‘There used to be a house here,’ Mama said, pointing at the small shop that now sells vegetables and fruit.

‘When?’ Arjuna scoffed. ‘When you were a child?’

‘Yes,’ said Mama, glaring at him. ‘Which was only about thirty years ago!’

‘Only!’ Arjuna said, clutching at his forehead and staggering into the path of an oncoming trishaw.

I shoved him out of the way and the trishaw man glared at him, blaring his horn at the same time for dramatic effect.

‘I need to buy some veggies. Come on.’ Mama crossed the road in front of yet another trishaw and went inside the small shop. We followed reluctantly. Coming out of the hot December sun into the darkness of the shop, I felt claustrophobic. The fruits all smelled extremely sweet and I could see flies buzzing around a papaw that looked ever so slightly off. I tripped on the rubber carpet as we went in and almost toppled Arjuna over as well.

‘Children!’ Mama said, reprovingly. She turned back to the onions. We stared all around the shop while Mama bought her veggies, trying to find any traces of its having been a house before. We saw a space on the wall that might have marked where a picture had hung.

‘Ey, look there!’ Arjuna hissed in my ear.

‘Stop that!’ I snapped, pushing him away. ‘You put spit all over me!’

‘No no but look! Down there.’ He pointed to the corner of the room. I saw a broom and a pile of sweepings under it. A long slender object that looked horribly like a cockroach feeler protruded from the pile, so I looked away.

‘The door,’ Arjuna breathed.

‘What door?’ I looked back, but I could see it even before he pointed again. A small trap door, set into the floor.

‘Let’s see if it opens,’ Arjuna said, starting for the corner. He hadn’t seen the potential cockroach so I let him go ahead to scare it away. There was an enormous padlock through a small bolt that held the trapdoor closed. Arjuna began fiddling with it, squatting down on the floor.

‘Don’t do that!’ the shopkeeper said, abruptly turning away from Mama.

‘Why not?’ asked Arjuna.

The man looked shifty. ‘It’s… not a good idea.’

Mama frowned a bit. ‘Leave it, Arjuna.’ she said.

‘What’s down there?’ Arjuna asked.

‘Nothing, nothing. Just an old store-room. There might be rats or snakes only. So don’t touch it.’ The shopkeeper said, frowning.

‘Let’s find out!’ Arjuna whispered to me, getting back up.

‘How?’ I frowned at him.

‘This man has some kids. I saw them round the side of the shop. Let’s go ask them shall we?’

I’d seen the kids too but hadn’t thought about asking them. I was getting a bit bored with all the mystery over this shop’s trapdoor, but I followed Arjuna outside anyway.

‘What’s under the shop?’ Arjuna asked the oldest boy, who was about six. He just asked him point-blank, with no tact or leading up to the question.

The boy scoffed. ‘Under the shop? Aiyo, it’s some rats. We have the most rats in the neighbourhood,’ he boasted proudly.

‘That’s nice,’ I said, though I wanted to laugh and laugh.

‘Our rats can scrape the wall like normal rats but they can also tap and make sounds. They’re very clever rats.’ the kid went on.

Arjuna was frowning now, pretending to be all clever and closer to the truth than I was.

‘What sort of taps?’ he asked, finally.

‘Like one two three taps. He can make it when we tap the floor also.’

‘He?’ I asked immediately, pleased that I’d caught onto that.

‘The rat,’ the little boy explained, looking at me strangely.

‘So you tap to the rat and he taps back?’ Arjuna asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Is it like a bandicoot?’ Arjuna went on.

The boy looked fed up of our questions. ‘How do I know, I didn’t see him still. He is living under the shop only.’ 

‘And he never comes out?’ I asked.

‘No. Only at night he wakes up and starts his noises. He tries to get out sometimes, but we don’t let him. Silly fellow! My father will put a big trap there and catch the fellow! Then he’ll be dead and no more tapping.’ The boy said, and then he screamed very loudly as a way of announcing the end of the interview, ducked between Arjuna’s legs and ran off to join his tinier siblings.

Arjuna looked at me, his eyes shining. ‘What do you make of that?’

‘Uh, it’s a creepy big rat?’ I said.

‘No! It’s an intelligent rat. If we can catch it, we can tame it and make it do tricks!’ Arjuna said.

‘Don’t be stupid. You wouldn’t know how to train a rat even if a rat trainer sat next to you and told you exactly how.’

‘We should do it! Imagine how famous we could be. We can be on tv!’ Arjuna stood in silence for a while, imagining his future as a celebrated rat tamer.

‘I don’t like rats. They’re yucky and they have rabies,’ I said.

‘Only sometimes! Dogs have rabies sometimes too but you’re always saying aney sweet to them. You just hate rats because you’re a bigot!’ Arjuna said, scowling. He stalked off into the shop.

I stood there on the side of the road until they came out and joined me again. Arjuna had forgotten all about our quarrel and came up to me. ‘Let’s come back in the night and catch the fellow,’ he whispered. I wasn’t about to go but I also didn’t want to remind him of his mood so I just stayed silent.

We started walking down the road.

‘Those boys who lived in that house were nice,’ Mama began.

‘The shop, you mean?’ Arjuna asked, perking his ears up.

‘Yes. Two brothers, and both were very sweet. Nice fellows.’

‘Were they your age?’ I asked, as Mama’s voice trailed off and her eyes refocused on the same road, thirty years ago.

‘No, no, I must have been only about ten when that happened. They would have been in their twenties or thirties at least.’

‘When what happened?’ Arjuna asked.

‘Did they live alone in the house?’ I asked, at the same time.

‘Yes, their parents had died. There was another brother I think, he got married and moved away. It was just these two brothers, George and Paul, and they were lovely. Very kind.’ Mama had a half smile on her face.

‘What was the thing that happened?’ Arjuna insisted. That boy has a one-track mind.

Mama sighed. The road and all the people in it were turning yellow in that funny pre-twilight which makes everyone look like they’re in a photograph from the seventies. I imagined that things looked much as they had when Mama had been ten.

‘The older brother, George, had a problem,’ she said, softly.

‘Like what?’ Arjuna asked, oblivious to Mama’s sadness.

‘He was uncontrollable when he was drunk,’ Mama told him. ‘He flew into nasty rages.’

‘Ohhh,’ I said. ‘So why did you say he was so nice and gentle then?’

‘He was! He became someone else when he was drunk. But even though he flew into such bad tempers- I remember Grandma said once that she’d heard a whole heap of plates smashing when he had got angry- he never hurt anyone.’ She sighed again. ‘Except that last time, I suppose.’

‘What last time?’ Arjuna asked, all agog. He was so agog that he didn’t see the bottle caps on the ground and actually stepped on them, even though they were portello and he didn’t have them in his collection.

‘The time I was telling you about. When I was ten,’ Mama said, pulling me out of the road as a motorcyclist whizzed past.

‘So what happened?’ Arjuna said. That boy doesn’t know how to winkle stories out of people. I nudged him hard.

‘George had been drinking one night, and the neighbours heard him shouting and throwing things. Next day, neither he nor Paul came out of the house so the neighbours went round to see what was wrong. They found Paul dead, and George had hung himself.’

Wherever we expected this story to go, it wasn’t there, so Arjuna and I walked on a bit in silence. We were both a bit shocked.

‘What had happened?’ Arjuna asked, after a decent interval. Mama wiped her eyes a bit.

‘George must have got into a rage and somehow hurt Paul. Then when he came around he would have realised what he’d done and killed himself. That’s what the neighbours thought, anyway. It makes sense, those two bothers were always close, and George… like I said, he was a gentle, sweet man.’

We went on in silence.

‘So then what?’

‘Then what?’ Mama asked. ‘The neighbours took the body down and made it look like an accident.’

‘Why? Aren’t you not supposed to do that?’ Arjuna asked.

‘Suicide was much more scandalous than it is now,’ Mama said. ‘The neighbours thought they’d at least save George and Paul’s good names.’

We went on again in silence.

‘So did George shoot Paul?’ Arjuna asked.

‘No, no, no! He wouldn’t have hurt him on purpose. The neighbours said it seemed as if Paul had been pushed, and wasn’t able to get back up. He must have hit his head or something. They said he was close to the top of the stairs as if he’d tried to come up again but had died before he could.’

‘What stairs? I didn’t see any ne.’ I said.

‘Oh, the stairs going down. They found Paul in the underground store-room.’

– Terry Wijesuriya

Author’s Note: This story is partly based on a true story that my mother and grandmother told me.