Attica

chapter 11

Dancing Rats in the Moonlight

Having fought his way across the region of the scissor-birds Jordy had settled for a while in a forest of tall clocks. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to leave it. He did. For one thing, the grandfather clocks were all set to different times, which meant there wasn’t an hour in the day when all of them were silent. At least one of them was chiming. And the ticking drove him crazy. He wondered who it was who wound them up.

And of course, the hands were all going backwards, which meant that an hour after a clock had chimed six times, it chimed five.

‘Have to clear myself an area,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I’ll never get any sleep.’

And this he did, by opening the fronts to the grandfather and other clocks and stopping the pendulums. Those with weights and chains, he unhooked and let fall to the bottom of their cases. With others he simply jammed pieces of paper in the works to stop the wheels from moving. Thus he managed, after a day, to make himself a silent vale in the forest of tall clocks, where he could wait for his step-sib-lings. He had seen them coming over the plain behind him: vague misty shapes warped by the moted sunbeam shafts that criss-crossed the space between.

Chloe he had recognised by her posture: Jordy had always admired the straightness of her back when she walked. Alex had been more difficult to identify, for he seemed quite lumpy now. Then Jordy realised his step-brother was bundled up for some reason, with coats and other clothes, a hat, and was wearing some kind of mask. But it had definitely been Alex: you could tell by the way he dragged his feet and walked in that dreamy kind of way which told you he was lost in his head somewhere.

‘I expect they’re missing me,’ he told Nelson, who paid him a visit once the clocks had stopped. ‘I can’t see them getting on very well without me. They’re not practical like me. I’m a survivor.’

Nelson agreed with Jordy, of course: he always did.

But after that initial sighting, Alex and Chloe vanished. They must have taken another turning, or direction. Jordy was disappointed. He longed to have someone real to talk to now. Loneliness was not a pleasant thing, especially in a strange place. It dragged you down. He found himself waking in the middle of the night with a start, wondering if he’d heard voices or had simply been caught in a dream. He would stare out into the darkness, hoping that Alex and Chloe were nearby, and that morning would reveal them. Once or twice he even called out their names, but received so many mocking replies from attic creatures, he never did it again.

At night the attic was like a jungle. Even with the clocks stopped Jordy was plagued with sounds. There were twitterings, squealing, screeches, scratchings and scrapings and the like. These were noises he could more or less identify and put down to live creatures. But there were other more sinister sounds: whirrings, rattlings, mechanical buzzings, high whining noises, raspings. Some of them were quite loud and near to him, others were softer and further away.

In the night it seemed as if the whole of Attica was swarming with mechanical beasts, roaming the boards, looking for prey. When morning came around, however, it became relatively quiet again. He would stand on the edge of the plain and stare out, thinking to see herds of clockwork elephants, or robot monkeys, or automated leopards out there. But once the darkness had lifted, the boards were bare of such creatures. There was just him, alone, without a single companion of any kind.

The nights gave him the feeling of being besieged, threatened and menaced by hordes of unseen creatures. The days left him convinced that he had been abandoned, acutely aware of his solitude, like a castaway sailor on a desert island. Neither sensation was very pleasant. Yet he was swiftly falling in love with the attic. He guessed it was the same sort of feeling his grandfather had spoken of, when talking of Africa. In his grandfather’s youth Africa had been a dangerous place, with wild animals which roamed everywhere. Snakes, crocodiles, lions and other beasts. There had also been the extremes in climate, deadly diseases and mosquitoes. Yet Jordy’s grandfather had loved Africa with a great passion. This is how Jordy felt about Attica: it was a dangerous place, but it captured your heart.

When Nelson was around Jordy felt better, but Nelson was not one to stay long and once he’d gone again the bitter taste of loneliness returned to haunt him. He found he needed to talk to himself to avoid going crazy. One’s own company is better than nothing. Otherwise he was afraid he might come to believe he was not there at all: a figment of an imagination. How terrible that would be, to discover he did not exist except in the mind of a spider or a fly. To go swiftly from a point where he believed he was the only real living thing in the world, to the sure knowledge that he was nothing but a stirring of the dust, a draught of air, a splash of light.

‘I must try to stop these weird thoughts coming into my head,’ he told himself. ‘Otherwise I will go crazy.’

He tried making noises to prove to himself he was there: clashing old saucepan lids together and kicking hollow drums. But somehow the noises made things worse. He found himself listening very hard in the silence that followed, for sounds that he might have missed during the racket. What if there had been a search party out there, calling his name, and he had blotted those calls out with his stupid noises? Every solution turned out to be a problem and every problem grew to enormity.

But he stayed in the forest of tall clocks, and waited. There came a time when he ran out of food and had to go looking for more. Sick as he was of the vegetables grown by Atticans, he knew he had to find some or starve. And true to his determined nature he did find some. Two hours’ walk from the forest there lay a triangle of three Attican villages. He visited this place twice in two days, gathering crops and filling his larder.

On his third trip he found the villages in the middle of a festival.

‘Oh, hey!’ cried Jordy, delighted with what he saw. ‘A game of hockey – I think.’

It appeared that they celebrated this festival by playing sport with old-fashioned T-squares – such as those used by draughtsmen and architects – wielding them as their sticks. With these sticks they batted an object around in teams of thirteen, attacking three goals placed one outside each village. Jordy watched as the lumpy little Atticans charged back and forth, whacking a ball made of rags. There seemed to be few rules in this game apart from the obvious one: you were not allowed to pick up the ball.

There were no goalkeepers and the goals themselves were sea chests on their sides with the lids thrown back, like open mouths waiting to be fed.

‘Oh, wow,’ Jordy murmured to himself from behind a cardboard box. ‘I’d love a game …’

He sat watching for quite a time from his hiding place. Gradually, one by two or three, players began dropping out. Jordy wasn’t sure why this was happening, but he guessed that when they got too exhausted to play any more they simply gave up. Once they came off the pitch, it seemed they couldn’t or wouldn’t return. Before long the teams were down to about three on each side and Jordy realised that the drop-out rate had been the same from each team at any one time. So if a player from village A had had enough, and left the field, village B and C players would follow shortly. Thus the teams were reduced equally and with no advantage to any of them.

One trick with the T-square seemed to be a favourite. A player would slip the T-square between an opponent’s legs, so that the top bar of the instrument was behind the ankles, then yank him off his feet. A great cheer would go up from the crowd when one of them did this to another. Jordy could see no referee or umpire on the field and assumed this kind of play was not a foul, even though the aggrieved player would leap back onto his feet and remonstrate loudly with the attacking player.

Finally, when there were only three players, one from each village, left on the pitch, Jordy could stand it no longer. He jumped out and grabbed a T-square which had been left leaning against a box. Shouting wildly, he threw himself into the fray, swinging his T-square with expert hands.

‘Go for the ball!’ he yelled at himself. ‘Keep your eyes on the ball!’

Indeed, one would have expected the villagers to have been shocked into immobility by the sudden appearance of a ghost. Not so. The players still on the pitch fought furiously with him for possession of the ball. Did he think he could be a star T-square-wielder overnight? Not so. These villagers had been playing the game since they could walk. Within two seconds Jordy was on his backside and nursing a bump on the back of his head.

He didn’t stop to complain: he was up on his feet in a flash and had downed the Attican who had flattened him. The other two came at him in a rush, but he sold them a dummy and sidestepped them, managing to take the ball with him. Two whirled and chased, the one on the ground followed swiftly. Jordy drew back his T-square to shoot at the nearest goal: what did he care which village it belonged to? But an Attican flung his T-square from five metres, striking the ball and sending it shooting across the field of play, out of his reach.

‘Is that allowed?’ cried Jordy. ‘Is that in the rules?’

He didn’t wait for an answer. Jordy chased the bat and ball. Reaching them he kicked the other player’s T-square out of reach, sending it skidding over the boards. Then with the other two bearing down on him he did a marvellous turn and struck the ball well. It lifted about six centimetres off the floor and passed between the two oncoming players. Onward it flew, surely and truly, and ended in the corner of a goal on the far side.

The crowd went into an uproar. They surged on to the pitch.

‘Yay!’ Jordy yelled, elated. ‘Goal!’

But the mood was ugly.

They were not coming to congratulate him, to raise him up on their shoulders and carry him triumphantly through the attic. They were coming to get him. Many had picked up T-squares and were holding them in a threatening manner. Jordy was left in no doubt they were angry with him and meant to do him harm. He decided it was time to leave. He dashed off into the dim regions of the attic. Happily they did not follow, probably feeling that having chased him away was a victory in itself, ghosts in the attic often being quite stubborn creatures.

Jordy went disconsolately back to his camp site among the grandfather clocks and brooded for a while. That game with the T-squares had reminded him of how much he was missing his old life. He moped around for the rest of the day, thinking that he wasn’t going to move again until Alex and Chloe caught up with him. At least they never minded indulging him when it came to a game of cricket or hockey or something, even if they didn’t feel the same way about it themselves. They could be a pain in the neck at times, but they had their good points.

Jordy went for a walk in the evening, avoiding the three villages. He was on his way back when he saw the villagers gathered in a large group around something hanging from the rafters. He hid behind a pile of junk and observed them from a distance.

At first he thought it was another game, but then the scene seemed too solemn for it to be sport of any kind. Something more serious was going on. He studied the object hanging like a huge plumb bob from the rafters by a long rope. Covered in butcher’s muslin it looked like a giant cocoon, a chrysalis. About the size of a large side of mutton, it spun slowly on the end of a rope.

What the heck is that? thought Jordy.

He noticed that the villagers were all dressed in white and some of them, the ones with hats on, had wooden bowls in their hands which they offered to the masses. These containers seemed to be full of grey powder which the Atticans took in the fingers and sprinkled on each other’s heads, until their lumpy bald pates were as grey as rain clouds.

Suddenly four villagers appeared with an enormous brass bed, carrying it up on their shoulders, one person to each leg. The brass was polished to a brilliance and sparkled in the evening light from the roof windows above. There was no mattress on the bed, only a white blanket.

The cocoon was cut ceremoniously from the rope and placed on the bed. The four carriers moved off with the crowd following and throwing the grey powder on to the cocoon. Jordy went along with them, ducking and weaving between piles of junk to remain hidden. Eventually the party came to a spot where two villagers stood with tools in their hands. They had removed three boards from the floor. The cocoon was then lifted from the bed and placed in the hole and the floorboards hammered back in place. At this point the creaking voices were raised to a high pitch and Jordy had to put his hands over his ears: the discordant sounds hurt his hearing.

Finally the group dispersed and Jordy was alone once more.

‘Wow,’ he said to himself, ‘that was weird. I wonder what that is under those boards. Something valuable, I’ll bet.’

He resisted the inclination to go and prise the boards up to see what it was. Even if it was a treasure hoard he was in dangerous territory. If he was seen it was a long run back to safety and he didn’t want to risk being caught stealing valuables as well as food. He returned to his den in the clock forest to think about what he had witnessed.

When the sun had disappeared from the skylight windows, he lay on his back and mused. Suppose Alex and Chloe never came? He’d lost sight of them out on the boards now. They had vanished. What if they’d turned round and gone home? Perhaps they’d fallen down some hole in the boards and were hurt – or even dead? Maybe it had not been a good idea to go on ahead by himself after all? Why was he always trying to be the big brother to them, instead of letting them share the responsibility?

At that moment Jordy sat bolt upright and listened hard.

What was that?

Music?

Definitely music. He could hear the distant strains of a fiddle being played somewhere just outside the forest of clocks. The sound was mournful and melancholy at first, but then the pace picked up and the tune became what sounded like an Irish jig. Jordy jumped to his feet and went in search of the musician, who was no great violinist.

Jordy reminded himself that he ought to be careful. If the musician was an Attican he could expect a cold reception at the very least. It was best to remain concealed until the situation became clearer.

Creeping up to the pale of the forest of dead clocks, Jordy peered into the dense blackness. Anything could be out there: a different people; a herd of strange beasts; even monsters.

But there were no monsters. What there were, were rats.

From a high skylight a shaft of moonlight, very bright, very intense, full of flecks of dust, fell upon the attic floor.

In this spotlight two rats were up on their back legs, dancing. They were gently twirling and spinning, hopping and jumping, both moving to the music from a hidden minstrel. Their tails swished in time to the cadence, their ears twitched and their forelimbs waved. They were lost in the melody, caught up in their own rhythmic steps, as they pranced and leapt, swayed in an elegant manner, and even quivered with the longer humming notes. Two willowy rafter rats with intent expressions, dancing to the magic of a fiddler’s tune.

‘How can they do that?’ murmured Jordy to himself.

But they did. And they did it magnificently.

Then the speed of the music picked up pace and the dance became faster and faster, until Jordy felt giddy for the two rodents. They spun, they somersaulted, they flew through the air. It was a dance of demented red-eyed rats with whirling-dervish suppleness in their bones. What demons possessed their souls to dance with such frantic energy, such frenetic movements? Surely at any moment their limbs would fly off, their heads would shoot from their bodies? Jordy had never witnessed such a scene.

He became aware of an audience out there, beyond the dancing rats, who were just as entranced as he. When his eyes grew used to the darkness he could see they were villagers: Atticans, probably the same ones who had chased him earlier, now lured by a fiddler’s tune. The villagers stood and watched the pair, absolutely absorbed by them. None appeared to look for the music maker. They simply enjoyed the dancing rodent duo and ignored the presence of the one-man orchestra.

It was sheer poetry in the moonlight. Jordy was not normally one to appreciate such delights, but this time he knew he had witnessed something quite extraordinary.

Once the music stopped the rats slipped away up into the darkness beneath the rafters.

The villagers had brought gifts with them, of food and drink, which they left standing in the shaft of moonlight. When the Atticans had gone, Jordy waited to see who would take the gifts. No one did. Eventually he decided to take some of them himself. His stores could always do with a boost. So he crept out and reached for one of the bottles of drink. Unscrewing the top he took a long swig. It tasted a little like weak ginger beer and after a diet of plain water it was delicious. Jordy then reached out for a parcel of food: squares of something which looked like confectionery.

A hand of strong thick fingers clamped around his wrist.

‘Aahg!’ Jordy almost died of fright.

‘Leave them where they be,’ snarled a rough, coarse voice, ‘or I’ll snap your arm like a matchstick.’

Still all Jordy could see was this thick wrist in the spotlight provided by the moon, with a bunch of hairy fingers attached.

‘Leave me alone,’ he cried. ‘I haven’t done anything.’

‘Nothin’ but steal the food out of my mouth.’

‘I haven’t touched the food yet.’

‘Nothin’ but snatch the drink from my lips.’

Jordy’s fear ebbed a little as no threat was carried out.

‘It’s not your food – the villagers left it.’

‘Didn’t I earn it?’ growled the hoarse-voiced speaker. ‘Didn’t I busk the life out of two talented and willin’ rodents, who danced their socks off to my beautiful music? Who do you think trained the rhythms into ’em? Old Nick? Who put the skill in their little feet? Who gave ’em the music to make ’em dance? This food is payment. Mine. You can bugger off, if you like, and leave my wages where they be, thank you.’

Jordy felt the grip relax and he wrenched his hand free, so that he could run back into the forest of clocks.

Once he’d got away he stood there panting and sweating.

Who the heck was that? Was it human?

Jordy gathered his courage and went back, to stare out at his erstwhile captor.

It was indeed a person. It was a tall powerful-looking boy in a thick ankle-length raincoat with many folds. On his feet were knee-length leather boots with heavy heels. On his head was a broad-brimmed felt hat with a wide floppy brim. You could imagine rain pouring off that brim as the rugged face beneath stared out over unexplored regions.

‘Hey!’ cried Jordy. ‘Are you a local or are you like me?’

The boy looked up from his task of chewing a sweetmeat. There was a tough air about him. He had a jutting jaw that made granite look like soft sandstone.

‘Human? Was once, I s’pose.’

‘I’m human too.’

‘You be a bloody nuisance, that’s what you be.’

It had been a long time since Jordy had talked to another member of his own species.

‘Can we talk?’ he asked. ‘Can I come out there and talk with you?’

‘If you do I’ll break your neck.’

‘No you won’t.’

The squatting youth looked up from his eating again and seemed to sigh.

‘Come on out then, but mind, I live up here ’cause I don’t like my own kind. I prefer the company of rats to people. But you look lost, boy. Come on out and tell me the tale of woe.’

Jordy set his jaw. ‘It’s not a tale of woe,’ he argued, stepping out of the clock forest. ‘There’s no woe in it. I’m simply missing a bit of company. My brother and sister are around somewhere, and when I find them I couldn’t care less what you do – whether you hate people or not – but until I find them I haven’t got anyone else to talk to.’

‘I’m not sure if I care for that or no – I think I don’t. But come anyway, if you must.’

Jordy squatted down near his new companion.

‘Was that an Irish jig you were playing?’

‘It was a jig all right, but not all jigs have to be Irish. It were a sailor’s tune, learned from sailors. I might have been one once. Hard to remember now.’

‘What are you doing up here – in the attic? Are you lost?’

Jordy had been about to add ‘like me’ but pride held back the words in the end.

‘Nope. I like it here.’ The youth was eating what looked like the roasted leg of a bird. ‘It’s peaceful and unbothersome.’

‘Can I have some of that?’ Jordy pointed to the meat. ‘I’ll swop you for some apples I found.’

The boy gave Jordy three cold drumsticks.

‘Here – but keep your shrivelled old apples.’

‘How do they cook it?’ asked Jordy. ‘I haven’t seen any fires.’

‘And you won’t,’ replied the boy. ‘They use lenses – from telescopes, binoculars, magnifying glasses. With lenses you can cook something under direct sunlight without producing a naked flame.’

Jordy ate the bird with relish wondering why a naked flame was so much of a problem. ‘You better watch out for those rats,’ he told his companion, ‘or Nelson will have them for breakfast.’

‘Nelson bein’ …?’

‘Our cat. He’s got three legs.’

‘Kind of guessed that, by his name. If he kills my boys though, I’ll skin him alive and eat him too. What’s a damn cat doing up here in the attic? Who let him up here?’

Jordy felt a little shame. ‘I guess we did.’

‘Huh! Well, you’ve been warned.’

‘So have you. Nelson won’t listen to me. He doesn’t listen to anyone. All I’m saying is, watch your rats. If they dance in front of Nelson he’ll think it’s Christmas.’

Suddenly the youth grinned at Jordy over a legbone.

‘I’m beginnin’ to like you, boy,’ he said. ‘You’ve got some grit about you. Most of the lost ones up here cry for their mummies. This is a good, generous land up here, if you know how to live. I do and I like it.’

‘How did you come to be up here?’ asked Jordy, taking a swig of ginger beer without asking. ‘Did you get lost?’

‘Oh, we all get lost at first. I went up into my attic to look for somethin’ – can’t remember what now, it’s so long ago. I was a reader then. Found some books, started readin’ one of ’em. Then another. Loved reading in them days. Once I’d read all them I’d found in a cardboard box, I moved out a bit, outside my own attic space. Once you do that, you’re a goner. I became a browser. Would be one today, if I hadn’t found that book on navigation. Inspired me to become a bortrekker.’

‘What’s a bortrekker?’

‘Someone who treks the boards – a wanderer – an attic explorer of sorts, I guess you’d say.’

Jordy liked the sound of that.

‘And a browser?’

‘Someone that wanders the attic, lookin’ for books. Picks ’em up, reads a bit. Puts ’em down. Moves on. Finds another book. Reads a bit. And so on. Browsing. Just browsing.’ The voice became dreamy as he said this, then the bortrekker waved his arm at the darkness around them. ‘Lots of ’em out there. Bortrekkers, board-combers, browsers, others. You won’t come across many of ’em, ’cause this is a big, big place. And only a few of us roaming over it. How long have you been here?’

Jordy told him.

‘Well, you’re only just startin’, but you’ll find out. The boards,’ he waved a bird-bone again, this time in one direction, ‘they seem to go on for ever …’

At that moment though, there were squealing sounds behind Jordy and he turned to see the two rats were descending from the rafters. The bortrekker threw them the bones of the cooked bird he and Jordy had been eating. The rats fell on this fare with great enthusiasm, cracking them in their rodent jaws. They nibbled away at what was left of the flesh on the bones, staring at Jordy as they did so, their small red eyes unblinking.

‘That performance tonight,’ said Jordy. ‘It was good.’

‘The audience was expectin’ it. They’d been to a funeral. They needed cheerin’ up.’

‘A funeral?’ Jordy suddenly thought about what he had seen at the village. ‘Do they – do they bury their dead under the boards?’

The bortrekker gnawed on another bone. ‘Yep. First they gut ’em and hang ’em high up in the rafters, though. Way, way up, in the high draughts of the loftiest regions. Dry ’em like Parma hams, so there’s no moisture left in ’em. That way there’s no smell of rotting flesh, if you know what I mean.’

Jordy’s stomach felt queasy all of a sudden. He felt stupid for thinking that what he had seen stashed away was buried treasure. Of course he did not mention this to the youth sitting with him.

‘I saw them,’ he said. ‘They threw powder over each other.’

‘Dust,’ explained the bortrekker. ‘Old grey dust.’