Read an extract from Rat Daniels

Rat Daniels is on shelves July 7 2026: let Alex tell you more about the book himself and start reading below!

Chapter 1

Mum and Lisa dress me for the police interview. Mum pays for the suit, the first one I’ve ever owned. I can’t decide between two equally uninspiring options, so Mum picks for me – charcoal grey. The shoulders are too tight and there’s an inch or so of hairy leg showing between sock and hem when I sit, but there’s no time for adjustments. On the morning of the interview, I go round to Lisa’s and she cuts my hair herself. Short back and sides, a little bit of product. Standard private school haircut; Rat wouldn’t approve.

I can’t ever look in a mirror and like what I see, but I can appreciate Lisa’s work. She dreams of being a beautician, although we both know she’s going to be a lawyer. I straighten my shoulders and thrust out my chest. Fuss with the part. Lisa says there’s a right and a wrong way to comb hair to the side – Clark Kent versus Superman – and I always have to remind myself that the image in the mirror is a distortion of how it really looks. I’m dressed like I’m going to a funeral.

Mum messages to remind me that the detectives will be at their place in an hour. The cops must think I’m a loser, having my mum coordinate the interview for me. Lisa draws the tie up tight under my chin while I pull faces. I was tying my own school tie for a decade before she came along, but she claims I never learned how to do it right.

‘I look like an idiot.’
‘Don’t be a child,’ she says. ‘You look hot.’
I look at myself in the mirror and wonder when I’m going to stop being a child. I can legally drink and legally drive. I can vote. I could fight in a war if I wanted to; I’m pretty sure we’ve still got one going.

The suit is unnecessary. Even if it would convince the cops of something, I don’t have anything to prove. I’m an innocent bystander. My reasons for being on the scene are understandable, if embarrassing, my escape fortunate bordering on miraculous, my behaviour completely normal under the circumstances. I don’t need to dress myself up as a respectable member of society. Rat’s the one who’d need to wear a suit, not me.

This interview is a formality, I’ve been told. An opportunity to get my statement on the record. There is a thick fist of guilt punched deep in my stomach, but the police aren’t after me. Being a shit bloke isn’t a crime. The courts aren’t going to care about my shame. Maybe they should. Maybe I should take this opportunity to confess my part in things. And then Davey Callaghan can chime in and confess his, and Robbie Gunn and Wayne Pope and all the other ghosts and bastards. And we could go all the way back in history, trace down every last tangled strand to a beginning. ‘Here’s where it all got f*cked, Your Honour.’ And then the judge would look at Rat and say, ‘Well there’s no denying you’ve done a bad thing here, lad, but given everything that’s happened, I understand why we are where we are.’ And we’d all be able to go home. Put this behind us.

Except two people are dead, in the most horrific way I can imagine. And I can’t understand it. Maybe Rat’s innocent. He says he is. What kind of friend am I if I don’t believe him?

I don’t have whatever compass other people have in them that makes them certain of what they believe. I sit with things, I watch everything. I try to work out what’s right, but eventually I end up doing whatever seems easiest. I’ve been called stubborn my whole life, but the way I see it, I’m just waiting to be told what to do.
Rat had it. Whatever happened to him when he was younger left him an exposed wire, always sparking. Always live. He channelled the hidden currents of the world in a way I haven’t seen any other person do. It made him honest, not in the sense that he always told people the truth, but he never bullshitted, and he never hid from some imagined version of himself like I sometimes think I’ve spent my whole life doing. He never ducked under doorways that weren’t there. It made him sensitive and it made him vulnerable.

Lisa drops me off at Mum and Dad’s but doesn’t wait around. I walk up the old driveway, feet crunching the gravel. Mum waits on the verandah; I don’t meet her eyes. I try to go over it all in my mind, get my story straight for the interview, but the thoughts keep blurring on me, distorted by the static of anxiety and stabs of urgent fear. Rat is in prison. And what if something I’m about to say keeps him there? And what if he’s guilty? a traitorous voice asks quietly. What if he’s right where he belongs? What kind of man am I if I can’t do the right thing here?

‘Hullo love.’ Mum hugs me around the midsection, as high as she can reach. ‘They’re already here waiting.’ They’ve come in an unmarked car, unremarkable clothes, casual attitude. I feel like an idiot in the suit. A man and a woman: he looks to be in his thirties, she’s about Mum’s age. We sit at the kitchen table. Neither wants a cuppa; Mum makes herself scarce.One of the cops asks if I’m missing the footy for this. I tell him I’m into basketball. He says he’s a Lakers fan, has been since Kobe. I almost don’t realise when the actual interview starts.‘Alright, why don’t you just tell us everything that happened from your perspective?’ And I laugh then, a sort of swallowed hiccup of a laugh. Because where do you start? ‘I’m gonna kill him one day,’ Rat had said. That was ten years ago now. Do the words of an eight-year-old even matter? And if they do, then doesn’t everything matter, every single part of the story? Isn’t that what the cops want to know? The whole truth? Nothing but.

But these detectives don’t want to know everything. They’ve got their suspect in custody, they just want to find out whatever will help them keep Rat locked up. They don’t need to understand the whole story.
So, I hesitate. I’m always slow to react, unless I’m on a basketball court, and I get interrupted a lot by people who think I didn’t understand the question. After a moment, one of the cops says, ‘How about you start with what brought you to the Callaghan property that day?’ That’s safer territory. I answer their questions honestly and methodically, and slowly we work through events to construct the story that they want to hear.

And I can keep Rat’s secrets, our secrets, a little longer.