Once there was a room with a crack in the wall. There was a locked door. There was a bucket and a quilt with birds on it. There was a woman who came and went, who brought food and water and songs that ended too soon. And there was the other time, more time, when the ceiling would creep imperceptibly lower unless you watched it, where the only way not to be crushed was to stare without blinking. Or when the floor grew so thin it wasn’t safe to tread on it, when you had to stay still (stay here, stay quiet, whatever you do, darling, you must) and every drip from the roof made you tremble. Sometimes smoke would trickle out of the crack in the wall and if you put your hands to the plaster it would be warm. On stormy days, distant murmurs rose and died, carried on gusts of wind.
The Rat has never been back to that room. She feels it like a numbness deep inside, the one place she will never go. Someone cried in that room – someone lived, waiting, someone waited and slept and tried not to think that anything was wrong, someone stared at the extra food and water that had been left, too much, more than a day’s worth, her panic rising until finally she tried the door and found it, to her confusion, unlocked – but it wasn’t her. She became the Rat the moment she stepped over the threshold.
She stands still. The crying belongs to what she left behind, not to who she is; and every instinct is telling her to run away. It’s dangerous to stay here, in full view. But she can’t. The voice is deep and hoarse, foreign, but the despair is familiar, the choke of suppressed sobs, the fear of being heard. The shame. It’s like a loop of wire, tightening as she pulls against it.
The sobs die away, quieter, into gasps. Gradually the sound loosens its grip on the Rat. She takes a breath. But the heaviness is still in her feet, pinning her to the floor: she isn’t ready to move yet.
There’s a faint rustle, a wet sniff, and the scrape of shoes on stone. A door opening at the far end of the corridor.
Now. Now a rat would run. But it’s too late.
For a long time they stare at each other, the Rat and the man at the far end of the corridor. She should go, right now, disappear into a crevice before he’s sure he’s seen her. But his stance mirrors hers: abruptly she doesn’t know which of them is prey. He wipes his face on his sleeve. He is one of the black-robed ones, the young ones; he has a cross on his collar, standing out stark against the fabric. He sees her notice it and squeezes it in his fist.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I was – I – I wanted somewhere where no one could hear … the cells are so close together, I was afraid they’d – but I wasn’t doing anything wrong … please don’t …’
What does he want of her? She waits, her nerves singing with the danger. When was the last time she deliberately let someone see her? It makes her feel raw, prickling all over.
‘Are you a servant? I mean – not that it matters, I don’t … It’s stupid, I’m fine really, it’s only … the others are – they don’t … And the Magisters, too. I didn’t realise it would be so hard …’ He tugs at his collar as if there are teeth on the inside. ‘You must think I’m pathetic. Well, the others do. I wish …’ He stops, starts again, with a jerk like being sick. ‘And I’m scared for my family. They keep saying things about Christians being attacked. But we’re not allowed newspapers, and I don’t know if they’re lying, or if … Do you know?’
Silence. She stares at him.
‘Um,’ he says. ‘Sorry. I’m Simon. Are you, I mean …?’
He is asking her name. As if she has one.
She can’t move. She can’t remember the last time someone spoke to her. Asked her a question and expected an answer.
He steps forward.
Whatever there is between them, his movement snaps it. She swings around, hears him call after her, runs. Perhaps there are footsteps, but they falter and anyway she leaves them behind. She keeps going, surefooted in the dark, until her breath comes ragged and a patch of sweat spreads across her back. The shirt she stole is coming loose from its bundle against her stomach. She clambers on to a pipe to reach a window, drags herself upwards, lets herself down again into a storeroom, follows the familiar path through the buckets and brooms to the half-hidden door at the far end. No one is following her now. The door leads to another set of steps; at the top of it is her tiny nook, her nest, where the slates rattle next to her ears at night and the draughts whirl. She drags her stolen shirt out from under her clothes and clutches it to her face, breathing hard. Whose was it, before she plucked it off the washing line? She imagines a young man – the young man she just saw – and wonders if she can smell his body under the lingering scent of soap. Abruptly she throws it into a corner. She has never thought this way before. What does she care? What she takes is hers. She drops into the knot of blankets and curls up. She is shaking as well as sweating.
He saw her. He thought she was human.
Simon, she thinks. His name was Simon. Since when did she care about names? She is the Rat. She is not one of them. She survives; she does not remember, she does not feel. This is wrong. This is dangerous. A rat would smell poison. Simon.
She waits until she has stopped shuddering. Then she lies down and closes her eyes. She is the Rat: she always sleeps dreamlessly, lightly, her mind blank. But tonight she does not. Tonight she stays awake, wrapped in her private dark, listening to the silence in the walls.
12: the Magister Ludi
The snow below the window of the Biblioteca Ludi is less like a blank page than a primed canvas that has been carried carelessly, buckled and spotted with marks. Any artist would grimace at it and refuse to pay the bill. It’s unusable. Unless, the Magister supposes, staring out through the leaded panes until her eyes begin to blur, unless he were one of these modern iconoclasts – the kind of enfant terrible she is old enough now to despise – who might simply exhibit it as it is. She saw a show like that in England once, a childish mess of solid colours, and it made her sick that someone should be allowed to get away with it. That a privileged, pretentious young man should be admired for mere audacity. At her side, Aunt Frances was bewildered, wandering from blue to green and finally coming to a halt in front of a panel of yellow. ‘Oh my,’ she murmured, ‘yes, it is … um …’ The Magister (although she wasn’t yet Magister Ludi, she was only Claire, halfway between lives, adrift in a foreign country) said nothing. All the energy she had was concentrated on not looking sideways to where the largest picture hung like a square of new-cut meat, with a thick bloody sheen. Red. If she never saw red again she would be happy.
Now she blinks away the pink shadows her brain has superimposed on the snow, and tries to see what’s there. A wide slope, criss-crossed by bird-prints and flecked with blown fragments of bark. Today is Sunday, and no one has come up the road; it’s a seam, a mere ripple under the white. Granite boulders hunch under their caps and burrow into the drifts. The sky is heavy, layered with grey strata. Another snowfall is coming.
There’s nothing unusual about snow. She draws back from the window, rubbing her eyes. Every year it falls, and stays, and melts. It’s hardly an omen, even less a surprise. She’s being fanciful. Allowing the weather to play on her nerves – is this how the madness begins? One day she feels this vague dread, as if pressure is building on the mountain behind Montverre, waiting for a yell, a dropped plate, a single gunshot … and the next she will be creeping to the library, secreting barrels of oil. She laughs. She is so afraid of madness she will drive herself mad, thinking about it. She’s being self-indulgent. Hysterical. Deliberately she uses the word she hates the most. A womanly state, of no importance. Like the nightmares, or the times when she can’t sleep, the surges of grief that catch her off guard, the new agony of a wound she thought had healed. Neurosis. A feminine lack of detachment. She turns her attention back to her desk, and the real blank page. Maybe, after all, this is why she can’t look at the snow without a prickling sense of malaise.