The rats are dying, I tell W. I can hear them squeaking, which they do only when they're distressed, the pest controller told me. I hear them squeaking at night in agony, it's terrible.
Couldn't it have been otherwise? Couldn't there have been a way for me to live alongside my rats? The rat is an opportunist, the pest controller said. It's a scavenger. But if things were different, and rat did not have to be prey to rat? And what if they didn't need to bother us for food, for shelter?
Oh God, the smell! I say to W. on the phone, a week later. It's so thick, so pungent. The pest controller warned me, I tell W., that poisoning a rat will only lead it to seek the tightest, obscurest of hiding places; that it will die in the smallest gap, rotting away. The stench will be impossible to trace, he told me, and he was right.
Should I have set traps? Perhaps. Should I have bought an emitter of ultrasonic noise? Perhaps, again. But I let the council lay down poison, didn't I? I let them lay down poison in the black box nest.
I thought they'd just eat each other up, the poisoned rats, I tell W. on the phone. I thought the carcass of one would attract other rats, happy to cannibalise, happy to chew on their fellow rats … But when they themselves die? When they hide themselves in the most obscure places to let death come to them? The stench, I tell W. The great smell of corpses, rotting.
It's ended there. It all came to an end there, beneath the floorboards. And no doubt they've already come, the great, fat bluebottles who will leave their maggots in the rotting corpses. No doubt they're soon to hatch, the generation of maggots will feed on rat carcasses in the folds of the earth …
Lars Iyer's Blog 