“It’s got to be. I’ve got the rat-man coming.”

A slur has set in on both sides. He’s drunk a half-bottle more than I have.

“When?” I say.

“When what, Luke?”

“When’s the rat-man coming?”

“Any moment now, I’d say. He needn’t bother us.”

If a rat-man’s coming, he’s probably right, he does have rats. Let’s accept it for now. Then I wonder, incoherently, what’s so wrong with rats. And why, in order to converse, do we drink so much?

That rat-man is a rat-woman. I feel glowingly, stupidly, privileged to watch her at work. She’s about thirty, skinny, unapologetically rough-dressed, her boyish ginger hair all over the place. I’ve never seen such a savage mite of a woman, a matey tank girl in filthy overalls. I imagine that these days most pest control operators are attired more neatly, like plumbers and TV installers. But this one — “call me Becky” — looks like she puts in hard days on a building site.

When I say “watch her at work,” I exaggerate — it’s the drink speaking — she pulls herself into the loft just from standing on a chair, and that’s the last we actually see of her methods of deinfestation. Such muscles on skinny arms is impressive, scary, amusing. I shake my head, trying to clear it, and take another sip of whiskey. After her vanishing act, we hear only muffled rat-woman noises. She’s speaking to herself up there. Dad and I are both mouthing whispers at each other, for no reason at all. She has taken her kit with her. The work doesn’t take long.

Once down again, she tells us there are no sign of nests, but cracks in the eaves “could of let in the little buggers” from a loft next door. Portsmouth working class speech has an aggressive cut, like vinegar, thin and acidic.

I’ve never seen such a savage mite of a woman, a matey tank girl in filthy overalls. I imagine that these days most pest control operators are attired more neatly, like plumbers and TV installers. But this one — ‘call me Becky’ — looks like she puts in hard days on a building site.

“Did you put down poison?” Dad asks.

I won’t try and represent her speech. It’s the raw diction passed on by jolly Jack tars, rough dockers, street hawkers, fishwives, bricklayers. One of my best friends, perhaps my only best friend — Alison of course, another man’s girl — recently convinced me that the Liverpool dialect is melodic. It’ll be some time before Pompey-speak breaks through into that class. The reply of Becky the rat-woman is, in essence:

“Yes like, I’ll be coming by again in a week and pick up any of the little buggers we’ve caught. I’ll also stuff some rags in those cracks you’ve got, but you should get them looked at properly.”

Dad offers her a drink, and she accepts a mug of tea with four sugars. Then something interesting starts going on between her, Dad and me. We’re talking films again. The rat-catcher is on the ball. She’s got a nonstop mouth on her, but it talks sense, and she gets us into a film that she’s evidently studied, Scorcese’s Shutter Island. Briefly, if you’ve not seen it, here’s a summary (which contains a spoiler).

A US police marshal (Teddy Daniels) visits Shutter Island, a prison for the criminally insane, to investigate the disappearance of a child murderer, Rachel Solando. After a while we begin to doubt Teddy’s own sanity, and we’re made to wonder what is really going on. In an episode which is clearly part of his delusional insanity, Teddy “encounters” the missing woman in a cave. She tells him he is being drugged and will never leave the island. Later he enters a lighthouse and again meets the overseer, Doctor Cawley, who tells him he is really a patient who killed his wife Dolores, herself having drowned their three children. Doctor Cawley has set up an elaborate role play to enable Teddy (real name is Andrew Laeddis, from which “Edward Daniels” is an anagram) to face reality. The alternative would be a lobotomy. Teddy/Laeddis breaks down and admits who he really is. However, in the conclusion, he seems to have lapsed back into believing he is Marshal Teddy again. Yet we can see this is a ruse, enabling him to be willingly led away to be lobotomised. As he says, it’s better to die as a good man rather than live as a monster. A lobotomy will kill the monster in him.