‘Big as dogs.’
‘Come on, let’s go after them,’ the workman who had been prepared to climb the fence growled. ‘We can’t have things like them running around.’
‘No,’ said Harris. He couldn’t tell them about the fatal disease the vermin carried, but he had to stop them from trying to do battle with them. ‘The police are on their way, and the people from Ratkill too, better let them deal with them.’
‘Time we wait for the law, the bleeders’ll have disappeared. I’m going now. Who else is coming?’
Harris caught him by the arm as he began to march towards the fence. As he angrily swung around, two police cars roared into the estate and came to a screeching halt beside the group of stricken people.
Foskins emerged from the second car and strode directly towards Harris, his eyes never leaving the two figures on the ground.
As a Ratkill van arrived, he pulled the teacher to one side so the gathering crowd would be unable to hear their conversation.
‘Well, Mr Harris, what happened?’
The teacher briefly told him of the events just past. He felt full of pity for the little rat-faced Ferris whose sense of duty towards his job had led to his untimely death. It could have been Harris, himself, lying there if Ferris hadn’t insisted on following the rats himself.
‘We’ll get a search party down there immediately,’ Foskins told him. ‘They’ll go through the fence and down the canal.
We’ll send out patrols along the canal and cordon the area off.’
’Look, these canals run for miles. How can you possibly cordon them off?’ Harris was slightly irritated by Foskins’ calm, authoritatively calm, voice. ‘And in any case, how are you going to cordon off all the sewers that run beneath this area?
‘That, Mr Harris,’ said Foskins coldly, ‘is our problem.’
Chapter Seven
Harris was in no mood to go back to the school that after-noon. He walked for a while through the streets of his child-hood, coming upon long-forgotten alleys; a tobacconist where he bought his first packet of ‘Domino’ cigarettes;
Linda Crossley’s house, a girl who had one night, when they were teenagers, let he and six of his mates have it off with her at the back of their local youth club - and was forever after known as ‘7-up’; bomb-sites, still untouched by building developments; stunted posts, once used to tie horses to, in his day to play leap-frog and today - well, not many horses around any more - and when was the last time he’d seen kids playing leap-frog? Finally, he caught a bus and returned to the flat. He made himself some tea and sat in his only armchair, still depressed by the morning’s events.
Keogh, the woman and her baby, those poor old down-and-outs, Ferris and the old lady.
CivilisedLondon..SwingingLondon. Dirty bloodyLondon!
For all its modernity, its ‘high standard of living, it could still breed obnoxious, disease-carrying vermin of the like he’d seen today. And their size! What had caused this mutation?
And their cunning. Twice that day, one of the big, black rats had just stood and stared at him (had it been the same one each time? Christ!)not cowering, nor preparing to attack, but just surveying him, seemingly studying him, inscrutable.
How many more people would they kill before they were put down? And where had they come from?
What made them so much more intelligent than their smaller counter- parts? Well, why should he worry?
It was the problem of the bloody authorities. But what disgusted him more? The vermin themselves - or the fact that it could only happen inEast London? Not Hampstead or Kensington, but Poplar.
Was it the old prejudices against the middle and upper classes, the councils that took the working-class from their slums and put them into tall, remote concrete towers, telling them they’d never been better off, but never realising that forty homes in a block of flats became forty separate cells for people, communication between them confined to conversations in the lift, was it this that really angered him?
That these same councils could allow the filth that could produce vermin such as the black rats. He remembered the anger he’d felt at the time a new ‘ultra-modem’ flat had collapsed when by some miracle only nine people had been killed. His resentment had been directed not only at the architects who had designed the ‘block’ construction, but at the council who had approved its design. He remembered the rumours that had spread afterwards, the favourite being the one about the safe-breaker who had kept gelignite in his flat, and it had been this that had exploded and forced out one of the concrete slabs, causing the walls down one side to topple like a pack of cards. Then it had been the gas leak, which had, in fact, been proved as the cause. But the point was it was the construction itself that had made a minor disaster into a major one. And the construction had been a cheaper means of building - a cheaper way of cramming thirty or forty families into the smallest square footage possible. This is what embittered Harris.
The incompetence of ‘authority’.
Then he had to smile at himself. He was still a student at heart, a rebel against the powers that be. As a teacher, he was directly under the control of a government body and was often exasperated by
‘committee’ decisions, but he knew there were fair-minded men and women who really did care amongst the committee members, who fought hard to get the right decisions. He’d heard many stories of individuals who had fought the government ban on free milk for kids, for instance. Of men and women, including teachers, who had all but lost thin: jobs because of their opposition.
No, it was no good becoming over-wrought with authority, for he knew too well that apathy existed on all levels. The gasman who neglected to fix a leaky pipe. The mechanic who failed to tighten a screw. The driver who drove at fifty miles an hour in the fog. The milkman who left one pint instead of two. It was a matter of degree. Wasn’t that what Original Sin was supposed to be all about? We’re all to blame. He fell asleep.
At a quarter-past-six, he was awakened by the front door being slammed and footsteps racing up the stairs.
‘Hello, Jude,’ he said as she bustled in, red-faced and breathless.
‘Hello, lazy.’ She kissed his nose. ‘Have you seen the paper yet?’ She unfolded a Standard and showed him the headlines proclaiming more killings by rats.
‘Yes, I know. I was there.’ He told her of the day’s events, his voice hard, emotionless.
‘Oh, love, it’s horrible. Those poor people. And you. It must have been terrible for you.’ She touched his cheek, knowing his anger covered up deeper feelings.
‘I’m just sick of it, Jude. For people to die senselessly like that in this day and age. It’s crazy.’
‘All right, darling. They’ll soon put a stop to it. It’s not like the old days, when things like this got out of hand.’
‘That’s not the point though. It should never have happened in the first place.’
Suddenly Harris relaxed, his natural defencewhen ,events became too much to take. He reached a certain point, and knowing there was nothing he could do about the situation, his mind walked away from it.
He smiled at Judy. ‘Let’s get away from it at the weekend, eh? Let’s go and see your silly old aunt at Walton. The fresh air will do us both good.’
‘Okay,’ Judy’s arms encircled his neck and she squeezed it hard.
‘What’s for dinner?’ he asked.
The rest of the week, as far as the rats were concerned, was quiet. There had been a public outcry, the usual campaigns from the press to clean upLondon. Angry debates on television by politicians and councillors, and even a statement from the Prime Minister. Large areas of dockland were sealed off and rat-exterminators sent in. The dockers themselves came out on strike for two days until they had been convinced that no trace of rats could be found. Canals leading to the docks were searched by police and soldiers, but nothing larger than the usual rodents were found, and not many of these either. Reports of large, black rats being seen came in regularly, but on investigation it usually turned out to be a dog or cat.
