The Pit

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He shrank away, watching open-mouthed as it found the plate, ate the mouldy crumbs delicately, taking its time, then sat on its tiny haunches, dabbing at its face like a miniature cat. Oliver clapped his hands and stamped one foot smartly. The rat shot away towards the wall and he saw its long pinkish tail disappear through a hole in the crumbling lath and plaster. There were dozens of holes; dozens of rats, probably. But he’d thought house rats were bigger, and brown. The only others he’d ever seen were fat white ones with pink eyes.

Why did he feel that he knew about rats? And why did he feel that if he got to the back of this dark little house he would find the river Thames? Memories tugged at him, then danced out of reach, floating round his bewildered head like scraps of paper caught by the wind. Warily, keeping one eye on the holes in the rotting wall, he reached the door and pulled it open gingerly.

“Thomas … Thomas! Where are you, bird?” A woman’s voice, gentle even though she was shouting, and somehow familiar, came up the narrow wooden stairs.

“Leave him, mother, he’s sleeping. Better to leave him.” This voice was younger, different. He’d not heard it before.

“Thomas!” the woman called again, anxiously this time, but he took no notice. His name was Oliver, not Thomas, so she couldn’t mean him. Anyway, he’d found another door at the top of the staircase. He pushed at it, and crept through.

This room was tiny and contained nothing but a bed, a small one with high sides, a bed like a coffin. There was a rough grey blanket on the floor and a small lumpy object on top of it, something with a polished round head and two stuffed legs. It looked like a doll made by a witch doctor, something evil, to stick pins in. For a minute he stayed over by the door, he’d seen movement. Rats, three or four of them, had shot away into the walls like streaks of ink. They must live in the plaster all over this house. “Runs” their escape routes were called. How did he know about rats? And where was his mother, fussing about getting a good set for her jam? And where were the old people?

But he didn’t go looking for them, he looked through the tiny back window at the Thames; that river was more familiar to him than anything else in life. It was like breathing.

When he saw it, majestic and glittering under the hot blue sky, relief flooded over him. This was London, and he was Oliver; here was the Thames. It curved round in its old way, like an arm with its hand disappearing east, under the double railway bridge and out towards a power station. But the bridge he saw now was quite different, low-arched and narrow and cluttered with houses, and where the chimneys of the power station should have been he saw green fields, blue-edged in the haze.

The river was busy. Crude wooden dinghies, piled high with bundles, scurried under the low bridge like water beetles, heading east and out of sight. There were bigger craft too, sailing boats, their whitey-yellow canvases plump with wind. Some were moving slowly down river, others were moored to the far bank, and he could see little black figures, like stick people, going down swinging gangways with boxes and baskets, stacking things on deck. But no one was tying up and coming ashore, he noticed. They were all leaving London.

Oliver wiped the sweat off his face. It felt like an oven in that tiny room and his dirty brown tunic was sticking to him. Underneath he was naked. His mother always insisted on sensible underwear, even in summer, but he wasn’t thinking about her any more; she’d become irrelevant.

He turned away from the window, crossed the room and started to creep down the stairs. Another door stood open on the floor below and through it came a sound he’d heard before, the woman’s voice weeping again. Oliver stopped. He wanted to see who was there but he hated the crying, the sound of that desperate, unknown voice filled him with pain. It cut right down inside him, making him want to cry too. What was the matter with her? Why couldn’t she stop?

He peeped round the door into a largish room, smelly and hot, and faintly smoky. There was no fire though, the smoke seemed to be coming from some little brown pots. There was one on a table, another on a shelf. They gave off a peculiar chemical smell, a bit like fireworks.

The woman sat at the table with her face in her hands and there was a girl standing behind her. They were both dressed in the same coarse brown, and their skirts swept the ground. Their long dark hair was braided and pinned up.

“Don’t, mother, don’t,” the girl was saying, in a frightened whisper, and he saw her bend down and put her arms round the woman’s neck.

“The sickness is in White’s Alley, Elizabeth,” he heard. “The houses are all shut up. And Biddy Skelton is taken away, and her man fled to Greenwich with the children and ’tis come to the Marleys’ house too, in Bearbinder Lane, all five of them dead, Elizabeth, and Susan, she that was my good friend …”

“We must pray, mother,” the girl said quietly. “We must say our prayers and take comfort from the scriptures. That’s what the Reverend Pearson told us to do.”

“Priests,” the weeping woman said bitterly, “and doctors. Where are they now when the people need them? The whole city is dying, Elizabeth, and there is no one to comfort it. Don’t speak to me of Reverend Pearson. He’s gone into the country, he was one of the first. It was his own skin he wanted to save.”

But the girl had put a book down on the table and started to read, tracing the words with her finger like a child that barely knows its alphabet. “Unto Thee, O Lord, will I lift up my soul,” she began. “My God, I have put my trust in Thee. O let me not be confounded, neither let mine enemies triumph over me. For all they that hope in Thee shall not be ashamed …”

The weeping gradually changed to a quiet sobbing, then stopped altogether. The woman’s hands dropped from her face and she stared blankly across the smoky room. Oliver looked at her. The tear-stained face, framed in its heavy dark hair, was very beautiful. Oliver had never seen her before and yet he knew her. As the girl called Elizabeth read on, two smaller girls wandered up to the table and tried to bury themselves in the woman’s skirts. He saw her arms stretch out and gather them in, like a hen gathering her chicks, and a pain shot through him. He wanted to go to her as well. In this terrifying world, a world he knew yet did not know, Oliver wanted comfort too.

At the bottom of the stairs was an oblong of dusty sunlight and a bit of cobbled street. He started padding down, on his dirty bare feet, but when he heard more voices he stopped and shrank into the shadows. The foul rotten smell was still there but now mixed with something more familiar, the clean, ordinary smell of new leather. He was looking into what appeared to be some kind of shop, the walls were lined with hooks and nails, and belts and bridles hung from them. On the floor there were crude buckets, also of leather, and a couple of saddles. A man in a greasy apron was sitting behind a long table, bending over a piece of harness.