Fiction

Ratland

‘Go back to Ratland Rat!’
Adiz scampered away. He checked behind to see if the big man was chasing him, fear catching in his throat. The big man wasn't; he had already turned his back and unsteadily wandered up the crowded street. Cowering in a yellow tiled doorway, Adiz breathed deeply and tried to ignore the curious shoppers.
Adiz Kamper was not, in fact, a Rat. He was a Mouse. From his whiskers to his tail it was obvious, and sometimes painfully obvious, that he was a five-foot-six, thinly furred, increasingly gaunt Mouse. But the Humans still called him Rat, as they called Rema, a pot-bellied and excessively loud Cockroach, a Rat. They were all the same in Humanitaria.
He kept breathing heavily, attempting to control the ensuing panic attack. It was the way the big man had slapped his paw that brought this on. He was only trying to examine the strange foreign currency more closely; the colours and sizes were all so confusing. All Adiz wanted was the cake advertised in the window, but a hand slapped on top of his and suddenly, Adiz was back in Mouseonia. That was how they first arrested him. He held up his paw in a handshake and the official in sunglasses smacked it down as if he were holding a knife. He still remembered the sting sometimes. The next blow, to his head, left a scar.
Adiz slowly came to breathe normally. The curiosity deadened, people's eyes rolled from him to the display window, their arms straining with the weight of bulging plastic bags, like trees drooping with over-ripe fruit. The shop was bursting full of plasma screen televisions, over-sized speakers, mobiles and tablets, twinkling and reflecting in the glare of lights that transformed the walls into a planetarium. A disgruntled store-assistant was coming over to the doorway. Heaving himself up, and keeping his head bowed and shoulders hunched, Adiz began to scurry home. The unspent change jingled in the pocket of his tracksuit with every step. It was probably best he didn't buy that cake; it would have cost him a meal tonight. But sometimes you miss the simple pleasures. Adiz shook his head, dismissing the thought as if it were an irritating fly, and scurried faster.
The city started to transform around him, from the smooth, clean metal of the city centre, to the more decrepit high office blocks, green smudges under every old window. His accommodation was beyond that, a council house crammed against its neighbours, built in a cheery, utopian vision of societal companionship. The greying bricks and littered gardens spoilt this dream, encouraging the residents to be as bleak and as cold to each other as the street was to them.
Adiz had moved in just under a fortnight ago. The nice Human from the charity had organised it. With no common language between them she had communicated with smiles and gestures that this was his home now. Home. That word, at least, came through. Adiz tried his best to repeat it in Human, but his natural Mouseonian squeak dominated his lips. Home. How could anyone call this a home? His room was tiny, the door not opening all the way before hitting the bed, the bed squeezed next to the wardrobe, the wardrobe only opening a slither before knocking the desk. The ceiling looked like it had been hastily repaired several times, cracks traced along it like lines on a map, the walls were softly crumbling at every corner, dampness soaking through methodically every winter.
No air-freshener could overpower the stench of a rotting house mixed with the sweat of too many individuals residing within its corpse, for there were several residents, and every one of them in a room like Adiz's. Rema had been there longest, his belly large and his legs weak, so he often sat rather than stood. But his experience of living in Humanitaria held authority over the others, who orbited around his portly gravity. Samba was an Ant, he had only just turned nineteen and lived in Rema's shadow, following him wherever he went, and being the only appreciative audience to Rema's ramblings. He had a particular twitching habit with his neck, jerking his head from side to side. There were others, but Adiz had not yet learnt who they were, or even if they lived with him or just came visiting.
As he pushed his way through the stiff front door Adiz always liked to stop, close his eyes, and picture entering his real home, in Mouseonia. The scent of surrounding pine filtered into the house with every breeze. The hallway was wide and tall, pictures smiling down from nearly every space, his children, at different ages and in different places, his old Mama at the park, weddings and parties and dinners. His wife, Venesee, would play the radio softly in the kitchen, but loud enough that Adiz would try and sneak in unheard to surprise her with a tickle, which made her snigger. That joke lost its humour after a while. Eventually she would simply lay in their bed all day, one eye glued to the T.V, the other on the door, waiting for his return. He always saw her before she saw him. She would look haggard and sickly, and then he entered the room and she allowed a weak smile to ripple across her face.
‘Why do you do it every day Adiz? Why?’ she would sometimes ask, when the children were put to bed.
‘You know why, my love.’
‘Is it worth it? Is it worth it for our family's safety?’
Adiz always responded to this with a sigh. He sighed now, opening his eyes to gloom and dampness in every corner, to smell the wafts of mould, to push the door closed and fumble with lock after lock after lock. It wasn't worth it.

Rema had saved up enough to buy meat. He said he had been putting a pound aside every week for the past month and had his eye on a juicy chicken breast.
‘And juicy it is too, just like my old ladies breast, ha!’ Rema thumped one of his six massive legs on the table. Samba swung his own leg onto the table and laughed quietly. North Cockroach neighboured Mouseonia, so Rema used a bastardised form of Mouse, for Adiz's benefit. In particular Rema had trouble with the last part of Adiz's name, instead pronouncing it with an ‘s’ and a shower of spittle.
‘Yes you look like you need good meal, Adiss!’ Rema had shared the lunch between the three of them: a steaming bowl of stock and scant meat.
‘It's good, ay?’
Food often dominated the conversation in their house; Rema took great pleasure in dishing out both advice and snacks. His breakfast would often consist of watery porridge, and for lunch some plain rice, a diet he called ‘a King's pittance’, though Adiz wondered whether he knew what this actually meant.
‘Yes, it's lovely, thank you.’
Samba nodded his head appreciatively which immediately sent his neck into a spasm, stopping only when he clutched his throat.
‘This chicken travels almost as far as we did, ay! Look, look, “free range from Chickenany,”’ he said, reading from the packet. ‘Free range! I bet life is nice as chicken, ay, all space they want, all food they want! Though, if I chicken, I would have to be a chicken cannibal, ha!’
Adiz nodded his head.
‘What you do today Adiss? I thought you went town to find job? Though you know you not allowed, crazy cheese eater!’
Adiz had gone to town that morning in the vague hope of applying for a job. It was after another evening where his dinner had consisted of the smallest and meanest vegetables he could find. The hours preceding it had been spent in a haze of wandering the city and, in the morning, trying to read the little squiggles that formed Human language, his duvet wrapped around him for some protection against the elements that his home was supposed to block out. But he went knowing that his courage would fail. It was illegal for him to get a job; they would deport him. So he had scurried up and down the high street, until his eyes had found the cake.
‘No I — I didn't think it was a good idea in the end.’
‘I know because I say is not! You mice all same, you have big ears, but for what purpose? Ha!’
Samba chuckled.
‘You have to sign on later yes?’
Adiz nodded.
‘Yes, it not good! But soon will be every six months rather than every week, ay.’
‘It's really not so bad Adiz.’ Samba looked up at the ceiling and his voice was barely a whisper. ‘You just have to sign your name and then you're out of there.’
Adiz nodded again. He had been dreading this. The angry man had told him about it. Without looking at Adiz, or the interpreter, he had spoken to the folder in front of him, saying that Adiz would need to sign on at the government building every week, just so they knew where he was. In fact he had said a lot, all in one continuous monologue. When Adiz had tried to ask him questions at the end the man hadn't even listened before he threw the folder aside and, with a jerk of his coffee cup, indicated the door.
‘I could… I could go with you? That is, if you like?’ Samba politely inquired to the hanging light bulb.
‘No, I'm sure it'll be fine. Thank you though, Samba.’
‘Yes I remember first time I go there.’ Rema gnawed on a chicken wing. ‘You know North Cockroach was owned by the Humans? That's why my Human is good, ay. I remember going into that building and thinking: ‘they will help me, they used help my country, no?’ But no, they not help — when I ask, women say: ‘who do you think you are?’ They leave me living like this for two years! I sleep on street until I got this room. You know what I said to Samba here? I said it's going back to the whip. It's going back to them, just so they whip you all over again, yes?’
Adiz nodded his head automatically, having heard this story before. He mimicked looking at his watch, which had stopped working several months ago. Samba and Rema wished him goodluck and Samba came to lock him out.
‘Don't mind him, Adiz.’ Samba spoke to his feet. ‘I haven't told you yet but I — I was in a detention centre. You know what that is, right? Good. Just know that — that anything here is better than anything there.’ He looked up. ‘This is screwed up. But just play by the rules, and you can get by.’
He closed the door softly into Adiz's perplexed face. He knew what happened in detention centres. He had heard enough about it on his journey here. A bony and chattering Mouse had told him all about it as they squashed into the boat together, their knees pushed painfully close. He told Adiz how he had reached Humanitaria before, and was arrested. They put him into the detention centre where the guards screamed at him; where a boy and fellow Mouse, not even eighteen, was put in the cell with him and had cried for his mother every night. ‘What rule did I break?’ He would ask, his face uncomfortably close, eyes questioning, ‘I was a prisoner but committed no crime!’
Adiz started scampering because the government building was in the middle of the office blocks. He had no idea that Samba had been in such a place but it made sense now. No one in that house could be called healthy. At night their house felt like an asylum: screams, or at best mutterings, emanated from every room. His dreams were often of the day he left, the image of a door crooked on its hinges, of glass sprinkled across the wide corridor, glittering like a frozen sea, and what was upstairs … When he awoke several times a night, he heard Samba's muffled sobs and Rema going into his room with soothing tones. But he had never imagined he had gone through that.
He approached the door of a gravel-coated building, the archway was endowed with the biggest green smudge of any of its neighbours, suspended in mid trickle. Adiz could see the queue to the desk and its mismatched and shuffling people.
How did things get so bad?
A man pushed past him, eyes focused on his phone. Looking over his shoulder to observe the obstacle, connecting Adiz with the building he breathed the first word Adiz had understood in Human: ‘Rat.’
‘Mouse!’ Adiz put his hand to his mouth. He couldn't quite believe he had said it.
The man, dressed in a blue suit and tie, had heard. Without moving closer, he turned to fully face Adiz. His angry face spat out words which Adiz didn't understand. There was a pause after he had finished, waiting for a reply.
‘I … Mouse.’ Adiz said in his best Human. The man moved closer. Adiz held his ground but shrank. His chest constricted.
He said more words at more speed, and an accusing finger came up, jabbing in his direction like a dagger. Adiz could see the darkened rings under his eyes and hair displaced from his groomed scalp. He held up both paws and began to stammer. ‘I — home, home!’ His breath was short. The man bellowed this word back at him, and screamed more. Adiz understood some.
‘Home?’ ‘No!’ ‘Rat.’ ‘Rat.’ ‘Rat!’
‘Stay quiet.’ A deep, accented, Mouseonian voice muttered in his ear. A thin, brown Rat slipped in front of him, placing himself between Adiz and the man.
He said some words quietly in Human. The man continued to shout, but the Rat never shouted back, brushing the screams away with slow paw movements and tilting his head to one side as he listened. The man quietened. After a few more words he threw up a hand in frustration, like waving a flag, and stalked off. The Rat turned to Adiz.
‘Are you all right, my friend?’
‘Yes I — I think so, I, thank you.’ He put a paw to his chest, lungs loosening. He straightened up properly.
‘Don't worry. The name's Terez.’ He gave a warming smile and extended a thin paw. ‘Come. Let's get a coffee.’
‘I — I can't, I need to sign.’
His dark eyes drank him in. ‘You can sign later, come for coffee now. It's only round the corner.’
Without another word he led Adiz on around the corner to a grubby looking church. It was made from old stone that was weathered and rough, but looked like it was cowering in fear from the tall surroundings. They went through the doors to a wooden floored hall, bustling with Beetles, Cockroaches, Ants, Rats, Humans, even a few Badgers, sitting around tables drinking tea. They all laughed and talked, the person speaking never interrupted, the star of the table until another wanted to speak.
‘Your first time here?’ Terez handed him a coffee and guided him to an abandoned table. Several people shouted greetings at him and he waved back. ‘Yes, what is this place?’
‘Speak society. Some come to improve their Human, some come to talk in their own tongue.’ Adiz nodded appreciatively and looked around once more.
‘How long have you been here, my friend?’
‘Longer than I'd like.’
He looked at Adiz keenly. ‘Do not worry about what happened. It happens to us all. It … it is not easy to live here.’
He described his trip to Humanitaria. The smugglers not telling him where he was going, forcing him into the dark, the immobilising space he was kept in, the man who unwittingly released him, shouting and kicking him. Terez ran, and spent most of his first month on the street. Eventually, finding the authorities, he was told he should have reported as soon as he got here. As if he even knew which country he was in.
‘This is a strange new world we're in,’ he muttered.
Adiz clutched his mug. ‘It's a cruel world. Why don't they see? How can they live with the way we live?’
Sombrely, he studied the room.
‘They choose to see us as different; they choose to treat us as different. You see, they are… forgetful when they want to be. They forget what sort of society they created, forget why they created it. They're proud of their history, but they're cursing it with this present.’
Adiz looked at his watch and jumped up, pointing out he must sign, but would come back. Terez nodded gracefully and clasped his paw again.
Adiz scuttled out of the church and returned to the busy shopping centre. He went back to the shop he had cowered in front of this morning, an electric sun now in the growing gloom, and stood outside. There were women inspecting screens, seeing the T.V but not the news, kids jostling and scrambling over each-other to play the latest consoles, men in black suits, their hands behind their back, necks rotating. He closed his eyes for a minute. The jabbering of the shoppers, the speakers buzzing, the T.V's roaring melded together and became louder and louder, forming a howl, echoing up to the lonely half-moon that silently gazed upon the earth. Adiz opened his eyes and straightened up. He walked towards the government building to sign his name, to say that he was a destitute Asylum Seeker, to say he was still here.

Nick Gore