I Was a Rat! Read online

  “Now come and have your breakfast. Wrap them pieces of nightshirt around you, you can’t walk around naked, it ain’t decent.”

  Roger sat and watched Bob cut two slices of bread and prop them on the range to toast.

  “I’ll cook you an egg,” the old man said. “You like eggs?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Roger, “thank you. I like eggs a lot.”

  Bob cracked one into the frying pan, and Roger’s jaw dropped as he saw the white spitting and bubbling and the golden yolk glistening in the middle.

  “Ooh, that’s pretty!” he said. “I never seen the inside of an egg!”

  “I thought you’d ate ’em before.”

  “I ate ’em in the dark,” Roger explained.

  “What, when you was a rat?”

  “Yes. Me and my brothers and sisters, we ate ’em in the dark, yes.”

  “All right, then,” said Bob peaceably, and slid the fried egg onto a plate and buttered the toast.

  Roger could barely hold himself back, but he remembered to say “Thank you” before he put his face right down onto the plate and drew it back at once, gasping at the heat. His eyes brimming with tears, yellow yolk dripping off his mouth and nose, he turned to Bob in distress.

  “Oh, I forgot you don’t know how boys eat eggs,” the old man said. “You probably thought you was a rat still, I expect.”

  “Yes,” said Roger unsteadily, wiping at the mess with his fingers and licking them hard. “I couldn’t see the spoom, so I used me face.”

  “It’s a spoon, not a spoom. For eggs, you got to use a knife and fork. Here, do it like this, you copy me.”

  Ignoring the tears and the egg on his face, Roger tried hard to do as Bob showed him. It was much harder to eat the egg with a fork than it had been to spoon up the bread and milk, but whenever he got discouraged, Bob told him to take a bite of toast. Roger held it up in both hands and chewed it swiftly with his front teeth.

  “I like toast,” he said. “And egg.”

  “Good. Now listen. We got to find out where you come from and if there’s someone who ought to be looking after you. Because you can’t look after yourself, you’re too little. And you can’t stay here, because…because you don’t belong to us, see?”

  “I want to stay here. I don’t want to go anywhere.”

  “Well, we got to do what’s right. There’s clever folk in the City Hall, they know what’s right. We’ll go there by and by.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Roger.

  The City Hall

  The office they needed was at the top of a grand staircase and along a paneled corridor. Bob and Joan had to hold the boy’s hands, because he kept making little twitching movements as if he wanted to run away.

  “D’you want the privy again? Is that it?” said Bob, and Joan hushed him for using a rude word in an important place, but he said, “There’s times when the privy is the most important place.”

  “No,” said Roger, “I just want to see what the wood on the walls tastes like.”

  “He’s an odd one, all right,” said Joan.

  But she looked down at him fondly all the same, and he did look smart, with his brown hair brushed neatly and stuck down with water, and his uniform washed and pressed, and his vivid black eyes gazing around.

  In the office where they dealt with lost children, the three of them had to sit down while a lady filled in a form. Bob was anxious to get things right.

  “Properly speaking, we oughter gone to the Found Children Office, because this is a found child, only there ain’t one as far as we could see,” he told her. “So we come here instead.”

  “You’d better tell me the details,” said the lady.

  She took one of a dozen very sharp pencils out of a jar.

  Roger watched her hand move to the jar, but he didn’t watch it go back to the paper. As soon as he saw the pencils, he fell in love with them. His whole heart longed for them.

  So while the lady and Bob and Joan leaned across the desk talking, Roger’s hand crept off his lap and slowly, carefully over to the jar. He couldn’t help it any more than a dog can help tiptoeing round the corner to eat the cat’s food.

  Bob was puzzled by what the lady was saying, which was why he was leaning over the desk to peer at the form she was filling in.

  “No, no,” he said, “that can’t be right. He’s got to come from somewhere. Someone must be missing him.”

  “I can assure you,” she said, “our records are very thorough. There are no lost children in the city, boys or girls.”

  “But what about found children?”

  “There’s nothing we can do about found children. We deal with lost ones.”

  “Well, then,” said Bob, “I’m baffled.”

  “Have you asked him where he comes from?” the lady said.

  And they all turned to Roger.

  He looked up, pleased to be noticed but a little guilty too. The stump of the pencil was just sticking out of his mouth, and he quickly sucked it inside and pressed his lips together; but the lead had marked his mouth, and there were little flecks of red paint all round it too.

  Joan said, “Child, what have you been doing?”

  He tried to answer, but his mouth was full of pencil.

  The lady said, “That pencil was the property of the City Council! I shall have to ask you to pay for it.”

  Bob paid up. It seemed a lot of money for a pencil. Roger could see he’d done something wrong, and as soon as he’d swallowed the last of it, he said, “Sorry.”

  “That’s all very well, but you don’t mean it, you bad boy,” said Joan, “that’s the trouble.”

  The little boy was bewildered. Did he have to do something else as well as say “Sorry”? What did meaning it mean? He looked from one grownup to another, but they were all talking again.

  “He must have said something,” the lady said. “I’m trying to help you, though it’s not my job to. I’ve shown a lot of patience.”

  Roger looked for the patients, but since he didn’t know what they looked like, he supposed she meant the pencils.

  “He said he was a rat,” Bob said. “Not now; I mean, he didn’t say, ‘I am a rat,’ he said, ‘I was a rat.’ That’s all he said.”

  The lady looked at them all with distaste.

  “I’ve got plenty to do without listening to nonsense,” she said.

  “Well,” said Bob, “all right. We won’t trouble you anymore.” And he got up, as massive as a hill beside the little boy. “All I can say,” he went on, “is that you ain’t been much help. Good day to you.”

  And with Roger between them, the old couple walked out of the City Hall.

  “Ain’t I going to stay there?” said the boy.

  “No,” said old Bob.

  “Is that because I’m a bad boy?”

  “You ain’t a bad boy.”

  “But Joan said I was.”

  “She was muddled,” said Bob, frowning. “And now I’m muddled too.”

  The Orphanage

  Since it wasn’t far away, they decided to go to the orphanage, just in case. But when they stood outside it, and looked at the broken windows and the cracked brickwork and the missing tiles on the roof, and smelt the orphanage smell drifting out of it (stale cigarette smoke, boiled cabbage, and unwashed bodies were the better parts), and heard someone crying steady sobs of misery through an upstairs window, Bob and Joan looked at each other, then shook their heads.

  They didn’t need to speak. Holding Roger’s hand, they turned and walked away.

  The Police Station

  There was a blue light outside the police station and a stout sergeant on duty at the desk. Roger looked at everything: the poster about Colorado beetles, the pictures of wanted criminals, the notices about bicycle safety. Since he couldn’t read, he liked the picture of the Colorado beetles best. They looked very tasty.

  “Well?” said the duty sergeant.

  “We found a little boy last night,” said Bob.
“He don’t know where he comes from. We thought we ought to bring him here.”

  “I do know where I come from,” said Roger. “I come from down under the market. There’s a broken gutter behind the cheese stall, and we had a nest in there. I was a rat,” he added, to make it clearer for the policeman.

  The sergeant gave him a long cold look.

  “Did you know there’s such an offense as wasting police time?” he said.

  “No, he’s confused,” said Bob, anxious to explain. “That’s all it is. He probably had a bang on the head. He’d forgotten his name and all.”

  “I knows it now, though,” said the boy. “I’m Roger.”

  “Surname?” asked the sergeant.

  “My surname is…” said Roger, then worked it out. “My surname is Sur Roger,” he declared, nodding firmly. “That’s who I am, all right.”

  “And we been to City Hall,” Joan said, “but they couldn’t help, and—”

  “And you’re the only other place we could think of,” said Bob.

  “If he’s had a bang on the head,” said the sergeant, tapping a pencil on the desk, “he ought be took to the hospital.”

  “Ah, we didn’t think of that,” said Joan.

  Roger was watching the sergeant’s hand.

  “That’s a nice patient,” Roger said to him.

  “Eh?”

  “That patient you got. You been chewing the flat end. I like chewing the pointy end first.”

  The sergeant gaped, and then recovered his wits.

  “Did you notice that?” he said. “When I said hospital, he said patient. That proves it. He’s had a bang on the head. Either that or he’s an escaped lunatic. But in any case he ought to be at the hospital. We can’t take him here, we haven’t got the facilities for lunatics, and in any case he ain’t committed an offense. Yet,” he added, glaring down at Roger.

  The Hospital

  “No,” said the receptionist, “he’s not one of ours.”

  They were very busy. People with broken legs or saucepans stuck on their heads sat waiting to be dealt with; doctors in white coats rushed about listening to heartbeats or taking temperatures; nurses emptied bedpans, or bandaged cuts and grazes. It was the best place Roger had been in yet.

  “But he might have had a bang on the head!” said Joan. “Poor little boy, he thinks he was a rat!”

  “Hmm,” said the receptionist, and wrote rodent delusion on a pink slip of paper.

  “You got a lot of patients,” said Roger, looking with great interest at her desk.

  “Got to be patient here,” she said, and passed the slip to the nearest doctor.

  That puzzled Roger, but he soon forgot it. The doctor was an important-looking man with a smart black beard, and he said, “Follow me.” So Bob and Joan took Roger into the consulting room and watched anxiously as the doctor examined him.

  First he felt all round Roger’s head.

  “No cranial contusions,” said the doctor.

  Roger was fascinated by the rubber tube the doctor had round his neck, and when the doctor put the two hooks on the end into his own ears and placed the other end against Roger’s chest, he could hardly hold himself back. His mouth was watering so much that he dribbled.

  “Good appetite?” the doctor asked.

  “Very good indeed,” said Joan. “In fact—”

  “Good,” said the doctor, twiddling Roger’s knees.

  Joan thought she’d better keep quiet.

  The doctor examined Roger all over and seemed to find only a healthy little boy.

  “So what’s this rodent delusion?” he said finally.

  “Well, he says he was a rat,” said Bob. “He’s convinced of it.”

  “A rat, were you?” said the doctor. “When did you stop being a rat, then?”

  “When I turned into a boy,” said Roger.

  “Yes, I see. When was that?”

  Roger twisted his lips. He looked at Bob for guidance, but the old man couldn’t help, and neither could Joan.

  “Dunno,” the boy said finally.

  “And why did you stop being a rat?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Do you know what you are now?”

  “I’m a boy.”

  “That’s right. And you’re going to stay a boy, d’you hear?”

  “Yes,” said Roger, nodding seriously.

  “No more of this nonsense.”

  “No.”

  “Mustn’t worry your…” The doctor hesitated. He’d been about to say “parents,” but he looked at Bob and Joan and said, “granny and grandpa.”

  Joan sat up a bit sharply. Roger looked puzzled. Bob took Joan’s hand.

  “He’s no worry to us,” he said. “As long as he’s all right.”

  “He’s perfectly all right,” the doctor said. “A normal, healthy little boy.”

  “But what should we do with him?” Joan said.

  “Send him to school, of course,” said the doctor. “Now, I’m busy. Run along. Good day to you.”

  THE DAILY SCOURGE

  PALACE MAKE-OVER!

  To celebrate the royal marriage, the Palace is to be spectacularly redecorated.

  OUT go fuddy-duddy antiques and dusty old pictures.

  IN come designer furniture and a new, bright, up-to-the-minute look.

  The redecoration is being carried out by attractive blonde Sophie Trend-Butcher, 23, the brilliant young designer. The wallpaper is being hand-printed in gold.

  While the work is being carried out in the Palace, the Royal Family is staying at the Hotel Splendifico.

  THE SCOURGE SAYS:

  Yes, the redecoration is costing a fortune.

  Yes, the money is coming from you and me.

  BUT THIS IS OUR ROYAL FAMILY!

  For heaven’s sake, where is our national pride?

  We have the finest designers and craftspeople in the world—and here is a chance to show what they can really do.

  And don’t let’s forget Prince Richard and his radiant bride-to-be.

  Are they supposed to live in a museum?

  Let’s get behind the Royal Family in their attempt to bring the Palace up to date!

  School

  Since they hadn’t had any luck, Bob and Joan took the little boy back home with them. He was perfectly content to trot along holding their hands, looking this way and that, seeming for all the world as though he did belong to them.

  “Granny and grandpa,” said Joan scornfully.

  “Well, that’s not so bad,” said Bob. “He might have thought we were rats, and all.”

  “But what are we going to do with him?”

  “Blowed if I know. But I don’t want to spend another day trailing about and getting nowhere. I shall have to work late tonight, and I’m blooming tired.”

  Roger didn’t eat his bedclothes that night, though Joan thought the wooden bedposts looked a little gnawed and there was a damp splinter or two under his pillow in the morning.

  “There’s a good boy,” she said, cooking him some porridge on the range. “You eat this and I’ll take you down to the school.”

  Bob stayed at home to catch up with his cobbling. “Listen carefully and do what the teacher says,” the old man told him. “That’s the way to learn.”

  The school was a big building smelling of children. Roger liked it at once. There were boys and girls running about outside and throwing balls and fighting each other and shouting, and he thought this would be a fine place to spend a day.

  “But you’re not in fact his, er, any relation at all?” said the Head doubtfully to Joan as she stood holding Roger’s hand in front of his desk.

  “No. But we’re looking after him for the time being, and the doctor said we had to bring him to school,” she said.

  “I see,” said the Head. “Well, Roger, how old are you?”

  “Three weeks,” said Roger.

  “Don’t be silly, now. That’s not a good way to start. If you were only three weeks old, you�
��d still be a baby. How old are you? Answer me properly this time.”

  Roger shifted uneasily and looked up at Joan.

  “He’s not sure,” she said. “I think he’s lost his memory, poor lamb. He wouldn’t know a thing like that.”

  “He looks about nine,” said the Head. “He can go in Mrs. Cribbins’s class. She won’t stand any nonsense.”

  A bell rang loudly, and all the children stopped running and shouting and fighting and came inside. Roger was disappointed that the fun seemed to have stopped, but he sat where the teacher told him to, next to a boy with a runny nose.

  “Now get your pencils,” said Mrs. Cribbins, “and we’ll have some arithmetic.”

  Roger didn’t have a pencil, of course, or he’d have eaten it already. So he just watched as the other children took out theirs, and he knew he’d learned another word: arithmetic meant snack.

  But to his absolute amazement, the other children put the tasty ends of their pencils on pieces of paper and drew lines with them. Roger had no idea you could do that, and he was so surprised and delighted that he laughed out loud.

  “What’s the joke?” snapped Mrs. Cribbins. “What’s so funny? Eh?”

  “They’re making lines with their patients!” Roger said, eager to share his discovery.

  “You’re playing a dangerous game with my patience,” said Mrs. Cribbins. “Haven’t you got a pencil?”

  “No,” said Roger.

  Mrs. Cribbins couldn’t believe that any pupil would come to school so badly prepared, and thought he was being cheeky.

  “Go and stand in the corner,” she snapped.

  Roger was happy to do that. He could smile at all the other children. But she made him face the wall, and that wasn’t so interesting. And then the boy with the runny nose found a rubber band in his pocket and flicked it hard at Roger’s neck.

  Mrs. Cribbins’s back was turned, so naturally when Roger shouted and jumped and rubbed his neck, she thought he was being naughty.

  “I’m warning you,” she said, “one more piece of nonsense and you’re going to the Head.”