Golden Rat

It was, as I remember, a Tuesday evening in late spring, as I was driving home through the city traffic, when first I noticed the young girl on the bicycle. She was, I suppose, about twelve years old, a bony little person, pedalling away, struggling through the traffic as best she might, the determined set of her head telling of both anxiety and anticipation. But this was not what had attracted my attention: no, it was the piece of russet fur which hung around her neck like a choker. A child in shorts and t-shirt with a fur collar, did that make sense?

After that I passed her almost every evening. Always she seemed the same and the fur collar, though it shifted around a little sometimes, was certainly the same short-haired glowing pelt.

One evening we chanced both to be stopped by the same red light, I with my foot ready poised over the gas pedal, she balanced on the toes of her runners. Now I was able to get a good look at the fur-collar girl. She wasn’t, of course.

What I had taken for a fur collar was simply the pelt of the small animal she kept coiled about her neck. As I looked closer, I saw that the creature was nothing less than a yellowish rat, his pointed snout up against her left ear as she bent her head towards him, for all the world as though he were speaking and she was listening attentively to his words.

What could a rat be saying to a girl? It was a question I needed the answer to, and so I determined to follow her home. I slowed to a crawl, and always a hundred yards behind her, I turned all the corners she did: never approaching closer, ready to give the excuse of engine trouble should anyone challenge my abominable pace. I need not have worried. Soon we had left the streets and even the highway behind and were journeying in the country from this dirt road to that. All was lonely and deserted until a grey board cottage became visible ringed with a small thicket of trees. I parked the car in a patch of scrub on the roadside and followed the girl on foot for the last two hundred yards.

It was almost dusk, and suddenly a lamp was lit in the house. I crept in amongst the leafing poplars and stared into the lighted window to see what I could see. Apparently this room was the dining room. There was a long table covered with a white cloth, and the girl in a flowered apron was busy putting dishes upon the table. The dishes, although they were all of the same size, were of many different colours and contained many different kinds of food. She arranged them on the table and cried “Come. Come.” Then she sat down on the only chair in the room, spread a white napkin upon her knees and waited. In no time the room was full of rats of all colours and sizes. They leapt up on the table and each stood before a dish waiting. It was only when the girl dipped her spoon into her own plate that they began frantically to devour what was before them as though they were starving. She had barely taken three spoonfuls before they had finished their supper and disappeared into the dark corners of the house, squealing their thanks as they went.

And all this time the yellow rat sat upon the girl’s shoulder, apparently directing everything.

Of course there was more to be seen, more questions to be answered but I was so horrified at seeing the child surrounded by what seemed to me a horde of horrid creatures that I turned tail and ran back up the road to my car.

I don’t remember how I found my way out of that tangle of dirt tracks back to the city, back to my home, to my angry wife wanting to know why I was so late for my dinner.

To my job, to my daily journey to and from work, which always took me past the place where I once used to see a young girl on her bike bending her gentle head, listening to, no doubt obeying, the words of the yellow-brown rat on her shoulder.