Tomorrow night she will be back in Saint Féliu with that slippery mother of hers. He wishes she weren’t going. Beneath Rat’s stories of an idyllic childhood roaming the beaches till nightfall with her friends, he can detect an underlying narrative of neglect, of rootless families scourged by alcohol, joblessness, mental illness, violence. He doesn’t want to relinquish her to a world in which it is unremarkable for a child to quit school at fifteen.

She will go back to where she comes from, and he will follow her; he will show up in her life again and again, shadowing her with his awkward undeclarative kind of love. She will take him to her secret places, the dynamite factory, the Nazi bunker, she will introduce him to the friends she has just begun to tell him about.

And he too over time will take her to the places he loves—to Rome, to San Sebastián, perhaps even to Ghent to look at the Mystic Lamb. And perhaps, if he plays his cards right, she’ll come live with them again. Perhaps he can even get her to like school. Perhaps, if he’s very patient, very underhand, he can change the way the story goes, so she too doesn’t end up a single mother in an out-of-season beach resort.

And perhaps one day, she will be able to speak of Gillem to her friends as other young women speak of their fathers. Not as a glamorous stranger, but as the person who taught you how to drive and who used to nag you to turn your music down, the person you complain to when you can’t figure out your taxes or when your mother’s gone completely mad. Somebody irritating, interfering, and infinitely familiar.

He thinks he’d like that.

About the Author

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fernanda Eberstadt is the author of four novels—The Furies, When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth, Low Tide, and Isaac and His Devils—and one book of nonfiction, Little Money Street, an account of Gypsy music in Perpignan. She was born in New York City and graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford. She lives between London and France with her husband and two children.

Copyright

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2010 by Fernanda Eberstadt

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eberstadt, Fernanda, [date]
Rat / by Fernanda Eberstadt. — 1st ed.
p.   cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59307-8
1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Single mothers—Fiction. 3. Brothers and sisters—Fiction Voyages and travels—Fiction. 5. Birth fathers—Fiction. 6. Pyrénées-Orientales (France)—Fiction. 7. London (England)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS 3555.B484R37 2010
813′.54—dc22            2009024849

v3.0