A long time ago I lived in an old London warehouse with a guy called Steve, who was a questionable character and a cocktail of mental illnesses. Steve and I were both penniless; I worked full-time for a respectable fashion label but got awful pay for incredible PR, sales, and marketing skills, whereas Steve was a bum and deserved to be broke. On the outside of our building, near our front door, was some graffiti: a Banksy rat. The most famous of Banksy’s work, the one in all the coffee table books, the one that drew in hipster tourists every day to photograph it. I liked the rat. It made me smile a little each morning as I left the house.

One night Steve’s drug dealer came over. He was also some kind of art collector. While snorting blow or some kind of flour mixed with bleach or whatever it is that dirty coke dealers give you now, he started telling Steve and I about how much the small graffiti rat on the side of our building was worth. Then he told us that if we get it off the wall all in one piece he can sell it for us for “about £50,000,” he says. And now I’m thinking, fuck, I could live off that money for a long time. I could be one of those people who gets their hand blown off when the printer in the office explodes and gets a lump sum of compensation money, except I don’t even have to have a fucked-up hand: I just have to sell out and be a bad person. At the time that sounded just fine.

The dealer left and Steve and I discussed our moral dilemma. “Well, I mean, I’m sure Banksy himself would be fine with it because it would be like we were preserving it in a way, selling it to an art dealer and all.” I looked at him and we both knew I was lying.

As the guy walked past me and down the stairs, the only tool I could see was a red plastic bucket, and that worried me a little. I asked Steve what was going on and he told me that the guy had successfully been given detailed instructions of what he was to do. “So he speaks English?” I asked. Come on, I had to check. Steve assured me that yes he did in a annoyedly self-satisfied voice. He was on the computer trying to look all work-like, proud that he had, in his eyes, found “The Builder” for the job. He said he was researching Banksy but I knew he was on MySpace.We decided that we needed a truly expert builder to survey the situation and see if it would be feasible to even attempt to remove the rat all in one perfect piece. I left Steve to find this builder on account of I was too busy and important, seeing as I was the one with the job. I came home that evening and there was a Polish guy in our apartment. He had one of those creepy faces that did not belie his age: he could have been 20 or 50, for all I knew. He looked like he was drunk and bad-smelling but I didn’t go close enough to find out because my sense of smell is my strongest sense and it probably would have upset me.

I sat down to eat and heard something that made me run outside. It was horrifying. Clearly not the sound of a piece of art being carefully removed from a wall. I went outside and the alcoholic builder was there chipping the rat off the wall in tiny bits into the red bucket. All that was left was his rat head. The rest of the famous landmark was in splinters of stone and paint in the bucket. I shouted at him to stop and he made some noises that confirmed to me that he couldn’t speak English. I wanted to cry but I didn’t, I just told him to stick some paper over the rest of the rat’s head and fuck off. I took the red bucket inside, cradling it as if the shards of graffiti rat were ashes of the deceased. And, in a way, they were.

I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was about to have an epileptic fit (I really do have epilepsy). I can’t remember what happened next but after a while Steve came upstairs with the rat’s head all in one piece, which made me mad as hell because it proved that it should have been such a simple process to remove the graffiti in one piece.

We didn’t say anything to each other. I sat the red bucket of guilt and grief in the corner of the sitting room, took lots of valium, and went to sleep.

The next day I go to work and found a crazy amount of hate mail in my inbox from people that had witnessed the catastrophe. Stuff like:
“I live opposite you and saw your housemate pouring the remains of the Banksy rat from your wall into a bucket last night. What the fuck is wrong with you you dumb bitch, that was an urban landmark.” Apparently all of my details were online due to my being the main contact for the fashion label I work for.

I replied to the first couple, trying to explain that it was simply an accident, but then as more come flooding in I gave up. Damn the Fashion Council with their helpful list of contacts. That night I came home to discover Steve had plastered up and painted over the hole in the wall, which made some of my bad feelings disappear.

Days passed and the red bucket was still in the corner, haunting us like the body we murdered but didn’t bury. I’m very good at ignoring it because I have a true talent for repressing bad memories and experiences. More days pass. Steve eventually got a big tray and a bag of sand and a plan to slowly try to piece the rat back together, as if he were a special archeologist mapping together a dinosaur’s bone from fossil fragments and I were his assistant. But we weren’t: we were just a failed bum and failed fashionista who had done a bad thing.

I spent the whole weekend sitting at the sandbox trying and trying to find just two pieces that would match. But every time I put my hand in the stupid red bucket, the pieces seemed to become smaller and flakier. I knew that soon it would just be a pile of dust, my hopes and dreams of living my sweet life of luxury over.