The Hope

by James Lovegrove

  “Isn’t it great? Real corpuses, straight up, no shit. Soon as word got around, I came down here to have a look. Knew you’d be interested.”

  “I am,” said Paolo through the cotton. “But I’ve seen worse. Who found ’em?”

  “Lil. Said she was paying a social call and the door wasn’t locked, so she went in and there they were. Yeuch! Can you imagine it? I mean, they were friends of hers. Yeuch!”

  “Lil doesn’t pay social calls,” said Paolo. “Bet she wanted something. Bet it was one of her customers.”

  “Naah, it’s a woman, can’t you see? Look, she got tits.” Longpole scampered into the cabin and went right up to the adult corpse. He put out a finger and prodded the corpse’s chest, but poked so hard that his finger went through the fabric of the dress and sank two joints deep into the flesh. He screeched and pulled his finger out, which made a sucking noise Paolo would have preferred never to have heard, and then Longpole was wiping his hand in a frenzy on the nearest available set of bedclothes.

  “Eurgh, eurrr…! Oh, Christ! Shitshitshitshitshit!”

  Paolo was trying to smother his laughter under his facemask but Longpole could see the creases around his eyes.

  “Shut up, you fucker! It’s not funny.”

  The adult corpse now had a gimlet-hole in its left breast, edged with an ooze of gore. That looked pretty funny, too. But Paolo was still scared even as he laughed at Longpole. That corpse, dead for days, seemed as if it could turn its head right now and raise its mildewed finger and point at him, stare with blanked eyes, open its mouth until the hinges cracked under the strain and the jaw fell away in a soundless scream of condemnation framed by yellow rotted teeth.

  “OK, joke’s over,” said Paolo. “Let’s go back.”

  “Why?” asked Longpole coming back out into the daylight, wiping his finger on his shirt as if he was determined to remove every last scrap of his own skin. “Scared? Don’t you want to go in and have a closer look? You chicken?”

  “No, just don’t think we should be late, that’s all.”

  “They’re well nasty, aren’t they?”

  “Why hasn’t someone come to take them away yet?”

  “Would you want to?”

  “No, but hasn’t someone reported it to the Captain or something?”

  “Probably. Who cares? People die all the time.”

  “Hey, you! You kids!” It was Lil, hurrying towards them along the walkway, accompanied by three men. “Get away from there!”

  “Only having a quick look,” said Longpole with a shrug. “No harm in that.”

  “Leave poor Mary alone! She had a hard enough life without little brats like you making it hard for her when she’s dead.”

  “Friend of yours, then?” jeered Longpole. Paolo kept a tactful silence.

  Lil reached them with her entourage in tow and made to clip Longpole around the side of the head, but he was too quick for her bulbous, flabby arm and ducked out of the way.

  “Come on, Paolo, let’s get out of here.”

  “Little brats!” screamed Lil after them as they showed her their heels. “No respect for the dead.”

  “Want us to get them, pussywillow?” asked one of the entourage.

  “No, love, you and your mates just deal with the bodies like I asked you.” Covering her nose with her hand Lil strode into the cabin and took a quick but thorough mental inventory. It wasn’t a bad place. Bit of cleaning, bit of decoration, and it could be quite nice. At last the useless bitch had proved useful for something.

  Paolo and Longpole ran and giggled as they ran. Somehow, close scrapes with adults were ten times more exciting than scraps with other kids or even close encounters with week-old corpuses. Paolo followed Longpole, who was as lanky as his name suggested and had a strange way of running like a speeded-up impression of a long-legged stalking bird, a method that kept him well ahead of his companion. When he turned corners, he leaned into them and his legs shot out centrifugally. Every so often he would look over his shoulder at Paolo and give a manic leer and pour on the speed.

  “Look out, you daft bugger!” panted Paolo. “You’ll run into somebody!”

  “My arse!” replied Longpole, looking round, and a moment later ran into somebody. He turned round to launch a volley of insults at the dumbfuck dickhead who had been stupid enough to get in his way, and the insults died unformed in his throat. Paolo skidded to a halt behind Longpole. He couldn’t see the other guy at all because it had got dark all of a sudden; maybe the smoke from the funnels had thickened or a cloud had passed over the sun. Then he heard the other guy speak in a voice that was the last gasp of a victim on the rack: “Do you know?”

  And he heard Longpole say: “Holy Jesus, shit!” Longpole turned his head round to look at Paolo and he wasn’t grinning any more. He turned his head a bit further. Paolo thought that wasn’t natural, you couldn’t twist your neck that far, before he saw a pair of hands either side of Longpole’s face and there came a sound from Longpole’s neck that reminded him of the sound dice make when they’re thrown down. Longpole was looking over his shoulder now, Longpole’s tongue was pushing itself out between his lips, Longpole’s pupils were drifting upwards into his head, Longpole’s neck was a twisted rope, Longpole’s long legs were kicking at the walkway. Paolo spurted urine into the front of his jeans. Then Longpole was dropped to the deck like a full sack and his killer, hands held forward, had this look on his face that wasn’t mad but sad.

  “Sorry,” he said, but Paolo wasn’t listening because he was trying to figure out what those patterns were on the man’s chest and stomach. The man was naked from the waist up and so emaciated that his veins were like lengths of string wrapped around his skeleton and his muscles no more than tumorous swellings trying to scratch a living from their owner. The corners of his mouth were tilted downward.

  He said, “Do you know?” His scars were a wide, imperfect circle crossed half a dozen times diametrically to form the spokes of a crude wheel. The lines were shaded with angry red inflammation, and here and there black scabs hung grimly on. Who the hell had done that to him?

  Paolo clawed for his back pocket and found it and slipped his hand in and drew out his blade. The thin man took a step forward over Longpole.

  “Do you know?”

  Paolo groped for his voice and found that, too: “I know you’re in big trouble if you come an inch closer.” He slid his thumb up the knife handle to find the stud. He wished there was someone else around, even a stopper. Where had everybody gone? The lower decks were usually crowded at this time of day. But Paolo was alone with Longpole bent and dead and a madman coming towards him. His thumb tried to press the stud but didn’t really want to, had changed its mind about this fighting business, you can look after yourself, Paolo, me old mucker.

  No, I can’t, thought Paolo, and wished his father, the great signor, had never thrown him out into this cruel nightmare to make his own way and fend for himself. He didn’t want to end up like those corpuses, loathsome and rotten and perpetually startled by what the Hope had held in store for them, the big surprise that had been kept until last, crouching to spring when you least wanted it or expected it.

  “Do you know?”

  Paolo knew death, knew what dead was, knew he was looking at death’s little helper right now, coming at him, hands reaching out in a pitying embrace.

  “Yes, I know all right,” he said. The thin man stopped a yard in front of him, perplexed. The hands that had twisted Longpole’s head round as easy as a bottle-top faltered and fell. Paolo’s thumb at last did a nervous spasm on the knife handle and the knife responded with a familiar click and jerk in his fingers. Without pausing Paolo’s blade flashed out to the thin man’s mutilated chest, not stopping when it met the weak resistance of skin or flesh, glancing upward inside the thin man’s chest as it grated off a rib. The thin man coughed politely and an apologetic dribble of blood abseiled down his front, making diversions around scar tissue, with two more dribbles in
hot pursuit.

  “Sorry,” said Paolo, working the blade free, drawing back his arm and plunging it in again.

  “Sorry,” said the thin man as he lumbered into Paolo, dying arms groping for a last, lethal embrace with someone who didn’t know.

  “No, I’m sorry,” hissed Paolo as he caught the thin man’s insubstantial weight and fended it off with a few more thrusts of the blade. “I’m just so fucking sorry, you wouldn’t believe it.” The thin man’s blood was spraying from several apertures and patterning Paolo’s shirt and joining the other stains already there on his trousers. The arms were shuddering at Paolo’s shoulders, still going for his neck even though the brain was sending messages that the body was dead, no use, mission aborted.

  Paolo dropped back against the walkway railing and let the thin body tumble at his feet. He breathed out hard and breathed in and steadied himself as the outstretched hands gave a final valiant twitch and lay still. The two of them, the quick and the dead, remained in that position until the quick’s heart-rate slowed down to something approaching normal and his breathing was no longer an urgent rasp.

  Paolo felt the cool wetness of his jeans against his skin and wondered how and when that had happened. He saw the blade in his hand smeared with the thin man’s blood, and he could not count how many times he had stabbed him. He knelt down and wiped the blade against the back of the thin man’s trousers, and as he did so he noticed a notebook poking out of the back pocket. It had a red cover, grainy like calfskin leather, with tattered corners and a couple of fingerprints. He did not want to touch it because it would be like touching the dead man’s skin, taking a part of the body. Paolo remembered Longpole’s finger going through that corpse’s dress and skin. Longpole was now a corpse too, and it was as if they all had a contagious disease like the plagues that hit deck areas now and then. Longpole had touched the woman’s corpse, the thin man had touched Longpole, that’s how it spread. Paolo was unwilling to follow suit and catch it in turn. But the notebook was fascinating. Why did he carry it? What did he have to take notes about?

  Tentatively Paolo took hold of one corner of the cover and extracted the notebook. There was a square of white on the cover. On this square were two lines ruled in anticipation of a title, and there was the title in tortuous pencilled letters:

  Lonely the Rat

  Paolo didn’t think much of the title. He hoped the story would be better.

  He got to his feet and, barely glancing at Longpole, who was only dead, after all, he walked off with Lonely the Rat in his hand. There was dead and there was dead, he decided. Riot had once said that death made everybody equal. When an upper deck guy died and rotted, you wouldn’t be able to tell him for a lower deck guy who had died and rotted. Both ended up as fish food in the ocean and the fishes weren’t fussy. Paolo didn’t think this was true now. There was a world of difference between the corpuses in the cabin and the two broken bodies lying across the walkway. Longpole and the thin man, well, that had been a scrap really, hadn’t it? Death had been sudden but expected and evenly shared out. You didn’t go into a scrap at the pool without thinking there was an odds-on chance you’d get stuck by someone, although you hoped you wouldn’t and if you were a good enough fighter you probably didn’t. But that family in that cabin – they hadn’t stood a chance. For whatever reason they’d died (that was something Paolo could not figure out), it was an all-round shitter. They hadn’t got anything, not a blade, nothing, to defend themselves with.

  If I’m lucky, thought Paolo, I could get to the pool in time for the scrap with Lock. But first things first. New shirt and trousers. Wouldn’t do to turn up looking like you’d already finished.

  Paolo shared a cabin with three other guys, although it was rare if more than two of them were there at any given time. People like them had better things to do than fart around all day inside, and if they came back at all, they came back to sleep. One was an engineer who worked long shifts and always came in pissed and crashed out in his bunk at about 23.00. Nice enough guy, but Paolo had never caught his name, which gave him a fair indication of how well he knew his bunkmates.

  Everyone was out. Paolo sat on his bunk and pulled off his clothes. The stains had dried but were starting to smell.

  He grabbed a fresh pair of jeans and someone else’s shirt and put them on. While doing so, he saw Lonely the Rat had fallen out of his pocket on to the floor. He picked it up, sat down, turned back the cover and started to read. The handwriting wasn’t much better than a scribble but Paolo soon worked out how to decipher it. As he read, thoughts of scraps with Lock vanished from his head.

  Lonely the Rat – A True Story

  I am a dream. I was not born in a woman’s tummy. I was born in a head, like all dreams. I began. I licked off the wet bits of my birth. I took my first breath. I lived. I live. I live in Hope. My name is Lonely because I am alone. I am the only one, the only rat. When I was born I knew many things. I knew how to walk. I knew how to talk. I knew how to read. I knew how to write. I knew how to eat. I knew how to shit. I knew my name and my place and my purpose. This is very important, that I knew my purpose, for I know that many people do not know their purpose and they waste their lives. If you only have one life, it is a good thing to know your purpose, otherwise you will waste your one chance at life. A rat’s (I am a rat) purpose is very simple. I deal with the rubbish. I sort out the rubbish. There is too much rubbish here and it is my purpose to do something about it. If the rubbish was left to keep piling up then there would not be enough space, which would be silly, so I sort it all out. Is anyone else’s purpose so good? I don’t think so. In the first few days of my life I simply lived and thought about my purpose because I wasn’t sure of myself enough yet, though I am now. Then I just hid and lived and ate and shitted, but I was not wasting time. It was a time to think. I had lots of talks with the Hope in that time and the Hope told me many different things about my purpose. The Hope was launched to travel across the ocean to the other side, everybody knows that. The Hope is a big ship with lots of people on board, everybody knows that. All the people are here because they are here. Many cannot remember why they were here in the first place and that is why they have no purpose, because they can’t remember. When they get up in the morning, they can’t remember so they just go through the day expecting all of a sudden to remember everything. Those are the older people.

  The younger people have no memory of anything at all. They have not been told their purpose, and they don’t care about it and would rather make lots of noise and fight. They make my purpose easier by fighting. Younger people are rubbish from the moment they are born. Older people are mostly rubbish too, or if they weren’t rubbish before they came on board they are now. They are empty tins and old cartons and bottles. All the good bits have been used up and there is only rubbish left, which has no purpose. They do not think they are rubbish, they think they are really good because they have been used up, which they think is living. They are silly. They are rubbish. I sort them out and clean them up and tidy them away. I am a rat. I have a purpose. While I was hiding in the first days of my life and thinking, the Hope came and told me about the launching which was all black smoke and black paper. It was meant to be a happy occasion, and all the people were smiling as if it was a happy occasion, but it wasn’t because the man whose purpose it was to make the Hope was dead. He was sensible because he threw himself away and didn’t wait to be thrown away by someone else, which is more wasteful. That was the launching. The Hope set out straight, pointed in the right direction, and sailed for days and then for weeks and then for months and then for years, and this is a long time because I have not lived for that long. The Hope did as the people said. The Hope sailed on and on and on. The Hope got bored. It didn’t like the people very much. They thought they knew everything. They thought they were better than the Hope. They thought they could order the Hope around like they ordered each other around, but it wasn’t as simple as that. After all, people thought they could
order around the wind and the sun and the moon and the sea and the land, but they were wrong. The wind and the sun and the moon and the sea and the land just let people do what they wanted because they didn’t care really, they were so much better and bigger than the people. Sometimes the wind would get angry and the land would shake and the sea would clap its hands, but this only kept the people quiet for a little while. When they had got over being scared, they would go back to thinking they were the best things ever. But they weren’t! Because people got used up and died while wind and sun and moon and sea and land just went on for ever and for ever and never got used up and never became rubbish.

  The Hope wasn’t quite like that because the Hope was made by the people. The Hope found that it couldn’t ignore the people so easily because the people annoyed the Hope and were like a sickness, filling the Hope with themselves and their shit and rubbish, making the Hope not feel very well. That was not nice. The Hope decided on a way to get rid of the people, first with rats and then with things that were like rats only much, much worse. These didn’t work. I don’t know why they didn’t work (I don’t know everything, do I?), but I know they didn’t work. Perhaps they weren’t good enough. Perhaps people could beat them at their own game. Whatever the reason, the Hope admitted it had lost this time. But this was early on in the journey, so there was plenty of time for the Hope to think up another plan. So the Hope thought and thought and thought so hard you could hear its brains turning and rumbling and roaring as they thought. People got scared by the noise but they couldn’t understand why they got scared, but it should have been obvious why the noise was scary if they had any sense of purpose which they didn’t. There were lots of times when people killed themselves off, which was a good thing for the Hope, getting someone else to put out the rubbish. When people live together, because they are so horrible they get diseases of their own, diseases like themselves that kill themselves. Sometimes the diseases hurt their bodies and made parts of them suffer and bleed, sometimes the diseases hurt their minds and made them make others suffer and bleed. It didn’t matter to the Hope which it was, because people died. Which was a good thing. But still they were not dying quickly enough and so the Hope kept on thinking, but it was always a struggle to think because the Hope had been made by people and people didn’t want their creations to think. Often the Hope felt that thinking was too difficult, like trying to see in the dark, but it found after a while that thinking got easier and easier, just as it gets easier and easier to see in the dark as time goes on, although there are always darker bits where you cannot see a thing.