Bryce Courtenay - The Potato Factory

Tooth, now finally satisfied, gave a nod to the rat master, who pronounced on the punters, 'All's clean what feels clean, nothin' squeaked, nothin' seen!' He turned to the rat boy. 'Sample the show, three in a row!'

The boy bent over and taking up the bag at his feet, began to untie the twine, though mid-way through this task he appeared to have acquired an itchy nose. He held the top of the bag with his left hand and scratched his nose with the other, finally wiping the copious snot from under it into his open palm and appearing to wipe his hand on his matted and greasy hair. His hand disappeared completely beneath his very large cap seemingly for this very purpose.

His sniffing and scratching finally over, the rat boy returned his attention to opening the bag and without as much as a glance inwards plunged his arm into the bag of squeaking rats and brought up the first 'show', a rat selected blind to show that the bag had been called correct, and selected as specified, 'small, house and country'.

'One-o!' he shouted holding a small house rat up above his head and then dropping it into the ring at his feet before plunging his arm back into the bag and withdrawing it again. 'Two-o!' The second rat was almost identical in size to the first. Once again his arm entered the rat bag, which was now jumping and bumping around his boots 'Three-o!' the boy finally yelled, holding a third rat above his head.

'All's fair what's shown fair! Ring the rats and free the tails!' the rat master shouted.

Whereupon the boy upended the entire bag of rats into the ring and they fell in a large tail-twisted and squirming clump. The rat boy commenced to sort them out, untying their tails and scattering them helter-skelter about the ring. Free to sniff and scratch while their eyes grew accustomed to the bright light, they seemed now to be quite calm. The rat boy climbed out of the enclosure as George Titmus rang the starting bell and the terrier, Valiant, straining in his master's arms and yapping in great excitement, was dropped in among the rodents.

What Thomas Tooth hadn't witnessed was that the three sampling rats the boy appeared to have pulled at random out of the rat bag, in fact came from under his large cap. These three small house rats, so ceremoniously shown, had been nestling quietly in his hair. They had been trained to the smell of mucus on his hand, and upon it entering his cap they had slipped down his coat sleeve where he'd concealed a crust of bread. So that he now only had to put his hand inside the bag and let a rat drop down his sleeve into it, whereupon he would withdraw it again to show that the rats in the bag had been selected small. He repeated this twice more to show three small rats in what was seen to be an honest call.

The rats which were upended into the ring from the bag stank of the river and the sewers, a particular smell no person experienced in the game of ratting could possibly mistake. Their bite was most infectious and often quite deadly, and they were larger by as much weight again as the three smaller house rats the boy had 'shown', though a direct comparison was no longer possible as all the rats in the ring now appeared to be of similar size.

This was achieved by a second clever ploy, though it would take a more sober man than Thomas Tooth to see the trick. The rat boy, having emptied the rats from the bag, scattered them about the ring, though a moment before doing so he had again wiped his nose. The three smaller house rats in the ring, trained to the smell of the mucus on the boy's hand, once again darted up his sleeve, leaving only the larger rats behind.

Moreover, while Thomas Tooth was busy patting and slapping at the boy in the ring, behind his back the silver collar was taken from the dog Valiant's neck and placed around the neck of a second terrier of similar markings. This second ratter, a bitch named Rose, cankered from rat bites, was a sister to Valiant from an older litter. Enfeebled from the gnawing of the canker, she could no longer fight well, even though her canine instinct and eagerness to fight remained, and to all appearances she was equal to the task.

Rose worked briskly, picking up a rat and shaking it, biting deep behind its head to snap its neck and then drop it, immediately grabbing at another. Blood dripped to the floor and the little canine was soon slipping as she scrambled to snatch at the now panicky rats. The terrier lunged at a very large rodent, slipped in the blood on the ring and missed. The rat, panic stricken, bit deeply into the little bitch's nose and hung on. Rose, who had already killed twelve rats, was beginning to tire. She tried to shake the large rat off, but it held fast and soon the little bitch's slender neck started to drop. As though by some primeval instinct, the remaining rats rushed at the weakened ratter and pulled her down. She tried to rise but the rats smothered her, tearing at her tiny black and white pelt.

The bell sounded and the rat master shouted: 'Rats high, dog low! Take yer dog or let it go!'

The rats had won and the rat boy, wearing a thick leather mitten, for the rats were now maddened by the taste of blood and would bite at anything, jumped into the ring and pulled a frenzied rat from the still alive terrier's body and threw it back into the ratbag. Some of the rats held on so tenaciously that the boy had to grab about their blood-matted stomachs, lifting the terrier's body with the rat still attached to it. With a twist of the wrist he removed the rat, leaving its teeth embedded in the pelt, as the little bitch fell back into the ring to be smothered again by the feeding rodents.

With the rats finally safely in the bag, the boy tied the top and lifted it out of the ring. The blood-crazed rats would continue to attack each other inside the bag in a squeaking feeding frenzy until only one was left alive. Such a rat was tagged and much prized as a symbol of luck and, should it recover from the numerous bites to its body, was eagerly sought by a keen ratter as a pet.

The rat boy climbed from the ring, the ragged ends of his trousers and the toes of his boots soaked with fresh blood. The stench of death was everywhere and the punters, the fun over for the night, began to leave. As was the custom, most of them repaired downstairs to Marybelle Firkin's public house where the gin whores would be carousing and the fiddler would be playing a merry jig on a gypsy fiddle.

Marybelle Firkin's inglorious establishment was well known for both ratting and whores and was well frequented by gonophs and macers and magsmen, and all manner of thieves and villains. Towards the latter part of the evening, when the ratting was over, the Pig 'n Spit became a place of great merriment and fornication with every dark corner as well as the skittle court behind the public house taken up with thrusting bodies and much loud groaning. Lust and loving was bought here for the price of three drams of gin. Hence the people in the surrounding rookery took much amusement by referring to both Marybelle Firkin and the Pig 'n Spit as 'Merry Hell Fucking at the Pig 'n Shit'.

George Titmus, the last to leave the ratting ring, turned the lamps down low. Rose, the little terrier, tried to rise, but slipped on the blood-stained floor. She tried again and this time got shakily to her feet, whimpering and looking up with trusting eyes to see if she could find her master. But she lacked the strength to hold herself up and collapsed back among the dead rats. She was dead before her owner sneaked back up the stairs to retrieve the silver collar about her neck.

With the contest declared in favour of the rats, Thomas Tooth owed thirty pounds to Dan Figgins to be paid by midnight. The fish was landed.

Dan Figgins' small, cold, agate-blue eyes, only just visible within the multiple folds of scar tissue surrounding them, grew sharp as pin-points as he heard Tooth explain his inability to pay up at the appointed hour.