The Rat

Neil Christie

Colin unlocked the attic room and slipped inside, turning the key with a practised flick. The space, once intended as a child's bedroom, had become what Anna called ‘the man-cave’. Its white walls and tired grey carpet gave it the air of a room waiting for a life that never arrived. Only one picture broke the blankness: a faded photograph of Colin’s hockey team from his final year at Wilmslow Academy for Boys. He was still recognisable, far left of the second back row, squinting against the sun on a summer’s day nearly twenty years gone.

The furnishings were sparse: a utilitarian desk, a metal filing cabinet, an empty bookcase and an Eames Style EA 217 office chair (replica), bought by his employers and dutifully declared as a taxable benefit. From that chair, through a small window, Colin could look down on the tree-lined street of his north London neighbourhood. 

Colin had been quietly thrilled when, after the government-enforced restrictions eased, BBGFS announced flexible working. One or two days a week at home felt like a reprieve. No more shuffling through the grim commute from Highgate to the open-plan chaos of Battrick, Burke and Grinnell Finance Solutions. No more awkward lift conversations or forced small talk by the communal kettle. On-screen, his colleagues were reduced to tidy rectangles. Video calls discouraged the chatter about personal lives, television shows and other irrelevancies. This suited him perfectly. It seemed these days you could hardly say anything at work without contravening some new HR guideline. 

He set down his coffee – one and a half teaspoons of Nescafé Gold Blend Cap Colombia, a centimetre of semi-skimmed milk, no sugar – in his green mug. He tilted the blinds until the sun no longer stabbed into his eyes; at this time of year it always found him until 11.45. Conveniently, the adjustment also hid him from the neighbours’ upstairs windows.
 

Settling into the EA 217, he breathed deeply and paused. Faint birdsong. Distant traffic drone. The momentary illusion of peace before the spreadsheets reclaimed him. But first…
He opened his laptop, switched the browser to incognito mode and logged into his AdultFans account. 

AdultFans branded itself as ‘a subscription social platform revolutionising creator–fan connections’. In practice, most of it consisted of women filming themselves doing sexual things for paying strangers. Colin had first encountered the site in the Telegraph business pages: revenue surging, the founder feted as one of the UK’s brightest digital innovators.
What began as ‘work-related business research’ had quietly become a subscription. He checked for a new video from Katja. Yes. In the thumbnail she reclined on her bed in a pink nightie, surrounded by plush toy animals, smiling her soft, cheerful smile. Colin liked that she avoided the tattoos and piercings he found so off-putting on other creators. She seemed neat. Feminine. His appearance didn’t matter; she never saw him. He sent money through PayPal, typed his requests into her chatbox, and Katja dutifully fulfilled them. A simple transaction: services rendered, accounts payable. 

 
Colin put on the glasses he reserved for close examination of figures and unzipped his flies. His anticipation was interrupted by a shriek from downstairs. Colin froze, fingers suspended above the keys. Another sound followed—an anguished, rising howl. He sighed, logged off, shut the laptop and fastened his trousers. Anna was summoning him. 

‘Colin! Colin!’
He stepped onto the narrow landing and leaned over the banister. Anna stood below, outside the kitchen, staring up through the masculine, unflattering spectacles she had recently taken to wearing because screen work gave her headaches. She seemed distressed.
‘What is it now, Anna?’ he called.
‘There’s a rat.’
‘A rat?’
‘A rat. In the kitchen. Come down! Will you please come down?’
Colin trudged down the stairs to the hallway, where they stood together outside the closed kitchen door.
‘I am trying to work, you know. Are you sure it wasn’t a mouse?’
‘It’s not a mouse. It’s huge.’ She shuddered.
‘Rats have got, you know, different tails.’
‘I know what a rat looks like. This is a rat. A bloody enormous bloody rat. Strolling around our kitchen. And I want it out!’
‘All right, calm down. What exactly do you expect me to do?’
‘Go in there and catch it. Kill it!’
‘Well, I didn’t happen to bring my shotgun. I’ll just go and fetch it. Or my sword. Or one of my many other weapons suitable for destroying rats.’ 

Anna stared at him with exhausted disbelief, then brushed past to the cupboard under the stairs. Behind the vacuum cleaner and mop was the metal toolbox she’d given him for Christmas several years earlier. The gift tag still dangled from the handle. She opened the box, pulled out a hammer and thrust it at him.
‘Here.’
‘You expect me to face a rabid rat with a hammer?’
‘Rabid? It’s not rabid. It’s a Highgate rat; it probably lives on artisanal hummus and Waitrose Stilton.’
‘They do carry diseases,’ he muttered. ‘If it’s so cuddly, why don’t you deal with it?’ He tried to return the hammer, but Anna folded her arms and looked at him as though he were a slug she’d found in her baby spinach and seared radicchio salad.
‘What kind of man are you?’
‘Oh, don’t start.’
He tested the weight of the hammer, unfamiliar and faintly ridiculous in his hand. Looking down at his loose corduroy trousers, he murmured, ‘They go up your trouser leg, don’t they? Like a rat up a drainpipe.’ 

Anna didn’t reply. She was staring past him at the cupboard. He followed her gaze. His wellington boots sat beside the bucket. She fetched them, then produced a pair of yellow rubber gloves from the bucket and dropped the boots at his feet. For a moment he half-expected her to slap him with the gloves like an offended eighteenth-century nobleman issuing a challenge but she merely handed them over and folded her arms. 

 
Colin kicked off his slippers and pulled on the wellies. The openings looked perilously wide – large enough for a cunning rat to jump inside and tear at the tender flesh of his calves. Trapped in such a space, a frenzied rat could strip flesh to the bone in seconds. 

The rubber gloves were clearly designed for a woman. He wrestled his hands into them; once on, they felt less like protective gear and more like tight, vaguely humiliating fetishwear. He felt both ridiculous and exposed.
‘Go on, then,’ said Anna.
‘Wait. Give me the bucket.’
‘What for?’
‘Maybe I can trap it.’
She retrieved the bucket and passed it to him. He hooked it over his arm. As he reached for the kitchen door, she slammed it shut again.
‘What now?’
‘Careful! We don’t want the rat getting out.’
‘If the gap’s big enough for me to get through, Anna, it’s big enough for the rat.’
‘Just go on!’ 

‘Make your mind up.’ He opened the door a crack. ‘Where was it?’
‘By the sink. Then it shot across the floor and under the cooker.’
He craned his head round the door. ‘I can’t see it.’
Anna reached past him, yanked the door wide and shoved him inside. The wellies made him stumble. The door slammed behind him.
 

Keeping a firm grip on the hammer and the bucket, he scanned the room. Grey units. Marble-effect counters. Dishes in the sink. Shelves overloaded with cookery books, papers and the usual detritus of Anna’s domestic life. A sour smell of leftover food hung in the air. In other words: normal. 

‘Can you see it?’ Anna shouted.
‘Give me a chance!’ 

The kitchen was Anna’s territory. Lawyering, as she liked to remind him, paid well enough, but it also spawned endless folders, papers and yet more clutter. Her salary funded her clothes, hair and beauty appointments and the various little objects she believed made a house ‘cosy’. Colin tolerated it; after all, her income also paid for the few luxuries with which he occasionally rewarded himself. 

 
But the place was a tip. 

 
On the kitchen table: her laptop, a mug of cold tea, piles of papers and books, a plate with half-eaten toast, a make-up bag, vanity mirror, hairbrush, pills, an electric toothbrush, an angle-poise lamp… Why did women need so much stuff? Sometimes he wondered whether the mess was a deliberate rebuke to his preference for order. Their home life felt increasingly out of control. This was exactly the sort of chaos in which vermin might thrive.

Uneasy, Colin used the hammer to deliver a desultory warning bang to the cooker, then warily bent down to peer underneath. No rat. Only a smear of filthy black seepage matted with fluff. Clearly Anna hadn’t cleaned beneath it in ages. 

Still tense, he tiptoed to the French windows overlooking the small, paved-over garden. Two metal chairs sat outside alongside earthenware pots filled with nothing but dry soil. He noticed that the floor-length curtain at the edge of the windows was slightly askew.  A hiding place. He raised the hammer, braced himself, heart beating frantically, and yanked the curtain back with his rubber-gloved hand. No rat. Just a jar of beetroot that had rolled into the corner. 

‘There’s nothing here,’ he called. His fist ached from gripping the hammer; he lowered his arm.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. I mean, lots of clutter. But no rat.’
‘You must be missing it. It’s in there somewhere!’
‘Maybe I scared it off.’ He went to the hallway door and opened it. Anna stood there.
‘Maybe I—’
She slammed the door in his face.
‘Don’t let it out,’ she warned.
‘There’s no rat here.’
‘Well, it is there.’
‘We could put down poison. Or call pest control.’
‘Please, Colin. I’m scared of rats.’
‘Yeah? I love them, myself. Lovely rats.’
Silence from the other side.
He pressed a rubber-gloved hand against the door. ‘Anna?’
‘Colin, I don’t ask you to do much for me.’
He jerked his hand back. ‘I put the bins out. Every Sunday night, almost. I reorganise the dishwasher when you stack it like a maniac. I’m the only one who ever puts petrol in the car. I cook Christmas dinner. And I never complain about your mother staying.’
‘Please. Can we just? Can we be together on this?’
‘But there’s nothing. You get these ideas, Anna. Like when you accused me of using your Clinique shampoo.’
‘Why can’t you do something for once without arguing or implying I’m imagining things?’
‘But you were imagining it about the shampoo.’
‘For God’s sake, man up, Colin! Kill the rat.’
‘“Man up”? Do you hear how ridiculous you sound?’
‘Get on with it. Kill it!’ 

He rested his forehead against the door that separated them. This day had been meant to be a sanctuary, a tranquil interlude. Instead it had unravelled into this. Why did she always sneer at him this way when they argued? She wouldn't treat her partners at the law firm like that, he knew. 

 
He didn’t want this. He wanted to be at his workstation, watching Katja’s new video and populating cells with numbers in neat vertical columns. And Anna? She’d rather be clinging to the back of some man’s motorbike, probably, wind in her hair, racing through foreign mountains towards an adventure. That was the sort of thing she liked.

So why was he the one in the kitchen holding a hammer? 

He turned back to the kitchen and froze.
There, in the midden of Anna’s abandoned breakfast, sat a large rat. It stared at him, whiskers twitching, utterly unbothered by his presence.

Shit.

How had it got onto the table? How high could rats jump? A nausea of fear and something disturbingly like excitement swirled in his stomach. He edged forward, lifting the hammer. The rat crouched, hindquarters tensing, as if preparing to leap at him and sink its teeth into his face. Colin lunged, squeezed his eyes shut and brought the hammer down with a violent crash, shattering a plate.
 

‘What was that? What’s happening? What have you broken?’ Anna shouted.
He’d missed. The rat had vanished. A wild, involuntary laugh burst out of him – half panic, half hysteria.
‘Try not to break anything else,’ Anna called.
He ignored her.
Where was it? Under the table? He crouched. No – nothing.
The dread of knowing it was somewhere in the room, unseen, was somehow worse than being able to see it. It could be under the sink, or in the pantry feasting on his special delicatessen chorizo, building strength for the next attack.
There.
The rat lurked by the French window beside the beetroot jar, staring at him with a revolting, knowing intelligence. It was the foulest thing he had ever seen in the kitchen, and now it was cornered.
Clutching bucket and hammer, he crept toward it.
‘What’s going on?’ Anna called faintly.
The rat’s eyes darted. It hurled itself at the glass. An alarmingly powerful jump. He stepped into the corner and swung. The rat dodged, skittering on the Amtico flooring, but the hammer caught its hind leg, crushing it to paste. The desperate creature spun in agonised circles. Colin struck again. And again. And again. Aiming for the head.

It was a messy, thrilling business.
 

‘Colin? What’s happening?’
‘It’s over. It’s dead. I fucking killed it.’ He wiped sweat from his forehead, exhilarated. Something in him sang. 
The kitchen door opened. Anna stepped inside and stared at the mangled body. ‘How disgusting,’ she murmured, resting a soft hand on his shoulder. ‘Thank you, darling.’
She lifted the bucket and placed it gently over the dead thing. She tried to hug him, but it was awkward; he still gripped the soiled tool.
‘I’ll take the rat to the bin,’ he said. 

‘It is a bit of a mess, isn’t it?’ Anna said, surveying the carnage. ‘Give me those gloves and I’ll clear up.’

Colin scooped the corpse into a Waitrose Bag for Life and carried it to the front bin. As he stepped outside, their neighbour Mr Snead happened past.
‘Morning. Lovely day for it.’
‘I just killed a rat,’ Colin said.
‘A rat? You’ve got rats?’ Snead recoiled.
‘Not any more,’ Colin replied, a note of pride rising in him. 

When he returned, Anna was at the sink, rinsing the hammer under foaming water. He watched her for a moment, arms folded.
‘Can I, er, give you a hand?’
‘Oh, that would be amazing.’ She turned, genuinely pleased. ‘Why don’t you load the dirty plates into the dishwasher?’
Colin stacked the dishes and swept up the shattered plate. Anna packed away her files and breakfast debris. He fetched the brush from under the sink and scrubbed the last traces of the rat from the floor. She returned the hammer to the toolbox, then brought out the hoover. He vacuumed while she wiped the surfaces with Mr Muscle Kitchen Gel. 

‘Some of these papers can go,’ Anna said, pointing at a pile on the table. ‘Can you fetch the spare recycling bin from the shed?’ 

 
He opened the French windows and stepped into the back yard. The shed, once an outside toilet, was now a damp, seldom-used storage room. He pulled the door open and was hit by an acrid, unpleasant smell. Wrinkling his nose in distaste, he picked up the recycling bin from the back corner. Underneath, part of the wooden floor had rotted away. Through the opening he could see a small nest of twigs, scraps of paper and mouldering rubbish. He bent down for a better look and recoiled in disgust. The nest was alive with a knot of pink, hairless, blind baby rats. This was their breeding ground. The plump new-borns twitched and pulsed with appalling vitality, their soft flesh like uncooked sausage meat. His stomach turned. He reached for the spade that was leaning against the wall and set to work. 

 
He returned shortly with the recycling bin. Anna dropped the papers in.
‘There. Things go quicker when we work together,’ she said. ‘Thanks for helping, darling.’
‘That’s okay,’ he replied, slipping an arm around her, surprised by how steady and capable he suddenly felt. He wondered whether to mention the grisly heap he'd dispatched in the shed. She smiled up at him. ‘Anything special you’d like for dinner?’ 

That evening, Colin joined Anna in the kitchen. It felt strange; they hadn’t eaten dinner together in ages. Since Anna’s promotion, evenings had dissolved into microwave meals eaten separately, Colin in the attic, Anna at the kitchen table, ringed by files and the cold glare of her laptop.

But tonight, the table was laid: napkins, wine glasses, candles flickering in silver candlesticks. The overhead light was off; the French windows were open, letting the cool gloaming drift into the room. 

‘This all looks very nice,’ Colin said. Somewhere inside him, a thin thread of adrenaline still buzzed. He looked at Anna in the flickering candlelight. She wasn't wearing her glasses and she seemed to have done something different with her hair. He had to admit that, when she made the effort, Anna was better-looking than Katja. As he had the thought, he realised it was a distasteful comparison. 

‘And you look nice,’ he added. 

‘Thank you.’ She seemed almost bashful, as she had been in the days when he used to pay her compliments, when they were first married. 

‘Well, you earned a feast, Beowulf!’ She set a plate of stew before him.
Colin poured two glasses of wine. They clinked them together. It was the red they usually saved for Christmas. 

‘Y’know,’ she said, ‘seeing you today, it reminded me of when I first noticed you. When we girls came to watch the boys’ hockey match. You were rushing about with your stick. Very dashing.’
‘God, that feels like a lifetime ago. Remember what happened after the match?’
‘We were waiting for the bus. You saw me looking, and pretended you weren’t looking back. But you were shy, so you sent Alan over to talk to me.’
‘I watched you giggling at whatever he said and panicked that you fancied him.’
‘Spotty Alan?’ She laughed. ‘Not likely. It was definitely you. I thought you were moody and mysterious. Wilmslow’s answer to Daniel Day-Lewis. Little did I know that beneath the reserve lurked the heart of a cold-blooded killer.’ 

Colin smiled, though something in him tightened at the words. He topped up their glasses. They ate. They talked. They even laughed. The silences were companionable, each studying the person they had married, tracing in quiet wonder the path from the school playing fields to this Highgate kitchen. After the meal, he rose to clear the table, but she told him to leave it. They stepped out onto the narrow terrace and sat together, listening to the neighbourhood settle.

When the air cooled, Anna fetched an old Barbour jacket from the hook behind the kitchen door and slipped it on. In the pocket she found a lighter and a crumpled cigarette pack. She shook it. One left. 

‘Shall we?’ She lit the cigarette, inhaled, and offered it to him.
‘Anna, I thought you quit years ago. We both did.’
‘No reason not to.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Just… why not? We can allow ourselves a ciggie.’
He watched her fingers – short, practical nails – as she held the cigarette.
‘We decided,’ he said. ‘We’d wait a few years, then think about starting a family.’
‘Yes. We decided.’
‘And it’s worked out, hasn’t it? We’re doing well. You’re a partner.’
‘Senior partner.’
‘Exactly. And I’m deputy head of department.’
‘I am aware.’
‘Is that what this dinner was about? So you could bring up kids again?’
‘I didn’t even mention kids! But do we have to just work? Stop going out? Stop doing things together?’ She hesitated. ‘Stop having sex?’
‘Why are you being like this? We’ve had a nice dinner. Why spoil it?’ He stood. ‘As it happens, I still have work to finish.’
He walked inside, leaving her alone on the terrace. She took a final drag, then flicked the butt into the yard and watched the red glow fade into darkness.  

Later, Anna knocked on his office door.
‘I’m going to bed now.’
‘Okay.’
‘Will you come soon?’
‘I’m working.’
‘Lots still to do?’
‘Yeah. I’m behind because of… the rat.’
‘I really do appreciate it. I appreciate you. It's not like I expect you to be something you’re not.’
‘Okay.’
‘Thank you for what you did. You made me feel safe. I’m sorry we argued.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’m going to turn in now. Might read for a bit.’
Colin listened to her footsteps retreat along the landing. When he heard the bathroom taps running, he turned back to the glow of his screen. His fingers hovered over the keys for a moment, then he closed the laptop and went to the bedroom. 

He was already in bed when Anna emerged from the bathroom. She undressed quietly, slipped beneath the covers and nestled against him.
‘My brave man,’ she said. The praise stirred something hot and certain in him. Her hand travelled along his side, under the sheets, fingers tracing his skin before moving lower. She kissed him; he shifted, accommodating her. When she felt him ready, she climbed on top of him and they had sex. 

‘Thank you,’ she whispered, with the same polite gratitude Katja sometimes typed. She kissed his cheek before turning away. 

He lay awake, staring at the bedroom wall. In the darkness he could just make out the frivolous floral wallpaper he’d always hated. After a while, she began to snore softly.
If we had a baby, he thought, she wouldn’t be able to sleep like that. It’d just be more shit to clean up.
He lay still.
From behind the skirting board came a faint, then distinct, sound of scratching.