I first read this story at 17, about the same age as its main characters, and I can remember reading the first page standing by a bookshelf in Manchester Central Library and wandering away to a chair, still reading and completely drawn in, and finishing the whole of it before I left the building.
It’s a dark but involving story that begins with the description of a teenage couple having sex on a table in front of an open window while a hidden animal scratches somewhere in the flat behind them, so faintly the narrator thinks he might have imagined it, and opens up into an intense depiction of their floundering relationship and the pressures of real life that increasingly weigh on them as the summer gets hotter and their flat gets dirtier. The narrative propulsion comes from the narrator’s increasing preoccupation with the rat that’s sharing the flat with them and his desperate attempts first to ignore it and then to catch it.
The description of the narrator’s eventual conflict with the rat is grotesque and horrifying, but there is a strong sense of psychological truth to the story that keeps me coming back to it, years after I first read it. There are deep silences between the characters, and an insistent refusal to acknowledge problems. This is most notable between the narrator and Sissel, his girlfriend, but also occurs in the narrator’s interactions with Sissel’s family, especially with her younger brother, Adrian, who cartwheels and shouts and fights and imitates the noise of machine-guns to avoid acknowledging the increasing tension he feels during his visits to the flat. This deliberate avoidance of emotion recurs so insistently throughout the story and is so brilliantly evoked that I’ve always found it very moving.
Though the growing air of despondency that grows through the story is eventually punctured by a more hopeful note, there’s a strong sense throughout it of summer ending and adolescence being painfully outgrown that’s wistful and tender, and pulls me back each time I reread it.
First published in First Love, Last Rites, Jonathan Cape, 1975. Republished by Picador, 1991
