Stinkfist

Wednesday is about books, and reading, and writing. Here’s a new short story. If it helps, you could imagine it was set in 1996.

One thing I knew about the rat: It wasn’t judging me.

It was a poor decision to live alone, and like so many poor decisions, you make it and then you double-down, pretend it wasn’t just the right call, but that you were super smart for recognising it; no one else would have done what you did. And that’s what separates you from them. I mean, that last part is true, but you could ask anyone else for their opinion, and it’d be like one of those maths problems where they had the same answer, but no one could articulate how they arrived at it.

That was it. Out on my own and away and adrift, and in the first year my room had been party-central, and you think that’s going to make you the desired flatmate, but, actually, people use that spot for connections. First year is a breeze, and you hose on through. I did. I mean, shit, I took four beers to one of my English classes when we were learning about the Beats, sat drinking them, by the fourth — and I’d had a handful before I even got there — I wasn’t even hiding it, the empties clinking in my fucking bag. No shit. And could not care less, because I had a cute line all ready too, about method acting and going the extra mile since the subject was Kerouac — so just getting in character mate, and all that. Didn’t need the line. Didn’t need the compassionate consideration I’d lined up for exams by telling a wee lie that the girl that died was actually my girlfriend. But a back pocket just hangs there unless you have something in it. So I filed that away, and then still flew through. No shame. Or is it actually a heap of shame? I don’t fucking know.

I just know that first year is easy, it’s second year when the work really kicks in, and everyone chose their flat groups, and I was left standing there. Like the guy that had cooked the BBQ, and suddenly everyone with their sausages and no place for this guy but to stand.

So I moved in with the rat.

I mean, I moved in by myself. Filled a huge duffel bag with clothes, had a bunch of VHS tapes and records. A lava lamp. Tarantino posters. Books by the Beats, and Bukowski, Irvine Welsh, and Bret Easton Ellis. Convinced myself that I could stay up watching Short Cuts for three hours whenever I wanted and with no one to tell me to turn it down, and no one to have to keep explaining that to, yes, the stories were linked, but they were also fragments, it was a fucking interpretation of Carver, alright!

It was all going swimmingly, at least for the first few weeks. I even got a girl to come back with me to the bedsit. Its grotty little bathroom, and tiny ship’s galley kitchen weren’t even the things to put her off. I was able to do that myself. Ha! I put Songs In The Key of Life on the turntable, all smooth. Had the lava lamp glowing pinky-red, and thought as far as first moves go, this was decent-as. Only issue really was there wasn’t even any understanding of what to do. I gave a monologue about Pulp Fiction which I even called ‘The Golden Watch of The Gold Watch Monologue’ — but you know, that was all I had.

I suggested a massage. And she said sure. And when it became apparent that she meant me massage her, I put my top back on and rubbed her shoulders for a bit, over her shirt. And she moved her hair across to hang down over one shoulder, and she turned her head to look at me, and I started squeezing down tighter, and mumbled some shit about sports-medicine and how I was wasted here and should have done physiotherapy, and next thing she asked if it’d be okay for me to drive her home.

That car-ride was silent. And that was that. I mean, that was that in terms of her ever visiting me again. I called past a couple more times, but she was out at the gym apparently. And also she had some part-time job. So whenever I called on the phone that’s where she was. Whenever I drove by, and pretended I was already in the neighbourhood, she was either at the gym or the library. I mean, whatever. I moved on from that after a while. But of course, I did ponder why I’d played Stevie Wonder instead of Al Green or Marvin Gaye.

A few weeks in, the rat made itself known. It’s entirely possible of course, rats being what they are, that it had been with a previous tenant. But the landlord never mentioned that. Obviously. And yeah, probably it was the landlord that was the real rat. He reckoned he knew my grandfather, said some shit about how if I was half the man he was, and well, fuck I moved out halfway through the year didn’t I. So clearly, I was! He went from the sorts of smiles Bukowski said came from people who cleaned their teeth with piss, to telling me, in a letter — a fucking handwritten letter — that I was “possibly infected by the devil. That demons were in my soul”. And that he prayed for me. I wished I’d known where the cunt lived. Woulda thrown eggs at his fucking front door.

Anyway, the rat had a routine, which made me instantly jealous of it. I craved routine, I realise now. I was lost and lonely and could never admit to either. I was a show-off, but only when the stage lights were up. Backstage I was the clown removing make-up. Still tripping up in the big fucking shoes.

The rat started in the bathroom, moving swiftly across the gap between the rooms. I’m not going to call it a corridor or hallway, that’s just insulting to dictionary definitions. The rat would move to the kitchen and be gone. That was it. Using my house like a bus-stop. Ha. House. Wasn’t even mine. Wasn’t even a house. There were four older students, or actually a couple of them were out in the world with their first jobs, living above me. I was in this damp fucking shithole that was charitably being called a flat, but there was nothing charitable about the rent. Although the landlord seemed to think he was doing my dead Granddad some kind of cosmic god-bothering favour.

In the early days of the rat, I feared it might arrive at the end of my bed while I was having a wank. So I took to flogging in the shower. The rat wasn’t going to find me there. Plus, easy clean-up. Masturbation isn’t all its cracked up to be, it’s not always easy to, um, pull off. There was this story from the hostel, the year previous, about a guy who fell through the glass door, slipped on the soap was his story, and he had stitches in his hand, and he had to run with a towel half on him, and grab a t-shirt and some trackies before getting to the ambulance and then the hospital. So you know his story, the one written for his return to communal living, is that he was furiously beating it and in a punch-drunk moment he slipped, soap or otherwise, and crashed through the fucking glass door. At least this bedsit shower didn’t have a glass door. A mouldy old shower curtain was probably my one saving grace.

I had always just figured that everyone masturbated, and no one talked about it, since it was kinda literally a person minding their own business. And why would you be fucking noisy or nosy about that anyway. But the rat was a new development in my processes. I don’t want to go calling anything I had a routine.

The rat wasn’t onto me at all. But that didn’t help me from lizard-braining that the rat was totally onto me. In fact, that was the contributing factor to me giving the rat a status of equal importance, possibly higher even than myself. This rat had actual work it was doing. Routine. A family? This rat was a provider. This rat was going places. I mean literally. I was just providing occasional shelter. And since I mostly saw the rat during the day to fix that I just stayed out all day. I couldn’t go to class half the time, owing to a debilitating problem whereby I absolutely Could Not Be Fucked. Ask the suddenly very busy girl from the throwaway massage-night and she’d have said the same, though she might have used a different method of workings before reaching that identical conclusion.

I was downtown a lot, bugging friends in their flat. Which meant I was their rat. Sliding around between rooms, making rustling noises in the kitchen after everyone was in bed, leaving my shit everywhere. I would ‘live’ in this other place for most of the week, eventually. Even waiting until everyone was asleep and making them think I’d left, then sneaking onto their couch to crash. I’d return home for a night or two and end the weekend. That was never an exact science, some weekends started as early as Tuesday night. Mostly Wednesday or Thursday though. By Sunday night, I’d have fresh batteries in the Discman, and I’d be listening to Dire Straits or Natalie Merchant or even Hootie & His Bloody Blowfish — all my calming-down music, my ‘normal’ music, my dressing-down music (“dressing gown music”) — as I mounted that huge assault-climb to my bedsit from down in the middle of town. Crampons and a bag of Scroggin. A litre of water. And then just before hitting the North Face I’d stop and pull into a bus-shelter and change CDs.

It was one Sunday night when I got home about 7pm, winter, dark, I’d been putting off the walk home since about 2.30 that afternoon, just sitting there in full fucking mope, and then finally everyone else in the downtown flat just stopped talking to me, they wanted me gone. And probably had no idea that that’s what I wanted too. But I made it. Without god’s help, and, with only the devils in every detail of whatever it was I thought I was fucking doing, I made it. Key in the door, light on, and the fucking rat tore straight past me, from right by my feet. Was it using the front door too? Was it stuck outside and waiting for me? That cunt. I chased it to the kitchen and took a dive grabbing at its tail. I held it for a second, and it started gnawing back towards me, teeth visible. And though they never cracked the skin, they were at my knuckles, the rat in a half-loop and its tail like not-enough flax when you’re falling down a muddy hill on a bush walk.

I had no idea what I was going to do if I’d got it, but touching it felt even more revolting. I looked at the clothes on the floor, the dishes all over the bench that had civilisations happening within them now; an electric frying pan that I could have submitted as some sort of science experiment — the puddle of sauce on a plate now more like those realistic food sculptures of puddles of sauce on plates than either the sculptures or actual sauce. It was time to turn in for the night.

I smelled my hand where the rat had been. It was woody, a bit of the wetness of mud, but no residue. No real evidence. Fuck it. This time I slipped the Marvin Gaye on, as I turned all the lights out. I made it quick, under the duvet. Tossed a sock on the floor. And that was the closest I ever came to the rat.