightily. Bah bababa baba. The pilastered front of the neo-Grecian town hall, the blackened timbers of the Corn Exchange, the symmetrical sash windows of the row of Georgian merchant’s houses, all gave back the sound, superbly resonant.

  Tiny Elsa got down from the sofa-back, crying, and her father picked her up and snuggled her under his armpit so that her ears were comfortingly blocked by T-shirted f
lesh. Sylvia and her boy thumped down the stairs on their bottoms, which was Billy’s favourite way of descending, and felt to her, in this time of weird menaces, like a sensible precaution against God-knows-what.

  The Venetian blinds rattled against the glass at the front of the house. At the back there was a sound of incessant soft thumping on the flat roof of the kitchen, as though it was hailing slippers.

  Piper took it slow. His followers’ legs averaged less than a centimetre in length. They could scurry pretty quick considering, but still. To maintain the momentum he had to keep them in his force field. In first gear the transit groaned and bunny-hopped. In second, at that pace, it repeatedly stalled. Each time it did, the music stuttered and the volume level dropped, but the rats, it turned out, weren’t bothered. The D’Oyly Carte company’s performance, as transmitted by Piper’s makeshift sound-system, might jerk and hiccup, but the river of rat-flesh flowed, smooth and collected as a spill of mercury, down the Thoroughfare and across the mini-roundabout. (Piper’s van went around it but his mud-grey velvet train swirled straight across, devouring somehow, without pausing or deviating, all the pansies forming the floral clock.) Slowly, slowly, out along Quay Street with more rats dropping silently from window ledges or pouring like slurry down the embankment beneath the railway line to join the flood.

  The windows were full of faces. Piper didn’t look up at them. He’d be the hero of the hour, but he didn’t kid himself that he would be liked for it. He looked odd, with his beaky nose and his flaming hair. His arms were unusually long and he’d heard some of the kids call him monkey-man. But it’s not as though all the men who walked into the pub to cries of ‘what are you having’ and ‘over here’ were that easy on the eye either. It wasn’t any deficiency in the looks department that made Piper an object of suspicion – other way round, if anything. The men had a nasty feeling he was attractive to women, though they themselves couldn’t see it. It was more to do with his not living in a house, not working alongside anyone else, not being from thereabouts.

  On the way out of town there was a house that looked like a castle. The brewer who built it, some hundred years earlier, had had a fanciful side. He liked his wife to wear velvet and do up her hair in a snood dotted with artificial pearls. His daughters were called Deirdre and Genevieve. He liked the words ‘bosky’, ‘crenellation’, and ‘casement’. The river ran along the bottom of his garden. He had an engraving of the drowning Ophelia above the big black sideboard where three different types of sherry sat, in decanters heavy enough to brain a burglar with, on an elaborately scrolled silver tray.

  By the time Deirdre died there, after seventy-five years of scatter-brained spinsterhood (Genevieve had married and gone to live in Canada), the garden had become very pretty. Willows grew aslant. Tiny pink and white roses rambled through the old apple trees. No one cut the asparagus any more – Deirdre didn’t like getting her fingers buttery – but in June its pale green plumes waved, feeble and lovely, over the flagged paths.

  Once she was gone, though, the new proprietor got the place sorted out.

  Humphrey Leach was a realist. His words were ‘tidy’, ‘low-maintenance’ and ‘cost-effective’. Now the castle rose from an expanse of grey gravel and there were spiky succulents in square concrete containers by the bolted door. The willows had been pollarded and the river embanked, and there was a long fibreglass thing, halfway between a surfboard and canoe, on which Humphrey Leach liked to skim up and down the river, wearing tight clothes purpose-made for practitioners of his preferred mode of high-speed punting. His girlfriend was extremely thin.

  Piper’s van crawled by. His entourage now trailed behind him for nearly quarter of a mile, a squeaking mass of entranced rodents. They jostled and snapped at each other. Baaah Baaah baba bah bah. Outliers trampled the crocuses on the verges alongside the new-built semis. Breakaway parties mounted walls garlanded with aubretia and ran along their crests, barging each other aside.

  Baah baba ba baba. Piper was singing along. In his wing mirror he could see Jenny Leach from year five scrambling over the castle’s electronic gates. She was a nice kid. He hadn’t realised she was Humphrey’s daughter. Hadn’t put the names together in his head. That scraggy woman was surely never her mother. He’d seen to a wasps’ nest for them once. He was there for a good three quarters of an hour and all that while Humphrey and the woman were doing press-ups on the lawn. They had earphones in. No conversation. Just grunting. Can’t be much fun for the girl. He’d take her along with the other big ones when it came to blackberrying time.

  The stretch of coastline to the east of the town was curiously formed. The sea was only five miles away, as the crow flies, but the river travelled closer to twelve to reach it. It ambled from side to side of the broad water-meadows, filling the whole shallow valley with its silt. Cows stood knee-deep on its verges and swans drifted above its mud. It had its own landscape of kingcups and dragonflies, willows and bog-grass. It wasn’t in a hurry to be swallowed up in the brown undifferentiating sea.

  When the meadows gave way to salty marshland where samphire grew and little birds with long legs and beaks strutted, the river did a sudden swerve. A shingle bank had arisen over the centuries to protect it, a miles-long finger of shifting stony ground wide enough for a road of sorts, and fishermen’s tarred shacks, and the forbidding rubble of past wars.

  You could drive out along that bank. Lots of people did. You could tell that by the numbers of bottles scattered about the Martello tower and the stench of urine in the Second World War pillboxes. On one side lay the sea, heaving. On the other side, considerably lower at this phase of the tide, ran the river. Along that road going nowhere, Piper went, and the rats followed him. Me too, I’m coming, they might have been chattering. Keep up keep up keep up keep up. They were exhausted, and hungry.

  Baah baah baba ba bah. Piper kept an eye on the flow. He’d known this river since he was a boy chucking flat stones at it. He could see, by the way it dimpled, in which direction the current was running. He was satisfied. When he got to the steep dip where last year’s spring tides had burst through the shingle, he left the track and took the van very slowly down the landward side on to the marshy expanse alongside the river. He drove in a big circle so that the rats following him swirled together. The music never let up. He wouldn’t be wanting to listen to that tune again any time soon. He was watching the break in the sea wall, that notch. He could see spray beyond it. There was an alteration in the light, an increase in the volume of sound coming from the sea. He turned the van carefully. He knew exactly the course he’d have to take, and he knew he’d have to go like the clappers.

  When the tide broke roaring through, he was ready. The Pirates’ chorus snapped off, and he was racing along the overgrown causeway, kicking up spray, feeling his wheels skidding under the pressure of water weighted and solidified by the bodies of a million drowning rodents. On the further side of the breach, when he reckoned he was high enough, he switched off the engine and got out his second cheese sandwich. There was no way he’d get the transit back over the marshes until the tide had receded. He watched the mass of struggling rats being carried upriver a way, and there being whirled around by the tricky currents where the incoming tide met the outgoing flood of the river, and then being tossed and churned again as they were tumbled back past him and on out to sea. Will the seagulls eat them, he wondered? Or do they think rats are dirty too?

  The following morning, once he’d shaved, and once he’d hosed down the transit, he drove into town and went to the estate agents’ office, where he knew he’d find Humphrey Leach, and he presented his bill.

  It was a surprising fact about the town that it was a communist enclave. There’d been a long shop there once, where they made engines and farm machinery. And there was a charismatic journeyman who’d drifted there from the Welsh valleys a hundred years ago – he was Silvia’s great-grandfather – and made himself quite a reputation by singing nightly
in the pub before he signed up at the shop, and began making trouble there, as the proprietor put it, or rather, as the other workmen saw it, teaching them to stand up for their rights. The pity of it was that, whether or not a decent wage was a human right, the proprietor couldn’t pay it and keep the business in profit, so the agitation ended with the closing of the works, and the men drifting off to Lowestoft and Folkestone, looking to make their livings on the docks there. But the Welshman stayed, and became the town’s barber, and made a go of it because men loved the way he sang as he soaped their cheeks, and it was under his influence that the town council veered leftward. They stopped calling themselves the Soviet of East Suffolk after the invasion of Hungary, but they still sang the ‘Internationale’ and the ‘Marseillaise’ and they kept on conducting their meetings on the Leninist model.

  By the time Piper came to town their revolutionary rhetoric had become a quaint tradition. They addressed each other as ‘comrade’, rather as the old codger who kept the key of the Dissenters’ Chapel made a point of calling visitors ‘Brother’ or ‘Sister’. Funny how conservatism can be a preserver of the revolution. The Chapel was their meeting place. Its layout was supposed to undermine the oppressive authority of Almighty God. No altar. But where the altar might have been there was a lofty pulpit, or crow’s nest (the roof timbers all came from wrecked ships) from which a preacher could survey and dominate the gathering.