I got up, thinking, ‘Tomorrow I shall wear my new sandals and I shall run home from school.’ I was suddenly happy. They were whispering, their heads close together, Rhoda stroking the bicycle pump. When I reached the door I opened it quickly, pulled it behind me quickly, and ran as fast as I could home. I would try on my sandals again if my mother would let me. It was something to look forward to. But I couldn’t do anything about the blot. To rub it out would leave a worse mark. I would just have to take what was coming to me. I couldn’t do anything at all about it.
The Old Woman and the Rat
When the old woman went into the barn she saw the rat and she also saw the feathers of the little yellow chicken among which the rat was sitting. It was a large grey rat and its whiskers quivered. She knew that there was no way out for it but past her, for there was a hole between the door and the wall and she knew that this was the place where the rat had entered. She regretted that she had not filled this up before. It seemed that the rat was mocking her but certainly it knew that she was present. And it also knew that the chickens had belonged to her, those beautiful little chickens of bright yellow which she had nursed so carefully and which had seemed so much the sign of a new spring. The day was Easter Friday.
As she gazed at the rat she felt a ladder of distaste shudder up her spine climbed by many rats, but she stood where she was and then bent down slowly to pick up a plank of wood with nails at one end of it. Her back ached as she bent. The barn itself was large, spacious and clean with a stone floor. At the far end were the remains of the chickens and the hens. Above were the rafters on which hung an old mouldy saddle which her father had once had for the horses. It hung its wings on both sides of the rafter. She thought, and then quite deliberately she stuffed it, mouldy and breaking as it was, into the hole which the rat had entered by. All this while the rat watched her with bright intelligent eyes as if it knew perfectly well what she was up to. The arena was prepared, the large clean spacious arena. She made her way rather fearfully towards the rat. She felt rather unsteady but angry. After all, she was quite old and she had arthritis in her hands and she had varicose veins in her legs. The rat certainly was fitter than her, more agile, more swift. She advanced on the rat steadily with her plank, the nailed end foremost. It waited, almost contemptuously. She went up to it and thrust the plank at it. It moved rapidly away and crouched, looking at her, its long rat tail behind it, its whiskers quivering, its bright eyes moving hither and thither. Where have you been? she thought. Before the chickens, where have you been? She thought of her husband, dead in the cemetery, and closed her eyes. She deliberately made visions of flowers appear.
She thought. Then slowly she went over to a big disused table which she had put in the barn many years before and propped it up on end, to cut off part of the space. But that was useless for the rat immediatly climbed up to its top and stood there slightly swaying and half smiling. For the first time as she looked up at it she thought that it might leap down at her from above and this frightened her. She was also frightened that her fear might be communicated to the rat which might then attack her. She backed away from the rat slowly, thinking. What a terrible thing to have this battle when she could be in church, but then some things were more important even than church. She backed towards the door still holding the short nailed plank ahead of her. She pulled the door slowly behind her and backed out, shutting the door quickly. She was determined that the rat would not escape. She almost felt the rat’s claws in her back as she turned away but she knew that it was still there in the barn with the remains of its feast, its obscene supper. She went into the house and got a box of matches. Then she went round the side of the house in the great calm of the morning and got a lot of straw and grass, all of which was dry because of the blue cloudless weather. She felt happy now that she had something to do. But clutching her masses of grass and straw and with the box of matches in the pocket of her apron she was slightly frightened entering the bare arena again. Still it was better to be bare than not, for one knew where one was then. She felt in her mouth the tiny fragile bones of the chickens, and the taste of the blood. She slowly opened the door and edged in with all that grass and straw. The rat stayed where it was, licking its body. She threw the straw and the grass as far towards it as she could and then rapidly picked up the plank with the nails again, her back vibrating with terror. The rat watched her, more uneasily now, as if wondering what she was up to. She lit the match nervously and threw the lighted flame among the dry straw and the grass. The fire ran along it boiling like illuminated rats. The rat backed away into its corner, snarling. Smoke began to rise and billow round it, for there must have been some dampness at the centre of the straw somewhere. She backed towards the door. The rat rushed out through the smoke towards her, its teeth drawn back. Behind the rat she saw the flames rising and the smoke. It seemed to have emerged out of, been generated by, the fire. The rat made for the place where she had stuffed the remains of the broken winged saddle. As it did so she swiped at it with the nailed plank. It squirmed away, half hit. It turned and faced her snarling as if it knew that she was the only obstacle to its escape. Its face looked incredibly fierce and evil as if all the desire for life had been concentrated there. It wished to live at all costs. For a moment she was terrified at what she had done, at the smoking arena she was in. But she knew that the stone floor would prevent the fire from spreading. The rat launched itself at her, knowing that she was the enemy, that there was no going back through the smoke. She swung the nailed plank as its face, snarling and distorted, looked towards her, and she felt it hit the rat, felt the rat’s claws scrabbling against it as if it wanted to get purchase on it, to grip it and climb towards her. She swung the plank against the floor and banged and banged. The rat’s head and body squelched against the stone floor of the barn which had once been filled with sacks of corn. She banged and banged till the shudders left her back and breast and legs. She banged it so that it was a flat grey mess on the floor. Then after a while flushed and panting she opened the door on the wide day. She threw the plank as far away as she could into the undergrowth. There were bits of rat attached to it. No doubt the birds of the air would finish it off. She forced herself to get a spade to detach the smashed body from the floor. She threw the mashed carcass from the spade into the bushes as well and then fetched pail after pail of water which she splashed over the place where the body had been. She cleaned and cleaned till there was not even the shadow of the rat left. When the straw had finally burned itself out she took that away as well, and the remains of the chicken and the hens which had themselves got burnt. She spent a long time cleaning the barn, making it bright as new. When she had finished she went into the house and made herself strong tea. It was too late for church now. Still she could go there in the evening. Meanwhile she could sleep for a while by the window, for she felt empty and victorious. As she passed her mirror she saw that her face looked gaunt and fulfilled, and she hadn’t felt so light for a long time.
The Delicate Threads
I am ten years old but I am supposed to be very intelligent. I heard my father say that one night to my mother but he didn’t tell me. It was something to do with the IQ test he gave me out of a blue book one Sunday afternoon when it was raining and there was nothing much to do. As a matter of fact there is little to do here anyway. Perhaps that was why my father gave me my funny name. I know that he reads a lot and sleeps a lot as well. Still a doctor has plenty of time on his hands in the village: no one ever dies here. They just rot away.
I spend most of my time thinking up new ideas. I am not an inventor or anything like that: I’m what you might call an author. But one of these days I’ll go and find what’s in the cave. My father says that a village is bound together by a lot of fine threads and that if you pull on one you disturb the whole village. He probably got that out of one of his sloppy books. I hardly ever read and that puzzles him. But the thing is that I see the end of the story almost from the very first page. I have th
is sixth sense, I suppose you might call it. It’s the same with TV, I can’t be bothered much with it either. All the other boys were on about Colditz. I thought it was daft, all these silly people making up silly plans which never came to anything, and they were supposed to be grown up men. Even my father liked Colditz.
I must tell you about one incident of which I’m very proud, just to show you the kind of thing that I can do. The postman in our village is a great gossip. He gets up at six in the morning and he sets off on his old bicycle, carrying his bag, and waving cheerfully to anyone who is up at that time. He’s a bit of a fool actually. He has no business to go broadcasting the things he does, such as that Mrs Moss has been ordering clothes again without telling her husband. He can tell from the mail order catalogue, you see. I sometimes think that he also opens all the letters. How else could he have known that Mrs Murray got a tax refund? Yet he told various people that.
But the person he told our family about, when he was leaning against the gatepost one fine summer morning, and the sun sparkled off his bicycle, was young Mrs Ross. He told us that she got a letter regularly in a man’s handwriting from Essex (where she had been working before she got married) but that as her husband was away at work before he, the postman, got to the house, he never saw the letters. Each letter was always addressed to Mrs James Ross, and he often wondered what James would do if he knew what was going on behind his back. As a matter of fact I myself think James Ross is a bit of a twit. Anyone who can spend his time as a shepherd must be that. All these stupid sheep he looks at all day. Also he chased me away once from his hen house though I had no intention of stealing the eggs. All I wanted was to look at them. Anyway the postman never noticed me standing there. I thought about his story for a long time. I brood a lot especially in the attic and I look down through the skylight window on the houses of the village. It gives me a feeling of power, to watch all these clods working at their silly jobs. What a life! I’ll soon be out of here when I get older. I’m fed up of the place. I’ve got a lot of mirrors in the attic and sometimes I play with my little theatre and make masks for myself.
But anyway one day when the postman came to the house again I stopped him and asked him if he would like a cup of tea. I told him my mother had invited him in and as she is quite good-looking he was flattered. I had arranged this with my mother before, saying that I wanted to have a look at his bicycle as I wished to buy one. She was agreeable to this though she couldn’t see why I couldn’t just ask him about the bicycle when he was there himself. But I said I was too shy. So then she said she’d ask him but I said no, he would tell everybody and I wanted it to be a secret. Anyway while he was in the house I searched among the letters in the bag and found one from Essex addressed to Mrs James Ross. I stroked out the ‘s’ of ‘Mrs’ with a pen and returned it to the bag just in time as the old fool came round the corner looking very pleased with himself.
Now I knew the mind of the postman well. I knew that he had his suspicions about the letter and I also knew that his job bored him, cycling round the village day after day and waving good morning, and bringing letters to people when he himself got none. When he was very young he had wanted to be an engineer and even yet he was good at repairing things. So I knew that he felt bitter. You could tell that by the way he smiled at people when he was talking to them but frowned immediately they turned away from him. As I am only ten, people don’t take any notice of me, so I am allowed to see things like that. Well, I considered that he would want to find out once and for all what was going on and that he would take the letter not to James’s wife but to James himself (he might not be able to imagine how or why the ‘s’ had been stroked out but he would take advantage of it). If the wife later said anything to him, then he was in the clear. And that is exactly what he did. I like having this power over people, making them do things that deep down they themselves want to do. The result was that the husband gave his wife the most awful thumping and the postman sang most gloriously at church on Sunday believing that what he had done was, in the sight of God, morally reasonable. That was one of my most interesting enterprises.
The other one I wish to tell you about since it gave me complete control where I most wanted it was the following. One hallowe’en night I asked my father if I could dress up as a guiser and go out and collect apples and oranges, which he agreed to. My father really is a very pleasant man on the whole and treats me with much dignity and sensitivity. But then everyone does this if they can keep you quiet. It’s all a matter of trading, as with stamps. Anyway I dressed up as a man from the classics whose name was Agamemnon. I have read a little, you know, it’s just that sometimes I get bored and I have a reason to be interested in the Greek stuff as I will tell you later (all the best stories have surprise endings and I’m saving one for you). I knew that he had been on an expedition to Troy and had a lot of trouble from Achilles, the bloke with the weak heel. I like him quite a lot. I saw a picture once of Achilles stabbing Hector while his round shield was in the centre of the picture like a wheel. I liked that. You call that symbolism. My father acts surprised when I tell him these new words and he sometimes looks at me in a horrified manner.
In any case I dressed up as this wet Greek and set off to all the houses. It was the night that my father was directing the local play and it was lucky it was that night since he usually came home very late, very mellow and fulfilled. That sort of thing gave him a kick. Actually his plays are a load of rubbish and so are the actors and actresses. Most of them work in shops and I suppose it’s a change from banging away at the till, but even I realise that they’re very poor actors.
Well, at about ten o’clock I arrived at this house where Mr Dewhurst stays. He’s a stranger who came into the village about six months ago and he’s got a big blue Jaguar and a lot of money. He’s built himself a swimming pool at this huge house and they say that he’s something to do with films. He’s a big fellow with a moustache and when he goes shopping he wears a hunting jacket and a tweed cap and he carries a cane. He looks in actual fact a bit of a drip though some people say that he’s very dangerous to the local women, especially those who fancy themselves as actresses and see themselves in Hollywood. He doesn’t seem to be married and he throws a lot of parties. Once I did some bobs-a-job for him since I amuse myself by belonging to a Scout Club, and one of the jobs he gave me was to clean out the dining room. It was full of ashtrays which were crammed with bits of cigars and cigarettes and there were lots of glasses lying about the floor. He gave me a pound for cleaning up that lot. I told my mother about it and she phoned up and thanked him.
Anyway it was a very glittering night and there were lots of stars in the sky and I was walking along the road as Agamemnon. His house is in a wood and there’s a path up to it. I could hear animals rustling among the undergrowth but apart from that there was a deep silence. There were however lights on in the house which I had cased pretty thoroughly when I was doing my bob-a-job. I didn’t go to the front door at all. I went for the light ladder in the woodshed where I had seen it before and set it up against the window. It was very quiet except that now and again I could hear a woman’s laughter. I set the ladder slowly and carefully against the wall and climbed in through the window. I had noticed that he was a fresh air fiend when I was up before and that nearly all the windows were open. Anyway, not to be too rural and boring with my story, I climbed in (I have actually a very good head for heights) and crawled slowly along the corridor till I came to the room from which I could hear the laughter coming. I stood up then and very quickly pushed the door open. To this day I cannot forget that scene. He was on top of my mother and as he turned round I could see that he wasn’t wearing his pants but that they were on the chair beside the bed. The expression on his face was quite indescribable. I couldn’t begin to tell you about it. Perhaps if I had brought a camera . . . The tableau (another word I found recently) was frozen. There I was dressed as Agamemnon and there were the two of them caught in the act.
; My mother screamed, a high scream that went on and on. She of course knew of my disguise and she told him who I was before he could belt me out of the room and the window. In any case he offered me all sorts of money which I refused. I was really very dignified, asking him what he thought I was, did he think that I would corrupt myself in that cheap manner, etc. etc. I must say that he seemed very confused and that his eyes gradually glazed over. I have found that this happens often when older people have any real dealings with me. I had of course succeeded in getting my mother into my power which had been my aim from the start. There is nothing that she will now refuse me, nothing at all.
But I’ll tell you something. Where I’m going to now is the cave. I want to test out my father’s words about the threads which bind the village together and which vibrate all the time according to him. What I shall find in the cave I don’t know but I’m sure it must be something horrible, some terrible stinking monster which gnaws and sleeps and belches, some being such as the world has never seen in the daytime. I have had this feeling in my bones for a long time, as if it was my destiny to find this monster and see what it has to say for itself. Not that I want to fight it really. I shall make use of it if I can, but I do know that it is waiting there in the darkness. It won’t suspect a ten year old boy of trickery or cunning or destructiveness, surely. Like all monsters it will probably be stupid. Like all people, really. And in any case the victory is predestined. After all, my father didn’t name me Theseus for nothing.
The Red Door Page 44