Gnawing pest problem goes through the roof
We know what to do now. term economic gain
Future generations deserve better. Well, there I was in the shower on my – how did this happen? – 60th birthday, singing a song and soaping the bits of me I can still reach, when my mind turned to gifts. In particular to the gift an American woman gave her dying husband last week. As the breath rattled in his throat she whispered that Trump had been impeached.
She meant only to cheer him up in his final moments but it seems a risky way to do it. The danger was that the news would work on him like a defibrillator and he’d leap from his deathbed, punch the air and bellow God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world. Soon after, of course, he’d turn on the telly and discover the truth, and the disappointment would probably kill him, but not before he’d hung around long enough to sue his wife for cruel and unusual kindness.
Anyway, I was wondering whether there was any birthday gift that could cause me to leap from the shower cubicle of apathy and punch the sky with relish renewed, and thinking probably not, when something, and I amnot making this up, fell from the sky.
Out of that geometric oddity the corner of my eye I glimpsed the something tumble past the misted glass. Could this be a sign? A birthday miracle to call my own? A visit from the angel Gabriel of the ablution block? I opened the glass door. Something small and green lay on the mat. I bent to pick it up then stopped. Had I been in a cartoon I’d have scratched my head. Then I looked up to where the recessed lights are cut into the ceiling for that fashionable eighties look, nodded and said to myself sotto voce, ‘‘so it’s happening’’.
And for an explanation of that cryptic whisper I need to take you back another week or so to when I was still a coltish 59. I’d gone to bed as usual with my prostate pills and a glass of red and the lovely Tibor Fischer, when I heard a noise. I froze, lay as still as any stone, coiled, attent, pricked. It came again. Scrabbling. The scrabbling of feet. Rats. Rats in my roof.
As a rule when it comes to the animal kingdom, I amMr Soft from Softistan. The range of the eggs in my pantry is free. The bacon in my sandwiches never saw a sow crate. But everyone draws a line somewhere, and I draw mine at rats in the roof. Rats come down from the hills every autumn and they get into my woodshed, which I don’t much mind, and they dash through the garage which I mind a bit more, but then they climb into the roof and I mind to the point of war. So at dawn the next morning the dog and I set off in the Toyota Dirty to fetch munitions.
‘‘Hello Mr Soft,’’ said the man at the hardware store, ‘‘your autumn usual?’’
‘‘Thank you,’’ I said. The legend on the packet said Rentokil.
My roof space is low and dark and hot and awkward and even in the days when I could still soap the whole of me I struggled to crawl around in it. Now I don’t even bother to try. I just clamber on to a chair, lift the hatch, and lob Rentokil’s finest into the darkness, like mortars. It doesn’t matter where they land. Rattus rattus, the black or ship rat, is good at finding them. As evidenced by the half chewed bait that dropped through the light fitting and on to the bath mat as I took my birthday shower.
And that afternoon the dog found the rat in the garage, stretched on its side by the lawn mower, rowing the air with its paws but going nowhere other than to meet its maker. I picked it up by the tail, the thick and meaty tail. My gorge rose with distaste. Why? Some remote ancestral memory? Some bubonic hangover?
Its body was a fat hump, its eye a black bead, its fur as sleek as the dog’s. The scrabbling paws, that had signed its own death warrant, were hands, four little hairless hands, five-fingered like mine, jointed like mine, palmed like mine. They continued to tread slowly, feebly, at the unresisting air, running from the enemy that none of us can see.
My cellphone rang. ‘‘Happy birthday to you,’’ sang a friend, ‘‘happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Joe-oh,’’ and as she paused before the last line I swung the rat in the manner of a caveman swinging one of those things for taking the feet out from under mammoths, and smacked the rat’s head against the wall. The rat shuddered once and was dead. ‘‘Happy birthday to you,’’ she sang.