"The rat was back. I waited until Cress went to the loo - to sort herself out. The rifle was a present from the Sultan of Oman. I positioned myself on the sofa, and took aim. The little bugger was eating out of the dog bowl, My breathing slackened, as I felt time stand still - the pad of my finger whitened as applied pressure to the trigger. I knew this had to be a clean kill. The gunshot rang through the house. I caught the rat square between the buttocks, the bullet ripping through the guts, traveling up the sinister arch of it's spine, then exiting it's chest and lodging in the skirting board.
Before I had chance to enjoy my kill, Cress scuttled down the stairs. "What the F," she said. "Why are you firing a gun in the house?" "It's not a house, it's a cottage," I coolly countered - peeling myself from the sofa, and innocently replacing the gun on it's stand on top of the television. Cress watched me with concern. This pleased me because it meant she hadn't seen the rat: now dead. That would have blown my chance for nooky. "Is that thing loaded?" she asked. "I don't fire blanks," I replied, crossing the room for a kiss. Cress was reluctant. I wondered if she'd fitted her coil - or whatever it was she'd been doing in the little room. The kiss was less than spectacular.
Breaking away from me, Cress perched on the sofa. Sensing she needed lubrication I went to the kitchen. As I fished the Stolly from the freezer I poked the rat with my toe. It had somehow managed to get past the Fruit Corner pot I had super-glued over the hole. It was a male. I stared into the raven marble of it's eye. It spoke to me of nothing - of the great beyond - of the eternal void that awaits us all - of when the fan stops when you switch off the X-box: game over.
"Harry?" she said, when I returned, "do you want to have children?" "Don't you want a drink first?" I asked, unsure if I had misread the signals. "I can take the bottle upstairs with us if you want." Cress shook her head, "I don't mean that. Anyway, I'm on the blob." "Oh," I said, sitting beside her. "Drinks it is." I added, hiding my disappointment. I poured two glasses and gave her one - 'it was all I would be giving her that night' I thought. "Have you ever got a girl pregnant?" The question combined the impact of the liquor made me splutter, the splutter became a cough, and almost left me choking. "Of course I have." "Have you?" "No of course not." "What never?" "Well maybe. How would I know?" "They would tell you." "Who would?" "The woman - women - girls - it doesn't matter if you have." "Well I haven't. Now drink up. And let's have another."
I could tell I was in for a rough night. Cress was always quiet when she was thinking. Thankfully Sky was showing re-runs of Tenko. I rolled a spliff. Cress had changed. She said she had stopped smoking tobacco. She didn't seem that keen on drink either - said it hardened the uterus. I didn't know what she was talking about. But I kept my composure - stayed calm and polite - hoping for a blow job, or at least a bit of hand relief. Though she blew that, and any chance of seeing my todger that night, when in the middle of scene in which Mrs Van Meyer was arguing with Stephanie Beacham about rice, she asked, "if you've never got a girl pregnant, how do you know you can?"
"Of course I can. I just chose not to," I stated. "I just never met a girl who would let me... I mean, I have just never met the right girl... I mean..." I could feel the embarrassment flushing my cheeks. The dope had yet to kick in, and the drink was only just reaching my veins. Unable to think straight I stabbed for answers. Half formed thoughts impotently poured from my lips but never reached a period. Ironic in the circumstances. Willy never faced this torment. Cress would never undermine Willy's manhood like this. She would just look at his kids and know. But then he didn't have amber pubes. He was all green down there, ready to go - just like my ancestor Victoria - and no one would dare undermine him in this way.
She left at the turn of morning. When the the darkness of deep night settles in a band on the Surrey hills. I listened to the whistling of a lamplighter wending his weary way home, and wondered if he had children. Wondered if he had faced these questions. These insults upon his manly vigour - just for the crime of passing thirty. Tossing the Stolly bottle into the bin, I noticed again the rat. I did consider leaving it for Vera, my woman-who-does, just in case I slept through the alarm again.
But that night something within me had changed. It was as if my mother's hand had touched me, for I felt her presence once more. I took the rat and thanked him, his blood now cold upon my guilty fingers. All of my life, until that point, had been in death's shadow: the polo club, Afghanistan, the urinals at Eton. I resolved to change. To choose life.
And with that I threw the rat in the bin."
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any respect I ever had for him.
