Lynne Barrett-Lee - Able Seacat Simon

I was sharing his hammock in the mess now, curled on top of his feet to keep his toes warm and, despite the chatter of the men, it was impossible not to hear the rats’ constant scurryings and scrapings beneath and around us.

‘Wish they were rabbits,’ remarked the other boy sailor, Martin. ‘Least then we could put them in a pie and eat the blighters!’

Martin, too, had had a tougher time than most. He and Bannister, one of the stoker mechanics, had been among those put to shore. They’d spent time in captivity – the plan being to use them to help coerce the captain. But they hadn’t co-operated, and had not long been returned.

‘Oh, for pity’s sake!’ said Sid. ‘Now you’re making me feel sick!’

Sid was particularly queasy about the rats, having woken up one morning to find one half dead and squealing, dangling a scant three inches above his head, after a kind soul had rigged up a snare with some fuse wire. ‘Well, how was I to know you planned to sleep there?’ the sailor had huffed.

As it was, my kills were mostly lobbed over the guardrail into the Yangtse. It became the ritual to wish them a safe journey to the north shore, where the ‘bloody commies’ could roast them for dinner. I worked hard to keep the supply up, knowing my contribution was vital, as no other method of killing them seemed to work. Which was not to say the men didn’t try – in a fit of furious determination upwards of fifty traps were laid in a single afternoon. The next day, not a single one was sprung.

It was perhaps inevitable, then, that the feeling became prevalent that the rats were more organised than we knew. They certainly seemed so – and so confident! They were increasingly bolder and braver. Poor Sid, who’d been dozing in the sick bay one afternoon, just after his accident, was roused from his slumbers by one calmly nibbling at his toes.

There was also talk of several sightings of a rat to beat the lot of them – a giant of an animal who they’d nicknamed Mao Tse-tung, on account of him seeming to be the ringleader. ‘Big as you, he is Blackie,’ Jack had helpfully told me. ‘I reckon you’d have a job on your hands, taking him on.’

‘Nah, he’s a sight bigger,’ Sid had even more helpfully corrected him. ‘Job on his hands? I reckon that rat could see him off if he wasn’t careful. You’d best keep away from him, Blackie.’

‘He’s the one, though,’ Martin agreed. ‘He’s the King Rat, no doubt about it. He’s the one that needs dispatching to the afterlife, the filthy bugger. Before he sires any more of the blasted things.’

I’d never thought about rats having an afterlife before. Did they too have their souls in the stars? I wasn’t sure I liked it, but I had to concede that the idea made some sense to me, even it didn’t inspire any finer feelings for the filthy vermin. I was a member of His Majesty’s Navy and I had no time for that. Not for animals that caused so much misery for my friends.

I did think quite a lot about this legendary Mao Tse-tung, though. That perhaps Jack and Sid were right. Perhaps he would be too much for me. I’d already dealt with a couple of sizeable males, and, even with my strength returning and my whiskers coming along nicely, I was not fully fit yet, and it had been no small matter to catch them and finish them off. It seemed the bolder they got, the more well fed they got – while the men faced the meat running out in a matter of days now, the rats, gorging on grain and rice, were growing ever plumper. The plumper they were, the heavier and bulkier they were, and though I was healing well – barely limping now, as Lieutenant Hett had noticed recently – I weighed no more than I ever did, nor, I thought, would I.

But for all my ever-present anxiety about facing down the fabled ‘King Rat’, when the day of reckoning came, I had no time to even think , much less be frightened. It was all just so sudden, so unexpected, so unlike any rat encounter before it.

I had simply turned a corner onto the quarterdeck one morning, and there he was – it had to be him – looking as bold as you like. He was waddling across the deck in my direction, staying close to the bulkhead, but seemingly oblivious of all the sailors milling about, getting on with their duties. At first I could only gawp. He had such a proprietorial air about him (or so he thought; a rat could never aspire to such a thing) it really was as if he was entirely without a care. King Rat. Afraid of nothing and no one.

I’d sunk down to my belly before I’d even consciously thought about it, my instinct kicking in before my eyes had even registered what I’d seen.

He stopped too, and stared at me, his dead eyes like fish eyes. The same dull, unblinking gaze of a sandfish on a slab. His whiskers, in contrast, were quivering and questing, causing the air between us, which carried the scent of him, to tickle my own. He was a brute and his stench made me nauseous.

Jack had been right, though. Sid even righter. He was a very big rat. Even face on he looked huge so, though I couldn’t properly see the length and spread of him, there was no question that he was almost as big as I was. Not as big, which I registered gratefully, even as I stared. But heavier. So much heavier. A fat rat indeed. An unwelcome glimpse of the tip of his tail soon confirmed it. It was a good foot beyond the end of his body.

I settled and I watched and I waited, as per usual, vaguely conscious of movement at the edges of my vision. The men on deck had now noticed him too.

‘Go on, Blackie,’ I heard someone say to me – in no more than a whisper, though my fear that it might give the rat cause to turn and flee was soon forgotten. Quite the opposite. He was actually edging towards me.

I stayed where I was, mindful of the things my mother had always warned me. With an animal this size, it would be foolhardy to ignore them. He rose up as he kept moving forward – though not in a straight line but using a strange angled walk. Then I realised. He was circling me. Trying to come around the side of me. The better to spring? Then I must get the advantage and spring first. I side-stepped, and now I could see the bulk of his body, but with my adrenaline pumping and my hackles fast rising, there was no question of not taking him on, giant though he was. I had my friends to think about. I could not, would not, walk away.

He slipped past me again, and I was treated to a flash of his rodent teeth. Huge pegs, they were. Perhaps the biggest I’d yet seen. Deep yellow, curving up to the roof of his mouth. I would have to spring and get my jaw locked high up on his neck. I spun around, sprang and pounced – no room for waiting, too dangerous – and in one move had my own teeth buried deep into the fur of his upper back.

He whirled then, unbalancing me, sending me over onto my flank, heavily, so I curled my paws round him to stop him gouging at my eyes. And he squealed and squealed and squealed – high, high, and higher, scrabbling and pulling me round with him, using all his strength, which was considerable, to free his front legs. My jaws were on fire from the extent I’d had to open them, my breath coming in rasps as I tried to keep them locked. I couldn’t stand up and, even if I could, I hardly dared to – I knew it would only take the tiniest amount of slackening and he’d be out, he’d be free, he’d be turning on me…

I willed myself to bite down even harder – to try to finish him off now, to try to get a better, stronger, purchase… But the action only made him squeal and scrabble at me all the louder and harder. There was nothing for it – I had to clamp him between my paws and change my bite… One, two, three… Do it now . Do it now! Break and clamp. Break and grab again… Fast as you can. Strong as you can. Do it!