Five Boys (19 page)

B
Y THE TIME
the checkpoints had finally been dismantled and the exiled farmers were allowed back home it was late autumn and the evacuated area was even more of a wilderness than when the Five Boys had stolen in. The gardens and fields tumbled into one another. Blocked ditches diverted the streams along the lanes. The crops had gone to seed, the sprawling hedgerows made half the roads impassable and down by the coast the trees were so packed with shrapnel that no one would risk ruining their saws by trimming them back.

A special unit was meant to have cleared away any explosives but such quantities kept turning up that in the end the farmers just drove their cattle back out onto the fields and let them graze, like unwitting mine clearers, for a couple of days.

By rights, the farther inland a house was the less likely it was to have suffered any damage, but this was no comfort to Miss Minter, who returned home to find every last hinge and coat hook missing. All that was left were the tufts in the timber where the screws had been prized away—as if a huge magnet had swept down the valley and pulled up every last pennyweight.

It was the same in half the neighboring cottages—anything remotely valuable had been removed—but down the
road, Mr. Steere had his own problems and, despite having written to the Admiralty on the day he discovered it and getting on the telephone to the council half a dozen times since, it was almost a month before help arrived.

Steere was in his caravan washing the dishes when a moped came spluttering down the lane—a peculiar-looking piece of machinery with an oval windscreen, a suspension which squeaked in and out of every puddle hole and a wicker trailer the size of an appling basket strapped to a set of old pram wheels rattling along behind.

The moped lurched to a halt in front of the caravan and its rider kicked the stand down with the heel of his boot. He wore an old dispatch rider’s leather coat, buttoned behind the knees, and when he dismounted it stuck out from his thighs like a pair of jodhpurs. By the time Steere got to the caravan door his visitor had removed his crash helmet and was combing his hair in the moped’s wing mirror. The fellow must have had exceptional hearing, for he spun around and was ready for conversation before Steere had put a foot on the steps.

“Mr. Steere,” he said, smiling. “I hear you have an infestation.”

Steere had never much cared for people who smiled for no good reason and he certainly didn’t consider his current predicament as constituting one.

“See for yourself,” he said and turned to go.

But his visitor went over to his wicker trailer and began to unbuckle its leather straps. He lifted the lid, whispered a few words into it, then ducked his head in after them. When he came out he had in his arms the leanest, keenest terrier Steere had ever set eyes on. The dog looked around, blinking in the sunlight and twitching its nostrils. But just
when Steere was hoping they might finally get on with the job, the moped rider ducked back into the basket, pulled out what looked like an old rag and started slipping it over the terrier’s head and paws.

“What the hell is that?” said Steere.

“It’s her little uniform,” said the dog’s owner. “It gets her in the mood.”

The dog had been sniffing and twisting from the moment it came out of its basket and in Mr. Steere’s opinion needed no help getting in the mood at all, and when the dog came up alongside him, straining at its lead, Steere couldn’t help but notice that its little waistcoat was actually made out of a patchwork of rat skins.

The dog seemed to know where it was going and to be even more anxious to get there than Steere himself. Its head rocked along the ground, picking up all sorts of information, which started its tail rocking from side to side at the other end, and by the time they got to the gate the dog was choking on its collar.

“Now, let’s see what we’ve got, shall we?” said its master, then bent down and unhooked the lead. “You go and stir them up, my girl.”

The dog shot off across the field like a cannon and what had appeared to be just another few acres of overgrown pasture suddenly erupted into life. The field was boiling with rat heads and rat tails and rats’ scuffling bodies, which parted in a great V as the terrier tore into them. The dog was a solid, thundering mass of forward motion, broken only by the occasional dip of its head as it picked a rat off along the way, and for a minute the field was a cauldron of rat activity. But just as it had been suddenly brought to the boil, so it suddenly abated and the rats drained back into
their holes. Then the rat catcher tucked a finger and thumb into his mouth and let out a piercing whistle which brought the dog to a dramatic halt. It looked mightily baffled at first—as if it had just been snapped out of a trance and was having trouble orienting itself—but when its master whistled again, the dog looked over its shoulder, saw him and seemed to come to its senses.

“Come, Sally,” he shouted. “Come on, girl.”

Mr. Steere was absolutely incredulous. “You’re surely not bringing her in already?” he said.

The rat catcher turned and smiled at Steere. “I’d say we’re going to have to call in the heavy artillery, wouldn’t you?” he said.

When the rat catcher came down the track the next morning he had an old fellow riding pillion and the two of them bounced in and out of all the potholes in perfect unison. News of a mass poisoning had reached the village and the Five Boys had been waiting on the wall for half an hour. None of them were much impressed by the rat catchers. Only their leather coats, jet-black oilskins and matching crash helmets caught their eye.

“They look like human cannonballs,” said Harvey under his breath.

It could have been nothing more than coincidence, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth Harvey noticed a change in the rat catcher’s attitude. He turned, fixed his eyes on the Boys and inserted a forefinger deep into his mouth. He pulled it out and extended it toward them.

“I wouldn’t sit there,” he said. “Not unless you want snuffing out.”

Lewis had a sudden and powerful urge to go to the toilet.
“What’s he mean?” he said to the others, who were now all doing their best to avoid the rat catcher’s eye.

“What I
mean,”
he called out, “is that if you stay there my powder’ll see to you.”

A cloud of incomprehension settled over the Five Boys but the rat catcher waved his hand at them and kept on waving until they got down from the wall. His assistant, meanwhile, was busy with a penknife, cutting foot-long pieces from a ball of twine—a job inducing such brooding concentration in him that he might have been separating rats from their tails. The rat catcher ambled over to his wheeled basket and brought out a stirrup pump and several coils of rubber pipe. He slung them over his shoulder and filled his lungs, like a mountaineer contemplating some fierce ascent.

By now various tins, tools and other clutter were spread out on the ground, but there was still no sign of the terrier the Boys had heard so much about. Their own recent rat encounter was still fresh in their minds and the prospect of a few hundred being eaten by a vicious dog had been the prime motivation in them coming along. Hector raised his hand. He had to hold it there for quite some time—long enough for him to think that while the rat catcher might be able to pick up a whisper at fifty paces, his eyesight wasn’t up to much—and in the end it was his oilskinned assistant who noticed him and tapped the rat catcher on the arm.

“Where’s the dog with the fancy jacket?” Hector asked him.

The rat catcher shook his head, as if Hector had made an improper suggestion. “Sally doesn’t come out when we’re using the gas,” he said.

The Boys didn’t say another word. Didn’t dare. They
just watched the men doing the last of the unpacking. Once they’d finished they both went down on one knee and wound the lengths of twine around their trousers at the ankle, as if saying a prayer before entering the battlefield. Then they gathered up their equipment and the chief rat catcher turned to the Boys.

“If you want to make yourself useful,” he said, “you can bring along Punch and Judy,” and nodded at the wicker trailer. Then he and his assistant went on their way.

Lewis was the first to get to the basket—had high hopes of Punch and Judy being a couple of ferrets or other bad-tempered animals. Certainly something more sinister than the pair of ancient cricket bats lolling in the corner, with the string hanging off the handles. And yet, once they were lifted out and more closely inspected they were found to have considerable qualities of their own, not least the ragged bandages which bound their shafts and the fact that these bandages were caked with blood.

Lewis and Hector set off after the rat catcher, holding the cricket bats out before them like duelists’ pistols and with Finn and Harvey running alongside. Aldred had been the last man to get to the basket and was reluctant to leave it, but all that was left inside were the rat catchers’ crash helmets, their goggles and a can of oil.

He fished one of the helmets out and held it by its strap. Watched it slowly twisting. Knocked it with his knuckles to hear what sort of sound it made. He peered inside. The manufacturer’s name, embroidered on a cotton hexagon in the middle of the lining, had been worn away, but a whiff of scalp grease came up from it—a tallowy warmth which stirred up in Aldred some vague memory of his own father, even though he hadn’t seen him in years.

Mr. Steere and the rat catcher had spent the previous afternoon filling in every last rat hole, and when the rat catcher came striding around the side of the house with his retinue of assistants and bat carriers Steere was still out there, turning over great clods of earth with his shovel and stamping them down.

“They all tucked up, Mr. Steere?” the rat catcher called out from the gate.

Steere looked distractedly around the meadow. “The little fuckers keep burrowing out,” he said.

The rat catcher pulled back the latch and kicked the gate open. “Mr. Soames and I shall put a stop to that,” he said.

The two men strode out into the field with their cricket bats tucked under their arms. The rat catcher had a cylindrical tank over one shoulder about the same size as a milk churn. Mr. Soames carried the stirrup pump.

“We’ll see to them from here,” the rat catcher said.

Steere no longer knew when the weaselly little man was mocking him. He was past caring. The rats, their urinous stench and their boundless love of destruction had sapped all his spirit. The day he’d got back home after the evacuation he’d put a box of groceries down on the kitchen table and stepped back out into the yard to pick up a couple of cases. When he’d opened the door again the whole table was thrashing with them. It was the most disgusting thing he had ever seen. He hadn’t had a decent cup of tea in weeks. The rats had eaten his tea, had eaten half his kettle. Had chewed through the roof, the walls, the water pipes. Even the putty in the windowpanes wasn’t beyond their appetites. As the rat catcher had told Steere the day before, with that irritating grin of his, some putty has got fish oil in it and the rats can’t leave the stuff alone.

Like Miss Minter’s, Steere’s house had been stripped of every brass fitting. What was left the rats had done their damnedest to destroy. For weeks he’d been holed up in a leaking caravan while the rats worked his house over, and with such resolve that on the couple of occasions he’d dared set foot back in it, the place had the hot stench of silage to it—was warm from their relentless effort at bringing him down.

Steere limped back to the gate. Dragged his spade behind him. The Boys on the wall leaned to one side to get a better view of the rat catchers as they laid out their strange little arsenal—a ritual which seemed to bestow upon them a degree of levity, for as soon as he’d finished the chief rat catcher got to his feet and began tiptoeing around the field with his hands stretched out before him, as if he was sleepwalking. It was not the kind of thing the Boys were accustomed to seeing. The only thing Lewis could think of which was anything like it was watching his mother trying to find the towel after she washed her hair.

The rat catcher’s formidable hearing appeared to be directed solely toward the earth. The soles of his feet glided over it as if seeking out some underground activity—a halting little two-step which, in time, led him to a spot only ten yards or so from where he had set off.

“Pike please, Mr. Soames,” he said.

Mr. Soames slipped his hand between the buttons of his oilskin and drew out a long wooden pole—a pole which was so long and emerged so slowly that the Boys began to wonder how much more was still to come. It might have been nothing more than an old broom handle with a metal spike at one end, but once it was in the rat catcher’s hands it seemed to sweep him straight back into his sleepwalk. He
held it vertically in his fists, with the spike just a couple of inches above the ground. It seemed to guide him at first, then began to shift more intricately, as if tracing some arcane symbol. Paused in its deliberations, rose up, then dived into the ground with such force it seemed to send a shudder right through the field.

This all made for a highly entertaining spectacle but it occurred to Finn, at least, that spearing a whole field full of rats in this manner could easily take up the best part of a week. Yet that single incision seemed to be enough for the rat catcher, and the moment his spike was in the ground he seemed to recover himself.

“Carry on, Mr. Soames,” he said.

As the rat catcher headed back to the gate Mr. Soames rolled out the coils of rubber pipe. He fitted one length between the metal cylinder and the stirrup pump and the other to a nozzle at the base of the metal cylinder. Then he took the loose end over to where the pole stuck out of the ground and knelt beside it. Paused for a couple of seconds, whipped the spike out with one hand and jammed the pipe into the hole with the other. Fed another few feet in after it, then got to his feet, trod the earth down around it and brushed the dirt from his knees.

When the rat catcher got to the gate he stopped and bowed to his audience and Aldred, for one, was all set to give him the applause he so richly deserved. But the rat catcher plucked a clutch of grass from the ground, straightened up and threw it in the air. The breeze sent it scattering back toward Steere’s cottage.