She – a girl, mixed ethnicity, maybe 22 – sees a rat.
It’s dead of course, lying upturned on the Whitechapel Road. Its body is puffed and swollen from poison. What happened here? Perhaps a Shakespearian tragedy: a sip from a poison chalice, a lover’s misadventure, a drop in the throat to exchange a moment of pain for an afterlife with its soulmate.
The girl gets closer and feels choked at the indignity. The rat’s exposed with its claws in the air and legs akimbo. Lifeless. It reminds her of the vagrant she saw that time in Atlanta, Georgia.
(You know the way Americans give you that inch more context to their location? The same way Londoners tell you their socioeconomic co-ordinate: ‘I live in East.’)
Well, maybe the man wasn’t a vagrant. Maybe he had a home and a cooked meal waiting for him and he’d just fallen on a hard few hours. Either way, just like the rat, he was lying on the side of a freeway in the grass, legs flat but arms scrunched and stiff. He too was dead, she thinks. But she was in a taxi to the airport so couldn’t confirm.
Perhaps this rat is exactly where it’s supposed to be. Maybe it’s been laid and attended to by its loved ones. Perhaps what she’s about to walk past is the end of a ceremony: the prayers have been said, the tears shed. And this is where the rat asked to be scattered. Well, left. Abandoned even. On the Whitechapel Road outside Superdrug, as we transition from market and first-generation immigrant to City. From okra by the kilo to Okra Fries for £5.50.
She steps over the rat, and her body jolts – kicked back to the day they all piled into the car and drove for 90 minutes in the rain and no one mentioned that they were going to the chaplaincy or that the casket would be open and that she’d be asked to kiss the cold, lifeless cheek of the fallen queen. No one said she’d be boxed up like her old black Reeboks that for years softened her stomp through Hammersmith.
The girl comes to a stop. She stares at the rat. Commuters start to give her a wider berth. It occurs to her that she’s one of those people that you don’t immediately know is crazy – the kind with a job and a laptop, but that’s thrown off-kilter by a rat carcass on the main road.
Then, seeing a fried chicken box by the bin, the girl makes a decision. She picks up the rat. Its fur is cold, and its body bulbous. She kisses its swollen stomach and puts it in the box, laying it on a cushion of softened, mayo-bleached chips, and dangles its tail over the side.
Then she says a prayer to a god she doesn’t believe in.
Gemma Doswell is a mixed-race writer from Birmingham, currently based in London. She writes regularly about racism and equality and her work has been featured in Restless Network, The Flock Magazine, Litro Magazine, Curiosity Club, AZ Magazine, and Vestal Review, along with smaller corners of the internet. She’s currently working on her debut novel series for young adults. You can find Gemma at @GemmaDoswell and linkin.bio/gemmadoingwell.
Photo by Birger Strahl on Unsplash.
What a wonderful read it was – absolutely enthralling!