(old) Isaac and the Rat, part 1

When Isaac was eleven years old, he became a problem child. He was bright, talented, and curious in all directions. So he was curious about sand, the ocean, the stories of Aesop or Henry the Eighth and he was curious about death. His trouble first arose when his teacher caught him examining a rat. He says examining, but she called it torturing. They had a difference of opinion.

Our school always had problems with rats in the winter. One grey December morning only a few days before Christmas, as Isaac was pissing in the bathroom, he heard one of the janitor's traps snap followed by a high-pitched squealing. He said it was like listening to a tiny violin. He was curious, so he sneaked past his classroom and its long glass window and made his way downstairs. He hid behind the door to the canteen while one of the teachers passed by, oblivious to the sound, and he darted down the maintenance stairs into the basement.

Its left hind leg had been broken, and it flailed around looking for an escape, its shrieks were so loud that they hurt his ears. He had thought that rats were filthy and nothing more, and yet he could see that there was a little mind at work here. It tried several tactics to loosen its leg between bouts of yelping. It wiggled, shook, tried to gnaw the trap open with its teeth, and even gnawed on its own leg, perhaps thinking to bite it off and be free. This willingness to do what had to be done fascinated Isaac.

At first he thought maybe to help it, but then remembered that it was a thing of disease. He had learned about the Black Death and knew what ring-a-ring-a-rosey really meant. His fascination aside, they were delineated according to the natural law of things as enemies. He might respect the rat, but he could not be the ally of the rat. So he studied his enemy.

At first, he stole back upstairs and made sure that the door to the maintenance stairs was shut. Then he set to work. He wanted to see just how adaptable the creature was, so he looked around the maintenance room and found tape, a stapler, a scissors and a large tin of magnolia paint. Not much really, and nothing really set his imagination alight. He considered maybe covering the creature in paint or injuring it with the scissors, but was sure that he knew what would happen. It would either drown or bleed out.

He found an empty bucket and placed it over the rat to muffle it's piccolo sound and went back upstairs, closing the maintenance door behind him. The damping effect of the bucket worked; Isaac couldn't hear the rat any more. He went back to our class and quietly walked back in and took his seat. Our teacher didn't seem to notice as she was drawing a diagram on the blackboard. He thought that if he could wait until lunch then he could get some more interesting tools from the classroom's supply.

He was excited. As we continued to learn about long division, he paid no attention whatsoever and instead discreetly fumbled around his bag for tools. He produced his pencil case, one of those old metal ones that used to dent very easily and had hinges which broke in the first week of term, and took out a sharpener, a protractor, a cheap compass with a screw-hole for a pencil and a nail file with a slight hook on one end.

He used to carry the nail file around with him wherever he went. He had found it one day on the canal bank when he was eight and it always fascinated him. He didn't actually know what it was for, but it seemed to be useful as a pinning or wearing device when torturing ants and snails. Or rats perhaps.

(old) The Fat Bitch Said

I had a major row with Delia this afternoon. Today America has had its mid-term election, and Delia, like everyone I know, doesn't like President Bush. I don't hate her for it because Delia is basically kind. She's Karen's mum and she's house-bound, arthritic and refuses to get treatment.

I called in to her at about 1:15, as I was on a half day from work, and she was surprised to see me.

'Well look at you!' she said and smiled. 'And on a day of mourning too.'

She hobbled back to her favourite decrepit chair and fell into it with a wink. I must have scowled as I got the joke because she grinned apologetically and asked me if I would like a cup of tea.

'It's not over,' I said as I got up to make the tea, waving away her attempts to get up and do it herself. Delia has a small bedsit sort of arrangement in her room in the house that helps her get the essentials without too much motion. Karen lives in the next room. She, George and Henry lived here before their bust-up, but most of the house is now vacant. 'He's still the President.'

'It's high time that idiot got what he deserved though, Nathan,' she said. 'Justice must be served.'

I try to avoid bait. Various NHS counsellors, a clinical psychologist and my family say that I should learn not to get so worked up, so I use techniques like counting backward or breathing to stay steady. As I stood by Delia's kettle, I counted back to zero.

'It's not justice.' I said and calmly placed Delia's tea beside her, along with two sugar lumps. 'It's just revenge.'

'You're too young to understand dear,' she said.

''I'm twenty six years old,' I said. I remember all of the elections just fine. 'Don't you think that Gore would have done the same?'

'No dear. That Bin Laden is one thing, but torture camps?' she said. 'One of them said so only last week.'

'No.'

'He did, on the news,' she said, 'Cheney. Bold as brass, he was, saying it was fine to drown someone.'

She took a strong draught of her tea and ate a biscuit. I thought for a minute that she looked like a self-satisfied walrus, smacking its lips at the thought of some screed of a fish scuttling around the ice. I regret thinking that about Delia, but my temper is like that. I get mean.

'No he didn't,' I said, 'That was just like the Kerry joke about Iraq.'

Delia nodded. 'Well, Iraq, there's another example-'

'There's nothing wrong with Iraq,' I said flatly to cut her off. We've spoken about this a hundred times. 'This is what happens.'

'It doesn't just happen-'

'It bloody does!' I said and that's when I lost it, 'It's all over history, people die to make way for change.'

'Ah Nathan, that's just nonsense-'

'It is not,' I said, 'it's the by-product of ... of social and economic .... population. Anybody in power would have done exactly the same.'

She shook her head, 'Afghanistan is one thing, but Iraq is another. It's exactly the same as Germany and Poland. Exactly.'

'Oh for fuck's sake, it isn't,' I started.

She looked at me, silent. I'm not the type of person that uses foul language in public, especially not with older people. It's a reflection of a poor state of mind and an inability to think. I couldn't really think though. I realised at that point that I was standing, holding a teaspoon like a flick-knife. She smiled at me again, dismissively this time, telling me with a glance that I'd blinked first and lost the debate. This is why I don't visit Karen's mum very often.

'It isn't,' I said half-heartedly and sat down again.

'You can talk like a sailor with your friends in work or even in the hospital, but not in my house Nathan,' the fat bitch said. At least that's what I thought of her at that moment.

'It isn't the same as Poland at all,' I said, 'Germany was all about ideology. America is all about symbol.'

Nobody but me understands this. America is the source of poetry.

'I taught history for thirty-eight years,' she said, 'I lived in post-war Britain and through communism and all the rest of it and I can tell you that it is exactly the same, young man.'

'It's not.'

'It is.'

'It's not! The agencies are different now. The resource balance is different. People like you have to learn to look at the world in a new context because not every war is The War fought again and again.'

She seemed stumped.

'People like me?'

'Your generation, Delia,' I said. After a moment, I added 'I have to go.'

'Why is it,' she said, 'that a man as bright as you can only get a job in a supermarket at the age of twenty six?'

I snarled and grabbed my coat. Delia always brings out the assassin's knife. This is a fight that we've had before.

'Oh Nathan, I didn't mean it,' she started.

Yes she did. She knows full fucking well what's wrong with me.

'Oh Nathan,' she said but I was half way out the door.

'Bye Delia,' I said. 'I'll see you again in a few days.'

I left and slammed the door behind me.

(old) Fluid Retention

Karen always calls in on Tuesdays and Thursdays because those are the week days that she goes for dialysis. The process always makes her depressed, so she likes to call in to see me on her way because she says I cheer her up.

We usually get lunch in a Gregg's sandwich shop around the corner from the shop. She'll get some variation of chicken salad. I always get plain ham sandwiches and Dr Pepper. We sit in the stock room where I work, and she talks. She talks almost all of the time, which I like because I don't. She tells me about her day, the hospital, the nurses who are (in her words) bitches, the weather (shitty shitty English weather specifically) and asks me how my job is going.

I always tell her that the shop is doing well, and talk about the impending Christmas. She says that she likes my voice and stays for a few minutes longer than she is supposed to, so she is always late for the hospital. My work fellows always tease me afterwards, calling her my girlfriend even though I tell them that she isn't. Karen is my older half sister, but I haven't told them that. I like the pretend secrecy of it.

Today, she has more trouble than normal. She talked a lot about her friend Maria, who is Spanish, and her problems. Maria is due to get married to some Australian banker who works in the City, and apparently it's a source of drama. While Karen talked, I ate. Then she said:

'My ankles are swollen, which means fluid retention. I think I have another infection. What do you think?'

I kept chewing and said nothing.

Karen has been on dialysis for two and a half years. She used to be really alive, but now she always looks tired, her hair is greasy and her skin never looks good. I've told her about all the local gyms in our area, and she thanked me each and every time. Karen always thanks me for everything I do for her. I don't think she takes the idea seriously though.

'Would you come visit me some time?' she asked as I was finishing my sandwich, 'Mother hasn't seen you in ages.' Her mum, she means. They've lived together since Karen's kidneys stopped working.

'I have to go back,' I said, just like always.

She smiled, 'Thanks. It's good that you're busy again.'

Everybody is saying this to me recently.

(old) I want to care but don't seem to know how

Isaac is my friend because he doesn't really listen to me, and that's okay. It's not very easy to listen to me when I start one of my ravings, but he just carries on in his own way, nodding or hmmm-ing while making tea, washing the dishes or getting stoned on that green weed of which I disapprove.

Most of my family and friends don't let me talk. We converse, but this is different. We converse about weather, Blair, traffic, my job, their holidays, my lack of a girlfriend, but they don't let me talk about America.

I say, The only good kind of football is American football.
And they say, Shut it Nathan, I'm watching the match.

I'm easily annoyed, according to my doctor. He is a very old man who smokes in his surgery, and I don't like his smell. When not refusing to prescribe me some more pills, he grumbles about the NHS and how things apparently ought to be. I've told him that we should have private health insurance because that's what the Americans have and they like it just fine. He doesn't let me talk now.

Here in crummy London there are only three types of people:

1. People who roll their eyes at America while copying it in every way
2. People who rave about the great evil or devil of America, but have no courage of their conviction
3. People who realise that America has it right

London isn't a real city. Real cities have culture and a character of their own, but London doesn't have that. It's a city of mirrors. Everything in the city is either a mirror of the past, like the Tower, the Queen, Downing Street, or a mirror of something American, like Canary Wharf, the people and the food. Whatever becomes cool in New York eventually becomes cool in London.

Isaac lets me talk all this out for hours. He likes London, he says, but he's happy as long as I'm happy. Isaac likes to listen to music, paint and draw pretty pictures while I talk. He only ever paints animals and things in the wild because he says that it reflects the true character of the world. I think he's actually does it because he likes to watch David Attenborough and can't get mouths and eyes right. When I've told him this, he's just smiled and continued to draw a scene. His latest is a leopard being eaten alive by an antelope.

A bearded NHS counsellor that I saw for a few weeks when I was depressed last winter tells me that it's good to have a friend who can just listen. He smiled a wan I want to care but don't seem to know how smile while saying it. Many of my people of them are expert at that smile. He told me to talk to Isaac whenever I could. It's good to talk.