Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life

by Roald Dahl

  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
ambled off down the driveway, across the road to the hayrick and we watched him go. The way he walked was so like a rat it made you wonder – that slow, almost delicate ambling walk with a lot of give at the knees and no sound at all from the footsteps on the gravel. He hopped nimbly over the gate into the field, then walked quickly round the hayrick scattering handfuls of oats on to the ground.

  The next day he returned and repeated the procedure.

  The day after that he came again and this time he put down the poisoned oats. But he didn’t scatter these; he placed them carefully in little piles at each corner of the rick.

  ‘You got a dog?’ he asked when he came back across the road on the third day after putting down the poison.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now if you want to see your dog die an ‘orrible twistin’ death, all you got to do is let him in that gate sometime.’

  ‘We’ll take care,’ Claud told him. ‘Don’t you worry about that.’

  The next day he returned once more, this time to collect the dead.

  ‘You got an old sack?’ he asked. ‘Most likely we goin’ to need a sack to put ‘em in.’

  He was puffed up and important now, the black eyes gleaming with pride. He was about to display the sensational results of his craft to the audience.

  Claud fetched a sack and the three of us walked across the road, the ratman leading. Claud and I leaned over the gate, watching. The ratman prowled around the hayrick, bending over to inspect his little piles of poison.

  ‘Somethin’ wrong here,’ he muttered. His voice was soft and angry.

  He ambled over to another pile and got down on his knees to examine it closely.

  ‘Somethin’ bloody wrong here.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  He didn’t answer, but it was clear that the rats hadn’t touched his bait.

  ‘These are very clever rats here,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly what I told him, Gordon. These aren’t just no ordinary kind of rats you’re dealing with here.’

  The ratman walked over to the gate. He was very annoyed and showed it on his face and around the nose and by the way the two yellow teeth were pressing down into the skin of his lower lip. ‘Don’t give me that crap,’ he said, looking at me. ‘There’s nothin’ wrong with these rats except somebody’s feedin’ ’em. They got somethin’ juicy to eat somewhere and plenty of it. There’s no rats in the world’ll turn down oats unless their bellies is full to burstin’.’

  ‘They’re clever,’ Claud said.

  The man turned away, disgusted. He knelt down again and began to scoop up the poisoned oats with a small shovel, tipping them carefully back into the tin. When he had done, all three of us walked back across the road.

  The ratman stood near the petrol-pumps, a rather sorry, humble ratman now whose face was beginning to take on a brooding aspect. He had withdrawn into himself and was brooding in silence over his failure, the eyes veiled and wicked, the little tongue darting out to one side of the two yellow teeth, keeping the lips moist. It appeared to be essential that the lips should be kept moist. He looked up at me, a quick surreptitious glance, then over at Claud. His nose-end twitched, sniffing the air. He raised himself up and down a few times on his toes, swaying gently, and in a voice soft and secretive, he said: ‘Want to see somethin’?’ He was obviously trying to retrieve his reputation.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Want to see somethin’ amazin’?’ As he said this he put his right hand into the deep poacher’s pocket of his jacket and brought out a large live rat clasped tight between his fingers.

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘Ah! That’s it, y’see!’ He was crouching slightly now and craning his neck forward and leering at us and holding this enormous brown rat in his hands, one finger and thumb making a tight circle around the creature’s neck, clamping its head rigid so it couldn’t turn and bite.

  ‘D’you usually carry rats around in your pockets?’

  ‘Always got a rat or two about me somewhere.’

  With that he put his free hand into the other pocket and produced a small white ferret.

  ‘Ferret,’ he said, holding it up by the neck.

  The ferret seemed to know him and stayed still in his grasp.

  ‘There’s nothin’ll kill a rat quicker’n a ferret. And there’s nothin’ a rat’s more frightened of either.’

  He brought his hands close together in front of him so that the ferret’s nose was within six inches of the rat’s face. The pink beady eyes of the ferret stared at the rat. The rat struggled, trying to edge away from the killer.

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Watch!’

  His khaki shirt was open at the neck and he lifted the rat and slipped it down inside his shirt, next to his skin. As soon as his hand was free, he unbuttoned his jacket at the front so that the audience could see the bulge the body of the rat made under his shirt. His belt prevented it from going down lower than his waist.

  Then he slipped the ferret in after the rat.

  Immediately there was a great commotion inside the shirt. It appeared that the rat was running around the man’s body, being chased by the ferret. Six or seven times they went around, the small bulge chasing the larger one, gaining on it slightly each circuit and drawing

  closer and closer until at last the two bulges seemed to come together and there was a scuffle and a series of shrill shrieks.

  Throughout this performance the ratman had stood absolutely still with legs apart, arms hanging loosely, the dark eyes resting on Claud’s face. Now he reached one hand down into his shirt and pulled out the ferret; with the other he took out the dead rat. There were traces of blood around the white muzzle of the ferret.

  ‘Not sure I liked that very much.’

  ‘You never seen anythin’ like it before, I’ll bet you that.’

  ‘Can’t really say I have.’

  ‘Like as not you’ll get yourself a nasty little nip in the guts one of these days.’ Claud told him. But he was clearly impressed, and the ratman was becoming cocky again.

  ‘Want to see somethin’ far more amazin’n that?’ he asked. ‘You want to see somethin’ you’d never even believe unless you seen it with your own eyes?’

  ‘Well?’

  We were standing in the driveway out in front of the pumps and it was one of those pleasant warm November mornings. Two cars pulled in for petrol, one right after the other, and Claud went over and gave them what they wanted.

  ‘You want to see?’ the ratman asked.

  I glanced at Claud, slightly apprehensive. ‘Yes,’ Claud said. ‘Come on then, let’s see.’

  The ratman slipped the dead rat back into one pocket, the ferret into the other. Then he reached down into his knapsack and produced – if you please – a second live rat.

  ‘Good Christ!’ Claud said.

  ‘Always got one or two rats about me somewhere,’ the man announced calmly. ‘You got to know rats on this job and if you want to know ‘em you got to have ’em round you. This is a sewer rat, this is. An old sewer rat, clever as buggery. See him watchin’ me all the time, wonderin’ what I’m goin’ to do? See him?’

  ‘Very unpleasant.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked. I had a feeling I was going to like this one even less than the last.

  ‘Fetch me a piece of string.’

  Claud fetched him a piece of string.

  With his left hand, the man looped the string around one of the rat’s hind legs. The rat struggled, trying to turn its head to see what was going on, but he held it tight around the neck with finger and thumb.

  ‘Now!’ he said, looking about him. ‘You got a table inside?’

  ‘We don’t want the rat inside the house,’ I said.

  ‘Well – I need a table. Or somethin’ flat like a table.’

  ‘What about the bonnet of that car?’ Claud said.

  We walked over to the car and the man put the old sewer rat on the bonnet. He attached the string to the windscreen wip
er so that the rat was now tethered.

  At first it crouched, unmoving and suspicious, a big-bodied grey rat with bright black eyes and a scaly tail that lay in a long curl upon the car’s bonnet. It was looking away from the ratman, but watching him sideways to see what he was going to do. The man stepped back a few paces and immediately the rat relaxed. It sat up on its haunches and began to lick the grey fur on its chest. Then it scratched its muzzle with both front paws. It seemed quite unconcerned about the three men standing nearby.

  ‘Now – how about a little bet?’ the ratman asked.

  ‘We don’t bet,’ I said.

  ‘Just for fun. It’s more fun if you bet.’

  ‘What d’you want to bet on?’

  ‘I’ll bet you I can kill that rat without usin’ my hands. I’ll put my hands in my pockets and not use ’em.’

  ‘You’ll kick it with your feet,’ Claud said.

  It was apparent that the ratman was out to earn some money. I looked at the rat that was going to be killed and began to feel slightly sick, not so much because it was going to be killed but because it was going to be killed in a special way, with a considerable degree of relish.

  ‘No,’ the ratman said. ‘No feet.’

  ‘Nor arms?’ Claud asked.

  ‘Nor arms. Nor legs, nor hands neither.’

  ‘You’ll sit on it.’

  ‘No. No squashin’.’

  ‘Let’s see you do it.’

  ‘You bet me first. Bet me a quid.’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody daft,’ Claud said. ‘Why should we give you a quid?’

  ‘What’ll you bet?’

  ‘Nothin’.’

  ‘All right. Then it’s no go.’

  He made as if to untie the string from the windshield wiper.

  ‘I’ll bet you a shilling,’ Claud told him. The sick gastric sensation in my stomach was increasing, but there was an awful magnetism about this business and I found myself quite unable to walk away or even move.

  ‘You too?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ the ratman asked.

  ‘I just don’t want to bet you, that’s all.’

  ‘So you want me to do this for a lousy shillin’?’

  ‘I don’t want you to do it.’