The Hope (27 page)

“Sorry,” said Paolo, working the blade free, drawing back his arm and plunging it in again.

“Sorry,” said the thin man as he lumbered into Paolo, dying arms groping for a last, lethal embrace with someone who didn’t know.

“No,
I’m
sorry,” hissed Paolo as he caught the thin man’s insubstantial weight and fended it off with a few more thrusts of the blade. “I’m just so fucking sorry, you wouldn’t believe it.” The thin man’s blood was spraying from several apertures and patterning Paolo’s shirt and joining the other stains already there on his trousers. The arms were shuddering at Paolo’s shoulders, still going for his neck even though the brain was sending messages that the body was dead, no use, mission aborted.

Paolo dropped back against the walkway railing and let the thin body tumble at his feet. He breathed out hard and breathed in and steadied himself as the outstretched hands gave a final valiant twitch and lay still. The two of them, the quick and the dead, remained in that position until the quick’s heart-rate slowed down to something approaching normal and his breathing was no longer an urgent rasp.

Paolo felt the cool wetness of his jeans against his skin and wondered how and when that had happened. He saw the blade in his hand smeared with the thin man’s blood, and he could not count how many times he had stabbed him. He knelt down and wiped the blade against the back of the thin man’s trousers, and as he did so he noticed a notebook poking out of the back pocket. It had a red cover, grainy like calfskin leather, with tattered corners and a couple of fingerprints. He did not want to touch it because it would be like touching the dead man’s skin, taking a part of the body. Paolo remembered Longpole’s finger going through that corpse’s dress and skin. Longpole was now a corpse too, and it was as if they all had a contagious disease like the plagues that hit deck areas now and then. Longpole had touched the woman’s corpse, the thin man had touched Longpole, that’s how it spread. Paolo was unwilling to follow suit and catch it in turn. But the notebook was fascinating. Why did he carry it? What did he have to take notes about?

Tentatively Paolo took hold of one corner of the cover and extracted the notebook. There was a square of white on the cover. On this square were two lines ruled in anticipation of a title, and there was the title in tortuous pencilled letters:

Lonely the Rat

Paolo didn’t think much of the title. He hoped the story would be better.

He got to his feet and, barely glancing at Longpole, who was only dead, after all, he walked off with
Lonely the Rat
in his hand. There was dead and there was dead, he decided. Riot had once said that death made everybody equal. When an upper deck guy died and rotted, you wouldn’t be able to tell him for a lower deck guy who had died and rotted. Both ended up as fish food in the ocean and the fishes weren’t fussy. Paolo didn’t think this was true now. There was a world of difference between the corpuses in the cabin and the two broken bodies lying across the walkway. Longpole and the thin man, well, that had been a scrap really, hadn’t it? Death had been sudden but expected and evenly shared out. You didn’t go into a scrap at the pool without thinking there was an odds-on chance you’d get stuck by someone, although you hoped you wouldn’t and if you were a good enough fighter you probably didn’t. But that family in that cabin – they hadn’t stood a chance. For whatever reason they’d died (that was something Paolo could not figure out), it was an all-round shitter. They hadn’t got anything, not a blade, nothing, to defend themselves with.

If I’m lucky, thought Paolo, I could get to the pool in time for the scrap with Lock. But first things first. New shirt and trousers. Wouldn’t do to turn up looking like you’d already finished.

Paolo shared a cabin with three other guys, although it was rare if more than two of them were there at any given time. People like them had better things to do than fart around all day inside, and if they came back at all, they came back to sleep. One was an engineer who worked long shifts and always came in pissed and crashed out in his bunk at about 23.00. Nice enough guy, but Paolo had never caught his name, which gave him a fair indication of how well he knew his bunkmates.

Everyone was out. Paolo sat on his bunk and pulled off his clothes. The stains had dried but were starting to smell.

He grabbed a fresh pair of jeans and someone else’s shirt and put them on. While doing so, he saw
Lonely the Rat
had fallen out of his pocket on to the floor. He picked it up, sat down, turned back the cover and started to read. The handwriting wasn’t much better than a scribble but Paolo soon worked out how to decipher it. As he read, thoughts of scraps with Lock vanished from his head.

Lonely the Rat – A True Story

I am a dream. I was not born in a woman’s tummy. I was born in a head, like all dreams. I began. I licked off the wet bits of my birth. I took my first breath. I lived. I live. I live in Hope. My name is Lonely because I am alone. I am the only one, the only rat. When I was born I knew many things. I knew how to walk. I knew how to talk. I knew how to read. I knew how to write. I knew how to eat. I knew how to shit. I knew my name and my place and my purpose. This is very important, that I knew my purpose, for I know that many people do not know their purpose and they waste their lives. If you only have one life, it is a good thing to know your purpose, otherwise you will waste your one chance at life. A rat’s (I am a rat) purpose is very simple. I deal with the rubbish. I sort out the rubbish. There is too much rubbish here and it is my purpose to do something about it. If the rubbish was left to keep piling up then there would not be enough space, which would be silly, so I sort it all out. Is anyone else’s purpose so good? I don’t think so. In the first few days of my life I simply lived and thought about my purpose because I wasn’t sure of myself enough yet, though I am now. Then I just hid and lived and ate and shitted, but I was not wasting time. It was a time to think. I had lots of talks with the
Hope
in that time and the
Hope
told me many different things about my purpose. The
Hope
was launched to travel across the ocean to the other side, everybody knows that. The
Hope
is a big ship with lots of people on board, everybody knows that. All the people are here because they are here. Many cannot remember why they were here in the first place and that is why they have no purpose, because they can’t remember. When they get up in the morning, they can’t remember so they just go through the day expecting all of a sudden to remember everything. Those are the older people.

The younger people have no memory of anything at all. They have not been told their purpose, and they don’t care about it and would rather make lots of noise and fight. They make my purpose easier by fighting. Younger people are rubbish from the moment they are born. Older people are mostly rubbish too, or if they weren’t rubbish before they came on board they are now. They are empty tins and old cartons and bottles. All the good bits have been used up and there is only rubbish left, which has no purpose. They do not think they are rubbish, they think they are really good because they have been used up, which they think is living. They are silly. They are rubbish. I sort them out and clean them up and tidy them away. I am a rat. I have a purpose. While I was hiding in the first days of my life and thinking, the
Hope
came and told me about the launching which was all black smoke and black paper. It was meant to be a happy occasion, and all the people were smiling as if it was a happy occasion, but it wasn’t because the man whose purpose it was to make the
Hope
was dead. He was sensible because he threw himself away and didn’t wait to be thrown away by someone else, which is more wasteful. That was the launching. The
Hope
set out straight, pointed in the right direction, and sailed for days and then for weeks and then for months and then for years, and this is a long time because I have not lived for that long. The
Hope
did as the people said. The
Hope
sailed on and on and on. The
Hope
got bored. It didn’t like the people very much. They thought they knew everything. They thought they were better than the
Hope
. They thought they could order the
Hope
around like they ordered each other around, but it wasn’t as simple as that. After all, people thought they could order around the wind and the sun and the moon and the sea and the land, but they were wrong. The wind and the sun and the moon and the sea and the land just let people do what they wanted because they didn’t care really, they were so much better and bigger than the people. Sometimes the wind would get angry and the land would shake and the sea would clap its hands, but this only kept the people quiet for a little while. When they had got over being scared, they would go back to thinking they were the best things ever. But they weren’t! Because people got used up and died while wind and sun and moon and sea and land just went on for ever and for ever and never got used up and never became rubbish.

The
Hope
wasn’t quite like that because the
Hope
was made by the people. The
Hope
found that it couldn’t ignore the people so easily because the people annoyed the
Hope
and were like a sickness, filling the
Hope
with themselves and their shit and rubbish, making the
Hope
not feel very well. That was not nice. The
Hope
decided on a way to get rid of the people, first with rats and then with things that were like rats only much, much worse. These didn’t work. I don’t know why they didn’t work (I don’t know everything, do I?), but I know they didn’t work. Perhaps they weren’t good enough. Perhaps people could beat them at their own game. Whatever the reason, the
Hope
admitted it had lost this time. But this was early on in the journey, so there was plenty of time for the
Hope
to think up another plan. So the
Hope
thought and thought and thought so hard you could hear its brains turning and rumbling and roaring as they thought. People got scared by the noise but they couldn’t understand why they got scared, but it should have been obvious why the noise was scary if they had any sense of purpose which they didn’t. There were lots of times when people killed themselves off, which was a good thing for the
Hope
, getting someone else to put out the rubbish. When people live together, because they are so horrible they get diseases of their own, diseases like themselves that kill themselves. Sometimes the diseases hurt their bodies and made parts of them suffer and bleed, sometimes the diseases hurt their minds and made them make others suffer and bleed. It didn’t matter to the
Hope
which it was, because people died. Which was a good thing. But still they were not dying quickly enough and so the
Hope
kept on thinking, but it was always a struggle to think because the
Hope
had been made by people and people didn’t want their creations to think. Often the
Hope
felt that thinking was too difficult, like trying to see in the dark, but it found after a while that thinking got easier and easier, just as it gets easier and easier to see in the dark as time goes on, although there are always darker bits where you cannot see a thing.

Then the
Hope
made a friend of one of the people who was not like the other people. Neither this person nor the
Hope
knows they have made friends, as far as I know. Perhaps they will. They didn’t have much in common. After all, one was a little human and the other was a big ship. But they did have one thing in common, which was that both of them wasn’t a man or a woman. This was what brought them together and made them make friends even though they didn’t know they had made friends. Sometimes one was a man and the other was a woman, other times one was a woman and the other was a man, it didn’t matter which. When they met and made friends without knowing it, they made dreams and the dreams were born. The first dream was a dream of water. Water goes around in a big circle, from sea to sky to land to sea and back to sky again. Water can be diseased for a while, but it will always become pure again. The
Hope
had a dream of people of water, pure, cured, living for ever, hurting nothing. The dream came to life. It will be one of many. Like it, I am a dream. I was born. I live. I am a rat. I have a purpose. Some dreams are nice and some dreams are nasty. Nobody can say what dreams they are going to have, they can only go to sleep hoping that it is going to be a good one to make up for the way that life is so horrid and rubbishy for them. Dreams really belong to the bits of life outside like the wind and all the rest, the bits that don’t really care about people and can be beautiful and angry in equal amounts. I was born perfect with my purpose and alone. I ran away almost straight after I was born, because I did not need to learn anything from the things that had given birth to me, the
Hope
and the person. I was born knowing my purpose so nobody could tell it to me, although in the first days of my life the
Hope
did come and tell me lots of things about the
Hope
because that was all part of my purpose. It is no good sorting out rubbish if you aren’t told what to do with it. So I listened to what the
Hope
had to tell me and I knew my purpose better and I knew what I had been born to do better. After all those years of thinking, the
Hope
had at last come up with the answer, the cure to the sickness. I was only part of the answer.

The
Hope
tries to cure itself in many different ways, but the
Hope
cannot do it alone. I promised to help, knowing that it was my purpose. Agreeing to the promise, the
Hope
gave me a knife, which was old and had been thrown away and had been lying in wait for me. I took the knife and the
Hope
told me a shape and I cut that shape into myself to swear to the
Hope
that I would do my purpose. It hurt! it still hurts a bit, but that makes me keep the promise. The
Hope
called it a “bond”. It would join us together. I would carry on me the answer to the
Hope
’s sickness. It is a circle. The
Hope
is travelling in a circle. The Captain does not know, the crew do not know, the passengers do not know, all the people do not know. The
Hope
lies to the Captain and the crew. They think their charts and compasses are correct, but their charts and their compasses lie to them. The purpose of the Captain and crew never has been and never will be to steer the
Hope
because the
Hope
needs no steering. The
Hope
chases itself round and round in a circle that takes a year. It has been doing so for a long, long time. Nobody knows. I know nobody knows because I ask them. If they do not know, I kill them to cure the
Hope
. I do not always like doing this. I have never said my purpose is a nice purpose but it is a rat’s purpose. Although it is my purpose, I feel sorry for them. In many ways they are like me, it’s just that they don’t have a purpose. I always tell them I am sorry. It makes me feel better. I make the
Hope
feel better. The
Hope
will keep going in circles until I have had time to cure it completely. The
Hope
is patient. The
Hope
needs time to think, because the darkness is still there in the
Hope
’s thoughts and it takes time to see. I will keep going too, with the bond on me as a promise. The
Hope
calls me the last and best rat. I am the only one. I am Lonely the Rat. I have a purpose. I will save the
Hope
.