Boots Read online

Blitzkrieg Revisited

  “You’ve never had it so good” Grandpa Rat said to us, in the pile of rubble that was once Mrs Bleachdale’s house.

  We gathered around him, the whole colony, ready as always for one of his bedtime yarns; and behind us, in the distance, the East End shimmered in a rosy incendiary glow; and from the sky, the Rat Gods dropped more exploding poisoned pellets of revenge on our human torturers, splintering their world and turning it into our world.

  “You remember what this place used to be like, don’t you? You remember Mrs B., don’t you?”

  He paused then for effect, and let the image of the ogre grow in our minds. Our eyes grew large and our whiskers trembled in remembering the giant of a woman, who was two dozen-rats-high and was said to grow a tail taller for every rat sent to heaven.

  “She was a terror of a woman, Mrs B., and I for one hope she lies howling down below. When it wasn’t traps she was laying, it was poison she was putting down for our young innocents.”

  He stood on his two back legs, lifted his right front leg and sniffed the air with his pink nose to drive home the point, like some sewer orator; and when all of us were looking at each other and nodding in agreement about how bad things used to be, he continued.

  “Time was when only one rat in ten would make it to adulthood in this house, I tell you. One in ten! And they’d be a scrawny, skantering, snivelling kind of animal: all bone and fear, they was. But now, well. Look at yourselves now, my fine furry friends. You’ve got meat on your bones and a twinkle in your eye. The future’s as bright as the search lights that light up the night sky; the lights that show the Rat Gods flying high above us!”

  We all looked up, and there they were, our buzzing vengeful Rat Gods, smoking out the humans, filling the air with strange new smells.

  “And look at this fine house of rubble we’ve got for ourselves now, with more hiding places than we know what to do with, and a cracked larder full of food, and all for ourselves. It’s getting a mite smelly now, but that only adds flavour, if you ask me. Good food is like a good rat — the older the better!”

  He chuckled at his own witticism, and we pretended to laugh, but in truth, we’d heard this joke a thousand times since Mrs B. died.

  Another rat climbed up into the mouthpiece of the gramophone and continued.

  “And it’s like this all over the city, my comrades tell me, from Lewisham to Neasden. More and more rat communes are taking what’s rightfully theirs, and declaring Rat Rubble Republics. Decadent human civilization is collapsing and history demands that we seize this opportunity to establish the dictatorship of the rodent, in accordance with the laws of dialectic materialism.”

  Thus spoke Rarathusa, a political rat who often went on forays into the wider world. He was developing quite a following among some of the younger more bookish rodents.

  There was an awkward silence after he spoke and we could hear the wind whistling through the rubble. Grandpa Rat and the rodent elders twitched their whiskers.

  “Tell us about the cat, Grandpa Rat!” one of the young ‘uns demanded, never having seen the fearsome beast herself.

  “Ay, well might you shout the word ‘cat’ out loud now, safe in the Ratopia of the blitz world, when men hide in shelters and rats rule the roost. But t’was a time, young ratty, when you only had to say the word ‘cat’ and the mean ole moggy’d appear. Teeth sharp as kitchen knives; claws longer than your paws; and yellow eyes bigger than your head. A pox on the mangy rogue, for she slaughtered me own flesh and blood, a dozen times over, and I was never such a happy rat as when I saw her, dead on the dusty floor, skull smashed in twain, fallen masonry all round and a shard of glass straight through her evil feline heart.”

  “Say what you like about Killer Kat, Grandpa, but she did make fulsome good eating in the end!” Grandma Rat said.

  “Ay, she did that, I’ll grant you … even if the screamin’ and hollarin’ and wailin’ of old Mrs B. wasn’t exactly appetizing; lying there, trapped under her precious mahogany table, bleeding from more holes than she had orifices.”

  “Ay, but she was fairly tasty herself, I thought, considering her advanced years” Grandma Rat said. “She kept us going for weeks, the old witch, and sixty kilos ain’t nothing to be sniffed at, even if she did get a bit whiffy near the end.”

  “Better whiffy food than no food, I tell you. You’ve never had it so good!” Grandpa said.

  “But we’ll have it even better, come the Union of the Rat Rubble Republics!” Rarathusa exclaimed.

  Grandpa’s nose twitched at that and scraped the ground three times. The rat elders did likewise before disappearing into the rubble. They soon reappeared, and they now surrounded Rarathusa, but he was so wrapped up in his oratory that he didn’t take heed of their movements.

  “From each rat according to his abilities; and to each rat according to his needs. Rodent brothers —”

  The attack came so quickly that Rarathusa didn’t even have time to give the final death squeak, so his poor soul will never make it to Ratheaven.

  “You’ve never had it so good!” Grandpa Rat said again, but this time with menace.

  If Walls Had Ears

  The kitchen and the living room were the oldest of friends.

  Neither could remember a world without the other and both their memories stopped at the inception of construction. To the rubble time their memory would not stretch. They had been and always would be: one flat indivisible, in and of itself.

  Even their earliest memory was the same: the naked pain of their birth, their protracted partum, when their form was glued and hammered together, brick by brick. In the beginning was the brick and the brick was made flat and dwelt among us.

  They remembered the creatures they mistook for Gods: those grunting sweaty Irish bricklayers, who had no sooner brought them into the world than abandoned them, leaving them with the suffocating clothing of plaster and the slapdash make-up of paint.

  As they turned from warbling infants to rancorous adults, they stored the bitter memories of every indignity forced upon them by the flesh creatures who followed the builders. They hated the hominids who moved within them; the vile squatter lice who arrived, aged and died, only to be replaced by others from beyond the Building. They remembered all and forgave nothing.

  The living room was by far the larger of the two friends and was almost four times the size of his companion, and although the kitchen was jealous of his friend’s size and stature, this did not impede their friendship. One could have been ten times the size of the other, but they would still have regarded each other as equals.

  Toward the other rooms, however, they shared an animosity bordering on contempt. All rooms were equal, the Building’s Charter proclaimed, but some, the two friends thought, were more equal than others. They were separated by the tiny but truculent toilet and the eternally confused hall. They rarely saw each other room-to-room and instead communicated through the conduit of the water pipes.

  One dry June day, the kitchen creaked the pipes a little to let the living room know it wanted to converse.

  “What did you make of them this morning? He seemed very distracted, I thought. He spilled the milk and dropped an egg on me, you know,” Kitch said.

  “Clod! We should drop a brick on him one day, see how he likes it! I suppose he’s worried by the news from the front.”

  “The front of the building?”

  “No, the war front! You really should try to keep abreast of current affairs, Kitch.”

  “What care I for maggot men news? And even if I did listen, what could I find out? You’re the one who gets all the gaff. All day and night I hear them in there with you, gabbing about who knows what. And I’m out here, lone and lonesome, a kitchen without a friend in the world.”

  “Now don’t get all maudlin on me, Kitch. Sometimes they talk out there, don’t they?”

  “Sure they do! Mostly they talk about how two grown people can’t both fit in a three-metre squared kit
chen. If they’re not ignoring me, they’re insulting me. Or else they’re stinking me out; boiling and frying up the flesh of dead monsters from land, sea and air. Bloody squatters!”

  “We are born to suffer, and our world is but a veil of tears,” injected Toilet.

  “Ah shut up ya shitehawk! Your world is but a world of turds, dropping one after another into the fetid blackness of the Sewerworld. Why don’t you butt out of our conversion and go chew on a colon sausage!” Kitch suggested.

  “We cannot help what we are. Function is destiny,” Toilet said, and then he signalled his displeasure by flushing himself loudly.

  “Oh, so you’re off again, are you? Huffing and flushing and trying to swish the house down. You want them to get the plumber out again, do you? You want a rubber plunger rammed down your privates, do you? You want a hairy hand to wiggle about with your ballcock?”

  “Ah just ignore ole Privy Pervert,” Liv said dismissively.

  “I will sing no more songs for rooms which care nothing for me.”

  “Good! Shite shouldn’t sing.”

  There was silence for a while and Toilet sulked and stewed in the bitter moodiness that marked his bile and bilious being. Soon the two friends resumed their conversation.

  “These last lot of tenants are alright, as far as blood pumps go. At least they don’t have any cats, not like that old bat before them. Remember that moggy of hers, the fat old grey thing, always scratching her nails on my walls and leaving little brown mementos in every corner. Dirty animal!”

  “Well, she got what was coming to her, old Pussface. I saw to that.”

  “Hum … felinicide. Yes, I remember. You’ve got a terrible wicked side to you sometimes, Kitch.”

  “Well, who could resist it?! There she was, sitting on my ledge at the height of summer, staring down at all and sundry in the courtyard below, meowing like she owned the place, cleaning her oh-so-delicate paws like the jumped-up little Bagpuss she was. All I did was … give her a little nudge.”

  “And it was curtains for pussy!”

  “She had it coming! Anyway, what’s all this about ‘The Front’?”

  “It’s the war, isn’t it?”

  “Haven’t they only just finished the war?”

  “That was twenty years ago, Kitch. You’re in a world of your own out there, aren’t you? This is the Second War.”

  “Well they must have liked the first one if they’re having another. So who are they fighting this time?”

  “The Germans, of course.”

  “Wasn’t it the Germans last time?”

  “That’s right, but you can’t expect originality from flesh bags, can you? All that movement stops them from thinking. They just mill about doing the same things over and over: get up, have breakfast, wash the sweat off themselves and then go to work. No sooner are we nice and comfy than they come back again. They eat, yak a bit, go to bed and snore the night away. We’ve seen a half-century of it and no doubt we’ll see another half.”

  “It must be terrible strange though, to be moving about all the time,” Kitch mused.

  “They’re a strange lot, make no mistake. And now they’re set to start shooting each other again.”

  “What’s this shooting business anyway?” Kitch asked.

  “I’m not really sure, but whatever it is, it stops them from moving.”

  “So, it’s gotta be a good thing, hasn’t it?”

  “Not for the flesh heads it isn’t. As soon as they stop moving, they die. We’ve seen it before with our own eyes. Remember the old wrinkly one who died mid splutter in the toilet; half a plop inside her and half outside. She stopped moving and then got all bloated and purple. And then she gave birth to those wriggly wormy things,” Liv remembered.

  The pipes shook a little at the memory of it.

  “Didn’t she stink up the place something awful? I was almost glad to see those scurrying rats come in to clean that mess up.”

  “But it’s always the same story. Just when we think we’ve got the place to ourselves, more rubbery things come a knocking. More arms and legs and torsos. Why do we have to suffer them?”

  “We are born to suffer and –” Toilet intoned, adding echo for effect.

  “Shut up!” they both shouted in unison.

  Toilet did not have time to respond. All three rooms, like every room in the apartment block, was silenced by a new sound. The siren wailed and rose and fell and seemed to be the very embodiment of pain, causing all rooms great and small to shiver with a fear they could not identify.

  The man and the woman returned shortly after the siren stopped, breathing heavily and with panic in their wide eyes. Much to Kitchen’s chagrin, they immediately went to the living room and sat on the sofa. He tried to eavesdrop but they spoke in hushed tones and even Living Room had to strain his ears to make out the conversation. The man spoke first, sweating and trembling.

  “They’ve broken through. The lines are collapsing. The government’s fled to Bordeaux. There are rumours they’ll be in Paris by the end of the week.”

  “But, it can’t be! What about the Maginot line?”

  “The Huns have gone around it. Walls! Why did they hide behind walls?! Why did they think we could trust bricks and mortar? France will fall.”

  “But England’s safe. The Channel will protect us, and the Navy. Britain still rules the waves. They can’t touch us here. London’s safe.”

  “Safe as houses,” the man replied.

  The man and the woman hugged each other as dusk fell on the city, and neither one thought to draw the thick black-out curtains and turn on the lights, preferring instead to hide in the darkness. Pipes creaked and seemed to amplify their fear.

  “Liv, Liv, what’s going on in there? I can’t hear a word!”

  “The war’s going badly or something.”

  “Ah, who cares about their silly fights?! This war can only be good news for the two of us. The only good human is a dead human; and with any luck, they’ll all immobilize one another, and we rooms will have the place for ourselves. As it was in the beginning and will be again, a world of bricks and mortar, after the plague of man.”

  The summer wound on and the man and the woman became more and more restless. As their anguish grew, the two rooms, almost in spite of themselves, began to share their sense of apprehension, but they never spoke of it, being too proud to admit that the fear of man had infected them.

  In early September, from the skies above, a strange droning noise was absorbed by the outer walls of the building and passed through Liv and Kitch to the seated tenants.

  “They’re here. They’re coming. The Luftwaffe!” the woman shrieked.

  She got up to look through the window, pointing at some slow-moving matchsticks in the sky.

  “The ack acks will get them!” the man said.

  The pipes rumbled and Kitchen and Living Room tried to make sense of the changing world beyond the Building.

  “What’s going on now?” Kitch asked.

  “Someone called Lift Waffle’s coming.”

  “Is he a bill collector?”

  “Search me, but what are all these strange noises? That’s what I want to know.”

  “Search the waters of the water closet,” Toilet whispered.

  “What are you wittering on about now, Toilet?” Kitch asked.

  “The water bowl’s vibrating. Something is rotten in the ground below us. The earth is shaking. A world of pain will rise to meet us: a sky of death will fall to greet us.”

  Toilet repeated the last sentence over and over again, in a rabid tone.

  “That lunatic’s gone totally off his rocker now. He’s like a deranged demon, he is. How are we gonna shut him up?”

  Toilet’s shrill voice whirled on and on, faster and faster.

  “A world of pain will rise to meet us: a sky of death will fall to greet us.”

  “Will you ever shut up, you terrorsome toilet?” Kitch pleaded.

  “For the love o
f God the Builder, pipe down!” Liv demanded.

  And then, silence. Except … except for the soft sound of raining metal. All three rooms and all the rooms beyond heard it, and even the humans sensed it. A projectile falling. Solid sky rain.

  A light brighter than the sun heralded the end of time for Kitch, Liv, Toilet, and all the rooms beyond and all the flesh creatures within. Explosive turned solid to gas with such force that all around it were torn apart. Flesh stuck to wall and wall stuck to flesh. Bones, bricks and mortar were buried together in the ugly unity of rubble.

  Last Orders for Churchill

  “Oh gawd, he’s sozzled again!” Lord Beaverbrook exclaimed.

  He held up the brandy bottle to the light, noted it was nearly empty and then shook his head at the rotund figure, slouched over his writing desk, drooling over his papers and snoring loudly.

  “His sense of timing is truly impeccable. The House, the country and the free world awaits his emergency address, and how does he prepare? By getting blotto! For Heaven’s sake, Sawyers, how could you let him get into this state?!”

  “My master is not one to be told what to do, and certainly not by his valet,” Sawyers replied. “Shall I call a doctor? Or perhaps The Voice?”

  “What good would that do?! No doctor can cure drunkenness and no impersonator can take his place in a live address to the House. This is not a BBC production!”

  “Then might I be so bold as to suggest a postponement, owing to my master finding himself so … indisposed?”

  There was a brief pause while Beaverbrook considered this and both men looked at the snoring hulk slumped on the chair.

  “Can you hear that, Sawyers?”

  “The snoring, Lord Beaverbrook?”

  “The wolves, Sawyers, the wolves.”

  “Wolves, Your Lordship?”

  “They are circling this Prime Slumberer of ours already. I heard them first after the Norway fiasco, in the distance, but they have come a lot closer now that France is about to collapse; and if he does not deliver the speech of his life tonight, I fear the whisperers who speak of peace treaties will start to howl.”

  “The Prime Minister would never allow it, sir!”

  “Then they will have another Prime Minister.”

  Sawyers looked to the ground and tried to take this information in. His life had been spent in the service of his master and he had difficulty imagining that anyone could imagine life without him.

  “Might I be permitted to enquire as to who ‘they’ are, Your Lordship?”

  Beaverbrook turned away and walked toward the window. Sawyers noted that his shoulders fell and his back bent a little, as though he was weighed down by some terrible truth.

  “The landed gentry; the monarchy; the church: the industrialists; the imperialists; the defeatists: the army; the navy and the air force: the newspaper barons and their invisible men who shape opinion: in short, the owners of this sceptered isle.”

  “But… are they not all committed to the fight against fascism?”

  “They are committed to their own survival. If that means selling Europe into Nazi slavery, then they will do so. If that means an alliance with the Wehrmacht against the Soviet Commissars, then they will do so.”

  “Does the Prime Minister know of their treachery?”

  “He thinks he can control them. He thinks himself a master of wolfish politics. The bottle feeds his delusions and he looks deeper and deeper into it … but let’s see if we can pull him out of it. Sawyers — get some black coffee, and make it strong enough to wake the dead!”

  “At once, Your Lordship,” Sawyers said and left the room.

  Beaverbrook pulled some papers from under Churchill’s face, grimacing a little as he did so. He walked nearer to the lamp at the other side of the study, not so much for the light but to avoid the stench of alcohol that rose from Winston’s gargantuan frame.

  He spoke to himself as he flicked through the papers.

  “Hum … ‘Let us fight on and never surrender. I say that we should fight them on the beaches, the shores, the fields and the streets. We must defend our island, regardless of the loss of life and suffering.’ Not bad, not bad at all.”

  “Not bad! What rot! It’s bloody genius, you young whelp,” Churchill announced and went to rise from his chair, but finding his legs unwilling, slumped back into it.

  “Ah you’re back in the land of the living, Winston, I see.”

  “I never left it, and never will; for the land of the living is the best place to live, and I have never heard anyone speak well of the other place; not from first-hand experience, in any case. Now, where’s that confounded valet of mine? My glass is dry, and my tongue in sore need of lubrication.”

  “I say, old boy, don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

  “Nonsense! Quite the contrary, in fact, I think I need to drink a great deal more, for I must now drink for two.”

  “For two, Prime Minister?”

  “For two, I say. France, as you may have noticed, has fallen; and I must therefore also imbibe for our Gallic friends, in their absence from the sodden field of battle. Oh heavy burden! Now, in the absence of my missing valet, please perform your duties as Minister for Munitions and furnish me with a brandy forthwith.”

  “But Winston, The House expects you within a couple of hours and …”

  “And they shall find me willing, ready and able; but before that time, I must lubricate my parched vocal chords. Now, for the last time, I ask you, nay I tell you, to silence your tongue and pour me a brandy.”

  Beaverbrook ground his teeth and pursed his lips, but in the end, he did as requested. Tipping the decanter slowly, he poured a small measure of vintage brandy and went to add a larger measure of water to it, but before he could even touch the water decanter, Winston interrupted him.

  “Do you mean to drown me?! If I had wanted water, I would have asked for it. Now, return your hand to the elixir I did request, eons ago, and fill me a proper measure. I must say, Lord B., that if you plan to manufacture this realm’s munitions so slowly, we might as well surrender now, so poorly furnished shall we be.”

  Grudgingly, he filled the glass half-way and handed it to Churchill, whose eyes fixated on the glass as a baby’s eyes would a milk bottle.

  “Very well, Winston. Now, please promise me this will be your last. Sawyers will be here presently with some coffee and we can be an audience for you to rehearse your speech with.”

  “Rehearse!? Do you take me for a vaudeville performer? Would you like to me tread the boards of the scullery while I entertain you? Dance a jig to the Free State, perhaps?”

  “I only meant …”

  “I wonder what you meant … Perhaps you would rather deliver the speech yourself, Lord Beaverbrook? Perhaps you tire of your lordly title and seek another? There is something in your eyes of late, good friend, that troubles me.”

  “I am your most loyal friend. I only want to help you.”

  “Then to that end, I would ask you to kindly return my notes to me so that I might finish them, or were you planning to help me with that task also?”

  “But Winston …”

  “Get thee to a bomb factory, and be a breeder of munitions rather than my distemper!” Winston hollered, rising to his feet and staring straight at Beaverbrook with angry bloodshot eyes.

  Lord Beaverbrook left, his eyes cast down, and Winston drained off the last of the brandy and moved to the other side of the room to fill his glass up again. He gulped two more glasses down in quick succession and brought the bottle back to his desk before returning to his notes.

  “I shall drink brandy in my study, I shall drink brandy in the bars

  I shall drink brandy till my eyes pop, and use the sockets for some jars.”

  He hiccupped and tried to focus once more on his notes.