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Rats on their Rounds
Last night, I refolded the leaf of the table upon which my Visitor, now departed, used to work, and pushed the table back up against the window as it used to be. I'm closer to the yard now, most of which is nearly level with the bottom of the window frame. The yard: there it is, a concrete shore, absolute. The yard that is like the future and the past, or the time before the future and the past and returns into the present. The yard that says: I will be there before and after; I have always been and always will be.
The concrete yard! Across from me, the rotten door from under which the rats came. Rats, who can dislocate their backs so as to squeeze under a gap of two inches. Do the rats still visit? I took a hammer to the planks of wood that were supposed to box the pipes and hide them. I hammered the box apart, there where the rats used to live and found ... nothing at all, no rats, no droppings, no remnants of poison. But I think the rats still visit. Didn't my Visitor see one right up by the kitchen door, very daring? The big one, the biggest of the three rats sniffing the air, little head lifted, there daringly by the door - our door?
The table, this one I write on, is up against the window. The yard spreads to the wall and the rotten door that will have to be replaced, under which the rats slid and probably still slide themselves to do the rounds of the yard, to search it. What are they looking for? The birdfood that had fallen there. The split bag of birdseed I threw away because it was full of just-hatched insects digesting the mix of seeds. And that, split, spilled open, allowing the insects to escape the bag and fly about. Swarms of small flies that put me off sweeping up the spilt birdseed.
I should have cleared it up! I know that now. The split bag in the outhouse round the corner. In the hollow beneath the concrete stairwell that leads up to my neighbour's back door. Everything must be kept clean because of rats, I know that now. I should have swept away the spilt seed and bleached the floor of the hollow.
What was I doing putting up a bird feeder, anyway? No birds come here. In the past 5 years I've seen 2 birds - a female blackbird, who laid eggs in a nest in the outhouse and deserted them when the plumber and I surprised her, and a magpie who would peck open the bin bags when they were exposed because the wheelie bin lid wouldn't close. Two birds, no more; but I thought I should try and tempt more to the yard. Thought the yard, a concrete shore, could do with more life.
In the end, it is only rats who belong in the yard. Rats precisely because they belong to the end and the return of the end that is the yard. Rats on concrete, rats moving across concrete, like the coming end.
Sometimes, over the summer, clothes and towels hung from the line. The yard was inhabited; it looked as though someone lived here. We'd even eat dinner on the bench, for that month when the sun would reach us there, that month that was mostly lost, anyway, to rain. An inhabited yard; I would come home to find my Visitor reading there, in the hour of sun. And perhaps I'd sit out there too with her, eyes closed against the sun: it was bright! How could that be! The yard, full of bright sun!
But light does not reach here, for the most part. No light in the enclosed space of the yard, whose walls are high. Plants who like shade grow here. Plants in pots, doing well enough, tended by me, watered. Once I pressed a flowering moss into the gaps between bricks on the wall. I'd taken it from somewhere else, from a wall on the other side of the city, to try and grow it here.
It amused my Visitor, who saw at once it wasn't going to take; that its roots would not bind to the plaster. And they didn't; I found the flowering moss (small purple flowers) dried up on the concrete. It didn't take; the roots found no purchase; nothing grew from the old wall with its gaps. And I'd dreamt of the moss spreading over the wall! That moss and purple flowers would cover it like a meadow! That a meadow would spread up across that north-facing wall and redeem it!
For a time, enthused by the presence of my Visitor, I had great hopes for the yard. I took a bottle of fungicide to the low wall that runs right opposite this window, and separates the path, level with the floor of this room, from the raised brow of concrete the same level as the lane that runs behind the rotten door. Off came the algae and the grime, and there was a smooth magnolia beneath, and the red painted brick of the steps. The low wall cleaned along its length was a creamy white, and I thought to clean the concrete, too, to discover its original grey beneath the algae.
A chewing gum grey, pristine: imagine that! I was pleased at the change in the yard I had effected; I wanted more. It is possible to change and shape the world and your own fate thereby, I discovered. Your own fate: because I always thought the yard in terms of fate. Always thought it was my personal Egdon Heath, the unchanging, running 15 foot back and 20 foot across, but fate nonetheless. I always thought: you return to the yard; you sit at its level. Or, the yard returns, and there where you write, at your level, the extended leaf of the table being nearly continuous with concrete. A wooden extension of the sprawl of concrete. And now I thought: it can be changed, scrubbed clean, and perhaps chipped away.
What did it hide, the concrete? Access manholes to the drains - I saw one opened when the men came to unblock the sewer. I saw the secret channel that runs under the yard. And there is still the long scar left from when the water company came to repair a burst pipe. A band of lighter grey upon grey, that scar, leading out to the rotten door, which I must get repaired, and beneath which the rats come, disolcating their bodies to squeeze through its two inches.
Rats on their rounds. Rats surveying the yard, completing a circuit and then, I suppose, out again, but to where? To the lane behind the yard; to other yards, perhaps, or back to the moor, which although divided by roads, still surrounds this neighbourhood. The moor, you can see it on Google Earth, that fits around this village-in-a-city and from which, I think, the rats come, and foxes and even the woodlice who lived in the black wooden box.
We walked out on the moor, my Visitor and I, this summer. Happiness, as I would never want to walk alone. Up the hills, the 'town tits' from one of which you can see the sea, a blue line on the horizon, and the individual hills of the Cheviots (it was a bright, crisp day). And all the way to Morrisons at the roundabout, which I would jokingly call Eldorado. We reached Eldorado by way of a thinning finger of moor, that pointed us all the way to its entrance. Perhaps the rats have gone back there, to the moor. Perhaps it is from there they begin their great circuit, and to there they will return. And perhaps the moor will grow up through the concrete again, and through this flat, this house, and the potted plants will rejoin the earth.
Tuesday morning, and the empty bird feeder hanging from the washing line. No birds came, and no clothes hang from the line. It's cold; the weather is unreliable. Clothes pegs clipped to yellow string, and the potted plants beneath. Didn't we repot them this summer? Wasn't that joy itself, smashing the old cracked pots and installing them in new ones? That was a sunny day; we booked two taxis back from B & Q. Two big bags of soil: the drivers didn't want to bring those. And fungicide. And new string for a washing line and a garden candle that splashed blue wax on the concrete. And slug pellets, that I spread in a blue Maginot line around the potted plants.
Tuesday morning, at the other end of summer, when it's no longer summer. The end of a season, and the new one not really begun. A few crisp brown leaves on our walk back from town yesterday. A 'nip in the air', but not autumn, not yet. At the other end of summer from the beginning of the Visit, and now beached at the Visit's end, at its farthest edge where, like a beach, it runs up back into the land. The summer was a glade, or a stretch of water. Turn back and you'll see a gap in the trees, light. That's where it was, the summer. And now forward again. But isn't there a larger glade ahead? Scarcely a glade, I think, but a whole horizon of light?
September 18, 2007 | Permalink