The characters and story of Flushed Away are entirely the work of those miraculous boffins at Aardman and DreamWorks Studios. May they smile benevolently and not-too-patronisingly on my pilfering of their wonderful creations! This began life as a continuance of Flushed Away: A Change of Scene but evolved into a story so different as to deserve its own posting. My heartfelt gratitude to the kind reviewers of that first effort at a Flushed Away piece- I would not have written this without them.
One day, a long time ago, Francois Grimaldi and a band of followers dressed themselves as monks and tricked their way into the inner sanctum of what was then a small Genoese colony on the Mediterranean. Casting their Franciscan cloaks aside, Grimaldi and his men attacked the surprised inhabitants with their concealed swords, capturing the citadel almost unopposed. It was a nasty trick, but Europe in 1297 was a nasty place and Grimaldi knew better than most that history was written by those who survived it.
Thus began the events which saw an inconsequential northern Italian colony become the Independent Principality of Monaco. For this action, Francois Grimaldi earned himself the title of 'malitzia', which translates as "The Cunning" or "The Malicious", depending on whose side you take.
Of course, Francois Grimaldi was not the only one there. He, his men and their victims were not alone. Rodent eyes watched the treachery from the drains and the shadows, and some shrugged because life went on just the same whatever the humans did. But others remembered, and they told their children what had happened in the citadel, and they told their children, and they theirs. Contrary to popular imagination, rats have very good memories. And they know how to hold a grudge. A small band of rats retreated across the sea to Genoa, and there they told their stories and waited for the opportunity to reclaim the Principality for its rightful owners…
The clash of steel on steel echoed up and down the Nice East Central Sewer as the Jammy Dodger II motored along it. Roddy St. James struck out with his sabre again, and again it was parried aside by his opponent, who then launched a counter-attack with snakebite speed. He retreated, defending himself as best as he could, but to no avail. The sabre was knocked out of his hands and he was forced to duck hurriedly in order to avoid losing his head. His attacker loomed over him and brought their own weapon down to deliver the coup de grace.
Rita Malone pulled her punch at the last second, and the hatpin she had been wielding halted half an inch from Roddy's neck. Not for the first time, Roddy wondered whether it was a good idea asking her to be his sparring partner. Since acquiring the Royal Navy dress sabre that had once belonged to August St. James, a distant relative, he had wanted to learn how to use it. Swordsmanship, he felt instinctively, was something a gentleman should know and Roddy would still have used the word to describe himself despite his voluntary change of lifestyle. Rita, on the other hand, was no gentleman, and that was true not just in the obvious sense but in the metaphorical one. She was a dyed-in-the-wool street fighter and was willing to use anything which presented itself as a possible weapon. It had been with great difficulty that Roddy had persuaded her to limit herself only to the hatpin- early 'lessons' had involved the use of various implements ranging from a ball bearing up to and including a spare drive chain from the boat's engine. Rita's knowledge of swordsmanship extended about as far as knowing which end of the weapon was meant to go into your hand and which end, therefore, went into the enemy, but treated any rule more intricate as more akin to a guideline. She was, in short, enough to make the Marquess of Queensberry hang up his gloves and turn to growing basil. Roddy grinned up at her hopefully.
"I dub thee," said Rita regally, winking and tapping Roddy lightly on both shoulders with her makeshift sword, "Sir Roderick St. James of Loserdom."
"Go easy!" protested Roddy. "I nearly beat you yesterday."
"Yesterday you tried to catch me unawares while I was putting my boots on," said Rita. "That doesn't count. And remember, I still beat you anyway."
"Yes, but not exactly fairly." Roddy went to recover his sabre. "I'm sure there's something in the rules about kicking your opponent. Certainly kicking him there, anyway." He nodded meaningfully.
"Hey, come off it! You were wearing a bottlecap there, remember? It isn't as if you didn't anticipate it." Rita sat down and pointed to the marked dent in her toecaps.
Roddy winced. "That didn't make it pleasant, exactly. And that's what you get for being so predictably underhanded."
Rita stood up and patted his cheek lightly.
"Forget about where my hands are. I could beat you with my tail. Now are we done?"
"We are," Roddy swept his blade up to the salute, nearly removing her nose in the process. "Whoops! Sorry about that."
"I'll make you caulk the decks again if you're not careful," warned Rita, only half-serious.
"If I'm really careless you won't be able to make me do anything ever again," said Roddy, sheathing the sabre. "And wouldn't that be a crying shame?"
"Oh, come on," objected Rita. "At least I make your life interesting."
"You make it a lot more than that," smiled Roddy. She smiled too. It had been more than a month since Paris and the Hotel d'Invalides, and though their relationship was still notable for what wasn't said rather than what was, at least neither held any doubts about what the other felt. Rita put her hatpin back in its bracket against the funnel and went up to the cockpit as Roddy went below to hang up August's sabre.
"Remind me again why we left Nice?" he said. "I liked it there."
"You thought Nice was nice?" said Rita, making the obvious joke.
"If I had a penny for every time you've made that joke," Roddy said, emerging from below decks. "I'd have…four pennies."
"So what?" Rita made a minor course correction.
"Well, you thought it too. I can tell these things, you know. And now we're going to where, Morocco? Is that the place with the cars?"
"We're going to Monaco, Roddy, and I have no idea," said Rita. "I know it's the place with Jasper, though, which is why we're going there."
"Jasper being...?"
Rita sighed. "If I had a penny for every time I've had to tell you this, I'd have…three pennies."
"Well, I'd still be making a profit," said Roddy.
"Jasper, as you should know by now but clearly don't on account of being irreconcilably slow and as thick as a…a…" She hesitated, trying to find a suitable metaphor.
"Triple-layer brick sandwich?" suggested Roddy, helpfully.
"Yes. Jasper used to work with my father. He built half of the first Jammy Dodger before striking it rich and going off to Monaco. He gave us the tip-off about the ruby."
"The fake ruby?"
"You like to remind me about that, don't you? Yes, Roddy, the fake ruby." She smiled wryly at him. "And since the boat he helped build is currently at the bottom of the Hyde Park Purification Plant, I thought it would be nice to show him its successor. As well as the goon who sank the last one."
"But Le Frog isn't here, is he?" Roddy feigned ignorance and began peering around. Rita poked him in the side.
"I was referring to you, Roddy," she pointed out.
"Oh, were you really? I'm sorry; the subtlety of the reference was lost on me totally. Maybe you should dial the dial the humour up to 'atom bomb' rather than the default 'sledgehammer'." Roddy poked her back. She laughed and tried to dodge, leading to the boat scraping along the tunnel wall with a sound which brought both of them down to earth.
"Maybe we shouldn't do that if we're going to show him the boat," said Roddy, after a while. "What kind of chap is this Jasper? If he struck it rich and abandoned you he doesn't sound like much of a friend."
Rita shook her head. "That's just Jasper. He was always his own rat. Sure, he was like part of the family for a while- he used to play with me when I was young- but we knew he came and went as he pleased."
"Sounds like something of an opportunist," opined Roddy.
"You could say that, but without the implied insult." Rita scanned the tunnel ahead, her eyes softening as she was mugged in Memory Lane. "He was just…like that. Amazing mind. But it was never in the same place as his body and that's just how he was. He wouldn't have thought he was abandoning us. He was just a nice old coot. Madder than a haddock. You'll like him."
Roddy thought for a moment. "Are haddock…particularly mad?" he asked.
"Not," said Rita. "In comparison to what I'm about to be if you don't stop pretending to be an idiot."
"But I am an idiot," grinned Roddy. "Most of the time I'm pretending to be a suave, sophisticated rat-of-the-world with charm to spare." He took the wheel from Rita as she went to the forward locker. She cast him a doubtful look.
"Suave and sophisticated, I don't think so. But you have something which might pass for charm, in a certain light."
"I'm glad you agree," Roddy said. "And there was me worried that you didn't like me."
"What makes you think I like you now?" Rita closed the locked and rejoined him, flicking his ear playfully.
"Oh, you know. Just the occasional hint. Which are about as subtle as your sense of humour, by the way." Roddy put an arm around her waist. "So do you know where this Jasper actually is?"
"It's Monaco. It's a small country. And if he's anything like he was, you just need to follow the explosions and the smell of burning metal. He calls himself an inventor. My dad used to say that if he was an inventor, it was on his mother's side." She took Roddy's hand. "He was always saying how much he wanted to be able to fly. I guess that was a part of why he left the sewers. He was always on about some new kind of flying machine he had an idea for. Never built them of course. Well, he couldn't. But that never stopped him trying and thinking. He was an old romantic in his way. A bit like you." She smiled fondly.
"I'd prefer to be a young romantic," said Roddy. "But that's fine, if it works for you. Does this mean I have to start wearing tweed now?"
"I'd prefer you to start reading the maps again," said Rita. "I'd actually like to get to Monaco the direct way, not like the way we went to Antibes."
"We got there in the end, didn't we?" Roddy pulled the maps over to look at them.
"Yes. Via Belgium."
"I thought you liked Belgium?"
"I did," said Rita. "I very much enjoyed the three hours we spent there trying to get out of it."
Roddy shook his head in mock resignation. "It's hardly my fault if you can't follow simple instructions."
"Roddy, a simple instruction would be 'turn left here'," said Rita.
"That's what I said, wasn't it? Turn left at Charles de Gaulle Place."
"Yes, but you weren't actually looking were you? You had your eyes closed because you were scared of the traffic." Rita grinned.
"That wasn't traffic, that was attempted homicide," said Roddy. "What is it with French drivers? Oh, no…"
"What is it?" asked Rita.
"I just realised that Monaco is near Italy. There might be…Italian drivers there."
"Roddy, it'll be perfectly safe. We drop by, we see Jasper, we go. This'll be easy."
He stared. "I can't believe you actually said that, Rita. 'This will be easy'? That belongs in the same dictionary as 'nothing can possibly go wrong'."
"Well? Nothing can go wrong. It's Monaco, Roddy. I hear they have paved roads there and everything." Rita patted his shoulder.
"That's not the point. There's such a thing as tempting fate, and that sort of sentence offers it an embossed invitation. You're jinxing us, Rita."
"Me? I'm not the one whose family history consists largely of being torpedoed, Commander!" She pushed him away cheerfully.
"I'm just saying, there's a narrative convention at work! Saying 'this will be easy' is right up there with star-crossed lovers in the world of things-which-go-horribly-wrong." Roddy stood up and went to start preparing a meal.
"The star-crossed lovers bit seems to be working so far!" called Rita. Roddy grinned, clasped a hand to his chest and began reciting dramatically.
"She speaks! Oh, speak again, bright angel, that I might-" He fell backwards through the open hatch, still posing. Rita fought down her laughter and returned to the controls.
"It's going to get a little risky tomorrow," said Rita, scooping up the last of her meal. Roddy, who had already finished his, glanced up.
"What happened to 'it will be easy'?" he said.
"It'll be easy from tomorrow," said Rita, reconsidering. Roddy was not reassured.
"What happens tomorrow, then?"
Rita pushed over the maps. "Tomorrow, we have to get onto a new trunk tunnel to get into Monaco anywhere above sea level. It joins up here, you see?" She pointed. Roddy nodded, and followed the trunk up northwards, where it disappeared into the French Alps.
"It comes from the Alps," he pointed out.
"Exactly," said Rita, seriously. "Which means it carries off all the snowmelt that the local sewers can't handle."
"And the snowmelt started early this year," said Roddy. "You're expecting a bumpy ride?"
Rita sighed anxiously. "I'm not sure what to expect, Roddy. That's the problem. It might be serious, it might not. Either way, we'll both need to be alert."
"Alert but not alarmed it is, then," said Roddy, cheerfully. His face fell when he noticed Rita's grave expression.
"Rita? What's wrong?"
She shook her head.
"Nothing. Nothing. It's just…we're too far from home. I don't know these sewers. I always used to know where I was. Instinctively. I could find my way from St. Albans to Greenwich blindfolded. Now we're a country away and…" She trailed off. Roddy watched her carefully.
"We've got the maps," he pointed out.
"Yes, I know. And they've led us true so far, which is more than I can say for the map-reader." Rita cast Roddy a meaningful look, but she was smiling as she did so. "It just feels unfamiliar. Like we're out of place. Oh, I don't know. It'll be fine, I guess. You wouldn't understand."
Roddy blinked. That had been unexpected. "I don't know," he said slowly. "I seem to remember an unexpected relocation to the sewers which confused me for a moment or two."
"Or three?" Rita smiled.
"Or three. Yes, perhaps. And I didn't have maps then either, but we both came through it all right." He patted her hand encouragingly, and tried to hide his unease.
It was morning, although the Nice East Central Sewer didn't reflect that. Roddy was in the engine room having a rare morning shower- it wasn't too bad if the bucket of water was left on the engine's heat exchanger for an hour or so beforehand. He lifted it into a bracket on the roof, which began slowly tipping the hot water into a salad strainer which poured down onto Roddy as he stood on a concave metal plate. Learning to enjoy simple pleasures like this had been a key to his adjusting to the sewer life, and now he could scarcely imagine any other attitude. There was a bar of soap as well, but Rita had forbidden its use on pain of pain after it had become lost in the Jammy Dodger II's bilges where it had made its presence felt by filling the boat with puffs of lavender-scented bubbles. Still, the hot water was enough. He closed his eyes and let it cascade onto his face.
He heard footsteps on the deck above him. Rita was still a highly protective captain, and wasn't willing to trust a delicate manoeuvre to anyone else, even Roddy. That was partly why he had the time to take a shower at all- this was normally his watch.
The hatch to the deck creaked open. Roddy opened his eyes and was immediately blinded by the water. Blinking furiously, he saw Rita come down the ladder into the engine room. He muttered an imprecation under his breath and made a dive for his towel in an effort to preserve his modesty. It succeeded, but his dignity paid the price. He slipped on the metal and his head arrived abruptly at the floor, having made a minor detour via the engine casing.
"Roddy? Are you all right?" Rita tried to peer over the machinery. Roddy, rubbing his head with one hand and trying to hold the towel around his waist with the other, stood up.
"I'm a bunch of fluffy ducks, thanks for asking. What is it?"
"I need you on deck. Right now."
"Yes, I was just going to-"
"Right now, Roddy! Right now!" Her voice was tight and determined, but still betrayed an emotion which in any lesser being, Roddy might have thought was nerves.
"Fine! I'll just get dressed and I'll be right with you." He turned away and gathered up his clothes as Rita disappeared back on deck. Shaking his head, he dried off and dressed. As he straightened up again, he caught the back of his head on the shower bracket and the rest of the bucket emptied itself over him. He was already getting the feeling that this would be one of those days…
Coming through the hatch, he flinched at the breeze. It was like they had shifted climates. There was a wind behind them now, brisk and biting, the sort which blows right through even heavy jackets. Roddy's wet clothes weren't going to help him, but Rita had spotted him and beckoned him up before he had a chance to change. She flicked him an amused glance as he joined her.
"Most of us take our clothes off to have a shower, Roddy," she said. "I'm sure it's in a manual somewhere."
"Oh, hark at the lady's witticisms," said Roddy, sarcastically. "You said you wanted me up here, so here I am."
"You remember how I said that the Alpine drain might be a touch risky?" Her jaw was set in a determined fashion.
"Yes?" Roddy looked around and saw something floating in the water not far off to starboard. If he hadn't been given a clue by the chill wind, he would have assumed it to be a foam sculpture, which were common in the sewers.
"Was that..?" he began.
"An iceberg?" said Rita. "Yes, and it's the fifth I've spotted this morning. The early snowmelt happened too fast and there's solid ice coming down the alpine drains!"
Roddy shivered. "What can I do?"
"I need you to keep a lookout, of course. Get up the bows with a lamp."
Roddy nodded, grabbed one, and sat on the bows. At least here, in the lee of the cockpit, the wind didn't feel like it was trying to strip him to the bone. The water around them was clear, cold and fast-flowing like all glacial melts. The icebergs were easy to spot above the water, but it was what lurked beneath that was the real risk, and more than once Rita was forced to make a last-minute adjustment to avoid gutting the boat on an underwater ice outcrop. She jinked around once such obstacle, and gunned the engines to correct their course. Roddy held on to the rail, and peered ahead. To his horror, he saw it with perfect clarity. The water banked up behind a solid plug of ice- the chunks floating down the drain had become dense enough to block it. He screamed out a warning he thought he would never have to give in a sewer in the south of France.
"Iceberg! Right ahead!"
Rita saw it, and yelled. She threw the wheel hard to port, but the wall of ice was effectively blocking the tunnel. Water was still flowing through gaps, but the Jammy Dodger II had no such chance. There was a grinding of metal as they struck hard. Rita was thrown into the control panel and was winded by the wheel. Gasping for breath, she stood up and took stock. Nothing had broken loose, although their mattress was now at the cockpit steps.
"Roddy? Are you there?" She peered around. Everything seemed to be in its place...
"Roddy?"
Ah…make that nearly everything.