‘What’s that noise’, W. asks. ‘Is it squeaking?’ Rats, I tell him. Rats have infested my flat. I point out the rat droppings in the yard — black, elongated pellets, ten or twelve of them, some forming a haphazard pile, others scattered. I point out the soil displaced from the plant pots. The rats have been looking for bulbs to eat.
Another squeak, like strangled birdsong. — ‘Where’s it coming from?’, asks W. ‘Inside the flat?’ Beneath it, I tell him. That’s where they live now, the rats.
There’s a five foot gap beneath the floorboards, I tell him, all the way down to the mud. The other day, I pulled up one of the floorboards and shined a light down there. I saw the rats, I tell W. I don’t know how many there are. I don’t know what they were doing. But I could see them crawling over each other, I tell him. I could see their wet fur glistening.
‘What are they doing down there?’, asks W., shuddering. ‘What do they eat?’ And then, ‘You’re feeding them, aren’t you? You’re cultivating them’. He reminds me of the narrator of Trakl’s poem, who feeds rats in a twilit yard, in an act that betrays all of humankind.
He can see it in my face, he says, in the madness of my eyes: the dream of murine becomings, of feral alterity: of rat packs, alive with fleas, spreading out from my flat, crawling, burrowing, swimming in all directions, bearers of new kinds of plague …
Rats come from the East, W. says. They come from the deserts of Arabia (the black rat) and the shores of Lake Baikal (the brown rat), thriving in periods of war and famine, and spreading epidemics of plague as they move westwards.
They reached Britain in the thirteenth century (the black rat) and in the nineteenth century (the brown rat), being omnivorous, adaptable, fecund. Rats are pitiless, W. says (the brown rat more than the black rat). Merciless. They drive the weak before them. Just as the black rat drove out its natural rivals, so the brown rat drove out the black rat. And no doubt, there are new rat-waves to come …
And they’re intelligent, too. The brown rat is claimed to show signs of meta-intelligence, though W.’s not sure what that means. He thinks it’s got something to do with learning from your mistakes, which is something we’ve never done. Brown rats are more intelligent than us, W. says, that’s the trouble. — ‘Well, more intelligent than you’.
W. tells me of the rat man of Freud’s case study, who spoke of his greatest fear, which was also his greatest desire: to have a pot placed on his arse, into which a pack of rats was introduced. His fear, his desire, was for the rats to bore their way in, for them to swarm through his body …
Is that what I want? W. wonders. Am I, too, waiting for the rat punishment? Or perhaps that’s why I’ve invited him up, to rat-punish him …
I look ill, W. says. Grey. — ‘What do you think is wrong with you?’ Is it the plaster dust, continually falling from the ceiling? Is it the filth on the kitchen counter, or the cans of stale beer? Is it the fact that the whole flat is tilting sideways, like the deck of a ship in a storm?
It’s the yard, W.’s sure of it. The shore of concrete, at the same level as the window, covered in algae. — ‘It’s like the end of the world out there’, W. says. Dead plants, no more than sticks in pots. The long crack in the kitchen wall, which lets in the rain. The mould-encrusted hopper, overrunning with water.
Then there’s the damp, the omnipresent damp. It’s no wonder that I cough constantly. Even he, W., has a cough, and he’s only visiting for the weekend. He’s staggering around like Widow Twankey. How can I do it to him? How can I do it to myself?
Why is he drawn back to my flat again and again? Why does he want to see where it happens, or fails to happen?
Ruination, W. says. Living destruction. The Jews have a name for it, W. says: the tohu vavohu. The chaos that preceded the act of creation. He supposes the Hindus have a name for it, too, W. says. Actually, he supposes Hinduism is a name for it.
‘You drink too much, that’s your problem’, W. says. ‘Mind you, I’d drink if I had your life’.
My instincts are wrong, W. says. They always have been. How else can I account for the horror of my life, with its lurches and shudders? How else can I account for that desire for ruination that has marked every one of my relationships?
It’s going to end in a stabbing, W.’s always said. Someone’s going to stab me. But if not him, then who? — ‘One of your nutters and weirdoes’, he says. I know enough of them. — ‘You’ve been stabbed before, haven’t you?’ Nearly, I tell him. — ‘Well, next time, they’ll really get you’.
‘My God, your friends’, W. says, though he would hardly call them friends. Outpatients. Case studies. — ‘What do you think they see in you? What do you see in them?’ I draw them to me, my nutters and weirdoes. I can never get rid of them. — ‘You’re too weak. Too passive’. I regard myself as an object to which things happen, W. says. I call it fate. He calls it idiocy.
Is he one of them, one of my nutters and weirdoes? It’s his greatest fear, W. says.
You ought to know everything about your home city, W. says, if only to know what you’re about to lose. It makes it more poignant, more mournful, W. says: your loss of your city. Because we will both lose our cities, W. says, it’s inevitable. Just as he will be forced out of Plymouth, I will be forced out of Newcastle. Just as he will be kicked out of the city he loves, I will be expelled from the city I profess to love, despite the fact that I know nothing about it.
W. had to piece together the history of Newcastle for himself, he says. Perpetually hungover, perpetually dazed, I can scarcely navigate my way to my office. But W. read tour guides and websites; he consulted plaques on our walks. He traced the course of the culvetted rivers that run beneath the streets and speculated upon where they flow out into the Tyne. He consulted Ordinance Survey maps of the riverbanks and insisted upon reconstructing the medieval city in his own mind, walking the route where he thought the city walls must once have run.
Crossing Warwick Street, W. demands we stop at a plaque detailing the construction of the culvert that runs beneath our feet. Heaton once meant ‘high-town’, we discover, being separated from the city by a steep valley. They filled in the valley and culvetted the river. Why are they always culvetting rivers in Newcastle? W. wonders.
W.’s decline is getting worse, he says, as we cross the stadium. He doesn’t work at night any more, but watches trash TV instead. And now, like me, he’s downloaded Civilization 4. What appals him, he says, is that he plays Civilization 4 with more seriousness than he works.
Of course, W. knew that the last thing he should ever do is buy Civilization 4. Which meant that he went straight out and bought Civilization 4, W. says. Then he destroyed Civilization 4; he snapped the CD in two. Then the next morning, he went out and bought it again, he says, but he threw the whole package in the bin before he even got home.
Then, in a weak moment, despairing of his many years of intellectual work and convinced he’d taken a fundamentally wrong turn in his philosophy, he downloaded Civilization 4 from a torrent site, W. says, and has been playing it ever since.