by Beth Madden
*
It was still dark outside the tiny window above the toilet when he woke, hours later. Yawning and blinking bemusedly, the rat slowly remembered where he was and clambered out of the tub, wrapping himself in his towel. He dried what hadn’t trickled from his skin as he slept, and carefully wiped his feet to ensure he wouldn’t drip a single drop on the carpet. Opening the bathroom door a crack, the rat peeped through. The Link television still blared. The Father had barely moved.
Slipping like a fugitive shadow, the rat dressed in his fresh clothes, then approached the squat, square fridge with his empty bag. He opened it only halfway, trying to keep the bright light it encased from striking the Father’s face.
Stealing anxious glances over his shoulder as he raided, the little rat emptied the fridge, filling his bag with nuts, cheese, salami, vegetable sticks, rice cakes, and bottles of water, soft drink, and beer. Bag full and heavy, he pulled it over his shoulders and crept from the room, along the corridor, and down the creaking stairs. He sneaked out of the inn, and into the car park.
The rat couldn’t remember where the Father had parked, but it didn’t take him long to spot the long, sloping sedan—it shone vibrant blue in the gritty neon sign when every other vehicle was heavy under years of dust. Sliding open the protective panel by the driver’s doorhandle to reveal a little screen, the rat pressed his index finger against it and drew a pattern, connecting invisible dots on an eight-by-eight matrix. He’d long ago learned to lock and unlock the sedan by watching and imitating the Father. The rat sometimes hid in there at night when the Father raged, either on his phone or face-to-face, livid, with a quailing accomplice.
A quiet snick told him that, as always, the car had responded to his touch. That reassured him, and the rat forgot to think fearfully of the Father, asleep somewhere above him, as he trotted around the back of the sedan. He tugged and pulled the boot open, shoving the door up high. It balanced on an angle above him.
Below him lay five girls, crushed inside the boot.
Two were young women with thin, worn faces. Two were slight teenagers, and one was a small girl with long black curls splayed across hers and her neighbours’ faces. The freckled teenager with a somewhat squashed, crooked nose came awake as the sedan bounced ever so slightly, the rat climbing up and sitting on the edge of the car.
‘He’s here!’ she mouthed, voice barely more than a breath.
All of their tongues had been bound since they’d been taken, targeted and lured to their kidnapper’s door. But the man’s spell-work was only rudimentary. He hadn’t been able to seal away their voices completely. It was enough to keep anyone more than a metre distant totally deaf to their cries, but her fellow captives stirred at her near-silent words.
The teenager reached through a small gap in the strong metal lattice that held them prisoner. The rat reached down and took her hand, interlocking fingers in greeting and whispering hoarsely. ‘Hi, Mari.’
‘Thank you,’ whispered the women as the rat began to empty his pack of food, threading packets and squashing rice cakes through the gaps. The cakes compressed, deforming, before springing back to their original puffy shapes on the other side of the lattice. ‘Thank you. You’re such a good boy. Such a brave boy.’
The half-starved women moved with difficulty to take what the rat passed them and stuff it in their mouths, peeling and popping open packaging as best they could. ‘It won’t fit,’ the rat murmured, trying to push a bottle through the cage. Only the neck passed through.
‘Try to pour it, dear one,’ the eldest woman breathed, boosting the little girl up, who positioned her mouth close to a gap. Nodding obediently, the rat tried to remove the stiff cap from a brown bottle. ‘Not that one,’ she added hastily, recognising the beer brand on the label. ‘Do you have any water? That’s it,’ she smiled weakly as he pulled out a clear bottle and held it up for validation.
The rat unscrewed the cap with ease and held the spout carefully over the gap. Slowly, he tipped it up. Clear liquid poured over the girl’s livid red, chapped lips. She lapped and swallowed eagerly, moistening her deprived throat. One at a time, the rat helped the five women drink, emptying all four water bottles he’d taken.
‘We can’t let his father see any of this,’ Mari muttered, scrunching up her empty cheese wrapper. The eldest women got the rat’s attention as he drank deeply, the company of the lovely women giving him courage to drink orange fizz when it had been denied him.
‘Can we pass you our rubbish? We can’t make a mess, can we?’
The rat nodded and shook his head in ordered response, and took all of the empty packages back.
‘Don’t throw them away in your room,’ she warned as he zipped the rubbish into his bag. ‘See if there’s a bin nearby on the street.’
‘Wait! Not yet!’ Mari’s fellow teenager called as loudly as she could—a feeble croak—as the rat began to scramble off the car. ‘Don’t go! Can you let us out? Please try!’
‘Please,’ the little girl whispered, gazing up at the younger boy with wide eyes ringed by aging yellow bruises. The rat gazed back, terrified.
‘Buddai … I … can’t …’
The girl’s pleading eyes evoked silent screams in his mind, recalling with fright weeks before when he’d been found with his hands on the lock of the prison under the Father’s bedroom floor. The Father had dragged little Ami out, her mouth stretched wide with whispers of cries, thin and ghostly.
You did this! You hurt her! You made her cry!
‘Can you find someone?’ the woman with jewel-bright eyes tried to offer an alternative as the rat began to cry plaintively, strangling his fresh sleeves. ‘Lead them here?’
The rat shook his head hard, tears flying from his cheeks in horizontal arcs.
‘Make him cry louder, someone might hear him,’ the other teenager suggested desperately.
‘But what if his father comes first?’
They’d all seen what the man would do to his son if he was caught.
Mari and the eldest woman tried to make their frightened whispers soothing. ‘Shush, dear one. You’re our brave boy. Don’t cry … stay here with us a while …’
‘That way, at least someone might see the boot open,’ the jewel-eyed woman nodded as the rat clambered back up, reaching down for Mari and the eldest woman’s hands through the cage, clutching them as he sniffed and swallowed. ‘Someone could still come …’
‘Come on, dear one,’ the eldest woman cajoled as the rat gave an almighty sniff and squashed the fleshy triangle tipping his rigidly straight nose between his hands, plugging his runny nostrils. ‘What if Mari showed you the coloured lights? Would you like that?’
‘What?’ The rat removed his hands, letting his nose run freely, and leaned in close to the cage, straining his ears and eyes locked on her moving lips.
‘Would you like Mari to show you the coloured lights?’ the eldest woman repeated slowly and patiently, smiling kindly through the bars. The rat nodded, remembering the tissues that the childcare house minders insisted they all carry, and using one distractedly to see to his nose.
‘Are you up to it, Mari?’ the other teenager questioned in Mari’s ear. She nodded, tossing her head in a moment of something almost like arrogance.
‘A few coloured lights? Nothing but play. I’ve done more in my sleep.’
‘Not when you’ve been imprisoned with barely a crust for seven weeks straight, you haven’t.’
Mari scowled, but the jewel-eyed woman looked mildly surprised. ‘Seven weeks? Are you sure, Saia?’
‘I was first,’ Saia replied glumly, shifting as best she could to address the jewel-eyed woman, ‘and it’s been at least that, I’m sure. I would ask him,’ she angled her chin towards the rat, who was busy stuffing a soggy tissue in his pocket and pulling out a fresh one, ‘but I don’t think he could even tell us what day it is.’
Mari stuck her fingers through the bars and twirled, pulling a tiny sphere of light into being and bounci
ng it around for the rat’s enjoyment. He leaned in close, nose only a hand’s breadth away, and Mari made the light spin like an electric top as she tossed it between her fingertips. She added a second, then a third, and when she started tinting them so they flashed rainbow colours the rat stopped crying altogether, giggling as she began to flick the spheres skyward, higher and higher into the air, juggling. Laughing, he tried to catch them, but every time he managed to touch a sphere it would break apart and shatter in a spray of light, like a splash of water.
The tiny spheres of light suddenly dissolved and Mari retracted her fingers, a moan startled from her as a vast shadow fell over the caged women and their little rat.
‘Aww,’ the rat sighed in reluctant acceptance. The fun was over.
Powerful arms seized him around the middle and swept the rat off the car. Not yet comprehending that he’d been found out, it was with almost bemusement that he found himself thrown to the stony ground.
Dazed, the rat dimly heard the boot slam shut above him. Then, a thick forearm was shoved against his throat, pinning him to the bitumen. Gasping as his windpipe was constricted, the rat at last recognised the Father, and cowered as his tiny form vanished in the man’s looming shade.
‘I’ll deal with you properly when we get back to Daini. But if you come near them again,’ the Father threatened, digging his arm into the rat’s neck, choking him, ‘if you say a word, breathe a single syllable where I can hear it, I’ll make you regret your sow of a mother being such a filthy slut. Got it?’
The rat tried to nod, but his head barely dipped, straining to breathe beneath the Father’s crushing weight. The suffocating rat’s instincts began to overcome his fear, and he started to struggle, slapping at the Father’s arm.
‘You know what we did to her?’ the Father snarled vindictively, and the rat’s scuffling almost stilled when the man began to grin, young blood and bone chilled ice-cold. ‘Your mother? We fried her. Can’t even yank up her skirt without say-so, anymore. Wouldn’t know me from a hole in the wall, thank the Gods. She wouldn’t know you, either,’ the Father added nastily, leaning into the rat’s throat with his blunt arm, making him blub like a fish cast ashore to be smothered by air. ‘And neither will they.’
The Father thumped the side of the sedan with his free hand. ‘We’re going to fry every one of them.’
‘No!’ the rat choked shrilly, battering at the Father’s restraining arm with renewed vigour, kicking his legs and throwing his body forward. ‘No! Don’t fry them! Don’t! Saia! Mari! Etta, Jen, Ami! Mari! Please don’t cook them! Don’t eat them!’
The Father’s grin tore his jaw from his nose. ‘That’s right, we’re going to cook them. We’re going to cook them and serve them to their new masters to gobble up.’
‘NO! DON’T EAT THEM! MARI!’
‘Shut it.’
The Father hit him hard in the mouth, knocking out the same front tooth that had tingled for so long that morning. The rat’s shrieks stilled, feeling oozing blood trickle into his injured oral cavity with captivated horror.
The Father dragged the rat up and threw him over his shoulder, carting him back upstairs. Unceremoniously, the Father dropped him in an armchair.
‘Move once before I say so,’ the Father said slowly, unpleasantly over-articulating every word, ‘and I’ll eat you, too. Homemade rat stew, how does that sound?’
The rat spent the next five-and-a-half hours huddled in sleepless terror in the overstuffed armchair, haunted by waking nightmares of giant spitting cauldrons, slowly rotating spits over flame, barbeque grills, and massive, roasting ovens.