The Hope Read Online Free PDF Page B

stomach.
    As you can imaging, the situation was getting out of hand and we petitioned the Captain to do something. Fred sent him six messages and finally went and saw him, and the Captain said, “It’s your problem, you sort it out. And don’t let any of the passengers hear about it.” The fucking passengers!
    Then something peculiar happened. One day, the rats just upped and went. You don’t notice things missing as easily as you notice things being where they shouldn’t be and so none of us picked up on this for a bit, but Tommy mentioned it to me one evening and I had to agree. Not a rat in sight. Vanish. Poof.
    A week later, Stan came running past me, kinda all het up. You know how you get to sense people moving behind you when you can’t hear them? It’s like a whoosh in the back of your head. Well, I turned round and saw Stan shinning up the playroom ladder and hammering on the hatch, and Fred let him in and a moment later they both came out, Big Fred with his Mickey Mouse ear-defenders on. He looked like an asshole in those ear-defenders but it was his joke on us, you know, “I’m not such a total bastard after all, guys.” You know who Mickey Mouse is, don’t you? No? Never mind. Stan took Fred over to one corner. We were all watching now and, although they were quite a way away, I could see Stan pointing at something and Fred scratching his head and nodding and signing back to Stan that he would do something about it. Later that day Fred put up a notice saying there was going to be a powwow up in the playroom at the end of shift.
    We all piled in. There wasn’t much space. In those days there must have been about forty of us, so it was standing-on-tiptoes-room only. Fred told us that Stan had found a rat-hole in one of the bulkheads. Came across it behind a floor cleaning unit he was supposed to be fixing. No one had used the unit for ages because there’s not much point in cleaning the floor here, is there? Just gets dirty again in five minutes. At least, that’s you guys’ excuse. And Stan had probably just been taking a nap anyway. So, somehow these rats had gnawed through a inch of steel. I didn’t believe it, no one believed it… You don’t believe it, I can see. That’s OK. Put the heebie-jeebies on me, let me tell you, when I thought of how many thousands of rats had spent how many thousands of hours grinding their teeth and claws down to stumps, then bleeding to death or starving to death, all in the name of the rat cause. Brrr. A hole two foot square.
    And Fred asked for a team of volunteers to go into that hole and flush the buggers out once and for all. Exterminate them. I didn’t think anyone would be that stupid, but almost every man there stuck up his hand. We hated those rats. I was pretty green in those days and I wasn’t going to be left out, so I stuck up my hand too.
    “Only a dozen of us’ll be going in there,” said Big Fred, and selected ten: Stand, Tommy, Ed, Falstaff, Benjamin (who was the biggest spade you ever saw, bigger even than Aaron), a few others, all sensible choices, except Fred looked at me and asked if I wanted to be number eleven. Well, I said yes, but I didn’t say it right away. I asked Fred if he was sure and he said yes, so then I said yes. The rest of the guys went back down and Fred told us volunteers to go and look for weapons – hammers, bars, that kind of thing – and each get a flashlight out of the storeroom. He leaned back behind him and took a shotgun and a box of cartridges out of this very cupboard here. A couple of the guys laughed because they’d suspected he kept one there but they’d never dared to find out for themselves.
    “This is life insurance,” said Fred. “In case one of you boys thinks he can do my job better than me.” And he laughed and we laughed, but it wasn’t that funny.
    By the way, in case you’re wondering, yes, it’s still here. Now, where was I?
    Standing round that hole, feeling the shuddering of the