The Ratcatcher's Daughter

The rats, at least, are waxing fat. The rats eat the dead men, and Hickey eats the rats. He has honed this knife to an edge, he has pricked it out with a dead man’s name — a wholesome pastime to promote wholesome character. Some men paint watercolors. Hickey hides himself away in the groaning belly of the Terror and catches rats.

A rat can prosper in the Royal Navy — stow away and see the world. Hickey presses the edge of his knife to a hind leg and peels up the hide in a flap. It’s no more difficult than a man taking off his socks — the filth peels away in stringy peels, and all that’s left is bone and meat, pink and shiny as a ribbon. The blood is an extra — he can suck it off his fingers and pretend he’s in a drawing-room someplace lapping up sauce a la Espagnole. The blood isn’t enough to wet his striped cuffs.

Behold, the virtuous poor. Waste not, want not. The hides shuck off easily with a careful hand — there’s a sort of smell to them, like chestnuts over the coals, and they leave your hands wet with oil and meltwater. Some fellows have sweethearts at home to knit them gloves and mufflers stitched with hearts and verses — Hickey has a whole festoon of ratskins tacked up on the wall. By the end of this he’ll have himself a fur-lined collar for his coat, same as any officer.

Beneath the spotted black skins there are legs like a man’s, and ribs like a man’s, and hardly any brain to speak of. Precious slips of meat, trapped in a jumble of bone. Hickey has had more meat to eat since sailing from Kent than he’s ever had in his life. Horse passed off as beef, stray dog tarted up as veal, every day’s a fancy dress ball when you’re in the Royal Navy. There’s an honesty about meat that looks like what it is — sow’s cheeks, oysters snugged in their shells, eels fresh from the tub, calves’ feet only slightly spoiled. Anything that hasn’t been boiled to death and forced into a metal case.

It takes a good half-hour to catch three or four rats, and it takes three or four rats at a time to get more than a mouthful off the bones, no matter how fat they may look when they’re squirming in your hand. But give a plate of drippings, a sliced onion, a glass of beer, and a couple of these over the fire — what man could be happier? A man must eat — and if Hickey never sees another spoonful of runny gravy slopped out of a patent tin he’ll die happy. There’s something far more honest about meat on the hoof, and he’s done worse things to eat. Keep your eyes open, and ignore the taste of it.

What’s the harm in ratflesh? Everywhere, men eat each other up. He digs for the stray bones with his fingertips, and plucks them out. His fingers are raw with bites — Hickey thrusts the back of one bleeding knuckle into his mouth.

If Billy could see him now, he’d be spittingly jealous. If the fancy takes him, he could show another man his tricks, and really burn Gibson up — how to catch and keep your dinner, where the private shipboard places are, how to swallow the peculiar taste and not mind it. Some of these narrow black places are already familiar from his fondest memories, from the early days, dreaming of lily-white sand beaches and a brown cannibal Adonis behind every palm tree with Billy Gibson sweating under him white as cheese and all too willing. He could save him this way, he could keep him alive with scanty tastes of stolen flesh and it would be just the two of them left aboard after the others have left, two captains of their own fate. But Billy is a man, and not a rat, he’s a man for the captain’s table and the officers’ mess and not for luscious secret meals by lamplight between the bales of fancy-dress costumes and the oilcloth pallets of prayer books. He’s a tailor’s son. He’s never starved before. He’ll die before he partakes in anything so low, or at least that’s what Billy tells himself. Fuck him.

No, but for now Hickey is the first to resort to this exigency — he won’t be the last. His trophies will keep well enough — bundled in a tarred rag, filleted and stuffed in pockets, smoked to a crisp over patent stoves. He will need them later, but he needs them now, too. There’s no shortage of animal life if you aren’t proud. Have you ever seen a Shoreditch rat? Fat as a puppy, slippery as an eel, and quick as the devil. Rats are better than men in this way — they eat and breed without distinctions of rank. Below decks, there is a complete society of rats, an egalitarian company of vermin all loving indiscriminately — when the men are all dead, the rats will have a regular holiday.