It is a week night and Wilfred Fiberglass cannot sleep. He is sitting on the floor in his kitchen with a blanket wrapped around his knees, thinking about the carrots in his vegetable garden. Are they growing, he wonders? As in, are they growing right now? – or, to put it another way, do carrots grow all the time, or do they sometimes stop for a break?
He wonders whether, in the short time he has spent thinking about them, his carrots have gotten any bigger. And how one would find out.“The difference would be too small; you could never measure it,” he hears himself saying out loud – and straight away he agrees. Of course you couldn't measure it. So what's the point in asking the question, even?
The clock on the front panel of the stove reads 03.36 in green, square digits. If he looks at it long enough the edges of the numbers start to go fuzzy and blur into one another, and it looks like the clock is moving slowly towards him. A floating, disembodied clock. At half-past three in the morning.
“Shouldn't you be asleep, mate?” he asks himself. But again, what's the point of the question? If you can't sleep then surely you're not meant to be asleep. So might as well find out what it is that you're supposed to be doing instead. Wilfred stands and folds his blanket up and opens the door and walks outside.
It is a clear night and the stars are plentiful in the sky above him. Like a sea of stars, he thinks. Like a sea of stars that are actually small fish with illuminated body parts, all swimming in circles above me. The sky rotates at night and if you point a camera upwards with a ten-hour exposure then you get a picture with concentric circles of starlight set against a background of deep indigo blue. Wilfred knows this because he saw an exhibition at the Planetarium in town once, and that was his favourite photo.
He crosses the lawn to inspect his vegetable garden. There are rows of carrots growing – Wilfred's favourite vegetable is carrots – and lettuce and runner beans and a few mournful cabbages. And chillies, but Wilfred hasn't touched those since he severely burnt his mouth cooking an authentic Indian curry a few months back. He bends to inspect his cabbages more closely. A ha! A giant slug makes a break for safety but Wilfred is too fast for him and snatches him up.
“Look, mate, I don't know if you're the same one as last time but I asked you not to eat here please. Can't you eat my grass?”
The slug contemplates Wilfred's question in a curled-up position but doesn't respond, so Wilfred flings it over the wall.
“There,” he says softly. “You can eat my neighbour's vegetables instead.”
Back inside Wilfred feels cold again, so he boils the kettle and makes himself a cup of tea. Wilfred likes his tea with lots of sugar in – about six teaspoons – and eats it with a rusk. Good old rusks, he thinks as he chews. Where would we be as a civilization without rusks? He polishes it off and reaches for another, but then sees that he only has two left and decides to leave them for breakfast. Which is in, oh, three hours time. If you wake up at three in the morning, should you have breakfast then or wait until later? Wilfred wishes there were places he could find answers to these kinds of questions.
Nothing is playing on the radio except a talk show with crazy old people phoning in for company. One woman croaks that she is “waiting for her husband to stop using the hair-dryer in the bedroom so she can go back to sleep,” but then she says her husband is bald and starts crying. Wilfred switches off the radio and sits cross-legged on the table with the blanket around his knees.
“If I were bald,” he says to the room, “I would use a hair-dryer too. It must feel incredible.”
He decides that, when he is older, he will shave all his hair off and blow-dry his scalp once a week for a special treat. And eat lots of sweet things because it won't matter if his teeth go bad then. Suddenly he remembers that he wasn't supposed to put so much sugar in his tea and that his dentist will be angry, so he pours the remainder down the sink and goes to brush his teeth.
A strange thing happens in the bathroom: Wilfred switches on the light and is startled to see a large rat curled up in the sink, sleeping. It's definitely not dead – he can see its chest rising and falling with each breath. Its pink front paws are clasped together as if it is praying. The rat is jet black and sleek and not at all dirty looking.
“This is a royal rat,” Wilfred hears himself saying (very softly) and straight away he agrees. “I must not wake this rat; to wake such a fine specimen of rat would be nothing short of disrespectful.”
He returns to the kitchen with his toothbrush and brushes his teeth there. He times it with the digital watch on his wrist: one minute on the top row, one minute on the bottom, twenty seconds on the gums and tongue. The green digits on the stove read 04.23 and they don't look fuzzy anymore, just square and stern, like they are standing with folded arms. Wilfred rinses his mouth, spits into the sink, and goes back to check on the rat.
It's still there. In the few minutes Wilfred's been gone the rat has shifted position, and he finds it lying on its back with all four paws in the air. What a rat! It's the size of a loaf of bread. Cautiously, reverently, Wilfred edges closer. He can hear the rat breathing. It is a rough, rustling sound, like papers being moved back and forth on a desk. It is very peaceful. Wilfred crouches down at the sink so that his head is just a few centimeters away from the sleeping animal. From up close he sees how the black fur is interspersed with streaks of nut brown and grey; how the pink paws are coated in fine golden hairs; how the whiskers extend at least six centimeters from the face. And how, in dreaming, the whiskers fidget and twitch, like jumping black wands.
“You grand, dreaming king,” Wilfred whispers as softly as possible. “You ambassador. You high priest. In what dreamy fields do you roam?”
The rat, which has been busy chasing a terrified kitten through the twisting branches of a giant red avocado tree, opens a round, black eye. He sees Wilfred's face in front of him, big as a moon, and in sheer fright leaps forward and bites him twice on the nose. He scrambles to the floor and dashes out the room.
Wilfred sits with blood dripping over his pajama shirt. For a moment he feels nothing, and then, before the physical pain, he feels a flood of overwhelming sadness rinse through him.
“I thought we could be friends,” he says thickly, wiping his nose. “I thought I could train you with rusk crumbs and you could sleep curled up at the foot of my bed, which is warmer than this sink.”
He stands up.
“And you could have sat on my shoulder while I gardened, and at night you could have hunted for slugs. I would have taught you which insects to eat and which ones to leave alone. And I could have watched you sleep, rat, and wondered more about your dreams.”
He lifts his head and looks at his reflection in the mirror. A sad, thin man with blood on his face looks back.
“But that rat wouldn't have been friends with you anyway,” he tells himself. “Because you're not a king – just a strange, clumsy loner.”
Wilfred feels tears well up and doesn't want to see himself crying, so he spits at himself in the mirror and turns quickly away. Warm liquid spills from his eyes and runs down his cheeks. It's pathetic to cry like this, he tells himself, but he can't help it – he feels utterly bereft. He walks out the door into the passage and switches off the light.
Later, when the sun is up, Wilfred wakes on a couch in the lounge. He has slept without a pillow and his neck feels stiff. He is hungry, and just as he's wondering what to make for breakfast he remembers the left-over rusks. What a treat. He stands and goes to the kitchen to make tea, and while the kettle is boiling he performs the first half of his morning stretch routine. The kettle clicks and he pours a large mug, adding just one shallow teaspoon of sugar. He drinks sitting cross-legged on the kitchen table (his favourite place to sit). Because his feet are cold, Wilfred holds the mug between his toes, seeing how long he can keep them against the rim for before it gets too hot. It's a fun game but it gets too easy towards the end. He drains the mug and walks outside.
The garden feels fresh and brand-new in the morning sunlight, and there are five white butterflies dancing in circles near the bird-bath. From somewhere far away comes the sound of a lawnmower. Wilfred stands on the tips of his toes, then bends at the hip and places his palms flat against the ground. He swings his arms from side to side and stretches out his neck. Then its down on all fours for eight quick pushups – one, two, three, four, five, six ... seven ... eight! – and his morning exercises are done. He crosses the lawn and stands inspecting his vegetable patch.
He's convinced his carrots have grown larger during the night.
