Read by Tony Bell
The Beginning
The Rat Pie Man adjusts the brim of his hat and slips down Cecil Court, almost invisible. Darkness has fallen on outer London but the lights in the centre are never extinguished. The theatre crowds have gone home; the homeless lay out their cardboard mattresses in doorways, pull up damp sleeping bags, turn restlessly on their stony beds. In the bowels of the earth a few trains still rumble; rodents squeak.
It is Valentine’s Eve. He has found a bunch of battered chrysanthemums accidentally left behind on the Victoria Line by a drunken commuter returning too late to his girlfriend in Walthamstow. He presents the bouquet to the Maiden with a flourish. She gravely accepts.
The Celestial Environmental Health Officer is enraged. He would have brought her only the best – lilies from Kew, roses from Regents Park - but it’s against park regulations to pick them. He brandishes his sword, signalling the start of another episode of their eternal struggle.
The Very Beginning
No one’s sure how it first began. There is a theory that the Celestial Environmental Health Officer was generated by a Big Bang, possibly caused by a fusion of volatile cleaning products stored under some heavenly sink. (You think there’s no washing-up in heaven? I tell you, even angels are partial to a nice cup of tea.)
Others say that the Rat Pie Man came first: that he crawled out of London’s primeval slime in the days when the stegosaurus wallowed near Chelsea Reach. This theoryclaims that the Celestial EHO arrived later, just as Light had to be created to combat Dark.
Who came first doesn’t really matter. The fact is that the weary stars have been gazing down on their ancient struggle ever since London began.
The Rat Pie Man snatches suckling baby rats from their mothers’ nipples down in the seething caverns beneath Leicester Square Underground Station.
“Locally sourced,” he likes to say.
You’ll find him selling his pies in all sorts of places: in unlit alleys off Whitechapel High Street or out in the open at Borough Market. He might be that gaunt figure in a trilby, half hidden in the shadows, carrying a tray of scrumptious smelling delicacies; or he could have disguised himself as the suave proprietor of the deli, leaning over the counter in a smutty white coat.
He’s proud of his pies. He’d like to trumpet their contents to the world, perhaps by allowing the tails to hang out as a pinkish dangling fringe, but he’s forced to disguise the contents because people are so unaccountably squeamish. They all say his pies are delicious - of course they are – doesn’t he stew his tender young ratlings in dregs of real ale collected from glasses left outside Soho pubs? - but he knows that if he listed the contents his customers would spurn them.
He believes in using things up, making something tasty out of what’s available, especially proteinacous things like rats, cockroaches and pigeons. Londoners are always being seduced by foreign foods, not content to get e-coli from good old-fashioned pies, so he’s forced to give his reluctant blessing and assistance to many other types of take-away.
You want to know the main ingredient of your burger, or the origin of those little meaty scraps in your Chow Mein? Ask the Rat Pie Man how he disposes of his surplus stock. That donor kebab, what exactly was it, before it was spitted? Is anyone missing a tomcat? Did you know that tougher, more mature rats make excellent biltong?
He gives his support to cut price chicken shops, the kind whose patron saint is depicted as a neon-lit Colonel from the Deep South; curry houses where just about anything can be swamped in an all-purpose spicy sauce; fish and chip shops where the fryer is filled with old and insufficiently heated fat.
He likes the rich possibilities of randomness: the careless cockroaches that dive into the pizza dough, the accidentally deep-fried mice. Germs should be given a chance. After a few pints on a Friday night he gets all nostalgic about the good old days, when Cholera was King.
Just as the Rat Pie Man prides himself on being sinister, so his arch-enemy, the Celestial Environmental Health Officer, the one who pursues him through time and space, is righteousness personified. Once you know who he is, you see him everywhere. It is he who wields the sword of truth for the Daily Express. His stern features are represented on the face of Richard the Lionheart’s statue, outside the Houses of Parliament. He is the Man who Knows What’s Right.
He favours the antiseptic: Formica counters that smell of Dettol, plastic-wrapped sandwiches made of flavourless sliced bread: slivers of processed ham or cheese pressed between flaccid white thighs. Everything, he believes, should be vacuum packed, then sterilised for extra safety. Refrigeration? Don’t get him talking about refrigeration. He can tell you the optimum cooling temperature for every food. And once he gets started he’ll never stop.
As the Rat Pie Man often says (fondling a rodent in his pocket), “There’s squeaky clean and there’s just plain squeaky. You pays your money and you takes your choice.”
The Celestial EHO and the Rat Pie Man are both in love with the Maiden. The Maiden has been here forever. We all know her. In London she appears in many forms. She is Justice, looking stern on the roof of the Old Bailey. In feeling mode she manifests herself as one of the sinuous nymphs who mourn Sir Arthur Sullivan in the Embankment Gardens. Militant, she’s Britannia, rousing the troops every year on the last night of the Proms. Sometimes she appears bare breasted, hair flowing, on the front of an Art Nouveau building. She has no false modesty; she is always entirely herself.
The Rat Pie Man loves the Maiden fierce or spiky – for example, as Queen Elizabeth I, who wields a big stick on the side of St-Dunstan-in-the-West. The Celestial EHO much prefers her as a helpless nymph, or Edith Cavell, noble and self-sacrificial in the Charing Cross Road.
Because she is the Eternal Feminine, the Maiden also appears as Mother and Crone. The Celestial EHO is reassured by a certain sort of mother: bosomy, dumpy Queen Anne outside St Pauls, Mrs Thatcher, strict but fair, and of course Queen Victoria, mother of an empire. The Rat Pie Man is more likely to be turned on by Boadicea, bare-breasted and beastly, driving her knife-wheeled chariot into the heart of Westminster.
And the Crone? They don’t make statues of crones, but you often meet her in human form. She’s that muttering bag lady shunting her shopping trolley along the Walworth Road. And the Rat Pie Man and the Celestial EHO give her due reverence and respect.
The Fight Continues
The Rat Pie Man laughs and swirls his enormous bottle green cloak, mottled with a thousand years of sinister London stains and patches, like the rottenest of Thames wharfs. The Celestial EHO is sharpening his Sword on the spinning Millennium Wheel. Close to the stars, above Old Bailey, the Maiden watches as battle commences.
They duel along the Embankment, leaping from the tops of lorries to the roof of Fishmongers Hall. The Rat Pie Man swings like a bat from Hungerford footbridge; the Celestial EHO hacks at the steel hawsers, badly notching his sword.
Scholars have noted that their fights seem to gravitate towards circular venues. In the past, they often battled in the Roman Forum (now 20 feet beneath the City). In the seventeenth century they span around the monument, slashing and cackling at one another, ignored by Christopher Wren and Robert Hook who sat in the basement carrying out scientific experiments, using the Monument as a giant telescope.
They’ve chased each other round the dome of St Paul's a thousand times, disturbing sleepy pigeons and amusing the contemplative moon. All those hairsbreadth ‘scapes and desperate slips, the last minute clutchings of leaded gutters, the grabbing at angels' wings…. They like the Globe too: the new Globe, the old Globe. (Shakespeare once nearly wrote a play about them.)
Tonight it’s the BFI Imax that hosts their struggle. The film is frozen into immobility, the late night audience falls into a trance, flattened into their seats by the force of a mighty gyration, as the Imax whirls round like the drum of an intergalactic spin dryer.
“Ha ha, got you!” cries the Rat Pie Man falling unexpectedly onto his opponent from the full height of the building.
With a speedy upward thrust the Celestial EHO stabs him through the heart. It is the equivalent of charging the Rat Pie Man under the 1947 Environmental Protection Act, subsection 12.2a, which is what the Celestial EHO would really like to do, but does not, because he hates being laughed at.
The Rat Pie Man laughs anyway as he leaps to his feet unscathed. That is how it is for immortals. Wearily they resume the fight, which does not differ greatly from all the other fights. At last relief arrives. A stillness falls; the spinning stops. The Maiden appears, descending from the top of the auditorium and passing floatily along the aisles, her bare and beautiful lily-white feet not quite touching the ground. Silently she gestures the opponents apart, nods thoughtfully at the Celestial EHO’s boasts, smiles gently at the Rat Pie Man’s witticisms, frowns away their aggression. As they leave she reverses Time with a wave of her lovely dimpled arm. The audience awakes, reaches for popcorn, focuses on the screen.
A drink
If they ever go out for a drink together (which they hardly ever do – only about once every twenty years) this is what they order. The Maiden has champagne; she likes the way it tickles her nose. The Rat Pie Man goes for a meaty red; a Chilean Malbec often hits the spot. The Celestial EHO longs to ask for a glass of milk, but he can’t because he’d be laughed at, so has to sip his way through something tough and manly like a half of lager and lime. He can’t bear being teased. It’s so unfair. They just treat him like he’s their kid brother or something.
The end.
Who knows when it will end? – probably when London ends, when the seas rise and the waters take us, and the tip of the Shard becomes a temporary lighthouse for lost sailors.
(c) Stephanie Brann, 2014
Stephanie Brann is a Londoner. She is taking forever to write a novel. Her only previous publications have been three tiny tales on Tube-Flash. She is fortunate enough to have attended the class of the late, the wonderful, the long to be remembered, John Petherbridge.
Tony Bell:Evening Standard Award nominee for A Man for All Seasons, he has performed all over the world with award-winning all-male Shakespeare company, Propeller, playing Bottom, Feste, Autolycus and Tranio. TV includesCoronation Street, Holby City, Midsomer Murders, EastEnders and The Bill. He is also a radio and voiceover artist.
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