1

Is the mattress rotten? Is that trickling sometimes rushing water I can hear the ancient River Effra making its way north, intermingled with the singing from the gospel choir behind the business centre, musical stream, bones and litter and flushed unflushables, beneath this damp basement? Could I get down there? Could I float on my back under the pavements, under the houses, alongside the sewers and slosh out into the Thames by MI6 like a great white turd? Like a corpse? Is there a chance the water could be clean? Crystal clear drinkable and nice for a subterranean swim? Is it encased in pipes? Are there bends in the pipes? Would I get wedged? Did Zofia break up with me because this mattress is disgusting? Am I destined to just lie here thinking stupid thoughts forever and ever, so what? A boring yawning nothing from a dead country in a dead time on a dead planet, or am I being melodramatic?

2

Is my anxiety about my break up with Zofia the reason why I’m having the teeth dream, night after night, can’t spit them out, like gravel filling up my mouth, blood-wet dice-like pebbles, gargling on them, crunkling, presumably meaning something? A fear of death? Lung cancer? Or do I just need to see a dentist? Do dentists enjoy their job? What the hell is wrong with them? Will I sleep better on my other side? If I roll over will I find that sweet spot with my hip in the gap between springs? Will my landlord answer my calls if I phone from a different number? Could I pretend to be a health-and-safety mattress inspector? Is there any point tugging on this one small thread of my great tapestry of minor disappointments and discomforts? What have I ever done to deserve comfort? What kind of watered down Sunday school nonsense makes me think my landlord being a grubby criminal has anything to do with my shame or ambition, success or self-obsession, guilt or misery, or a good night’s sleep? Did Christianity poison me at an early age, did it numb me, hand in hand with zombie capitalism, beyond repair?

3

Is that a rat clinging to the lip of my water glass?

Is that a rat clinging to the lip of my water glass?

Is that a rat clinging to the lip of my water glass?

Is that a fucking massive brown rat, drinking from my pint glass, inches from my face?

How big is that rat? Are rats really that big? Am I going to shit my pants?

Is this the most frightened and appalled and revolted I have ever been in my 21 years of life? Is this a new low? Am I more frightened now than when I thought the elves were in my sheets licking my toe jam? Am I hallucinating? Could there be acid in the weed I’m smoking? Is that why I did that chemical-tasting sicky burp? Is the rat a decoy? Why would my flatmate put a fake rat on my water glass? Why, if it’s fake, are its little whiskers twitching? Is it sipping? Has this rat come before, to rehydrate? Why is it so calm? Why isn’t it dashing, scrabbling, darting away? Why am I not running out of the bedroom screaming? Have I died? Is this sleep paralysis? Why is its tail so thick and ropey, whippy, noose-tough, ribbed, flesh-haired, leg-like, living, pulsing; am I going to be sick? Why am I thinking like this, like I’m in a hollow box, like a rat word boom box made of rat tail webbed matted panic attack; is rat saliva clear? Does the rat live here? Is this the rat’s bedroom? Does it live in this disgusting mattress sleeping in the dank coils beneath me, breathing the same air? Is the rat staying so still because he’s tickled pink that the sleeping human has finally noticed him after all these months of nightly refreshment?

4

Will baby rats emerge – party hard bastards – for their nightly drink, or to protect their dad? For this is surely a male rat, god help me if it is a female rat, I couldn’t handle that, the idea of a rat mother, doing her best for her rat babies while I hate her, my hate upon her like a veil, what on earth, shame on me, how does a person tell a female rat from a male? Does he have a little rat dick? Would a female have little rat teats, for feeding? Or a visible rat vagina? Who was it that showed me a picture of a rat king, abominable thing, cluster-hell, mutant monstrous nightmare lord of the underground, who showed me that? Was it my flatmate? How can I punish him? Is there a worse thing to Google image search before bed than rat kings?

5

God almighty if Zofia and I were still together, and we were in this bed shagging and the rat appeared would Zofia actually die of fright or leap off so quickly that she might snap my penis? Does a snapped penis bleed? Does Zofia miss me? Will I ever get another girlfriend as clever or interesting as Zofia? Did the rat just shake his head or am I quaking? Would it help to give him a name? Would it lessen the revulsion? Take the sting out of things with some anthropomorphising? Make things a bit less ratty and a bit more human? Gordon? What the fuck, why would I give the rat my grandad’s name? Is it because I’ve somersaulted through revulsion and I love him? Is that a little sip, sip, sip sound? Should I slam the rat and glass combo with a pillow in one smooth over-arm whack and hope to stun him? Or trap him, then jump on the pillow and glass and make a cocktail of broken glass and cut-up rat? In bare feet? Would the shards of glass penetrate the pillow?

6

Can he hear me? What the fuck is up with Gordon? What kind of rat would stay still and let this clumsy rhetorical flirtation play out? A maudlin rat, one who knows he has cancer of the rat prostate who has been to see his old friend Doctor Rat and had the little gloved rat digit slipped up his greasy rat bum while making predictable but necessary rat golf chat or how’s-the-wife chat? Taken the news like a legend rat? Tidied things up with the financial rats and the legal rats and sworn he’ll enjoy what little time he has left rat? One last daring escapade for the cheekiest rat on the block, Fantastic Mr Rat? Would I be able to kill such a legendary rat? Should I shut the empathy trap and stamp on the fucker because it’s just a rat, not a local hero, not a friend of mine or tutor in banal animism, no personality, no history, not much cerebral activity at all beyond gnawing, eating, shagging, drinking my water just because it’s water, not because he’s some flamboyant crusader rat broaching my student defences? Should I just grit my teeth and do it, because rats are vermin so I needn’t be too qualmed, if qualmed is a word? A dead rat is hardly a beautiful waste, is it? And what possible right do I, qualmless carnivore, have to worry about animal death; I am part of the great meat murder industry and don’t care so long as my jerk wings are hot and my roast lamb is tender and comes with mint sauce and my kebabs are kebabby and my steak is bloody and my turkey is dry and desperate for gravy, will I lie here thinking about food and death and myself forever and ever?

7

Have I been sipping from the same bit of rim, so to speak, sharing lip space with Gordon, tasting Gordon on the glass, exchanging fluids with Gordon, body of rat, body of man, for weeks? Am I already delirious with Weil’s disease? Would you kiss a rat if the rat had been tested and proven to be clean? Who is the weaker person here, because this rat gives absolutely no fucks whatsoever; he is merrily glugging away at my water as if the rat-human relationship has been completely redrawn and this is normal, because really is he the sly, surreptitious hugger of drains and dark corners and trash heaps rat, or is he the suave “drinks at the bar and chats with you rat”, and would he be frankly outraged to be associated with plagues, is he ashamed of his descendent the dirty rat, is he a clean, hygienic rat with whom I can share night-drinks, secrets, lifestyle anxieties, even knotty metaphysical questions, because didn’t I already know this? Who makes a better therapist than an object of horror, an emblem of impurity? Is this how I have to unlearn ideas of human superiority in nature? Is the rat staying mouth-to-water petrified for as long as the therapy requires, saying Oi, oi human, don’t look away, if you and I are to benefit from these sessions, you are going to have to see past the inherited idea of ratness, as I agree to see past your murderous hulking sapien bigness, OK?

8

Is he dead? Has the rat had a heart attack? If this rat was my Dad, and I was an estranged rat son, living miles away in a sewer, having a panic attack about some unimportant thing like a breakup, would I want the giant human to smash my dad up? Or let him be, or feed him miniature peanut-butter sandwiches? Should I make a call, if he is dying? To a vet? To his family? Is this the wife of Gordon? I have some terrible news, are you sitting comfortably? Did you know he had a weak heart? Would you like to hear the details, or will that be too upsetting? Shall I describe how he seemed to be sipping, but I realise now that perhaps he was gasping, breathing his last, singing confession or requiem into my water, into the glass I stole from the Mucky Duck, and did I imagine it or did he sigh as I lifted him gently off the rim and unbuttoned his little plaid shirt, did my fingers fumble with the tiny ratty buttons? Did I admire the quality of his little leather belt, such fine craftsmanship, threaded into each and every belt loop of his little ratty Levi’s jeans? Did I lay him down and call “CLEAR” before shocking his tiny body with my Sylvanian Family defibrillator, and did I pause before leaning down to press my big fat pink sofa of human lips against his twitching downturned mouth (teeth like little yellow whist pins) and did I smell that last dinner you cooked him on his feeble rodent breath? Pasta bake? Passata, garlic, bacon lardons, am I right? Who am I kidding? His last meal was electrical cord, greasy Cheerio behind my skirting board, am I right?

9

Shall I continue? Shall I walk you through the sad ritual of lifting his cooling body, wiping that last drop of water from his handsome jaw, or was it my saliva? Was I dribbling? Weeping? Shall I spare you the details? Shall I just tell you what you need to hear, that I stripped him, folded his clothes, wrapped him in a muslin shroud, took him to the wheelie bin and laid him gently down? Do you mind that I’m lying? Do you mind if I don’t tell you what I sang, at his funeral? Is it OK if that’s private, between Gordon and me? Gordon and I? Are you a rat grammarian? But do you need these details, for the children, for the babies, for the endless offspring Gordon scattered in the pipes and stud walls of South London like a ratty Lucien Freud? Do the children even care? Do they know him? Do they need true stories to provide a firm foundation upon which they can build an edifice of memory, the architecture of loss, for the gone Rat Daddy? Shall we collaborate, you and I, on a better end than the one I provided? If this is all made up why can’t we make up something less banal? Aren’t most meetings, books, films, albums, lives, much too long? Shall we say I lit a few candles and read a nice robust Victorian funeral poem? Or shall we spare them the sentimental bullshit and tell them he was just a rat, not an especially interesting or special rat, and he died, worse than that he died like a total fucking idiot trying to drink a human’s glass of water, he didn’t even have the cardiovascular strength to pull off a moderately dangerous hydration raid, shall we make it very clear and tell them he was a dickhead, a coward?

10

Or do the children need fortifying against the tidal wave of watered-down emotional pap they’ll have to wade through in the coming years in this fibby-fake society? Shall we tell them Nothing matters? Shall we tell them that all there is to do is die? Or would you like to leave them to figure that out for themselves? But will they? Really? Do we ever figure anything out? Or are we all just clinging to the edge of someone else’s water glass, dead or waiting to die, horrifying whoever is kind or stupid enough to wake up and watch? What do I believe in? What am I waiting for? Shall I roll out of bed, pick up this rat, and bite its head off, for a reason to live? For an experiential centrepiece in the stultifying drabness of my life? To break through the chains of accepted social behaviour? To give myself a secret? A character keystone? To give myself a shame-shored reason to keep myself to myself? Shall I bite Gordon’s head off so as to have an ever-ready excuse for not partaking better or more charismatically in the sham of contemporary human life in the weird death-drenched Western shopping mall we call life? Shit, hang on, Gordon? Where is you? Where’s the rat? ◉

Max Porter is a British novelist. His first novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers won the Sunday Times/Peter, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Europese Literatuurprijs and the BAMB Readers’ Award and has been sold in 29 territories. He is also the author of Lanny, a beguiling work set in rural England and most recently, The Death of Francis Bacon which Porter describes as his “attempt to write as painting, not about it”. Praised for his emotional depth and formal inventiveness, Porter’s works are at once expansive and intimate, communal and personal. He lives in Bath, England.