It began as a blur of white against the muted grey wall. The movement was so quick it may have been nothing more than a speck of dust passing by her sleepy eye. At first, this was exactly what she took the movement to be, so she turned over and drifted off to sleep.
In the moments before dreams caught her, she thought she heard a soft scratching, but it was slow and careless, like an old man idly carving wood, so it drew no alarm.
Morning arrived and with it, she had forgotten about the white blur. She stumbled to the bathroom to pee and stared at her rheumy eyes in the mirror for a long time. Under one eye, halfway between its outer corner and the tip of her nose was a red blemish. She leaned forward and examined it more closely. She brushed a narrow fingertip across its surface and felt lumpiness. She washed and dabbed something on it to help with the swelling, then wandered to the kitchen.
One of the joys of living alone was the freedom to cook breakfast in your underwear. She never had to worry about someone judging her belly swelling or the drama that surrounded it. Questions came with companionship, and the dispelling of the one meant the lack of the other, so it was a welcome trade to her.
She never liked questions.
She sat on the two-seat sofa and ate as she watched breakfast TV. She ate a breakfast designed for children. She selected her food based on the number of colours it contained and never looked at the ingredients. What moved across the screen was as colourful as the contents of her bowl, and just as substantial. Vacuous smiles split pretty faces and spewed words that she knew were not worth her time, but she watched anyway because it filled the empty air.
She finished her bowlful of colour and placed it aside.
The apartment consisted of four rooms if she included the tiny hallway that connected the other three. It was functional and even nice – in a modest way – but mostly it came at the right price, which was nothing. It was paid for by the Centre, presumably to move her on so her bed could be taken by someone more in need. This meant – of course – someone with fresher bruises. Her bruises had faded, but the remaining addition to her body had remained and would remain for some time.
Unconsciously she brushed her fingertips across her slightly swollen belly. It was far too early to feel any response, but she thought she felt it anyway. She felt the warmth through her fingertips and thought of a list of names.
Most of the following day was spent reading, with a portion of it put aside for her coursework. Neither was taxing, but while one was her memory and understanding of the previous two years, the other made her look forward to brighter times. Before this had happened, back when she was still a teen, she would have scoffed at the idea of a parenting course making her future brighter, but she had excelled in making bad decisions back then. She finished her coursework a little before the evening soaps. She watched with the sound turned up high, so the accents from actors on the other side of the globe filled her tiny apartment, the surf and sound of sea birds lighting up her imagination. There was also something to be said for Australian men in beachwear.
She let her imagination free flow for half an hour, the index finger of her right hand pressed gently on the spot directly under her navel as if awaiting confirmation of something that it hoped was due any day.
When the evening came she played music, not music written by others, but her own. The CDs had seen better times, but they were all that was left now. Her guitar had been smashed and the computer she had used to mix the music had been riddled with viruses after he’d taken it. She had cried at the loss. After all that had happened between them, that had been the only time she had remembered crying. She must have other times – of course – but that moment, when she had realised all her songs had gone, she had broken down. With everything else he had taken: the past, and much of the present, but with her music he had taken any dream she had of the future too.
She would not find the CDs for some time, and when she finally did, she had outrun him. It was a chance encounter with a man she recognised but could not name. He remembered her and seemed pleased with the chance meeting. His eyes had been bright while looking at her and it took her a while to recognise the meaning behind them. It had been too long since someone had looked at her that way.
She had considered taking him home with her, she knew he would have accompanied her, but she thought of her slightly distending belly and quiet apartment and decided against it. When she disengaged from the encounter he was rooting around in a large tan postal bag. When his attention returned to her, he produced three home-burned CDs.
“Remember these?” He had said with a smile, and she had taken them off him with a gentleness that was almost reverence. For the second time in recent memory, she had started to cry.
So, a thread of dreams remained. It was a frayed thread that jumped and sometimes would not play. But it was enough. She noted down what she remembered of the chords, copied the lyrics, and slowly rebuilt them from the ground up. She added hew phrases and chords as she did, and things slowly became better.
The evening gave way to night, and she had stripped down to flesh decorated with old, yellowed bruises and bathed. Bathing still felt good, drifting in water without a care, knowing nothing was between those walls could hurt her. She dried, slipped on fresh nightclothes, then slid into the bed she would only share with one other.
Sleep took her, but it did not take her for long.
She was watching the shadows move across the ceiling. They were gentle and undulating, created by the trees that lined the circumference of the apartment block. She did not know how long she had lain awake watching the movement, not knowing what had woken her, but she was alert as if something had disturbed her. There was a moment of panic until she remembered she was alone in her apartment. It was the smell that had reminded her; or the lack of smell. She could not smell the mix of alcohol or the acrid stench of unwashed male flesh.
She knew she would know his presence by his stench alone, and her heart slowed.
But something had awoken her.
She lay still and listened, staring at the shadows above her, listening to the darkness that pressed in on all sides. Outside she heard the wind moan between the apartment block and the office opposite it. The tree branches clattered their applause, then the leaves whispered their chorus of gossip before the wind returned.
Under this sound was another. A scraping sound so quiet that it may not have been a sound at all. It moved from her right, behind her head and around to her dressing table. She moved her head slightly to look, seeing a reflection of her silhouette looking back at her. Behind her, the window was a square of muted orange distorted by the shadows of trees. It looked like the pelt of an exotic animal, and she was so taken by the conceit that she didn’t immediately witness her visitor.
It sat on the dressing table, and their eyes locked.
Carefully she reached over to the small bedside lamp, its bulb would not cast much light – she only used it to read by – but it may be enough.
The glare did not disturb her visitor, who continued to watch her.
The rat was large and flawlessly white. It was sat on its hind legs with its front feet raised almost to its lower jaw. It looked like the rodent was caught in mid-prayer. Its pink eyes were wide and reflected the light like little beacons.
She lay in the bed, watching as it dropped onto all fours and turned to slip between the back of the dressing table and the wall, leaving the young woman to stare at herself in the wobbling dressing table mirror.
She lay there awake until red light stained the room and she could hear people in the apartments around her begin to stir. Water drummed through the pipes as showers were used and toilets were flushed, footsteps thudded along the apartment floor above her, and deep inside the complex a baby began to cry.
Her hand moved to that spot just under her navel, and finally, she drifted off to sleep.
She woke just in time for the evening soaps. She remembered the rat, but quickly it drifted into her memory as a dream might. She thought the rat must have been half the size of the dressing table mirror. Perhaps a comparable size to a domestic cat, but that could not have been true. She thought her half-sleeping mind had elaborated on the encounter. There was nowhere such a large rodent could hide in the apartment, and no gaps anywhere large enough for it to wriggle down. It was – she was certain – no larger than a regular rat. It was in all likelihood just a regular-sized animal that her sleeping mind had exaggerated into something exceptional.
The soaps ended and she moved on to her coursework, and then on to reading for pleasure. The weather had changed so she dressed in something warm instead of turning on any heating. She’d prefer that hot water in a bath rather than in the radiators. She gathered her books and moved to the bedroom. She wrapped herself in the quilt over her clothes and continued to read until the light failed her.
Another day over, she huddled down and drifted off to sleep.
When she awoke it was with a scream in her throat. She had dreamed of Orwell’s 1984. Of room 101 and the horrors it contained. A man’s face she knew all too well was leaning over her, and the grin it wore held far too many teeth. She could hear scratching. It was from the rats in the cage that would soon be raised over her face.
Her heart thudded in her chest, and her breath was short. The familiar man had asked her the question he always asked. His voice was soft and the words unthreatening, but the question had been a trap, and they had both known it.
The darkness settled around her. At first, she thought she felt its weight until she realised she had wrapped herself in a cocoon of clothes and a quilt. It was warm, a ball of heat curled at her stomach, in that special place just below her belly button. She intended to reach for it, but sleep caught her first.
This time there were no dreams.
She had woken early and was under the glare of the unforgiving light of the bathroom cabinet when she saw them. For a moment she did not comprehend what it was and wondered – bizarrely – if they represented a part of the ageing process no one had discussed with her. She was old enough now to lament the lack of a life manual, or failing that, a mother who could have pointed out the mistakes she had made in life. She thought this even as she slid onto the edge of the bath and brushed the hairs that had accumulated on her belly button. They were fine short hairs of the purest white, and it took her far too long to place their origin.
She thought of the warmth she had felt there the night before and her stomach rolled. She fell to her knees before the toilet bowl and wretched. She had not eaten, but it did not matter, there seemed to be far more in there than she had put there in recent days. By the time she had finished her knees had locked in position and she had to hold on to the slick edge of the toilet bowl to stop from sliding down onto the cheap linoleum.
An hour later she dressed and slipped on shoes. Her feet complained at this indignity, unused to being confined in hot leather even on the coldest days. She checked her purse for cash and sought out her elusive keys. The door resisted as she pulled it open, and complained as she closed it, and the key in the lock sounded as keen as a guillotine blade as the bolt drew closed.
The apartment was not silent even though the young woman had abandoned it. The four rooms seemed to take an intake of breath. It was unthinkable that she should leave the confines of its walls, and for a moment the apartment sulked in frank disbelief. Upstairs, people shuffled around as they woke from a restful night, and the pipes vibrated to life as they used their bathroom. A radio was turned on, then the volume was increased. If the young woman had been home, she would not have been able to recognise the music. The layers of carpet and wood between her apartment and the one above had rendered the music nothing more than a series of flattened sounds unrecognisable as a song.
This track ended and another began, and as this one ended the rat slipped from around the bedroom door and scampered across the hallway carpet. It paused at the corner of the living room and sniffed. It knew the woman wasn’t home, so it ran across the living room floor under the two-seat sofa.
The music faded out and was replaced by the muted voice of a DJ. He laughed and then the rat slipped from the other side and ran to the TV on its stand. It sniffed around its base and turned back on its tail to run through to the small kitchen.
It was like a ghost, a white blur that gleamed when its movements coincided with the light that streamed through the living room window. A thin trail gleamed in its wake. A tiny thread of urine marked its passing as it made its way around the room. The rat climbed the gap between the unused electric cooker and the kitchen unit and sniffed at the edges of the countertop. It poked its head into a slightly open drawer where the young woman kept her utensils and then slipped into the sink where it ate the remains of the woman’s breakfast.
The apartment was its apartment now, it leapt from the counter and scampered over to the sofa, climbed it and dug its wedge of head under the cushions to root out any crumbs that had nestled there. It explored every inch of the rooms, but it held little interest in the bathroom, and neither did the living room. Then it found the small cupboard under the TV that contained a cardboard box filled with sweet-smelling confectionery. It ate its contents and then ran from the confinement of the tiny cupboard. Its door swung open, then back again before the magnetic catch caught and held it closed.
For almost half an hour the rat made the apartment its own. It left a tuft of hair on the edge of the sofa, a pool of its urine seeped into the carpet near the front door and it ate anything and everything it could find that was even barely edible but suddenly it stopped in its tracks and pointed its wedge of head up towards the ceiling as if listening. It stayed that way for a minute. It did not move. Then a key hit the lock and as quickly as the bolt was drawn aside the rat was gone, ghost-like, back into its secret hideaway.
She stepped back into the apartment, the carrier bag containing the spoils of her journey hanging from one wrist. She slid the bag from her arm and placed it on the kitchen worktop. She slid the items free and arranged them in a line along the countertop.
The young woman planned the rest of her day as she reached into the utensil drawer and fished out a knife to make a sandwich. She didn’t see the blur of white this time, a tiny ghost that rushed silently from under the sofa and through into the bedroom. She was too taken with her plans.
She returned to the living room and turned on the TV for the evening soaps. She devoured her sandwich and did not notice the tuft of white hair next to her bare knee.
She worked on her coursework and then ran a bath as the sun began to set. While it filled, she arranged the items she had purchased around the apartment. She didn’t think about their placement too deeply, she tried not to think about the items. She half hid them behind furniture, in places less used and then retired to the bathroom.
The bruises were a little less pronounced now, and someone who did not know her might not see them. However, the likelihood of her allowing someone who didn’t know her in an undressed state was unlikely, especially as her belly had begun to show a pronounced curve.
She slipped into the bath and read.
Six chapters of the latest Keigo Higashino later, and the bathwater was growing cold. She slipped out of it, dried off, dressed, and went to bed. She climbed in and carefully tucked the edge of the quilt under the mattress, creating a sealed pocket in which to sleep. Then, using the muted light from the bedside table, she read until she slept, doing her best not to think about what she might wake up to in the morning.
Before morning came, she had the night and her nights never came without dreams. These dreams rarely scared her, though they probably should have. They could startle her awake and sometimes leave her unsettled the next day, but it would be rare for them to wake her with a cry of distress. Any attention a cry of anguish would attract would be unwelcome, her life had taught her the burden of silence.
So, she slept through her horrors and did not hear the trap when it snapped shut.
When she awoke, she awoke to stillness and silence. At first, the dreams were all she could think of, but slowly they receded. Ten minutes into the waking world she could only remember impressions from what had scared her the previous night. Slowly, even the impressions faded and just the feeling of unease remained. Then she remembered the items she had placed around the apartment the night before and something cold lodged in her belly. She reached down and slid the palm of her hand over her bulge of stomach, then her other hand joined it and she filled her mind with music as she rose.
It was in the first trap she approached. The one she had placed beside the bedroom dressing table. She could see her reaction in the mirror. Her eyes were wide and her mouth formed an “O”.
The rattrap had closed around the animal’s throat, marring its perfect white fur with a streak of red, but it was not this that made her throat hum in an unexpressed scream. It was the pool of tiny white wriggling things spewed from under its long thick tail. Tiny maggots of white that she knew were not maggots.
They were babies. Tiny rat babies.
The young woman opened her mouth and screamed.