It had been a difficult birth. Elizabeth seemed to spend more time in hospital than she did at home during the final five months. The labour had been horrendous. Everything had conspired to make it so. There was a power-cut, the ambulance service was on strike, the midwife's car broke down on her way to the delivery. In the end, Amy had been born at home. It was a small miracle that either mother or child had survived. To top it all, as Elizabeth was lying there, in excruciating pain, with no midwife, no pain control and only the light of a candle, a rat had run across her pillow and nipped the lobe of her ear. When her husband returned from trying to get some guidance by telephone, from the maternity ward sister, he found Elizabeth in hysterics. It took all his resources of kindness and patience to calm her down and get her to control her breathing. Finally, just as the baby was born, the lights came on and a midwife arrived.

Amy was cleaned up, wrapped up and placed in her mother's arms, with father smiling on, relieved and proud. Elizabeth was exhausted but, considering all the difficulties, she came through the ordeal pretty well, physically. The psychological trauma lasted a little longer.

It was that incident with the rat. She had the greatest trouble getting anyone to believe her initially, but she did have the evidence of a bite-mark on her ear. John told her that he would make sure the house was a rat-free zone as soon as the shops opened and he could get hold of some traps. The other small matter was Amy's appearance. She was a lovely baby, perfectly formed and healthy, but covered in fine, black hair. The midwife reassured the couple that it wasn't unknown for babies to be born covered in hair and that it usually just fell out within a few weeks. She asked if they knew of other children in their families that had been born with a covering of fine hair. They didn't know about John's family. He was adopted. And Elizabeth's family were mainly blond or bald. She'd never heard that any of her relatives had started their life with a surfeit of hair.

So, that was Amy's inauspicious start in life. The dark covering of hair never did drop out. It looked quite sleek and attractive - or would have done if people had chosen to see it that way. People can be cold and cruel though. It made Elizabeth very protective towards her. John tried to encourage more independence but it was a wrench for him. Dear, affectionate little Amy with her bright eyes, sharp features and quick, graceful movements - it squeezed his heart if he heard anyone make a thoughtless or unkind remark about her hair. But she would have to learn to handle it and not allow it to diminish her.

John worked on a miniature railway that transported people up and down the seafront during the summer months. In the winter he worked alone, carrying out maintenance work on the trains and their infrastructure. He was able to do most of the work in a vast dark cavern that occupied the space under the promenade. There was only one door into it but it ran on for miles under the coast road and the prom. Amy often went with him and kept herself occupied exploring the dark recesses of the dank, echoing space. She was not supposed to go too deep into the gloom but stay where she could still see the strip light by which her father worked. Even so, she often wandered far down the darker regions, beyond the reach of the light. John didn't like to discourage his brave little girl. She wasn't in the least bit afraid of the dark. In fact, she seemed almost unaware of it. Her night vision and other senses were uncanny. If John had known about the hidden tunnels that could be accessed from the back of the cavern, about half a mile from where he worked on the engines and carriages, he would not have allowed her to wander. But he didn't know.

Elizabeth and Amy walked back from town with a bag of vegetables. They passed a pet shop and Amy insisted on stopping to look at the animals. She watched the tropical fish, then twittered and tweeted at the colourful budgies, canaries and finches, picked up a tortoise and tried to kiss it on the nose, but it pulled in its head. Then she came to a cage with a black and white rat in it. She and the rat looked at each other. She squeaked and the rat squeaked back. Elizabeth had a dislike of rats, bordering on phobia, since the time she was bitten on the ear. She tried to pull her away but Amy resisted, saying she was talking to the rat.

The shop keeper came over, smiling at the woman and child. He said he needed the cage for a new delivery of stock coming in, so they could have the rat cheap if the little girl wanted it - just two pounds. Elizabeth frowned at the man and shook her head, but Amy looked up with an expression of annoyance, as though the man had offended her.

'He doesn't like it in here. He doesn't like that man. He wants to come home with me mummy.'

Elizabeth wouldn't hear of it, of course - not until Amy kicked up such a fuss that everybody in the shop and several people in the street turned to stare. Her mother had never seen her so upset, so she gave in and bought her the rat, a cage to keep it in and a book on looking after rats. Amy was only four and couldn't read very well. John was going to have to read the book with her - a good exercise.

As they were about to leave the shop, Amy suddenly screwed up her face and pressed her hands to her ears. Elizabeth gingerly replaced the cage on the counter and knelt down to ask what was the matter. She had to pull her hands from her ears to be heard, but then Amy cried in pain and looked around for her tormentor. There was a boy just a few feet away, blowing a dog whistle. Nobody else could hear it, but Elizabeth could see that every time the boy blew out his cheeks, Amy's distress increased. The rat was also showing signs of discomfort, swinging his head from side to side. Elizabeth picked up the cage and her bag, took Amy's hand and hurried out of the shop.

It was November, cold and dark. A steely hard rain was blowing in almost horizontally. John and Amy hurried up the garden path. They'd been down in the caverns all day - John working and Amy playing in the tunnels that John didn't know about...with friends that John didn't know about. It was bright and warm inside and the smell of food sharpened their hunger. Elizabeth backed away from the grubby pair, laughing and sent them upstairs to wash and change.

As Amy stepped through her bedroom door, Freddie launched himself from her dressing table and landed deftly on her shoulder. She plucked him off, gave him a kiss and a nuzzle, sat down on the edge of the bed and placed him on her lap. He liked to be tickled. She flipped him onto his back and tickled his tummy. He squeaked and giggled like a child. The sound was outside the normal range of human hearing, but Amy could hear him. She giggled too, hovering her hand just out of reach of his nose. He stretched his neck, trying to touch it, so she moved it to one side. He jumped up and followed it, trying to get another tickle. She was teasing him. They played until her father finished cleaning himself up in the bathroom. Then it was her turn and Freddie had to stay in the bedroom. It was a compromise really. Elizabeth wasn't happy that the rat was in Amy's bedroom but she didn't want him anywhere else in the house either. The deal was, he had to stay in the bedroom and he had to be kept scrupulously clean. That was not a problem. He was a very clean animal.

They were ready for their dinner. John and Elizabeth told each other about their day and Amy ate quietly, looking around the room. Her eyes came to rest on the door of the cupboard where the coats hung. She cocked her head to one side, listening intently. At last Elizabeth noticed and followed her eyes to the cupboard. John stopped eating and looked from one to the other, frowning.

'Is something wrong?'

Elizabeth didn't say anything. They were both aware of Amy's hearing range by now. She could see that Amy was listening to some sound that was beyond her own hearing range. Placing her knife and fork on the side of her plate, she pushed back her chair, stood up and stepped over to the cupboard. She put her ear to the door and listened.

'There's something in there. I can hear it scratching and rustling around. It's not your rat is it Amy?'

Amy shook her head.

'Oh god. I hope it's not rats John. Mr Philips will keep putting bread on his lawn for the birds. If they don't eat all of it, he just leaves it out all night. I saw a rat in his garden last week. You'll have to look in here, John. I can't.'

John got up and Elizabeth went into the kitchen. He listened at the cupboard door for a moment, then slowly opened it. Amy clapped with delight as a brown rat shot out of the door. But then her delight turned to anguish as her mother rushed in with a broom and tried to hit it. The little girl ran to the hall door and flung it open, allowing the rat to escape.

She was in deep trouble. Her parents were angry and upset - John more angry than upset, Elizabeth more upset than angry. Elizabeth hated the idea of a rat running around loose in the house and John, tired and in need of a rest, was going to have to get the traps out of the cellar and set them up all over the house. Amy was sent to bed. She was upset too, at the thought of the poor rat being caught in a trap. She knew about traps. From time to time she'd come across them down in the cavern where her father worked.

Of course there were rats down in the caverns. It was exactly the sort of place you'd expect to find rats. Only last summer John had seen one almost the size of a cat, sitting on top of the main generator. It didn't even move when he walked over to start it up. It seemed fearless. John had to throw a spanner at it before it would deign to move.

Whenever Amy came across one of the empty traps, she set it off. If it had a rat in, she would lever it open with a stick or a screw-driver - whatever came to hand - and remove the body. Once she heard a trap go off and rushed down to see. The rat was just caught by its paw. It was frightened but Amy calmed it with a combination of sounds that always relaxed Freddie when he was agitated. The rat understood them to indicate she intended to help and not to kill it. She freed the animal and it limped away, one leg broken. But it survived and it was the first of the friends she made in the caverns.

After that, all she had to do was produce a certain, high-pitched call and the rats would come to her. She followed them into all their secret places - and found those tunnels. The tunnels were fabulous: a labyrinth of wonder, a playground of adventures. The tunnels stretched for miles and miles in every direction. Many were connected to cellars and sewers by passages too small to admit a human adult. Amy dared not go too far into them. She longed to explore them all, but if she was away for more than a couple of hours, her father would notice and come looking for her.

After John and Elizabeth had gone to bed, Amy sneaked out and went down to the cellar. She knew the ways of rats and she guessed where their uninvited guest had gone. She found her there, hiding in a hole in the brick-work, giving birth to her kits. She brought her some food and told her to stay out of sight.

The following day, she found a trap in the cavern with a rat in it. She removed the body carefully, wrapped it in a piece of tarpaulin and placed it under the front passenger seat in the car. When they got home, she hid it inside her coat and ran upstairs with it before her parents had finished greeting each other, saying she was desperate for the loo. There was a trap set in the bathroom, behind the laundry basket. She put the dead rat on the trap and set it off. Then she called her parents to come and see that they'd successfully got the rat so they could put the others away again.

Rats breed rather quickly. Amy often visited the cellar. She was able to impress upon the growing population down there, that they must remain unobserved, if they wished to stay and survive.

Spring arrived. Amy was to start school. The mothers and children were all milling around in the playground, waiting for the head-mistress. A heavily made-up woman in a very 'little black dress', a fur coat and scarlet stilettos, let out a nasal hoot and said she'd just spotted the kid who would grow up to be the next cat-woman. Her little boy stared at Amy and then said he thought she looked more like a rat than a cat. Elizabeth was mortified. She scooped Amy into her arms and stalked from the playground, stopping for a moment to turn and tell the woman that she herself had more in common with cats than anyone she could point to here and that, by the way, she looked far too old to be dressing like a kitten. She didn't wait to hear the reply.

Elizabeth's distress was infectious. She transmitted a strong dose of it to Amy, who didn't understand about 'cattiness' or wanton cruelty, but did understand that her mother had had a dramatic change of heart about enrolling her at the school. Blinking back tears and walking quickly down the hill, Elizabeth kept telling Amy it was all right and not to worry and not to cry, while her whole demeanour told Amy exactly the opposite to her reassuring words.

When they arrived back at home, they took off their coats and hung them in the cupboard under the stairs and Elizabeth reached for her gardening jacket. Gardening was very therapeutic for her when she was angry or upset. It helped her to dissipate her aggression and calm down. As she thrust her arm into the right sleeve and adjusted the elasticated cuff, she asked Amy if she would like to help mummy do a bit of digging and weeding. Amy hesitated, noticing movement and hearing a high pitched distress call from her mother's left sleeve. Elizabeth pushed her left arm into the sleeve and before she could untwist the cuff, she felt the desperate scrabbling of the rat around her upper arm. She screamed and struggled to get the jacket off. Panic slowed her down and she seemed to be wrestling the coat off her arms in a rising state of hysteria. Amy was horrified. She tried to help, but her mother batted her away in her frenzy. Finally the crying, screaming woman freed herself from the jacket and flung it across the room, where it hit a sideboard and the stunned rat staggered out.

Elizabeth was beside herself, casting around for a weapon to use on the dazed rat. Her eyes came to rest on an old wine bottle with a candle in it. She grabbed it by the neck and rushed at the rat. It was Amy's turn to scream. The little girl flew to the defence of the rat and the mother almost brought the bottle down on the child's head - stopping herself only in the nick of time. The rat recovered sufficiently to scurry away through the open door and Elizabeth, overcome by anger and frustration even more than fear, smacked Amy across the back of the legs. She didn't believe in smacking children and had never smacked Amy before. Mother and daughter stared at each other for a moment in shock then both burst into tears and hugged each other.

It was a very bad day - and it wasn't over yet. When John got home, Amy was sent to her room where she played sadly with Freddie. Freddie caught her mood and just wriggled under the waist-band of her jumper and curled up. And Amy lay curled up on her side, cuddling Freddie. Elizabeth told John all that had happened. The awful woman at the school made the blood rush to his face, but the more immediate problem was the rat. They could discuss Amy's education once order had been restored for Elizabeth. He went to the cellar door and, before he'd even switched the light on, he heard the unmistakable sounds of scurrying vermin and the crash of a falling bottle. The light revealed a sea of brown bodies in motion, all trying to hide themselves away. Suddenly John didn't want to go down there.

'Come on Elizabeth. Pack a few things for yourself and Amy. You're going to stay with your mother for a few days.'

'Why? What have you found?'

With cool understatement he told her 'We have a family of rats in the cellar. You'll be happier away from here for a few days while I get the council's pest control service in. They'll be able to do a more thorough job without having to worry about you or Amy accidentally setting off their traps or touching the stashes of poison.'

Amy didn't want to go. They didn't tell her the rats were going to be exterminated, but she fought and cried and raged when she wasn't allowed to take Freddie. In the end they managed to get her to her grandmother's house, where she spent a miserable fortnight pining for her pet and fretting about her friends in the cellar.

When they returned, the house really was rat-free. Even Freddie had died. Nobody had bothered to feed him.

John and Elizabeth didn't know that Amy was well aware of the rats in the cellar. She tore up the stairs to see Freddie and came down again very slowly, carrying his poor emaciated little body, the tears streaming down her face. She didn't even look at her parents, but carried on down to the cellar to sit with and take comfort from her friends. The comfort offered by her parents was rejected. John attempted to get the dead rat away from her but she clung onto him stubbornly, hurt and upset and far too angry with them to listen to anything they had to say.

They were surprised that she made for the cellar. The beginnings of a suspicion was starting to dawn on both of them and they exchanged an uneasy look. Amy's little legs could only manage the steep stairs one at a time. She reached the bottom and gave the high-pitched call that the rats never failed to answer. No answer came. John followed her down, puzzled as he heard the frantic search, with obstacles being pulled and pushed aside.

Now Amy was bawling loudly and shouting: 'Where are you? Where are you all? Come back. It's all right. I'm home now. Come back.'

Then John knew for sure. Amy had been keeping the huge rat infestation a secret - probably feeding and encouraging them. It astonished him that the population could have got to such a size without either Elizabeth or him noticing. It was still a mystery how Amy had got them to keep such a low profile. To him, it seemed the house was entirely empty of rats one day and completely over-run the next. He didn't realise how close the affinity was, between his daughter and the rats. It was Amy's distress on that horrible day, that had fetched them all out of hiding, and doomed them.

He stood there, confounded, his eyes following the little girl as she ransacked the cellar, until suddenly she stopped, staring down at something behind a rolled up carpet. The pest control men had missed some. There was a pile of blue stuff - rat bait - and a family of dead rats. Amy tore her eyes away and looked round at her father accusingly. He was surprised to find he felt guilty when, by rights, he should have been very cross with her. Very cross indeed. But she was only just five years old. And for reasons he couldn't fathom, she adored rats. He couldn't bring himself to tell her off, but he would have to explain to her, that rats were dirty, disease carrying animals, that multiplied at an alarming rate - and they could do all sorts of other damage besides passing on very unpleasant diseases. She must be made to understand that they couldn't have wild rats in the house.

Amy seemed defeated. She listened in silence to her mother and father as they both tried to explain what had happened, why they had had to go away while the rats were destroyed, why they must never be allowed to get into the house again. At last, they felt they'd made her understand. She offered no resistance, no argument against their case. They were still concerned though as they tucked their sad and dejected little girl into bed. That night, they discussed buying her a kitten or a puppy: a normal pet.

It must have been some time after midnight that Amy climbed out of bed. The house was silent. Her parents were asleep. She dressed quietly, crept downstairs and left the house.

When they woke in the morning to find Amy gone, there was pandemonium. They searched the house from cellar to attic, questioned the neighbours, telephoned her grandmother and, finding no sign of her anywhere, telephoned the police. The search went on for months. Sightings were reported all over the country and from other countries as well. Her grieving parents were inconsolable.

Eight years passed. Elizabeth still clung to the hope that Amy would come home. John was more realistic - although he was the one plagued by illusions.

A few months after Amy's disappearance, he was cleaning rust from one of the carriage wheels with a wire brush, when he looked up and saw her little face peering at him out of the gloom. He dropped the brush, called her name and chased down the dark cavern after her. A dozen or more rats, that had just been quietly standing around in the pitch black (odd behaviour for rats), scattered as he ran into their midst. But there was no sign of Amy. A couple of years later, the same thing happened.

Four or five times, over those years, just as he was leaving work, at dusk or full dark, he thought he saw her peeping at him from behind pillars, bins, stacks of deck-chairs. There was never anyone around to see him making a fool of himself, running after apparitions, calling her name. But there were always rats. That was the curious thing: every time it happened, there were rats.

Most recently, just a few months ago, he saw something - he thought it was a stray dog at first - upset a rubbish bin beside one of the beach kiosks. It jumped away from the bin and looked around in alarm, afraid of attracting attention. It was a dark evening but the seafront was dimly lit by the seaside illuminations further along the promenade. By this inadequate light he thought he saw the creature run away on two legs, surrounded by rats, running behind and along side. 'Amy!' he breathed, but then, as usual, accused himself of wishful thinking and seeing phantoms.

It was winter again. A tremendous storm had been battering the coast with unremitting violence for three days. The sea was rearing up like an angry beast and hurling itself up the beach, tossing shingle over the sea wall and flushing through the sewers. John couldn't get into the caverns to work. He would have been washed away before he could get the padlock off the door.

After the fourth day, when the rain and wind subsided and the sea had spent its rage, he went down to assess the damage and make a start on the clean-up operation. It was a mess. The level of the beach was several feet lower than usual because the pebbles had either been washed further up the coast or been thrown up onto the lower esplanade. Beachcombers were picking gingerly above the ebb tide, for the bounty of the sea. Beachcombing is usually a fascinating and absorbing 'job'. Not after this storm though. There were drowned rats everywhere you looked, washed out from the sewers. There were half a dozen youths standing round in a circle, over by one of the groins, stoning something. A rat, he guessed. He wondered what satisfaction these morons could get from maiming an animal that was already dead.

He left them to their mindless entertainment and turned back to his workshop, wondering how badly it was flooded and how much work he'd have to do to get the place ship-shape. The padlock was stiff with rust and sand. It was a struggle to get it unlocked. He finally got the door open and groaned at the state of the place. The water had been deep but it was seeping away now, leaving a thick layer of stinking sludge from the sea and from the sewers. His boots squelched through the slippery brown slime.

It took a long time to get the place clean - and longer to get rid of the smell. Without the rats, it felt somehow, empty. He never imagined that he would miss them. No doubt it would take a year or two for the numbers to get back to what they were. He steered his mind away from the real source of his desolation. He never saw - or thought he saw - Amy again, after that storm.

Fiction by Tibley Bobley

Tibley Bobley

17.07.08 Front Page

Back Issue Page