Toes

Sid

There once was a man named Sid who lived on his own in a bungalow on a nondescript council estate. Sid was old. He was so old that he’d outlived all his friends and family. Sid was 92. That’s old.

Sid may have lived alone, but that didn’t mean he was on his own. His neighbour would pop by once a week to perform odd jobs around the house. Sid didn’t count the neighbour, with his hurried weekly visits, as company, but he didn’t need to. Sid got all the companionship he needed from his pets – four white rats.

No Sid

Sid loved his rats just as his rats loved him, or at least so it seemed to the old man as he lounged in his favourite armchair in front of the TV. He liked to watch DIY and science programs and he could have sworn that the rats watched them too. They would assemble in a line, four soft noses pushed through the bars of their cage, eight eyes fixed on the screen that lay inches beyond the reach of their sharp incisors.

Those glistening rodent teeth had already wreaked havoc on Sid’s curtains, whose only crime had been to brush perilously close to the cage. Before Sid could tear his gaze away from his beloved custom motorcycle programme, those naughty rats had reduced his dingy 1970s curtains to strips.

Rats gonna rat just as death-defying old men gonna die, and soon enough Sid’s time came. At the ripe age of 92½, the pensioner passed away in his sleep, sat in his favourite old armchair watching his favourite DIY show. Don’t be sad for Sid: he lived a good life and died happy and contented. Be sad for his rats, who now found themselves without an owner and, more importantly, without anyone to feed them.

This oughtn’t to have been a problem, but by an unfortunate twist of fate, Sid wasn’t the only one to take an eternal nap that week. His neighbour also died in a bizarre gardening accident. The man had only been 52, but electrocution isn’t choosy: drop your mains-powered leaf blower in the hot tub and nine times out of ten that AC current is gonna come looking for you.

The Plan

Rats are smart creatures. Smarter than humans give them credit for. The caged quartet knew their keeper was dead – hell, they could smell it with their finely-attuned noses – and, within a few days, they knew that help wouldn’t be coming. The Other Man hadn’t arrived and, as far as they knew, he might never arrive. They were right.

The rats might have been trapped in their cage but that didn’t mean they were destined to starve. For one thing, rats can eat anything. Food scraps? Straw? 1970s curtains? They weren’t fussy. The foursome would even have eaten each other if they'd had to, but they were hopeful it wouldn’t come to that. Not so long as they stood a chance. Not so long as the TV continued to beam into their cage, tuned to the science channel with its mixture of practical, educational programs.

For the next 30 days, the rats watched a lot of TV and ate a lot of curtains. By the time the month was up, something strange had happened. The rats’ bodies had shrunk (this wasn’t surprising – eating curtains at an 800 calorie deficit will do that) but their brains had expanded to contain all the human knowledge they had begun to acquire.

As the rats watched documentary after documentary on the science channel, they began to learn. Had Sid died watching TMZ it might have been a different story, but the old man had been a smart cookie. Now it was the turn of his surviving pets – the closest thing he had to family – to get smart. Previously, the rats had watched Sid’s shows with a mixture of curiosity and bemusement.

Now they were woke.

Now they were hanging on every word, processing every sentence and formulating a plan, an escape strategy, one that wouldn’t call for devouring one another like rats trapped in a cage.

Extreme Ratitude

Using the skills they picked up from TV, the rats were very productive over the course of the next month. They created a funnel out of cardboard and, shoving it through the bars of their cage, channeled rainwater from an open window. They tied the ragged curtain strips together and, fashioning a lasso, hoisted a bag of corn from the floor till it was level with their cage.

For three months, the rats followed the same routine. All day they would graze on corn, interspersed with mouthfuls of curtain fabric which had an annoying habit of reappearing in their poops still undigested, whereupon they would eat it again, washed down with large quantities of rainwater. (The curtains were supposed to make their stomachs feel fuller so that they would eat less corn, thus preserving precious rations. At least that’s what they’d been told by the TV, and the TV had never been wrong.) Then, all night the rats would pee and poo the day’s intake away.

The pee went into one tub and the poop into another. By the end of the three months, the rats had amassed quite a collection of bodily fluids. When the tubs were full, they mixed the contents with straw and water till it formed a sludge and poured it onto the base of their cage to dry. The stench was horrific, but the rats didn’t seem to mind. They were on a mission, and it was gonna take more than a bit of stink to thwart their plan.

With the aid of a box of matches, which the rats had manoeuvred into their cage, they assembled charcoal and sulphur, scraping it off the match heads till it formed a fine powder. Then they crushed the dried pee and poop with their teeth to create a chemical called potassium nitrate. There are lots of interesting facts to know about potassium nitrate, but only one of these is relevant to this story: assemble enough of it and things go boom.

The rats combined the three powders – the potassium nitrate, charcoal and sulphur – and peed on it some more for good measure. Then they took the doughy mixture, moulded it around the bars of their cage, lit a fuse made out of toilet roll tubes and retreated to the furthest corner.

Ten seconds passed as the fuse burned slowly towards the combustible mixture and then, disappointingly, the flame appeared to fizzle out. After another ten seconds had passed, one of the rats removed its paws from its face and dared to glance across the cage. At that moment, there was an enormous flash of light and heat as the concoction exploded violently. Debris rained down everywhere, the walls shook and smoke billowed in thick black clouds. When the dust had finally settled, the rats gingerly emerged from their corner to be greeted by a beautiful sight.

Where once there had stood stout steel bars now lay a gaping hole. The rats wasted no time in making good their escape. They swarmed out of the cage, across their beloved TV and scampered past the armchair, pausing to pay their respects to Sid, whose body still sat undiscovered, four months on.

Grub's Up

The foursome careered into the kitchen, whereupon they set about devouring their first proper meal in forever – dry Frosties and dishwasher tablets – and this time they declined to wash it down with curtain strips. The rats were free at last, free to live the good life, roaming wherever they cared and eating whatever they liked. They could go anywhere and do anything but, being rats, there was only one place they really wanted to go – the sewers.

The newly liberated rodents ambled through to the bathroom. One by one they plopped into the toilet and swam through the U-bend and onward to the great unknown. As it happened, the great unknown didn’t take them too far. They swam out of Sid’s bungalow, along a series of pipes and before they knew it they had emerged in another toilet, this one belonging to the house three doors down.

The rats shook themselves dry, raised their pink noses in the air and sniffed. They were hungry again, and what’s more they could smell something extremely appetising. It smelt like cheese, and it appeared to be coming from upstairs. The rats dashed up the stairs, shrugged under the crack in the bottom of the door and emerged into a bedroom. Two children were peacefully asleep in adjoining beds but the rats paid them no attention. Instead, they scurried under the covers to locate the morsel of cheese that their noses told them was very close by.

With their keen sense of smell, they located it in the dark, devoured the snack and then fled the house via a drainpipe before moving off under the cover of night. When the children awoke in the morning, they lifted the covers and screamed. Where once there had been five toes, now there were only four. It was the first time the rats had ever made such a mistake, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

It turns out that even the smartest of rats can confuse a pinkie toe for a cheesy Wotsit. And so, when you fall asleep each night, pull the covers tight over your feet and, when you awaken, be sure to count your toes to check they’re all there.