Rat!
As sudden and unexpected as that: one word, three letters.
Rat!
It may only have been one word, a short, simple noun, and this particular rat may have been dead, but this little six-inch bundle of fur, laying in a back lane on my daily route to work, was far more than mere vermin. Like seeing an urban fox, or a raptor working over the garden, this little rat, even in death, had, ironically, injected a little bit of life into my day through the otherness of its sudden and unexpected presence. It was a small but poignant reminder of a world that now, unfortunately seems to run parallel to ours, a world in which animals like rats, foxes, badgers, buzzards and any number of others have been forced to skulk around in the shadows, making them no more real to successive generations of children than the stuff of story books.
Dirty rat, sneaky rat, filthy rat; rat-fink, ratted; all those well-worn and much-used idioms flooded instantly to the tip of my tongue. Then, hard on their heels, came all the connotations: fleas, filth, infestation, plague, and images of the gruesome beaked masks of the plague doctors. I stepped carefully around it, safe in the knowledge that some cat or fox would soon make light work of it.
But the next day it was still there. Rat. A blunt wedge of fur that just lay where it fell, less exclamation now, slightly bedraggled after a few days of rain, and more a plain statement of fact. I could barely bring myself to believe that none of the residents had moved it, or at least called the council to get rid of it, but there it was and there it stayed.
After a few days I had become accustomed to its presence, paying it no more attention than a newly-installed litter bin or road sign, just another small landmark on a small journey; but then something changed. Either a rubbish truck carrying out the fortnightly refuse collection, or a car belonging to one of the residents, had run over the rat, leaving it completely flattened, and so this one-time plague-carrying vermin became flat-rat, and, of course, my mind instantly made the short sound-leap to splat, and in no time I was completing my walk to work whilst composing lines of doggerel (or perhaps that should be ratterel?) in my head:
The rat went splat
And it was flat!
The fat rat went splat
and now it’s flat.
“How’s about that?!”
said the steamroller-driving cat.
Now that all those negative imaginings had been washed away in a flood of the absurd, I actually started to feel some affection toward Monty (I had decided to name him, giving him a distinctly British moniker, considering how he had so stoically borne all that had been dished out to him) and made an effort to look ahead for his familiar outline on the floor as I approached. As the days rolled past, Monty became exactly that – an outline, the effects of wind and rain making him less discernible as a rat day-by-day.
In truth, I began to feel sorry for Monty: although the little patch of fur was sleek and flat in the rain, it would dry out somewhat in the sun, leaving little tufts to stick up and catch the breeze.
The Easter holidays came around, and after nearly three weeks I returned to my walk to work to find Monty all but gone. Neither horror nor comedy, affinity nor sympathy, existed now. Now, all that was left was a faint brown patch on the tarmac, and a little secret known only to Monty and me.
