Ah Sweet Mystery of Life Read online

  I could see Claud staring at him with a certain fascination.

  ‘They’re more clever’n dogs, rats is.’

  ‘Get away.’

  ‘You know what they do? They watch you! All the time you’re goin’ round preparin’ to catch ’em, they’re sitting quietly in dark places, watchin’ you.’ The man crouched, stretching his stringy neck far forward.

  ‘So what do you do?’ Claud asked, fascinated.

  ‘Ah! That’s it you see. That’s where you got to know rats.’

  ‘How d’you catch ’em?’

  ‘There’s ways,’ the ratman said, leering. ‘There’s various ways.’

  He paused, nodding his repulsive head sagely up and down. ‘It’s all dependin’,’ he said, ‘on where they is. This ain’t a sewer job, is it?’

  ‘No, it’s not a sewer job.’

  ‘Tricky thing, sewer jobs. Yes,’ he said, delicately sniffing the air to the left of him with his mobile nose-end, ‘sewer jobs is very tricky things.’

  ‘Not especially, I shouldn’t think.’

  ‘Oh-ho. You shouldn’t, shouldn’t you! Well, I’d like to

  see you do a sewer job! Just exactly how would you set about it, I’d like to know?’

  ‘Nothing to it. I’d just poison ’em, that’s all.’

  ‘And where exactly would you put the poison, might I ask?’

  ‘Down the sewer. Where the hell you think I put it!’

  ‘There!’ the ratman cried, triumphant. ‘I knew it! Down the sewer! And you know what’d happen then? Get washed away, that’s all. Sewer’s like a river, y’know.’

  ‘That’s what you say,’ Claud answered. ‘That’s only what you say.’

  ‘It’s facts.’

  ‘All right then, all right. So what would you do, Mr Know-all?’

  ‘That’s exactly where you got to know rats, on a sewer job.’

  ‘Come on then, let’s have it.’

  ‘Now listen. I’ll tell you.’ The ratman advanced a step closer, his voice became secretive and confidential, the voice of a man divulging fabulous professional secrets. ‘You works on the understandin’ that a rat is a gnawin’ animal, see. Rats gnaws. Anything you give ’em, don’t matter what it is, anything new they never seen before, and what do they do? They gnaws it. So now! There you are! You got a sewer job on your hands. And what d’you do?’

  His voice had the soft throaty sound of a croaking frog and he seemed to speak all his words with an immense wet-lipped relish, as though they tasted good on the tongue. The accent was similar to Claud’s, the broad soft accent of the Buckinghamshire countryside, but his voice was more throaty, the words more fruity in his mouth.

  ‘All you do is you go down the sewer and you take along some ordinary paper bags, just ordinary brown paper bags, and these bags is filled with plaster of Paris powder. Nothin’ else. Then you suspend the bags from the roof of the sewer so they hang down not quite touchin’ the water. See? Not quite touchin’, and just high enough so a rat can reach ’em.’

  Claud was listening, rapt.

  ‘There you are, y’see. Old rat comes swimmin’ along the sewer and sees the bag. He stops. He takes a sniff at it and it don’t smell so bad anyway. So what’s he do then?’

  ‘He gnaws it,’ Claud cried, delighted.

  ‘There! That’s it! That’s exackly it! He starts gnawin’ away at the bag and the bag breaks and the old rat gets a mouthful of powder for his pains.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘That does him.’

  ‘What? Kills him?’

  ‘Yep. Kills him stony!’

  ‘Plaster of Paris ain’t poisonous, you know.’

  ‘Ah! There you are! That’s exackly where you’re wrong, see. This powder swells. When you wet it, it swells. Gets into the rat’s tubes and swells right up and kills him quicker’n anythin’ in the world.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘That’s where you got to know rats.’

  The ratman’s face glowed with a stealthy pride, and he rubbed his stringy fingers together, holding the hands up close to the face. Claud watched him, fascinated.

  ‘Now – where’s them rats?’ The word ‘rats’ came out of his mouth soft and throaty, with a rich fruity relish as though he were gargling with melted butter. ‘Let’s take a look at them rraats.’

  ‘Over there in the hayrick across the road.’

  ‘Not in the house?’ he asked, obviously disappointed.

  ‘No. Only around the hayrick. Nowhere else.’

  ‘I’ll wager they’re in the house too. Like as not gettin’ in all your food in the night and spreadin’ disease and sickness. You got any disease here?’ he asked, looking first at me, then at Claud.

  ‘Everyone fine here.’

  ‘Quite sure?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘You never know, you see. You could be sickenin’ for it weeks and weeks and not feel it. Then all of a sudden – bang! – and it’s got you. That’s why Doctor Arbuthnot’s so particular. That’s why he sent me out so quick, see. To stop the spreadin’ of disease.’

  He had now taken upon himself the mantle of the Health Officer. A most important rat he was now, deeply disappointed that we were not suffering from bubonic plague.

  ‘I feel fine,’ Claud said, nervously.

  The ratman searched his face again, but said nothing.

  ‘And how are you goin’ to catch ’em in the hayrick?’

  The ratman grinned, a crafty toothy grin. He reached down into his knapsack and withdrew a large tin which he held up level with his face. He peered around one side of it at Claud.

  ‘Poison!’ he whispered. But he pronounced it pye-zn, making it into a soft, dark, dangerous word. ‘Deadly pye-zn, that’s what this is!’ He was weighing the tin up and down in his hands as he spoke. ‘Enough here to kill a million men!’

  ‘Terrifying,’ Claud said.

  ‘Exackly it! They’d put you inside for six months if they caught you with even a spoonful of this,’ he said, wetting his lips with his tongue. He had a habit of craning his head forward on his neck as he spoke.

  ‘Want to see?’ he asked, taking a penny from his pocket, prising open the lid. ‘There now! There it is!’ He spoke fondly, almost lovingly of the stuff, and he held it forward for Claud to look.

  ‘Corn? Or barley is it?’

  ‘It’s oats. Soaked in deadly pye-zn. You take just one of them grains in your mouth and you’d be a gonner in five minutes!’

  ‘Honest?’

  ‘Yep. Never out of me sight, this tin.’

  He caressed it with his hands and gave it a little shake so that the oat grains rustled softly inside.

  ‘But not today. Your rats don’t get this today. They wouldn’t have it anyway. That they wouldn’t. There’s where you got to know rats. Rats is suspicious. Terrible suspicious, rats is. So today they gets some nice clean tasty oats as’ll do ’em no harm in the world. Fatten ’em, that’s all it’ll do. And tomorrow they gets the same again. And it’ll taste so good there’ll be all the rats in the districk comin’ along after a couple of days.’

  ‘Rather clever.’

  ‘You got to be clever on this job. You got to be cleverer’n a rat and that’s sayin’ somethin’.’

  ‘You’ve almost got to be a rat yourself,’ I said. It slipped out in error, before I had time to stop myself, and I couldn’t really help it because I was looking at the man at the time. But the effect upon him was surprising.

  ‘There!’ he cried. ‘Now you got it! Now you really said somethin’! A good ratter’s got to be more like a rat than anythin’ else in the world! Cleverer even than a rat, and that’s not an easy thing to be, let me tell you.’

  ‘Quite sure it’s not.’

  ‘All right then, let’s go. I haven’t got all day, you know. There’s Lady Leonora Benson asking for me urgent up there at the Manor.’

  ‘She got rats, too?’

  ‘Everybody’s got rats,’ the ratman said, and he